The Devils of D-Day (25 page)

Adramelech
laughed a torrent of
ugly laughter.
‘Heavenly duty?
You’re crazed!

You’re as crazed as Jeanne
d’Arc
!
She summoned us up, supposing that to be her duty, and now you’ve done the
same! The girls of France are as simple today as they ever were!’

But Madeleine held her ground. She raised her arms, so that
she stood like a human crucifix, and when she spoke, her voice sounded so clear
and penetrating that I could hardly believe it was her.

‘I am more than a human reincarnation,
Adramelech
.
I am a human reincarnation born to be possessed!’

‘Possessed?’ retorted
Adramelech
.
‘Possessed?’

‘Possessed by what?’ asked
Elmek
.
‘By man or by mule?’

The devils rustled in bloodthirsty glee. For my part, I kept
as far back in the shadows as I could.

It was then that Madeleine underwent a transformation that
had only just been beginning when she had first spoken of angels and had taken
the crisis in hand. The air all around her began to
darken,
and she herself became harder to see, until there was scarcely anything visible
at all. Where she had been standing was what you could only call an intense
black glow –
a darkness
so dark that I could hardly
bear to look at it.

I didn’t have much in the way of scientific training. After
all, I was only a cartographer. But I knew what I was looking at. Whatever
Madeleine really was, or whatever
was possessing
her,
she was now so physically dense that no reflected light could leave her body
and enable us to see her. She was like a black hole in space, only she was
standing right amongst us.

Her voice rang through the basement.
A
high, clear, beautiful voice.
She said: ‘You
recognise
me now,
Adramelech
! You
recognise
me now for what I am!”

Adramelech
ferociously tossed his
great donkey-like head, and bared his teeth. His devils scrambled all around
him, but he hurled them aside with a brutal sweep of his arm.

‘
Hod
!’ he shrieked.
‘The angel
Hod
!’

The devils groaned and howled, and retreated away from the
glowing blackness.

Adramelech
himself drew back, but
he was changing now, looking less like a monstrously diseased donkey, and more
like a black
Satanic
beast with reddened eyes and a
mouth that was thick with fangs.

Madeleine’s voice said: ‘I have waited centuries for this
moment,
Adramelech
. Now I have you all together, all
in one time, all in one place, all in one earthly dimension.

You and your thirteen leprous disciples!”

Adramelech
roared in fury, and the
basement shook. Bricks were dislodged from the walls, and loose cement sifted
down from the ceiling.

‘I have my devils!’ he screamed. ‘You are nothing against me
and my devils!’

He swept his black, scaly arm towards his acolytes, and the
air of the cellar became thick with fire and smoke and the rank smell of
disease. He swept his arm again, and we were enveloped in swarms of flies and
mosquitoes. He raised both arms, and brought them down in a powerful sweep of
destruction, and there was a tremor that must have shaken the whole building by
its foundations.

‘
Begone
,
Hod
!
Out, deceitful angel! Get out of this place and never return!’

There was another tremor, and part of the cellar steps
collapsed, half-burying the burned body of Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
. Slowly, cautiously, their reptilian wings lifted,
the devils encircled the shimmering darkness of the angel
Hod
,
their claws lifted and their teeth bared in an ecstasy of murderousness. I
could see their slanted eyes through the dust and the smoke and the swarming
blowflies, and I could smell that stench they exuded whenever they were
aroused.

Hod
said clearly: ‘You have no
chance,
Adramelech
! My angels are already invoked!

I call you down, my messengers! I call you down, my legions!
I call you down to destroy these vile devils, and dismiss their remains to
everlasting hellfire!’

I saw, for one moment, the horns of the devils silhouetted
against the ultimate blackness of the divine angel
Hod
.
I saw
Adramelech
rearing in the background, more
hideous and bestial than ever before, his rows of teeth glistening with saliva.
I saw the whole cellar lit with the phosphorescence of diseased flesh, and
clouded with flies.

Then, my vision was blinded by white intense light.
Everything was blotted out in brilliance – the brilliance of angels who had not
yet attained the ultimate brilliance of total darkness. I clapped my hands to
my face, and turned towards the wall, but the after-image still exploded over
my retina. Every one of those thirteen angels we had summoned down had arrived;
in a burst of holy energy that wiped out human sight, and dazzled human
understanding.

The basement trembled. I heard shrieks of agony, and screams
of intolerable fear. I half-opened my eyes, squinting against the light, and I
saw tall, impossibly attenuated outlines of flickering fire; things that
radiated energy in all directions, and cut their way through the devils in
swathes of light. I saw
Umbakrail
fall, its strange
ribcage cloven open by light, its insides exploding in ancient dust. I saw
Cholok’s
flesh torn from its bones in papery flakes, and
scattered in a hurricane of light. I saw
Themgoroth
try blindly to flee, only to be sliced apart by an angel’s dazzling arm. And I
saw
Elmek
, too, a wriggling mass of tentacles that
shrunk in on itself in pain, seared beyond endurance by the heat and the light
of the angels.

In a few minutes, it was almost over. The devils lay as they
had before, as bones.

The angels faded, until they left nothing but shapeless
memories of what they were on the
sensitised
rods and
cones at the back of my eyes. A cool wind blew across the cellar floor, and
seemed to blow the dust away, and the stench of
Adramelech’s
devils.

Only
Adramelech
and
Hod
remained.
Adramelech’s
encrusted feet were set squarely on the basement floor, his gigantic black bulk
overshadowing everything, and the grand Chancellor of Hell itself glared
viciously around him.
Hod
, the shimmering black
angel, stood before him like
an
hallucination.

‘
Hod
,’ whispered
Adramelech
. ‘You cannot dismiss me. It is not within your
power.’

‘I am conscious of that,’ replied
Hod
,
in the voice of Madeleine. ‘But you shall go, all the same.’

‘You cannot dismiss me! I shall stay! Only a mortal can
dismiss
Adramelech
, and only a mortal with proof that
your
precious God once lived! You know that as well as
If
Hod
glowed darkly, and remained silent.

Adramelech
growled: ‘
For
what you have done today,
Hod
,
I shall encourage a war on this earth such as has never been seen before. You
have destroyed my servants.

Well, I shall destroy millions of your mortal charges.
Tonight, such weapons will be used that the earth will seem to burn from pole
to
polef
and the generations of man will be cursed
with sickness and disease and deformation for ever after.’

‘The Lord God will...’

‘The Lord God will do nothing! The Lord God has never done
anything, never intervened, and he will not intervene now! I will see this
earth burn,
Hod
. I will see it burn! And then your
precious Lord’s precious plan will be seen for what it really always was.’

With my back against the basement wall, I heard this
booming, echoing exchange of hostilities like the voices that you hear in
dreams. I was uncertain at first, and desperately scared, but then I took one
step forwards into the light, and the warring beings fell silent, and were
obviously observing me with curiosity and surprise.

I said, hoarsely: ‘I dismiss you,
Adramelech
.’

The grand Chancellor of Hell, looming over me in glistening
coils of black snake-like flesh, paused for a while to think about what I had
said. Then his yellowish mouth opened, and he laughed such a cruel, evil laugh
that I knew that I had probably made a mistake. I took another step, but this
time it was backwards.

‘So,’ said
Adramelech
, ‘you
dismiss me, you pathetic mortal? You dismiss me, do you?’

Terrified, I nodded yes. I remembered as much as I could of
the dismissals that Father Anton and the Reverend Taylor had spoken, and I said:
Adramelech
, I adjure thee to go out! In the name of
God the Father
leave
my presence! In the name of God
the Son
make
thy departure! In the name of the Holy
Ghost leave this place! For it is God who commands thee, and it is I who
command thee! By Jesus of Nazareth who gave his soul, by the blessed angels
from whom thou fell, be on thy way I demand thee! Amen!’

Adramelech
remained where he was.
His teeth gnashed together, and he glared down at me with such fury and hatred
that I was ready to do what Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
had done, and
make
a run for it. Maybe the angel could
protect me while I got away. On the other hand, maybe it couldn’t. I felt
lukewarm sweat running down my back, inside my shirt.

The angel
Hod
said quietly: ‘Do
you not go,
Adramelech
?’

Adramelech
laughed. ‘Not until
this mortal produces his proof that Jesus of Nazareth actually lived.
If he can.’

There was a long, tense silence. I turned towards the angel
Hod
, but its black brilliance was so intense that I
couldn’t see whether it was encouraging me or warning me. I turned back to
Adramelech
.

‘Without proof of Jesus, you are doomed,’
grinned
Adramelech
. ‘I shall devour you, mortal, and
Hod
will be powerless to prevent me. The choice of the
human race was self-destruction, and not even the greatest of angels can
prevent it.’

I coughed. Then I reached into my pocket and took out the
pastille tin that Eloise had given me. I carefully
prised
off the lid, and held it up towards
Adramelech
.

‘What is that?’ asked the demon, turning its grotesque head
away.

I held the tin higher. ‘It is irrefutable proof of the life
of Our Lord Jesus Christ. It is the ashes of his seamless robe, which was taken
from him on Calvary.’

Adramelech
twisted and shuddered
uneasily. ‘It’s a fake,’ he said, in a harsh voice.

‘All relics are fakes.’

I felt frozen with fear. But I kept the tin held aloft, and
I repeated, as steadily as I could: ‘It is the ashes of Christ’s robe, and it
is not a fake. Christ lived, and these are the remnants of his robe to prove
it.’

‘You lie!’ shrieked
Adramelech
.
‘Take that thing away!’ ‘It’s the truth!’ I yelled back.

‘Christ must have lived because nobody in the whole
goddamned universe could have tolerated a world where you and your devils ruled
alone! Christ’s life was logical, as well as divine, and that’s all there is to
it!’ ‘You lie!’ fumed the demon. ‘You lie!’ ‘Do I?’ I shouted back. Then take
this!’ I raised my arm, and hurled the tin of ashes over the serpentine body of
the grand Chancellor of Hell in a powdery spray.

There was a second in
which
I
thought that nothing was going to happen, and that the demon was going to
attack me with those rows and rows of vicious teeth. But then
Adramelech
bellowed, so loudly that bricks and dust
collapsed from the basement ceiling in thunderous showers, and bellowed again,
and again, until I had to cover my ears.

His black snake-like skin sloughed off him in heavy,
wrinkled folds. Beneath that, he was all raw glistening flesh – greys and
yellows and purple veins. Then his flesh began to slither away from his bones,
and evaporate into sickening, stomach-turning steam. Finally, his bones dropped
to the floor, and out from his ribs
crawled
a
twitching iridescent slug creature that subsided on to the concrete and
shrivelled
into nothing.

For a long time, I stood there staring at
Adramelech’s
remains, and couldn’t speak. It was hardly
possible to believe what had happened. Then I turned back towards the dark glow
of the angel
Hod
, and I said: ‘Is that it? Is
Adramelech
really dead?’

Madeleine’s voice said: ‘
In
this
life, yes. We have much to thank you for, mortal. You have acted wisely.’

I wiped dust and dirt from my face. ‘What about Madeleine?’
I asked the angel. ‘Is she going to come back? Or do you have her
for ever
?’

The blackness gleamed. ‘Madeleine is gone now, mortal, just
as Charlotte
Latour
did before her. She is not dead,
but will live in another form. Perhaps one day you will meet her again.’

I coughed. The air in the basement was dusty and stifling. I
said: ‘What does that mean? She’s going to be reborn?’