Demons of Ghent

by Helen Grant

  ‘Straight home after school,’ her father said before he walked away. ‘Or Anneke will call me.’

  Veerle said nothing at all. She looked at her father’s retreating back for a few moments and then she turned away.

  At registration she wondered whether it was her imagination that the teacher put some small emphasis on her name when he called it; that he looked at her for a little longer than one might have expected. Had Geert asked the school to keep an extra close eye on her, to inform him if she disappeared again? The thought was depressing: the teaching staff here, Anneke at home. She might just as well have been under surveillance.

  And so it went on. Every morning Geert delivered her to the school; every evening when Veerle arrived back at the flat Anneke was waiting with one eye on the phone. Once Veerle was ten minutes late because the teacher had kept the class in after the bell had rung, and when she got home Anneke was holding the telephone receiver, the smoothness of her expression belying the malice in her eyes.

  Veerle wondered how long it would go on. Could Geert keep this up indefinitely, the house arrest and accompanying her right into school, the ominous silence, the constant policing of her whereabouts? The trouble was, she rather thought he could. Since she was not going to tell him where she had been during the missing night and day, they had reached an impasse. There was a break between them as profound as a geographical fault-line, with occasional magmatic pyrotechnics and the long weary attrition of rock grinding against rock.

  She did her best to concentrate at school, but sometimes it was difficult: thoughts of Geert’s stony face and Anneke’s swift cool glance before the storm broke and the guilty memory of the night in the Gravensteen that she could never, never tell them about would keep intruding into her conscious mind. Veerle would find herself being dragged down into a spiral of grim reiteration – I have to end this; I can’t tell them but I have to end this – the thoughts running faster and faster, sucking her down into themselves like a hungry whirlpool – and then a voice would pierce her consciousness or the girl next to her would give her a surreptitious dig with her elbow and she would realize that the teacher had spoken to her, that she was expected to reply. It was useless, like coming into a conversation halfway through, and she could feel the gaps in her knowledge from the days she had missed, like blank patches on a map she could no longer read well enough to follow. Veerle wasn’t stupid; she could see the looks she was getting from each successive teacher in turn, and she knew well enough which way that particular road led: it was the easy downhill path that led from Trouble to the place sign-posted Deeper Trouble.

  And then there was the question of Bram.

  Being grounded by Geert meant not seeing Bram, not unless he came to the flat, and now wasn’t the right time to introduce the two of them, that was plain. Especially not when she considered that the information Geert had been trying to prise out of her was also in Bram’s keeping, as though she and Bram had shared it like the two halves of a lovers’ token. No; Bram had to stay away for the time being.

  That wasn’t the thing that was really bothering her. That was the question of how she felt about not seeing Bram.

  Not seeing Kris, not being with him any more, that had been like having some soft tender part of herself roughly hacked out.

  Maybe, she thought, I just can’t feel like that again. Something’s just . . . gone.

  Sometimes they spoke on the phone, but nearly always when Veerle was at school. Veerle thought that if Geert overheard her chatting to Bram while he was in his current mood, there was a definite danger that he would decide that Bram was unsuitable, and that would be sufficient grounds to confiscate her phone.

  The school term ended, and the Christmas holidays passed dismally, with Veerle closeted in the flat with Anneke and the baby most of the time. She suspected that Anneke was finding the curfew on Veerle as irksome as she was herself, but she didn’t try to remedy the situation by asking Geert to relax it. Instead she became more and more waspish. Nothing that Veerle did – or didn’t do – was right. It was a relief when the new term began in January.

  The first two days back passed without incident. On the third day Veerle switched on her mobile phone when the lunch bell rang and found that she had eight missed calls.

  Eight? she thought, looking down at the tiny screen with a furrowed brow. That was over-enthusiastic even for Bram, and she felt the faint stirrings of disquiet. Before she had time to press LIST and see whether all of them were from him, the phone went off in her hand, a sharp trill that actually made her jump. She fumbled with the phone, almost dropped it, then thumbed the ANSWER CALL button.

  As she pressed the phone to her ear she started to say, ‘Hi, Bram,’ but it wasn’t Bram on the other end.

  ‘Veerle?’ said the voice. ‘It’s me, Kris. Don’t hang up.’

  41

  Death continued to stalk the ancient streets of Ghent, crossing and recrossing the same paths, and at last his feverish zeal was rewarded. He found the blonde girl again, and she was alone and unaware of his presence.

  He had hoped to track her to wherever she habitually hid herself, which he believed was within close walking distance of Voldersstraat, but she had eluded him for so long that he suspected she was aware of his hunt, was deliberately evasive, taking varying routes as she went about the city, and always, always, checking behind her.

  Nobody can hide for ever, though. Now he had found her, the blonde one, and he was determined to finish it. She was the last; once his blade had carved the life out of her, he could turn it on himself. It would not take long; he was skilled at taking life now. A brief agony and then peace – peace for ever.

  The long waiting had made him hungry for the deed. He trailed her at a distance of perhaps one hundred metres, his collar turned up to hide the lower part of his face, his strong hands thrust into his deep pockets where they could caress the things that hid there, the hungry sharp things.

  He went stealthily, turning slightly to slip knife-like between other pedestrians where the pavement was crowded, not wanting a collision or anything that might draw attention to him. As ever, he felt the familiar pain as he moved, the smouldering of old fires in his joints that cooled and faded as he went along, as his body kindled to the task in hand and his will asserted itself over corporeal considerations. He thought of the blonde girl, of ending her, ending his own long search, and he felt a kind of savage joy that seemed to strip the years from him. The last one.

  She was perhaps seventy metres away now, a thin black-clad figure topped with that striking and unmistakable pale hair, sleek and luminous as white gold. There was a little backpack on her back and she had something in her hand – a mobile phone, probably. There was a sense of purpose he hadn’t seen in her before, and she seemed to have relaxed her guard somewhat; in the last two blocks she hadn’t looked behind her once.

  Do you not feel Death approaching? he wondered, watching the crown of bright hair threading its way through the assortment of other bobbing heads, dark, fair, bald, muffled in winter hats. Do you not feel me coming for you?

  It baffled him, the human ability to live alongside Death, to know that it was coming for you, inevitably; that there was no escape for anyone. Such a short span, even for the longer-lived: perhaps seventy or eighty years. Perhaps that was the reason they tried to deny it, because otherwise what would life be except a short painful scream into the endless dark? The blonde girl was denying him, he thought; she must have felt his proximity, felt the imminence of her own end like the beating of great dark wings in the air about her, felt the feather-light touch of wingtips on the skin of her face.

  Sixty metres; fifty.

  The streets were crowded, and she was showing no signs of deviating from her route along the busiest of them. He began to feel real anger; anger and frustration. To be thwarted at this critical moment by the mindless crowds of pedestrians pressing in on them! He wished he could cut them all down, scythe them down like a strange bloody cr
op.

  With an effort he controlled himself. The girl – focus on the girl. On Eva. He simply needed her to turn down some street that was quieter than the others, one where he could be confident that no passer-by could intervene when he struck. If they stopped him before she was dead, it was all for nothing.

  Up ahead was a De Lijn tram stop, and he saw that the girl was crossing the street diagonally, making straight for it. She was swinging the little backpack off her shoulders, and then she was feeling through the front pockets, looking for something: probably her wallet. Sure enough, she drew something out of the bag just as she reached the tram-stop sign with its yellow-and-white De Lijn logo.

  Of course. He had not lived this long in Ghent without learning its routes and rhythms intimately. From here the trams ran south towards Gent-Sint-Pieters railway station. The backpack, the sense of purpose, all suggested one thing. She was planning to leave Ghent.

  He could have howled with fury. When he spotted her, he had felt so strongly that this was the time. Success had been so close that he could almost smell it on the air, like the coppery tang of blood. His lungs, inflating and deflating like bellows, awaited the smooth passage of the knife between their cage of ribs, releasing him. All he had needed was a few brief moments in some secluded place.

  But she was going to board the tram, and then she would be at the teeming railway station, and then she would be on a busy train. Even if he could follow her without being seen, how could he unsheathe the blade in such places without some foolhardy passer-by hanging on his arm while others called the police?

  He came to a halt, watching her approach the tram stop. It was very busy; unusually busy, in fact. Probably the next tram was overdue.

  He thought about that; about forty tonnes of metal and glass approaching rapidly through the streets, ready to carry the girl away with it. And then suddenly he knew what to do.

  He joined the waiting crowd with ease. Nobody gave him a second glance; today it was cold enough to see your breath, even in the middle of the day, and nearly everyone was just as muffled up as he was: collars were turned up, scarves stretched over noses, hats pulled down over ears.

  The girl was standing on the very edge of the pavement now, gazing up the tramlines, eager to be climbing aboard, to get away. There were other travellers on either side of her: a stout older woman with a shopping bag on one side; on the other a tall, broad-shouldered man in a long black coat of some thick woollen material. All of them had their backs turned to him. He was able to move closer without difficulty, so close that he could have stretched out a hand and touched that gleaming pale hair.

  It was distinctive, that hair; it was one of the things that had first alerted him to her. He wasn’t the only one to notice it, he saw; the tall man in the black coat was looking down at her, and now he was saying something to her, and she was muttering something in return, not meeting his eye, making a play of leaning out over the edge of the pavement again, looking for the tram.

  Here it came at last, he saw: gliding down the street towards them, the harsh metallic voice of the bell blaring out, a great metal monster like a battering ram. Heavy enough to crush anything in its path, even at braking speed. The girl was close to the end of the queue; the tram would not have stopped braking until the driver’s end was well past the place where she stood. He edged closer, taking care not to attract attention to himself by shoving anyone else. He took his hands out of his pockets.

  She was so close to him now that he could not help himself: her name slipped out of his mouth, as subtle as smoke, and there was one appalling moment when she half turned and he thought that she would see him, and know. But she did not pick him out from the tightly packed bodies in their uniform drab cocoons of winter coats. She turned to the front again, because here came the tram, and the attention of everyone on the pavement was focused forwards.

  In the second before the tram swept past, he said her name again, and this time when she glanced over her shoulder, momentarily distracted, he placed both hands firmly in the centre of her back, and with one brutal shove thrust her forward into its path.

  42

  Hommel had been relieved to leave the flat that morning. For some weeks she had been free of the sensation of being followed when she went about the city; she judged that her strategy of varying her route home, of avoiding the streets where she thought she had been tailed before, of going in and out at odd and unpredictable hours, had been successful. Whether her follower had given up or whether the trail had simply gone cold, she couldn’t say.

  In spite of the absence of any further incident, however, Hommel found being in Ghent a strain. Sometimes she would be alone in the darkened grotto that was the music shop, and someone would pass the front window; she would see a dark shape flitting past and she would think, I’m alone here. It doesn’t matter that it’s broad daylight out there; if something happens to me, who’s going to stop it? Or she would awake in the middle of the night on her mattress in the comfortless flat, listening to the creaks and groans of the old building and wondering whether she could pick out anything else amongst them: a furtive tread on the stairs, a rustle on the landing outside the door.

  So she had decided to take a few days off. Kris couldn’t come to her in the week – he had to work – but she could go to him.

  Just a couple of days, she thought. Three days, two days. One, even. Just to spend a little time feeling safe, not looking over her shoulder every time she went out. So she went to Axel, and after a little negotiation she agreed to work a whole week without pay in exchange for three days off. Axel was getting the best of the bargain but she had no leverage: if he threw her out she would be homeless as well as jobless. The pay is rubbish anyway, Hommel reminded herself. You’re only losing a percentage of nothing.

  The moment she walked out of Muziek City with her backpack on her shoulders – not much in it, just a couple of clean T-shirts and a few other bits and pieces – she knew she had done the right thing. She felt light, free, as though the bright wintry sunshine had burned off some oppressive dark fog that had been hanging over her. As she threaded her way through the shoppers on Voldersstraat the only thing that was on her mind was her destination. Normally she would have slowed her pace from time to time and glanced swiftly behind her, but now there seemed no need; in less than an hour she would be out of Ghent anyway.

  The tram stop was unusually crowded but that wasn’t a problem; even if she had to wait for the next one she had enough time. Hommel took her place on the pavement and glanced up the street, looking for the tram. It was a cold day, in spite of the sunshine; she could see a trace of her breath hanging on the air. People were beginning to push forward towards the kerb, in readiness to board the next tram: to her right, a robust-looking, grim-faced old woman who was clearly determined not to let anyone ahead of her, and to her left a tall man in a dark coat. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the man glance down at her, but she didn’t react, didn’t look back at him. Then he spoke to her.

  ‘Cold, isn’t it?’

  She looked up fleetingly and saw that he was no more than a few years older than she was, with a pleasant, open-looking face and a shock of light brown hair. He was looking at her in a way that she recognized; there was more to it than simple politeness. The interest would have been flattering except for the all-pervading knowledge that she was not officially a resident of Ghent at all; for all she knew, she was a missing person back in Vlaams-Brabant. So she didn’t return the stranger’s smile; she just muttered, ‘Yes,’ in the most neutral tone she could manage, and concentrated on looking out for the tram, a little more self-consciously than she had before.

  Here it came at last, sliding down the street towards her, its metallic bell as strident as a clash of swords. She was close to the back of the line; it would have to pass right by her before it came to a full stop. She waited.

  It was at that moment that she heard someone say a single word. A name.

  ‘Eva.’

>   It wasn’t her name, which was Els, although she hardly ever called herself that, preferring her nickname of Hommel. It wasn’t even the fake name she had given Axel, which was Hannah, and it wasn’t a voice she recognized, either. She knew no one with that hoarse, guttural way of speaking. All the same, there was a certain insistent urgency to the tone in which the name was pronounced that caught her attention, that made her feel that it was somehow intended for her.

  She half turned, but there was a crush of people behind her, and since whoever had spoken had fallen silent after that one emphatic word, she had no way of knowing who it had been, nor to whom it was addressed. Here came the tram, only a few metres away now; she turned her attention back to the front. It was braking now, you could hear it, but it was still moving quite quickly; she took care to hang back a little from the edge of the pavement.

  In the very last moments before it swept past her, she heard that harsh voice again, only this time it was louder and there was no mistaking the sense of purpose in it.

  ‘Eva.’

  Hommel didn’t mean to turn round; it could have nothing to do with her, after all. Still, she couldn’t quite help herself; instinctively she reacted, glancing over her shoulder and away from the approaching tram with its hurtling blunt head of tinted glass and steel.

  At that moment she felt a savage shove from behind, which propelled her forward with sudden and shocking violence. It happened so quickly that she was unable to prevent herself lurching forward. There was just time for her to think, The tram – I’m going to go under the tram! as a surge of terror rose up in her like the upsweep of a tsunami. Then she felt an agonizing pain in her left arm, as though it were being pulled right out of the shoulder socket, and she was jerked forcibly back onto the pavement. The side of the tram shot by so close to her right cheek that she felt it passing like a cold and savage breath, and at the same moment her hand hit the side of the carriage with a shattering force that sent a jarring pain right up the arm.