Graham Masterton - The Devils of D-Day

I listened to this patiently, but I felt weary and sick. I said, “Father, this is all very well, but what are we going to do about the tank?”

Father Anton turned towards me. “There is nothing we can do, monsieur. Wiser men than us have sealed that evil entity away, and it would be foolish to disturb it. If the authorities will not remove the tank, then it will have to stay there.”

“And the Passerelles will have to suffer the consequences for the rest of their lives? You know that Madeleine believes the tank killed her mother?”

The old priest nodded. “She didn’t tell me, but I guessed as much. I wish there was more that I could do. All I can say is that I am very thankful we were left with only one tank, instead of many.”

I took a last hot drag of my Gauloise, and stubbed it out. “Well, I think you’re being too cautious,” I told him. “Maybe it’s time that someone gave the Passerelles a break, and maybe it’s time the Pentagon got their dirty washing back.”

Father Anton looked at me and crossed himself. “I can only warn you, monsieur, that to open the tank would be more than foolish. It would be tantamount to suicide.”

I stood up, and brushed ash off my pants. “The tape-recorder was 189 francs,” I said. “But I’d be more than happy with half of that. It was kind of a joint venture, after all.”

Father Anton slowly shook his head. “Perhaps one day I will understand Americans,” he said. “And, perhaps one day they will understand themselves.”

I met Madeleine for a glass of wine at lunchtime, in a small smokey cafe unappealingly called the Bar Touristique. A grossly fat woman in a floral housecoat served behind the bar, and occasionally forayed out to slap at the red formica-topped tables with a wet rag, as if they were disobedient dogs who kept playing up. The house wine was robust enough to clean your family silver with, but I’d managed to find a stale pack of Luckies in the local tobacconist’s, so my palate wasn’t complaining quite so vigorously as it had this morning.

Madeleine came in through the plastic-strip curtain looking very pale and waif-like, and when she saw me she came across the bar and put her arms tight around my neck.

“Dan, you’re all right.”

“Of course I’m all right. I’ve only been talking to Father Anton.”

I took her speckled tweed coat and hung it up next to a sign that warned Defense de Cracker . She was wearing a plain turquoise-blue dress that was probably very fashionable in Pont D’Ouilly, but in Paris was about eight years out of style. Still, she looked good; and it was a lift to meet someone who really cared about my welfare. Ten-ton Tessie behind the bar brought us our wine, and we clinked glasses like one-time lovers meeting in a seedy bar at the back of Grand Central Station.

“Did you play Father Anton the tape?”

“Well, kind of.”

She touched my hand. “There’s something you don’t want to tell me?”

“I don’t know. I guess we’re at a crossroads right now. We can either open the tank up, and find out what’s in there, or we can forget it for ever, just like everyone else has.”

She reached up and stroked my cheek. Her pale eyes were full of concern and affection. If I hadn’t been feeling so goddamned sick last night, lying doubled-up in the Passerelle’s draughty spare bedroom, I think I might have tiptoed along the corridor and tapped on Madeleine’s door, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that making love is the last thing you feel like after puking a mouthful of maggots; and I guess that even those who love you dearly find it kind of hard to give you a wholehearted kiss.

She sipped her wine. “How can we leave it there?” she asked me. “How can we just leave it there?”

“I don’t know. But the mayor and the civic authorities and even Father Anton himself seem to have managed to leave it there for thirty years.”

Madeleine said, “You must think that I have a bee in my bonnet.”

“Where did they teach you to say that? The school of colloquial English?”

She looked up, and she wasn’t smiling. “The war was over years and years ago. didn’t we lose enough? Enough fathers and brothers and friends? They still sell postcards of Churchill and Eisenhower at the seaside resorts, and that makes me angry. They saved us, yes, but there is nothing glorious to celebrate. To fight wars is not glorious, not for anyone. It is better to forget. But, of course, they have left us their tank, and we can never forget.”

I sat back in my cheap varnished chair. “So you want to open it up?”

Her eyes were cold. “The thing itself said that it wanted to join its brethren. What can it want with us? If we let it out, it will go to meet its friends, and that will be the end of it.”

“Father Anton said that opening the tank would be as good as committing suicide.”

“Father Anton is old. And anyway, he believes that demons and devils have power over everything. He told me that once, in catechism class. “Madeleine,” he said, “if it weren’t for Jesus Christ, the whole world would be overrun with demons.” ”

I coughed. “Supposing we open it up and there is a demon?”

She leaned forward intensely. “There must be something , Dan. Otherwise we wouldn’t have heard that voice. But demons don’t have horns and forks. There’s probably nothing inside there at all that the human eye can see.”

“Supposing there is?”

“That’s what we have to find out.”

I drank some more wine, and I could almost feel it put hairs on my chest as I sat there. I said, “What do they put in this stuff? Rust remover?”

Madeleine answered: “Ssh. Madame Saurice used to entertain an American sergeant in the war, and she knows English well. All the slang English, like shucks.”

“ Shucks? You sure it wasn’t the war of 1812?”

Madeleine said, “I never wanted to open the tank before, Dan. I never met anyone who gave me the strength to do it. My father wouldn’t have touched it; nor would Eloise. But Eloise will tell us how to ward off demons and evil spirits while we do it, and I’m sure Father Anton will give you help if you ask him.”

I lit another cigarette. “I don’t see why it’s so important to you. If you dislike the tank that much, why don’t you move away? There isn’t anything to keep you in Pont D’Ouilly, after all.”

“Dan, it’s important because it lies on my father’s farm, and my father’s farm has always been home. Even if I go away for ever, that farm will still be the place where I was brought up, and that tank will still be there.”

She drank a little wine, and looked at me intently. “And, anyway,” she said, “I have dreamed about that tank ever since I was a little girl. That tank has given me terrible dreams.”

“Dreams? What kind of dreams?”

She lowered her eyes. “They were cruel dreams. Nightmares. But they were exciting as well.”

“Sexually exciting?”

“Sometimes. I dreamed of being forced to have sex with bristly beasts and strange creatures. But sometimes the dreams were different, and I imagined that I was being mutilated or killed. That was frightening, but it was exciting, too. Pieces were being sliced off me, and there was lots of blood.”

I reached across the table and held her thin wrist.

“Madeleine… you know this tank isn’t a joke. What’s in there, whatever it is, is something really malign.”

She nodded. “I have always known it. But I have also known, all my life, that one day I would have to face up to it. Of course, I tried to evade my responsibility. I tried to persuade you not to go down there to make your recording. But I am led to the conclusion that the time has probably come.”