The Devils of D-Day (19 page)

‘We’ll take it,’ I said wearily, and I sat down on the bed
and took off my shoes before she could even answer. The mattress felt as if it
was crowded with
unravelled
fencing wire, but right
then it was heaven. The old lady left us alone together, and we undressed,
washed in Arctic water, and fell into bed. I don’t remember falling asleep, but
it must have been pretty quick, because I didn’t even have time to put my arm
around Madeleine’s naked back.

I was wakened by a scuffling noise. For a second, I wasn’t
sure if I was dreaming or not, but then I heard it again, and I lifted my head
from the pillow and looked around.

I held my breath, and tried to suppress the pump-pump-pump
of my heart. The room was very dark,
suffocatingly
dark, and even though I strained my eyes, I couldn’t see if there was anything
there. I lifted myself up on one elbow, and the bedsprings creaked and
complained like a tired orchestra.

There was silence. I whispered, though I didn’t want to: ‘
Elmek
?’

No reply. Madeleine stirred in her sleep, and turned over.

I whispered again: ‘
Elmek
?’

There was another scuffle, then a rustling sound
They
seemed to come from down behind the foot of the bed. I
sat up, my skin electric with fear, and I tried to see what was hiding there in
the darkness.

Again, there was silence. But I was sure I heard a faint
scratching and rustling on the worn linoleum, and I was sure that a darker
shadow shifted and moved in the gloom.

I kept absolutely still. I could feel that Madeleine was
awake now. She reached across the bed and squeezed my hand, too frightened to
speak. But I bent my head towards her and said softly: ‘Don’t panic. It’s in
here somewhere, but don’t panic.’

She nodded, and swallowed. In the hush of the night, we
waited for the devil to stir
again,
our hands tightly
clenched together, our breath held back into shallow gasps.

Suddenly, Madeleine said: ‘Dan.
The
window.
Dan!”

I turned towards the window. I flinched in shock. There was
someone silhouetted against the curtains, a tall figure of clotted shadows,
unmoving and quiet. I took one look, and then my hand went scrambling in search
of my bedside lamp, but I tangled my fingers in the flex by mistake, and the
lamp tipped over and crashed on to the floor.

In the terrible silence that followed, a woman’s voice said:
‘‘Are you rested?”

It was a strange, throaty voice; too deep for a woman,
really, but too vibrantly female for a man. The dim figure stirred, and moved
silently across the room. I could just make out a pale face – a smudge of grey
in the grainy blackness.

‘Who are you?’ I demanded. ‘Who are you?’

The figure didn’t reply for a while. It seemed to be grating
its teeth together, with an edgy, squeaking sound. Then it said: ‘We take many
forms you know.
Many substances.
Aren’t you afraid?’

I said: ‘Are you
Elmek
?’

“
Elmek
or
Asmorod
or
Kaphis
.
We have
more names than nights that have passed since the crucifixion. Don’t think that
your book can identify us, because it won’t.’

‘What do you know about that?’

The thing gave a hoarse, blowzy laugh. ‘I know that you.
are
wasting your time on religious folly. Angels! You must
be demented. You have struck yourself a bargain with me, my friend, and with my
master
Adramelech
, the Grand Chancellor of Hell, the
peacock and the serpent. Don’t talk to me of angels!’

Madeleine said: ‘What are you going to do with us? You’re
not going to keep your bargain, are you?’

There was a sound of crackling, as if the beast were tugging
its knuckles, or biting into bones. Then it said, in a much deeper, more
slurred and masculine voice:

‘Bargains are struck for good and evil. Bargains have always
been struck for good and evil. The priests and the bishops have struck bargains
before, and not been disappointed. We didn’t only fight at
Senlac
,you
know. We were there with Charlemagne, and we
were there with
jeanne
d’Arc
.
No wonder the English burned her! The stones told of monstrous devils whirling
around her head in battle, and they were true,
mon
ami
. It is only now
that the church has seen fit to rewrite its history, and deny the existence of
all the unholy allies it used for its so-called holy wars!’

Madeleine was shivering in fright. I put my arm around her
and held her close, but the devil wasn’t disturbed.

‘Think of the Spanish Inquisition,” it whispered. ‘Think of
the torture chambers of England and France. Each had its devil! In times gone
by, devils walked the earth freely, and they still walk the earth! They made
bargains with men, for mutual advantage, because man is an evil
creature,
thank the stars, as well as a good one.’

Over in the corner of the room, near the door, I saw a faint
blueish
light, like the phosphorescence in the ocean
at night. Then, to my horror, something began to appear out of the darkness. I
stared and stared, and, half-distinguishable in the shadows, its mouth
stretched back in a wolfish grin, was a beast that could have been a devil,
could have been a
whoreish
woman,
could
have been some hideous slimy subaqueous squid. There was a sour smell in the
room, and the blue light crawled and nickered like the foul illumination from
decaying fish.

I saw everything in that moment that disgusted and horrified
me. I saw what looked like a woman’s hands seductively drawn back up a curving
shining thigh, only to
realise
that the thigh wasn’t
a thigh at all, but a desperately wriggling trunk of tentacles. I saw pouting
lips that suddenly turned out to be festering cuts.
I
saw-rats crowding into the mouth of a sleeping woman.
I saw living Mesh
cut away from living bones, first in ribbons of skin and muscle, and then in a
stomach-turning tangle of sodden flesh.

Madeleine, beside me, shrieked.

‘
Elmek
.’
I yelled, and rolled out of the bed towards the ghastly apparition.

There was a
paralysing
burst of
white light, and I felt as if someone had cracked me over the head with a
pickaxe handle. Dazed and dazzled, I fell sideways on the cold
lino
, bruising my shoulder against the leg of the bed. I
tried to get up, but something hit me again, something heavy and soft.

Madeleine screamed: ‘Dan! It’s in the bed! It’s in the bed!’

Stunned, wiping blood away from a split lip, I gripped hold
of the edge of the mattress and pulled myself upright. Madeleine was beating in
terror at the blankets, as if something had scurried its way under them, and
was crawling around her legs.

For a half-second, in the eerie blue light of that failing
phosphorescence, I saw something reach out from under the covers and touch her
naked leg. It was black and claw-like and hairy, like a grossly overgrown
spider. I hit at it, yelling in fear and anger, and then I seized Madeleine’s
wrist and yanked her off the bed and halfway across the Moor.

There was a moment of sheer panic when I thought that
whatever was under those blankets was going to come crawling after us. I heard
something heavy drop off the bed, and the scratch of claws on the floor; but
then the blue light suddenly began to flicker again; and go dim, like a torch
with used-up batteries, and the sour
odour
of devil
began to fade away. I heard a soft soughing noise, a wind where no wind could
blow, and then there was silence. Both of us crouched on the floor, panting
from fright. We listened and listened, but there was no sound in the room at
all, and after a while we cautiously raised our heads.

‘I think it must have gone,’ I said quietly.

Madeleine whispered: ‘Oh
God, that
was terrible. Oh my God, I was so scared.’

I switched on the overhead light. Then I went over to the
bed and prodded at the covers with the broken bedside lamp. In the end, I
gathered up enough courage to lift the blankets and turn them over. There was
nothing there. If it hadn’t been a terrifying illusion, then it had left us.

Madeleine came up behind me and touched my back. ‘I don’t
think I could sleep
any more
,’ she told me. ‘Not in
that bed. Why don’t we start out for London?’

I found my wristwatch where it had been knocked on the
floor. It was five-thirty in the morning. It would soon be dawn.

‘All right,’ I said, feeling very little better than I had
when we first went to bed. ‘It looks like
Elmek’s
pushing us on, in any case. Remind me to remember that devils rarely sleep.’

Madeleine put on her blue jeans without panties, and combed
out her hair in front of the dingy mirror. I said: ‘I can’t take much more of
this. I don’t even know why it does these things.’

‘Maybe it’s boasting,’ suggested Madeleine. ‘They’re
supposed to be vain creatures, aren’t they, devils:”

‘It could be that. If you ask me, it’s just relishing how
frightened we are. It intends to squeeze the last ounce of fear and agony out
of us two and get its goddamned money’s worth.’

Madeleine tugged a grey ribbed sweater over her head. It was
so cold in that bedroom I could see the outline of her nipples through the
thick Shetland wool. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I have the feeling it’s
excited, as if it’s getting itself all worked up to join its brethren. All that
boasting about what devils had done in the past. And that figure, whatever it
was, with all those squids and snakes and things. That was like some horrible
kind of showing-off.’

I brushed my hair, and did my best to shave with a blunt
razor and no soap. There were dark smudges of tiredness under my eyes, and I
looked about as healthy as a can of week-old tuna. In fact, I was so exhausted
that I could hardly feel frightened any more. When we were ready, we tiptoed
out on to the landing, and went downstairs through the dark, creaking house.
There was no-one around, so I left three pounds on the hall table, and we let
ourselves out into the freezing early morning.

The sun came up over the Sussex Downs just as we were
driving out of Brighton. On each side of us, the long frosted hills stretched
into the haze; to
Chanctonbury
Ring in the west, and
to
Ditchling
Beacon in the east. At that time of the
morning, in winter, Sussex has a strangely prehistoric feel to it, and you
become uncannily sensitive to the memory that Ancient Britons trod these downs,
and Roman legions, and suspect that across the
smokey
plain of the Sussex Weald, the fires of Anglo-Saxon
ironfounders
could be seen glimmering in the depths of the forests. Beside me, Madeleine sat
huddled in her coat, trying to doze as we turned northwards towards London. We
drove along roads white with ice, past old cottages and pubs and filling
stations and roadside shops advertising home-made fudge and large red potatoes.
Behind us, in the back of the car, the copper-and-lead box was silent as a
tomb. The sun rose on my right, and flickered behind the spare trees as I
sped
on to the motorway. In another hour, we would reach
the suburbs of London. By noon, we would probably discover whether
Elmek
was going to keep his bargain or not. I thought of
the saying that ‘he who sups with devils must needs use a long spoon’, and it
didn’t encourage me very much.

As we left the fields and the countryside behind, and came
into the crowded grey streets of Croydon and
Streatham
,
the sky grew ominously dark, and I had to drive with my headlamps on. On the
wet sidewalks, shoppers and passers-by hurried with coat-collars turned up
against the cold, and a few first flakes of snow settled on my windshield. The
traffic was crowded and confused, and it took another hour of edging my way
between red double-decker buses and black shiny taxis before I crossed the
Thames over Chelsea Bridge, and made my way towards the Cromwell Road. The snow
was falling heavily now, but it melted as soon as it touched the busy streets
and pavements. I passed Sloane Square, with its fountains and bedraggled
pigeons; turned left at Knights-bridge, and then juddered along in solid
traffic past Harrods and the Victoria & Albert Museum. Today, London looked
grimly Dickensian and as we drove by the Natural History Museum, with its
twisted Gothic pillars and its gardens arranged with petrified trees, I felt as
if bringing this medieval devil into the city was part of some dark and
sinister Victorian plot. Only my tiredness and my fear reminded me that what
was inside that locked trunk was hideously real, and that this morning in
December in London was overshadowed with the vicious horror of mankind’s most
ancient enemies. I lit up a cigarette, and coughed.

At last, we arrived outside 18, Huntingdon Place. It was a
late-Victorian house of grimy yellow-and-grey bricks, in that gloomy hinterland
between Cromwell Road and High Street Kensington, all shared flats and registry
offices and unfashionable mews.

I pulled the car into the
kerb
, and
nudged Madeleine awake. She blinked, and stretched, and said: ‘Are we here
already? That was the best sleep I’ve had in days.’

There was no sign on the black spiked railings outside the
house to show that it still belonged to the Ministry of
Defence
.
But I climbed stiffly out of the car, and walked up to the front door to see if
there was any kind of identification by the two rows of doorbells. There was
nothing at all, not even the name of a tenant. The door itself was firmly
locked, and by the condition of its cracked grey paint, looked as if it hadn’t
been decorated for twenty years. I tried to peer through a dirty pane of
spiderweb
glass beside it, but inside the house it was
completely dark.