The Devils of D-Day (9 page)

‘No, no,’ said Father Anton. ‘There was a time, in the
Middle Ages, when demons and gargoyles walked the earth as living creatures.
There is too much evidence to refute it. Paul Lucas, the medieval traveller,
tells how he actually met the demon
Asmodeus
in
Egypt, and the demon
Sammael
was said to have walked
through the streets of Rouen as late as the twelfth century.’

Madeleine said: ‘We don’t yet know that it’s really bones.
It could be anything.’

Father Anton returned his Bible to his pocket.
‘Of course, of course.
We can take it back to my house. I
have a cellar where we can lock it up safely. It seems to be acquiescent enough
now.’

I looked at Madeleine, but she simply shrugged. If the
priest wanted to take the sack back home with him, then there wasn’t much we
could do to stop him. I just hoped that the thing wouldn’t decide to wake up
and take its revenge on.
any
of us for being disturbed
so unceremoniously on a cold December afternoon.

I opened the back of the Citroen, and between us we carried
the sagging, musty sack across the road and laid it gently in the car. Then I
collected up the tools that Madeleine’s father had lent us, and climbed into
the car myself. Father Anton, taking off his hat and shaking the snow off it,
said: ‘I feel strangely elated. Can you understand that?”

I started the motor. ‘This is what you’ve wanted to do for
thirty years, isn’t it? Open the tank and find out what the hell’s happening.’

‘
Mr
McCook,’ he said, ‘you should
have come here years ago. It takes unusual simplicity, unusual directness, to
do something like this.’

‘I’m not sure whether that’s a compliment or not.’

‘I didn’t mean
naivete
.’

We drove through the gathering dusk, and the thick
snowflakes whirled and tumbled all around us. But the time we reached Father
Anton’s house in the middle of the village, the church clock was striking five,
and we could hardly see through the pouring snow. The housekeeper opened the
door as we arrived, and stood there with a sour face and her hands clasped
across her apron as I helped Father Anton into the porch.

‘
Il
a
quatre
-
vingt
-dix arts,’ she snapped, taking the old man’s arm and
leading him inside. ‘Et
il
faut
sortir
dans
la
neigt
pour
jouer
comme
un petit garcon?’

‘Antoinette,’ said Father Anton reassuringly, patting her
hand. ‘I have never felt so healthy.’

Madeleine and I went round to the back of the Citroen, and
lifted out the sack. From the dark hall, Father Anton called: That’s right,
bring it inside. Antoinette – will you bring me the keys to the cellar?’

Antoinette stared suspiciously at the black bundle we were
carrying through the snow.

‘
Qu’est-ce
que
c’est
?
‘ she
demanded.

‘
C’est
un sac de
charbon
,
‘ smiled
Father Anton.

With one last backward look of ultimate distrust, Antoinette
went off to fetch the cellar keys, while Madeleine and I laid our unholy bundle
down in the hall.

Father Anton said: ‘If these are bones, then I have a
ceremony for disposing of them.

The bones of a demon are just as potent as the live demon
itself, so the books say; but they can be scattered in such a way that the
demon cannot live again. The skull has to be interred in one cathedral, and the
hands and the feet in three others. Then the remaining bones are laid to rest
in churches all around the intervening countryside, in ritual sequence.’

I took out my handkerchief and blew my nose. It was so cold
that I could hardly feel it.
‘Supposing we ask the Pentagon
how to get rid of it?’
I asked. ‘After all, they put it there in the
first place.’

Father Anton looked down at the black sack and shook his
head. ‘I don’t know. I think the most important thing is to exorcise this beast
as quickly as possible.’

Antoinette came bustling back with the cellar keys, and
handed them to Father Anton. She pursed her lips in disapproval, but then
Father Anton said gently, ‘I would love some of your barley broth, Antoinette,’
and she softened a little, and went off to the kitchen to prepare it.

Madeleine and I lifted the soft, yielding sack once more,
and Father Anton said;

‘Follow me.’ But as we shuffled off down the long polished
hallway, I glanced back at the place where the sack had been lying, and a
feeling went down my shoulders like ice sliding down the inside of my shirt.

The wooden floor had been burned, as if by a poker. Where
the black sack had been laid, there was the distinct, unmistakable outline of a
small, hunched skeleton.

‘Father Anton,’ I whispered.

The old priest turned and saw the burns. He said: ‘Lay down
the sack, gently.’ Then while we settled the decaying black fabric on the floor
again, he walked back on creaking boots and knelt stiffly and painfully down.
His fingers traced the pattern that was scorched into the woodblock flooring,
touching it as respectfully and gently as a fine medieval brass. I stood behind
him and said: ‘Do you know what it is?’

He didn’t look up. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said quietly. ‘I know what
it is. It is the mark of the demon. This house is holy, you see. It has been
the vessel of years of prayer and blessings. And a demon’s bones cannot touch
it without making a mark.’

‘It looks very small. Not much more than a child.’

‘It is no smaller than the devils and gargoyles that are
carved on medieval churches, my friend. We forget that many of those were
carved, secretly, from the actual bodies of such fiends. I have the memoirs
upstairs of a stonemason who worked at Chartres, and he tells of how the monks
would bring him skulls and bones of creatures that he could never identify.’

Madeleine came up and took my arm. ‘What are we going to
do?’ she asked softly.

‘What if it tries to break free?’

‘We must take it to the cellar at once,’ said Father Anton.
‘I can confine it there by the power of the crucifix and the power invested in
me by Our Lord Jesus Christ. Then, at the first opportunity, we must take the
skeleton to pieces and scatter those pieces according to the
Sepher
Ha Zohar, which is the most important book of the
Kabbalah.’

We returned to the black sack, and this time all three of us
took hold of it, and we walked with it as quickly as we could to the carved oak
door of the cellar, way down at the end of the hall. Once we were there, Father
Anton took out the largest of his keys, and put it into the lock.

Inside the door, it smelled of limestone and must. Father
Anton switched on the light, and said, ‘Be careful of the stairs. They’re very
old and uneven.’

Like the cellars of most French houses of any size, Father
Anton’s was enormous, and divided into several rooms. I could see wine racks
through one half-open door, and inside another, garden tools and pieces of
medieval masonry. But Father Anton directed us down to the very farthest
recesses of the cellar, to a heavy door studded with black iron nails, and
opened it up with another elaborate key.

This room was totally dark inside, and airless. There were
no windows, and the room was empty but for a few broken flowerpots and a rusted
mangle. It was floored with dusty clay tiles, and whitewashed with lime. Father
Anton switched on the single bare bulb and said: ‘Lay the sack down here. This
room was originally used for storing valuables and furniture. The lock is very
strong.’

We set the black bag down in the
centre
of the room, and stood back from it with considerable relief. Father Anton
reached inside his coat and took out his worn brown spectacle case.

‘First of all, we have to find out what kind of a demon this
is,’ he said. ‘Then we can do our best to dismiss it.
Mr
McCook – you’ll find a garden sickle in the next room.

Perhaps you’d be kind enough to bring it in.’

I went to fetch the sickle while Father Anton stalked
impatiently around the flaccid, lumpy bag, staring at it closely through his
gold-rimmed spectacles, and coughing from time to time in the cold air of the
cellar.

There were five sickles of varying sizes, so being a native
of Mississippi I chose the largest. I took it back to Father Anton, and he
smiled, and said, ‘Will you cut it open?

Or shall I?’

I looked across at Madeleine. She was tired and tense, but
she obviously wanted to know what horrors were contained inside this sack just
as much as I did. She nodded, and I said, ‘Okay- I’ll do it.’

I leaned over the sack and pushed the point of the sickle
into the ancient fabric. It went in easily, and when I tugged, the bag ripped
softly open with a dusty, purring sound, as
fibre
parted from
fibre
after centuries of waiting for
unimaginable reasons in places that could only be guessed at.

The bag was full of dust and bones. I stood back, and stared
at the bones with a kind of horrified curiosity, because they weren’t the bones
of any human or beast that you’d
recognise
. There
were narrow ribs, curved thighbones,
long
claw-like
metatarsals. They were dull brown and porous, and they looked as if they were
six or seven hundred years old, or even more. I’d once dug up the skeleton of a
Red Indian at my father’s place at
Louin
, in Jasper
County, and that had the same dry look about it.

It wasn’t the bones of the body that frightened me so much;
though they were grotesque enough in themselves. It was the skull. It had its
jawbone missing, but it was a curious beaklike skull, with slanting
eye-sockets, and a row of small nib-like teeth. There were rudimentary horns at
the back of the head, and if it hadn’t have been for the reptilian upper jaw, I
would have said it was the skull of a goat.

Madeleine took my hand, and squeezed it hard. ‘What is it?’
she said, in a voice unsteady with fear. ‘Dan -what is it?’

Father Anton took off his spectacles, and closed them with a
quiet click. He looked at us, and his eyes were red from tiredness and cold,
but his face was alive with human compassion and religious fortitude. He had
been a priest for seventy years, twice as long as either of us had been alive,
and even though he was elderly, he had seen in those seventy years enough
miracles and enough demonic fears to give him strength where we had very
little.

He said, ‘It is just as I suspected.’

I raised an eyebrow. ‘You suspected something? You mean, you
guessed what this was beforehand?’

He nodded. ‘It was after we spoke, after we talked about the
thirteen tanks. I spent an hour or so looking through the
Pseudomonarchia
Daemonum
, and I came across a small reference to
les
treize
diables
de Rouen
. There is very little there, very
little information. But it appears from what Jean
Wier
says that in I045 the city of Rouen was
terrorised
by
thirteen devils which brought fire, pestilence, sorrow, and disaster.

They were the thirteen acolytes of
Adramelech
,
who was the eighth demon in the hierarchy of the evil
Sephiroth
,
and the grand Chancellor of Hell.’

I reached inside my coat for my stale Lucky Strikes. I said,
‘Is it that unusual to find devils in teams of thirteen?’

‘Well, quite.’

‘But what were thirteen eleventh-century devils doing in
thirteen American tanks in the Second World War? It doesn’t make any sense.’

Father Anton shrugged. ‘I don’t know,
Mr
McCook. Perhaps if we knew the answer to that, we would know the answer to
everything.’

Madeleine asked: ‘What happened to the devils of Rouen? Does
the book say?’

‘Oh, yes. They were imprisoned in a dungeon by a powerful
spell imposed on them by the medieval exorcist Cornelius
Prelati
.
The book is in medieval French, so it’s a little difficult to decipher exactly
how, or for how long. But it mentioned the word
coude
,
which I thought at first meant that the devils were imprisoned very close
together, rubbing shoulders. However, when I saw this sack I
realised
that there could be some connection. The French
word
coudre
, as you may know,
monsieur
, means “to sew up.” ‘

Madeleine whispered, ‘The devils were sewn in bags. Just
like this one.’

Father Anton said nothing, but raised his hands as if to
say
,
c’est
possible.

We stood around the bones for a long time in silence. Then
Madeleine said: ‘Well, what’s to be done?’

Father Anton sucked at his ill-fitting dentures. ‘We must
spread the bones across the countryside, as the Kabbalah recommends. But of
course we cannot do it tonight. In any event, I shall have to call every one of
the church authorities involved, and ask for permission to bury the bones in
such a way.’

‘That’s going to take forever,’ I told him.

Father Anton nodded. ‘I know. But I’m afraid that it’s
necessary. I cannot simply bury the bones of a creature like this on sacred
ground without the knowledge of the church.’

Madeleine took my hand.
Very naturally,
very easily, and very affectionately.
She said, ‘Dan, perhaps you ought
to stay with Father Anton tonight. I don’t like to leave him alone with this
thing.’