The Devils of D-Day (5 page)

Madeleine came to the door. She was wearing a blue check
cowboy shirt and jeans, and she looked as if she’d just finished changing a
wheel on a tractor.

‘Dan,’ she said, but she didn’t sound surprised. ‘You left
something here?’

‘No, no. I came back for you.’

‘For me?
Je ne
comprends
pas.
‘

I said, ‘Can I come in? It’s like the North Pole out here. I
only wanted to ask you something.’

‘Of course,’ she told me, and opened the door wider.

The kitchen was warm and empty. I sat down at the broad pine
table, scarred from a hundred years of knives and hot saucepans, and she went
across to the corner cupboard and poured me a small glass of brandy. Then she
sat down opposite, and said, ‘Are you still thinking about the tank?’

I went to see Father Anton.’

She smiled faintly. ‘I thought you would.’

‘Am I that easy to read’’

‘I don’t think so,’ she smiled ‘
But
you seem like the kind of man who doesn’t like to leave puzzles unsolved. You
make maps, so your whole life is spent
unravelling
mysteries. And this one, of course, is a very special enigma indeed.’

I sipped my brandy. ‘Father Anton says he’s heard the voices
himself.’

She stared down at the table. Her finger traced the pattern
of a flower that had been scorched into the wood by a hot fish-kettle. She
commented, ‘Father Anton is very old.’

‘You mean he’s senile?’

‘I don’t know. But his sermons ramble these days. Perhaps he
could have imagined these things.’

‘Maybe he could. But I’d still like to find out for myself.’

She glanced up. ‘You want to hear them for yourself?’

‘Certainly.
I’d like to make a
tape-recording, too. Has anyone ever thought of doing that?’

‘Dan – not many people have ever gone to listen to the
voices on purpose.’

‘No, I know that. But that’s what I want to do tonight. And
I was hoping you’d come along with me.’

She didn’t answer straight away, but stared across the
kitchen as if she was thinking of something quite different. Her hair was tied
back in a knot, which didn’t suit her too much, but then I guess a girl doesn’t
worry too much about the charisma of her coiffure when she’s mucking out cows.
Almost unconsciously, she crossed herself, and then she looked back at me. ‘You
really want to go?’

‘Well, sure. There has to be some kind of explanation.’

‘Americans always need explanations?’

I finished my brandy, and shrugged. ‘I guess it’s a national
characteristic. In any case, I was born and bred in Mississippi.’

Madeleine bit her lip. She said, ‘Supposing I asked you not
to go?’

‘Well, you can ask me. But I’d have to say that I’m going anyway.
Listen, Madeleine, there’s a fascinating story in this. There’s some kind of
weird thing going on in that old tank and I want to know what it is.’

‘
C’est
malin
,’ she said. ‘It is wicked.’

I reached across the old table and laid my hand over hers. ‘That’s
what everybody says, but so far I haven’t seen anything that proves it. All I
want to do is find out what the voices are saying
,
if
there are any voices, and then we can go from there. I mean, I can’t say that
I’m not scared. I think it’s very
scarey
. But a whole
lot of
scarey
things turn out to be real interesting
once you take the trouble to check them out.’

‘Dan, please. It’s more than simply
scarey
.’

‘How can you say that unless you investigate it?’ I asked
her. ‘I don’t knock superstition, but here’s a superstition we can actually
test for ourselves.’

She took back her hand, and crossed her arms across her
breasts as if to protect herself from the consequences of what she was about to
say. ‘Dan,’ she whispered.

‘The tank killed my mother.’

I raised an eyebrow. ‘The tank did what?

‘It killed my mother. Well, it was responsible. Father isn’t
sure, but Eloise knows it, and I know it. I have never told anyone else, but
then nobody else has shown such interest in the tank as you. I have to warn
you, Dan. Please.’

‘How could the tank have killed your mother? It doesn’t
move, does it? The guns don’t fire?’

She turned her elegant Norman profile away from me, and
spoke in a steady
,
modulated whisper.
‘It was last year, late in summer. Five of our herd died from disease. Mother
said it was the tank that had done it. She always blamed the tank for
everything that went wrong. If it rained and our hay rotted she would blame the
tank.

Even if one of her cakes wouldn’t rise.
But last year she said she was going to fix the tank forever. Eloise tried to
persuade her to leave it alone, but she wouldn’t listen.

She went down the road with holy water, sprinkled it across
the tank, and spoke the dismissal of demons.’

‘The dismissal of demons?
What the
hell’s that?’

Madeleine touched her forehead.
‘The words
of exorcism.
Mother always believed in devils and demons, and she has
the words in one of her holy books.’

‘Well, what happened?’

Madeleine slowly shook her head. ‘She was only a simple
woman. She was kind and she
was loving
and she
believed deeply in God and the Virgin Mary. Yet her religion couldn’t save her.
Thirteen days after she sprinkled the holy water on the tank, she started to
cough blood, and she died in hospital in Caen after a week. The doctors said
she had some form of tuberculosis, but they could never say precisely what form
it was, or why she had died so quickly.’

I felt embarrassed now, as well as afraid. ‘I’m sorry.’
Madeleine looked up, and there was that wry smile again. ‘You have no need to
be. But you can see why I’d rather you didn’t go near the tank.’

I thought for a while. It would be easy enough to forget the
tank altogether, or simply add a footnote to Roger’s book that the last
remaining Sherman tank of a secret special division was still decaying in the
Norman countryside, and that local yokels believed it was possessed by evil.
But how can you dismiss something like that as a footnote? I didn’t
particularly believe in demons and devils, but here was a whole French village
that was scared half to death, and a girl seriously claiming that malevolent
spirits had deliberately killed her mother.

I pushed back my chair and stood up. Tm sorry,’ I said, ‘but
I’m still going to take a look. If it’s true, what you said about your mother,
then
we’ve got the biggest supernatural story here since Uri
Geller.’ ‘Uri Geller?’ she frowned. I coughed. ‘He,
er
,
bends spoons.’ She sat at the table looking a little sad. Then she said: ‘Well,
if you insist on going, I’ll have to come with you. I don’t want you to go on
your own.’

‘Madeleine, if it’s really that dangerous...’ ‘I’ll come
with you, Dan,’ she repeated firmly, and all I could do was lift my hands in
acceptance. I was glad of the company anyway.

While I turned the 2CV around in the yard, Madeleine went to
get her overcoat. The clouds were beginning to clear a little, and there was a
washed-out moon up above us like a white-faced boy peering through a dirty
window. Madeleine crossed the yard, climbed into the car, and we bounced off
across the ruts and the puddles until we reached the road. Just before we
turned, Madeleine reached over and squeezed my hand. ‘I would like to say,
“good luck,”
‘ she
whispered. Thanks,’ I told her.
‘And the same to you’

It took us two or three minutes to reach the hedge where the
tank lay entangled. As soon as I saw the shape of it, I pulled the Citroen over
on to the opposite verge, and killed the motor. I lifted my battery-operated
tape recorder out of the back seat, and opened the car door.

Madeleine said: ‘I’ll wait here. Just for the moment,
anyway. Call me if you need me.’

‘Okay.’

Down here by the river, under the brow of the cliffs, the
pallid moonlight barely reached. I crossed the road and stepped right up to the
tank, touching its cold corroded mudguard. It seemed so dead and desolate and
rusted that, now I saw it again for real, it was hard to believe that there was
anything supernatural about it. It was nothing more than the abandoned junk of
war.

There was a rustling sound in the grass around the tracks,
and I froze. But then a rabbit jumped out from underneath the tank, and
scampered off into the hedge. It was kind of late in the year for rabbits, but
I guess they could have made their nest inside the tank
itself,
or underneath it somewhere. Maybe that was the real answer to Pont
D’Ouilly’s
haunted relic – squeaking and rustling wildlife.

I walked round the tank as far as I could, but its right
side was completely tangled in brambles, and it would have taken a sharp machete
and three native bearers to go round and take a good look at that. I satisfied
myself with the left side and the back. I was interested to see that even the
air vents for the engine had been welded up tight, and so had the grille over
the driver’s porthole.

Slinging my tape recorder over my shoulder, I heaved myself
up on to the tank’s mudguard. I made a lot of noise doing it, but I didn’t
suppose that thirty-year-old ghosts really objected that much to being
disturbed in the night. Carefully, I walked across the blackened hull, and my
footsteps sounded booming and metallic. I reached the turret, and hammered on
it with my fist. It sounded very empty in there. I hoped it was.

As Jacques
Passerelle
had said,
the tank’s hatch was welded shut. It was a hasty-looking weld, but whoever had
done it had known his job. As I strained forward to look at it more closely,
however, I saw that the hatch was sealed by other means as well – means that,
in their own way, were just as powerful.

Riveted over the top of the tank was a crucifix. It looked
as if it had been taken from the altar of a church and crudely fastened to the
turret in such a way that nobody could ever remove it. Looking even nearer, I
saw that there was some kind of holy adjuration, too, engraved in the rough
metal. Most of the words were corroded beyond legibility, but I could
distinctly make out the phrase ‘Thou art commanded to go out.’’

Up there on the hull of that silent ruined tank, in the dead
of winter in Normandy, I felt frightened of the unknown for the first time in
my life. I mean, really frightened. Even though I didn’t want it to, my scalp
kept chilling and prickling, and I found I was licking my lips again and again
like a man in an icy desert. I could see the Citroen across the road, but the
moon was reflecting from the flat windshield, so I couldn’t make out Madeleine
at all. For all I knew, she might have vanished. For all I knew, the whole of
the rest of the world might have vanished. I coughed in the bitter cold.

I walked along to the front of the tank, pushing aside wild
brambles and leafless creeper. There wasn’t much to sec there, so I walked back
again to the turret, to see if I could distinguish more of the words.

It was then, as my fingers touched the top of the turret,
that I heard someone laughing. I stayed stock still, holding my breath. The
laughter stopped. I lifted my head, and tried to work out where the sound might
have come from. It had been a short, ironic laugh, but with a peculiarly
metallic quality, as if someone had been laughing over a microphone.

I said: ‘Who’s there?’ but there was silence. The night was
so quiet that I could still hear that distant dog barking. I laid my
tape-recorder on top of the turret and clicked it on.

For several minutes, there was nothing but the hiss of the
tape coursing past the recording head, and that damned dog. But then I heard a
whispering sound, as if someone was talking to himself under his breath. It was
close, and yet it seemed far away at the same time. It was coming from the turret.

Shaking and sweating, I knelt down beside the turret and
tapped on it, twice. I sounded as choked up as a grade school kid after his
first dry martini. I said: ‘Who’s there? Is there anybody inside there?’

There was a pause, and then I heard a whispery voice say:
‘You can help me, you know.’

It was a strange voice, which seemed to come from everywhere
at once. It seemed to have a smile in it as well; the kind of voice that
someone has when they’re secretly grinning. It could have been a man or a woman
or even a child, but I wasn’t sure.

I said, ‘Are you in there? Are you inside the tank?’

The voice whispered, ‘You sound like a good man.
A good man and true.’

Almost screaming, I said: ‘What are you doing in there? How
did you get in?’

The voice didn’t answer my question. It simply said, Ton can
help me, you know. You can open this prison. You can take me to join my
brethren. You sound like a good man and true’

‘Listen!’ I shouted. ‘If you’re really inside there, tap on
the turret! Let me hear that you’re in there!’

The voice laughed. ‘I can do better than that. Believe
me,
I can do far better than that.’

‘I don’t understand.’

The voice laughed softly. ‘Do you feel sick?’ it asked me.
‘Do you feel as if you’re seized with cramps and pain?’

I frowned. I did, as a matter of fact, feel nauseous. There
was something in my stomach that was turning over and over; something foul and
indigestible. I thought for a moment that it was something I ate for lunch; but
then I was seized by a stomach spasm that made me
realise
I was going to be violently ill. It all happened in an instant. The next thing
I knew, my gut was racked by the most terrible heaving, and my mouth had to
stretch open wide as a torrent of revolting slush gushed out of me and
splattered the hull of the tank. The vomiting went on and on until I was
clutching my stomach and weeping from the sheer exhaustion of it.