Graham Masterton - The Devils of D-Day

I said nothing. I guessed I was five or six paces away from the door now. The old priest kept stepping woodenly towards me.

“From inside, I can manipulate his legs and his arms like a marionette,” said the devil. “I can look through the sockets of his eyes, and breathe through the cavities of his nostrils. It’s a secure home inside here, monsieur. Warm and bloody, and sweet with decay already. I could even seduce that shrivelled old housekeeper of his through his own dangling penis!”

I stared at the priest with mounting fright.

“Are you lying?” I taxed him, knowing he wasn’t. “My God, if you’re lying—”

“Your God won’t help you. He didn’t help Father Anton.”

“Well, where is Father Anton?” I demanded. “What have you done with him?”

The stiff figure marched so close that I could have reached out and touched him.

He said, in that coarse, throaty voice, “You’re almost standing in him.”

At first. I didn’t want to take my eyes off the devil. But then I glanced quickly down behind me, and I saw something that made my stomach tighten and turn over. On the floor beside the chest-of-drawers, spread out in pale mucus-coloured strings, clotted with dark-red kidneys and blueish cakes of liver, were Father Anton’s entrails. The devil had disembowelled him, and climbed into his empty body like some hideous kind of parasite.

The devil hadn’t moved. I looked back at it in fear and nausea, and said: “You’ve killed him.”

The devil grunted in evil amusement. “On the contrary, I think I’ve given the old fool some new life. He was almost dead anyway. His heart wouldn’t have lasted much longer, particularly after you dragged him out in all that snow.”

I paused, anxiously biting my lip. If the devil could rip Father Anton open, it could certainly do something equally disgusting to me. I looked quickly up at the ebony crucifix on the wall, and wondered if everything I’d seen in vampire movies was true. Was it really possible to ward off demons and ghosts with the Holy Cross?

Sidestepping Father Anton’s glutinous remains, I reached over the chest-of-drawers and wrenched down the crucifix. Then I brandished it right in the devil’s face, and shouted as heroically as I could: “ I dismiss you! In the name of the Lord, I dismiss you! ”

With one powerful blow, the old priest knocked the crucifix out of my hand. He gave a hissing snarl, and moved towards me again, his eyes as dark and cruel as an alligator’s.

I swung my arm back, and belted him across the side of the face with my candlestick. His head jerked to one side, and the base of the candlestick raised a weal; but no blood flowed because Father Anton’s heart wasn’t pumping any longer, and his occupied cadaver simply shuddered and stepped forward again.

“Your violence amuses me,” it whispered. “Now let’s see if mine amuses you .”

I edged back. I knew that I’d never make the door in time. I kept my eyes on Father Anton’s grey, bruised face, and I began to wish that I’d never seen that damned tank, and never dreamed of opening it.

“It’s such a pity, you know,” said Father Anton. “You could have assisted me so much. But I have only survived the centuries by protecting myself against the moral and the conscientious, and I’m afraid that I shall have to deal with you as I have dealt with so many others.”

I only had one gambit left. I reached into the pocket of my nightshirt and produced the small ring of hair which Eloise had given me, the hair which was supposed to prove that I had already paid my dues to the hierarchy of hell.

There was an electric silence. Father Anton raised his eyes and stared at the hair with undisguised malevolence. I thought for a moment that he was going to tear the hair aside, just like the crucifix. But then that forked tongue flickered again, and the demon moved warily aside, watching me with a hard, poisonous look that made me so nervous I could hardly speak.

“Well,” said Father Anton, keeping his eyes on the ring of hair. “I see that you’re less naïf than I thought. You’re not a witch, or a necromancer, and yet you keep the firstborn’s locks with you. Now, I wonder how you got hold of them?”

“That’s none of your business. Just keep back.”

Father Anton jerkily raised his hands in a gesture of conciliation. “There is no need for us to quarrel, monsieur. There is no need for us to fight. After all, you must remember that you can protect yourself only once with this ring of hair; and for each protection thereafter you will need to sacrifice some other first-born to Moloch. It will only take the rising of tomorrow’s sun, and its setting at evening, and all the power you have in that ring will have died with the day.”

“I’m not interested. I’ll have you behind bars by then.”

Father Anton threw back his head again, and laughed. Then, without warning, the door banged wide open and slammed shut again, and the windows exploded in a hailstorm of shattered glass. The sheets were whipped off the bed in a screaming indoor hurricane, and the furniture was thrown violently around the room, clattering and bumping.

Most hideous of all, Father Anton’s body was hurled this way and that, its arms flailing wildly in all directions, until there was a shrieking blast of wind, and it was thrown face-first into his dressing-table mirror, the sharp slices of glass opening up his face like a skinned chicken.

The noise died away. I lowered my arm away from my eyes. The room was very dark now, although the curtains were flapping open, and a grey strained light was reflected from the snow outside. With the windows broken, it was intensely cold.

Something small and shadowy was sitting in the far corner of the room., on the oaken post of Father Anton’s bed. I couldn’t make it out very well, but I could see stubs of horns and eyes that slanted like a goat’s. It made a dry, leathery sound as it shifted on its perch:

“Monsieur,” it whispered.

“What is it?” I asked, chilled.

“I must warn you, monsieur, not to interfere again. Next time, you will have no protection.”

“There isn’t going to be any next time,” I asserted.

“Monsieur,” said the devil, “I am going to find my brethren with or without your assistance. Although, if you have any taste for what is best tor you, you will do what you can to help me.”

“What about Madeleine?”

“She must come too.”

“That’s out of the question.”

The devil rustled, papery and ancient as Hell itself.

“I will strike a bargain with you,” it whispered. “If you help me to find my brethren, you and Madeleine, then I will restore this fool to life.”

“That’s insane.”

The devil laughed. “Insanity is a human word which almost always describes the activities of devils. Yes, in that sense, it is insane. But Adramelech can do it.”

“How about you? Can you do it?”

“It is not within my powers.”

I hefted my candlestick again. I wondered what the devil was capable of doing in the time it would take me to cross the room and smash him on his perch.

I said: “I thought only God could give the gift of life.”

The devil shifted its unseen claws. “Life is not a gift, my friend. It is a curse. Adramelech is quite capable of giving such a curse.”

My mouth felt very dry. I said, “How can I believe you? How can I trust you?”

There was a moment’s pause. The winter wind raised and lowered the drapes, and flakes of snow came tumbling over the window-ledge. The devil stirred, and said in that throaty, sexless voice, “You don’t doubt what I can do, surely?”

I moved cautiously across the rumpled rug, trying to get as near to the devil as I could.