Demons of Ghent

by Helen Grant

  Geert nodded. ‘She’s good.’

  After a while Veerle left him to it and went to bed. When she got up the next day he had already gone.

  It occurred to Veerle once again that she could quite easily have stayed at home all day without anyone knowing, but the silence and coolness in the flat drove her out. The temperature had dropped a few degrees and someone needed to adjust the heating, but Veerle had no idea how to do it and there was nobody else there. The cold deserted flat had never felt more like the empty packaging for someone else’s life.

  As she was walking to school under an oppressive ceiling of dark grey clouds, her mobile phone rang. Veerle looked at the screen and saw that it was Bram calling. She hesitated, her finger poised over the touch screen, and then she took the call.

  ‘Veerle?’ said Bram’s voice in her ear.

  ‘Mmm-hmm?’

  ‘You want to go climbing this evening?’

  Veerle went on walking, with the phone pressed to her ear. ‘Where? Indoors or outdoors?’

  ‘Outdoors.’

  Veerle glanced up at the building she was passing, a high, white-fronted apartment block with ornate iron balconies.

  The cliffs of Ghent, she thought.

  ‘Veerle?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Where do you want to meet?’

  ‘Good,’ said Bram. ‘How about Sint-Veerleplein, by the Gravensteen?’

  ‘Hmm, well, I’m not going to forget that.’

  She heard him give a little grunt of amusement.

  ‘Just before seven?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Veerle. ‘Bram . . .’

  ‘Yeah?’

  Don’t take this the wrong way. I just want to be friends. Don’t try to kiss me again.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said eventually. ‘See you later.’

  It was not difficult to get away that evening. Geert elected to work late, because he wanted to spend the middle of the day with Anneke and the baby in hospital. Veerle left him a note: Gone to the climbing wall. It was not entirely untrue, she reasoned.

  She dressed warmly for the autumn evening: a dark soft shell jacket, comfortable trousers for climbing, her battered Converse. She pulled her dark hair into a sloppy knot at the back of her head, since it was unwise to be blinded at a critical moment by it hanging in her face. No rings or bracelet or necklace – nothing that could get caught on anything. The overall effect was practical rather than alluring.

  It’s not a date, she reminded herself. All the same, she added some blue and silver earrings. Under no possible circumstances could she imagine her ears getting caught in anything. She slid her phone and wallet into her pockets and set off on foot. It was possible to take the tram part of the way but she preferred to walk. The cool crisp air, the rhythm of her feet on the pavement, helped to clear her mind.

  The route took her along the Coupure for a while and she remembered the night she had climbed out of her bedroom window and gone strolling, and met the older woman who had spoken to her so strangely. She had laughed in an odd, false way, and said, ‘I saw them.’ So mysterious, and yet there was a perfectly rational explanation. The figures she had glimpsed moving about up there were people doing what she and Bram were planning to spend the evening doing: enjoying the upper reaches of the city.

  Daring, she thought. Unusual. Illegal, probably. But nothing sinister about it.

  Except . . .

  Except a couple of them had taken the short way down.

  Stop obsessing about it, Veerle said to herself. So two people had falls from buildings. Ghent’s a huge place. There are thousands and thousands of people living here. Two out of all those people, dying in similar ways, that’s not that much of a coincidence. Or maybe they are connected, and Daan De Moor’s death was a copycat thing.

  She chewed her lip, looking up at the deepening sky.

  What, are you going to get too jumpy to go up on the rooftops again? Snap out of it.

  She crossed the canal at the bridge where she had lost Hommel that time. There were more people about here. Lights, voices, the chill of the evening air: those things were real. Demons . . . no.

  When she saw Bram she wasn’t sure how to react, but as she went up to him he just grinned and kissed her on the cheek. It was difficult to be unnerved by Bram; he was so good-humoured.

  ‘Are we going up de ladder again?’ she asked.

  He shook his head. ‘I thought we’d go to this other place.’

  They set off through the darkening streets. At first Veerle hung back a little, not wanting to get too close to Bram in case he tried to put an arm around her. After a while, however, he took her hand, and she didn’t object.

  The other place proved to be the roof of a three-storey building with a shop on the ground floor. From the street it looked impossible, and far too public, but Bram took her down a narrow alleyway to the back where there was a fire escape running nearly all the way up to the roof. By standing on the metal railings that surrounded the stairs and steadying yourself on the drainpipe which ran down from the roof, it was quite easy to ascend the last part, as long as you kept your nerve.

  They stood side by side on a flat section of roof and gazed out over the city of Ghent. The sun was setting and the illuminations had not yet come on, so the three towers were dark against a flaming sky, as though the other side of the city were burning.

  ‘That’s amazing,’ said Veerle, and meant it. When she saw the city like this, its upper horizon, she felt more at home than she ever could at ground level. Up here there was no one asking difficult questions, no one speculating about you, no one hassling you. Nor did this landscape belong to the people who teemed in the streets below, the people of Ghent, to whose ranks she did not belong. It was empty, untrodden territory, waiting to be explored, waiting for them to claim it.

  ‘How long do we have?’ she asked, looking at Bram. When it became fully dark she did not think it would be possible to climb down the way they had come. The back of the building was unlit and she did not fancy hanging off the parapet feeling for an invisible rail with her feet.

  ‘As long as we like,’ said Bram. ‘There’s a building I know with a service ladder that goes almost to ground level. We could climb down that blindfolded.’

  Veerle nodded. She didn’t have to ask which way they were going. Only one route was possible; on the other side was a sheer wall.

  They began to pick their way along the rooftop, moving west towards the sunset. After a few minutes they climbed down onto another flat roof, skirting a large expanse of shallow rainwater, made bright flame by the reflection of the evening sky, as though it were not water but blazing petrol. Once they disturbed a flock of pigeons roosting on a parapet, and the birds took flight, the sound of their panicked wings like the riffling of the pages of a book.

  For a few metres they had to walk down the valley created by two pointed roofs. Up ahead Veerle could see the stepped façade of the building they were crossing. Clearly they were approaching the edge of the cliff. She moved towards it with caution, not wanting to be visible to anyone at street level who might take it into their head to look up.

  When she did risk a peep over the corbie steps she could see the dark waters of the canal below. She sat on the sloping tiles and waited for Bram, who was some metres behind her.

  When he slid into position beside her he was holding out a can of iced tea.

  Veerle stared at him. ‘Where did you get this?’ She took the can; it was very cold.

  ‘I left it up here earlier, behind those chimney pots. I’ve got other stuff too. You want some crisps?’

  Veerle shook her head. She had a dampening instant of déjà vu, remembering the house with the pool that she and Kris had visited soon after they had met; how he had produced a little flask of bessenjenever. She had sat opposite him in that opulent black-and-red kitchen, sipping it and watching him work on some broken kitchen gadget. You couldn’t drink bessenjenever up here, she realized; it would be far too dangerous to neg
otiate these rooftop mountain ranges with alcohol slipping insidiously through your bloodstream.

  She didn’t want to think about Kris, much less start comparing him to Bram, so instead she turned to Bram and said, ‘How long have you been doing this? Coming up here, I mean?’

  Bram shrugged. ‘A year. Eighteen months maybe.’

  ‘Do you see the others?’

  ‘Sometimes. But I told you, it’s not organized like your Koekoeken thing. We don’t come up here and have pow-wows or anything.’

  Veerle gave a snort of laughter at that in spite of herself.

  For a minute or two they gazed at the sunset. Then Veerle said casually, ‘Have you ever had any trouble with anyone up here?’

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘Anyone . . . I don’t know, getting funny about their own patch of roof or something?’

  ‘Marnix caught a woman sunbathing nude on her roof once and she threw a flip-flop at him.’

  Veerle began to laugh again. Bram grinned, pleased that he had amused her.

  Leave it there, said Veerle to herself. But she just couldn’t.

  After a few moments she said, ‘You know that guy from school I told you about, Daan – the one who fell off a rooftop near the cathedral? He was probably doing what we’re doing, right?’

  ‘I guess,’ said Bram. He did not seem particularly keen to further the discussion, but Veerle was really curious. She was faintly conscious of wanting to find some evidence that Daan and the other guy, the one who had supposedly fallen from Sint-Baafs, had no connection with each other or with what she and Bram were doing, so that she could dismiss them from her mind. She still had a vague uneasy feeling about those falls, like a nail sticking up out of a polished floorboard, a nail you just had to hammer down.

  ‘There was another one,’ she persisted. ‘Someone who fell from the top of Sint-Baafs.’

  Bram had been looking away, towards the sunset, but now the gaze of his blue eyes was fixed on her.

  ‘You mean Luc.’ He sounded resigned.

  ‘I didn’t know his name,’ said Veerle. ‘Luc. Did you know him?’

  Bram nodded. ‘What did you hear?’ he asked her. ‘Were they saying Luc jumped? Because there was no way . . .’

  Veerle nodded, her expression carefully grave. ‘That’s what they were saying about Daan at school,’ she told Bram. ‘That he wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know this guy Daan, but I did know Luc, and he wouldn’t have done it.’

  ‘It’s kind of odd, though,’ persisted Veerle. ‘Two people falling from buildings like that.’

  Bram was silent for a few seconds. Then he said, ‘Is that why you asked if I ever had any trouble with anyone up here? You think there’s something funny going on?’

  ‘I don’t know what I think,’ said Veerle. ‘It’s just . . . odd.’

  ‘Veerle . . .’ Bram hesitated. ‘The stuff that happened before . . .’

  ‘I know,’ said Veerle heavily. ‘It doesn’t mean anything bad is happening here.’ She shot him a glance. ‘You think I’m being paranoid?’ She dared him to say yes.

  ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘But I think you’re safe here.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Definitely. You’re with me, aren’t you?’

  Bram grinned and Veerle found herself smiling back. He’s probably right, she thought. And I probably am being paranoid. He knows this place a thousand times better than I do. It’s his territory. If there were anything strange going on, he’d be more likely to know it than I would.

  She relaxed back against the sloping roof tiles and turned her head to gaze at the sunset. In spite of the flaming sky, there was an autumn nip in the evening air; she was glad of her warm jacket.

  ‘Do you come up here in the winter?’ she asked Bram.

  ‘Sometimes. Not as often.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s more difficult when it’s wet or icy. But seeing it in the snow . . . that’s pretty amazing.’

  ‘I bet it’s really like being in the mountains.’

  ‘Just as cold too.’

  Veerle looked at him, her head on one side. ‘What about the castle, the Gravensteen?’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Are you going to try to do it before it gets really cold? If you slept out there in December, you’d probably freeze to death.’

  ‘That depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘It’d be kind of boring doing it on my own.’

  Veerle looked down at her own feet in their Converse trainers propped up comfortably on the tiles opposite, studying them with apparent fascination, as though the heels had suddenly sprouted fluttering wings.

  ‘And if someone did it with you?’

  ‘Then I’d go. I’d go tomorrow.’

  Bram had turned towards her, resting his shoulder against the slope of the roof; Veerle could see that out of the corner of her eye. He was a little closer too.

  ‘So what would be the plan?’ she asked. She didn’t turn to meet his gaze – not yet.

  ‘The Gravensteen closes at six. If we get into November it shuts earlier but we wouldn’t want to do that because we’d freeze. We can take sleeping bags, OK – if we can fit them in a backpack – but not much else. They’re not going to let us wander in carrying a tent or anything.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘We pick a moment to go in when it’s fairly busy. At this time of year it won’t be packed but there are still groups of tourists now and again. We wait till one goes in and follow them. We don’t want to go in on our own, because then there’s more chance the people on the ticket desk will remember us.’

  ‘Makes sense,’ said Veerle.

  ‘We go and do the tour, and we take our time about it, only we stay away from the bits with staff in them, like the shop in the cellar. We keep out of places like that so we don’t give anyone an opportunity to notice us. We do the whole tour and then we go back to the beginning and hide.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Bram, and now Veerle could tell from the closeness of his voice that he was centimetres away from her, studying her profile at close range. ‘That you find out if you come with me.’

  Veerle turned her head and looked him in the eye. Her gaze was so direct that he paused in his gradual movement towards her.

  ‘OK,’ she said.

  They stared at each other, Veerle’s hazel eyes gazing into Bram’s vividly blue ones. Veerle’s heart was thumping but she kept her chin up and her gaze level, challenging him.

  Don’t make me say it, she thought. She liked Bram – well, she more than liked him. The memory of those kisses was so vivid that she almost wavered in her resolve, almost leaned towards him herself and pressed her lips to his. But the thought of Kris was a dragging ache inside her.

  After a moment Bram sat back, but he didn’t look annoyed; his gaze was simply quizzical.

  ‘You’ll come, then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How are you going to square it with your dad?’

  Veerle grinned. ‘That you find out if you come with me.’

  23

  It was fully dark when they decided to return to street level. The rooftops had become a patchwork composed of the sallow artificial light of streetlamps below and the jagged black shadows thrown by gables and chimney stacks. In the distance the three towers of Ghent’s great churches were gilded by the illuminations.

  You can see why that legend started, about the demons, Veerle said to herself. It was easy to imagine something stepping out from those inky patches of shadow, showing horns against the golden glow, or scuttling all too deftly along the ridge of a roof. What would I do if I saw that? The thought made her skin prickle. She was not entirely sorry when they reached the edge of the building, even though it meant the end of an adventure.

  Bram was right about the service ladder. It was sturdy and well-maintained and it ran from the rooftop most of the way to the yard below, ending perhaps two metres above the ground. It woul
d have been difficult to climb up it, Veerle judged, because you would struggle to reach the bottom rung, but climbing down would be no problem because you could hang from the ladder by your hands and drop the last bit. She stood at the top and stared down into the yard below. The yard itself was unlit but there was an entrance large enough for a car to drive in, and the light of the lamps outside in the street poured through it like a sluggish river, tinting the stones and bricks that strange night-time colour that is neither properly yellow nor orange nor grey.

  ‘Shall I go first?’ Bram asked, nodding at the ladder.

  Veerle shrugged. ‘OK.’

  She squatted by the top of the ladder and watched as Bram swung himself out onto it. He grinned at her cheerfully, and then he began to descend, with a series of metallic ringing sounds as his feet hit the rungs.

  Veerle peered over the edge of the roof as Bram dropped below her line of vision. It was reassuring to see his blond head as he moved down the wall. She was conscious of a faint wish that she had gone first after all; she felt somehow exposed up here on her own, with her back to the darkened landscape of roofs and chimneys. It reminded her of that game she had played when she was a kid, 1, 2, 3, Piano, where someone had to stand with their face to the wall while the others crept up on them. Impulsively she put out a hand and tapped lightly on the top of the ladder.

  ‘One – two – three – piano,’ she whispered, making herself look forward towards the wall at the other side of the yard. Then she turned as swiftly as she could and swept the rooftops behind her with her gaze.

  Nothing.

  Of course there was nothing; they hadn’t seen a soul up here the whole time. The evening air had a distinct chill to it; that was why the hairs on the back of her neck were standing up.

  Veerle shivered. She peered over the edge of the parapet again. Bram was still descending with unhurried care.

  ‘Hurry up,’ she muttered under her breath. She wondered whether they had time to go somewhere for a coffee afterwards. Light and warmth were beginning to feel appealing.

  Absent-mindedly she let her fingers play on the metal strut of the ladder. The words shivered out almost unconsciously under her breath.