It is only today that my mind has fully realised the wholeness of my destiny, and that, as a reincarnation, I have a heavenly duty to perform.’
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?’
‘In a way.’
‘Can you tell her something for me?’
‘I’m afraid not. She will know nothing of what went before. But she will be happy. I hope that is some consolation for you. She has served us well, and deserves happiness.’
I wiped my face with my handkerchief. ‘And what about Father Anton, and Antoinette? Elmek promised that Adramelech would revive them.’
If such a thing was possible, the blackness smiled. Or at least, it radiated affection. It said: ‘The promises of devils are rarely kept. Only the Lord thy God has the final power of life or resurrection. But you may know that Father Anton is in his heaven, where he deserves to be; and that his Antoinette is with him. Those who struggle against evil are rewarded in the life hereafter.’
I was beginning to feel very tired. It was a long, long time ago since those two old men had come down the road on bicycles and interrupted my map-making to tell me about the tank at Pont D’Ouilly.
I said: ‘What about the devils? Are we ever going to see them again?’
‘As long as man makes wars, Adramelech and his thirteen acolytes will survive, in one form or another. A demon of the evil sephiroth cannot be totally destroyed, except by disbelief. The same is true for angels of the divine sephiroth. If no man believed in glory, which is my realm, then I should vanish for all eternity.’
‘I see,’ I told the angel, although I wasn’t sure that I did. I looked round at the ruined basement, and said: ‘What do I do now? Is there anything else you want me to do?’
There was no answer. I turned around, and the black glow had disappeared. I was alone again in the world of mortals.
Very wearily, very slowly, I climbed the cellar steps, and opened the door that led out into the hallway. There was nobody around. Up here, the building looked as ordinary and normal as when we had first pushed the doorbell. The front door was open, too, and I could see my rented Citroen parked outside, with a parking ticket tucked under the windshield wiper.
I went down the steps into the wintry street. It was almost dark now, and it was beginning to snow. I lifted up my wiper and took out the ticket, and as I stood there on that wet, cold London pavement, I was glad of the icy drizzle, because nobody could see that my eyes were filled with tears.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
The Devils of D-Day Page 18