Demons of Ghent

by Helen Grant

  ‘Well, what about you?’ said Kris roughly. ‘Do you want to tell me anything about the guy who was with you?’

  ‘You mean Bram? I hardly know him.’ Even before the words were out of her mouth Veerle could feel her face growing hot with guilt. She felt as though the burning marks of Bram’s kisses must be standing out on her skin. As silence yawned between her and Kris she felt a desperate urge to fill it with words, to babble out the absolute innocence of her association with Bram. Only that would make it worse. And it wouldn’t be true, would it?

  ‘Nothing going on?’ said Kris ironically. He stared at her for a moment. ‘Looks like we’re even.’

  Veerle could feel everything slipping away from her, as though she were high on a rock face, her fingers sliding off holds that were slick with her own perspiration, her own weight dragging her off the climb, hurling her into the abyss. There was a hot, choked feeling at the back of her throat. She looked at Kris, at his dark hair and his sharp, handsome features and the bold dark eyes that still beguiled her even though they were scowling with anger and mistrust, and she desperately wanted to stop this chasm opening between them.

  ‘I thought we were together,’ she said, struggling to keep her voice steady.

  ‘So did I,’ said Kris.

  They stared at each other.

  ‘You’re shivering,’ said Kris. ‘You should go back in.’ He glanced up at the window. ‘Can you get back inside the same way?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Veerle hopelessly.

  ‘I have to go. I have to be on the early train.’

  He paused for a moment, and Veerle briefly thought that he was going to lean towards her, perhaps kiss her farewell. But if that was what he had intended, he thought better of it. He turned up the collar of his leather jacket against the cold night air, gave her one last look and walked away.

  20

  It took Veerle a long time to fall asleep again, and when she did, she slept badly, dreaming of fleeing through a gigantic maze composed of tightly clustered dark green leaves. She had no clear sense of what she was running away from, but as she tore along something came whistling over her shoulder and she knew that she was being shot at. The thing missed her by centimetres; it was a bamboo cane, the kind used for tying up raspberries, and the end had been sharpened to a wicked point.

  She woke up with a start with the name Joren Sterckx running through her head, hot and red and noxious, like the taste of blood in the mouth. First she felt angry. She hated the way he could still invade her dreams, even though he never actually appeared in person; he was as elusive as whatever haunted the rooftops of Ghent. Then she felt the weight of the night’s events settle on her as heavily as a suit of chain mail.

  Kris has gone, she thought. He hadn’t just walked away from their conversation last night; he had walked away from her for good. Somehow seeing that, the last cool backward glance, the turning away, was much worse than anything that had come before. When he had opened the door to her hammering and she had seen him with Hommel she had been furious; now anger was replaced by a terrible dragging misery.

  She didn’t want to get out of bed, but when she looked at the clock it was already a little later than usual. An argument with Geert was the last thing she needed. She got up and dressed and went through to the kitchen, although she didn’t really feel like eating much.

  Geert was sitting at the small table sipping a cup of coffee and looking through a sheaf of papers. There was no sign of Anneke.

  ‘Morning,’ said Veerle, hoping that Geert wouldn’t talk to her. She went to the fridge and took out a carton of orange juice.

  ‘Leave enough of that for Anneke,’ said Geert, watching her pour herself a glass. He let her put the carton back in the fridge, and when she was leaning against the kitchen cabinets, sipping listlessly at it, he said, ‘We didn’t really speak yesterday.’

  That was true. Veerle had hardly come out of her room since her altercation with Anneke. She said nothing, and let Geert go on.

  ‘You were out a long time on Sunday night,’ he said.

  ‘I told you, I went to the climbing wall,’ said Veerle carefully.

  ‘You’re not usually gone that long.’

  ‘No.’

  Veerle saw Geert looking at her over his reading glasses and realized that he was waiting for her to say something more. It passed fleetingly through her mind that he would probably be pleased to know that she had spent the evening with Bram (though not what they had been doing), partly because he was a local Ghent boy but mainly because he wasn’t Kris. She couldn’t bring herself to say it, though.

  ‘The wall was really crowded. I had to wait for ages for all the decent routes,’ she told him.

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘I’m trying to get fit again. It takes time.’

  ‘If you’re going to be late back, you should call me or Anneke.’ Geert took off his glasses and stared at her. ‘Ghent is a city, Veerle, not a village with a couple of thousand inhabitants.’

  The accusatory tone in his voice roused Veerle from her gloomy apathy. ‘I know,’ she told him curtly.

  ‘Anneke says you don’t close your shutters at night.’

  Veerle stared at him. Did he hear me and Kris? She couldn’t believe that he had. There was no way he would have heard that and not intervened. She was aware too of a faint annoyance with Anneke for her tale-telling.

  ‘It gets stuffy,’ she said.

  ‘Nevertheless—’

  At that moment both of them heard a scream, muffled by the intervening walls but unmistakably Anneke’s voice.

  ‘Geeeeeeert!’

  Geert was on his feet in an instant, moving so swiftly that his sheaf of papers were swept off the table and drifted to the floor like falling leaves. Veerle followed him as far as the kitchen door but then she stood there, irresolute, the glass of juice still in her hand as he ran down the hall.

  Anneke was screaming his name again. Veerle saw her father charge into the bathroom. The door swung shut behind him, and then she could hear their two voices without being able to make out the individual words, Anneke’s high and panicky, Geert’s deeper and more measured but still somehow urgent.

  After a few minutes Geert put his head out and said, ‘The baby’s coming. Veerle, get Anneke’s bag.’

  Veerle knew the one he meant; it had been packed more than a month ago. She ran to the hall closet and hauled it out, then placed it by the front door. After a moment she remembered seeing Anneke’s mobile phone lying on the kitchen work surface, and she went and fetched that and added it to the bag. Then she waited.

  Eventually Anneke came out of the bathroom supported by Geert. She was still dressed in her nightclothes and had an expression of almost comical shock on her face, as though she had hardly expected her long wait to end like this. Geert looked calmer; he wasn’t the one having pains, and anyway . . .

  He’s seen all this before, Veerle realized. When I was born.

  ‘Go to school, Veerle,’ Geert told her before they left. ‘I’ll phone you later.’

  After they had gone Veerle looked at the clock and realized that she was already late for school; the first bell would have rung some time ago. For a moment she considered the possibility of not going in; Geert was not here to make sure she went, after all. But she couldn’t do it. You had to have a certain grudging respect for someone who would spend a whole morning holding a vigil to make sure you were doing what they thought you ought to do. It felt a little too callous to bunk off while he was watching his second child being born. She packed her bag and set off.

  She hadn’t had anything for breakfast other than the orange juice, so she made a small diversion from her usual route to school and went into a newsagent’s to buy a snack. Amongst the rows of chocolate bars and crisps she found a small cellophane-wrapped frangipane tart. While she was fishing her wallet out of the bottom of her school bag she put the tart down on top of the fan of newspapers spread out on the counter, and it was when she went t
o pick it up again that she saw the headline.

  GHENT: LATEST VICTIM, 17

  Simply those words, latest victim, sent a sudden thrill of unease through her. Her mind skipped back to the morning when she had gone into school and found everyone red-eyed and grim-faced. None of Daan’s friends had wanted to believe that it was suicide; and Daan hadn’t been the first, either – there was the unnamed guy who had fallen from the cathedral earlier in the year.

  Doesn’t it creep you out just a little bit when you’re up here on your own? she had asked Bram on the rooftop, and he had said, Not really. I’ve never seen anything.

  That was enough for Bram – that he personally had never seen anything untoward – but it wasn’t enough to put Veerle’s mind at rest. She didn’t believe in demons, but she believed in evil. She felt like a member of an ancient tribe who has looked away from the bright reassurance of the campfire and seen the carnivorous things that prowl just beyond the perimeter of the light. Once you had seen those things, you couldn’t unsee them. She could have envied Bram for still believing in safety.

  Perhaps Veerle had been standing there for a little longer than was natural, staring at the newspaper headline, because the man behind the counter said, ‘A bad business, that.’

  Veerle glanced at him, wondering whether he was going to suggest she buy the merchandise rather than simply reading it. He seemed friendly enough, uneven teeth gleaming under his brown moustache as he grinned at her, but all the same, she said, ‘Thanks,’ and left the shop as hastily as she could.

  She walked on down the street, unwrapping the frangipane as she went, and thinking about that headline.

  Latest victim. So there had definitely been more than one victim. It could be anything, she reminded herself. Some horrible disease, or a dangerous stretch of road. It probably had nothing to do with Daan, or with anyone she knew of.

  She bit into the frangipane, tasting sugar and almonds. The tart was a little dry, not the best she had ever tasted, but still it reminded her of the ones Claudine had sometimes bought.

  You’ve got to stop being so paranoid, she told herself.

  The trouble was, what had happened in the old castle had ripped away a veil from her eyes. The brutality, the savage and implacable urge to extinguish life that had pursued her through the burning building was no longer something only glimpsed in films or occasionally in the news. There was no magic that made those things happen only to other people, she knew that now. Whatever foul and stinking cauldron had cast forth De Jager – the Hunter – the man she knew as Joren Sterckx – it could create others too. There was no safety anywhere; only the hope that chance would never make her cross the path of one of them again.

  Thinking about the fire made her think of Kris again – about the terrible moment when she had found him on the floor of the castle, with the red and yellow fletching of a crossbow bolt sticking out of his shoulder. She had dragged him outside and then gone back in, risking her neck to try to distract the killer.

  We nearly died together, she thought. And now he’s walked away.

  Veerle looked up at the sky, grey with the pearlescent glow of morning. By now she supposed Kris would be passing through Brussels, or already on a bus or tram on the other side, heavy-eyed with tiredness from the shortened night, perhaps dozing against the dusty window with his arms folded across his chest, or perhaps staring out through the glass and sharing her own bitter thoughts. He would be back in Ghent next weekend, or the one after that, but she wouldn’t see him.

  She thought about that, and she thought about Geert and Anneke too, because she couldn’t not think about that; it was strange to think of having a tiny sibling when you had always been an only child. She was pleased for her father in a detached sort of way, but conscious too that she was the cuckoo in the nest, the interloper in the nursery quite literally. If she had not been occupying the second bedroom of the flat, holding them off with her baleful presence, blue rabbits and ducks would have been springing up all over the walls.

  It was all too much; it was so much that the impact was numbing. She felt that she could have wandered right past the school, continued into the streets beyond, carried on walking for ever. She went inside, though; there was nothing else to do.

  21

  Bram was as good as his word. When Veerle came out of school and switched on her phone, she found two missed calls, both listed as Bram De Wulf.

  Veerle didn’t call him back. She switched the phone off, feeling slightly guilty, as though she were purposely ignoring someone (which she supposed she was), then thought of Geert and Anneke and switched it on again.

  When she got back to the flat it was silent and a little cold. There was no sign of Geert and she didn’t expect to see Anneke. Veerle went into the kitchen and opened the fridge. There was still some orange juice; she didn’t think Anneke would want that any more so she helped herself to what was left. Then she cut herself a chunk of Pas de Rouge cheese. After that she fetched her laptop and sat down with it at the kitchen table, thinking that she would hear Geert if he came in.

  That headline, LATEST VICTIM, 17, was still on her mind. It wasn’t the only thing on her mind – it was simply a single persistent note in the deafening requiem that was running through her brain – but it was the only thing she could do anything about right now. She powered up the laptop, went onto the net and searched for the regional newspaper whose headline it was. She found the article pretty easily under the paper’s blue-and-white logo, and began to read.

  After half a minute she sat back in her chair, letting out a long breath like a sigh.

  OK, she told herself. You were being paranoid. You have to stop doing this; you have to stop seeing verdomde serial killers everywhere.

  The seventeen-year-old was a girl called Marie De Smet and she was dead all right, but she hadn’t fallen, or been pushed from anything. She had burned to death in a catastrophic fire on an elegant street close to the old Sint-Michielskerk. However, the tone of the article managed to imply that Marie was collateral damage: the fire had also consumed a local politician and a woman aged twenty-eight who were thought to have been in an upper storey of the building. Their deaths had evidently been reported in a previous edition – Monday’s, Veerle supposed. She had spent most of that evening in her room, keeping out of Anneke’s way, so she hadn’t seen the news, but now she came to think of it, hadn’t those two women on the tram on Sunday evening been talking about something like this? The whole street was taped off, one of them had said, and the other had replied, They still don’t know exactly who was in there.

  Veerle clicked through the previous articles, skim-reading them. The politician’s death was evidently the hot piece of news, since he didn’t live in that part of Ghent at all. The newspaper managed to imply a great deal by pointing out that the politician, who was fifty-three, had an expensive villa in a smart suburb and an equally expensive wife, aged fifty-one; it was mysterious therefore that he should have died in a two-bedroom apartment on Onderbergen, alongside an unrelated young woman of twenty-eight, in the small hours of the morning. There were suspicions of arson, and a call for witnesses.

  Marie De Smet, who was nondescript looking and not famous and had not been closeted in an apartment with an age-inappropriate companion, was definitely the also-ran in news terms, though the editorial worked the ‘tragic teen’ angle as much as it could.

  Veerle sighed. A horrible way to die. She should know; she’d heard the roar of flames all too close, and the shattering of windows blown out by the fire the night the castle had burned. She stared at the grainy photograph of Marie De Smet with terrible pity.

  After a while she shut down the laptop and closed it. Thinking about someone’s death like that, even the death of a complete stranger, was horrible and depressing. It was pointless too. There was no connection between what had happened to that poor girl and what had happened to Daan De Moor.

  Veerle rose and went to open the window. The silence in the flat was o
ppressive, the atmosphere as stuffy as a mausoleum. She felt the need for some fresh air on her face, and the sounds of normal life going on: cars passing, people walking along the street, the wind moving through the slender trees that dotted Bijlokevest.

  Maybe I’m going slightly crazy, she thought. All the people who live here, all the tens of thousands of people, they don’t see murder on every street corner. They tell stories about demons but it’s just for fun, just something to scare kids with.

  Veerle looked down at the pavement below the window, at the empty space that had been occupied by Kris the night before. Less than eighteen hours separated them. If she climbed down and stood there she would be occupying the space he had occupied; she wondered if she would feel it, as though his ghost had passed through her. If she could rewind to that moment when they had stood face to face on the pavement in the dark, she would find something different to say, something to divert the conversation so that it would not end with him giving her that last long cool stare and then walking away.

  She drew her head in and went to sit on the bed. After a while she lay down, and in spite of the thoughts that were going round and round her head like rats in a trap she must eventually have fallen asleep, because when she awoke it was nearly dark outside and her mobile phone was ringing. It was Geert, calling to tell her that she had a baby brother.

  22

  Geert came home late in the evening to eat and sleep. His eyes had a heavy, slumberous look and he was starting to need a shave.

  He said, ‘His name is Adam.’

  Geert went into the kitchen and began to make himself something to eat – an open sandwich with cheese. Veerle followed him, feeling self-conscious. She felt that she should be offering to make her father something, since he looked all in, but even after a period of months the flat was still more his and Anneke’s than hers. She would have felt strange taking over.

  ‘Is Anneke OK?’ she asked, feeling that she should say something.