Graham Masterton - The Devils of D-Day

Madeleine shouted, “No!” and I tried to grab the colonel’s arm in the darkness, but I guess he was practised at rugby or something, because he ducked deftly out of my way, and was gone.

We couldn’t see them, but we heard them. As Lieutenant Colonel Thanet dodged across the basement floor, the devils abruptly turned on him, their bodies rustling and clattering in a hideous excited rush. He reached the foot of the stairs, and I think he managed to stumble up the first two or three steps. But then he said, “ Ah! ” in an odd, choked voice, and I heard him trip and fall heavily on to the floor.

Madeleine said, “ Oh, mon Dieu… ” but both of us knew that it would be suicidal to go to help him. The darkness was total, and we would have been snapped up like baby mice tossed to a rat.

Suddenly, though, the ghastly hustle and flurry of devils died away; and out of the dark I saw a dim phosphorescent outline, which I recognized as Elmek. It shuddered and twisted, changing through images of bizarre and vicious reptiles to formless squids and threatening clouds of ectoplasm. Then, in a voice so grating that it was hardly recognisable, it spoke to its twelve brethren.

“Leave… the man… unharmed… He is a morsel… for our master… Adramelech…”

Gradually, the lights in the cellar began to glow again. They didn’t shine brightly, and all we could see of the devils was a grotesque huddle of shadowy shapes around the foot of the steps. But they showed that Lieutenant Colonel Thanet was still alive, crouched on the floor with his hands held over his head to protect himself from claws and teeth and leathery wings that had only just spared him.

“These mortals… will all be offered…” continued Elmek harshly. “That is their reward… for helping us…”

Madeleine took a step forward, and the cluster of devils whispered and rustled.

“Is that your idea of a bargain?” she said, in a clear tone. “Is that your idea of keeping your promises?”

Elmek laughed, and its laugh came out like shattered splinters of glass.

“You said… you wished… to serve Adramelech…”

“And we will! We will be the two most devoted mortals that his malevolence has ever known! But we cannot serve him if you use us as sacrifices!”

I stayed well back while Madeleine argued with Elmek. For one thing—although I couldn’t guess how—she seemed to have the situation under some kind of control. Either she hadn’t been levelling with me when we first met by the tank in Normandy, or else she was showing a side of her character I just hadn’t guessed at. But whichever it was, she was making a skilful play at keeping us alive, and that was all that mattered.

Apart from that, I stayed well back because those devils, those terrifying gargoyles who lived and breathed and ground their teeth in almost overwhelming blood-lust, were the shadowy stuff of nightmares, and I knew that if I came any closer, I would find out that the nightmares were real.

The devil Umbakrail raised its bony head from the crawling mass of demons, and I saw the dim basement lights blotted out by the narrow goatish shadow of its skull.

“ The highest act of devotion which a mortal can pay to Adramelech is to offer life, breath and blood. How can you say you are Adramelech’s loyal servant if you are reluctant to offer your greatest gifts? ”

Madeleine said, “I have a greater and more mysterious gift for your master Adramelech than my life, breath and blood.”

The devils whispered and murmured. They were exuding a stench now that made me feel as if I was trapped in a zoo. A sour, dry fetid odor like the urine of bears or apes.

Umbakrail said harshly, “ You will soon have the chance to prove what you have, mortal woman. We shall now call up Adramelech from his sleep of many years, and you shall have the honour of offering your gift directly. ”

Madeleine was silent for a moment, and then she said, “Very well,” and turned her back on the thirteen devilish acolytes of Adramelech as if they were no more vicious than thirteen chained dogs.

On the floor by the steps, Lieutenant Colonel Thanet coughed, and moaned. I called, “Colonel! How do you feel?”

He coughed again. “I don’t know… pretty rough. I think I broke a rib on the stairs. And something’s dug its claws into my back. I can feel the blood.”

Yet another thunderous rumble shook the basement, and the devils’ groans and whispers rose in a wave of discordant lust. Cholok said, “ It is time. It is time for the summoning. ”

While Madeleine and I kept ourselves back against the wall, the devils moved themselves into a semi-circle around the centre of the floor. I tried to look at them as they stood there in the dense, clotted shadows—tried to see what they really were. But they seemed to have shadows of their own making, actual cloaks of darkness, and all I could make out were scaly wings and curved horns and eyes that glistened and glowed with hellish lights. They were medieval devils of the most legendary kind—the devils that have plagued men and women from Europe’s earliest times. It was almost no surprise at all to find that they were not figments of some frustrated nun’s imagination, but that they walked the earth with real claws and real teeth, and that we have as much to fear from devils when the nights are dark as we have from muggers or murderers.

Madeleine bent towards me and whispered, “What you are going to see now will be frightening. You will be in danger of your life. But whatever happens, don’t panic or try to get away. You saw what happened to Lieutenant Colonel Thanet.”

I nodded, dumbly. The stench and the darkness were beginning to close in on me now, and I felt as if I was faced with some horrible but inevitable moment of fear, like sitting in a 747 with faulty landing-gear and knowing that you have to come down sometime. I think I would have done anything for a cigarette. I know I would have done anything to be somewhere else.

The devils began to chant some long litany in a language I couldn’t recognize. It had a curiously compulsive rhythm to it, a repetitive harshness that made me feel unexpectedly nauseous. The basement grew stuffier and stuffier, and it was impossible to take a breath that wasn’t ripe with the stench of demons. I wiped sweat from my forehead with the back of my sleeve, and tried to keep my stomach muscles tense so that I wouldn’t heave.

“ Adramelech chastu remlishthu narek. Adramelech hismarad yonluth. Adramelech chastu remlisthu narek. ”

At first, there was nothing but this unsettling chanting. But then I felt an odd sensation, a kind of singing metallic emptiness, as if I was under novacain at the dentist. The next thing I knew, the temperature dropped lower and lower and lower, and I had the feeling that the far wall of the basement had vanished, and that there was nothing there at all but a void of freezing darkness.

“ Adramelech chastu remlisthu narek. Adramelech hismarad yonluth. Adramelech chastu remlisthu narek. ”

Now, the walls of the basement seemed to dwindle away, and a chill astral wind blew across us. We appeared to be poised somewhere timeless and airless, and I couldn’t work out which was up and which was down, or how far away anything was, or how close.

The devils were still there, though. They were chanting their conjuration over and over again, in their harsh insect voices, and I could feel whatever it was that they were summoning draw nearer, the way you can feel someone approaching you in the pitch blackness of a darkened room. Something indescribably frightening was coming, called up by this evil and arcane chant that hadn’t been heard on earth since the Middle Ages. I thought I heard Lieutenant Colonel Thanet shrieking, but the piercing sound of it was overwhelmed by the devils’ litany, and by the endless emptiness all around us.