Demons of Ghent

by Helen Grant

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  About the Author

  Also by Helen Grant

  Acknowledgements

  Read on for a Taste of URBAN LEGENDS

  Copyright

  About the Book

  People are falling from the rooftops of Ghent. But did they throw themselves off - or did somebody push them?

  Veerle has seen enough death to last a lifetime. But death isn’t finished with Veerle just yet.

  When people start to die in her new home town, some put it down to a spate of suicides. Some blame the legendary Demons of Ghent. Only Veerle suspects that soemthing – somebody – has followed her to wreak his vengeance.

  But she watched the hunter die, didn’t she?

  For Robert L. Grant and in memory of Edith Grant

  1

  The old city centre of Ghent famously has three medieval towers: the belfry of the cathedral, Sint-Baafs, that of the Sint-Niklaaskerk, and the Belfort, which stands between the other two. The church towers are generally closed, but it is possible to ascend the ninety-one-metre Belfort and gaze out from the arches of the stone arcade that runs below the clock faces. The arches are unglazed, so it can be glacially cold up there, and the wind skimming through the arcade gives it an uncomfortably insecure feeling, but if you can stand that, the views of the old city are stunning.

  The Belfort is open for most of the day, but it closes to visitors at six p.m.

  It is difficult to get into the building after that, but not impossible – not if you know the timetable of the ancient city, the ebb and flow of the human tide. Not if you have a key.

  The man in question had a box of them – far too many to carry them all with him – accumulated over long years of working in menial jobs for the Ghent city council – the Stadsbestuur – and for businesses around the city. He had worked for a long time as a stonemason, then as a roofer, and as the decades took their toll he had worked as a maintenance man and cleaner. All this work was less than the life he had once known, but he accepted it, and became invisible. Nobody looks too closely at the hulking and dusty workman as he slouches past, or stumps up the stairs to the roof carrying the tools of his trade.

  Laying hands on the keys was not difficult; it merely required patience. Sometimes he was able to make duplicates himself. Sometimes he went to one of the various locksmiths dotted about the city and had a copy made; he had a story ready, about doing a favour for a workmate who had lost his own key, but he never had to use it. Sometimes he went to the foreman, touching his cap and apologizing roughly for having lost his key, and thus got a second one, although he could only ever do that once in each new position. He also stole them.

  The manager who went for a break leaving a bunch of keys lying out or hanging from the lock of the door generally wouldn’t notice that one was missing until very much later. He might assume he had lost it himself; certainly he was unlikely to know exactly when it had disappeared. That manager might bluster and complain and look askance at everyone else, but when nothing came of it, no overnight break-in or thieving, the incident would be forgotten.

  Eventually he had enough keys to gain access to almost any block in the old part of Ghent. Once inside a single building it was easy enough to make his way to the roof, and from there he could move freely until he came to one of those great canyons that represented a street far below.

  The oldest keys in the box were larger, more roughly made than the new ones. Some of them opened doors to the most ancient buildings in the city; some opened nothing at all any more. They lay crowded lengthways in the box, stark as bodies in a plague pit. When he handled them, as he liked to do, gloatingly, they were as cold as corpse-flesh, warming only temporarily from the touch of his hands; they clinked together like a hoard of coins running through a miser’s fingers.

  There was only one place in the old city for which he had tried repeatedly, and in vain, to obtain keys, and that was the cathedral of Sint-Baaf. The cathedral had the tallest of the three towers, measuring about ninety-five metres in height, and for that reason alone a set of keys would have been a prize worth having. But there was more to it than that: the old church was a reliquary, a treasure box. He would have given much to have thirty minutes alone inside it. He would have given his life.

  Sint-Baafs was closed to him, though. Instead he decided to ascend the second-highest tower, the Belfort.

  He waited until after nightfall. The three towers were illuminated throughout the night, so there was no cover to be found in the darkness. After the shops closed and all the daytime workers went home, however, there were fewer people on the streets, and once the bars and restaurants were closed too there was hardly anyone to see him as he passed.

  The last trams were running so he waited until one had just passed and he was confident that there would be no more until the early morning. He looked to left and right; he was alone in the street. He climbed the steps, drawing the keys from his pocket, and a minute later he was inside the building, closing the door behind him.

  He ascended the spiral stone staircase with dogged patience, toiling upwards like an insect crawling up a wall. He passed through the room that housed previous incarnations of the gilded dragon that topped the tower’s spire. The very oldest was little more than a metal framework now, like a carcass that has rotted down to the bones. Further up the tower was the great bell Roland, whose voice had warned the city of approaching danger in centuries past. He passed that too, and Roland was strangely silent.

  He stepped out into the arcade. The wind was cold on his face, and that was right because it was like the unnatural breath that chills and withers – the breath of pestilence, exhaled onto the sleeping city. It plucked at the collar of his coat with icy fingers.

  Here he would keep watch. The old tower was a place he favoured for his night-time vigils. It commanded a view not only of the square and the streets below, but also the rooftops of Ghent, with their peaks and towers and plains.

  He watched for them, the denizens of the rooftops, dark forms who moved between the chimney stacks with
stealthy confidence. They were shaped like human beings, but that was not what they were. They were there to stop him. They were his enemies.

  He had come to see his arduous task as something almost holy. Yes; it was possible for the bringing of death to be a holy thing – hadn’t the Lord God Himself sent the Angel of Death amongst the Egyptians? Out there in the city, sleeping perhaps, or keeping a midnight vigil like himself, were those who were marked out for death; those who had warded it off for far too long. He would find each one of them, no matter how much time it took, and wreak God’s will upon them. The things that clambered over the rooftops, snarling and chittering, would not hinder him in his task. Whenever he encountered one of them he would cast it down from the rooftops to destruction. They could be killed, he knew that; he had exterminated some of them already. If necessary, he would cleanse the upper reaches of the city of their foul presence entirely.

  He searched for them now, looking out through the nearest arch of the arcade, his gaze sweeping the skyline and then swooping down to the square far below, the Sint-Baafsplein. He expected to see them here; the cathedral was the epicentre. The demons would be unable to resist it; they would be drawn to it, as he was himself. They felt the power of the ancient building and the talisman within it. It drew them to it, like the drag of a strange tide.

  Once, he had seen one of the marked ones down there in the square before the cathedral; perhaps it drew them to itself too. He had been struggling in the grip of two hefty officials; otherwise he might have followed her there and then, and ended her life in some quiet street or on the doorstep of her own home. The men had been dragging him away from the cathedral door, and he had come almost face to face with her. He knew her instantly. Unconsciously, she had struck a pose he recognized, her right arm bent, the hand raised, her left arm hanging at her side. Her fair hair hung down over her shoulders. She was even wearing something familiar – a short dress of some dark stuff, leaving her shoulders and knees bare.

  The sight had angered him; it was as though she had done it deliberately, taunting him by her presence when he was unable to act. He had begun to struggle even more violently, and in the ensuing mêlée he had lost sight of the girl. Afterwards, she had gone. No matter. He had seen her once; he would see her again, and he would finish her.

  He gazed down now, trying to pick out the spot where he had seen her, and that was how he came to pick up the flicker of movement far below. Someone was crossing the square, keeping close to the façade of the old cathedral.

  Instantly his interest was piqued, flaring up like a gas jet firing. Unconsciously he tensed, watching the progress of the tiny figure as it passed the great doors of the cathedral, apparently making for the south side of the square.

  But no; the figure went unerringly to the narrow door set into the south tower – a door that was always locked: hadn’t he tried it himself, a hundred times? A moment or two of fumbling about the door, and it was open.

  Even before the figure had vanished into the darkness beyond the door, he turned and strode swiftly from the arcade, back into the Belfort. The descent of the spiral stone staircases seemed to take for ever, each turn of the stairs a penance. He would like to have spread great wings and sliced across the empty space between the Belfort and the cathedral like a scimitar sweeping through the air. The beating of his heart was like the striking of a hammer on the rim of a bell; it resonated through his body, filling him with savage joy.

  Fear my coming, he thought. I am Death.

  2

  Ninety-five metres is a long way to fall.

  It might not be the full ninety-five metres, Luc reminded himself. It depends how high you can climb. If you got to the top level but you couldn’t climb one of those conical things at each corner of the tower, well, you could take off at least five metres. He considered. You’d still be dead, though.

  He was standing at the corner of Biezekapelstraat, keeping close to the wall, doing his best to vanish into the shadows. He hadn’t done anything wrong yet, but there was no point in drawing attention to himself.

  Luc was watching the area in front of the cathedral, the Sint-Baafsplein. It was very late, and there were few people about, but you never knew. It didn’t help that the cathedral itself was illuminated, drenching the square with golden light. The trams had stopped running a little while ago, but there was always the risk of someone reeling home from the local bar on foot. It would take only one nosy person to wreck his evening’s activities.

  Luc felt in his pocket, as he had done perhaps a dozen times that evening. The keys were still there, the metal cool under his fingers.

  I still can’t believe I got them, he thought. The keys to the bell tower. I’ve done the impossible.

  They weren’t the actual keys, of course. Those were locked away somewhere inside the ancient building, where only the cathedral guides and the clergy could lay hands on them. The keys in Luc’s pocket were copies.

  It was a mystery to Luc why they never opened the bell tower – well, hardly ever, anyway. One measly week in the summer, when the festival was on. The rest of the time the tower was kept locked. Most people probably didn’t even notice the narrow wooden door, studded with black iron nails, at the south corner of the façade. Why would you, when no one ever went in and out of it?

  A couple of months ago, though, there’d been a problem. Something had fallen from the cathedral’s lofty heights onto the stones of the Sint-Baafsplein. Just something small – a tile, or a splinter of stone. It hadn’t hit anyone when it fell, no harm done, but the incident had alarmed someone enough that a surveyor had been called in, and then workmen had come.

  Luc had seen them all come and go from the other side of the square, where he had been sitting on the stones in the summer sunshine, sipping a can of Coke and masquerading as a tourist. He hadn’t bothered trying anything when the surveyor was there; the man had been accompanied at all times by a stern-looking clerical type, and anyway, he’d looked as miserable as sin. Not exactly approachable. The workmen, though – that had been another matter. Luc had perked up the moment he saw them unlocking the door to the tower. They didn’t look as unfriendly as the surveyor; they looked like Luc’s sort of people – informal, a bit scruffy, not too up themselves. Even so, he might have hesitated to try anything, except for one thing. He knew one of them.

  Wout, he thought, remembering. Good old Wout. Good old stupid Wout. They’d been in Vocational School together. Luc had recognized those blunt features, that shock of pale hair, immediately. Neither of them was ever going to be a brain surgeon, Luc knew that, but Wout . . . Luc had grimaced, hoping that the works foreman, whoever he was, wasn’t going to give Wout anything too taxing to do. Like holding a hammer, for example. Not with people walking about underneath.

  However, the unfortunate foreman’s responsibility was Luc’s opportunity. He had got to his feet, unfolding his long limbs gracefully, lobbed the Coke can into a bin and ambled slowly towards the cathedral.

  When he got to the doorway the other workmen had disappeared inside. There was only Wout standing there, looking slightly baffled as usual. Luc had gone right up to him, resisting the temptation to snap his fingers in Wout’s face and say, Wake up.

  ‘Wout,’ he’d said, and Wout had looked at him. Luc could swear that in the two full seconds it had taken Wout to respond, he could see the thought processes, the dawning recognition, spreading across those ponderous features like a puddle spreading out around a badly trained puppy.

  Luc had kept a friendly grin fixed on his face while Wout greeted him back. He kept the conversation going with ease; it was like playing table tennis with a very small child, he thought. He waited until Wout glanced away, digesting some nugget of information, and then he looked past Wout, at the door. The keys were there, one of them inserted into the lock, the others hanging from the ring. Luc had felt a thrill of excitement so acute that it was exhilarating. He hadn’t let it show in his face. There was still one thing standing between
him and those keys, between curling his fingers around them, drawing them out of the lock and running off to the very first key-cutter he could find. Just one thing.

  ‘Wout . . .’ he had begun.

  Five minutes later he’d been sprinting down the street, the keys clutched in his fist and his wallet twenty euros lighter. He’d been surprised that Wout had the nous to ask for money. Evidently he’d learned something from his apprenticeship after all. He’d made Luc promise not to drop him in it, either; if the foreman came down before Luc was back, Wout was going to say he didn’t know him – he was just a thief who’d snatched the keys when Wout’s back was turned.

  The foreman didn’t come down, though, thought Luc, staring at the great illuminated bulk of the cathedral jutting into the night sky. Nobody knows I’ve got these keys except Wout, and he’s probably forgotten his own surname by now.

  He was beginning to feel really jittery. His heart was thudding, and his skin was hypersensitive, pleasurably so, as though he were tangled in satin sheets, the smooth folds slithering across his naked flesh. He measured the distance from the spot where he stood to the narrow door at the south corner of the cathedral façade. How long would it take to run across to that spot, how long to slide the key into the lock and fumble the door open? He hadn’t seen anyone cross the square for at least twenty minutes now; perhaps no one would cross it again before sun-up.

  Now or never, Luc, he thought. Now or never.

  He wasn’t a great philosopher. Rationalizing things wasn’t his strong suit. Either you did something or you didn’t; thinking too hard about it complicated things.

  Before he knew it, Luc was running across the stones, aiming for the bell-tower door. He tried to tread lightly, but his footsteps and the sound of his own breathing were the only things he could hear. Nobody shouted, Hey, you! There were no answering footsteps, no one came running to intercept him.

  He reached the door and slid the key into the lock. It was a little stiff; the mechanism was antiquated. He struggled with it for a moment, all the time expecting to hear a shout behind him, or feel a hand coming down on his shoulder. Then the door was swinging open, and he was inside, closing the door behind him, shutting out the yellow light from the square.