Demons of Ghent

by Helen Grant

  – He knew a week ago; that’s when he stopped taking my calls.

  – Maybe he tracked her down after we met Fred and Fred told us she was still alive because she sent him the keys back.

  – Maybe he’s known all along, and this was his way of keeping it going with both of us at once.

  ‘Veerle,’ said Kris, and now he was telling her something in a regretful voice; he was saying sorry – and that confirmed it for Veerle because he wouldn’t be saying sorry if he hadn’t done anything wrong. Behind him Hommel had turned her back and was staring out of the window, still hugging herself, waiting for the conversation to be over, for Kris to get rid of Veerle.

  Veerle stared wordlessly at Kris, at the face she knew almost as well as the one she saw in the mirror every morning: the bold dark eyes, the fall of dark hair on his forehead, the wide mouth that always seemed to have a hint of an ironic smile hovering about the corners of it, though now he was deadly serious. She looked at him, and it was like looking into the eye of a storm, because on all sides the tempests of anger and jealousy and betrayal were raging, but through it all she knew that she still wanted him, and that hurt more than anything else.

  She took a step back, and Kris reached out, trying to take her arm.

  Veerle found her tongue. ‘Don’t touch me!’

  ‘Veerle—’

  ‘Just don’t!’ She was almost screaming.

  ‘Veerle, is everything OK?’ said someone behind her. She turned, and there was Bram at the head of the stairs, as incriminatingly good-looking as usual but without his habitual amiable expression. Now he looked grim and, from the way he was squaring his shoulders, ready to fight. He saw Kris standing in the doorway with his hand reaching for Veerle’s arm and his chin came up.

  ‘No,’ Veerle blurted out. It was impossible to explain. She was choking on emotions so hot and toxic that they felt radioactive. She stumbled towards Bram, her eyes stinging hotly and her throat suffocatingly tight, as though she were fighting her way through a cloud of poison gas.

  When she got to the top of the stairs she glanced back at Kris, and he was still standing in the doorway, motionless. He was staring at her and Bram, and his expression was unreadable.

  Veerle made a sound in her throat, halfway between a groan and a sob, and then she plunged down the staircase, not caring whether Bram followed her or not. At the bottom she looked around and ran for the door leading into the dark tunnel that was the shop.

  After the sunlit hallway the interior was a gloomy pit and Veerle did not realize that there was anyone in it. She ran the length of the shop between two long racks of CDs, and it was only when she heard someone shout, ‘Oi!’ that her head turned and she saw him standing in the next aisle: a heavyset man in an overstuffed black T-shirt and jeans, a tuft of beard in the centre of his vast jowls like an oasis in the middle of a fleshy desert. Veerle ignored him and went for the door. As she burst out into the street she heard him bellow, ‘Hannah!’

  She pelted down the street and dodged round the corner. Then she had to stop to catch her breath, leaning against the stone wall.

  A moment later Bram appeared, also breathless.

  ‘The owner, I guess,’ he said, coming over to her. ‘Klootzak.’

  ‘Is he following us?’ asked Veerle between gasps.

  Bram shook his head. ‘No. Too unfit, probably.’

  Veerle turned to the wall, resting her head on her arms. She didn’t want to look at Bram. She didn’t want to look at anything. She was still trying to blot out from her memory the sight of Kris standing barefoot in the doorway of that room, with the unmade makeshift bed behind him and Hommel standing by the window with her arms around herself. It was too much to take in; it was like trying to swallow down something so big that it would choke you.

  Concentrate on the feel of the stones under your hands, the weight of your head on your arms. Don’t think.

  She felt Bram touch her shoulder.

  ‘Veerle?’

  ‘I’m . . .’ She was going to say, I’m OK, but it wasn’t true. She ground her forehead into her arms as though she could burrow right through the wall and get away.

  ‘Don’t you think you’d better tell me what’s going on?’

  14

  She almost told him to go to hell. Why should she tell him anything, after all? She felt so bitter against every member of the male gender at that moment that she could cheerfully have given up their company for ever and gone to live like a nun in a begijnhof. Anyway, who was Bram? Just some uni student who hung about the Sint-Baafsplein and for all she knew chatted up a different girl every single day.

  In the end, though, she didn’t tell him where to go. She had to talk to someone; the feelings raging inside her were like the noxious contents of a boil, waiting to burst. And who else was there? She couldn’t talk to Geert, that was for sure. He hadn’t approved of Kris in the first place. Now he’d probably say, I told you so. Veerle wasn’t remotely close to Anneke. She had her friends back home, her classmates from the high school, like Lisa, but she’d never told them the whole story. She’d never told anyone the whole story. She couldn’t imagine explaining it all to Lisa down the phone now.

  Bram didn’t say anything trite. He didn’t say anything at all. He just waited.

  Eventually Veerle turned a set and dull-eyed face to him. ‘OK,’ she said.

  They went back to the cafeteria near the cathedral. Veerle didn’t wait to see what Bram was ordering, and she didn’t ask him for anything in particular. She felt curiously hollow but she wasn’t sure she wanted to eat or drink anything at all. She went and slid into a seat near the back, away from the other customers, who mostly wanted a view over Sint-Baafsplein.

  When Bram came over, carrying a tray in one hand and sliding his change back into his pocket with the other, she was sitting with her elbows on the plastic table-top and her head in her hands. Veerle looked up and saw that he had brought her a glass mug of hot chocolate with cream on it. She started to say that she wasn’t hungry or thirsty, but then she looked at the hot chocolate and decided that she was, after all.

  ‘So,’ said Bram when he had sat down opposite her, ‘it was her. Els Lievens.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the guy?’

  ‘His name is Kris.’

  ‘You know him, then.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Veerle in a low voice. She looked down at the glob of cream slowly melting into the chocolate. For a while she watched it dissolving. Then she began to talk.

  She told Bram about Silent Saturday, the day before Easter the year she turned seven. How she and Kris had climbed the tower of the Sint-Pauluskerk in the village where she had grown up. They had climbed it to see whether the bell really had flown away to Rome to collect Easter eggs, as the grown-ups always claimed it did. It hadn’t, and they had decided to make the most of their disappointing expedition by looking out of the windows, over the village. Gazing down from the tower, they had seen something terrible.

  ‘You’ve heard of Joren Sterckx, the child murderer?’ asked Veerle.

  Bram nodded, as she had expected he would: the case was notorious.

  ‘It was him you saw?’

  Veerle nodded. ‘Kris remembers it, but I can’t. Well, I didn’t think I could . . .’

  She picked up the thread again, telling Bram how she had met Kris again years later, the night she had gone to explore a light in the derelict castle, a light that should not have been there. She tried to play the whole thing down, the way she had jumped off the bus on impulse and walked through the castle grounds alone in the wintry dark. At the time it had felt like an adventure; now it seemed terrible, like dancing on a grave. All the same, she was aware of a subtle change in Bram’s body language. He shifted in his seat as though impatient, as though her actions that night had spoken to him in some way. He didn’t interrupt her, though.

  She paused for a moment before she told him what Kris had been doing in the deserted castle. It was very temp
ting to gloss over the existence of the Koekoeken, as they had done with the police. An online community swapping details of empty properties, and how to get into them: the police would have been very interested in that. It was impossible to approach the subject without dropping the other members of the group in it.

  Supposedly the web forum that had connected them had been long since erased, but Veerle knew quite well that once something was out there in cyberspace it was pretty much impossible to delete it altogether. It was a lot safer for everyone to think that she and Kris were a couple of bored thrill-seekers who’d had the evil luck to cross paths with a dangerous lunatic looking for someone to use as target practice.

  Lying – or at least, lying by implication, by neglecting to tell the police everything – still weighed on Veerle’s conscience. Still, she told herself, the guy is dead, whoever he was – Joren Sterckx or his twin. They found the body. He’s not going to shoot anyone else where he’s gone.

  She looked at Bram, trying to decide what to tell him, trying to work out how far she trusted him. It was hard to see how she could explain about Hommel without explaining the rest of it. Hommel had been the fourth person to vanish, at least the fourth that they knew about; the others had been Vlinder – the girl in the lake – her real name Valérie Renard, a software engineer called Egbert Visser and Clare, the daughter of an expat family. It was that pattern, the connection with the Koekoeken, either through membership or through the houses, that had made them fear the worst when Hommel disappeared. Otherwise, well – if your boyfriend’s ex suddenly went off, you’d probably be pleased, Veerle thought. You wouldn’t move heaven and earth to track them down.

  What’s Bram going to do with the information anyway? she reasoned to herself. I can make him promise not to tell anyone, and if he does, who’s going to believe it? They’ll probably think it’s another of these urban legends, like demons lurking on the rooftops of Ghent, throwing people to their deaths. Without names and dates and places it might just be that, a made-up story.

  She took a deep breath, looked Bram in the eye, and told him everything.

  ‘So this girl, Els, or whatever you call her, Hommel – you thought she was dead too, right up until you saw her in Sint-Baafs?’ asked Bram. He had been leaning forward across the table towards her, straining to take in every word of the story, but now he sat back with a big sigh. ‘Shit,’ he said.

  ‘Even her mother didn’t know where she was,’ Veerle pointed out.

  ‘And the guy at the shop, Kris?’

  Veerle avoided his gaze. ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure when I last spoke to him’ – that was a lie; she could have named the day and hour – ‘but up until then I could have sworn he didn’t know.’ She dug her fingers into her dark hair, raking back the strands. ‘Maybe he’s known for ages,’ she said, trying and failing to keep the bitter note out of her voice.

  ‘And you and he were—’

  ‘Not any more, it seems,’ cut in Veerle. ‘I guess that’s why Hommel ran away. She knew if I found out I’d want to kill the pair of them.’ Involuntarily she clenched her fists. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘It was her disappearance that made it personal. When the group shut down, the whole thing would have ended, if there was anything going on. We still weren’t sure then. But Kris knew her. He didn’t want to discount the possibility that someone had done something to her and got away with it. So we used ourselves as bait, for God’s sake, to get him to show himself.’ Impulsively she pushed back her sleeve and showed Bram the scar on her left arm. ‘You remember at the wall, how I fell off three times? That’s why. I broke my arm and a whole lot of other stuff climbing down the castle wall, trying to get away from that guy.’ She pulled the sleeve down again with angry energy. ‘I’m still not as strong as I was before.’

  ‘Keep practising. It’ll come back.’

  ‘Maybe.’ She scowled.

  Bram sat in silence for a little while. Then he said, ‘The killer – who did the police think it was?’

  ‘They don’t know. The body was really badly burned. He’d doused the whole place in petrol.’ Veerle shrugged. ‘They didn’t think it was Joren Sterckx, though.’

  ‘And you? What do you think?’

  ‘Well, it can’t be him, if he died in prison.’ She sighed. ‘But I saw him from the gallery in the castle, before the fire started. I had a really good look at him, and I was so sure it was him. It was like . . . I don’t know, like the years just rolled back or something, and all of a sudden I remembered. I recognized him.’ Veerle shook her head. ‘When they found out I’d been in the village the day he killed that boy, they just assumed it was because of that. Either I was sort of scarred by seeing him, or I was just making it up.’

  ‘And he’s definitely dead?’

  ‘The police said he was.’

  ‘Could it have been someone that looked like him?’

  Veerle looked Bram in the eye, and her expression was grim. ‘There’s no one who looks like Joren Sterckx, believe me.’

  A shark, she thought. That’s what he reminded me of. A great blunt-headed, dead-eyed killing machine. A sledge-hammer of muscle and bone. She shuddered.

  Aloud, she said, ‘I hurt myself pretty badly when I fell off the castle wall. I had concussion as well. So maybe I did get things mixed up in my head.’

  ‘But you don’t think so,’ said Bram.

  ‘No,’ said Veerle finally. ‘I don’t think so. But I can’t explain it. I saw a dead man.’

  ‘Well,’ said Bram, ‘whoever you saw, he’s definitely dead now, if they found the body.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Veerle. She didn’t tell him that she sometimes lay awake at night in the little second bedroom at Geert’s flat, the perspiration cooling on her skin, listening for a stealthy tread in the hallway or a rattle at the door or – God forbid – a dark shape at the window, however impossible it was. If I saw a dead man walking, then anything is possible. She found it hard not to think of Joren as something more than human, something malevolent and implacable.

  ‘He’s dead,’ she said.

  ‘So,’ said Bram after a moment, ‘that’s why you moved to Ghent? To get away from where it happened?’

  Silence stretched out between them.

  ‘No,’ said Veerle eventually. ‘It wasn’t that.’

  When she didn’t elaborate Bram said, ‘Look, you don’t have to tell me.’

  ‘I know,’ said Veerle. She looked at him and then she looked down at her hands. ‘I’d like to, though.’ She sighed. ‘My mum died.’

  ‘Shit, I’m sorry.’ Bram sounded stricken.

  He probably wishes he hadn’t asked, thought Veerle. All the same, she really did want to tell him now. She wanted to get it off her chest; she wanted to put it all into words and see if it seemed any better than the way she remembered it.

  ‘It happened when I was in hospital,’ she said. ‘I was pretty much out of it for a day or two, and when I woke up my dad and his girlfriend were there, and Mum wasn’t. I kind of knew something was wrong. She was such a worrier, and she hated my dad too. There was no way she wouldn’t have been there, and no way she would have wanted him there, either.’ She shook her head. ‘I didn’t want to know what had happened at first. I thought maybe . . .’ She drew in breath, shuddering. ‘I thought she had killed herself.’

  ‘But she . . .?’

  ‘No, she didn’t.’ Veerle sighed. ‘It was an accident. A stupid, stupid accident.’ She glanced at Bram. ‘The thing is, she worried about just about everything. When I was a kid, every time I got sick she thought it was meningitis or pneumonia. She used to go round the house every night switching off every single thing at the wall in case it started a fire. And it wasn’t just stuff like that, stuff that could happen, even if it was a bit unlikely. She worried about completely crazy things too, like a block of ice falling from an aeroplane. She spent her whole life worrying about something like that happening, and then she had this accident, and it was one thing she just
hadn’t thought about at all.’ Veerle took a deep breath. ‘She was out on the street – I guess she was probably waiting to cross the road or something – and a lorry got too close to the kerb.’

  ‘She got run over?’

  Veerle shook her head. ‘Not even that. The wing mirror hit her on the side of the head. She had a massive bleed into the brain and she just . . . died.’

  ‘God, Veerle, I’m sorry.’

  Veerle wasn’t listening. She said, ‘You know, when I heard what had happened, it was almost a relief in a way. Is that awful? I was so afraid she’d done it herself.’ She rubbed her fingers across the plastic surface of the table, drawing invisible hieroglyphs. ‘I was afraid she’d done it because of me.’

  Bram was silent; she wondered whether she had shocked him. Too late to go back now.

  ‘I’ve thought about it a lot,’ she told him. ‘And now I don’t feel relieved any more. Mum knew what had happened. I mean, she didn’t know all of it, but she knew I was in hospital. I think maybe she didn’t look out like she normally would have done. She was always so careful. I think she was upset and she didn’t look out.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ said Bram.

  ‘No,’ said Veerle, and she looked him in the eye. ‘I don’t.’

  15

  At a little past one a.m. the man who was Death left his hiding place and took to the streets of Ghent.

  The night favoured a mission like his. He felt his purpose unfurl around him like great black wings. Pain bit deeply into his limbs, a searing agony, as though his body were red-hot iron, forged in a glowing furnace, prodded by grinning demons. It would fade as he moved through the chilling dark, he knew; the liquefied white heat that ran through his veins would cool and he would solidify into something almost human. His purpose urged him on, deadly and implacable, like a dark soul driving the ravaged body.

  He slowly descended the flights of stairs from his eyrie. The building was deserted, as it always was when the shop below was closed. The shop sold expensive gifts – hand-made soaps and scented candles and dainty useless ornaments in cream and silver. It smelled of lavender and roses and cocoa. The staff never ventured above the ground floor: they had no reason to brave the creaky stairs and dusty rooms of the upper storeys. There was never any interest in renting them, either. Who wanted an expensive flat that had to be accessed through a shop? He was able to hide up there undisturbed, baleful as a wasp’s nest under the eaves.