The Devils of D-Day

At
the bridge of Le Vey in July I944, thirteen black tanks smashed through the
German lines in an unstoppable all-destroying fury ride.
Leaving
hundreds of Hitler’s soldiers horribly dead.

Thirty-five
years later, Dan McCook visited that area of Normandy on an investigation of
the battle site. There he found a rusting tank by the roadside that was
perfectly sealed, upon its turret a protective crucifix.
Sceptical
,
he dared open it, releasing upon himself and the innocents who had helped him
an unimaginable horror that led back to that black day in I944. And re-opened
the ages-old physical battle between the world and Evil Incarnate...

From
today’s master of the occult thriller, here is a riveting, mega-chill novel of
modern-day demonism.

THE DEVILS OF
D-DAY

IS ABOUT A NEW
SATANIC KIND OF WAR.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

All of the devils and demons that
appear in this book are legendary creatures of hell, and there is substantial
recorded evidence of their existence. For that reason, it is probably
inadvisable to attempt to conjure up any of them by repeating out loud the
incantations used in the text, which are also genuine.

I would like to point out that the
Pentagon and the British Ministry of
Defence
strenuously deny the events described here, but I leave you to draw your own
conclusions.

-
Graham
Masterton
, London, 1979

I
could see them coming from almost a mile away: two small muffled figures on
bicycles, their scarves wound tightly around their faces,
pedalling
between the white winter trees. As they came nearer, I could hear them talking,
too, and make out the clouds of chilly
vapour
that
clung around their mouths. It was Normandy in December – misty and grey as a
photograph – and a sullen red sun was already sinking behind the forested
hills. Apart from the two French
labourers
cycling
slowly towards me, I was alone on the road, standing with my surveyor’s tripod
in the crisp frosted grass, my rented yellow Citroen 2CV parked at an ungainly
angle on the nearby verge. It was so damned cold that I could hardly feel my
hands or my nose, and I was almost afraid to stamp my feet in case my toes
broke off.

The men came nearer. They were old, with donkey-jackets and
berets, and one of them was carrying a battered army rucksack on his back with
a long French loaf sticking out of it. Their bicycle
tyres
left white furry tracks on the hoar frost that covered the road. There wasn’t
much traffic along here, in the rural depths of the Suisse
Normande
,
except for occasional tractors and even more occasional Citroen-
Maseratis
zipping past at ninety miles an hour in blizzards
of ice.

I called,
‘Bonjour,
messieurs
,’ and one of the old men slowed his bicycle and dismounted. He
wheeled his machine right up to my tripod and said,
‘Bonjour,
monsieur,
Qu’est-ce
que
vous
faites
?’

I said, ‘My French isn’t too good. You speak English?’

The man nodded.

‘Well,’ I said, pointing across the valley towards the cold
silvery hills, ‘I’m making a map.
Une
carte
.’

‘Ah,
oui
,’ said the old man.
‘
Une
carte
.’

The other old man, who was still sitting astride his
bicycle, pulled down his scarf from his face to blow his nose.

‘It’s for the new route?’ he asked me.
‘The
new highway?’

‘No, no. This is for someone’s history book. It’s a map of
the whole of this area for a book about World War II.’

‘
Ah, la guerre
,’
nodded the first old man.
‘
Une
carte
de la
guerre
,
hunk
?’

One of the men took out a blue packet of
Gitanes
,
and offered me one. I didn’t usually smoke French cigarettes, partly because of
their high tar content and partly because they smelled like burning horsehair,
but I didn’t want to appear discourteous – not after only two days in northern
France. In any case, I was glad of the spot of warmth that a glowing cigarette
tip gave out.

We smoked for a while, and smiled at each other dumbly, the
way people do when they can’t speak each other’s language too well. Then the
old man with the loaf said
,
‘
They
fought all across this valley; and down by the river,
too.
The
Orne
.
I remember it
very clear.’

The other old man said: ‘Tanks, you know?
Here,
and here. The Americans coming across the road from
Clecy
,
and the Germans
retreating back up the
Orne
valley. A very hard
battle just there, you see, by the Pont
D’Ouilly
. But
that day the Germans stood no chance. Those American tanks came across the
bridge at Le Vey and cut them off. At night, from just here, you could see
German tanks burning all the way up to the turn in the river.’

I blew out smoke and
vapour
. It
was so gloomy now that I could hardly make out the heavy granite shoulders of
the rocks at
Ouilly
, where the
Orne
river
widened and turned before sliding over the dam
at Le Vey and foaming northwards in the spectral December evening. The only
sound was the faint rush of water, and the doleful tolling of the church bell
from the distant village, and out here in the frost and the cold we might just
as well have been alone in the whole continent of Europe.

The old man with the loaf said, ‘It was fierce, that
fighting. I never saw it so fierce.

We caught three Germans but it was no difficulty. They were
happy to surrender. I remember one of them said: “Today, I fought the devil.” ‘

The other old man nodded.
‘Der
Teufel
. That’s what he said. I was
there. This one and me, we’re cousins.’

I smiled at them both. I didn’t really know what to say.

‘Well,’ said the one with the loaf, ‘we must get back for
nourishment.’

‘Thanks for stopping,’ I told him. ‘It gets pretty lonely
standing out here on your own.’

‘You’re interested in the war?’ asked the other old man.

I shrugged. ‘Not specifically. I’m a cartographer.
A map-maker.’

‘There are many stories about the war. Some of them are just
pipe-dreams. But round here there are many stories. Just down there, about a
kilometre
from the Pont
D’Ouilly
,
there’s an old American tank in the hedge. People don’t go near it at night.

They say you can hear the dead crew talking to each other
inside it, on dark nights.’

‘That’s pretty spooky.’

The old man pulled up his scarf so that only his old wrinkled
eyes peered out. He looked like a strange Arab soothsayer, or a man with
terrible wounds. He tugged on his knitted gloves, and said, in a muffled voice,
‘These are only stories. All battlefields have ghosts, I suppose.
Anyway,
le potage
s’attend
.’

The two old cousins waved once, and then
pedalled
slowly away down the road. It wasn’t long before they turned a corner and
disappeared behind the misty trees, and I was left on my own again, numb with
cold and just about ready to pack everything away and grab some dinner. The sun
was
mouldering
away behind a white wedge of
descending fog now, anyway, and I could hardly see my hands in front of my
face, let alone the peaks of distant rocks.

I stowed my equipment in the back of the 2CV, climbed into
the driver’s
scat
, and spent five minutes trying to
get the car started. The damned thing whinnied like a horse, and I was just
about to get out and kick it like a horse deserved, when it coughed and burst
into life. I switched on the headlights, U-turned in the middle of the road,
and drove back towards
Falaise
and my dingy hotel.

I was only about a half mile down the road, though, when I
saw the sign that said Pont
D’Ouilly
, 4 km. I looked
at my watch. It was only half past four, and I wondered if a quick detour to
look at the old cousins’ haunted tank might be worthwhile. If it was any good,
I could take a photograph of it tomorrow, in daylight, and Roger might like it
for his book. Roger
Kellman
was the guy who had
written the history for which I was drawing all these maps, The Days
After
D-Day, and anything to do with military memorabilia
would have him licking his lips like Sylvester the cat.

I turned off left, and almost immediately wished I hadn’t.
The road went sharply downhill, twisting and turning between trees and rocks,
and it was slithery with ice, mud and half-frozen
cowshit
.
The little Citroen bucked and swayed from side to side, and the windshield
steamed up so much from my panicky breathing that I had to slide open the side
window and lean out; and that wasn’t much fun, with the outside temperature
well down below freezing.

I passed silent, dilapidated farms, with sagging barns and
closed windows. I passed grey fields in which cows stood like grubby
brown-and-white jigsaws, frozen saliva hanging from their hairy lips. I passed
shuttered houses, and slanting fields that went down to the dark winter river.
The only sign of life that I saw was a tractor, its wheels so caked with ochre
clay that they were twice their normal size, standing by the side of the road
with its motor running. There was nobody in it.

Eventually, the winding road took me down between rough
stone walls, under a tangled arcade of leafless trees, and over the bridge at
Ouilly
. I kept a lookout for the tank the old cousins had
talked about, but the first time I missed it altogether; and I spent five
minutes wrestling the stupid car back around the way it had come, stalling
twice and almost getting jammed in a farm gateway. In the greasy farmyard, I
saw a stable door open, and an old woman with a grey face and a white lace cap
stare out at me with suspicion, but then the door closed again, and I banged
the 2CV into something resembling second gear and roared back down the road.

You could have missed the tank in broad daylight, let alone
at dusk in the middle of a freezing Norman winter. Just as I came around the
curve of the road, I saw it, and I managed to pull up a few yards away, with
the Citroen’s suspension complaining and groaning. I stepped out of the car
into a cold pile of cow dung, but at least when it’s chilled like that it
doesn’t smell. I scraped my shoe on a rock by the side of the road and then
walked back to look at the tank.

It was dark and bulky, but surprisingly small. I guess we’re
so used to enormous Army tanks these days that we forget how tiny the tanks of
World War II actually were. Its surface was black and scaly with rust, and it
was so interwoven with the hedge that it looked like something out of Sleeping
Beauty, with thorns and brambles twisted around its turret, laced in and out of
its tracks, and wound around its stumpy cannon. I didn’t know what kind of a
tank it was, but I guessed it was maybe a Sherman or something like that. It
was obviously American: there was a faded and rusted white star on its side,
and a painting of some kind that time and the weather had just about
obliterated. I kicked the tank, and it responded with a dull, empty booming
sound.

A woman came walking slowly along the road with an
aluminium
milk pail. She eyed me cautiously as she
approached, but as she drew near she stopped and laid down her pail. She was
quite
young,
maybe twenty-three or twenty-four, and
she wore a red spotted headscarf. She was obviously the farmer’s daughter. Her
hands were rough from pulling cows’ udders in cold dawn barns, and her cheeks
were bright crimson, like a painted peasant
doll’s
. I
said:
‘Bonjour, mademoiselle
,’ and
she nodded in careful reply. She said, ‘You are American?’ ‘That’s right.’