Graham Masterton - The Devils of D-Day

I looked round, but I knew it was useless. I was so crowded with fears and superstitions that I was seeing things that weren’t even there. I walked back to Father Anton’s bedroom door, waited for a moment, and then softly knocked.

“Father Anton? It’s Dan McCook.”

There was no answer, so I waited for a while and then rapped again.

“Father Anton? Are you awake?”

There was still no answer. I gently tried the door. It wasn’t locked, and so I pushed it open and peered into the darkness of his bedroom. It smelled of mothballs and some mentholated rub that he obviously put on his chest at night. On one side was a tall mahogany wardrobe, and on the other was a chest-of-drawers, above which hung a large ebony crucifix with an ivory figure of Christ hanging on it. Father Anton’s oak bed was set against the far wall, and I could just make out his pale hand lying on the coverlet, and his white hair on the pillow.

I crept across the worn rug on the floor, and stood a few feet away from him. He had his back turned to me, but he looked all right. I was beginning to think that I was suffering from nightmares and delusions and not enough sleep. I whispered: “Father Anton?”

He didn’t stir, didn’t turn around, but a voice said, “ Yes? ”

My grip tightened on my candlestick. It sounded like Father Anton, but on the other hand it didn’t. It had some of that dry, sardonic quality that I had heard in the voice upstairs. I came a little nearer the bed, and tried to lean over so that I could see Father Anton’s face.

“Father Anton? Is that you?”

There was a second’s pause. Then Father Anton rose up in his bed as if he was being pulled upright on strings, and he turned to face me with his eyes glassy and his white hair dishevelled. He said, in that same unnatural voice: “What is it? Why did you wake me?”

I felt there was something curiously and frighteningly wrong. It was the way he was sitting there in his white nightshirt, as if he was unsupported by gravity or anything at all. And it was his peculiar manner, partly calm and partly hostile. There was nothing of the rambling old priest about him. He seemed strangely self-possessed, and his eyes seemed to be observing me as if there was someone else behind them, staring through.

I took a few steps back. “I think I must have made a mistake,” I said. “Just a nightmare, that’s all.”

“You’re frightened,” he said. “I can tell that you’re frightened. Now, why?”

“It’s okay,” I told him. “I guess I just didn’t get enough sleep. I’ll go right back upstairs now, and I’ll—”

“You needn’t go. don’t you want to talk? It’s very lonesome at this time of night, don’t you agree?”

Father Anton’s face was rigidly white, and his jaw seemed to move up and down when he spoke with the same mechanical movements of a ventriloquist’s dummy. Talking to him right then was like listening to a badly dubbed movie.

“Well, yes,” I said. “But I’d really rather go. Thanks all the same.”

Father Anton raised a hand. “You mustn’t go.” He turned his head stiffly and looked towards the door. It swung on its hinges, and silently closed, all by itself.

I lifted my candlestick.

“Now then,” admonished Father Anton. “There’s no need to be belligerent. We can be friends, you know. We can help each other.”

I said, quietly: “You’re not Father Anton at all.”

Father Anton abruptly laughed, throwing his head back in a way that terrified me. “Of course I’m Father Anton. Who do I look like?”

“I don’t know. But you’re not Father Anton. Now just stay there because I’m getting right out of here and you’re not going to stop me.”

Father Anton said: “Why should I want to stop you? You’re a good man and true. You helped me out, so now I’m going to help you.”

I was shivering like a man with pneumonia. I kept the candlestick raised over my head, and I stepped back towards the door. “Just stay away,” I warned him.

Father Anton gave an awkward, empty shrug. “You mustn’t misunderstand me, monsieur.”

“I understand you all right. I don’t know what you are, or what you’re trying to do, but keep away.”

The old priest’s eyes glittered. “If we don’t find the other twelve, you know, we could be in terrible trouble.”

“The other twelve what?”

“The other twelve brethren. There are thirteen of us, you know. I told you that. Thirteen of us. We have been separated for such a long time, and now we must get together again.”

I kept on shuffling my way backwards. “You don’t know where they are?” I asked him.

Father Anton swayed. Then he looked up oddly and said, “They’ve been hidden. They’ve been sewn up and sealed, just like before. I was the only one who wasn’t taken with them. Now you must help me find them. You and the girl together. We need the girl.”

I shook my head tautly. “I’m not going to help you find or do anything. I’m getting right out of here and I’m going to get some help.”

Father Anton lifted one jerky leg out from under the bedclothes, then the other. He stood up unsteadily, his arms hanging by his sides, and he grinned at me. For a split second, I thought I saw a thin dark tongue flick from his mouth—a tongue as forked as a reptile’s—but then it flicked back again and I wasn’t sure if it was just an illusion or not.

“We will have to find the Reverend Taylor in England,” said Father Anton, in a soft, rustling voice. “Then we will have to discover where the Americans hid the rest of us. My lord Adramelech will be deeply pleased, I can assure you. He will reward you, monsieur, in a way that no man on earth has ever been rewarded before. You can be rich beyond any comprehension. You can be powerful as a thousand men. You can spend years indulging your tastes for the finest foods and the greatest wines. And you can have sex with any woman, any man, any animal, you choose, and your virility will be limitless.”

I didn’t know what to say or do. It seemed as though Father Anton had been completely taken over. But was he really possessed, or was he just suffering from nightmarish nerves? Maybe he’d taken too many heart pills, or drunk too much before he went to bed. I just couldn’t look at this elderly shambling priest in his long white nightshirt and believe that I was talking to a devil.

Father Anton took one staggering step towards me. I retreated even further.

“Father Anton,” I said, “you’re sick. Now, why don’t you lie down for a moment, and I’ll go and get a doctor.”

“Sick?” he hissed, “I’m not sick. I’m free.”

“Will you stay back, please?” I asked him. “I’m going to have to hit you if you come any nearer, and I don’t want to do that.”

“You amuse me,” whispered the priest. “But I am never amused for long. Father Anton was not amusing. Fortunately, he was weak. A man who believes in us is so much more susceptible than a man who doesn’t.”

“You took over Father Anton? You possessed him?”

“You could say so, yes.”

“What does that mean?”

Father Anton took another step nearer. “Possession is more physical than mental. I possess Father Anton now, because I am inside Father Anton.”

I went cold with foreboding. I said: “I don’t understand you. What do you mean—you’re inside Father Anton?”

The white-dressed priest came clumsily towards me. His expression was grey and blank, and apart from those dark, penetrating eyes, I might have been looking at a corpse.

“A man, like a demon, is a mechanical device,” he said, in a voice that was even less like Father Anton’s than before, and so much like the voice that I had heard in the tank that I knew —despite everything I was trying to do to persuade myself otherwise—that this was the devil we had tried to seal in the cellar, the disciple of Adramelech who had once brought plague and misery to Rouen.