The Devils of D-Day (23 page)

I didn’t forget to call
Elmek’s
angel, either.
Jespahad
, the angel of healing.

Madeleine stepped back towards us. All the bones were
revealed now, and the ghastly skulls faced each other across the cellar, with
the distorted form of
Elmek
twisting and shifting
between them. The stench was disgusting – a fetid mixing of thirteen nauseous
odours
that made my eyes water and my stomach tense in
physical rebellion. Beside me, Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
gagged, and had to wipe his mouth with his handkerchief.

The cacophony of voices and sounds was growing, too. As I
leaned towards Madeleine and whispered: ‘I did it I think I did it,’ she could
hardly hear me over the shrieks and cries and gibbering noises. She said:
‘What?’ ‘I did it. I called all the angels. What happens now?’ ‘Yes,’ said
Thanet
, his face pale. ‘Where are they? If they’re supposed
to come and help us, where are they?’

Madeleine looked at us for a moment. Her pale green eyes
were very bright and very intense. She seemed to have taken on some indefinite
charisma of pure strength and determination, as if she knew now exactly what
had to be done, and how, and that she was going to carry it out whatever the
cost.

She said: ‘It is not yet
time
. But
the angels will come. First, we must let these devils call up
Adramelech
.’

‘
Adramelech
?’ asked
Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
, aghast. ‘But we don’t
stand any kind of a chance against
Adramelech
!’

Elmek’s
voice boomed and grumbled
over the screams and whispers of his fellow devils. ‘I am pleased,’ it said, in
a frighteningly amplified tone. ‘I am well pleased. At last, my brethren and I
are reunited! You will have your reward, mortals. You will have your reward!’

Madeleine turned to the devil, and called back: ‘We are
pleased to serve you, my lord.’

I said: ‘Madeleine...’ and reached for her arm, but she
brushed me away.

‘We are true disciples of
Adramelech
and all his works,’ she cried out, her voice high and thin over the bellowing
and groaning of the thirteen devils. ‘We will follow
Adramelech
wherever his chancellorship should lead us, and we will gladly bow before him
in the courts of the nether kingdom!’

‘For Christ’s sake, Madeleine,’ I snapped. But she ignored
me, and lifted her arms high.

‘Summon
Adramelech
when you will,’
she shrilled. ‘Let us
abase
ourselves before his evil
glory and his malevolent majesty!’

There was a thunderous roar, like a locomotive at full
speed. The lights went out altogether, and we were plunged into a darkness that
was loud with horrifying sounds and whispers, and sickening stenches of
putrefaction. I said: ‘Madeleine...’ again, but she called back: ‘Don’t move!
Just stay where you are! The devils are taking on flesh!’

Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
put in
sharply: ‘We’re going to have to move. We can’t stay here. We’re sitting
targets. I vote we go for the steps while it’s still dark.’

‘Colonel, these things are creatures of darkness. The>
can see you standing there as easily as if it were daylight.’

‘But, dammit, we can’t just stay here! One of us has to go
for help!’

Madeleine begged: ‘Please, Colonel! Just stay calm and keep
still! We do have a chance, if you’ll just stay calm!’

It was a little like asking someone to stay calm in a
pitch-black cage of mentally-disturbed leopards. What made it more difficult
was that Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
was trained for
action. His whole philosophy of life was – if in doubt, do something.

He said: ‘I’m going I0 make a run for it, that’s all!’

Madeleine shouted: ‘No!’ and I tried to grab the colonel’s
arm in the darkness, but I guess he was
practised
at
rugby or something, because he ducked deftly out of my way, and was gone.

We couldn’t see them, but we heard them. As
Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
dodged across the basement
floor, the devils abruptly turned on him, their bodies rustling and clattering
in a hideous excited rush. He reached the foot of the stairs, and I think he
managed to stumble up the first two or three steps. But then he said: ‘Ah!’ in
an odd, choked voice, and I heard him trip and fall heavily on to the floor.

Madeleine said: ‘Oh,
mon
Dieu
. . .’ but both of us knew that it would be suicidal
to go to help him. The darkness was total, and we would have been snapped up
like baby mice tossed to a rat.

Suddenly, though, the ghastly hustle and flurry of devils
died away; and out of the dark I saw a dim phosphorescent outline, which I
recognised
as
Elmek
. It shuddered
and twisted, changing through images of bizarre and vicious reptiles to
formless squids and threatening clouds of ectoplasm. Then, in a voice so
grating that it was hardly
recognisable
, it spoke to
its twelve brethren.

‘Leave .
..
the
man . ..
unharmed
... He is a morsel... for our master...
Adramelech
.

. .’

Gradually, the lights in the cellar began to glow again. They
didn’t shine brightly, and all we could see of the devils was a grotesque
huddle of shadowy shapes around the foot of the steps. But they showed that
Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
was still alive, crouched
on the floor with his hands held over his head to protect himself from claws
and teeth and leathery wings that had only just spared him. ‘

‘These mortals... will all be offered . .
.’
continued
Elmek
harshly. ‘That is their reward . .
.for
helping us
...’

Madeleine took a step forward, and the cluster of devils
whispered and rustled.

‘Is that your idea of a bargain?’ she said, in a clear tone.
‘Is that your idea of keeping your promises?’

Elmek
laughed, and its laugh came
out like shattered splinters of glass.

‘You said... you wished ... to serve
Adramelech
...’

‘And we will! We will be the two most devoted mortals that
his malevolence has ever known! But we cannot serve him if you use us as
sacrifices!’

I stayed well back while Madeleine argued with
Elmek
. For one thing – although I couldn’t guess how – she
seemed to have the situation under some kind of control.

Either she hadn’t been
levelling
with me when we first met by the tank in Normandy, or else she was showing a
side of her character I just hadn’t guessed at. But whichever it was, she was
making a
skilful
play at keeping us alive, and that
was all that mattered.

Apart from that, I stayed well back because those devils,
those terrifying gargoyles who lived and breathed and ground their teeth in
almost overwhelming blood-lust, were the shadowy stuff of nightmares, and I
knew that if I came any closer, I would find out that the nightmares were real.

The devil
Umbakrail
raised its
bony head from the crawling mass of demons, and I saw the dim basement lights
blotted out by the narrow goatish shadow of its skull.

‘The highest act of devotion which a mortal can pay to
Adramelech
is to offer life, breath and blood. How can you
say you are
Adramelech’s
loyal servant if you are
reluctant to offer your greatest gifts?’

Madeleine said: ‘I have a greater and more mysterious gift
for your master
Adramelech
than my life, breath and
blood.’

The devils whispered and murmured. They were exuding a
stench now that made me feel as if I was trapped in a zoo.
A
sour, dry fetid
odour
like the urine of bears or
apes.

Umbakrail
said harshly: ‘You will
soon have the chance to prove what you have, mortal woman. We shall now call up
Adramelech
from his sleep of many years, and you
shall have the
honour
of offering your gift
directly.’

Madeleine was silent for a moment, and then she said: ‘Very
well,’ and turned her back on the thirteen devilish acolytes of
Adramelech
as if they were no more vicious than thirteen
chained dogs.

On the floor by the steps, Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
coughed, and moaned. I called:

‘Colonel!
How do you feel?’

He coughed again. ‘I don’t know ... pretty rough. I think I
broke a rib on the stairs.

And something’s dug its claws into my back. I can feel the
blood.’

Yet another thunderous rumble shook the basement, and the
devils’ groans and whispers rose in a wave of discordant lust.
Cholok
said: ‘It is time. It is time for the summoning.’

While Madeleine and I kept ourselves back against the wall,
the devils moved themselves into a semi-circle around the
centre
of the floor. I tried to look at them as they stood there in the dense, clotted
shadows; tried to see what they really were.

But they seemed to have shadows of their own making, actual
cloaks of darkness, and all I could make out were scaly wings and curved horns
and eyes that glistened and glowed with hellish lights. They were medieval
devils of the most legendary kind – the devils that have plagued men and women
from Europe’s earliest times. It was almost no surprise at all to find that
they were not figments of some frustrated nun’s imagination, but that they
walked the earth with real claws and real teeth, and that we have as much to
fear from devils when the nights are dark as we have from muggers or murderers.

Madeleine bent towards me and whispered: ‘What you are going
to see now will be frightening. You will be in danger of your life. But
whatever happens, don’t panic or try to get away. You saw what happened to
Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
.’

I nodded, dumbly. The stench and the darkness were beginning
to close in on me now, and I felt as if I was faced with some horrible but
inevitable moment of fear, like sitting in a 747 with faulty landing-gear and
knowing that you have to come down sometime. I think I would have done anything
for a cigarette. I know I would have done anything to be somewhere else.

The devils began to chant some long litany in a language I
couldn’t
recognise
. It had a curiously compulsive
rhythm to it, a repetitive harshness that made me feel unexpectedly nauseous.
The basement grew stuffier and stuffier, and it was impossible to take a breath
that wasn’t ripe with the stench of demons. I wiped sweat from my forehead with
the back of my sleeve, and tried to keep my stomach muscles tense so that I
wouldn’t heave.

‘
Adramelech
chastu
remlishthu
narek
.
Adramelech
hismarad
yonluth
.
Adramelech
chastu
remlisthu
narek
.’

At first, there was nothing but this unsettling chanting.
But then I felt an odd sensation, a kind of singing metallic emptiness, as if I
was under
novacain
at the dentist. The next thing I
knew, the temperature dropped lower and lower and lower, and I had the feeling
that the far wall of the basement had vanished, and that there was nothing
there at all but a void of freezing darkness.

‘
Adramelech
chastu
remlisthu
narek
.
Adramelech
hismarad
yonluth
.
Adramelech
chastu
remlisthu
narek
.’

Now, the walls of the basement seemed to dwindle away, and a
chill astral wind blew across us. We appeared to be poised somewhere timeless
and airless, and I couldn’t work out which was up and which was down, or how
far away anything was, or how close.

The devils were still there, though. They were chanting
their conjuration over and over again, in their harsh insect voices, and I
could feel whatever it was that they were summoning draw nearer, the way you
can feel someone approaching you in the pitch blackness of a darkened room.
Something indescribably frightening was coming, called up by this evil and
arcane chant that hadn’t been heard on earth since the Middle Ages. I thought I
heard Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
shrieking, but the piercing
sound of it was overwhelmed by the devils’ litany, and by the endless emptiness
all around us.

Madeleine turned slowly towards me, slowly, slowly, like a
woman in a dream. I tried to say: ‘Madeleine . . .’ but my voice came out as
nothing but an endless blur of whispered sounds. She shook her head, and
half-smiled, and turned away again.

‘
Adramelech
usthul
!
Adramelech
hismarad
!
Adramelech
ghuthil
called the devils. And then their dark
membrane-like wings lifted wide and
stiff,
and their
eyes glared through the darkness, and I saw with my own eyes the first
manifestation of
Adramelech
, the Grand Chancellor of
Hell, since Patton and Montgomery had raised him during the war.

The vision was so terrifying that I went cold with wave
after wave of shock. In the middle of the reptilian circle of devils, huge and
hideous, stood a dark thing that looked like a giant deformed donkey, rearing
up on its hind legs. It had a monstrous head, and a chest covered with shaggy
hair, but its stomach and its hind quarters were afflicted with some kind of
crusty excrescences, like
tumours
. As it appeared
through the darkness, there was a screaming sound all around it, a thousand
decibels of feedback, and the air itself was distorted like heat rippling from
a road.