Demons of Ghent

by Helen Grant

  ‘So if he’d been quicker that night we saw him – or if he’d run into us one night on the rooftops . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ said Veerle swiftly, not wanting to hear the rest.

  ‘I’m glad he’s dead,’ said Bram. He spoke more bitterly than Veerle had ever heard him. She looked up at him, surprised; he didn’t sound like the Bram she knew, calm and amiable.

  ‘Don’t be glad,’ she said. ‘He got what he wanted. He’s got his rest.’

  ‘I hope he’s in hell.’

  The way he spoke cut Veerle. She didn’t like to hear that new harsh tone in Bram’s voice, not for the old man’s sake but for Bram’s. She said, ‘He was already, I think.’

  She told him what the old man had told her about the massacre at Gavere, about the blood and the screaming and the guilt. She told him how the police had gone over the story again and again, asking her whether she couldn’t have been mistaken, whether it couldn’t have been the Vinkt massacre he was talking about.

  ‘He was probably lying,’ said Bram resentfully.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Veerle. ‘I think he thought he was telling the truth.’

  ‘Well, if the police said there was no massacre at Gavere in the Second World War . . .’

  ‘Maybe they were wrong. They aren’t local historians, after all. The one who asked me about the old man’s name hadn’t heard of Joos Vijdt.’ Veerle shrugged wearily. ‘I tried Googling it myself and I didn’t find anything about Gavere in the Second World War, but maybe I was looking in the wrong place. Maybe it happened near Gavere, or somewhere else altogether. He would have been a little kid then anyway, and it would have been so horrible, seeing something like that . . . maybe he got mixed up. But he believed it, Bram.’

  It seemed important to Bram to know whether the old man was suffering from trauma or was simply a bare-faced liar seeking sympathy. It ended with Veerle dragging out her laptop, booting it up and running a new search for Gavere + Second World War. When that didn’t yield anything much other than a photograph of a couple of graves, she tried Gavere + massacre.

  When the results came up, Veerle clicked on one of the links. She was sitting at the desk, Bram leaning over her shoulder, his face illuminated by the screen. They read the first couple of lines of text simultaneously. Then they looked at each other.

  ‘No,’ said Bram. He shook his head. ‘It’s not possible.’

  ‘I know,’ said Veerle.

  They looked at the screen again. The Battle of Gavere: 23 July 1453. Thousands of citizens of Ghent killed by Burgundian troops.

  ‘Are you sure—?’ began Bram.

  ‘Don’t ask me if he might have said Vinkt,’ said Veerle. ‘It wasn’t Vinkt. It was Gavere.’

  ‘But if he was claiming to be at the massacre at Gavere, that would make him—’

  ‘Six hundred years old. Yes.’

  ‘Which is not possible.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Veerle. ‘It isn’t.’

  ‘Why didn’t the police find this?’ demanded Bram.

  ‘Because they were looking in the twentieth century,’ said Veerle. ‘Not the fifteenth, because that would be . . .’

  ‘Impossible.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nobody lives to be six hundred,’ said Bram. ‘Not even Joos Vijdt. It’s just a Ghent legend.’

  ‘I know.’

  They talked about it a little longer, but there was only one thing they could agree on: it is completely impossible for anyone to live to be six hundred years old.

  After a while Bram had to go. He asked if he could come back and see Veerle again, and she agreed. He kissed her before he left, but it was not one of those long, lingering kisses that he was so improbably good at; his lips simply grazed her cheek, almost experimentally.

  After he had left the flat Veerle opened her window and watched him striding away down Bijlokevest. It was dark now and his shadow was very long in the light of the streetlamps. She did not call out to him, simply watched him walking away, and he did not look back.

  The cold night air on the bare skin of her face and arms made her shiver. She shut the window, pulled the curtains closed, and after consideration she let the shutters down too.

  She went to bed thinking of Bram, and dreamed of Kris.

  About the Author

  Helen Grant is a highly acclaimed Young Adult author. Her debut novel attractied praise from critics and readers alike and was shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal.

  Born in London in 1964, Helen showed an early leaning towards the arts after being told off for writing stories under the desk during maths lessons. She went on to read Classics at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and then worked in marketing for ten years to fund her love of travelling before returning to writing.

  Helen now lives near Brussels with her husband, her two children and their two cats.

  Also by Helen Grant:

  Silent Saturday

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Once again I would like to thank Camilla Wray of the Darley Anderson Agency for her support and enthusiasm. I would also like to thank Annie Eaton, Ruth Knowles and the team at Random House for helping The Demons of Ghent to claw their way to the light of day!

  Particular thanks are due to those who helped with the research for this book: Tom Alaerts and Rebecca Benoot for their advice about Flemish culture; Adinda Demildt, André Demildt and Hedwige Cornel for arranging and conducting a tour of Ghent and sharing their local knowledge; Gaby Grabsch for providing transport and accommodation during my research trip; the staff at Sint-Baafs cathedral in Ghent for responding helpfully to my queries. Special thanks go to Ian Mundell for author assistance beyond the call of duty: he climbed the bell tower of Sint-Baafs to take photographs for me as I was unable to be there myself during the single annual week of opening.

  And thank you, as always, to Gordon.

  Read on for a taste of Helen Grant’s terrifying follow-up novel,

  URBAN LEGENDS

  COMING SOON

  ‘So all of a sudden the light goes out and she sees this dark shape coming towards her. He’s getting nearer and nearer and she recognizes her boyfriend’s face, only his hair is all standing on end, which freaks her out really badly. And there’s something wrong because the body isn’t like her boyfriend’s – he’s kind of heavy but this guy is thin and wiry. The next moment the head is just ripped from—’

  ‘Oh come on,’ interrupted one of the others. ‘This is just a variation of The Hook. It’s old.’ He rolled his eyes sardonically, his face underlit by the flickering orange flames.

  There were four of them in the darkened tunnel, huddled around the fire, which burned in a battered coffee tin. Light danced on damp black walls spotted with uneven growths that spread like disease across the crumbling bricks. In the spaces between the crackling of the fire and the echoes of their voices came the relentless dripping of water into water.

  The one who had been telling the story slumped resentfully, the sullen glitter of his eyes obscured by overhanging clumps of hair.

  ‘Fine. Someone else can tell one then.’

  No one was bothered by the silence that ensued between them; they didn’t have that kind of bond. If the story was bad, that was the storyteller’s problem.

  The fire and the falling water talked softly and persuasively in the background. After a while the girl spoke. She was the only female amongst them, small, light-boned and fox-faced, with hair dyed a vivid red and pulled into a knot at the back of her head. She deliberately avoided the role of peacemaker as she would have avoided pink or frills, but she was getting bored; she didn’t want to sit here all night watching the storyteller sulk.

  ‘Why don’t you tell us another one, Thomas? Yours are always cool.’ She was looking at the big man opposite her, broad shouldered and hulking in his padded jacket and trapper hat. Thomas wasn’t likeable exactly; there was a stillness about him, a suggestion of something suppressed, that gave her a faint sense of unease. Still, his sto
ries were easily better than everyone else’s. He’d earned his place amongst them. Next time she was in a group and he wasn’t there, she might retell one of them, pretending it was her own.

  Thomas sat in silence for a few moments and then he said, ‘I’ll tell you The Angel Smile.’

  There was a small cracking sound followed by a tiny splash, as the original storyteller, whose turn it had been, sent a pebble skimming across the tunnel with bitter energy. Nobody reacted.

  ‘Two people, one male and one female,’ began Thomas.

  A couple, thought the girl.

  ‘Went to explore an abandoned sanatorium at night. It was a big place, and old. It was impressive in its day, but now it had been locked and disused for over forty years. Some of the windows were broken; others had been boarded up. The grounds were overgrown with nettles and weeds as tall as a man. Sometimes animals died in the undergrowth, and their bodies would lie there rotting until they crumbled into the mulch around the roots of the plants. If a human being died there, the same would happen to them; in so many acres they’d never be found.

  ‘The two explorers parked their car a little off the road, where the darkness and the overhanging branches of the trees would hide it, and got out. By the cold light of the moon the pair of them examined the fence that surrounded the sanatorium’s grounds. They had brought bolt cutters, but they didn’t need them, because part of the chain-link fence was pulled away from the metal gate posts, leaving enough space for a person to climb through. That didn’t strike them as suspicious, because they knew other people had been here before, exploring the grounds and the deserted buildings. So they slipped through the gap and began to make their way uphill to the sanatorium.

  ‘The drive had originally been wide enough to let two vehicles pass each other, but after all these years it was almost completely overgrown. They had to wade through vegetation, tearing at it with their hands. The drive wound its way through trees so it was difficult to see very far ahead. When they came out from under the trees it was almost a shock to see the old sanatorium.

  ‘It was much bigger than either of them had expected, even though they had seen photos of it online. There was one massive central building and two sweeping wings. In the dark, with only moonlight to see by, you couldn’t tell how dilapidated it was, how the paintwork was peeling and the shutters hanging off their hinges. It looked impressively large and grand, and with not one single light burning inside, deeply forbidding.

  ‘Why did they go in anyway? Perhaps neither wanted to lose face in front of the other. Perhaps they didn’t want to have come all this way for nothing.

  ‘The main entrance was a set of double doors with reinforced safety glass in the panels and a heavy duty chain and padlock fastened across them. They might have got through the chain with the bolt cutters but it would have taken a lot of time and effort, so they began to walk along the building, looking for an easier way in.

  ‘Very soon they found a narrow door standing very slightly open, perhaps only a centimetre or two. The door was heavy and the hinges were rusty, but with two of them leaning on it with all their weight they were able to push it open far enough to get inside.

  ‘The boy switched on his torch and played the beam up and down the walls. They were in a stairwell, the stairs zigzagging up into the darkness above them. The metal handrails were still in place, though battered and dented, but the steps themselves were covered in debris. It looked as though someone had tried to clear things out from the upper floors by simply flinging them down the stairs. There were files, collapsed cardboard boxes, a metal clipboard, the splintered remains of a wooden chair – all of it thick with dust.

  ‘“I’m not sure about this,” said the girl, and her words floated up the stairwell like air bubbles rising through murky water.

  ‘“I’ll go up to the first floor and look. You stay here,” said the boy.

  ‘The girl protested but she didn’t make any attempt to go with him. She didn’t want to stay there on her own, but on the other hand she didn’t want to stray too far from the open door, the only bolthole to the open air. So she stood at the bottom of the stairs and watched the boy pick his way up the first flight, carefully skirting the heaps of rubbish. When he came to the bend in the stairs and started up the second flight, she could still see the light from the torch, slowly moving upwards.

  ‘After a minute she heard him say something – she couldn’t tell what – and then she heard footsteps and a kind of scuffling noise. After that, there was silence for a long time.

  ‘The girl could still see a faint glow from the torch, but it wasn’t moving any more. So she waited, but she was beginning to feel uneasy. She called the boy’s name a few times, but there was no reply.

  ‘She could have left the building and fetched help, but she didn’t. Maybe she thought it would take too long, or maybe the boy was the one who had driven the car, and she didn’t have a licence. So eventually she decided to go upstairs and see what had happened to him.

  ‘She went slowly and carefully up the stairs, taking the same route the boy had done around the heaps of rubbish. Up the first flight, round the corner, and up the second flight to the first floor landing.

  ‘As her gaze became level with the landing floor she saw the torch lying there at the end of a long gouge-mark in the dust, as though it had skidded across the tiles. The door to the first floor landing was off its hinges and she could see straight into the long dark tunnel of the corridor, but the boy was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘She said his name again, and now her voice was high and wavering with fear. She knelt to pick up the torch. It felt slightly sticky but she couldn’t tell why. After a moment she took several halting steps into the corridor, swinging the torch from side to side to rake the filthy walls with light.

  ‘There were doorways on either side of the corridor but she didn’t go inside any of them. She kept to the centre of the hall because she was afraid. That was her mistake. If she had looked into the first room on the left she might have seen who was in there, and if she had been very, very quick she might have got away. But she didn’t look.

  ‘The moment she passed that door, someone stepped out of the room behind her, and now she was cut off. He didn’t bother to tread silently, so she heard his footsteps very clearly and turned around.

  ‘Even in the dim light she knew immediately that it wasn’t the boy she came with. This man was much taller and heavier, with broad shoulders and muscular arms – and he was holding a crossbow. She didn’t dare run away.

  ‘She said, “Where’s -?” and named the boy, but she didn’t really want to know the answer.

  ‘The man came right up close, pointing the crossbow at her. He didn’t tell her where the boy was. Instead, he said, “You have a choice. I kill you, or you take the Angel Smile.”

  ‘The girl didn’t know what the Angel Smile was, but she didn’t want him to shoot her with the crossbow, so she said, “The Angel Smile.”

  ‘The man put down the crossbow, but it was too late to run away. He was close enough to reach out and grab her arm. He was very strong. She couldn’t pull away. He pulled out an enormous very sharp knife and cut her twice, here, at the corners of the mouth. Then he let her go.

  ‘The girl dropped the torch and put her hands up to her face. She could feel the terrible cuts, and feel the blood pouring out of them, but she didn’t dare scream. She didn’t make a sound, even though she was almost dead with fright, because she was afraid the cut flesh would tear. That is the Angel Smile, you see, when the new mouth runs from ear to ear.

  ‘She still thought the man would try to kill her, but he didn’t. He just stood watching her.

  ‘When she didn’t scream, he said, “Do you want to see the boy?”

  ‘The girl didn’t say yes or no, because she didn’t dare speak, but the man took her by the arm and dragged her towards the open doorway. He stooped and picked up the torch from the floor and shone it into the room beyond.

&nb
sp; ‘There was the boy, propped against the wall, stone dead of course. There was something sticking out of his eye and in the light of the torch the girl could see that his whole jacket and shirt, from the collar to the hem, were drenched with dark blood. That was what she had felt on the handle of the torch.

  ‘The killer waited for her to scream and give herself the Angel Smile. But what neither of them knew was that the girl had a heart defect. She took one look at the dead boy and her overburdened heart gave out. She went limp in the killer’s grasp and sagged to the floor. Very soon the blood stopped flowing. So she never had the Angel Smile at all.

  ‘The killer dumped both the bodies deep in the undergrowth in the grounds of the sanatorium, and they were never found. He left the car where it was, knowing that it would soon be covered in vegetation. And indeed nobody has ever found that, either.

  ‘But the killer was denied the satisfaction of creating the Angel Smile. So he still prowls around the deserted sanatorium and other lonely places at night with his crossbow and his knife, looking for a new victim to give the Angel Smile. Places,’ said Thomas, ‘like this.’ At the end of the story there was silence for a minute or two. Even the original storyteller, who had begun listening with such a poor grace, had become unpleasantly engrossed in the tale. The foxfaced girl cast uneasy glances around her at the deep shadows encroaching on all sides. She was thinking about leaving, about having to walk through the dark tunnel on her own, and wondering whether to ask one of the others to walk with her; she didn’t want anyone to see that she was rattled but that black maw was looking increasingly uninviting.

  Then the fourth person, the boy who hadn’t spoken much until now, broke the silence, his tone deliberately challenging.

  ‘So if the bodies were never found, and neither was the car, and the killer escaped, how did the story get out?’

  There were a couple of seconds in which they all contemplated that, and then the original storyteller let out a short laugh.