The Devils of D-Day (6 page)

Only then did I look at what had made me puke.
Out of my stomach, out of my actual mouth, had poured thousands of
pale twitching maggots, in a tide of bile.
They squirmed and writhed all
over the top of the tank, pink and half-transparent, and all I could do was
clamber desperately off that hideous ruined Sherman and drop to the frozen
grass, panting with pain and revulsion, and scared out of my mind.

Behind me, the voice whispered: ‘You can help me, you know.
You sound like a good man and true.’

F
ather
Anton carefully poured me a glass of Malmsey and brought it across his study at
arm’s length, as if it was a medical specimen. I took it unsteadily, and said,
‘Thank you, father. That’s very kind.’

He waved his hand as if to say not at all, not at all; and
then sat his baggy ancient body in an armchair opposite, and opened up his snuff
box.

‘So you went to hear the voices,’ he said, taking a pinch of
ground tobacco.

I nodded.

‘You look, forgive me for saying so, as if they alarmed
you.’

‘Not them.
It.’

Father Anton snorted, sneezed, and blew his nose like the
Trump of Doom. Then he said: ‘Demons can be either. One demon can be them, or
it, or whatever they please.

A demon is a host of evils.’

I reached across to the small
cherrywood
sidetable
and picked up my tape-recorder.

‘Whatever it is, father, it’s here, on tape, and it’s
an it
.
One infernal it.’

‘You recorded it? You mean
,
you did
actually hear it?’

The old priest’s expression, which had been one of patient
but not altogether unkind indulgence, subtly darkened and changed. He knew the
voice or voices were real, because he had been to the tank himself and heard
them. But for me to come along and tell him that I’d heard them, too – a
perfect stranger without any kind of religious knowledge at all – well, that
obviously disturbed him. Priests, I guess, are used to demons. They work, after
all, in the spiritual front line, and they expect to be tempted and harassed by
demonic manifestations. But when those manifestations are so evil and so
powerful that they make themselves felt in the world of ordinary men, when the
bad vibes are picked up by farmers and
cartographer then I
reckon
that most priests get to panic.

‘I didn’t come around last night because I was too sick,’ I
told Father Anton. ‘I wanted to, but I couldn’t.’

‘The tank brought on your sickness? Is that it?’

I nodded, and my throat still tightened at the thought of
what had poured out of my mouth.

‘Whatever it is inside that tank, it made me vomit worms and
bile. It took me half a dozen
whiskys
and a handful
of
paracetamol
to get me over it.’

Father Anton touched the ecclesiastical ring on his finger.
‘You were alone?’ he asked me quietly.

‘I went with Madeleine
Passerelle
.
The daughter of Jacques
Passerelle
.’

Father Anton said gravely: ‘Yes. I know that the
Passerelles
have been troubled by the tank for a long
time.’

‘Unfortunately, Madeleine didn’t hear the voice firsthand.
She stayed in the car because it was cold. But she’s heard the recording, and
she saw for herself how sick I was. The
Passerelles
let me stay the night at the farm.’

Father Anton indicated the tape-recorder. ‘You’re going to
play it for me?’

‘If you want to listen.’

Father Anton regarded me with a soft, almost sad look on his
face. ‘It has been a long time,
monsieur
,
since anyone has come to me for help and guidance as you have. In my day, I was
an exorcist and something of a specialist in demons and fallen angels. I will
do everything I can to assist you. If what you have heard is a true demon, then
we are facing great danger, because it is evidently powerful and vicious; but
beguiling as well.’

He looked towards the empty fireplace. Outside, it was
snowing again, but Father Anton obviously believed it was more spiritual to sit
in the freezing cold than to light a fire. I must say that I personally
preferred to toast my feet and worry about the spirituality of it later.

Father Anton began. ‘One thing I learned as an exorcist was
that it is essential correctly to identify the demon with whom you are dealing.
Some demons are easy to dispose of. You can say “The Father, the Son and the
Holy Ghost, boo!” and they vanish back to hell. But others are more difficult.
Adramelech
, for
instance, who is mentioned in the
Pseudomonarchia
Daemonum
, which I have on the shelves right here.
Or Belial.
Then there is Beelzebub, Satan’s successor, who
was always notoriously difficult to banish. I never faced him myself, and it is
probably best for me that I didn’t. But I have an interesting account of how he
possessed a nun at the
Ursuline
Convent at
Aix-le-Provence in the seventeenth century, and how it took seven weeks of
determined exorcism to dismiss him back to the netherworld.’

‘Father Anton,’ I said, as kindly as I could. ‘This is all
kind of medieval. I mean, what I’m trying to say is, we have something here
that’s evil, but it’s modern.’

Father Anton smiled sadly. ‘Evil is never modern,
monsieur
. It is only persistent.’

‘But what happens if we have an ancient demon right here?’

‘Well,’ said the priest. ‘Let us first hear the tape. Then
perhaps we can judge who or what this voice might be. Perhaps it is Beelzebub
himself, come to make a match of it.’

I wound back the cassette, pushed the ‘play’ button, and
laid the tape-recorder on the table. There was a crackling sound; then the
clank of metal as the tape-recorder was set down on the turret of the tank;
then a short silence, interspersed with the barking of that distant dog. Father
Anton leaned forward so that he could hear better, and cupped his hand around
one ear.

‘You
realise
that what you have
here is very rare,’ he told me. ‘I have seen
daguerrotypes
and photographs of manifestations before, but never tape-recordings.’

The tape fizzed and whispered, and then that chilling,
whispery voice said: ‘You can help me, you know.’

Father Anton stiffened, and stared across at me in
undisguised shock.

The voice said: ‘You sound like a good man.
A good man and true.
You can open this prison. You can take
me to join my brethren. You sound like a good man and true.’

Father Anton was about to say something, but I put my finger
against my lips, warning him that there was more.

The voice went on: ‘You can help me, you know.
You and that priest.
Look at him!

Doesn’t that priest have something to hide? Doesn’t that
priest have some secret lust, concealed under that holy cassock?’

I stared at the tape-recorder in amazement. ‘It didn’t say
that. There was no way it ever said that.’

Father Anton was white. He asked, in a trembling tone: ‘What
does this mean? What is it saying?’

‘Father, father,’ whispered the tape-recorder. ‘Surely you recall
the warm summer of 1928. So long ago, father, but so vivid.
The
day you took young
Mathilde
on the river, in your
boat.
Surely you remember that.’

Father Anton rose jerkily to his feet, like a Victorian
clockwork toy. His snuff tipped all over the rug. He stared at the
tape-recorder as if it was the devil himself. His chest heaved with the effort
of breathing, and he could scarcely speak.

‘That day was innocent!’ he breathed.
‘Innocence
itself!
How dare you! How dare you suggest it was anything else! You!
Demon!
Cochon
!
Vos
mains
sont
sales avec
le
sang des innocents!’

I reached out and seized Father Anton’s sleeve. He tried to
brush me away, but I gripped him more firmly, and said: ‘Father, it’s only a
trick.
For Christ’s sake.’

Father Anton looked at me with watering eyes.
‘A trick?
I don’t understand.’

‘Father, it has to be. It’s only a tape-recording. It’s just
some kind of trick.’

He looked nervously down at the cassette recorder, its tape
still silently spinning. ‘It can’t be a trick,’ he said huskily. ‘How can a
tape-recorder answer one back? It’s not possible.’

‘You heard it yourself,’ I told him. ‘It must be.’

I was as puzzled and scared as he was, but I didn’t want to
show it. I had the feeling that the moment I started giving in to all this weirdness,
the moment I started believing it for real, I was going to get tangled up in
something strange and uncontrollable. It was like standing at the entrance of a
hall of mirrors, trying to resist the temptation to walk inside and find out
what those distorted figures in the darkness were.

I pressed the tape-recorder’s ‘stop’ button. The gloomy room
was silent.

‘Sit down, Father Anton,’ I asked him. ‘Now, let’s play that
tape back again, and we’ll see how much of a trick it is.’

The old priest said: ‘It’s Satan’s work. I have no doubt.
It’s the work of the devil himself.’

I gently helped him back to his armchair, and picked up his
snuffbox for him. He sat there pale-faced and tense as I rewound the tape back
to the beginning, and then pushed the ‘play’ button once again.

We waited tensely as the tape began to crackle and hiss. We
heard it laid down on the turret again, and the dog barking. Then that voice
began once more, and it seemed colder and even more evil than ever. It sounded
as if it came from the throat of a hoarse hermaphrodite, some lewd creature who
delighted in pain and pleasure and unspeakable acts.

‘You can help me, you know,’ it repeated. ‘You sound like a
good man.
A good man and true.
You can open this
prison. You can take me to join my brethren. You sound like a good man and
true.”

Father Anton was sitting rigid in his seat, his knuckles
spotted with white where he was clutching the frayed upholstery.

The voice said: ‘‘Father Anton can take away the cross that
binds me
down,
and cast away the spell. You can do
that, can’t you, Father Anton? You’d do anything for an old friend, and I’m an
old friend of yours. You can take me to join my brethren across the waters,
can’t you? Beelzebub, Lucifer,
Madilon
,
Solymo
,
Saroy
, Then’,
Ameclo
,
Sagrael
,
Praredun
...’

‘Stop it!’ shouted Father Anton. ‘Stop it!’

With unbelievable agility for a man as old as ninety, he
reached out for the tape-recorder, held it in both hands, and smashed it
against the steel fireguard around the grate. Then he sat back, his eyes
staring and wild, snapping the broken pieces of plastic in his hands. He
dragged out the thin brown tape, and crumpled it up into a confused tangle of
knots and twists.

I sat watching all this in total amazement. First, I seemed
to have a tape-recorder that said whatever it felt like. Now, I had a priest
who broke up other people’s property. I said: ‘What’s wrong? Why the hell did
you do that?’

The priest took a deep breath. ‘It was the conjuration,’ he
said.
‘The words that can summon Beelzebub, the Lord of the
Flies.
There were only three more words to be said, and that demon could
have been with us.’

‘You’re not serious.’

Father Anton held up the smashed fragments of Sony
tape-recorder. ‘Do you think I would break your machine for nothing? Those
words can bring out of the underworld the most terrible of devils. I will buy
you another, never fear.’

‘Father Anton, it’s not the tape-recorder I’m worried about.
What concerns me is what goes on here. If there’s a creature inside that tank,
can’t we do something about it?

Exorcise it? Burn it out. Blow it up?’

Father Anton shook the smashed-up tape-recorder out of the
skirts of his cassock and into the waste-paper basket. ‘Exorcisms, my friend,
are woefully misunderstood.

They are hardly ever performed these days, and only in very
serious cases of possession. As for burning the
tank,
or blowing it up, that would do no good. The demon would still haunt Pont
D’Ouilly
, although he would be more like a fierce dog on a
long leash instead of a fierce dog inside a locked kennel. He cannot finally
get away until the holy cross is lifted from the turret, and the words of
dismissal erased.’

I opened the cigarette box on the table and took out a
Gauloise
. I lit it up and took a long drag. I was getting
used to this pungent French tobacco, and if it didn’t have as much tar in it as
a three-mile stretch of the Allegheny Valley Expressway, I think I could have
smoked it all the time. I said: ‘Whatever it is, it obviously wants out.’

‘Of course,’ agreed Father Anton. ‘And it appears to have a
strong desire to rejoin its fellows.
Its brethren.
Perhaps it means that there were demons or devils possessing the other twelve
tanks.’