Demons of Ghent

by Helen Grant

  After a while he said, ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘We can’t get out, can we?’ said Veerle dully.

  Bram shook his head.

  ‘So we can’t even go and check . . .’

  ‘No.’

  After a while Bram said, ‘We could call the police.’

  ‘We’d have to think what to say,’ said Veerle slowly. ‘What if they ask where we’re calling from?’

  ‘We don’t have to tell them.’

  ‘They’ll have the phone number of whichever of us calls. Once they find out we’re telling the truth, they’ll try to track us down. It’s murder.’

  ‘We don’t have to say we saw it from here.’

  ‘Where else could we have seen it from?’ asked Veerle. She was beginning to see the whole thing all too clearly. ‘There’s nowhere else high enough, unless we were on the rooftops with him when it happened. And even if we thought up some excuse, said we’d heard something from the street or whatever, we’re stuck in here until at least ten a.m. tomorrow. Supposing they take it seriously and say they want to come and interview us?’ Then, she thought, I’ll be busted. Dad will go mad, and we’ll probably be prosecuted or something. And I don’t think it will do any good. Marnix is dead – I know it. And if he isn’t – well then I’m seeing things, like everyone always thinks I am.

  Bram put his head in his hands, and for a while all Veerle could see of him was the top of his head, his fingers laced through the strands of blond hair. He said nothing, and there was nothing she wanted to say, either. She kept thinking about what she had seen: the dark figure racing across the rooftop, Marnix standing facing the drop, looking for her and Bram, unconscious of Death speeding towards him. It made her feel sick. She felt even sicker when she thought about the moment she had seen the killer turn towards the castle, where she was standing looking down at him.

  Was he looking for me? she wondered. It seemed impossible. Nobody knew she was in the Gravensteen apart from Bram, not even Geert, her own father. Well, she conceded, Marnix knew . . . She shivered.

  ‘Bram? Can we get out of here?’

  She hated sitting here on the floor surrounded by the instruments of pain and mutilation. In daylight it might be a cheap thrill to come in and look at these things. It all seemed remote, something that happened centuries ago, to people whose lives you couldn’t imagine. In the dark, with the knowledge of what she had just seen, Veerle hated being near them. Cruelty and savagery were still alive. She had seen them.

  They went back to the weapons room, taking care to bolt the rooftop doors closed. Veerle could not imagine wanting to admire the view from there ever again, even if they were shut in for days. As they passed the section of wall where she had been standing when she saw the attack on Marnix, she averted her eyes, although Bram looked over the wall, searching for any sign of movement on the rooftop opposite.

  ‘Nothing,’ he told her. He didn’t say, You imagined it. All the same, Veerle thought she sensed him relax a little.

  When they got to the weapons room Bram began to unpack his rucksack, pulling out his sleeping bag. There was a rough energy to his movements, as though he were taking something out on it. Veerle watched him for a moment, and then she began to do the same. It was hard to imagine sleeping, but she had no desire to explore the castle any further, and the hours until they could escape from the castle stretched out ahead of them with the grim monotony of a desert.

  They laid out the bags near the fireplace, in case they needed to hide quickly. Veerle took the torch from Bram and ducked into the fireplace for a moment, shining the light up the chimney. This is stupid, you know, she told herself. We can’t get out, so nobody else can possibly have got in. All the same, she didn’t feel safe until she had done it.

  Bram watched her. He said, ‘Veerle, is there any way you could be . . . mistaken?’

  Veerle didn’t say anything for a moment. She was remembering the night on the rooftop when she had asked, You think I’m being paranoid? and Bram had hesitated before he said, No . . . but I think you’re safe here.

  She couldn’t blame Bram for not wanting to believe it. She didn’t want to believe it herself, the thing she had witnessed. Bram had only seen someone running at Marnix; then he’d gone for the phone. Veerle had seen, but she wanted to unsee. It was useless seeing when you could do nothing to change what happened.

  Bram reached out and grasped her by the upper arm. His face was set. He doesn’t look like himself, thought Veerle. All his amiability was gone. He looked blank and bewildered.

  ‘Veerle, what did you see? I know you said this person hurt Marnix, but what exactly happened? Did you see his face?’

  Veerle shook her head. ‘He had some sort of black thing on, a cloak maybe. Or a loose coat. His head was muffled up. I couldn’t see his face at all. He ran at Marnix. You saw him. It looked like they were fighting.’

  ‘Fighting?’

  ‘Well, he attacked Marnix and Marnix was trying to defend himself. And then – then Marnix kind of slumped down.’ Her voice began to waver. Oh no. Don’t let me cry. ‘He fell down and he didn’t move any more,’ she finished, struggling to stop her voice breaking. Then she looked at Bram, shot him a pleading look, wanting him to stop asking her questions because she was afraid she was going to break down, and she saw her own distress mirrored in his face. Was it for Marnix, she wondered, or was it because he thought she, Veerle, was breaking down?

  He looked at her for a long time without speaking, and then he said, ‘I know you couldn’t see his face, but was there anything else about him, anything at all . . .?’

  ‘No,’ Veerle said, shaking her head. ‘I didn’t see his face. I couldn’t even tell how tall he was or anything, not from this far.’

  ‘So there was nothing,’ said Bram. ‘Nothing that we could tell the police.’ There was a note of something in his voice – relief? Pleading? Veerle looked at him and saw that he was waiting for her to say that it didn’t matter what she’d seen, there was no way she could identify the man anyway – that they would be bringing the storm down on themselves for nothing.

  ‘No,’ she agreed reluctantly. Suddenly she felt terribly tired, as though she had been carrying something for a long time and had only just begun to feel its weight. She wanted to lie down and close her eyes and not think about what had happened to Marnix and whether or not they should call the police. ‘Maybe we should sleep on it,’ she suggested, and she was relieved when Bram didn’t want to discuss it any further.

  It was uncomfortable lying on the hard wooden floor, even with the padding of the sleeping bag. They lay close together, close enough that Veerle could feel the warmth of Bram’s breath on her cheek, but he didn’t try to kiss her. Although he was lying motionless beside her, eyes closed, not speaking, she knew that he was not asleep. She could feel the tension in his body, in the arm curled around her, the way the hand was tensed into a fist.

  He’s thinking that maybe, just maybe, his friend has just died. In all the previous year, when she and Kris had been together, trying to see the pattern in the disappearances of so many people – Vlinder, the girl in the lake; the English girl, Clare; the Dutch guy, Horzel – Veerle had never lost anyone she personally knew, not unless you included Hommel, and she hadn’t exactly been a friend. Still, she remembered how shocked she had been at the news of each death. Vlinder, the girl whose body had been found frozen face down in the water – that one had struck her as particularly awful. There was a callousness in the way Vlinder had been left there, as though the killer were a fly-tipper offloading a pile of rubbish. And now she’d just told Bram that his friend, someone he knew, had been disposed of with that same casual brutality. Veerle could hardly imagine what that would feel like.

  She worked an arm free from the confines of the sleeping bag and put her own hand over Bram’s, trying to smooth the tension from the clenched fingers with her own. They lay there like that for a long time, and a little while after she felt him begin to
relax, Veerle fell asleep.

  31

  And dreamed of Kris. They were in the old castle, miraculously resurrected from the flames that had consumed it, a fact that Veerle unquestioningly accepted in the dream. They were standing in the middle of the upstairs landing, where once they had picnicked on a blanket on the worn floorboards. Dust motes were dancing in the bright sunlight that streamed in through the large windows. The light picked out every detail with flat photographic sharpness: the banister rail, polished to a smooth sheen by years of hands sliding along it; the battered panelling topped by faded wallpaper whose pattern had nearly vanished in places; the loose board with a single nail sticking up, glinting in the sunshine. Veerle looked around at all this and then looked up at Kris, at his familiar face, his dark hair and eyes.

  Kris had his arms around her, and then he was kissing her, and it was strange because although the interior of the castle itself now seemed somehow insubstantial, like a holographic projection or a reflection on the glossy surface of a lake, the feeling of Kris’s lips on hers was real; it was warm and alive. It was an intense point of exquisite sensation, like a single splash of crimson on an enormous monochrome canvas.

  Veerle awoke with a start, the transition from sleep to wakefulness so swift that she was disorientated. The wooden floor was uncomfortably hard under her hip and shoulder, and her upper body was chilled because she had pushed her arm out of the sleeping bag. For a moment she thought she was in the old castle, lying on the dusty boards.

  Kris, she thought confusedly. Then she began to pick out details of the room in the dim light that came from the tiny windowpanes: the reflective surfaces of the glass cases, the rough stones of the walls. Bram’s sleeping form beside her.

  I’m in the Gravensteen. Not the other place, the old castle.

  Veerle could almost feel Kris’s kiss; her lips were tingling with it. It had felt so real. She sat up, and in the dim light she stared down at Bram.

  Was he kissing me when I was asleep?

  She had kissed him gladly the night before; she studied his handsome face, his blond hair bleached almost white by the sun, and thought that she would gladly kiss him again. But she hoped he had not kissed her in her sleep because that would be kind of . . . weird.

  Veerle stared at him for a while, but it was soon obvious that Bram really was asleep. He hadn’t been kissing anyone unless it was in his own dreams. She didn’t wake him. She sat hugging her knees and shivering a little, watching him sleep.

  Why can’t it just be perfect? she asked herself. The dream of kissing Kris had stirred up all kinds of unwelcome feelings, as though someone had thrust a stick into a limpid pool and churned it up until the water was thick with brown and evillooking sediment. She bit her lip.

  Why am I dreaming about Kris? I don’t want to see him ever again. I want to be with Bram. I want to be happy.

  That possibility seemed to be slipping away, though, running through her fingers like water even as she grasped at it. The events of the previous night were crowding into her mind, and although they seemed to have the quality of a nightmare, and she would dearly have loved to believe that she had dreamed the whole thing, the reality was sinking in with an appalling finality.

  Bram’s friend Marnix is dead. He’s really dead.

  Veerle rubbed her face with her hands, as though trying to rub sleep out of her eyes, trying to dismiss an unpleasant dream.

  I saw someone stab him.

  Someone. Veerle saw Bram stirring in his sleep and she knew that he was going to wake up soon, and then they would be faced with that same question again: what, if anything, were they going to do about what they had seen? They could, she supposed, go up to the rooftop where they had seen it happening, if Bram knew a way. She thought that Bram would probably want to do that. He’d asked her whether she was sure about what she had seen, whether it could be a mistake. If she were Bram, if it were her own friend who had died, she would want to know.

  And then?

  That was the problem. Veerle had not seen the killer’s face, couldn’t even swear to his height or breadth. What could she possibly tell the police, other than the obvious fact that someone had killed Marnix, there on the rooftop? And if she did that, it wouldn’t be long before they knew who she was: the girl who had seen Joren Sterckx, long after he was dead.

  Then they won’t believe a word I say. We’ll probably have a hard time persuading them even to look on the roof for the body.

  Veerle gazed unseeingly at the nearest glass cabinet with its payload of ancient weaponry.

  The girl who saw Joren Sterckx. Was that label going to follow her everywhere, making her an unreliable witness for the rest of her life? The trouble was, she couldn’t even account for it herself. She had seen the impossible.

  Veerle sighed. These massive stone walls, Bram asleep on the floor beside her, the growl of hunger in her empty stomach: those things were real. Whoever she had seen that evening at the castle was dead, gone, burned to a crisp. His identity had ceased to matter.

  It didn’t help, though; it never helped. Once you had seen outside the bubble of safety that enclosed everyday life, once you knew what was prowling around out there, that lust to kill, that brutality, you couldn’t unsee it. The death of one killer wouldn’t end it. Even now, while she sat here in the cool silence, hugging herself, another monster was at work. At this exact moment the light might be dying from another victim’s eyes. Once you accepted that, she thought, the idea of demons on the rooftops seemed almost possible.

  When Bram awoke Veerle was already rolling up her sleeping bag, ready to stuff into her rucksack.

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Seven.’ Veerle shook unruly strands of dark hair out of her eyes. ‘What time do you think they’ll open up?’

  ‘Not before nine. I’ve come down and watched them a couple of times.’

  ‘When can we leave?’

  ‘It’s best to wait until the first visitors have been through,’ said Bram.

  ‘And what then?’ Veerle stopped what she was doing and looked at him. She wanted to hear what he was going to say. Don’t make me decide on my own, she thought.

  ‘I want to go there,’ said Bram. He didn’t have to say where.

  ‘OK.’ More than anything, Veerle didn’t want to go up onto the rooftops, to see what the killer had made of Marnix. The idea made her queasy. But she couldn’t leave Bram to do it alone. She said, ‘Bram, if – I mean, if I wasn’t mistaken about what I saw . . .?’

  ‘Then we call the police,’ said Bram.

  ‘From one of our phones?’

  ‘That depends.’ Bram raised his eyes to hers. ‘I’m not leaving him up there, if he’s . . .’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But if there’s nothing we can tell them, nothing useful – we’ll have to find some way of reporting it without getting involved.’

  ‘OK.’

  Veerle looked down at the rucksack, as though absorbed in the problem of how to cram the whole of the sleeping bag into it. She thought, We’re going to end up not going to the police again, just like last time. Then she thought, What choice do we have?

  32

  At eight thirty Veerle phoned the school office from her mobile and told them she was ill. It was not difficult to sound convincing; the effect of the events of the previous night was like a hangover. She felt tired and faintly sick.

  Escaping from the castle proved more straightforward than getting into it. She and Bram clambered into the chimney again and listened as the castle staff passed through the room, switching on lights. Nobody lingered in the room, and shortly after ten the first visitor came through: a middle-aged man with a Ghent guide book in his hand.

  ‘I thought I was the first one in here,’ he said to Bram, looking surprised.

  ‘I guess we were early,’ said Bram politely.

  The man watched him and Veerle hitch their rucksacks onto their shoulders and head for the door. ‘I was there when the ticket offi
ce opened,’ he said to their retreating backs.

  Veerle shot Bram a glance but she didn’t say anything. They kept their heads down and made for the exit.

  Bram had reckoned that the trickiest bit would be passing the ticket office without anyone recognizing them, but in fact it was crammed with schoolchildren when they passed, and the staff were far too busy to notice a couple of stray visitors wandering towards the gate. A minute later and they were out on the street, crossing Sint-Veerleplein in the morning sunshine.

  Veerle felt a little unsteady. At first she thought it was simply relief, the sheer release of tension once they had left the Gravensteen without a hand descending on either of their shoulders. Then she realized that she was starving. She had not eaten for over twelve hours and she had been up and about for three. She wondered what she looked like; hollow-eyed and dishevelled, probably, after spending the night sleeping on the floor.

  I bet I don’t look like I’ve spent the night in a hotel in Amsterdam, she thought. She would have to do something about that before she went home to Geert and Anneke.

  ‘Bram? Can we get something to eat?’

  As she spoke, Bram looked at her, and for a moment she could have sworn he wasn’t even seeing her; there was a glazed look in his eyes, as though he were looking through her into some grimly absorbing mental tableau. Then a change passed across his face, subtle as a shudder, and he was really looking at her, and smiling sadly.

  ‘Sure.’ He touched her shoulder. ‘I’m starving too.’

  They went into a little tobacconist’s shop whose windows were crowded with packets of food and other goods. They bought cans of iced tea and sweet rolls wrapped in cellophane. Veerle tore open the wrapping and attacked the roll gratefully. Bram put his into his backpack, in spite of what he had said about being starving. There was a suppressed tension about the way he moved; he was dying to get onto the rooftop, hoping perhaps that Veerle had been mistaken after all, or knowing that she hadn’t been and wanting to get it over and done with. Already he was drifting across the street, turning to look for traffic, stepping over the tramlines.