Graham Masterton - The Devils of D-Day

The voice didn’t answer my question. It simply said: “ You can help me, you know. You can open this prison. You can take me to join my brethren. You sound like a good man and true. ”

“Listen!” I shouted. “If you’re really inside there, tap on the turret! Let me hear that you’re in there!”

The voice laughed. “ I can do better than that. Believe me, I can do far better than that. ”

“I don’t understand.”

The voice laughed softly. “ Do you feel sick? ” it asked me. “ Do you feel as if you’re seized with cramps and pain? ”

I frowned. I did, as a matter of fact, feel nauseous. There was something in my stomach that was turning over and over—something foul and indigestible. I thought for a moment that it was something I ate for lunch; but then I was seized by a stomach spasm that made me realize I was going to be violently ill. It all happened in an instant. The next thing I knew, my gut was racked by the most terrible heaving, and my mouth had to stretch open wide as a torrent of revolting slush gushed out of me and splattered the hull of the tank. The vomiting went on and on until I was clutching my stomach and weeping from the sheer exhaustion of it.

Only then did I look at what had made me puke. Out of my stomach, out of my actual mouth, had poured thousands of pale twitching maggots, in a tide of bile. They squirmed and writhed all over the top of the tank, pink and half-transparent, and all I could do was clamber desperately off that hideous ruined Sherman and drop to the frozen grass, panting with pain and revulsion, and scared out of my mind.

Behind me, the voice whispered, “ You can help me, you know. You sound like a good man and true. ”

Father Anton carefully poured me a glass of Malmsey and brought it across his study at arm’s length, as if it was a medical specimen. I took it unsteadily, and said, “Thank you, father. That’s very kind.”

He waved his hand as if to say not at all, not at all . Then sat his baggy ancient body in an armchair opposite, and opened up his snuff box.

“So you went to hear the voices,” he said, taking a pinch of ground tobacco.

I nodded.

“You look, forgive me for saying so, as if they alarmed you.”

“Not them. It.”

Father Anton snorted, sneezed, and blew his nose like the Trump of Doom. Then he said, “Demons can be either. One demon can be them , or it , or whatever they please. A demon is a host of evils.”

I reached across to the small cherrywood sidetable and picked up my tape-recorder. “Whatever it is, father, it’s here, on tape, and it’s an it . One infernal it .”

“You recorded it? You mean, you did actually hear it?”

The old priest’s expression, which had been one of patient but not altogether unkind indulgence, subtly darkened and changed. He knew the voice or voices were real, because he had been to the tank himself and heard them. But for me to come along and tell him that I’d heard them, too—a perfect stranger without any kind of religious knowledge at all—well, that obviously disturbed him. Priests, I guess, are used to demons. They work, after all, in the spiritual front line, and they expect to be tempted and harassed by demonic manifestations. But when those manifestations are so evil and so powerful that they make themselves felt in the world of ordinary men, when the bad vibes are picked up by farmers and cartographers, then I reckon that most priests get to panic.

“I didn’t come around last night because I was too sick,” I told Father Anton. “I wanted to, but I couldn’t.”

“The tank brought on your sickness? Is that it?”

I nodded, and my throat still tightened at the thought of what had poured out of my mouth.

“Whatever it is inside that tank, it made me vomit worms and bile. It took me half a dozen whiskys and a handful of paracetamol to get me over it.”

Father Anton touched the ecclesiastical ring on his finger. “You were alone?” he asked me quietly.

“I went with Madeleine Passerelle. The daughter of Jacques Passerelle.”

Father Anton said gravely: “Yes. I know that the Passerelles have been troubled by the tank for a long time.”

“Unfortunately, Madeleine didn’t hear the voice firsthand. She stayed in the car because it was cold. But she’s heard the recording, and she saw for herself how sick I was. The Passerelles let me stay the night at the farm.”

Father Anton indicated the tape-recorder. “You’re going to play it for me?”

“If you want to listen.”

Father Anton regarded me with a soft, almost sad look on his face. “It has been a long time, monsieur, since anyone has come to me for help and guidance as you have. In my day, I was an exorcist and something of a specialist in demons and fallen angels. I will do everything I can to assist you. If what you have heard is a true demon, then we are facing great danger, because it is evidently powerful and vicious; but beguiling as well.”

He looked towards the empty fireplace. Outside, it was snowing again, but Father Anton obviously believed it was more spiritual to sit in the freezing cold than to light a fire. I must say that I personally preferred to toast my feet and worry about the spirituality of it later.

Father Anton said, “One thing I learned as an exorcist was that it is essential correctly to identify the demon with whom you are dealing. Some demons are easy to dispose of. You can say “The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, boo! ” and they vanish back to hell. But others are more difficult. Adramelech, for instance, who is mentioned in the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum , which I have on the shelves right here. Or Belial. Then there is Beelzebub, Satan’s successor, who was always notoriously difficult to banish. I never faced him myself, and it is probably best for me that I didn’t. But I have an interesting account of how he possessed a nun at the Ursuline Convent at Aix-le-Provence in the seventeenth century, and how it took seven weeks of determined exorcism to dismiss him back to the netherworld.”

“Father Anton,” I said, as kindly as I could. “This is all kind of medieval. I mean, what I’m trying to say is, we have something here that’s evil, but it’s modern.”

Father Anton smiled sadly. “Evil is never modern, monsieur. It is only persistent.”

“But what happens if we have an ancient demon right here?”

“Well,” said the priest. “Let us first hear the tape. Then perhaps we can judge who or what this voice might be. Perhaps it is Beelzebub himself, come to make a match of it.”

I wound back the cassette, pushed the “play” button, and laid the tape-recorder on the table. There was a crackling sound; then the clank of metal as the tape-recorder was set down on the turret of the tank; then a short silence, interspersed with the barking of that distant dog. Father Anton leaned forward so that he could hear better, and cupped his hand around one ear.

“You realize that what you have here is very rare,” he told me. “I have seen daguerrotypes and photographs of manifestations before, but never tape-recordings.”

The tape fizzed and whispered, and then that chilling, whispery voice said, “ You can help me, you know. ”

Father Anton stiffened, and stared across at me in undisguised shock.

The voice said: “ You sound like a good man. A good man and true. You can open this prison. You can take me to join my brethren. You sound like a good man and true. ”

Father Anton was about to say something, but I put my finger against my lips, warning him that there was more.

The voice went on: “ You can help me, you know. You and that priest. Look at him! Doesn’t that priest have something to hide? Doesn’t that priest have some secret lust, concealed under that holy cassock? ”