The Devils of D-Day

Home > Other > The Devils of D-Day > Page 16
The Devils of D-Day Page 16

by Graham Masterton


  Madeleine handed me the books. She whispered: ‘What is it doing? Has it said what it wants?’

  I shook my head. ‘It wants you, but I don’t know why.’

  Elmek cackled: ‘You don’t know why? You can’t even guess? Don’t you know what that poor girl Jeanne d’Arc did for the benefit of our help in battle? Can’t you imagine what befell poor Gundrada, the wife of William de Warrenne?’

  Sergeant Boone lifted his Sterling machine-gun. But Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet raised a hand and warned: ‘Steady, sergeant. We’re not dealing with the IRA now.’

  I called, ‘What do you want us to do, Elmek? The girl is here now. What do you want us to do?’

  The basement trembled and shook again, and there was a low, irritating sound like thousands of blowflies swarming over a dead horse. It was so dark now that we could hardly see at all. One of the soldiers said: ‘Christ, it’s like a bleeding grave down ‘ere.’

  ‘Quiet that man,’ snapped the sergeant.

  Elmek whispered, in a hoarse, mocking voice: ‘The girl must open each sack in turn.

  Only the girl will do. Only the girl has any religious faith. She must open each sack in turn, and say over it the words of the conjuration.’

  While Elmek was talking, I was straining my eyes in the dim light to read the pages which the Reverend Taylor had marked in his thin black book. The section was headed The Seven Accurate Tests of An Evil Spirit’s Identity, and it told you what you had to do to discover the true name of a demon or devil. But as I read more and more, my confidence sank. The first test was to ask the devil its name by the power of Sammael, the arch-demon whom they called ‘the venom of God’. The second test was to burn the devil’s hair or scales and see whether the smoke sank downwards or rose upwards. The third test was to sprinkle various herbs on its skin—borage, fennel, parsley, and dozens of others, because different devils were marked or repelled by different plants. The fourth was to spray a silver spoonful of devil’s blood across twenty-six cards with letters of the alphabet on them, and the blood would fall on every card except those with the letters of its own name. The fifth and the sixth and the seventh were equally impossible, and all of them were obviously devised for a full-scale ritual exorcism. What we had here, in this cellar in Huntingdon Place, was an occult emergency.

  ‘Madeleine,’ I hissed. ‘Madeleine, I can’t do these tests. They’re too complicated.’

  She lifted a finger. ‘Wait,’ she whispered back. ‘There may be some other way.’

  ‘What other way? What are you talking about?’ ‘You will have to trust me,’ she said.

  ‘Well, what do you want me to do. You can’t go around opening up those sacks!’ ‘I must.’ ‘Madeleine, I—'

  She reached out in the darkness and held my arm. ‘Trust me,’ she said. ‘As I open up each sack, I will try and discover the name of the devil within it, and I will try to pass that name on to you. These are only lesser devils. They’re fierce and warlike and loathsome, but they’re not wise.’

  ‘And what do I do when you’ve told me their names?’ I asked her. ‘Always supposing that we live that long.’

  She pressed her hand against L’Invocation des Anges. She said: ‘Look up each name in the book, and beside it you will see another name, the name of the devil’s corresponding angel. Invoke that angel by repeating the words of the conjuration.’

  I frowned at her. ‘How do you know all this? I thought that—'

  Elmek wheezed: ‘Come on, girl, open up these sacks for me! Tear open these sacks and release my beloved brethren! Hurry, girl, there is little time left!’

  The basement lights pulsed brighter, and then dimmed dark again. I could feel a deep, systematic throbbing throughout the whole room, like the gristly beating of some gruesome heart. Between me and Elmek, Sergeant Boone and his men now stood with their machine-guns raised, and Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet was turning towards us with an expression of responsible concern. I suppose they teach them responsible concern at officer school.

  He said: ‘I can’t advise you to do what the devil says, Mlle Passerelle. In fact, I’ll have to order you to stay back.’

  Madeleine gave my hand a last, gentle squeeze. ‘I’m sorry, Lieutenant-Colonel. But I cannot do what you ask.’

  Elmek, in what sounded like eight vibrant voices speaking at once, called: ‘Open the sacks, girl! Asmorod is impatient!’

  Madeleine took one step forward. As she did so, a hideous shape emerged from the shadows at the far end of the basement—a shape like the black glossy skull of a beetle. There was a shivering, rustling, grasshopper sound, the chirring noise of insects. But it wasn’t an insect, because I could make out tentacles as well, and some grotesque shape attached to its abdomen like a deformed Siamese twin of itself.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet shouted: ‘Fire!’

  What happened next seemed to happen so slowly that I remember every detail of it, like some repulsive action replay that goes over and over inside your mind. I saw the sergeant and his three soldiers raise their machine-guns. I saw Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet taking one pace backwards. Then, out of one soldier’s mouth, in a dreadful torrent, came gallons and gallons of bloody chopped-up slush, splattering all over the concrete floor. It looked as if he was puking a hundredweight of raw hamburger meat, and Madeleine turned her face away with a mewl of anguish. Transfixed, I watched as the soldier’s whole body seemed to collapse like an empty cushion-cover, and he twisted over and lay flat on his face on the gory floor. Beside him, Sergeant Boone collapsed in the same way, his fatigues black with bile and blood, and then the other two soldiers. The sweetish smell was overwhelming, and I had two dry heaves before I could control my stomach.

  The darkness, almost thankfully, closed in again. I wiped cold perspiration away from my forehead, and pulled Madeleine back, away from the four dead soldiers. It was silent for a minute or two; but then I heard Elmek’s creaky laughing, the voice of an old crone, but a harshly inhuman voice as well, as if its breath were piping through a throat lined with black hairs.

  ‘They dared to threaten me,’ the devil mocked us. ‘They dared to raise their weapons against me. It’s almost a pity that you couldn’t see, from the outside, the artistry of what I did to them. But then that’s the elegance of such a death. Their bowels and their stomachs and their lungs and their kidneys were sliced up and vomited out, leaving their bodies as empty as their stupid heads.’

  Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet, his voice shaking, said: ‘I think we’d better try to make a run for it, Mr McCook.’ I said: ‘I don’t think there’s much point, Colonel. We could be minced up like that before we even got up the first step. Damn it, that’s why we were forced to come here in the first place!’

  Madeleine interrupted: ‘It won’t harm us, monsieur le colonel, if we do what it tells us to do. Now, I must open those sacks. We don’t have any more time to waste.’

  Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet snapped: ‘I forbid it! I forbid you to take a single step!’

  ‘Then I shall take several,’ said Madeleine, defiantly, and pushed past him into the gloom.

  Elmek’s husky rustle of approval made me feel as if my shirt had been suddenly soaked in iced water. I tried to follow Madeleine, but she turned round and instructed me quietly: ‘Stay there, Dan. Please. Stay back. Just listen to the names when I tell you, and invoke their angels.’

  Elmek hissed: ‘What are you saying? What are you talking about?’

  Madeleine turned and looked straight into the convoluted shadows where the devil lurked. ‘I am doing what I have to do,’ she said simply, and went up to the first trestle table.

  She stood over the table for what seemed like minutes on end, but was only a few seconds. Then she said: ‘I summon thee, O being of darkness, O spirit of the pit. I command thee to make thy most evil appearance. I order thee to come forth, and I nullify all seals upon thee, all ties that bind thee. Venite O spirit.’

  Then she gripped the musty fabric of the sack, and ripped it
open.

  From where I was standing, it was difficult for me to see. But I could glimpse strange bones, and smell arcane dusts, and hear the rattle of fiendish vertebrae. Madeleine reached into the sack, and lifted out the devil’s skull, holding it up for Elmek to see.

  ‘The devil Umbakrail,’ she said. ‘The devil of darkness and evil events after nightfall.’

  I was so fascinated by what she was doing that I almost forgot to look up the name Umbakrail in L’Invocation des Anges. But as she moved to the next trestle, I hurriedly turned through the pages until I found it. Umbakrail, also Umbaqurahal, also S’aamed. The devil of dark. There was even an etching of it—a grotesque beast with staring eyes and razor-sharp claws. On the facing page, in Henri St Ermin’s laborious French, was a description of its seraphic counterpart, the angel Seron, and below that were the words which would call down Seron to banish the evil presence of its hellish adversary.

  ‘O angel,’ I muttered, fearful that Elmek might hear what I was doing, ‘I adjure thee in the name of the blessed Virgin Mary, by her holy milk, by her sanctified body, by her sanctified soul, to come forth. I ask thee by-all the holy names: Eloy, Jehova, El Oristan, Sechiel, Laaval …’

  Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet said: ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  I glanced up at him. ‘You mean what the heaven am I doing. I’m calling down the angels to get us out of this.’

  ‘For God’s sake, man, that girl’s in deadly danger! We’ve got to—'

  I hissed: ‘Shut up! There’s nothing else we can do! You saw what Elmek did to your men! Now, just give us a chance to do it our way!’

  Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet was about to protest, but a low, unpleasant rumbling went through the cellar, and he turned towards the writhing shapes of the demon Elmek in alarm. Madeleine had spoken the words of the conjuration over the second sack, and was pulling apart the soft medieval fabric to reveal the terrifying skeleton within.

  Again, she raised the skull. It was long and narrow, with slanted eye-sockets, and the nubs of two horns. I felt a chilly ripple flow out from it, as if someone had opened the door of a cold-store. The lights in the cellar sank and flickered, and I sensed the mounting presence of unspeakable malevolence and cruelty.

  ‘Cholok,’ said Madeleine, identifying the devil for me. ‘The devil of suffocation. The devil who smothers children and asphyxiates victims of fires.’

  Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet glared at me in helpless desperation, but I was too busy leafing through my book. There it was. Cholok, sometimes known as Nar-speth. A devil with a face of absolute dispassion, and the leathery wings of a reptile. On the page opposite, I saw that its heavenly opposite was Meles, the angel of purity and happiness. I spoke the words to summon Meles, and then watched Madeleine as she went to the third sack.

  Skeleton by skeleton, from the third sack to the fourth, and then to the fifth and the sixth and the seventh, the skeletons of each devil were taken from the ancient material in which they had been sewn up for so long. As yet, they took on no life, but I guessed that when all of them were free from their religious captivity, they would clothe themselves in flesh the way that Elmek must have done in Father Anton’s cellar.

  The noise in the cellar was hideous and unnerving. As each devil was freed, the chorus of hellish voices grew louder; until the whole place sounded like an insane asylum, with scratching insect sounds and grotesque shrieks, and voices that whispered incessantly of death and plague and aberrations beyond human understanding. I was sweating so much that my fingers made damp dimples on the pages of L’Invocation des Anges, and Lieutenant-Colonel Thanet was holding his hands to his ears in stunned disbelief.

  At last, Madeleine spoke the words to free the last devil from his sack—the demon Themgoroth, the hawk-like devil of blindness. In my turn, I mumbled the invocation that would bring down Themgoroth’s angelic opponent Asrul.

  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 to 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.

 

‹ Prev