Demons of Ghent

by Helen Grant

  Veerle glanced behind her, at the faint light coming from the bottom of the stairs. Then she continued to inch her way towards the door. She let go of the banister and put both hands out in front of her, and at last they touched polished panels.

  The floor was gritty under her feet here. In the darkness she could see nothing, but she thought she knew what it was. Salt, a thick border of it, barring the way to the door. She swallowed.

  Running her fingers lightly down the cool wood, she found a metal doorknob, cold to the touch. She didn’t open the door, though; not yet. Instead she moved as close to it as she possibly could, and laid her right ear against it.

  Veerle was not sure what she expected to hear. If the old man shared this dim eyrie with some other person, they might be inside. But she didn’t really think he shared it with anything but the phantasms of his obsession, and although she listened for several minutes, she could hear nothing at all from the room within. She turned the doorknob with some difficulty, as it was worn to a state of slippery smoothness and very stiff. Then she pushed the door open.

  Candles. That was the first thing she saw, and that was the first thing she understood. The shutters were down in all the windows, as she had suspected, and the light that she had seen tracing the dim shape of the door in the darkness was the light of candles, perhaps a dozen of them. She saw how the flames flickered with the slight draught from the open door.

  They were fat yellowish candles – church candles – and they had been placed very carefully in metal holders so that they could not fall over as they burned down, and set light to any of the other things in the room. They were not the only candles, Veerle now saw: there were many others, perhaps hundreds of them, all unlit. If all of them had been burning at once, the room would have been bright, and the air warm, heavy with the smell of hot wax.

  Instead, with a dozen of them alight, it was bathed in a dullish amber glow that gave everything a faintly sepia tint. The air was tainted with the body odour of its recent occupant. The room had the atmosphere of a vigil for a corpse that has lain out for too long.

  Veerle pressed her hand to her mouth. She looked around the room and saw objects that showed that someone was living here: a makeshift bed of grubby blankets heaped on the bare boards, a little cluster of tin plates with a spoon and a small pointed knife but no fork, a battered water bottle. Oddly, a small heap of what looked like scraps of iron scavenged at random – nails, a hinge, a crudely cut key. Standing behind this, as though offering a benediction, there was a little wooden statue of the Virgin and Child, the carved features softened by the candlelight. It looked old, an antique – a strange thing to have in what was obviously a squat. A moment later the statue was forgotten, because she had seen the other thing, the monstrous thing that dominated the entire room.

  The back wall, the one that faced the blinded windows, was covered with people. In the candlelight dozens, perhaps hundreds, of faces stared back at Veerle: flat, monochrome, accusing. Paper effigies – some photographically sharp, some in halftone, blown up so that the faces were melting into a kaleidoscope of black dots, others sketched with crude skill, all of them gazing out into the room with the impassivity of a hanging jury.

  Shock slithered through the pit of Veerle’s stomach with the slimy insistence of a fat worm pushing its way through the black earth. She looked at those images pasted to the wall and the wrongness radiating from them was so strong that it was almost tangible; she could almost taste it in her mouth like the cold metallic tang of fear. She looked at them and she did not know them; and yet she knew them, the shape of them.

  There was no consistency of scale or colour or detail to those faces, and yet together they made something that was instantly recognizable, that anyone in the city of Ghent would have known. The person who had made this thing – this diseased masterwork – had traced out the framework in which the human faces and figures appeared like intaglios in a set of panels. He had made his canvas a patchwork of lining paper, smoothly and evenly applied behind the human figures, but creased and bubbled at the edges as though it were wet muslin sticking to the wall. He had outlined arches and Gothic tracery and a distant skyline, trees and turrets. In the central foreground was a crude octagon, and above it was the only non-human figure.

  Veerle approached the wall, her mouth dry, and took a closer look. The Lamb was a copy of the real one, Van Eyck’s lamb. It had been cut out of a book – a large and expensive art book. The paper it was printed on was thick and glossy. Somewhere there was a thick heavy volume about the Ghent altarpiece with one of its pages cut out, or mutilated.

  There was something disturbing about that minor act of vandalism, but as Veerle began to examine the wall and its images in closer detail she began to suspect something very much worse. She began to think that all these people were dead people.

  Run, she thought. Get out of here. But she had to see all of it, she had to know.

  The seated male figure in the centre, above the Lamb . . . she knew him, or at least she knew the features: the high forehead, arched eyebrows and rather full lips framed by a beard. The body, the robes, had been sketched in, but the face was a large printed photograph. You’d have had to be blind to live in Ghent and not know who he was; his death by arson while in the flat of a younger woman who was not his wife had made all the headlines. Veerle thought that the picture of him had been cut from an election poster.

  Marie De Smet had died in that fire. Was she recorded here somewhere too? Somehow Veerle thought not. She thought the politician’s death was meant; Marie De Smet was collateral damage.

  Most of the other faces she didn’t recognize, but there was something suggestive about them, the way so many of them were obviously private family photographs reproduced in newsprint. There was usually only one reason for that: it meant that something had happened to the person; those sorts of photographs were usually accompanied by a legend reading something like ACCIDENT VICTIM or STABBED 23 TIMES.

  In one of the clusters of figures she found another face she knew: a rather nondescript one, small-eyed, with a blunt nose and the beginnings of a double chin. It took her a little while to realize who it was: the priest who had died in a house fire, probably also arson.

  Veerle had a very bad feeling about this. The person who had created this bizarre collage hadn’t made it simply to record deaths; she thought he had played a more personal role in those deaths than that. Still, as she studied it, conscious of the moments slipping past her like fleeing vermin, she felt increasingly perplexed.

  Some of these pictures are really old. He can’t have done anything to these people – can he?

  She wasn’t sure but she thought that some of the hairstyles and the visible items of clothing – a hat, a collar, a scarf – dated back to the 1960s or even the 1950s.

  Supposing one of these was taken in 1950 . . . supposing the old man is in his eighties . . .

  It was difficult trying to do the simplest arithmetic in her head when her heart was thumping madly and every one of her senses was strained to the utmost, listening for the slightest creak or bump that would tell her that the old man was back in the building. All the same, she worked out that he would have been perhaps twenty back then.

  So if he started early . . .

  Then she noticed other pictures, and now she really was moving into the realms of impossibility because these had been taken when the oldest person alive would have been a child. No woman would have worn such a gigantic feathered hat in a later decade, no man those moustaches and oldfashioned spectacles.

  How far back do these go? Veerle wondered queasily. Far further than any one person’s lifespan, that was for certain. Now that she was hunting for older images she could see that some of them were so old that they were artist’s impressions rather than photographs. In half a dozen places there was no portrait at all, simply a crude oval of newsprint. Veerle supposed these must contain reports of deaths but she found the typeface impossible to read – it was a
ncient and crabbed, and almost every instance of the letter s was represented as a kind of f.

  A small proportion of the faces had been cut from a reproduction of the original painting, like the Lamb. What did that mean?

  Veerle took a few paces back, away from the wall, wanting to see the thing in its entirety again. How many figures were there altogether? She seemed to recall that Bram had said one hundred and seventy. And all of them – except two – were represented by those dead faces, pasted onto the wall. She supposed that included the ones taken directly from a reproduction of the altarpiece, since the models for that were long dead too.

  The missing faces belonged to two of the larger figures. The tall empty space to the right of the centre was mirrored by a similar space on the left, filled by the figure of Adam. Veerle had no idea to whom the face belonged but the body had been sketched in, and it was clearly a naked male. If that was Adam, the opposite space, the empty one, belonged to Eva.

  Two missing, and one of them is Eva.

  Veerle remembered telling the old man what Bram had said, that all the people in the painting were still alive, walking around Ghent.

  Your friend is wrong, the old man had replied. There are only two of them now, as you say, ‘walking around Ghent’. One of them is Eva.

  This is insane.

  Still Veerle had to keep looking. She knew that she should go, that she should get out of here right now. But the mural held her with a sick fascination; it was a view over the border of sanity, into the abyss.

  She stared at the other unfilled space, which was on the very far left. She surmised that the panel in which it appeared had been on the back of the left-hand wing, which would originally have closed over the painting like a cupboard door.

  Who was it? Veerle wasn’t familiar enough with the altarpiece to make a guess, but after a moment she hit upon the idea of looking at the figure at the far right. She recognized it immediately because it was one of those taken directly from a reproduction of the original. The wife of the donor, Joos Vijdt. What was her name? Veerle thought it was Liesbeth or perhaps Lijsbeth.

  No – Lysbette, that was it.

  If that is Lysbette, then the other one – the space – must be for him. Joos Vijdt.

  Veerle stared at the wall.

  Lysbette.

  Joos Vijdt.

  Eva.

  An idea was forming in her mind, an outline of something dimly perceived, as though she were leaning over the side of a boat and gazing down into deep clear water at the remains of a wreck: first you would see nothing but the shifting light on the surface of the water, then you would look through and see the shape of something dark down there; and as you stared and stared, suddenly it would leap out at you, the form of the ship that it had been. So Veerle looked with her mind, and the shape of something began to appear out of the darkness.

  There are only two empty spaces.

  Everyone else is dead.

  Joos Vijdt and Eva are still missing because they are still alive. Walking around Ghent. That’s what the old man said.

  Veerle looked at the wall and she put her hands over her mouth, pressing her fingers against her lips as though she wanted to seal every possible sound within, every gasp, every scream.

  Supposing, she thought, he were Joos Vijdt.

  That was impossible, of course, in the literal sense, but the old man might believe he was. He might identify with the rich burgher of Ghent to the extent that their identities had merged in his own mind, that he no longer saw any distinction between them. The question of why was a more difficult point, but he had told her that he had witnessed a massacre. The savagery of the troops, the screaming, the blood, he had said. That had to be the Second World War.

  He saw something when he was a child, something terrible. And he was the only one who survived. The guilt became too much to bear, so he decided he didn’t want to be himself any more, whoever he was, Jan or Hendrick or Pieter. He decided to be Joos Vijdt.

  Her gaze slid to the empty space where the image of Joos Vijdt should have been. Joos Vijdt, the rich man who, according to local legend, had commissioned a painting whose subjects would never die, except by violence. She remembered what Bram had told her, that first night they had visited the rooftops.

  It’s their punishment. They didn’t want to die, so now they can’t. They have to keep roaming the streets of Ghent. As long as even one of them is left alive, the souls of the other ones can’t rest.

  Veerle thought, He thinks he can rest if they’re all gone.

  Perhaps, she said to herself, he sees it as a holy task. A duty.

  Of course, he wouldn’t have had to deal with every single one of them himself. Some would have died in accidents, or in the wars that had burned their way across Flanders over the centuries since the painting was completed.

  The ones who died within their normal life span, those are the ones that are reproductions of the figures in the painting. The really old newspaper reports, he hunted for those – maybe he searched through old papers until he found deaths that he decided were of people from the painting. The others, the later ones . . .

  Death glided across the landscape of her mind. She saw the stinking, deadly vomitus that pattered through the letter box of an apartment building on Onderbergen, and the tiny flame that kindled it, filling the stairwell with searing, inescapable light. She saw the smoking remains of the priest’s house, its occupant reduced to a bundle of blackened sticks barely distinguishable from the charred timbers that covered it. She saw a tram approaching with that metallic sound they always made, something between a scream and a whistle, the blonde-haired girl leaning out over the edge of the pavement, the sudden sharp thrust – but before it, that name, spoken aloud.

  Eva. The old man thinks Hommel is Eva.

  The whole idea was utterly insane, it was impossible – and yet Veerle was becoming more and more convinced. It was like staring at an optical illusion with something hidden in it – a face, a figure. Once you had seen it, you couldn’t unsee it.

  He thinks that when Hommel – Eva – is dead, he will be the only one left, and when he ends his own life there will be rest for all of them at last. Maybe he thinks the guilt will end.

  Veerle stepped backwards, away from the wall. She was remembering the other part of the legend, the final piece.

  And he thinks the only ones who can stop him are the demons.

  Are you one of them? the old man had asked her, and now it made hideous sense. He had been asking her whether she was one of his adversaries. The Demons of Ghent.

  Thank God she had said no – thank God she had taken the step he had demanded, crossing the line of salt, even though it had taken her under the shadow of that upraised blade. Because otherwise . . .

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

  Veerle swallowed, her throat dry.

  Who did he kill? Who did he think these demons were?

  Images raced through her head: Luc, plummeting from the belfry of Sint-Baafs. Daan De Moor, dead on the cobblestones. Marnix, savaged within her own view.

  Salt and iron.

  Marnix lying dead. Salt dyed in his blood. A black iron nail standing out like a melanoma against the pale skin.

  The demons are anyone he finds on the rooftops. Anyone he thinks is standing in his way. Oh God, how many people has he killed?

  Suddenly she was dreadfully aware of the sound of her own feet on the floorboards, of the audible hiss and suck of her breath on the cold air.

  Out out out, she was thinking, the impulse to flee suddenly so strong that she could feel the ghosts of movements as twitches in her muscles and sinews, the yearning of her limbs to carry her away from here as fast as they could. She could span the minutes, the obstacles that lay between her and the neutral safety of the street: the expanse of dusty floor studded with candles skewered onto their holders like baited traps; the
stifling darkness of the fifth-floor landing; the flights of wooden stairs that zigzagged downwards and away, the treads creaking and groaning under her feet in a strange percussion; the door; the yard; freedom.

  That would not be enough, though – for Veerle to be in the street, hurrying away, head down, unseen. No; that would not be the end of the story at all.

  I have to tell Hommel. She’s the one he wants – she’s the one he’s out there searching for, right now.

  It made Veerle queasy to think of it.

  Once, when all this started, it wasn’t just about her. It was about one hundred and seventy people. But now it’s about her – only her. Eva. Hommel. The one, the very last person, standing between him and everlasting rest.

  She turned her back to the wall with its hundreds of eyes and crept towards the door.

  He won’t stop. He won’t change his mind at the last minute, whatever she does, whatever she says. He wants to die but she has to die first.

  There was a terrible cold buzzing inside her, as though a thousand insects were rising up in a black cloud.

  He won’t care what he does now, or who sees it. He could take her down in the middle of a crowded street, in a packed tram car, in a busy shop. He could spatter passers-by with her blood, he could make the gutter run red with it. Just so long as he has ten seconds to turn the knife on himself, to follow her into the dark.

  Veerle reached the doorway on legs that felt as unsteady as stilts. She paused there, touching the doorframe, steeling herself for her passage along the darkened hallway. She would have to close the door behind her to conceal the evidence of her visit, and yet she was reluctant to shut out even the feeble amber light from the candles and enfold herself in the darkness.

  Veerle paused, motionless, and in the silence she heard someone coming up the stairs.

  54

  No. Veerle’s eyes widened. She drew in air sharply and released it, her breath, faintly visible on the cold air, dissolving into the dark. NoNoNoNoNo –

  Then she was moving, because it didn’t matter how horrifying it was to hear the stairs creaking under that furtive tread, it didn’t matter how shrilly the rational part of her brain was screaming at her for entering this place, this trap, in the first place: standing still and waiting for him to reach the spot where she stood was no better than lying on the sacrificial altar and handing him the knife.