The Devils of D-Day

ONE

I could see them coming from almost a mile away: two small muffled figures on bicycles, their scarves wound tightly around their faces, pedalling between the white winter trees. As they came nearer, I could hear them talking, too, and make out the clouds of chilly vapour that clung around their mouths. It was Normandy in December—misty and grey as a photograph—and a sullen red sun was already sinking behind the forested hills. Apart from the two French labourers cycling slowly towards me, I was alone on the road, standing with my surveyor’s tripod in the crisp frosted grass, my rented yellow Citröen 2CV parked at an ungainly angle on the nearby verge. It was so damned cold that I could hardly feel my hands or my nose, and I was almost afraid to stamp my feet in case my toes broke off.

The men came nearer. They were old, with donkey-jackets and berets, and one of them was carrying a battered army rucksack on his back with a long French loaf sticking out of it. Their bicycle tyres left white furry tracks on the hoar frost that covered the road. There wasn’t much traffic along here, in the rural depths of the Suisse Normande, except for occasional tractors and even more occasional Citröen-Maseratis zipping past at ninety miles an hour in blizzards of ice.

I called, “Bonjour, messieurs,” and one of the old men slowed his bicycle and dismounted. He wheeled his machine right up to my tripod and said, “Bonjour, monsieur, Qu’est-ce que vous faites?”

I said: “My French isn’t too good. You speak English?”

The man nodded.

“Well,” I said, pointing across the valley towards the cold silvery hills, “I’m making a map. Une carte.”

“Ah, oui,” said the old man. “Une carte.”

The other old man, who was still sitting astride his bicycle, pulled down his scarf from his face to blow his nose.

“It’s for the new route?” he asked me. “The new highway?”

“No, no. This is for someone’s history book. It’s a map of the whole of this area for a book about World War II.”

“Ah, la guerre,” nodded the first old man. “Une carte de la guerre, hunk?”

One of the men took out a blue packet of Gitanes, and offered me one. I didn’t usually smoke French cigarettes, partly because of their high tar content and partly because they smelled like burning horsehair, but I didn’t want to appear discourteous—not after only two days in northern France. In any case, I was glad of the spot of warmth that a glowing cigarette tip gave out.

We smoked for a while, and smiled at each other dumbly, the way people do when they can’t speak each other’s language too well. Then the old man with the loaf said, “They fought all across this valley; and down by the river, too. The Orne. I remember it very clear.”

The other old man said, “Tanks, you know? Here, and here. The Americans coming across the road from Clécy, and the Germans retreating back up the Orne valley. A very hard battle just there, you see, by the Pont D’Ouilly. But that day the Germans stood no chance. Those American tanks came across the bridge at Le Vey and cut them off. At night, from just here, you could see German tanks burning all the way up to the turn in the river.”

I blew out smoke and vapour. It was so gloomy now that I could hardly make out the heavy granite shoulders of the rocks at Ouilly, where the Orne river widened and turned before sliding over the dam at Le Vey and foaming northwards in the spectral December evening. The only sound was the faint rush of water, and the doleful tolling of the church bell from the distant village, and out here in the frost and the cold we might just as well have been alone in the whole continent of Europe.

The old man with the loaf said, “It was fierce, that fighting. I never saw it so fierce. We caught three Germans but it was no difficulty. They were happy to surrender. I remember one of them said, “Today, I fought the devil.”

The other old man nodded. “Der Teufel. That’s what he said. I was there. This one and me, we’re cousins.”

I smiled at them both. I didn’t really know what to say.

“Well,” said the one with the loaf, “we must get back for nourishment.”

“Thanks for stopping,” I told him. “It gets pretty lonely standing out here on your own.”

“You’re interested in the war?” asked the other old man.

I shrugged. “Not specifically. I’m a cartographer. A map-maker.”

“There are many stories about the war. Some of them are just pipe-dreams. But round here there are many stories. Just down there, about a kilometre from the Pont D’Ouilly, there’s an old American tank in the hedge. People don’t go near it at night. They say you can hear the dead crew talking to each other inside it, on dark nights.”

“That’s pretty spooky.”

The old man pulled up his scarf so that only his old wrinkled eyes peered out. He looked like a strange Arab soothsayer, or a man with terrible wounds. He tugged on his knitted gloves, and said, in a muffled voice, “These are only stories. All battlefields have ghosts, I suppose. Anyway, le potage s’attend.”

The two old cousins waved once, and then pedalled slowly away down the road. It wasn’t long before they turned a corner and disappeared behind the misty trees, and I was left on my own again, numb with cold and just about ready to pack everything away and grab some dinner. The sun was mouldering away behind a white wedge of descending fog now, anyway, and I could hardly see my hands in front of my face, let alone the peaks of distant rocks.

I stowed my equipment in the back of the 2CV, climbed into the driver’s scat, and spent five minutes trying to get the car started. The damned thing whinnied like a horse, and I was just about to get out and kick it like a horse deserved, when it coughed and burst into life. I switched on the headlights, U-turned in the middle of the road, and drove back towards Falaise and my dingy hotel.

I was only about a half mile down the road, though, when I saw the sign that said Pont D’Ouilly, 4 km. I looked at my watch. It was only half past four, and I wondered if a quick detour to look at the old cousins’ haunted tank might be worth while. If it was any good, I could take a photograph of it tomorrow, in daylight, and Roger might like it for his book. Roger Kellman was the guy who had written the history for which I was drawing all these maps, The Days After D-Day, and anything to do with military memorabilia would have him licking his lips like Sylvester the cat.

I turned off left, and almost immediately wished I hadn’t. The road went sharply downhill, twisting and turning between trees and rocks, and it was slithery with ice, mud and half-frozen cowshit. The little Citröen bucked and swayed from side to side, and the windshield steamed up so much from my panicky breathing that I had to slide open the side window and lean out; and that wasn’t much fun, with the outside temperature well down below freezing.

I passed silent, dilapidated farms, with sagging barns and closed windows. I passed grey fields in which cows stood like grubby brown-and-white jigsaws, frozen saliva hanging from their hairy lips. I passed shuttered houses, and slanting fields that went down to the dark winter river. The only sign of life that I saw was a tractor, its wheels so caked with ochre clay that they were twice their normal size, standing by the side of the road with its motor running. There was nobody in it.

Eventually, the winding road took me down between rough stone walls, under a tangled arcade of leafless trees, and over the bridge at Ouilly. I kept a lookout for the tank the old cousins had talked about, but the first time I missed it altogether; and I spent five minutes wrestling the stupid car back around the way it had come, stalling twice and almost getting jammed in a farm gateway. In the greasy farmyard, I saw a stable door open, and an old woman with a grey face and a white lace cap stare out at me with suspicion, but then the door closed again, and I banged the 2CV into something resembling second gear and roared back down the road.

You could have missed the tank in broad daylight, let alone at dusk in the middle of a freezing Norman winter. Just as I came around the curve of the road, I saw it, and I managed to pull up a few yards away, with the Citröen’s suspension complaining and groaning. I stepped out of the car into a cold pile of cow dung, but at least when it’s chilled like that it doesn’t smell. I scraped my shoe on a rock by the side of the road and then walked back to look at the tank.

It was dark and bulky, but surprisingly small. I guess we’re so used to enormous Army tanks these days that we forget how tiny the tanks of World War II actually were. Its surface was black and scaly with rust, and it was so interwoven with the hedge that it looked like something out of Sleeping Beauty, with thorns and brambles twisted around its turret, laced in and out of its tracks, and wound around its stumpy cannon. I didn’t know what kind of a tank it was, but I guessed it was maybe a Sherman or something like that. It was obviously American: there was a faded and rusted white star on its side, and a painting of some kind that time and the weather had just about obliterated. I kicked the tank, and it responded with a dull, empty booming sound.

A woman came walking slowly along the road with an aluminium milk pail. She eyed me cautiously as she approached, but as she drew near she stopped and laid down her pail. She was quite young, maybe twenty-three or twenty-four, and she wore a red spotted headscarf. She was obviously the farmer’s daughter. Her hands were rough from pulling cows’ udders in cold dawn barns, and her cheeks were bright crimson, like a painted peasant doll’s. I said, “Bonjour, mam’selle,” and she nodded in careful reply.

She said, “You are American?”

“That’s right.”

“I thought so. Only Americans stop and look.”

“You speak good English.”

She didn’t smile. “I was au-pair in England, in Pinner, for three years.”

“But then you came back to the farm?”

“My mother died. My father was all alone.”

I said, “He has a loyal daughter.”

“Yes,” she said, lowering her eyes. “But I expect I will go away again one day. It’s very solitaire out here. Very lonesome.”

I turned back to the grim brooding bulk of the abandoned tank. “I was told this was haunted,” I said. “At night, you can hear the crew talking.”

The girl said nothing.

I waited for a while, and then turned again and looked across the road at her. “Is that true, do you think?” I asked her. “That it’s haunted?”

“You mustn’t speak about it,” she said. “If you speak about it, it turns the milk.”

I glanced down at her aluminium pail. “You’re serious? If you speak about the ghosts in the tank, the milk goes bad?”

She whispered, “Yes.”

I thought I’d heard everything, but this was amazing. Here, in modern France, an intelligent young lady was whispering in the presence of a beaten-up old Sherman tank, in case her fresh milk curdled. I rested my hand on the tank’s cold rusted mudguard, and I felt as though I’d found something quite special. Roger would have adored it.

“Have you heard the ghosts yourself?” I asked her.

She quickly shook her head.

“Do you know anybody who has? Anybody I could speak to?”

She picked up her pail, and started to walk off down the road. But I crossed over and kept pace with her, even though she wouldn’t look at me, and wouldn’t answer.

“I don’t want to be nosey, mam’selle. But we’re getting a book together, all about D-Day and what happened afterwards. And this seems like the kind of story I could really use. I mean it. Surely someone’s heard the voices, if they’re real?”

She stopped walking, and stared at me hard. She was quite pretty for a Norman peasant. She had that straight nose you see on eleventh-century women in the Bayeux tapestry, and opalescent green eyes. Underneath her mud-spattered jerkin and her sensible skirt and her rubber boots, she had quite a noticeable figure, too.

I said, “I don’t know what you’ve got to be so sensitive about. It’s only a story, right? I mean, ghosts don’t exist, right?”

She kept staring. Then she said, “It’s not a ghost, it’s different from that.”

“What do you mean, different?”

“I can’t tell you.”

She started walking again, and this time she walked so quickly I had difficulty keeping up. I guess if you walk three miles to the cowsheds and back twice a day, your leg muscles get themselves built up pretty tough. By the time we’d reached the mossy stone gate where I’d turned my car round, I was wheezing for breath, and my throat was sore from the chill foggy air.

“This is my farm,” she said. “I have to go in now.”

“You won’t tell me any more?”

“There’s nothing to tell. The tank has been there since the war. That’s more than thirty years, isn’t it? How could you hear voices in a tank after thirty years?”

“That’s what I’m asking you,” I told her.

She turned her face away in profile. She had sad, curved lips; and with that straight aristocratic nose, she was almost beautiful. I said, “Will you tell me your name?”

She gave a small, fleeting smile. “Madeleine Passerelle. Et vous?”

“Dan, short for Daniel, McCook.”

The girl extended her hand, and we shook. “I am pleased to have made your acquaintance,” she said. “Now I must go.”

“Can I see you again? I’m up here again tomorrow. I have a map to finish.”

She shook her head.

“I’m not trying to pick you up,” I assured her. “Maybe we could just go for a drink. Do you have a bar around here?”

I looked around at the cold soggy countryside, and the mournful cows gathering at the fence across the road.

“Well, maybe a small hotel?” I corrected myself.

Madeleine swung her pail of milk. “I think I am too busy,” she said. “And besides, my father needs a lot of care.”

“Who’s the old woman?”

“Which old woman?”

“The old woman I saw at the stable door when I turned my car round. She had a white lace cap.”

“Oh… that’s Eloise. She’s lived at the farm all her life. She nursed my mother when she was sick. Now, there’s someone to speak to if you’re interested in stories about the tank. She believes in every superstition.”

I coughed in the cold twilight. “Could I speak to her now?”

Madeleine said: “Not tonight. Perhaps another day.”

She turned, and started to walk across the farmyard, but I caught up with her and grabbed the handle of her milking pail. “Listen, how about tomorrow?” I asked her. “I could come around noon. Could you spare a few minutes then?”

I was determined not to let her get away without making some kind of firm commitment. The tank and its ghosts were pretty interesting, but Madeleine Passerelle herself was even more so. You don’t usually get much action when you’re drawing up a military map of northern France, and a few glasses of wine and a tumble in the cowshed with the farmer’s daughter, even in the deep midwinter, was a lot more appealing than silent and solitary meals in the brown garlic-smelling mausoleum that my hotel jocularly called its dining room.

Madeleine smiled. “Very well. Come and eat with us. But make it at eleven-thirty. We lunch early in France.”

“You’ve made my week. Thanks a lot.”

I reached forward to kiss her, but my foot slid on the churned-up mud of the farmyard, and I almost lost my balance. I saved most of my dignity by turning my slide into three rapid steps, but the kiss was lost to the freezing air, a puff of vapour that vanished in the dusk. Amused, Madeleine said, “Au revoir, Monsieur McCook. Until tomorrow.”

I watched her walk across the yard and disappear through the stable door. A cold wet drizzle was beginning to sift down from the evening sky, and it would probably turn into snow in an hour or two. I left the farm and began to trudge back down the road towards the Pont D’Ouilly, where I’d left my car.

Along the road, it was silent and soaking and dark. I kept my hands shoved deep in my overcoat pockets and my scarf pulled up over my mouth. Way over to my right, I could hear the Orne rushing over the brownish granite rocks of its shallow bed, and on my left, just beyond the hedge, reared the slabby blocks of the cliffs that gave this part of Normandy its name—Swiss Normandy. The rocks were jacketed in slime and moss, and laced up with hanging tree-roots, and you could just imagine strange and malignant creatures lurking in their crevices and cracks.

I hadn’t realized how far I’d walked along the road with Madeleine. It took me almost five minutes before I saw my yellow car by the verge, and the huddled black bulk of the abandoned tank. The drizzle was turning into large wet flakes of half-melted snow now, and I pulled my coat collar up and walked more quickly.

Who knows what odd tricks your eyes can play in the snow and the dark? When your eyes are tired, you can see dark shadows like cats slipping away at the corner of your field of vision. Shadows can seem to stand on their own, and trees can seem to move. But that evening, on the road to Pont D’Ouilly, I was sure that my eyes weren’t playing up, and that I did see something. There’s a French road sign which warns that the night can deceive you, and possibly it did, but I still think that what I glimpsed wasn’t an optical illusion. It was enough to make me stop in the road, and feel a tight chill that was even colder than the evening air.

Through the tumbling snow, a few yards away from the derelict tank, I saw a small bony figure, white in the darkness, not much taller than a child of five, and it seemed to be hopping or running. The sight of it was so sudden and strange that I was momentarily terrified; but then I ran forward through the snow and shouted, “Hey! You!”

My shout echoed flatly back from the nearby rocks. I peered into the dark but there was nobody there. Only the rusting bulk of the Sherman tank, woven into the brambles of the hedge. Only the wet road, and the noise of the river. There was no sign of any figure; no sign of any child. I walked back across to my car and checked it for damage, in case the figure had been a vandal or a thief, but the Citröen was unmarked. I climbed thoughtfully inside and sat there for a minute or two drying my face and hair with my handkerchief, wondering what the hell was going on around here.

I started the Citröen’s engine, but just before I drove off I took one last look at the tank. It gave me a really peculiar feeling, thinking that it had been decaying by this roadside since 1944, unmoved, and that here at this very place the American Army had fought to liberate Normandy. For the first time in my map-making career, I felt history was alive; I felt history move under my feet. I wondered if the skeletons of the crew were still inside the tank, but I decided that they’d probably been taken out years ago and given a decent burial. The French were beautifully and gravely respectful to the remains of the men who had died trying to liberate them.

I released the Citröen’s brake and drove down the gloomy road, across the bridge, and back up the winding hill to the main highway. The snow was crowding my windshield, and the car’s tacky little windshield wipers were having about as much success in clearing it away as two geriatrics sweeping up the ticker-tape after Lindy’s parade through Wall Street. When I joined the main stream of traffic, I almost collided with a Renault which was bombing through the snow at eighty-five. Vive la vélocité, I thought to myself, as I crawled back towards Falaise at twenty.

Next day, in the high-ceilinged hotel dining room, I ate a solemn breakfast of croissants and coffee and confitures, watching myself in the mottled mirrors and trying to decipher what the hell was happening in the world today from a copy of Le Figaro on a long stick. Across the room, a rotund Frenchman with waxed whiskers and a huge white napkin tucked in his shirt collar was wolfing down breadrolls as though he was trying to put up the price of shares in the bakery industry. A waitress in black with a pinched face rapped around the black-and-white tiled floor in court shoes and made sure you felt you were lonely and unwanted, and that you only wanted breakfast because you were an unpardonable pest. I thought of changing hotels, but then I thought of Madeleine, and things didn’t seem too bad.

I spent most of the morning on the new curve of road that comes into Clécy from the south-east. A dry wind had lifted away most of the snow during the night, but it was still intensely cold, and the village lay frosted in its valley, with the broad hump of the hills far behind it, and tiny villagers came and went from its doors, tending their gardens or their washing, or fetching in logs, and the hours rang from the tall church spire, and New York seemed a very long way away.

Maybe my mind was distracted, but I only managed to finish half the readings that I’d hoped to take, and by eleven o’clock, as the church tolled its hour, I was wrapped up and ready to drive across to Pont D’Ouilly. I’d taken the trouble to stop at a store in the village and buy a very reasonable bottle of Bordeaux, just in case Madeleine’s father needed a little appeasing. I also bought, for Madeleine herself, a box of crystallised fruit. They’re very big on crystallised fruit in Normandy.

The rented Citröen coughed and choked, but finally found its way down the twisting road to the bridge. The countryside didn’t look very much more hospitable by daylight than it had by night. There was a cold silvery haze over the fields, and mist was hanging under the elms like soiled net curtains. The cows were still there, standing patiently in the chill, chewing the colourless grass and breathing out so much steam they looked like roomfuls of heavy smokers. I drove over the stone bridge, with the Orne gargling beneath me, and then I slowed down so that I could take a look at the tank.

There it was—silent and broken—wound in brambles and leafless creeper. I stopped the car for a moment and slid open my window so that I could see the corroded wheels, the collapsed tracks, and the small dark turret with its scaly sides. There was something deeply sinister and sorrowful about it. It reminded me of the abandoned Mulberry harbour that still lies off the shore of Arromanches, on Normandy’s channel coast, a grim memorial to June 6, 1944, that no stone monument or statue could ever adequately replace.

I looked around at the dank hedgerow for a while, and then I started the car up again and drove along to Madeleine’s farm. I turned into the gate and splashed across the muddy yard, with chickens flapping and skittering all around me, and a flock of grubby geese rushing away like athletes on a cross-country run.

I stepped out of the car, being careful where I put my feet, and reached in for my presents. A door opened behind me, and I heard someone walking my way. A voice said, “Bonjour, monsieur. Qu’est-ce que vous voulez?”

A short Frenchman in muddy pants, muddy boots and a muddy brown jacket was standing in the yard with his hands in his pockets. He had a long Norman face, and he was smoking a Gauloise that appeared to be permanently stuck to his lip. His beret was pulled well down to his ears, which made him look pretty rural, but his eyes were bright and he looked like the kind of farmer who didn’t miss a trick.

“My name’s Dan McCook,” I told him. “Your daughter Madeleine invited me for lunch. Er—pour déjeuner?”

The farmer nodded. “Yes, monsieur. She tells me this. I am Jacques Passerelle.”

We shook hands. I offered him the bottle of wine, and said, “I brought you this. I hope you like it. It’s a bordeaux.”

Jacques Passerelle paused for a moment, and reached in his breast pocket for a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles. He hooked them around his ears, and scrutinised the bottle closely. I felt as if I’d had the down-right effrontery to give a vacuum pack of A&P bacon to a Kentucky hog farmer. But the Frenchman nodded again, put away his spectacles, and said, “Merci bien, monsieur. I save this for dimanche.”

He ushered me through the stable door into the kitchen. The old woman Eloise was there, in her dark grey dress and her white lace cap, boiling a huge copper pan full of apples. Jacques introduced me, and we shook hands. Her fingers were soft and dry, and she was wearing a silver ring with a miniature Bible on it. She had one of those flat, pale, wrinkled faces that you sometimes see staring out of the windows of old people’s homes, or from the windows of buses on old people’s outings. But she seemed to be independent and strong around the Passerelle home, and she walked with a straight back.

She said, “Madeleine told me you were interested in the tank.”

I glanced at Jacques, but he didn’t seem to be listening. I coughed, and said, “Sure. I’m making a map of these parts for a book about D-Day.”

“The tank has been here since July, 1944. Mid-July. It died on a very hot day.”

I looked at her. Her eyes were washed-out blue, like the sky after a spring shower, and you didn’t quite know whether she was looking inwards or outwards. I said, “Maybe we can talk after lunch.”

Out of the steamy, apple-aromatic kitchen, we walked along a narrow dark hallway with a bare boarded floor. Jacques opened a door in the side of the hall, and said, “You would care for an aperitif?”

This was obviously his front parlour, the room he kept only for visitors. It was gloomy, heavily-curtained, and it smelled of dust and stale air and furniture polish. There were three chintz armchairs in the style you can see in any large French meubles store, a copper warming-pan hanging on the wall, a plastic madonna with a small container of holy water, and a dark-varnished sideboard with photographs of weddings and grandchildren, each on its own lace doily. A tall clock ticked away the winter morning, weary and slow.

“I’d like a calvados, please,” I told Jacques. “I don’t know anything better for warming yourself up on a cold day. Not even Jack Daniels.”

Jacques took two small glasses from the sideboard, uncorked the calvados, and poured it out. He handed one over, and lifted his own glass solemnly.

“Santé,” he said quietly, and downed his drink in one gulp.

I sipped mine more circumspectly. Calvados, the apple-brandy of Normany, is potent stuff, and I did want to do some sensible work this afternoon.

“You have been here in summer?” asked Jacques.

“No, never. This is only my third trip to Europe.”

“It’s not so pleasant in winter. The mud, and the frost. But in summer, this is very beautiful. We have visitors from all over France, and Europe. You can hire boats and row along the river.”

“It sounds terrific. Do you have many Americans?”

Jacques shrugged. “One or two. Some Germans sometimes, too. But not many come here. Pont D’Ouilly is still a painful memory. The Germans ran away from here as if the devil himself were after them.”

I swallowed some more calvados, and it glowed down my throat like a shovelful of hot coke. “You’re the second person who’s said that,” I told him. “Der Teufel.”

Jacques gave a small smile, which reminded me of the wav that Madeleine smiled.

“I must change my clothes,” he said. “I don’t like to sit down for lunch looking like a mud man.”

“Go ahead,” I told him. “Will Madeleine be down.”

“In a moment. She wanted to put on cosmetics. Well… we don’t have many visitors.”

Jacques went off to clean himself up, and I went over to the window and looked out across the orchard. The fruit trees were all bare now, and pruned, and the grass was white with cold. A bird perched for a moment on the rough fence of silver-birch at the far end of the garden, and then fluttered off. I turned back into the room.

On the sideboard, one of the photographs showed a young girl with a wavy 1940s hairstyle, and I guessed that must have been Madeleine’s mother. There was a colour picture of Madeleine as a baby, with a smiling priest in the background, and a formal portrait of Jacques in a high white collar. Besides all these was a bronze model of a medieval cathedral, with a ring of twisted hair around its spire. I couldn’t really work out what that was supposed to mean, but then I wasn’t a Roman Catholic, and I wasn’t really into religious relics.

I was just about to pick up the model to take a better look when the parlour door opened. It was Madeleine, in a pale cream cotton dress, her dark-blonde hair brushed back and held with tortoiseshell combs, her lips bright red with lipstick.

“Please—” she said. “Don’t touch that.”

I raised my hands away from the tiny cathedral. “I’m sorry. I was only going to take a look.”

“It’s something of my mother’s.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right. don’t think about it. Did father give you a drink?”

“Sure. A calvados. It’s making my ears ring already Are you going to join me?”

She shook her head. “I can’t drink it. They gave it to me once when I was twelve and I was sick. Now, I only drink wine.”

She sat down, and I sat opposite. “You shouldn’t have dressed up specially for me,” I told her. “But all the same, you look beautiful.”

She blushed. Not much, just a small tinge on the cheeks, but it was a blush all right. I hadn’t come across that kind of modesty for years.

I said, “I had a real weird experience last night. I was walking back to my car, and I could have sworn I saw something on the road.”

She looked up. “What was it?”

“Well, I’m not too sure. It was like a small child, but it was too thin and bony for a small child.”

She looked at me for several silent seconds. Then she said, “I don’t know. It must have been the snow.”

“It scared the hell out of me, whatever it was.”

She picked absentmindedly at the braiding on the arm of her chair. “It’s the atmosphere, the ambience, around the tank. It makes people feel things, see things, that aren’t there. Eloise will tell you some of the stories if you want.”

“You don’t believe them yourself?”

She shrugged. “What’s the use? All you do is frighten yourself. I’d rather think of real things, not of ghosts and spirits.”

I put down my glass on the small side-table. “I get the feeling you don’t like it here.”

“Here, in my father’s house?”

“No—in Pont D’Ouilly. It’s not exactly the entertainment centre of northern France, is it?”

Madeleine stood up and walked across to the window. Against the grey winter light, she was a soft dark silhouette. She said, “I don’t think so much of entertainment. If you’ve lived here, in Pont D’Ouilly, then you know what sadness is, and anything at all is better than sadness.”

“Don’t tell me you loved and lost.”

She smiled. “I suppose you could say that. I loved life and I lost my love of life.”

I said, “I’m not sure I understand.” But at that moment, a gong rang from across the hall, and Madeleine turned and said, “Lunch is ready. We’d better go in.”

Today, we had lunch in the dining room, although I suspected that they usually ate in the kitchen, especially when they had three inches of mud on their boots and appetites like horses. Eloise had set out a huge tureen of hot brown onion soup on the oval table, with crisp garlic bread, and I suddenly realized that I was starved of home cooking. Jacques was already standing at the head of the table in a neatly-pressed brown suit, and when we had all taken our seats, he bowed his thinning scalp towards us, and said grace.

“Oh Lord, who provides all that we eat, thank you for this nourishment. And protect us from the conversations of evil, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.”

I looked across the table at Madeleine, and tried to put the question in my eyes. The conversations of evil. What was that all about? The voices in the tank? Or what? But Madeleine’s attention was fastened on the large tureen, as Eloise dished up piping-hot platefuls of transparent brown soup, and whether she intended to avoid my gaze of not, she didn’t look up again until her father had started to talk.

“The upper field is frozen,” he said, dabbing his lips with his napkin. “I ploughed a hectare this morning, and there was ice coming up with the soil. It hasn’t been so cold here for ten years.”

Eloise said, “There are worse winters to come. The dogs know it.”

“The dogs?” I asked her.

“That’s right, monsieur. When a dog stays close to home, and when he calls in the night, that’s when the nights will grow cold for three years, one after another.”

“You believe that? Or is that just a French country saying?”

Eloise frowned at me. “It is nothing to do with belief. It is true. I have seen it happen for myself.”

Jacques put in, “Eloise has a way with nature, Mr. McCook. She can heal you with dandelion broth, or send you to sleep with burdock and thyme.”

“Can she exorcise ghosts?”

Madeleine breathed, “Dan—” but Eloise was not put out. She examined me with those watery old eyes of hers, and almost smiled.

“I hope you don’t think I’m impertinent,” I said. “But it seems to me that everybody around here is kind of anxious about that tank, and if you could exorcise it…”

Eloise slowly shook her head. “Only a priest can exorcise,” she said gently, “and the only priest who will believe us is too old and too weak for such things.”

“You really believe it’s haunted?”

“It depends on what you mean by ‘haunted’, monsieur.”

“Well, as far as I can make out, the dead crew are supposed to be heard talking to each other at night. Is that it?”

“Some say that,” said Jacques.

I glanced at him. “And what do others say?”

“Others will not talk about it at all.”

Eloise spooned up her soup carefully. “Nobody knows much about the tanks. But they were not like the usual American tanks. They were different, very different, and Father Anton, our priest, said they were visitations from L’enfer, from hell itself.”

Madeleine said, “Eloise—do we have to talk about it? We don’t want to spoil the lunch.”

But Eloise raised her hand. “It doesn’t matter This young man wants to know about the tank, then why shouldn’t he?”

I said, “How were they different? It looks like a regular tank to me.”

“Well,” explained Eloise, “they were painted black all over, although you cannot see that now, because the rust and the weather have taken away the paint. There were thirteen of them. I know, because I counted them as they came along the road from Le Vey. Thirteen, on the thirteenth day of July. But what was most strange, they never opened their turrets. Most American tanks came with their tops open, and the soldiers would throw us candy and cigarettes and nylon stockings. But these tanks came and we never saw who drove them. They were always closed.”

Madeleine had finished her soup and was sitting upright in her chair. She looked very pale, and it was clear that all this talk about the strange tanks disconcerted her. I said, “Did you talk to any Americans about them? Did they ever tell you what they were?”

Jacques, with his mouth full of garlic bread, said, “They didn’t know, or they wouldn’t speak. They just said ‘special division’, and that was all.”

“Only one was left behind,” put in Eloise. “That was the tank which is still there, down the road. It broke a track and stopped. But the Americans did nothing to take it away. Instead, they came along next day and welded down the turret. Yes, they welded it, and then an English priest came and said words over it, and it was left to rot.”

“You mean the crew was left inside?”

Jacques tore off some more bread. “Who can say? They wouldn’t let anyone near. I have talked many times to the police and to the mayor, and all they say is that the tank is not to be moved. And there it stays.”

Madeleine said, “And ever since it’s been there, the village has been dead and depressed.”

“Because of the voices?”

Madeleine shrugged. “There have been voices. At least, that’s what some people say. But more than anything else, it’s the tank itself. It’s a terrible reminder of something that most of us now would prefer to forget.”

Eloise said, “Those tanks could not be stopped. They set fire to German tanks all along the river, and then they set fire to the Germans themselves who tried to escape from them. You could hear the screams all night of men burning. In the morning, the tanks were gone. Who knows where, or how? But they came through in one day and one night, and nothing on earth could have held them back. I know they saved us, monsieur, but I still shudder when I think of them.”

“Who’s heard these voices? Do they know what they say?”

Eloise said, “Not many people walk along that road at night any more. But Madame Verrier said she heard whispering and laughter, one night in February; and old Henriques told of voices that boomed and shouted. I myself have carried milk and eggs past that tank, and the milk has soured and the eggs have gone rotten. Gaston from the next farm had a terrier which sniffed around the tank, and the dog developed tremors and shakes. Its hair fell out, and after three days it died. Everybody has one story about the evil that befalls you if you go too near the tank; and so these days nobody does.”

I said, “Isn’t it just superstition? I mean, there’s no real evidence.”

“You should ask Father Anton,” said Eloise. “If you are really foolhardy enough to want to know more, Father Anton will probably tell you. The English priest who said words over the tank stayed at his house for a month, and I know they spoke of the tank often. Father Anton was never happy that it was left by the road, but there was nothing he could do, short of carrying it away on his own back.”

Madeleine said, “Please let’s talk about other things. The war is so depressing.”

“Okay,” I said, lifting my hands in mock surrender. “But thank you for what you’ve told me. It’s going to make a real good story. Now, I’d love some more of that onion soup.”

Eloise smiled. “You have a big appetite, monsieur. I remember the American appetites.”

She ladled out more of that scalding brown soup, while Madeleine and her father watched me with friendly caution, and a little bit of suspicion, and maybe the hope that I wasn’t really going to bother to do anything unsettling, like talk to Father Anton about what happened on July 13, 1944, on the road from Le Vey.

After lunch of hare casserole, with good red wine and fruit, we sat around the table and smoked Gauloises and Jacques told me stories of his boyhood at Pont D’Ouilly. Madeleine came and sat beside me, and it was plain that she was getting to like me. Eloise retreated to the kitchen, and clattered pans, but returned fifteen minutes later with tiny cups of the richest coffee I’d ever tasted.

At last, at well past three o’clock, I said, “I’ve had a marvellous time, but I have to get back to work. I have a whole mess of readings to take before it gets dark.”

“It’s been good to talk with you,” said Jacques, standing up and giving a small bow. “It isn’t often we have people to eat with us. I suppose we are too close to the tank, and people don’t like to come this way.”

“It’s that bad?”

“Well, it isn’t comfortable.”

While Madeleine helped to take out the last dishes, and Jacques went to open the farm gate for me, I stood in the kitchen buttoning my coat and watching Eloise’s bent back as she washed up over the steamy sink.

I said, “Au revoir, Eloise.”

She didn’t turn round, but she said, “Au revoir, monsieur.”

I took a step towards the back door, but then I paused, and looked at her again. “Eloise?” I asked.

“Oui, monsieur?”

“What is it really, inside that tank?”

I saw the almost imperceptible stiffening of her back. The mop stopped slapping against the plates, and the knives and forks stopped clattering.

She said: “I do not know, monsieur. Truly.”

“Have a guess.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “Perhaps it is nothing at all. But perhaps it is something that neither heaven nor earth knows anything about.”

“That only leaves hell.”

Again, she was silent. Then she turned from the sink and looked at me with those pale, wise eyes.

“Oui, monsieur. Et le roi de l’enfer, c’est le diable.”

The priest was very old. He must have been almost ninety, and he sat at his dusty leather-topped desk like a sagging sack of soft potatoes. But he had an intelligent, kindly face; and even though he spoke slowly and softly, as his lungs filled and emptied with the laboured aspiration of ancient bellows, he was lucid in his words, and precise. He had fraying white hair and a bony nose you could have hung your hat on, and as he talked he had a habit of steepling his long fingers and lifting his neck so that he could see down into the grey cobbled courtyard that fronted his house.

He said, “The English cleric’s name was the Reverend Taylor,” and he peered out of the window as if expecting the Reverend Taylor to appear around the corner at any moment.

“The Reverend Taylor? There must be five thousand Reverend Taylors in England.”

Father Anton smiled, and did something complicated inside his mouth with his dentures. “That is probably so. But I am quite certain that there is only one Reverend Woodfall Taylor.”

It was four-thirty now, almost dark, but I had got so caught up in the mystery of this decaying Sherman that I had skipped my cartographic readings for the day, and taken a trip up to the opposite end of the village to talk to Father Anton. He lived in a huge, sombre, forbidding French house in the severest style, with a hall of dark polished wood that you could have landed a 747 on, and staircase after staircase of chilled marble, flanked by gloomy oil paintings of cardinals and Popes and other miserable doyens of the church. Everywhere you looked, there was a mournful face. It was as bad as spending the evening at a Paul Robeson record night in Peoria, Illinois.

Father Anton said: “When he came here, Mr. Taylor was a very enthusiastic young vicar. He was full of the energy of religion. But I don’t think he truly understood the importance of what he had to do. I don’t think he understood how terrible it was, either. Without being unkind, I think he was the kind of young cleric who is easily seduced into thinking that mysticism is the firework display that celebrates true faith. Mind you, the Americans paid him a great deal of money. It was enough to build himself a new steeple, and a church hall. You can’t blame him.”

I coughed. It was wickedly cold in Father Anton’s house, and apart from saving on heating he also seemed to have a penchant for penny-pinching on electricity. The room was so shadowy and dark that I could barely make him out, and all I could see distinctly was the shine of the silver crucifix around his neck.

I said, “What I don’t understand is why we needed him. What was he doing for us, anyway?”

“He never clearly explained, monsieur. He was gagged by your oaths of secrecy. Apart from that, I don’t think he truly understood himself what it was he was required to do.”

“But the tanks—the black tanks—”

The old priest turned towards me, and I could just make out the rheumy gleam of his eye.

“The black tanks were something about which I cannot speak, monsieur. I have done all that I can for thirty long years, to have the tank taken away from Pont D’Ouilly but each time I have been told that it is too heavy, and that it is not economical to tow it away. But I think the truth is that they are too frightened to disturb it.”

“Why should they be frightened?”

Father Anton opened his desk drawer and took out a small rosewood and silver snuffbox. He asked, “You take snuff?”

“No, thanks. But I wouldn’t mind a cigarette.”

He passed me the cigarette box, and then snorted two generous pinches of snuff up his cavernous nostrils. I always thought people sneezed after they took snuff, but all Father Anton did was snort like a mule, and relax further into his creaky revolving chair.

I lit my cigarette and said, “Is there something still inside that tank?”

Father Anton thought about this, and then answered. “Perhaps. I don’t know what. The Reverend Taylor would never speak about it, and when they sealed down the turret, nobody from the whole village was allowed within half a kilometre.”

“Did they give any kind of explanation?”

“Yes,” said Father Anton. “They said there was high explosive inside it, and that there was some danger of a blast. But of course none of us believed it. Why should they need a vicar to sanctify the sealing of a few pounds of TNT?”

“So you believe that tank has something unholy about it?”

“It’s not what I believe, monsieur. It’s what your Army obviously believed, and I have yet to meet anyone more sceptical than a soldier. Why should an Army call in a cleric to deal with its weapons? I can only assume that there was something about the tank that was not in accordance with the laws of God.”

I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by that, but the slow and lisping way in which he said it, the way the words came out in that freezing and sepulchral room like dead flowers, that was enough to make me feel chilled and strangely frightened.

I said, “Do you believe in the voices?”

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.”

“The dismissal of demons? What the hell’s that?”

Madeleine touched her forehead. “The words of exorcism. Mother always believed in devils and demons, and she has the words in one of her holy books.”

“Well, what happened?”

Madeleine slowly shook her head. “She was only a simple woman. She was kind and she was loving and she believed deeply in God and the Virgin Mary. Yet her religion couldn’t save her. Thirteen days after she sprinkled the holy water on the tank, she started to cough blood, and she died in hospital in Caen after a week. The doctors said she had some form of tuberculosis, but they could never say precisely what form it was, or why she had died so quickly.”

I felt embarrassed now, as well as afraid. “I’m sorry.” Madeleine looked up, and there was that wry smile again. “You have no need to be. But you can see why I’d rather you didn’t go near the tank.”

I thought for a while. It would be easy enough to forget the tank altogether, or simply add a footnote to Roger’s book that the last remaining Sherman tank of a secret special division was still decaying in the Norman countryside, and that local yokels believed it was possessed by evil. But how can you dismiss something like that as a footnote? I didn’t particularly believe in demons and devils, but here was a whole French village that was scared half to death, and a girl seriously claiming that malevolent spirits had deliberately killed her mother.

I pushed back my chair and stood up. I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’m still going to take a look. If it’s true, what you said about your mother, then we’ve got the biggest supernatural story here since Uri Geller.”

“Uri Geller?” she frowned.

I coughed. “He, er, bends spoons.” She sat at the table looking a little sad. Then she said: “Well, if you insist on going, I’ll have to come with you. I don’t want you to go on your own.”

“Madeleine, if it’s really that dangerous—”

“I’ll come with you, Dan,” she repeated firmly, and all I could do was lift my hands in acceptance. I was glad of the company anyway.

While I turned the 2CV around in the yard, Madeleine went to get her overcoat. The clouds were beginning to clear a little, and there was a washed-out moon up above us like a white-faced boy peering through a dirty window. Madeleine crossed the yard, climbed into the car, and we bounced off across the ruts and the puddles until we reached the road. Just before we turned, Madeleine reached over and squeezed my hand. “I would like to say good luck,” she whispered.

“Thanks,” I told her. “And the same to you”

It took us two or three minutes to reach the hedge where the tank lay entangled. As soon as I saw the shape of it, I pulled the Citröen over on to the opposite verge, and killed the motor. I lifted my battery-operated tape recorder out of the back seat, and opened the car door.

Madeleine said, “I’ll wait here. Just for the moment, anyway. Call me if you need me.”

“Okay.”

Down here by the river, under the brow of the cliffs, the pallid moonlight barely reached. I crossed the road and stepped right up to the tank, touching its cold corroded mudguard. It seemed so dead and desolate and rusted that, now I saw it again for real, it was hard to believe that there was anything supernatural about it. It was nothing more than the abandoned junk of war.

There was a rustling sound in the grass around the tracks, and I froze. But then a rabbit jumped out from underneath the tank, and scampered off into the hedge. It was kind of late in the year for rabbits, but I guess they could have made their nest inside the tank itself, or underneath it somewhere. Maybe that was the real answer to Pont D’Ouilly’s haunted relic—squeaking and rustling wildlife.

I walked round the tank as far as I could, but its right side was completely tangled in brambles, and it would have taken a sharp machete and three native bearers to go round and take a good look at that. I satisfied myself with the left side and the back. I was interested to see that even the air vents for the engine had been welded up tight, and so had the grille over the driver’s porthole.

Slinging my tape recorder over my shoulder, I heaved myself up on to the tank’s mudguard. I made a lot of noise doing it, but I didn’t suppose that thirty-year-old ghosts really objected that much to being disturbed in the night. Carefully, I walked across the blackened hull, and my footsteps sounded booming and metallic. I reached the turret, and hammered on it with my fist. It sounded very empty in there. I hoped it was.

As Jacques Passerelle had said, the tank’s hatch was welded shut. It was a hasty-looking weld, but whoever had done it had known his job. As I strained forward to look at it more closely, however, I saw that the hatch was sealed by other means as well—means that, in their own way, were just as powerful.

Riveted over the top of the tank was a crucifix. It looked as if it had been taken from the altar of a church and crudely fastened to the turret in such a way that nobody could ever remove it. Looking even nearer, I saw that there was some kind of holy adjuration, too, engraved in the rough metal. Most of the words were corroded beyond legibility, but I could distinctly make out the phrase Thou art commanded to go out.

Up there on the hull of that silent ruined tank, in the dead of winter in Normandy, I felt frightened of the unknown for the first time in my life. I mean, really frightened. Even though I didn’t want it to, my scalp kept chilling and prickling, and I found I was licking my lips again and again like a man in an icy desert. I could see the Citröen across the road, but the moon was reflecting from the flat windshield, so I couldn’t make out Madeleine at all. For all I knew, she might have vanished. For all I knew, the whole of the rest of the world might have vanished. I coughed in the bitter cold.

I walked along to the front of the tank, pushing aside wild brambles and leafless creeper. There wasn’t much to see there, so I walked back again to the turret, to see if I could distinguish more of the words.

It was then, as my fingers touched the top of the turret, that I heard someone laughing. I stayed stock still, holding my breath. The laughter stopped. I lifted my head, and tried to work out where the sound might have come from. It had been a short, ironic laugh, but with a peculiarly metallic quality, as if someone had been laughing over a microphone.

I said, “Who’s there?” but there was silence. The night was so quiet that I could still hear that distant dog barking. I laid my tape-recorder on top of the turret and clicked it on.

For several minutes, there was nothing but the hiss of the tape coursing past the recording head, and that damned dog. But then I heard a whispering sound, as if someone was talking to himself under his breath. It was close, and yet it seemed far away at the same time. It was coming from the turret.

Shaking and sweating, I knelt down beside the turret and tapped on it, twice. I sounded as choked up as a grade school kid after his first dry martini. I said, “Who’s there? Is there anybody inside there?”

There was a pause, and then I heard a whispery voice say, “You can help me, you know.”

It was a strange voice, which seemed to come from everywhere at once. It seemed to have a smile in it as well—the kind of voice that someone has when they’re secretly grinning. It could have been a man or a woman or even a child, but I wasn’t sure.

I said, “Are you in there? Are you inside the tank?”

The voice whispered, “You sound like a good man. A good man and true.”

Almost screaming, I said, “What are you doing in there? How did you get in?”

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.”