Demons of Ghent

by Helen Grant

  There are demons up there, all right, she thought, and shivered.

  All the same, she missed being able to escape up to the rooftops, where the city felt as though it did belong to her, and she to it. She gazed up at them as she and Bram strolled along.

  I hate you, she said silently to whoever lurked there. I hate you for what you did to Marnix, and I hate you for making something fabulous into something foul and horrible.

  It came back to her again then, relentlessly – the sight of Marnix lying there on the rooftop in the morning sunlight, his eyes staring sightlessly at the sky, his T-shirt stuck to his pallid skin with red wetness. And the salt.

  Salt.

  Bram stopped walking when he felt Veerle check her stride. ‘What is it?’

  It looked like he was sowing seeds, Veerle thought. She remembered the way Bram’s assailant had cast out his arm once, twice. The tiny metallic tinkle of something landing on the concrete afterwards. He wasn’t sowing seeds. He was sowing salt. And he dropped something, something metal just like that iron nail we found. I was right. It was him. It was the man who murdered Marnix.

  ‘Veerle? What’s the matter?’

  If he’d been a bit quicker – if Bram had been at the bottom of the ladder when he attacked him—

  ‘Veerle?’ At last the anxiety in Bram’s voice intruded into her consciousness.

  Veerle turned a pale, round-eyed face to him. ‘Oh, Bram . . .’

  36

  Death came to the priest, and not kindly. It had taken him a long time to find the man; he had never expected to find him hidden in the bosom of the church. The temerity of it astounded him.

  For a long time Death had stalked the streets of Ghent, his grim visage cowled, rarely speaking to anyone but gazing sidelong into the faces of his fellow citizens with well-concealed hunger. His search was so very nearly done. He had not yet succeeded in running the blonde girl to ground, but he knew that it would happen soon – very soon. Still, there were the others, a mere handful of them now, but infuriatingly elusive. He longed to scythe them down.

  He had found the politician in a newspaper, folded neatly and discarded or forgotten on a public bench, and had known him at once: the complacent bearded face with its high forehead, arched eyebrows and rather full lips. The printed face had crumpled as his hands gripped the paper, the knuckles whitening.

  After that he realized the value of scanning the pages of newsprint whenever he was able.

  The priest had been photographed amongst a group of other people at a charitable event, and it was the setting that had given him away, the way he alone had glanced towards the camera at the moment the shutter clicked. The one face in the crowd that was turned to the observer; how could he not have known him?

  Other than that, the priest might have been hard to recognize; his face was a nondescript one, with small eyes, a blunt but not excessively prominent nose and the beginnings of a double chin. A face you might see on any street in Flanders; a face you might have seen there at any time during, say, the last five hundred years. A face you would walk past without noticing.

  Death had found him, though; Death finds everyone in the end. He found the church too, without much trouble. It was not a grand church like the cathedral, but that was a point in his favour. It was very difficult for him to enter the hallowed precinct of the cathedral, but there was no such bar to entering the smaller church. It was not hard to find the priest’s dwelling place, and not particularly hard to get inside it. If you know that everything you touch will be smoking black ash by the time the sun rises, a few splinters of wood or shards of broken glass are nothing to be concerned about.

  Death entered the priest’s house on the ground floor, by the door whose lock he had broken easily. He stood, grim and silent, just inside the door, which would not now fully close; it hung awry, like a limb on a broken joint. The cold of the night seeped in around his bulk like a poison gas. If there was a window open anywhere in the house, if the priest liked a little fresh air while he slept, the through draught would suck the chill into the heart of the building, as though it were one gigantic lung inhaling deeply.

  Death listened, his dark eyes glittering, and he heard no sound of movement, nothing to suggest that the priest had heard him entering. Above him, in the upper reaches of the house, he could hear the murmur of voices. From their cadence he recognized the radio, turned up for ears that were hard of hearing. This was good; with the voices filling the room upstairs, the priest would have heard nothing from down here.

  Death was not thankful, though. He accepted that this good fortune was meant.

  There were lights on in the house; the priest kept late hours. The man who was Death stretched out a sinewy hand and turned them out as he progressed through the house and mounted the stairs, so that darkness followed him like the sweep of a black cloak.

  He paused on the upstairs landing, his nostrils flaring. Once that light too was extinguished, he identified the priest’s location easily by the thin rectangle of yellow light that surrounded the closed door as though it were the door of a furnace and fire burned on the other side of it, as indeed it soon would.

  He strode to the closed door and opened it.

  Inside was a study with a large desk and a bookcase, although not as many books as you might have expected; the priest was practical rather than theological or political. There was a fireplace, but it had been sealed; instead there was a heavy radiator fixed to the wall. On the mantelpiece above the redundant fireplace was the radio. Behind the desk was the priest, starting back in his chair with an expression of outrage and terror on his jowly face.

  ‘Goeien oovent, Gerard,’ said the man who was Death, speaking in the Ghent dialect, his tone low and ominous. He came right into the room, his shoulders filling the doorframe, and closed the door behind him.

  ‘My name’s not Gerard,’ said the priest. ‘Who are you? How did you get in?’ He pushed his chair back from the desk, intending to get up, but he dared not come out from behind it; one look at the intruder convinced him that it was best to keep the broad expanse of polished wood between them. His chubby hands clutched at the desktop, at the front of his own shirt, fluttering like fat pigeons in panic.

  ‘You know who I am,’ Death told him, pushing back the hood to let the priest see his grim and withered features.

  The priest’s face was a frozen mask of fear and anger, in which only the eyes were alive. Death saw their gaze flicker over to the telephone on the corner of the desk. He moved closer, letting the priest understand that to lunge for the receiver would be useless. Time had run out. Time was the one thing they all wanted more of, the people he destroyed, and for the priest there was almost none left.

  Death moved closer, and now he opened his coat and let the priest see what he had brought with him, the gleaming triangular blade nestled close to his body.

  ‘It’s time, Gerard,’ he said, and his voice was gravel and smoke, a pronouncement of coming execution.

  ‘I don’t have any money here,’ babbled the priest.

  ‘I don’t want money,’ Death told him.

  ‘What do you want?’ The priest’s voice was high and panicked now; the prospect of meeting his Maker did not delight him as you might have expected it to. But then the dark cloth he wore was simply a hiding place, a camouflage.

  Death slid the knife smoothly out of the inside of his coat. The blade flashed golden in the lamplight. His knuckles were white around the handle.

  There was a sound like steam escaping – the priest drawing in a thin and painful breath through a throat constricted with terror.

  ‘Peace,’ Death told him. ‘I want peace.’

  Afterwards he switched off the radio programme that the priest would never hear, and with crimson fingers he closed the eyes that would never see again, printing his marks upon their lids. Once again he listened – listened for the sounds that would mean that someone had heard him visiting bloody justice upon the priest – but there was n
othing beyond the sound of his own ragged breathing. He went about then, preparing to sear away all traces of his work, opening internal doors, heaping up those things that would easily kindle – papers, books. The priest had very few possessions to interest him. Only one thing caught his eye: a little wooden statuette of the Virgin and Child, centuries old, the features blunted and faded by the passage of years, a fellow traveller from past to future. Rather than consign her to the flames, he put her inside his coat and carried her away with him into the dark.

  The last thing he did before he pulled the outside door closed behind him was to toss the light back into the darkened house, as though he were releasing a bird into the air. As fire unfolded its wings and flew blazing down the hallway, he vanished silently into the night.

  A little later, from his vantage point in the church tower (the key lifted neatly from the priest’s cheerless kitchen) he watched the fire brigade arrive, too late to do anything but prevent the surrounding houses from going up. The orange glare of the inferno underlit his craggy features as he gazed down, dyeing them the colour of flames. If anyone had glanced up at him, they might have thought a gloating demon lurked there, relishing the grim incense of burning wood and charred flesh.

  He was satisfied that no evidence of his presence could have survived the conflagration: not one hair, not one finger-print; nothing but the marks of the blade on the priest’s vertebrae – and perhaps not even those.

  37

  For days, and even weeks, Veerle waited for the visit or phone call that would tell her that someone had linked Bram to the death of Marnix, and her too, by association with Bram. The discovery of the body was mentioned in the local papers with an appeal for information; that was the moment when she expected someone to come forward and say that they had seen her and Bram breaking into the empty house, or that they had watched through the security peephole in the front door of their flat as she and Bram had hurried downstairs afterwards. But there was nothing: no visit, no call.

  Soon the story was buried by a worse one: she found herself walking to school past newspaper stands with headlines screaming about the local priest whose charred remains had been found in the smoking pit of his home, and who had probably been dead before the fire started, cut down by persons unknown for reasons unfathomable. People were talking about crime waves, about the unacceptable level of violence that modern life had imported to the ancient city.

  Marnix became a statistic.

  At school Veerle heard Suki tell some of the others that the guy who had been found dead on the roof of a building near the Gravensteen was called Marvin, and that he had been covered with the marks of savage claws. She put her head down and didn’t contradict the girl on either point.

  As autumn slipped into winter Geert gave up escorting her to school, but still she went, and stayed. She tried to work, to catch up on all the things she had missed, but sometimes it was like trying to gather sand through open fingers. Sitting in a maths lesson she would think of Marnix, of the dead grey eyes staring up at the sky, and it wasn’t just that she was distracted, it was that suddenly the lesson didn’t seem to matter. Here was an equation she would never solve: Marnix was dead, and nobody had paid for it.

  Veerle puzzled about the salt and the nail. She tried running internet searches and came up with a lot of stuff about iodine in salt. When she tried adding the word ‘ritual’ the search turned up some dubious-looking forums with comments about warding off ghosts and fairies.

  I’m missing something, she thought, tapping the edge of the keyboard impatiently with her fingernails. Finally, though, she concluded that it didn’t really matter. The critical thing was that the salt and the nail proved that whoever had killed Marnix had also tried to attack Bram that night. That was all it proved. Without a face or a voice it didn’t help. They already knew there was a killer in the city, and the police did too. She wondered whether they had made any more of the salt and the nail than she had, but there was no way to know; if they had, they weren’t sharing it with the press.

  She saw Bram often. It didn’t seem to matter that Veerle hadn’t made up her mind about him; he had made his mind up about her, and he seemed to have enough determination for both of them. He invited her to the climbing wall, to the burger bar in the city centre, to the cinema. The one thing he didn’t suggest was another trip to the rooftops of Ghent via de ladder or any other route.

  Once Veerle suggested it, and pressed him into agreeing, but the expedition was a failure. The magic had fled with the end of autumn. It was chilly and dark, the roof tiles unpleasantly slick with damp moss and lichen, and every shadow a black pit concealing a nameless threat. It was no fun being on the rooftops when you were shivering with cold and looking over your shoulder all the time. Peering down over a set of corbie steps at the well-lit street below, Veerle found she was wishing herself down, not up: the street was full of warmth and light and voices; the rooftop felt like a graveyard. She and Bram climbed down and went to a café instead.

  Bram didn’t talk about Marnix; in fact you would have thought that he had forgotten about Marnix so completely that he might never have existed. Veerle knew better, though; she suspected that Bram was pushing the memory away on purpose, like someone trying to hide some noisome thing in open water, thrusting it down under the scummy surface with a stick. He didn’t want to be reminded of what they had seen that night in the Gravensteen and on the rooftop the following morning; he didn’t want to keep torturing himself by wondering whether he and Veerle had contributed to the death by asking Marnix to be at that spot. Veerle understood that; she had enough what-ifs of her own to last a lifetime.

  All the same, it felt strange to do ordinary things together. It felt uncomfortably like acceptance: of her life in Ghent, her life without Claudine, her life without Kris. She would be sitting in the darkened cinema with Bram’s arm round her and their faces lit an eerie blue by the screen, or sitting at a table by the window of a café waiting for him to come back with drinks, and she would have a sudden and desolate sense of dislocation which would coalesce into the question, What am I doing here?

  There were good things here. The city was beautiful, she had to admit that, and although there was not much love lost between her and Anneke, Geert was all right; they got on together in a cautious sort of way. Adam, her little brother, was kind of endearing too. And Bram – Bram was amiable and kind and very good-looking. It was natural to swim up from the black depths of the water towards the surface, to push your way up like a green shoot towards the light. She couldn’t help herself, and yet it still made her feel like a traitor. She felt as though she had taken all her memories of her mother, Claudine, and of Kris, the nine-year-old Kris of her childhood and the later Kris, the Kris she loved, and put them into a keepsake box, and closed the lid and locked it. Time would pass and nothing new would be added to those memories. They would be a for ever unfinished story; they would be like flowers pressed between the pages of a book, preserved for ever but growing slowly more brittle and faded.

  It was the ordinariness of it all, that was the thing. Being up on the rooftops, in that deserted landscape of weathered brick and stone and dusty glass, of geometric shapes and long shadows – that had been different. It had been outside life, neither past nor present; it wasn’t her home in Vlaams-Brabant but it wasn’t really Ghent either, not the Ghent that everyone else knew, the ones who swarmed down there in the streets. Up there the world had been a blank canvas, an unfinished map whose details she could ink in herself. She had not been called upon to accept anything up there, nor forget anything.

  But, she thought, that was before.

  So she and Bram stayed off the rooftops, and went instead to the kind of places ordinary people went to. Bram started talking about introducing her to some of his friends or, more alarmingly, picking her up from the flat, which would mean him meeting Geert and Anneke.

  Meanwhile Veerle would catch Geert watching her across the kitchen table with a complacent loo
k on his face, and she knew what he was thinking: She’s settling down. She’s getting over it. He asked her whom she was meeting all these times when she went out, and when she told him, A friend – yes, all right, a male friend, he wanted to know where this male friend was from, and when he found out that Bram was local, he was from Ghent, that complacent look came over his face again. It wouldn’t be long before he was asking her to bring Bram back to the flat himself, so they could meet.

  Sometimes Veerle felt like screaming. At other times she was almost grateful for the ordinariness of it all, the dull procession of days that seemed to be slowly accumulating like layers of varnish.

  Weeks went past like that, and then it all fell apart.

  38

  Veerle was blindsided. She had spent hours, days, fighting shock and sadness and guilt over Marnix. She’d tried to deal with the leaden dragging feeling she had every time she thought about Kris, and she’d spent the rest of the time worrying about where things were going with Bram and whether it was possible to be fair to herself and him. The one thing she hadn’t thought about, the thing that had slipped so far to the back of her mind that it was lost in the distance, was the conversation she had had with the school secretary.

  I could speak to the directeur, the woman had said, and later: He might be prepared to refund part of the money – if you have a pressing reason for cancelling.

  But then they had agreed that the reason Veerle had given for cancelling her place on the school trip – that she had to stay with Anneke and her newborn baby – was hardly an unforeseen circumstance. Veerle had assumed that that was the end of it, or at any rate she had hoped it was, and then circumstances had brought other more urgent considerations to the front of her mind and she had forgotten all about it. Now it appeared that the thing she had overlooked had turned to bite her, like a snake on a path.

  She had no idea that anything was wrong until she got home from school, and then the sky fell on her head.