The Devils of D-Day Read online

  As I opened the door to let Madeleine into the back of the car, I heard Eloise calling from the kitchen. She came out into the dull afternoon, holding her black skirts up above the mud, and she was waving something in her hand.

  ‘Monsieur’ . You must take this!’

  She came nearer, and saw Father Anton sitting in the car, and nodded her head respectfully. ‘Good day, father.’

  Father Anton raised a hand in courteous greeting.

  Eloise came up close to me and whispered: ‘Monsieur, you must take this. Father Anton may not approve, so don’t let him see it. But it will help you against the creatures from hell.’

  Into my hand, she pressed the same ring of hair that had been tied around the model cathedral in Jacques Passerelle’s parlour. I held it up, and said, ‘What is it? I don’t understand.’

  Eloise glanced at Father Anton apprehensively, but the old priest wasn’t looking our way. ‘It is the hair of a firstborn child who was sacrificed to Moloch centuries ago, when devils plagued the people of Rouen. It will show the monsters that you have already paid your respects to them.’

  I said, ‘I really don’t think—'

  Eloise clutched my hands in her own bony fingers. ‘It doesn’t matter what you think, monsieur. Just take it.’

  I slipped the ring of hair into my coat pocket, and climbed into the car without saying anything else. Eloise watched me through the snow-streaked window as I started up the motor, and turned the car around. She was still standing on her own in the wintry farmyard as we drove out of the gates and splashed our way through the melting slush en route to Pont D’Ouilly itself, and the tank.

  Twisted into the hedgerow, the tank was lightly dusted with snow, and it looked more abandoned than ever. But we all knew what was waiting inside it, and as we got out of the Citroen and collected together the torch and the tools, none of us could keep our eyes off it.

  Father Anton walked across the road, and took a large silver crucifix from inside his coat. In his other hand, he held a Bible, and he began to say prayers in Latin and French as he stood in the sifting snowflakes, his’ wide hat already white, with the low cold wind blowing the tails of his cape.

  He then recited the dismissal of demons, holding the crucifix aloft as he did so, and making endless invisible crosses in the air.

  ‘I adjure thee, O vile spirit, to go out. God the Father, in His name, leave my presence. God the Son, in His name, make thy departure. God the Holy Ghost, in His name, quit this place. Tremble and flee, O impious one, for it is God who commands thee, for it is I who command thee. Yield to me, to my desire by Jesus of Nazareth who gave His soul. To my desire by sacred Virgin Mary who gave Her womb, by the blessed Angels from whom thou fell. I demand thee be on thy way.

  Adieu O spirit, Amen.’

  We waited for a while, shivering in the cold, while Father Anton stood with his head bowed. Then he turned to us, and said, ‘You may begin.’

  Hefting the canvas bag of tools, I climbed up on to the tank’s hull. I reached back and helped Madeleine to scramble after me. Father Anton waited where he was, with the crucifix raised in one hand, and the Bible pressed to his breast.

  I stepped carefully across to the turret. The maggots that I’d vomited yesterday had completely disappeared, as if they’d been nothing more than a rancid illusion. I knelt down and opened the canvas bag, and took out a long steel chisel and a mallet.

  Madeleine, kneeling beside me, said, ‘We can still turn back.’

  I looked at her for a moment, and then I reached forward and kissed her. ‘If you have to face this demon, you have to face it. Even if we turn back today, we’ll have to do it sometime.’

  I turned to the tank’s turret, and with five or six ringing blows, drove the edge of the chisel under the crucifix that was riveted on to the hatch. Thirty years of corrosion had weakened the bolts, and after five minutes of sweaty, noisy work, the cross was off. Then, just to make sure, I hammered the last few legible words of the holy adjuration into obscurity.

  Breathing hard, I stood still for a while and listened. There was no sound except for my own panting, and the soft whispery fall of the snow. In the distance, it was almost impossible to see the trees and the farm rooftops any more, because the snow was thickening and closing in; but Father Anton stood alert with his white hat and white shoulders, still holding the silver crucifix up in his mittened hand.

  I tapped on the turret, and said, ‘Is anyone there? Is anyone inside?’

  There was no answer. Just the dull echo of my cautious knock.

  I wiped my chilled, perspiring forehead. Madeleine, her hair crowned in snowflakes, tried to give me a confident smile.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘this is the big one.’

  With a wide steel chisel, I banged all the way round the hatch of the turret, breaking the rough welding wherever I could, but mostly knocking dents in the rusted armour plating. I was making my seventh circle of the hatch when the blade of the chisel went right through a deeply corroded part of the metal, and made a hole the size of a dime.

  Even in the freezing cold, even in the blanketing snow, we heard the sour whistle of fetid air escaping from the inside of the tank, and a smell came out of that Sherman like I’d never smelled anywhere before. It had the stomach-turning sickliness of rotten food, mingled with an odour that reminded me of the reptile houses at zoos. I couldn’t help retching, and Madame Saurice’s rough red wine came swilling back up into my mouth. Madeleine turned away and said: ‘Mon Dieu!’

  I tried to hold myself steady, and then I turned back to Father Anton and said, ‘I’ve broken a hole through, father. It smells really disgusting in there.’

  Father Anton crossed himself. ‘It is the odour of Baal,’ he said, his face grey in the afternoon cold. Then he raised the crucifix higher and said: ‘I conjure bind and charge thee by Lucifer, Beelzebub, Sathanas, Jauconill and by their power, and by the homage thou owest unto them, that you do torment and punish this disobedient demon until you make him come corporally to my sight and obey my will and commandments in whatsoever I shall charge or command thee to do. Fiat, fiat, fiat.

  Amen.’

  Madeleine whispered: ‘Dan—we could seal it up again. There’s still time.’

  I looked at the tiny hole, out of which the polluted air still sang. ‘And then how long before it gets out of here, and comes after us? This thing killed your mother, Madeleine. If you really believe that, we have to get rid of it for good.’

  ‘Do you believe it?’ she asked me, her eyes wide.

  ‘I don’t know. I just want to find out what’s inside here. I want to find out what it is that can make a man puke maggots.’

  I licked my lips, and raised the hammer once again. Then I struck the turret again and again until the hole grew from a dime to a quarter, and eventually the armour plating began to break off in leaves of black rust. Within twenty minutes, I’d broken all the metal away around the hinges of the hatch, and the hole was the size of a large frying-pan.

  Father Anton, still waiting patiently in the snow, said: ‘Can you see anything, monsieur?’

  I peered into the blackness of the tank’s interior. ‘Nothing so far.’

  Taking a crowbar from the canvas bag, I climbed up on top of the Sherman’s turret, and inserted one end of the crowbar into the hole. Then I leaned back, and slowly began to raise the hatch itself, like opening a stubborn can of tomatoes with a skewer. Eventually, the welding broke, and the hatch came free. I stood there breathless and hot, even in the sub-zero temperature of that gloomy afternoon, but at least the job was done. I said to Madeleine: ‘Hand me the flashlight.’

  Her face pale, she passed it over. I switched it on, and pointed the beam downwards into the Sherman’s innards. I could see the tank commander’s jumpseat, the breech of the cannon, and the gunlayer’s seat. I flicked the beam sideways, and then I saw it. A black sack, dusty and mildewed, and sewn up like a mailbag, or a shroud. It wasn’t very large—maybe the size of a chi
ld, or a bag of fertiliser. It was lying next to the side of the tank as if it had fallen there.

  Madeleine touched my shoulder. ‘What is it?’ she whispered in a frightened voice.

  ‘What can you see?’

  I stood straight. ‘I don’t know. It’s a kind of black bag. I think I’ll have to go down there and lift it out.’

  Father Anton called: ‘Monsieur’. Don’t go in there!’

  I took another look at the bag. ‘It’s the only way. We’ll never get it out of there otherwise.’

  The last thing in the whole world I wanted to do was get down inside that tank and touch that bag, but I knew that if we tried to hook it out with the crowbar we’d probably tear the fabric. It looked pretty old and rotten—more than thirty years old, maybe more than a hundred. One rip and whatever was inside it was going to come spilling out.

  While Madeleine held back the jagged hatch for me, I carefully climbed up on to the turret and lowered my legs inside. Even though my feet were freezing cold, I had a strange tingling feeling, as if something inside the tank was going to bite them. I said hoarsely, ‘I always wanted to see what a tank looked, like inside,’ and then I lowered myself into the chilled, musty interior.

  Tanks are claustrophobic enough when they’re heated and lighted and they’re not possessed by demonic sacks. But when I clambered down into that cramped and awkward space, with wheels and instruments hitting my head and shoulders, and only a flashlight for company, I felt a surge of fear and suffocation, and all I wanted to do was get out of there.

  I took a deep breath. It still smelled pretty foul in there, but most of the odour had dispersed. I looked up and saw Madeleine’s face at the open hatch. She said nervously, ‘Have you touched it yet?’

  I shone my torch on the sack. There was something or somebody inside it, whatever it was. As close as this, the fabric looked even older than I’d imagined. It could almost have been a piece of the Bayeux tapestry, or a medieval shroud.

  I reached my hand out and touched it. The cloth was soft with age. I ran my fingers gently along the length of it, and I could feel various protrusions and sharp knobs. It felt like a sack of bones; an old and decaying sack of bones.

  I coughed. I told Madeleine: ‘I’m going to try and lift it up to you. Do you think you can take it?’

  She nodded. ‘Don’t be long. Father Anton’s looking very cold.’

  ‘I’ll try not to be.’

  I wedged the flashlight against a hydraulic pipe so that it shone across the inside of the turret, and then I knelt down beside the sack. It took a lot of summoning-up of nerve, but in the end I put my arms ‘around the black fusty cloth, and lifted it a foot or so upwards. It was saggy, and whatever was inside it, the bones or whatever they were, tumbled to one end of the sack with a soft rattling sound. But the fabric didn’t tear, and I was able to gather the whole thing up in my arms and lift it towards Madeleine. She reached down and gripped the top of it, and I said: ‘Okay, heave.’

  For one moment, for one terrifying moment, just as Madeleine took the weight of the sack and hoisted it upwards, I was sure that I felt it wriggle, as if there was something alive inside it. It could have been a bone shifting, or my own keyed-up imagination, but I took my hands away from that sack as fast as if it was burning.

  Madeleine gasped. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

  ‘Just get that sack out of here quick!’ I yelled. ‘Quick!’

  She tugged it upwards, and for a few seconds it snared on the rough metal around the broken-open hatch. But then she swung it clear, and I heard it drop on the hull outside. Taking the flashlight, I climbed out of the tank on to the turret, and I haven’t ever been so glad to see snow and miserable gloomy skies as I was then.

  Father Anton was approaching the side of the tank where the black sack lay. He was holding the crucifix and the Bible in front of him, and his eyes were fixed on our strange discovery like the eyes of a man who comes across the evidence, at last, that his wife has really been cuckolding him.

  He said: ‘Enfin, It diable.

  I touched the sack tentatively with my foot. ‘That was all there was. It feels like it’s full of bones.’

  Father Anton didn’t take his eyes away from the sack for a second.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the bones of a demon.’

  I swung myself down from the hull of the tank, and helped Madeleine to jump down after me. ‘I didn’t know demons had bones,’ I remarked. ‘I thought they were all in the mind.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Father Anton. ‘There was a time, in the Middle Ages, when demons and gargoyles walked the earth as living creatures. There is too much evidence to refute it. Paul Lucas, the medieval traveller, tells how he actually met the demon Asmodeus in Egypt, and the demon Sammael was said to have walked through the streets of Rouen as late as the twelfth century.’

  Madeleine said: ‘We don’t yet know that it’s really bones. It could be anything.’

  Father Anton returned his Bible to his pocket. ‘Of course, of course. We can take it back to my house. I have a cellar where we can lock it up safely. It seems to be acquiescent enough now.’

  I looked at Madeleine, but she simply shrugged. If the priest wanted to take the sack back home with him, then there wasn’t much we could do to stop him. I just hoped that the thing wouldn’t decide to wake up and take its revenge on. any of us for being disturbed so unceremoniously on a cold December afternoon.

  I opened the back of the Citroen, and between us we carried the sagging, musty sack across the road and laid it gently in the car. Then I collected up the tools that Madeleine’s father had lent us, and climbed into the car myself. Father Anton, taking off his hat and shaking the snow off it, said: ‘I feel strangely elated. Can you understand that?”

  I started the motor. ‘This is what you’ve wanted to do for thirty years, isn’t it? Open the tank and find out what the hell’s happening.’

  ‘Mr McCook,’ he said, ‘you should have come here years ago. It takes unusual simplicity, unusual directness, to do something like this.’

  ‘I’m not sure whether that’s a compliment or not.’

  ‘I didn’t mean naivete.’

  We drove through the gathering dusk, and the thick snowflakes whirled and tumbled all around us. But the time we reached Father Anton’s house in the middle of the village, the church clock was striking five, and we could hardly see through the pouring snow. The housekeeper opened the door as we arrived, and stood there with a sour face and her hands clasped across her apron as I helped Father Anton into the porch.

  ‘Il a quatre-vingt-dix arts,’ she snapped, taking the old man’s arm and leading him inside. ‘Et il faut sortir dans la neigt pour jouer comme un petit garcon?’

  ‘Antoinette,’ said Father Anton reassuringly, patting her hand. ‘I have never felt so healthy.’

  Madeleine and I went round to the back of the Citroen, and lifted out the sack. From the dark hall, Father Anton called: That’s right, bring it inside. Antoinette—will you bring me the keys to the cellar?’

  Antoinette stared suspiciously at the black bundle we were carrying through the snow.

  ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est? ‘ she demanded.

  ‘C’est un sac de charbon, ‘ smiled Father Anton.

  With one last backward look of ultimate distrust, Antoinette went off to fetch the cellar keys, while Madeleine and I laid our unholy bundle down in the hall.

  Father Anton said: ‘If these are bones, then I have a ceremony for disposing of them.

  The bones of a demon are just as potent as the live demon itself, so the books say; but they can be scattered in such a way that the demon cannot live again. The skull has to be interred in one cathedral, and the hands and the feet in three others. Then the remaining bones are laid to rest in churches all around the intervening countryside, in ritual sequence.’

  I took out my handkerchief and blew my nose. It was so cold that I could hardly feel it. ‘Supposing we ask the Pentagon how to g
et rid of it?’ I asked. ‘After all, they put it there in the first place.’

  Father Anton looked down at the black sack and shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I think the most important thing is to exorcise this beast as quickly as possible.’

  Antoinette came bustling back with the cellar keys, and handed them to Father Anton. She pursed her lips in disapproval, but then Father Anton said gently, ‘I would love some of your barley broth, Antoinette,’ and she softened a little, and went off to the kitchen to prepare it.

  Madeleine and I lifted the soft, yielding sack once more, and Father Anton said;

  ‘Follow me.’ But as we shuffled off down the long polished hallway, I glanced back at the place where the sack had been lying, and a feeling went down my shoulders like ice sliding down the inside of my shirt.

  The wooden floor had been burned, as if by a poker. Where the black sack had been laid, there was the distinct, unmistakable outline of a small, hunched skeleton.

  ‘Father Anton,’ I whispered.

  The old priest turned and saw the burns. He said: ‘Lay down the sack, gently.’ Then while we settled the decaying black fabric on the floor again, he walked back on creaking boots and knelt stiffly and painfully down. His fingers traced the pattern that was scorched into the woodblock flooring, touching it as respectfully and gently as a fine medieval brass. I stood behind him and said: ‘Do you know what it is?’

  He didn’t look up. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said quietly. ‘I know what it is. It is the mark of the demon. This house is holy, you see. It has been the vessel of years of prayer and blessings. And a demon’s bones cannot touch it without making a mark.’

  ‘It looks very small. Not much more than a child.’

  ‘It is no smaller than the devils and gargoyles that are carved on medieval churches, my friend. We forget that many of those were carved, secretly, from the actual bodies of such fiends. I have the memoirs upstairs of a stonemason who worked at Chartres, and he tells of how the monks would bring him skulls and bones of creatures that he could never identify.’