Graham Masterton: The Devils of D-Day

Father Anton nodded. “I have heard them myself. Anyone brave enough to go near the tank after dark can hear them.”

“You heard them yourself?”

“Not officially.”

“How about unofficially?”

The old priest wiped at his nose with his handkerchief. “Unofficially, of course, I made it my business. I last visited the tank three or four years ago, and spent several hours there in prayer. It didn’t do my rheumatism a great deal of good, but I am sure now that the tank is an instrument of evil works.”

“Did you hear anything distinct? I mean, what kind of voices were they?”

Father Anton chose his next sentence with care. “They were not, in my opinion, the voices of men.”

I frowned at him. “I don’t understand.”

“Monsieur, what can I tell you? They were not the voices of human spirits or of human ghosts.”

I didn’t know what to say after that. We sat in silence for a few minutes, and outside the day grew grainier and darker, tinged with that corroded green that always threatened snow. Father Anton seemed to be deeply buried in thought, but after a time he raised his head and said, “Is that all, monsieur? I have studies to continue.”

“Well, I guess so. The whole thing seems like a real mystery.”

“The ways of war are always a mystery, monsieur. I have heard many stories of strange and inexplicable events on battlefields, or in the concentration camps. Sometimes, holy miracles occur, visitations by saints. I have a parishioner who fought at the Somme, and he swears he was visited every night by Saint Therese. Then again, monsters and agents of hell have been seen, seeking out the cowardly and the vicious. It was said that Heinrich Reutemann, the SS commandant, kept at Dachau a dog that was possessed by the devil.”

“And this tank?”

The pale withered hands formed their reverent steeple. “Who knows, monsieur? It is beyond my comprehension.”

I thanked him, and got up to leave. His room was like a dark musty cave. I said, “Do you think it’s dangerous?”

He didn’t turn his head. “The manifestations of evil are always dangerous, my friend. But the greatest protection from evil is a steadfast belief in Our Lord.”

I stood by the door for a moment, straining my eyes to see him through the gloom. “Yes,” I said and then went down the cold and silent marble staircases to the front door, and out into the wintry street.

I didn’t drive straight there, partly because I was waiting for the late afternoon to grow darker, and partly because the whole thing made me unusually nervous. By seven o’clock, though, after a roundabout tour through the muddy shuttered villages of the Route Scénique of the Orne Valley; past farmyards and peeling houses and roadside shrines where pale effigies of Christ crucified leaned mournfully into the evening frost; past inkblot trees and cold whispering fields; I arrived at the Passerelle’s farm, and drove into the yard.

The evening was bitter and still when I climbed out of the Citröen and walked across to the farmhouse door. A dog was yapping at some other farm, way across the valley; but here everything was quiet. I knocked on the door and waited.

Madeleine came to the door. She was wearing a blue check cowboy shirt and jeans, and she looked as if she’d just finished changing a wheel on a tractor.

“Dan,” she said, but she didn’t sound surprised. “You left something here?”

“No, no. I came back for you.”

“For me? Je ne comprends pas .”

I said, “Can I come in? It’s like the North Pole out here. I only wanted to ask you something.”

“Of course,” she told me, and opened the door wider.

The kitchen was warm and empty. I sat down at the broad pine table, scarred from a hundred years of knives and hot saucepans, and she went across to the corner cupboard and poured me a small glass of brandy. Then she sat down opposite, and said, “Are you still thinking about the tank?”

“I went to see Father Anton.”

She smiled faintly. “I thought you would.”

“Am I that easy to read?”

“I don’t think so,” she smiled “But you seem like the kind of man who doesn’t like to leave puzzles unsolved. You make maps, so your whole life is spent unravelling mysteries. And this one, of course, is a very special enigma indeed.”

I sipped my brandy. “Father Anton says he’s heard the voices himself.”

She stared down at the table. Her finger traced the pattern of a flower that had been scorched into the wood by a hot fish-kettle. She commented, “Father Anton is very old.”

“You mean he’s senile?”

“I don’t know. But his sermons ramble these days. Perhaps he could have imagined these things.”

I said, “Maybe he could. But I’d still like to find out for myself.”

She glanced up. “You want to hear them for yourself?”

“Certainly. I’d like to make a tape-recording, too. Has anyone ever thought of doing that?”

“Dan—not many people have ever gone to listen to the voices on purpose.”

“No, I know that. But that’s what I want to do tonight. And I was hoping you’d come along with me.”

She didn’t answer straight away, but stared across the kitchen as if she was thinking of something quite different. Her hair was tied back in a knot, which didn’t suit her too much, but then I guess a girl doesn’t worry too much about the charisma of her coiffure when she’s mucking out cows. Almost unconsciously, she crossed herself, and then she looked back at me. “You really want to go?”

“Well, sure. There has to be some kind of explanation.”

“Americans always need explanations?”

I finished my brandy, and shrugged. “I guess it’s a national characteristic. In any case, I was born and bred in Mississippi.”

Madeleine bit her lip. She said, “Supposing I asked you not to go?”

“Well, you can ask me. But I’d have to say that I’m going anyway. Listen, Madeleine, there’s a fascinating story in this. There’s some kind of weird thing going on in that old tank and I want to know what it is.”

“ C’est malin ,” she said. “It is wicked.”

I reached across the old table and laid my hand over hers. “That’s what everybody says, but so far I haven’t seen anything that proves it. All I want to do is find out what the voices are saying, if there are any voices, and then we can go from there. I mean, I can’t say that I’m not scared. I think it’s very scarey. But a whole lot of scarey things turn out to be real interesting once you take the trouble to check them out.”

“Dan, please. It’s more than simply scarey.”

“How can you say that unless you investigate it?” I asked her. “I don’t knock superstition, but here’s a superstition we can actually test for ourselves.”

She took back her hand, and crossed her arms across her breasts as if to protect herself from the consequences of what she was about to say. “Dan,” she whispered. “The tank killed my mother.”

I raised an eyebrow. “The tank did what?

“It killed my mother. Well, it was responsible. Father isn’t sure, but Eloise knows it, and I know it. I have never told anyone else, but then nobody else has shown such interest in the tank as you. I have to warn you, Dan. Please.”

“How could the tank have killed your mother? It doesn’t move, does it? The guns don’t fire?”

She turned her elegant Norman profile away from me, and spoke in a steady, modulated whisper. “It was last year, late in summer. Five of our herd died from disease. Mother said it was the tank that had done it. She always blamed the tank for everything that went wrong. If it rained and our hay rotted she would blame the tank. Even if one of her cakes wouldn’t rise. But last year she said she was going to fix the tank for ever. Eloise tried to persuade her to leave it alone, but she wouldn’t listen. She went down the road with holy water, sprinkled it across the tank, and spoke the dismissal of demons.”