The Devils of D-Day Read online

  ‘The other twelve what?’

  ‘The other twelve brethren. There are thirteen of us, you know. I told you that.

  Thirteen of us. We have been separated for such a long time, and now we must get together again.’

  I kept on shuffling my way backwards. ‘You don’t know where they are?’ I asked him.

  Father Anton swayed. Then he looked up oddly and said, ‘They’ve been hidden.

  They’ve been sewn up and sealed, just like before. I was the only one who wasn’t taken with them. Now you must help me find them. You and the girl together. We need the girl.’

  I shook my head tautly. ‘I’m not going to help you find or do anything. I’m getting right out of here and I’m going to get some help.’

  Father Anton lifted one jerky leg out from under the bedclothes, then the other. He stood up unsteadily, his arms hanging by his sides, and he grinned at me. For a split second, I thought I saw a thin dark tongue flick from his mouth—a tongue as forked as a reptile’s—but then it flicked back again and I wasn’t sure if it was just an illusion or not.

  ‘We will have to find the Reverend Taylor in England,’ said Father Anton, in a soft, rustling voice. ‘Then we will have to discover where the Americans hid the rest of us.

  My lord Adramelech will be deeply pleased, I can assure you. He will reward you, monsieur, in a way that no man on earth has ever been rewarded before. You can be rich beyond any comprehension. You can be powerful as a thousand men. You can spend years indulging your tastes for the finest foods and the greatest wines.

  And you can have sex with any woman, any man, any animal, you choose, and your virility will be limitless.’

  I didn’t know what to say or do. It seemed as though Father Anton had been completely taken over. But was he really possessed, or was he just suffering from nightmarish nerves? Maybe he’d taken too many heart pills, or drunk too much before he went to bed. I just couldn’t look at this elderly shambling priest in his long white nightshirt and believe that I was talking to a devil.

  Father Anton took one staggering step towards me. I retreated even further.

  ‘Father Anton,’ I said, ‘you’re sick. Now, why don’t you lie down for a moment, and I’ll go and get a doctor.’

  ‘Sick?’ he hissed, I’m not sick. I’m free.’

  ‘Will you stay back, please?’ I asked him. ‘I’m going to have to hit you if you come any nearer, and I don’t want to do that.’

  ‘You amuse me,’ whispered the priest. ‘But I am never amused for long. Father Anton was not amusing. Fortunately, he was weak. A man who believes in us is so much more susceptible than a man who doesn’t.’

  ‘You took over Father Anton? You possessed him?’ ‘You could say so, yes.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Father Anton took another step nearer. ‘Possession is more physical than mental. I possess Father Anton now, because I am inside Father Anton.’

  I went cold with foreboding. I said: ‘I don’t understand you. What do you mean -

  you’re inside Father Anton?’

  The white-dressed priest came clumsily towards me. His expression was grey and blank, and apart from those dark, penetrating eyes, I might have been looking at a corpse.

  ‘A man, like a demon, is a mechanical device,’ he-said, in a voice that was even less like Father Anton’s than before, and so much like the voice that I had heard in the tank that I knew—despite everything I was trying to do to persuade myself otherwise

  - that this was the devil we had tried to seal in the cellar, the disciple of Adramelech who had once brought plague and misery to Rouen.

  I said nothing. I guessed I was five or six paces away from the door now. The old priest kept stepping woodenly towards me.

  ‘From inside, I can manipulate his legs and his arms like a marionette,’ said the devil.

  ‘I can look through the sockets of his eyes, and breathe through the cavities of his nostrils. It’s a secure home inside here, monsieur. Warm and bloody, and sweet with decay already. I could even seduce that shrivelled old housekeeper of his through his own dangling penis!’

  I stared at the priest with mounting fright.

  ‘Are you lying?’ I taxed him, knowing he wasn’t. ‘My God, if you’re lying—'

  ‘Your God won’t help you. He didn’t help Father Anton.’

  ‘Well, where is Father Anton?’ I demanded. ‘What have you done with him?’

  The stiff figure marched so close that I could have reached out and touched him.

  He said, in that coarse, throaty voice, ‘You’re almost standing in him.’

  At first. I didn’t want to take my eyes off the devil. But then I glanced quickly down behind me, and I saw something that made my stomach tighten and turn over. On the floor beside the chest-of-drawers, spread out in pale mucus-coloured strings, clotted with dark-red kidneys and blueish cakes of liver, were Father Anton’s entrails.

  The devil had disembowelled him, and climbed into his empty body like some hideous kind of parasite.

  The devil hadn’t moved. I looked back at it in fear and nausea, and said: ‘You’ve killed him.’

  The devil grunted in evil amusement. ‘On the contrary, I think I’ve given the old fool some new life. He was almost dead anyway. His heart wouldn’t have lasted much longer, particularly after you dragged him out in all that snow.’

  I paused, anxiously biting my lip. If the devil could rip Father Anton open, it could certainly do something equally disgusting to me. I looked quickly up at the ebony crucifix on the wall, and wondered if everything I’d seen in vampire movies was true.

  Was it really possible to ward off demons and ghosts with the Holy Cross?

  Sidestepping Father Anton’s glutinous remains, I reached over the chest-of-drawers and wrenched down the crucifix. Then I brandished it right in the devil’s face, and shouted as heroically as I could: 7 dismiss you! In the name of the Lord, I dismiss you!’

  With one powerful blow, the old priest knocked the crucifix out of my hand. He gave a hissing snarl, and moved towards me again, his eyes as dark and cruel as an alligator’s.

  I swung my arm back, and belted him across the side of the face with my candlestick. His head jerked to one side, and the base of the candlestick raised a weal; but no blood flowed because Father Anton’s heart wasn’t pumping any longer, and his occupied cadaver simply shuddered and stepped forward again.

  ‘Your violence amuses me,’ it whispered. ‘Now let’s see if mine amuses you.’

  I edged back. I knew that I’d never make the door in time. I kept my eyes on Father Anton’s grey, bruised face, and I began to wish that I’d never seen that damned tank, and never dreamed of opening it.

  ‘It’s such a pity, you know,’ said Father Anton. ‘You could have assisted me so much.

  But I have only survived the centuries by protecting myself against the moral and the conscientious, and I’m afraid that I shall have to deal with you as I have dealt with so many others.’

  I only had one gambit left. I reached into the pocket of my nightshirt and produced the small ring of hair which Eloise had given me, the hair which was supposed to prove that I had already paid my dues to the hierarchy of hell.

  There was an electric silence. Father Anton raised his eyes and stared at the hair with undisguised malevolence. I thought for a moment that he was going to tear the hair aside, just like the crucifix. But then that forked tongue flickered again, and the demon moved warily aside, watching me with a hard, poisonous look that made me so nervous I could hardly speak.

  ‘Well,’ said Father Anton, keeping his eyes on the ring of hair. ‘I see that you’re less naif than I thought. You’re not a witch, or a necromancer, and yet you keep the firstborn’s locks with you. Now, I wonder how you got hold of” them?’

  ‘That’s none of your business. Just keep back.’

  Father Anton jerkily raised his hands in a gesture of conciliation. ‘There is no need for us to quar
rel, monsieur. There is no need for us to fight. After all, you must remember that you can protect yourself only once with this ring of hair; and for each protection thereafter you will need to sacrifice some other first-born to Moloch. It will only take the rising of tomorrow’s sun, and its setting at evening, and all the power you have in that ring will have died with the day.’

  ‘I’m not interested. I’ll have you behind bars by then.’

  Father Anton threw back his head again, and laughed. Then, without warning, the door banged wide open and slammed shut again, and the windows exploded in a hailstorm of shattered glass. The sheets were whipped off the bed in a screaming indoor hurricane, and the furniture was thrown violently around the room, clattering and bumping.

  Most hideous of all, Father Anton’s body was hurled this way and that, its arms flailing wildly in all directions, until there was a shrieking blast of wind, and it was thrown face-first into his dressing-table mirror, the sharp slices of glass opening up his face like a skinned chicken.

  The noise died away. I lowered my arm away from my eyes. The room was very dark now, although the curtains were flapping open, and a grey strained light was reflected from the snow outside. With the windows broken, it was intensely cold.

  Something small and shadowy was sitting in the far corner of the room., on the oaken post of Father Anton’s bed. I couldn’t make it out very well, but I could see stubs of horns and eyes that slanted like a goat’s. It made a dry, leathery sound as it shifted on its perch:

  ‘Monsieur,’ it whispered.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, chilled.

  ‘I must warn you, monsieur, not to interfere again. Next time, you will have no protection.’

  ‘There isn’t going to be any next time,’ I asserted.

  ”Monsieur,” said the devil, ‘I am going to find my brethren with or without your assistance. Although, if you have any taste for what is best tor you, you will do what you can to help me.’

  ‘What about Madeleine?’

  ‘She must come too.’

  ‘That’s out of the question.’

  The devil rustled, papery and ancient as Hell itself.

  ‘I will strike a bargain with you,’ it whispered. ‘If you help me to find my brethren, you and Madeleine, then I will restore this fool to life.’

  ‘That’s insane.’

  The devil laughed. ‘Insanity is a human word which almost always describes the activities of devils. Yes, in that sense, it is insane. But Adramelech can do it.’

  ‘How about you? Can you do it?’

  ‘It is not within my powers.’

  I hefted my candlestick again. I wondered what the devil was capable of doing in the time it would take me to cross the room and smash him on his perch.

  I said: ‘I thought only God could give the gift of life.’

  The devil shifted its unseen claws. ‘Life is not a gift, my friend. It is a curse.

  Adramelech is quite capable of giving such a curse.’

  My mouth felt very dry. I said: ‘How can I believe you? How can I trust you?’

  There was a moment’s pause. The winter wind raised and lowered the drapes, and flakes of snow came tumbling over the window-ledge. The devil stirred, and said in that throaty, sexless voice: ‘You don’t doubt what I can do, surely?’

  I moved cautiously across the rumpled rug, trying to get as near to the devil as I could.

  ‘I doubt your existence,’ I said. ‘I doubt if you’re anything more than a nightmare.’ The devil cackled. ‘Then watch,’ it said. ‘Just watch.’ There was a silence. The shadows of the drapes rose and fell, like the wings of dreadful creatures. Then the house was pierced by a high, hideous shriek, and I heard furniture falling, glass breaking; and someone keening and moaning like an animal in agony. I turned. The door banged open again. From out of the corridor came a low, howling wind, and then the sound of someone staggering towards us, mumbling in pain as it came.

  There was a crackle of electricity, and the whole room was dazzlingly lit by a blueish light. Then there was darkness again, and a rumble of thunder that compressed my eardrums and almost threw me over. Then there was another fierce blitz of electricity, even brighter than the first, and in the wide-open doorway, her arms raised in desperation, her face blotted white by the demonic lightning, I saw Antoinette, the elderly maid, in a nightdress soaked by torrents of blood, her whole body, her arms, her legs, her stomach, her face, porcupined with knives and forks and scissors and skewers. It was as if every sharp instrument in the whole house had flown from its drawer and stabbed itself into her.

  Her voice almost swallowed by another burst of thunder, she moaned: ‘Father Anton, save me …’ and collapsed to her knees with a clatter of knife and scissor handles.

  I turned back to the devil, and I was stunned and furious. ‘Is that your damned power? Slaughtering old women? You damned maniac!’

  The voice came from somewhere else now—on top of the dark mahogany wardrobe, in a corner where I couldn’t see.

  ‘You would consider it powerful if it happened to you, monsieur. Or if it happened to Madeleine. I could make it happen to Madeleine right now. Every pitchfork and castrating knife in the whole of her farm could stick itself into her right now, right this minute. You only have to say the word.’

  I said, quaking: ‘What are you? What kind of a devil are you?’

  The devil laughed. ‘I am Elmek, sometimes known as Asmorod, the devil of knives and sharp edges. I am the devil of swords and daggers and razors. Do you like my work, you with your blunt cudgel and your blunt anger?’

  I hurled my candlestick towards the shadows where the devil’s voice came from, but it clattered uselessly against the wardrobe door, and dropped to the floor.

  ‘You have a choice, monsieur,’ the devil said. ‘You can either help me or try to hinder me. If you help me, Adramelech will reward you. If you hinder me, these dead will remain dead, and I will make sure that your precious Madeleine is sliced up like so much meat.’

  I pressed my hands to my forehead. I could hear Antoinette gurgling and choking in her own blood, but there was nothing I could do. If I tried to fight this devil any longer, it was going to cut everyone to pieces, including Madeleine and Eloise and Jacques Passerelle, and once the sun had risen and set, it would probably cut me to pieces, too. I knew then that I was going to have to pacify this demon, and play for as much time as I could get. If we searched for its brethren, it’s twelve brother devils, it could take us months, and by that time I might have found some way to exorcise it for good.

  I lowered my eyes, trying to look resigned and obedient. I said: ‘All right. It’s a bargain. What do you want me to do?’

  The devil rustled in pleasure. ‘I thought you might see sense. You are a good man and true, aren’t you?’ ‘I’m just trying to save people’s lives,’ I told him. ‘Of course.

  Very commendable. Life is full of commendable deeds, and it’s such a pity that they usually cause so much pain. I am the devil of suicide by throat-cutting or slashing of wrists, did you know that? I am always honoured when someone slices himself up nicely.’ ‘Just tell me what to do.’ ‘Of course,’ said the devil. ‘All in good time.’ ‘What am I going to do with these bodies? What if the police ask me about them?’

  ‘That’s very simple. When we have left, the house will burn. Not a severe blaze, but enough to gut this room, and the room along the corridor where this lady slept. It will be a great tragedy. Everybody will be sorry that their old priest is dead, but he was senile, wasn’t he, and perhaps he let the candle fall on his bedspread, or a stray-log drop on to his rug. Nobody will think to question you. You will have had no motive for arson, and so nobody will suspect your involvement.’ ‘For Christ’s sake, I didn’t kill them anyway!’ The devil laughed. ‘How many murderers have said that! How many witches have protested their innocence! How many Nazis claimed they were only obeying their orders!’

  I shut my mouth tight, and told myself, silently an
d firmly, to keep my fear and my anger bottled up tight. If this devil ever suspected that I was trying to play it along, it would probably cut me up like shish-kebabs in a split-second. I still couldn’t get that sickening apparition of Antoinette out of my mind, and I knew that I was going to have nightmares about those forests of knives and scissors for the rest of my life.

  There was no sound, now, from the doorway. I guessed she was probably dead.

  ‘How are we going to get you to England?’ I asked the devil.

  Elmek was silent for a moment. Then it said: ‘There is a copper-and-lead-bound trunk in the cellar. It was first used for carrying sacramental robes and chalices in the days when the king travelled around the countryside, staying at the chateaux of French barons. I will enjoy the irony of travelling in it myself. You will arrange for transportation across the Channel this afternoon, and all you will have to do is collect the trunk from the cellar and take it with you.’

  ‘Supposing I deliberately forget? Supposing I leave you behind?’

  ‘Then these two people will remain as dead as they are now, and your precious Madeleine will have the nastiest death I can devise. And so will you..’

  Outside the shattered window, the sky was growing greyer as dawn approached. I said: ‘All right. If that’s what you want.’

  ‘That’s precisely what I want. I am looking forward to meeting the Reverend Taylor again.’

  I stood in the ruined room, wondering what I ought to do next. I kept the ring of hair curled around my finger, and I couldn’t even bear to look at the carnage around me. I felt a sourish, bilious taste in my mouth.

  The devil said: ‘You can go now. Get dressed. The sooner you arrange our journey, the better.’

  I looked up at the gloomy corner where it was hidden. I said: ‘If I disbelieved in you -

  if I refuted your very existence—would you disappear?’

  Elmek laughed once again. ‘If I disbelieved in you,’ it said, ‘if I refuted your very existence, would you disappear?’

  I wiped my soiled and sweaty face with my hand, and I felt about as desperate and depressed as I ever had in my whole life.