The Devils of D-Day (12 page)

My grip tightened on my candlestick. It sounded like Father
Anton, but on the other hand it didn’t. It had some of that dry, sardonic
quality that I had heard in the voice upstairs. I came a little nearer the bed,
and tried to lean over so that I could see Father Anton’s face.

‘Father Anton? Is that you?’

There was a second’s pause. Then Father Anton rose up in his
bed as if he was being pulled upright on strings, and he turned to face me with
his eyes glassy and his white hair
dishevelled
. He
said, in that same unnatural voice: ‘What is it? Why did you wake me?’

I felt there was something curiously and frighteningly
wrong. It was the way he was sitting there in his white nightshirt, as if he
was unsupported by gravity or anything at all. And it was his peculiar manner,
partly calm and partly hostile. There was nothing of the rambling old priest
about him. He seemed strangely self-possessed, and his eyes seemed to be
observing me as if there was someone else behind them, staring through.

I took a few steps back. ‘I think I must have made a
mistake,’ I said. ‘Just a nightmare, that’s all.’

‘You’re frightened,’ he said. ‘I can tell that you’re
frightened.
Now, why?’

‘It’s okay,’ I told him. ‘I guess I just didn’t get enough
sleep. I’ll go right back upstairs now, and I’ll...’

‘You needn’t go. Don’t you want to talk? It’s very lonesome
at this time of night, don’t you agree?’

Father Anton’s face was rigidly white, and his jaw seemed to
move up and down when he spoke with the same mechanical movements of a
ventriloquist’s dummy.

Talking to him right then was like listening to a badly
dubbed movie.

‘Well, yes,’ I said. ‘But I’d really rather go. Thanks all
the same.’

Father Anton raised a hand. ‘You mustn’t go.’ He turned his
head stiffly and looked towards the door. It swung on its hinges, and silently
closed, all by itself.

I lifted my candlestick.

‘Now then,’ admonished Father Anton. ‘There’s no need to be
belligerent. We can be friends, you know. We can help each other.’

I said, quietly: ‘You’re not Father Anton at all.’

Father Anton abruptly laughed, throwing his head back in a
way that terrified me. ‘Of course I’m Father Anton. Who do I look like?’

‘I don’t know. But you’re not Father Anton. Now just stay
there because I’m getting right out of here and you’re not going to stop me.’

Father Anton said: ‘Why should I want to stop you? You’re a
good man and true. You helped me out, so now I’m going to help you.’

I was shivering like a man with pneumonia. I kept the
candlestick raised over my head, and I stepped back towards the door. ‘Just
stay away,’ I warned him.

Father Anton gave an awkward, empty shrug. ‘You mustn’t
misunderstand me
, monsieur
.’

‘I understand you all right. I don’t know what you are, or
what you’re trying to do, but keep away.’

The old priest’s eyes glittered. ‘If we don’t find the other
twelve, you know, we could be in terrible trouble.’

‘The other twelve what?’

‘The other twelve brethren.
There
are thirteen of us, you know. I told you that.

Thirteen of us.
We have been
separated for such a long time, and now we must get together again.’

I kept on shuffling my way backwards. ‘You don’t know where
they are?’ I asked him.

Father Anton swayed. Then he looked up oddly and said,
‘They’ve been hidden.

They’ve been sewn up and sealed, just like before. I was the
only one who wasn’t taken with them. Now you must help me find them.
You and the girl together.
We need the girl.’

I shook my head tautly. ‘I’m not going to help you find or
do anything. I’m getting right out of here and I’m going to get some help.’

Father Anton lifted one jerky leg out from under the
bedclothes, then the other. He stood up unsteadily, his arms hanging by his
sides, and he grinned at me. For a split second, I thought I saw a thin dark
tongue flick from his mouth – a tongue as forked as a reptile’s – but then it
flicked back again and I wasn’t sure if it was just an illusion or not.

‘We will have to find the Reverend Taylor in England,’ said
Father Anton, in a soft, rustling voice. ‘Then we will have to discover where
the Americans hid the rest of us.

My lord
Adramelech
will be deeply
pleased, I can assure you. He will reward you,
monsieur
, in a way that no man on earth has ever been rewarded
before. You can be rich beyond any comprehension. You can be powerful as a
thousand men. You can spend years indulging your tastes for the finest foods
and the greatest wines.

And you can have sex with any woman, any man, any animal,
you choose, and your virility will be limitless.’

I didn’t know what to say or do. It seemed as though Father
Anton had been completely taken over. But was he really possessed, or was he
just suffering from nightmarish nerves? Maybe he’d taken too many heart pills,
or drunk too much before he went to bed. I just couldn’t look at this elderly
shambling priest in his long white nightshirt and believe that I was talking to
a devil.

Father Anton took one staggering step towards me. I
retreated even further.

‘Father Anton,’ I said, ‘you’re sick. Now, why don’t you lie
down for a moment, and I’ll go and get a doctor.’

‘Sick?’ he hissed, I’m not sick. I’m free.’

‘Will you stay back, please?’ I asked him. ‘I’m going to
have to hit you if you come any nearer, and I don’t want to do that.’

‘You amuse me,’ whispered the priest. ‘But I am never amused
for long. Father Anton was not amusing. Fortunately, he was weak. A man who
believes in us is so much more susceptible than a man who doesn’t.’

‘You took over Father Anton? You possessed him?’ ‘You could
say so, yes.’

‘What does that mean?’

Father Anton took another step nearer. ‘Possession is more
physical than mental. I possess Father Anton now, because I am inside Father
Anton.’

I went cold with foreboding. I said: ‘I don’t understand
you. What do you mean – you’re inside Father Anton?’

The white-dressed priest came clumsily towards me. His
expression was grey and blank, and apart from those dark, penetrating eyes, I
might have been looking at a corpse.

‘A man, like a demon, is a mechanical device,’ he-said, in a
voice that was even less like Father Anton’s than before, and so much like the
voice that I had heard in the tank that I knew – despite everything I was
trying to do to persuade myself otherwise – that this was the devil we had
tried to seal in the cellar, the disciple of
Adramelech
who had once brought plague and misery to Rouen.

I said nothing. I guessed I was five or six paces away from
the door now. The old priest kept stepping woodenly towards me.

‘From inside, I can manipulate his legs and his arms like a
marionette,’ said the devil.

‘I can look through the sockets of his eyes, and breathe
through the cavities of his nostrils. It’s a secure home inside here,
monsieur
. Warm and bloody, and sweet
with decay already. I could even seduce that
shrivelled
old housekeeper of his through his own dangling penis!’

I stared at the priest with mounting fright.

‘Are you lying?’ I taxed him, knowing he wasn’t. ‘My God, if
you’re lying...’

‘Your God won’t help you. He didn’t help Father Anton.’

‘Well, where
is
Father Anton?’ I
demanded. ‘What have you done with him?’

The stiff figure marched so close that I could have reached
out and touched him.

He said, in that coarse, throaty voice, ‘You’re almost
standing in him.’

At first.
I didn’t want to take my
eyes off the devil. But then I glanced quickly down behind me, and I saw
something that made my stomach tighten and turn over. On the floor beside the
chest-of-drawers, spread out in pale mucus-
coloured
strings, clotted with dark-red kidneys and
blueish
cakes of liver, were Father Anton’s entrails.

The devil had
disembowelled
him,
and climbed into his empty body like some hideous kind of parasite.

The devil hadn’t moved. I looked back at it in fear and
nausea, and said: ‘You’ve killed him.’

The devil grunted in evil amusement. ‘On the contrary, I
think I’ve given the old fool some new life. He was almost dead anyway. His
heart wouldn’t have lasted much longer, particularly after you dragged him out
in all that snow.’

I paused, anxiously biting my lip. If the devil could rip
Father Anton open, it could certainly do something equally disgusting to me. I
looked quickly up at the ebony crucifix on the wall, and wondered if everything
I’d seen in vampire movies was true.

Was it really possible to ward off demons and ghosts with
the Holy Cross?

Sidestepping Father Anton’s glutinous remains, I reached
over the chest-of-drawers and wrenched down the crucifix. Then I brandished it
right in the devil’s face, and shouted as heroically as I could: 7 dismiss you!
In the name of the Lord, I dismiss you!’

With one powerful blow, the old priest knocked the crucifix
out of my hand. He gave a hissing snarl, and moved towards me again, his eyes
as dark and cruel as an alligator’s.

I swung my arm back, and belted him across the side of the
face with my candlestick. His head jerked to one side, and the base of the
candlestick raised a weal; but no blood flowed because Father Anton’s heart
wasn’t pumping any longer, and his occupied cadaver simply shuddered and
stepped forward again.

‘Your violence amuses me,’ it whispered. ‘Now let’s see if
mine amuses you.’

I edged back. I knew that I’d never make the door in time. I
kept my eyes on Father Anton’s grey, bruised face, and I began to wish that I’d
never seen that damned tank, and never dreamed of opening it.

‘It’s such a pity, you know,’ said Father Anton. ‘You could
have assisted me so much.

But I have only survived the centuries by protecting myself
against the moral and the conscientious, and I’m afraid that I shall have to
deal with you as I have dealt with so many others.’

I only had one gambit left. I reached into the pocket of my
nightshirt and produced the small ring of hair which Eloise had given me, the
hair which was supposed to prove that I had already paid my dues to the
hierarchy of hell.

There was an electric silence. Father Anton raised his eyes
and stared at the hair with undisguised malevolence. I thought for a moment
that he was going to tear the hair aside, just like the crucifix. But then that
forked tongue flickered again, and the demon moved warily aside, watching me
with a hard, poisonous look that made me so nervous I could hardly speak.

‘Well,’ said Father Anton, keeping his eyes on the ring of
hair. ‘I see that you’re less
naif
than I thought.
You’re not a witch, or a necromancer, and yet you keep the firstborn’s locks
with you. Now, I wonder how you got hold of” them?’

‘That’s none of your business. Just keep back.’

Father Anton jerkily raised his hands in a gesture of
conciliation. ‘There is no need for us to quarrel,
monsieur
. There is no need for us to fight. After all, you must
remember that you can protect yourself only once with this ring of hair; and
for each protection thereafter you will need to sacrifice some other first-born
to Moloch. It will only take the rising of tomorrow’s sun, and its setting at
evening, and all the power you have in that ring will have died with the day.’

‘I’m not interested. I’ll have you behind bars by then.’

Father Anton threw back his head again, and laughed. Then,
without warning, the door banged wide open and slammed shut again, and the
windows exploded in a hailstorm of shattered glass. The sheets were whipped off
the bed in a screaming indoor hurricane, and the furniture was thrown violently
around the room, clattering and bumping.

Most hideous of all, Father Anton’s body was hurled this way
and that, its arms flailing wildly in all directions, until there was a
shrieking blast of wind, and it was thrown face-first into his dressing-table
mirror, the sharp slices of glass opening up his face like a skinned chicken.

The noise died away. I lowered my arm away from my eyes. The
room was very dark now, although the curtains were flapping open, and a grey
strained light was reflected from the snow outside. With the windows broken, it
was intensely cold.

Something small and shadowy was sitting in the far corner of
the
room.,
on the oaken post of Father Anton’s bed. I
couldn’t make it out very well, but I could see stubs of horns and eyes that
slanted like a goat’s. It made a dry, leathery sound as it shifted on its
perch:

‘Monsieur,’ it whispered.

‘What is it?’ I asked, chilled.

‘I must warn you,
monsieur
,
not to interfere again. Next time, you will have no protection.’

‘There isn’t going to be any next time,’ I asserted.

‘‘Monsieur,’’ said the devil, ‘I am going to find my
brethren with or without your assistance. Although, if you have any taste for
what is best
tor
you, you will do what you can to
help me.’

‘What about Madeleine?’

‘She must come too.’

‘That’s out of the question.’

The devil rustled, papery and ancient as Hell itself.

‘I will strike a bargain with you,’ it whispered. ‘If you
help me to find my brethren, you and Madeleine, then I will restore this fool
to life.’

‘That’s insane.’

The devil laughed. ‘Insanity is a human word which almost
always describes the activities of devils. Yes, in that sense, it is insane.
But
Adramelech
can do it.’