Graham Masterton - The Devils of D-Day

I stared at the tape-recorder in amazement. “It didn’t say that. There was no way it ever said that.”

Father Anton was white. He asked, in a trembling tone: “What does this mean? What is it saying?”

“ Father, father, ” whispered the tape-recorder. “ Surely you recall the warm summer of 1928. So long ago, father, but so vivid. The day you took young Mathilde on the river, in your boat. Surely you remember that. ”

Father Anton rose jerkily to his feet, like a Victorian clockwork toy. His snuff tipped all over the rug. He stared at the tape-recorder as if it was the devil himself. His chest heaved with the effort of breathing, and he could scarcely speak.

“That day was innocent!” he breathed. “Innocence itself! How dare you! How dare you suggest it was anything else! You! Demon! Cochon! Vos mains sont sales avec le sang des innocents! ”

I reached out and seized Father Anton’s sleeve. He tried to brush me away, but I gripped him more firmly, and said, “Father, it’s only a trick. For Christ’s sake.”

Father Anton looked at me with watering eyes. “A trick? I don’t understand.”

“Father, it has to be. It’s only a tape-recording. It’s just some kind of trick.”

He looked nervously down at the cassette recorder, its tape still silently spinning. “It can’t be a trick,” he said huskily. “How can a tape-recorder answer one back? It’s not possible.”

“You heard it yourself,” I told him. “It must be.”

I was as puzzled and scared as he was, but I didn’t want to show it. I had the feeling that the moment I started giving in to all this weirdness, the moment I started believing it for real, I was going to get tangled up in something strange and uncontrollable. It was like standing at the entrance of a hall of mirrors, trying to resist the temptation to walk inside and find out what those distorted figures in the darkness were.

I pressed the tape-recorder’s “stop” button. The gloomy room was silent.

“Sit down, Father Anton,” I asked him. “Now, let’s play that tape back again, and we’ll see how much of a trick it is.”

The old priest said, “It’s Satan’s work. I have no doubt. It’s the work of the devil himself.”

I gently helped him back to his armchair, and picked up his snuffbox for him. He sat there pale-faced and tense as I rewound the tape back to the beginning, and then pushed the “play” button once again.

We waited tensely as the tape began to crackle and hiss. We heard it laid down on the turret again, and the dog barking. Then that voice began once more, and it seemed colder and even more evil than ever. It sounded as if it came from the throat of a hoarse hermaphrodite, some lewd creature who delighted in pain and pleasure and unspeakable acts.

“ You can help me, you know, ” it repeated. “ You sound like a good man. A good man and true. You can open this prison. You can take me to join my brethren. You sound like a good man and true. ”

Father Anton was sitting rigid in his seat, his knuckles spotted with white where he was clutching the frayed upholstery.

The voice said: “ Father Anton can take away the cross that binds me down, and cast away the spell. You can do that, can’t you, Father Anton? You’d do anything for an old friend, and I’m an old friend of yours. You can take me to join my brethren across the waters, can’t you? Beelzebub, Lucifer, Madilon, Solymo, Saroy, Theu, Ameclo, Sagrael, Praredun— ”

“Stop it!” shouted Father Anton. “ Stop it! ”

With unbelievable agility for a man as old as ninety, he reached out for the tape-recorder, held it in both hands, and smashed it against the steel fireguard around the grate. Then he sat back, his eyes staring and wild, snapping the broken pieces of plastic in his hands. He dragged out the thin brown tape, and crumpled it up into a confused tangle of knots and twists.

I sat watching all this in total amazement. First, I seemed to have a tape-recorder that said whatever it felt like. Now, I had a priest who broke up other people’s property. I said, “What’s wrong? Why the hell did you do that?”

The priest took a deep breath. “It was the conjuration,” he said. “The words that can summon Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies. There were only three more words to be said, and that demon could have been with us.”

“You’re not serious.”

Father Anton held up the smashed fragments of Sony tape-recorder. “Do you think I would break your machine for nothing? Those words can bring out of the underworld the most terrible of devils. I will buy you another, never fear.”

“Father Anton, it’s not the tape-recorder I’m worried about. What concerns me is what goes on here. If there’s a creature inside that tank, can’t we do something about it? Exorcise it? Burn it out. Blow it up?”

Father Anton shook the smashed-up tape-recorder out of the skirts of his cassock and into the waste-paper basket. “Exorcisms, my friend, are woefully misunderstood. They are hardly ever performed these days, and only in very serious cases of possession. As for burning the tank, or blowing it up, that would do no good. The demon would still haunt Pont D’Ouilly, although he would be more like a fierce dog on a long leash instead of a fierce dog inside a locked kennel. He cannot finally get away until the holy cross is lifted from the turret, and the words of dismissal erased.”

I opened the cigarette box on the table and took out a Gauloise. I lit it up and took a long drag. I was getting used to this pungent French tobacco, and if it didn’t have as much tar in it as a three-mile stretch of the Allegheny Valley Expressway, I think I could have smoked it all the time. I said, “Whatever it is, it obviously wants out.”

“Of course,” agreed Father Anton. “And it appears to have a strong desire to rejoin its fellows. Its brethren. Perhaps it means that there were demons or devils possessing the other twelve tanks.”

“You mean all of them were possessed?”

“It seems likely. Why were they all painted black? Why were they all sealed down? You have said yourself that the Germans felt as if the devil was on their heels. I don’t know whether you have yet had time to read your friend’s history of the war, but the Orne Valley was taken at record speed—far more quickly than any of the surrounding countryside. Caen was shelled flat. But here—the tanks came through at top speed, and nobody short of Our Lord Himself could have stopped them.”

I blew out smoke. “What you’re suggesting is that this special division was made up of demons? I don’t see how that’s possible. Demons are—well, dammit, they’re demons . They’re medieval. They’re imaginary. They don’t fight wars.

“On the contrary,” said Father Anton. “That’s precisely what they do do.”

“But how come nobody ever heard of this special division before? How come the Army even allowed it to happen? That’s supposing it did happen, and all this isn’t some kind of hoax.”

“Much that happened in the war is still secret. And, anyway, what were thirteen tanks among hundreds? Perhaps your government decided on a little experiment with black magic.”

“Father Anton, this doesn’t seem real. If there’s one thing that the Pentagon is not involved in, it’s black magic!”

Father Anton went across to the tall window and looked down on his courtyard. Although it was mid-morning, it was as dark as late afternoon, and a few flakes of snow were tumbling idly across the village. The church clock struck eleven.

“What people forget,” he said, “was that the war was mystic and magical in the extreme. Hitler set great store by magic, and made a particular point of confiscating the Spear of Longinus, the very spear that pierced Christ’s side on the cross, from the Hotburg Museum in Vienna, because he believed that whoever possessed it could control the destiny of the world. On the side of the Allies, many experiments were made in sending messages by telepathy, and in levitation, and there was a Dutch priest who claimed he could invoke the wrath of the ten divine Sephiroth to bring down German planes with bolts of fire.”