Demons of Ghent

by Helen Grant

  The rain was so heavy that she could hear it inside the cathedral: a kind of relentless drumming sound, dreary as nagging. Perhaps it was the overcast weather outside that made the interior of the ancient church so cheerless; in spite of the electric lights the nave was dim and gloomy, and it was so cold. Hardly better than being outside, Veerle thought. The only advantage was being out of the rain, and she had brought quite a lot of that indoors with her; she looked down at the waterproof fabric of her jacket and it was covered with tiny droplets, sparkling like polished gemstones. She touched one with a finger and the tip came away wet.

  Damp strands of hair were falling over her eyes. Veerle shook them back and glanced around. She seemed to be alone. On previous occasions when she had been inside Sint-Baafs there had been other visitors and a few cathedral guides, including the one who had admonished her for running inside the building the day she had chased Hommel outside. Evidently the weather had sent the few unseasonal tourists scurrying to the nearest coffee shop, and the guides, redundant, had retreated to some better-heated corner of the church. Veerle wandered towards the north aisle and looked at the ticket booth for the Ghent altarpiece. That was deserted too, unusually; there was a handwritten note stuck to the glass, reading: Back soon. The reinforced doors behind it were locked.

  Veerle went back to the middle of the nave, where she had a view of the door. Her footsteps sounded very loud on the tiles; it gave her the uncomfortable sense of disturbing the calm of a funeral. All the same, she couldn’t stand still; Bram was going to arrive in the next thirty minutes and she was aware that she had still not come to any firm decision. It was as bad as standing in the wings before a theatrical performance, knowing that you hadn’t learned your lines; she supposed that she could wait and see how she felt when she saw Bram, but somehow she didn’t want to wing it. She wanted to know what to do, how she felt. She found herself pacing restlessly, and if anyone else stirred within the dimly lit cathedral she didn’t hear them over the thunder of her thoughts.

  Minutes passed with agonizing slowness and nobody entered the cathedral. Veerle whistled under her breath, and tapped the toe of her boot on the tiled floor. Then, feeling self-conscious, she wandered over to look at a painting fixed to one of the gigantic grey stone pillars. A quick glance at the opposite pillar showed that the painting was one of a pair, one male figure and one female. This one was the female.

  It was an odd-looking painting; Veerle couldn’t have begun to date it. It showed a young woman framed within a wooden archway. In the half-hemisphere above her head were some much smaller figures who seemed vaguely familiar; they seemed to be fighting, or at any rate one was attacking the other, who was lying on the ground defending himself ineffectually. You could see how that was going to end. It was the figure of the woman that puzzled Veerle. She had the high forehead, the smooth features and the delicately arched eyebrows that went with very old paintings, the ones that were hundreds and hundreds of years old, but she was wearing a dress that was startlingly modern-looking: it was asymmetrical, leaving the left shoulder uncovered, and it ended halfway up the thighs, leaving the knees and calves completely bare.

  Veerle took a step closer, her interest mildly piqued in spite of herself, and it was then that she heard a movement some way off, the scuff of shoes on the tiled floor. One of the cathedral guides returning, she supposed. She didn’t look round; instead she continued to study the painting, thinking that the young woman seemed vaguely familiar – had she seen the painting reproduced somewhere before?

  Thus it was that Veerle had her back to the other person and her attention fixed elsewhere; she didn’t hear him come closer; she was not even aware of his proximity until he spoke.

  His voice was deep and hoarse, the voice of someone who has drawn smoke deep into his lungs; a ruined voice. But it was not the voice itself that sent a terrible jolt of icy shock through Veerle’s body; it was the single word he said.

  ‘Eva.’

  49

  Cold horror enfolded Veerle, as though a great bat had settled upon her, wrapping its leathery wings about her, sinking its fangs deep into her shrinking flesh.

  Eva. He said Eva.

  The man who tried to kill Hommel is standing right behind me.

  All those nights she had dreamed of running for her life, and now she couldn’t move. She was frozen, paralysed with shock. Her eyes were still turned towards the strange painting of the girl; they felt like the only living things in a body that had turned to marble. She looked at the girl but did not see her. In her mind she was seeing the edge of the pavement and a crowd of people clustering close and a tram approaching, forty tonnes of metal and glass; she was hearing the single word Eva and feeling that terrible shove that would send her straight into its path. It did not matter that there was no tram here, that there was no open sky wheeling above her; that kind of malice could transform itself into a blade, a bludgeon. It could attack an innocent person in a darkened yard behind a line of shops, for no other reason than that they were there. It could cut a throat and leave the body to the elements on a city rooftop.

  A ragged breath escaped her. She could hardly believe that she was still on her feet, that her consciousness had not imploded to somewhere deep inside herself, the shell of her body crumpling. She saw death coming, she saw it running her down, and still she couldn’t move.

  The voice came again, hoarse and rasping, as though the larynx were an engine with grit in its gears.

  ‘It is Eva.’

  Veerle stood there motionless in the nave, her rain-damp hair still clinging clammily to her face. She stared at the painting. At last realization forced its way into her consciousness through the seething terror, like flotsam thrown up by the boiling maelstrom of a tempestuous sea.

  Eva. The painting is of Eva.

  She couldn’t make sense of it. Her mind struggled to grasp the meaning of it, as a climber’s fingers skitter across a sheer rock face, searching for a hold. Eva – the damaged voice saying the name, here in the cathedral and out there on the street, seconds before Hommel had nearly been pushed under a tram. There was Eva here, in the painting, but out in the street there had been no painting; there had only been a skinny, nervous blonde girl, leaning out over the edge of the pavement to see the tram coming.

  Eva. Hommel. Veerle couldn’t make the connection; too much of her mind’s processing power was concentrated on the terrible thought that he was standing right behind her and all of the rest of the ancient cathedral was empty; its emptiness was the vast sky in which they both wheeled, the hawk and the dove, before the killing plunge.

  She couldn’t help herself then; she had to turn round and look at him. She had to know who he was, even if it was the very last thing she ever did. Slowly, Veerle turned.

  He’s old, she thought in shock. She registered that instantly, but there was no relief. Old, yes, but not feeble. She knew danger when she saw it, and it was radiating from him in waves, an instability as precarious as nitro-glycerine.

  He was aged, but tall and broad-shouldered, the remains of a strong and muscular man. His features were large and heavy, the mouth wide with deeply lined corners, the whole effect that of a pitiless deity carved in stone. He was wearing some kind of dark coat with a hood, but he had pushed it back revealing a wide forehead and deep-set eyes overhung by craggy brows. The skin of his face was more wrinkled than that of any other living being she could recall seeing; it was a network of tiny fine lines, textured like linen. It was the eyes that held her gaze, though: they had a flat glitter, the gaze of a fanatic.

  Veerle could believe that this man had tried to push Hommel into the path of the tram. She believed it immediately. He must have seen something in her face – the grim realization, a kind of subtle accusation; she saw him react minutely as she faced him, the wrinkles shivering and re-forming.

  He said, ‘Are you one of them?’

  Veerle saw his right hand slide deep into the pocket of the dark coat. There was nothing cas
ual in the gesture; the arm remained tense, as though he was on the point of drawing something out.

  Her mouth was dry. What does he want me to say?

  ‘No,’ she said very firmly. ‘I’m not one of them.’

  Veerle wanted to turn and run for the door, for daylight and the presence of other people. But she dared not; she was afraid of what was in that pocket. She was afraid it would be buried between her shoulder blades before she made it to the doorway. She watched the old man with wide horrified eyes.

  The right hand never moved, but now the left hand dipped into the other coat pocket and drew out a handful of something. The gesture the old man made, once, twice, was instantly and grimly familiar.

  Sowing something. Not seeds. Salt.

  The white grains pattered down onto the floor, pale and ominous as fallout.

  Instinct did what conscious fear had failed to do and galvanized Veerle into life. She stepped back smartly, as though the white stuff were quicklime.

  The old man saw her do it and his right hand jerked up out of his pocket. The knuckles were white around the hilt of a knife. Even in the dim light the long blade gleamed.

  ‘Did you lie?’ demanded the old man in his smoky voice.

  ‘No,’ said Veerle, the word escaping like a sob.

  ‘Then come here.’

  Veerle shook her head desperately. No.

  ‘Come here or I shall know you have lied.’

  Veerle saw the blade coming up in a glittering arc.

  ‘Cross the line or I cross it.’

  Dimly, through the panic that threatened to overwhelm her, Veerle found understanding, as though dredging up some barely recognizable and barnacled object from the depths of the sea.

  It’s a test. Whatever they are, he wants me to prove I’m not one of them by crossing the salt.

  That would mean stepping closer to the old man and the evil thing he held in his right hand, not moving further away. The idea made her light-headed with horror. Still her gaze stole to the pointed end of the blade quivering eagerly on the air.

  One chance. If I’m wrong . . .

  Veerle stepped forward, taking care to let the scattered salt crunch under her feet, ostentatiously trampling it. She was so close to the old man now that she could smell him, a nauseating reek of unwashed body and greasy clothing.

  The blade descended, but uselessly. The old man had believed her. The knife vanished back into the black coat. Now he was eyeing her with sly complicity.

  ‘I won’t be stopped,’ he said to her in that strangely grating voice. ‘They try, but I am stronger. I bar the way to them with salt and iron, and the ones I catch – I kill.’

  ‘Who?’ whispered Veerle. ‘Who do you kill?’

  ‘The demons,’ said the old man, and the matter-of-fact way in which he said it was chilling.

  Veerle wanted to step back, wanted to turn and run, but she dared not, not while that blade was a fingertip’s length away from the old man’s grasp. She did not want to hold the gaze of those glittering eyes; instead she focused on that grim mouth, waiting for the words that dropped from it like toads.

  She saw the old man turn away from her, towards the painting of Eva.

  ‘It is a good copy, the face,’ he said in that scratched and damaged voice. ‘But it is not as good as the original.’

  The altarpiece. That was what he meant, Veerle realized. The painting of Eva was a copy of one of the panels. Somehow the way the old man switched like that, from talk of killing to an inconsequential remark about an ancient painting, was more terrible than the knowledge that he had a knife in his pocket.

  Veerle’s eyes were the only things that moved in a face that had become a mask of deliberate neutrality; she was terrified of drawing that murderous insanity to herself.

  The cathedral was still empty apart from her and the old man. Where was everyone – the guides, the tourists? Still the rain was beating that monotonous tattoo outside.

  As the moments stretched out she fumbled for something to say, anything that would maintain the thinly stretched pretence that they were simply two strangers idly waiting out the downpour.

  ‘I’ve seen the Lamb painting,’ she offered at last. ‘It’s incredible.’

  ‘Incredible,’ he repeated in a voice loaded with grim significance. ‘Yes, it is – incredible.’

  ‘I have a friend from Ghent,’ Veerle blurted out. ‘He’s told me the story. He’s meeting me here in a minute.’

  Immediately she winced inside. Clumsy. She might as well have said, I just want to let you know I’m not really alone, whatever it might look like.

  ‘Really?’ came the reply in that smoky voice. The wrinkled lips worked, but what obscure emotion they were expressing she could not tell. ‘What did he tell you, your friend from Ghent?’

  ‘He said – he said all the people in the painting are still alive, walking around Ghent.’

  ‘Did he?’ said the old man, and there was an ominous quality to his tone that made Veerle’s stomach turn over, nauseatingly. ‘Your friend is wrong.’ Before Veerle could say anything he went on, ‘There are only two of them now, as you say, “walking around Ghent”.’ He nodded towards the painting. ‘One of them is Eva.’

  And the other one?

  Veerle didn’t say that out loud; hardly even had time to think it. Her whole mind was filled with the barely controllable desire to put some space between herself and this terrifying ancient person who looked like a statue that has been pitted and corroded by centuries of weather. Her eyes turned towards the cathedral door, longingly. She dared not even look at her watch, but still she hoped that Bram might appear, reassuringly tall and broad-shouldered.

  ‘I suppose,’ said the old man, ‘that you will say, why would anyone want to die, when they could live as long as the painting survives?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ whispered Veerle.

  ‘Then you are fortunate.’ The old man took a step closer, and Veerle had to force herself not to recoil. How long did someone have to go without washing to smell like that? Or was he sick, rotting from the inside? ‘Life can become a burden, from which the sufferer is gladly freed.’

  Veerle could not help herself; she took a step back. She dared not take her eyes from the old man’s seamed face, from the madness that seeped out of those eyes like the dark stain of an octopus.

  Where is Bram?

  The old man was waiting; she had to say something.

  ‘That’s . . . very sad.’

  ‘ “Sad”?’ The ruined voice took on a sly quality. ‘Such a small word. It is more than “sad”. More than “terrible”. It is something monstrous, to outlive yourself. I was there,’ he went on in that cracked voice that made every word sound painful. ‘I was at Gavere, when the soldiers came. So many years ago, but I cannot forget a single detail. The savagery of the troops, the screaming, the blood – all the blood, red, seeping into the earth. So very many died, but I did not. I did not,’ he repeated grimly. ‘And every day that I have lived since then has been a weight upon my shoulders.’

  The war, thought Veerle. He would have been young then – a child perhaps. Even through the paralysing sense of menace the old man instilled in her, she had the feeling that she had been given some critical piece of information, as though someone had handed her the largest shard of pottery from a broken vase and invited her to guess what the entire design had been, from that one fragment. No time to think about it, though; suddenly Veerle heard footsteps hurrying towards them, ringing out on the chequered tiles, and the relief that swept over her was like a flash flood, obliterating all other thoughts.

  Bram? Had he been inside all along? But no – she saw that it was one of the cathedral guides. He was tall and lean and smartly dressed, officious-looking even, and he had a face like thunder.

  He was not looking at her, he was looking at the old man, and as he approached he spread his arms wide, as though shepherding some rogue animal away. He didn’t seem intimidated by the old man a
t all, or perhaps it was simply the rage distorting his features that carried him along regardless.

  ‘Out!’ he shouted, really shouting, his angry voice expanding and filling the chill empty space of the cathedral, leaving no room for protest. ‘Out now, or I call the police.’

  The guide wasn’t looking at Veerle at all, he didn’t even seem to be aware that she was there, but all the same, his fury was so all-encompassing that she was afraid it included herself. He swept past her, though, with the blind objectiveness of a guided missile, and bundled the old man towards the doorway with what seemed like surprising roughness.

  Astoundingly, the old man didn’t resist. Veerle saw his face turn towards the painting of Eva one last time, and then he allowed himself to be hustled out of the door.

  Veerle didn’t move. The relief of seeing the old man disappear out into the rain-soaked square was so great that it was all she could do to stay on her feet. Suddenly her legs were trembling under her. She became aware of the wet strands of hair still clinging to her face, of her damp clothes, of the fact that she was shivering with cold. She touched numb fingers to lips that were like cool marble, staring at the doorway through which the old man had vanished.

  A few moments later the cathedral guide came back, his face still congested with anger. He came up to Veerle and said, ‘Were you speaking to that man?’

  ‘He spoke to me,’ said Veerle. She felt too drained to bridle at the guide’s irritable tone.

  ‘You don’t know him?’ the guide demanded.

  ‘No.’ On impulse, she said, ‘Has he done something?’

  ‘You could say that,’ said the guide grimly. ‘He’s banned from the cathedral completely. A couple of years ago he went into the altarpiece and tried to break the glass with a hammer. It’s a good thing it happened to be locked when he got in here. God knows what he would have done. Verdomd maniak. Every so often he tries it again.’ He eyed Veerle narrowly. ‘What did he say to you?’