The Devils of D-Day (22 page)

Through the muffling, suffocating silence, I heard Madeleine
coming downstairs and opening the cellar door. Then she appeared, with my two
books under her arm. I nodded towards the dark end of the cellar, and told her:
‘
Elmek
. It’s appeared.’

Madeleine handed me the books. She whispered: ‘What is it
doing? Has it said what it wants?’

I shook my head. ‘It wants you, but I don’t know why.’

Elmek
cackled: ‘You don’t know
why? You can’t even guess? Don’t you know what that poor girl Jeanne
d’Arc
did for the benefit of our help in battle? Can’t you
imagine what befell poor
Gundrada
, the wife of
William de
Warrenne
?’

Sergeant Boone lifted his Sterling machine-gun. But
Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
raised a hand and warned:
‘Steady, sergeant. We’re not dealing with the IRA now.’

I called, ‘What do you want us to do,
Elmek
?
The girl is here now. What do you want us to do?’

The basement trembled and shook again, and there was a low,
irritating sound like thousands of blowflies swarming over a dead horse. It was
so dark now that we could hardly see at all. One of the soldiers said: ‘Christ,
it’s like a bleeding grave down ‘ere.’

‘Quiet that man,’ snapped the sergeant.

Elmek
whispered, in a hoarse,
mocking voice: ‘The girl must open each sack in turn.

Only the girl will do. Only the girl has any religious
faith. She must open each sack in turn, and say over it the words of the
conjuration.’

While
Elmek
was talking, I was
straining my eyes in the dim light to read the pages which the Reverend Taylor
had marked in his thin black book. The section was headed The Seven Accurate
Tests of An Evil Spirit’s Identity, and it told you what you had to do to
discover the true name of a demon or devil. But as I read more and more, my
confidence sank. The first test was to ask the devil its name by the power of
Sammael
, the arch-demon whom they called ‘the venom of
God’. The second test was to burn the devil’s hair or scales and see whether
the smoke sank downwards or rose upwards. The third test was to sprinkle
various herbs on its skin – borage, fennel, parsley, and dozens of others,
because different devils were marked or repelled by different plants. The
fourth was to spray a silver spoonful of devil’s blood across twenty-six cards
with letters of the alphabet on them, and the blood would fall on every card
except those with the letters of its own name. The fifth and the sixth and the
seventh were equally impossible, and all of them were obviously devised for a
full-scale ritual exorcism. What we had here, in this cellar in Huntingdon
Place, was an occult emergency.

‘Madeleine,’ I hissed. ‘Madeleine, I can’t do these tests.
They’re too complicated.’

She lifted a finger. ‘Wait,’ she whispered back. ‘There may
be some other way.’

‘What other way? What are you talking about?’ ‘You will have
to trust me,’ she said.

‘Well, what
do you
want me to do.
You can’t go around opening up those sacks!’ ‘I must.’ ‘Madeleine, I...’

She reached out in the darkness and held my arm. ‘Trust me,’
she said. ‘As I open up each sack, I will try and discover the name of the
devil within it, and I will try to pass that name on to you. These are only
lesser devils. They’re fierce and warlike and loathsome, but they’re not wise.’

‘And what do I do when you’ve told me their names?’ I asked
her. ‘Always supposing that we live that long.’

She pressed her hand against
L’Invocation
des
Anges
. She said: ‘Look up each name
in the book, and beside it you will see another name, the name of the devil’s
corresponding angel. Invoke that angel by repeating the words of the
conjuration.’

I frowned at her. ‘How do you know all this? I thought that...’

Elmek
wheezed: ‘Come on, girl,
open up these sacks for me! Tear open these sacks and release my beloved
brethren! Hurry, girl, there is little time left!’

The basement lights pulsed brighter, and then dimmed dark
again. I could feel a deep, systematic throbbing throughout the whole room,
like the gristly beating of some gruesome heart. Between me and
Elmek
, Sergeant Boone and his men now stood with their
machine-guns
raised
, and Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
was turning towards us with an expression of
responsible concern. I suppose they teach them responsible concern at officer
school.

He said: ‘I can’t advise you to do what the devil says,
Mlle
Passerelle
. In fact, I’ll
have to order you to stay back.’

Madeleine gave my hand a last, gentle squeeze. ‘I’m sorry,
Lieutenant-Colonel. But I cannot do what you ask.’

Elmek
, in what sounded like eight
vibrant voices speaking at once, called: ‘Open the sacks, girl!
Asmorod
is impatient!’

Madeleine took one step forward. As she did so, a hideous
shape emerged from the shadows at the far end of the basement – a shape like
the black glossy skull of a beetle. There was a shivering, rustling,
grasshopper sound, the chirring noise of insects. But it wasn’t an insect,
because I could make out tentacles as well, and some grotesque shape attached
to its abdomen like a deformed Siamese twin of itself.

Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
shouted:
‘Fire!’

What happened next seemed to happen so slowly that I
remember every detail of it, like some repulsive action replay that goes over
and over inside your mind. I saw the sergeant and his three soldiers
raise
their machine-guns. I saw Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
taking one pace backwards. Then, out of one
soldier’s mouth, in a dreadful torrent, came gallons and gallons of bloody
chopped-up slush, splattering all over the concrete floor. It looked as if he
was puking a hundredweight of raw hamburger meat, and Madeleine turned her face
away with
a mewl
of anguish. Transfixed, I watched as
the soldier’s whole body seemed to collapse like an empty cushion-cover, and he
twisted over and lay flat on his face on the gory floor. Beside him, Sergeant
Boone collapsed in the same way, his fatigues black with bile and blood, and
then the other two soldiers. The sweetish smell was overwhelming, and I had two
dry heaves before I could control my stomach.

The darkness, almost thankfully, closed in again. I wiped
cold perspiration away from my forehead, and pulled Madeleine back, away from
the four dead soldiers. It was silent for a minute or two; but then I heard
Elmek’s
creaky laughing, the voice of an old crone, but a
harshly inhuman voice as well, as if its breath were piping through a throat
lined with black hairs.

‘They dared to threaten me,’ the devil mocked us. ‘They
dared to raise their weapons against me. It’s almost a pity that you couldn’t
see, from the outside, the artistry of what I did to them. But then that’s the
elegance of such a death. Their bowels and their stomachs and their lungs and
their kidneys were sliced up and vomited out, leaving their bodies as empty as
their stupid heads.’

Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
, his
voice shaking, said: ‘I think we’d better try to make a run for it,
Mr
McCook.’ I said: ‘I don’t think there’s much point,
Colonel. We could be minced up like that before we even got up the first step.
Damn it, that’s why we were forced to come here in the first place!’

Madeleine interrupted: ‘It won’t harm us,
monsieur
le colonel, if we do what it
tells us to do. Now, I must open those sacks. We don’t have any more time to
waste.’

Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
snapped:
‘I forbid it! I forbid you to take a single step!’

‘Then I shall take several,’ said Madeleine, defiantly, and
pushed past him into the gloom.

Elmek’s
husky rustle of approval
made me feel as if my shirt had been suddenly soaked in iced water. I tried to
follow Madeleine, but she turned round and instructed me quietly: ‘Stay there,
Dan. Please. Stay back. Just listen to the names when I tell you, and invoke
their angels.’

Elmek
hissed: ‘What are you
saying? What are you talking about?’

Madeleine turned and looked straight into the convoluted
shadows where the devil lurked. ‘I am doing what I have to do,’ she said
simply, and went up to the first trestle table.

She stood over the table for what seemed like minutes on
end, but was only a few seconds. Then she said: ‘I summon thee, O being of
darkness, O spirit of the pit. I command thee to make thy most evil appearance.
I order thee to come forth, and I nullify all seals upon thee, all ties that
bind thee.
Venite
O spirit.’

Then she gripped the musty fabric of the sack, and ripped it
open.

From where I was standing, it was difficult for me to see.
But I could glimpse strange bones, and smell arcane dusts, and hear the rattle
of fiendish vertebrae. Madeleine reached into the sack, and lifted out the
devil’s skull, holding it up for
Elmek
to see.

‘The devil
Umbakrail
,’ she said.
‘The devil of darkness and evil events after nightfall.’

I was so fascinated by what she was doing that I almost
forgot to look up the name
Umbakrail
in
L’Invocation
des
Anges
.
But as she moved to the next trestle, I hurriedly turned through the pages
until I found it.
Umbakrail
, also
Umbaqurahal
, also
S’aamed
.
The devil of dark.
There was even an etching of it – a grotesque beast with staring eyes and
razor-sharp claws. On the facing page, in Henri St
Ermin’s
laborious French, was a description of its seraphic counterpart, the angel
Seron
, and below that were the words which would call down
Seron
to banish the evil presence of its hellish adversary.

‘O angel,’ I muttered, fearful that
Elmek
might hear what I was doing, ‘I adjure thee in the name of the blessed Virgin
Mary, by her holy milk, by her sanctified body, by her sanctified soul, to come
forth. I ask thee by-all the holy names:
Eloy
,
Jehova
, El
Oristan
,
Sechiel
,
Laaval
...’

Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
said:
‘What the hell are you doing?’

I glanced up at him. ‘You mean what the heaven
am I
doing. I’m calling down the angels to get us out of
this.’

‘For God’s sake, man, that girl’s in deadly danger! We’ve
got to...’

I hissed: ‘Shut up! There’s nothing else we can do! You saw
what
Elmek
did to your men! Now, just give us a
chance to do it our way!’

Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
was
about to protest, but a low, unpleasant rumbling went through the cellar, and
he turned towards the writhing shapes of the demon
Elmek
in alarm. Madeleine had spoken the words of the conjuration over the second
sack, and was pulling apart the soft medieval fabric to reveal the terrifying
skeleton within.

Again, she raised the skull. It was long and narrow, with
slanted eye-sockets, and the nubs of two horns. I felt a chilly ripple flow out
from it, as if someone had opened the door of a cold-store. The lights in the
cellar sank and flickered, and I sensed the mounting presence of unspeakable malevolence
and cruelty.

‘
Cholok
,’ said Madeleine,
identifying the devil for me.
‘The devil of suffocation.
The devil
who
smothers children and asphyxiates
victims of fires.’

Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
glared
at me in helpless desperation, but I was too busy leafing through my book.
There it was.
Cholok
, sometimes known as Nar-
speth
.
A devil with a face of absolute dispassion, and the leathery wings
of a reptile.
On the page opposite, I saw that its heavenly opposite was
Meles
, the angel of purity and happiness. I spoke the
words to summon
Meles
, and then watched Madeleine as
she went to the third sack.

Skeleton by skeleton, from the third sack to the fourth, and
then to the fifth and the sixth and the seventh, the skeletons of each devil
were taken from the ancient material in which they had been sewn up for so
long. As yet, they took on no life, but I guessed that when all of them were
free from their religious captivity, they would clothe themselves in flesh the
way that
Elmek
must have done in Father Anton’s
cellar.

The noise in the cellar was hideous and unnerving. As each
devil was freed, the chorus of hellish voices grew louder; until the whole
place sounded like an insane asylum, with scratching insect sounds and
grotesque shrieks, and voices that whispered incessantly of death and plague
and aberrations beyond human understanding. I was sweating so much that my
fingers made damp dimples on the pages of
L’Invocation
des
Anges
, and Lieutenant-Colonel
Thanet
was holding his hands to his ears in stunned
disbelief.

At last, Madeleine spoke the words to free the last devil
from his sack – the demon
Themgoroth
, the hawk-like
devil of blindness. In my turn, I mumbled the invocation that would bring down
Themgoroth’s
angelic opponent
Asrul
.