Graham Masterton - The Devils of D-Day

Father Anton was approaching the side of the tank where the black sack lay. He was holding the crucifix and the Bible in front of him, and his eyes were fixed on our strange discovery like the eyes of a man who comes across the evidence, at last, that his wife has really been cuckolding him.

He said, “ Enfin, It diable .”

I touched the sack tentatively with my foot. “That was all there was. It feels like it’s full of bones.”

Father Anton didn’t take his eyes away from the sack for a second.

“Yes,” he said, “the bones of a demon.”

I swung myself down from the hull of the tank, and helped Madeleine to jump down after me. “I didn’t know demons had bones,” I remarked. “I thought they were all in the mind.”

“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 acquiescènt 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 Citröen, 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 naïveté.”

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 Citröen, 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.