Demons of Ghent

by Helen Grant

  She thought, I can see why they go nuts when I bunk off school. They’re afraid I’m going to fail the year and have to stay and do it again.

  She rolled onto her side.

  If I keep missing stuff I am going to fail the year.

  Admitting it to herself gave her a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  But . . . but . . . I’m not supposed to be here, this is not supposed to be my life, thought Veerle. As long as she could hang onto that, a tiny part of her was still safe; her old life wasn’t entirely gone. Cutting school didn’t feel like a deliberate act of rebellion, an attempt to flout her father’s wishes; it felt like a bid for survival.

  The school didn’t see it that way, of course. When they called Geert to apprise him of Veerle’s truancy they had said all the right things about sympathy and patience and time, but they weren’t going to bear with her for ever. She wasn’t going to get her ASO diploma on sympathy alone.

  And when I fail . . .?

  She wondered whether it was possible that Geert and Anneke would actually ask her to leave. Once she was past eighteen no one could make her stay at school and re-take the year. Already she felt like the cuckoo in the nest, the oversized intruder, eating up time and resources that were not hers by right.

  Where would I go? she wondered.

  She heard Geert’s voice rise in the next room again, though she only caught the words ‘. . . not enough money . . .’ before he caught himself shouting and lowered it once more.

  It was useless trying to sleep. The room felt like a cell. Veerle got off the bed and padded over to the window, taking care not to make a sound. She pulled aside the curtain and gazed up at the night sky.

  It was not like being at home in her own village. There were streetlamps there, of course there were, but you could still see the stars on a clear night, thousands of them. In the city there were more lights, there were late-night cafés and shops and floodlit buildings and bridges, and well-lit main roads. You had to look for the stars through a haze of yellow artificial light. You could see the moon, though, and Veerle liked to look for that. She liked to think that the same moon that floated over the spires and corbie steps of Ghent was also shining down upon her home village. It was the one thing she could see from here that you could also have seen if you were standing in front of the house on Kerkstraat, with the bulk of the Sint-Pauluskerk rising into the night sky.

  She opened the window, taking care not to rattle the latch, and the cool of the September evening leached into the room.

  Air, thought Veerle gratefully. She rested her elbows on the windowsill and gazed down at the street. The flat was on the first floor; you could watch the comings and goings below without anyone being able to stare in. She watched a man of perhaps fifty walk by with a small dog on a lead. Further up the street someone was trying to get a car into a parking space. She could see lights in some of the windows opposite, the ones that didn’t have their shutters down. City people, she thought. Living in their little boxes, like battery hens. Then she thought, I wonder where Hommel is. Is she in one of those little boxes too? She let her gaze wander up and down the street. She could be on this street somewhere, or the next one. She’s out there somewhere.

  Veerle leaned a little further, resting on the windowsill. Her room just had an ordinary window, but the room next door, the one in which her father and his girlfriend were conducting their heated debate, had a balcony. Geert and Anneke weren’t enjoying the cool night air, though; they had put the roller shutters down. What a waste, thought Veerle. She measured the distance between her own window and the balcony. It was too far to step across, or even jump safely, but there was a metal drainpipe halfway between the two, and she thought that if you were able to step onto the bracket holding the pipe to the wall, and if it held your weight, it might be possible to get across. Not that I’d do it, she thought. She didn’t fancy sitting on the balcony listening to Geert and Anneke arguing about her. She didn’t move away from the window, though. She kept looking at that drainpipe; at the brackets screwed into the bricks. You could go across to the other balcony, all right, she thought. And you could also get down to the ground.

  She was terribly tempted to try it.

  9

  You know, Veerle told herself, there’s really no point in doing this. Where are you going to go when you get down into the street?

  She was standing, fully dressed now, on the windowsill of her bedroom window. The frame was not that tall, so her hands gripping the top of it were at hip height and her nose was a centimetre from the brick wall. The next move was going to be the tricky one: she had to step with her left foot onto the bracket fixing the drainpipe to the wall, and then transfer her weight onto that foot. The building was fairly old and the pipe was a heavy-duty metal one, not a modern plastic one, so she was hoping it would take her weight.

  Veerle was very conscious of the empty air behind her; she could feel a cool breeze on the skin of her face and neck.

  At least there are no railings down there, she told herself. If you fall off you’ll just be smashed, you won’t be skewered.

  She grinned in spite of herself, in spite of the strain on her fingers and the ache in the shoulder that had hit the pavement earlier. She felt better than she had all day. All week, in fact. The strain on her body, the urgent need to maintain her balance, the hard wood of the windowframe, the rasp of the brickwork when her skin touched it and the soft caress of the breeze – all of it was real, a problem to be solved with strength and concentration and nerve. Best of all, it demanded her whole attention, and crowded out all those other problems that she couldn’t solve.

  She kept her weight on her right foot and reached out with the left, letting the toe of her Converse trainer find the metal bracket. Her left hand crept like a spider across the rough surface of the brickwork, found the drainpipe and grasped it. It felt rock solid. All the same, she had a moment of apprehension before she shifted her weight across. The bracket held.

  Veerle clutched the pipe with both hands and began to climb down. The brackets were too far apart for her to rely on those so she had to brace her toes against the bricks. With so much of her weight on her arms, the strain on her shoulders was immense, a savage ache. If she didn’t get down quickly her shrieking muscles would give way. She went down hand over hand, as swiftly as she could, and when she was nearly at the bottom she let go of the pipe and dropped the last metre, her feet landing on the pavement with a slap.

  She glanced about her, wary of nosy neighbours, but the ground-floor shutters were all down and there were no lights on in the building opposite. Veerle put her head back and looked up at her window.

  I left the shutters open, and the window. Anneke will go mad if she sees that. Still, she didn’t think anyone would be climbing up there in a hurry. It had been difficult enough getting down.

  What now? Veerle wondered. She could walk into the heart of the old city in perhaps twenty minutes, she supposed, but there was not much point, with no one to meet. I could climb back up, but that would be lame, and anyway, my shoulders need a rest. I feel like my arms have been pulled out of their sockets. She decided to walk down to the Coupure canal, along and back. She had a vague idea that if she saw a call box she could try phoning Kris from that; if he was avoiding her she’d have a better chance of reaching him from a number he didn’t recognize. She didn’t hold out much hope, though; she couldn’t remember seeing a single call box since she’d arrived in Ghent. All the same, it was a plan.

  It didn’t take long to reach the waterfront: perhaps five minutes. Veerle only had to walk up Bijlokevest a little way and then take a dogleg down a couple of smaller streets. The last of these passed between two tall buildings so that little of the canal could be seen until you emerged from between them.

  The Coupure was beautiful after dark, she saw. The façades of the buildings lining the banks were gilded by the yellow light of the streetlamps and the dark water glittered, the lights reflected in i
t as golden columns.

  Its beauty was a pain, a hard little knot in the centre of Veerle’s chest.

  Beautiful, but not home.

  She wanted to be able to hate Ghent whole-heartedly. Instead she found herself thinking how magical it looked, and then she felt guilty – guilty and resentful. It made her feel the way she had felt when Bram had smiled at her and said, It’s a date: as though she were being dragged unwillingly into something, as though she had said yes without meaning to.

  Veerle looked at the canal, at the golden flecks of light dancing on the black water. The thought of Bram made her uneasy. I wish I hadn’t agreed to meet him again, she thought, biting her lip. But I have to find Hommel, and I don’t know where else to start.

  It would be easier if he wasn’t so . . . She grimaced.

  Attractive wasn’t the word she was looking for; she was with Kris – at least she hoped she still was. But when you looked at it objectively, with that sun-bleached hair and those very blue eyes – well, if Kris were here, if he had seen her talking to Bram, he might have jumped to the wrong conclusion. A lot of people would think Bram was attractive, Veerle conceded to herself.

  She began to walk along the path at the side of the canal, intending to turn up one of the side streets further down and circle back to the flat. The question of whether it was going to be easy or even possible to climb back up to her bedroom window was becoming more pressing. There was an ominous dull ache in her shoulder.

  I could ring the bell, she thought. And say I let myself out without them hearing. But if Anneke works out what I did she’ll try to stop me doing it again. She’ll lock the window at night or something.

  Her glance flickered over the dancing lights on the black water of the canal.

  OK, there’s no reason to go out that way.

  She grinned to herself.

  You never know when it might come in useful, though.

  She was considering this and walking rather briskly along the path when something shattered under the sole of her Converse trainer with a brittle crunch.

  Veerle stopped. Whatever she had trodden on was substantial enough to arouse her curiosity. She looked down, and by the sallow light of the streetlamp she saw that it was a plastic case, the sort people used for glasses. It had split right along its length, and she could see one of the earpieces sticking out.

  Veerle bent to pick it up, thinking that if the owner were ever to come this way again, looking for it, it would be better to leave it at the side of the path where nobody else would finish the job she had started and flatten it completely. As she did so she caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye. She turned to look and felt a cold jolt of shock. Someone was standing there, not two metres away, in the shadow of the nearest tree.

  ‘Shit.’ Her first impulse was to drop the glasses case and move away as quickly as she could. She hesitated, though.

  The person under the tree wasn’t the bogeyman – it wasn’t even a man in fact, she saw. It was a woman of perhaps sixty, grey-haired, soberly dressed in a dark suit and court shoes. She was leaning against the tree – that was why Veerle hadn’t seen her as she came along the path: she had been concealed by the trunk.

  Not just leaning – almost hanging onto it, Veerle thought.

  She heard the woman gasp and wondered whether she was ill. All the same, she stayed where she was, on the path. If you met someone after dark in a quiet place it was wise to be cautious. Especially, thought Veerle, if you have climbed out of your bedroom window and nobody knows where you are.

  ‘Mevrouw?’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’

  She heard another gasp, and then the woman said something indistinct. Veerle caught virtually nothing of it, just a single word that might have been fright.

  Did I make her jump? she wondered. It’s not like I sneaked up on her or anything.

  She glanced down at the ground, and now she saw that the glasses case was not the only thing that had been dropped there. The grass and the edge of the path were strewn with items: a tub of butter, a little tin of pâté, a packet of coffee filters and, incongruously, a couple of loose onions.

  ‘Dropped my bag,’ said the woman breathlessly.

  This was so self-evidently true that Veerle shrugged off caution. She picked up the onions, which were lurking in a tuft of grass by the edge of the path like a pair of unexploded bombs, and then the tin of pâté.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the woman. She was still holding onto the tree.

  Veerle found her bag, which was on its side on the grass. She didn’t like to repack it so she piled the items carefully next to it, placing the glasses case on top.

  ‘I’m not drunk,’ said the woman suddenly.

  Veerle glanced at her sharply. The idea hadn’t crossed her mind until that moment. There had been nothing to suggest it, no astringent whiff of alcohol.

  She heard the woman laugh; the sound was tremulous and unconvincing.

  ‘I saw them,’ she said, nodding, and instinctively Veerle turned to look behind herself at the dark waters of the canal with the lights reflected in them and the illuminated buildings beyond. She could see nothing untoward.

  ‘I saw them,’ repeated the woman. She put a hand to her breast. ‘It gave me such a start.’

  Perhaps she is drunk, thought Veerle uneasily.

  ‘Whom did you see?’ she said aloud.

  ‘On the rooftops,’ said the woman. She laughed again, nervously. ‘You hear the stories but you never think you’ll see them yourself – it’s crazy, impossible . . .’ She put a hand to her face, and Veerle saw that it was trembling. ‘You must think I’m quite insane.’

  Veerle’s gaze flickered back to the buildings on the other side of the canal.

  On the rooftops? There’s nobody up there.

  She picked up the tub of butter and added it to the little pile next to the bag. Then she took a step back, back onto the path. ‘I should go,’ she said.

  ‘Did you see them?’ asked the woman suddenly. ‘The demons?’

  Demons?! Now Veerle really began to think that she should put some space between herself and this woman. Did she really say demons?

  ‘No,’ she said aloud. ‘I didn’t see anything.’

  She saw the woman let go of the tree and she took another step back.

  ‘You’re not from Ghent,’ said the woman.

  ‘No,’ said Veerle. The feeling of unease was growing at an exponential rate, like a time-lapse film of a plant hurtling from seed to bud to flower, unfurling into some monstrous bloom. ‘I really have to go,’ she said, and she walked away as decisively and rapidly as she dared, hurrying but not quite running.

  She’s nuts, Veerle thought, and as she walked away she was listening for the sound of footsteps on the path behind her, the sound that would say that she hadn’t shaken the woman off, she was going to follow Veerle and grab her sleeve, start raving on about demons on the rooftops. No sound came, and when she judged that she had put enough space between them, that the woman must be at least twenty metres behind her, Veerle risked turning round to look.

  The woman was standing motionless in the middle of the path. In her rather formal clothes she could have been a statue, if she hadn’t had that rather incongruous bag of groceries dangling from her left hand. She wasn’t looking at Veerle; she was gazing across the canal at the row of apartment houses opposite. Veerle followed her gaze. It was impossible not to, really; there was such an air of fixed concentration about that still figure that you had to look and see what she was staring at . . .

  A minute later Veerle was hurrying down the street, looking for the turning that would take her back to Bijlokevest and the flat, and the difficult climb back up to her bedroom window. She listened to the slap of her feet on the pavement and her breath shuddering in and out, and as she went she asked herself: Who or what was that moving along the rooftops?

  10

  The following morning Anneke made waffles for breakfast. When Veerle got
up and dressed she could smell the sweet aroma on the air, warm and enticing.

  She knows I heard them arguing about me last night, she thought.

  Normally she had to fend for herself. Anneke was heavily pregnant, after all; if anyone was being waited on it ought to be her, as Geert was fond of reminding Veerle if she left her T-shirt on the bathroom floor or her mug on the coffee table in the living room.

  The waffles were the nearest Anneke was likely to come to a peace offering. Veerle wasn’t all that fond of them; she preferred the Liège kind, which were thicker and sticky and crusted with sugar. She didn’t tell Anneke that, though, and she ate three of the waffles with as convincing a show of relish as she could manage, the fork scraping at the plate.

  When she’d cleaned her teeth and fetched her school bag, Geert was at the door, waiting to walk her to school again. Anneke came to the door too, to see them off, as she always did. She looked wan. Veerle thought that she probably couldn’t wait for her and Geert to leave so that she could put her feet up.

  ‘Thanks for the breakfast,’ said Veerle, hoisting her school bag onto her shoulder. She watched Anneke lean in to kiss her father.

  When they had reached the street Geert said, ‘It isn’t easy for Anneke. She’s very tired.’

  He didn’t say what wasn’t easy for Anneke. Veerle waited for a moment, wondering whether her father was trying to open a discussion, whether he would follow it up with Did you hear anything last night? or Anneke doesn’t always mean everything she says, you know.

  Geert said nothing more, however. They walked on in silence. That was fine by Veerle. She was thinking about the night before, about the encounter with the woman at the Coupure.

  Did I imagine it? she wondered. Whatever it was I thought I saw on the rooftops? She couldn’t decide. It had been weird, hearing that ordinary-looking middle-aged woman say, Did you see them? The demons?