The Devils of D-Day

TWO

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?”

I stared at the tape-recorder in amazement. “It didn’t say that. There was no way it ever said that.”

Father Anton was white. He asked, in a trembling tone: “What does this mean? What is it saying?”

“Father, father,” whispered the tape-recorder. “Surely you recall the warm summer of 1928. So long ago, father, but so vivid. The day you took young Mathilde on the river, in your boat. Surely you remember that.”

Father Anton rose jerkily to his feet, like a Victorian clockwork toy. His snuff tipped all over the rug. He stared at the tape-recorder as if it was the devil himself. His chest heaved with the effort of breathing, and he could scarcely speak.

“That day was innocent!” he breathed. “Innocence itself! How dare you! How dare you suggest it was anything else! You! Demon! Cochon! Vos mains sont sales avec le sang des innocents!”

I reached out and seized Father Anton’s sleeve. He tried to brush me away, but I gripped him more firmly, and said, “Father, it’s only a trick. For Christ’s sake.”

Father Anton looked at me with watering eyes. “A trick? I don’t understand.”

“Father, it has to be. It’s only a tape-recording. It’s just some kind of trick.”

He looked nervously down at the cassette recorder, its tape still silently spinning. “It can’t be a trick,” he said huskily. “How can a tape-recorder answer one back? It’s not possible.”

“You heard it yourself,” I told him. “It must be.”

I was as puzzled and scared as he was, but I didn’t want to show it. I had the feeling that the moment I started giving in to all this weirdness, the moment I started believing it for real, I was going to get tangled up in something strange and uncontrollable. It was like standing at the entrance of a hall of mirrors, trying to resist the temptation to walk inside and find out what those distorted figures in the darkness were.

I pressed the tape-recorder’s “stop” button. The gloomy room was silent.

“Sit down, Father Anton,” I asked him. “Now, let’s play that tape back again, and we’ll see how much of a trick it is.”

The old priest said, “It’s Satan’s work. I have no doubt. It’s the work of the devil himself.”

I gently helped him back to his armchair, and picked up his snuffbox for him. He sat there pale-faced and tense as I rewound the tape back to the beginning, and then pushed the “play” button once again.

We waited tensely as the tape began to crackle and hiss. We heard it laid down on the turret again, and the dog barking. Then that voice began once more, and it seemed colder and even more evil than ever. It sounded as if it came from the throat of a hoarse hermaphrodite, some lewd creature who delighted in pain and pleasure and unspeakable acts.

“You can help me, you know,” it repeated. “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 sitting rigid in his seat, his knuckles spotted with white where he was clutching the frayed upholstery.

The voice said: “Father Anton can take away the cross that binds me down, and cast away the spell. You can do that, can’t you, Father Anton? You’d do anything for an old friend, and I’m an old friend of yours. You can take me to join my brethren across the waters, can’t you? Beelzebub, Lucifer, Madilon, Solymo, Saroy, Theu, Ameclo, Sagrael, Praredun—”

“Stop it!” shouted Father Anton. “Stop it!”

With unbelievable agility for a man as old as ninety, he reached out for the tape-recorder, held it in both hands, and smashed it against the steel fireguard around the grate. Then he sat back, his eyes staring and wild, snapping the broken pieces of plastic in his hands. He dragged out the thin brown tape, and crumpled it up into a confused tangle of knots and twists.

I sat watching all this in total amazement. First, I seemed to have a tape-recorder that said whatever it felt like. Now, I had a priest who broke up other people’s property. I said, “What’s wrong? Why the hell did you do that?”

The priest took a deep breath. “It was the conjuration,” he said. “The words that can summon Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies. There were only three more words to be said, and that demon could have been with us.”

“You’re not serious.”

Father Anton held up the smashed fragments of Sony tape-recorder. “Do you think I would break your machine for nothing? Those words can bring out of the underworld the most terrible of devils. I will buy you another, never fear.”

“Father Anton, it’s not the tape-recorder I’m worried about. What concerns me is what goes on here. If there’s a creature inside that tank, can’t we do something about it? Exorcise it? Burn it out. Blow it up?”

Father Anton shook the smashed-up tape-recorder out of the skirts of his cassock and into the waste-paper basket. “Exorcisms, my friend, are woefully misunderstood. They are hardly ever performed these days, and only in very serious cases of possession. As for burning the tank, or blowing it up, that would do no good. The demon would still haunt Pont D’Ouilly, although he would be more like a fierce dog on a long leash instead of a fierce dog inside a locked kennel. He cannot finally get away until the holy cross is lifted from the turret, and the words of dismissal erased.”

I opened the cigarette box on the table and took out a Gauloise. I lit it up and took a long drag. I was getting used to this pungent French tobacco, and if it didn’t have as much tar in it as a three-mile stretch of the Allegheny Valley Expressway, I think I could have smoked it all the time. I said, “Whatever it is, it obviously wants out.”

“Of course,” agreed Father Anton. “And it appears to have a strong desire to rejoin its fellows. Its brethren. Perhaps it means that there were demons or devils possessing the other twelve tanks.”

“You mean all of them were possessed?”

“It seems likely. Why were they all painted black? Why were they all sealed down? You have said yourself that the Germans felt as if the devil was on their heels. I don’t know whether you have yet had time to read your friend’s history of the war, but the Orne Valley was taken at record speed—far more quickly than any of the surrounding countryside. Caen was shelled flat. But here—the tanks came through at top speed, and nobody short of Our Lord Himself could have stopped them.”

I blew out smoke. “What you’re suggesting is that this special division was made up of demons? I don’t see how that’s possible. Demons are—well, dammit, they’re demons. They’re medieval. They’re imaginary. They don’t fight wars.

“On the contrary,” said Father Anton. “That’s precisely what they do do.”

“But how come nobody ever heard of this special division before? How come the Army even allowed it to happen? That’s supposing it did happen, and all this isn’t some kind of hoax.”

“Much that happened in the war is still secret. And, anyway, what were thirteen tanks among hundreds? Perhaps your government decided on a little experiment with black magic.”

“Father Anton, this doesn’t seem real. If there’s one thing that the Pentagon is not involved in, it’s black magic!”

Father Anton went across to the tall window and looked down on his courtyard. Although it was mid-morning, it was as dark as late afternoon, and a few flakes of snow were tumbling idly across the village. The church clock struck eleven.

“What people forget,” he said, “was that the war was mystic and magical in the extreme. Hitler set great store by magic, and made a particular point of confiscating the Spear of Longinus, the very spear that pierced Christ’s side on the cross, from the Hotburg Museum in Vienna, because he believed that whoever possessed it could control the destiny of the world. On the side of the Allies, many experiments were made in sending messages by telepathy, and in levitation, and there was a Dutch priest who claimed he could invoke the wrath of the ten divine Sephiroth to bring down German planes with bolts of fire.”

I listened to this patiently, but I felt weary and sick. I said, “Father, this is all very well, but what are we going to do about the tank?”

Father Anton turned towards me. “There is nothing we can do, monsieur. Wiser men than us have sealed that evil entity away, and it would be foolish to disturb it. If the authorities will not remove the tank, then it will have to stay there.”

“And the Passerelles will have to suffer the consequences for the rest of their lives? You know that Madeleine believes the tank killed her mother?”

The old priest nodded. “She didn’t tell me, but I guessed as much. I wish there was more that I could do. All I can say is that I am very thankful we were left with only one tank, instead of many.”

I took a last hot drag of my Gauloise, and stubbed it out. “Well, I think you’re being too cautious,” I told him. “Maybe it’s time that someone gave the Passerelles a break, and maybe it’s time the Pentagon got their dirty washing back.”

Father Anton looked at me and crossed himself. “I can only warn you, monsieur, that to open the tank would be more than foolish. It would be tantamount to suicide.”

I stood up, and brushed ash off my pants. “The tape-recorder was 189 francs,” I said. “But I’d be more than happy with half of that. It was kind of a joint venture, after all.”

Father Anton slowly shook his head. “Perhaps one day I will understand Americans,” he said. “And, perhaps one day they will understand themselves.”

I met Madeleine for a glass of wine at lunchtime, in a small smokey cafe unappealingly called the Bar Touristique. A grossly fat woman in a floral housecoat served behind the bar, and occasionally forayed out to slap at the red formica-topped tables with a wet rag, as if they were disobedient dogs who kept playing up. The house wine was robust enough to clean your family silver with, but I’d managed to find a stale pack of Luckies in the local tobacconist’s, so my palate wasn’t complaining quite so vigorously as it had this morning.

Madeleine came in through the plastic-strip curtain looking very pale and waif-like, and when she saw me she came across the bar and put her arms tight around my neck.

“Dan, you’re all right.”

“Of course I’m all right. I’ve only been talking to Father Anton.”

I took her speckled tweed coat and hung it up next to a sign that warned Defense de Cracker. She was wearing a plain turquoise-blue dress that was probably very fashionable in Pont D’Ouilly, but in Paris was about eight years out of style. Still, she looked good; and it was a lift to meet someone who really cared about my welfare. Ten-ton Tessie behind the bar brought us our wine, and we clinked glasses like one-time lovers meeting in a seedy bar at the back of Grand Central Station.

“Did you play Father Anton the tape?”

“Well, kind of.”

She touched my hand. “There’s something you don’t want to tell me?”

“I don’t know. I guess we’re at a crossroads right now. We can either open the tank up, and find out what’s in there, or we can forget it for ever, just like everyone else has.”

She reached up and stroked my cheek. Her pale eyes were full of concern and affection. If I hadn’t been feeling so goddamned sick last night, lying doubled-up in the Passerelle’s draughty spare bedroom, I think I might have tiptoed along the corridor and tapped on Madeleine’s door, but I can tell you from first-hand experience that making love is the last thing you feel like after puking a mouthful of maggots; and I guess that even those who love you dearly find it kind of hard to give you a wholehearted kiss.

She sipped her wine. “How can we leave it there?” she asked me. “How can we just leave it there?”

“I don’t know. But the mayor and the civic authorities and even Father Anton himself seem to have managed to leave it there for thirty years.”

Madeleine said, “You must think that I have a bee in my bonnet.”

“Where did they teach you to say that? The school of colloquial English?”

She looked up, and she wasn’t smiling. “The war was over years and years ago. didn’t we lose enough? Enough fathers and brothers and friends? They still sell postcards of Churchill and Eisenhower at the seaside resorts, and that makes me angry. They saved us, yes, but there is nothing glorious to celebrate. To fight wars is not glorious, not for anyone. It is better to forget. But, of course, they have left us their tank, and we can never forget.”

I sat back in my cheap varnished chair. “So you want to open it up?”

Her eyes were cold. “The thing itself said that it wanted to join its brethren. What can it want with us? If we let it out, it will go to meet its friends, and that will be the end of it.”

“Father Anton said that opening the tank would be as good as committing suicide.”

“Father Anton is old. And anyway, he believes that demons and devils have power over everything. He told me that once, in catechism class. “Madeleine,” he said, “if it weren’t for Jesus Christ, the whole world would be overrun with demons.” ”

I coughed. “Supposing we open it up and there is a demon?”

She leaned forward intensely. “There must be something, Dan. Otherwise we wouldn’t have heard that voice. But demons don’t have horns and forks. There’s probably nothing inside there at all that the human eye can see.”

“Supposing there is?”

“That’s what we have to find out.”

I drank some more wine, and I could almost feel it put hairs on my chest as I sat there. I said, “What do they put in this stuff? Rust remover?”

Madeleine answered: “Ssh. Madame Saurice used to entertain an American sergeant in the war, and she knows English well. All the slang English, like shucks.”

“Shucks? You sure it wasn’t the war of 1812?”

Madeleine said, “I never wanted to open the tank before, Dan. I never met anyone who gave me the strength to do it. My father wouldn’t have touched it; nor would Eloise. But Eloise will tell us how to ward off demons and evil spirits while we do it, and I’m sure Father Anton will give you help if you ask him.”

I lit another cigarette. “I don’t see why it’s so important to you. If you dislike the tank that much, why don’t you move away? There isn’t anything to keep you in Pont D’Ouilly, after all.”

“Dan, it’s important because it lies on my father’s farm, and my father’s farm has always been home. Even if I go away for ever, that farm will still be the place where I was brought up, and that tank will still be there.”

She drank a little wine, and looked at me intently. “And, anyway,” she said, “I have dreamed about that tank ever since I was a little girl. That tank has given me terrible dreams.”

“Dreams? What kind of dreams?”

She lowered her eyes. “They were cruel dreams. Nightmares. But they were exciting as well.”

“Sexually exciting?”

“Sometimes. I dreamed of being forced to have sex with bristly beasts and strange creatures. But sometimes the dreams were different, and I imagined that I was being mutilated or killed. That was frightening, but it was exciting, too. Pieces were being sliced off me, and there was lots of blood.”

I reached across the table and held her thin wrist.

“Madeleine… you know this tank isn’t a joke. What’s in there, whatever it is, is something really malign.”

She nodded. “I have always known it. But I have also known, all my life, that one day I would have to face up to it. Of course, I tried to evade my responsibility. I tried to persuade you not to go down there to make your recording. But I am led to the conclusion that the time has probably come.”

“Well,” I said, “it looks as though we’ve talked ourselves into it.”

She gave a fleeting, humourless smile.

Later that afternoon, I telephoned Father Anton and told him what we were planning to do. He was silent for a long time on the other end of the line, and then he said, “I cannot persuade you otherwise?”

“Madeleine’s set on it, and I guess I am, too.”

“You’re not doing this out of a mistaken sense of affection for Madeleine? Because it can only do her harm, you know. You must realize that.”

I looked across the polished floor of Pont D’Ouilly’s post office, marked with muddy footprints where the local farmers had come in to draw their savings or to post their letters. There was a tattered poster on the wall beside me warning of the dangers of rabies. Outside, a thin wet snow was falling, and the sky was unremittingly grey.

“It has to be done sometime, Father Anton. One day that tank’s going to corrode right through, and that demon’s going to get out anyway, and maybe someone completely unsuspecting is going to be passing by. At least we have some idea of what we’re in for.”

Father Anton was silent for even longer. Then he said hoarsely: “I’ll have to come with you, you know. I’ll have to be there. What time are you planning to do it?”

I glanced up at the post office clock. “About three. Before it gets too dark.”

“Very well. Can you collect me in your car?”

“You bet. And thank you.”

Father Anton sounded solemn. “Don’t thank me, my friend. I am only coming because I feel it is my duty to protect you from whatever lies inside that tank. I would far rather that you left it alone.”

“I know that, father. But I don’t think we can.”

He was waiting for me at the front door of his house, dressed in his wide black hat and black button-up boots, his cape as severe and dark as a raven. His housekeeper stood behind him and frowned at me disapprovingly, as if I was particularly selfish to take an old man out on an afternoon so cold and bleak—probably forgetting that it was colder inside his house than it was out. I helped him to climb into the front passenger seat, and smiled at the housekeeper as I walked around the car, but all she did was scowl at me from under her grubby lace cap, and slam the door.

As we drove off across the slushy grey cobbles of the priest’s front courtyard, Father Anton said, “Antoinette is what you probably call a fusspot. She believes she has divine instructions to make me wear my woollen underwear.”

“Well, I’m sure God cares about your underwear as much as He cares about anything else,” I told him, turning on the windshield wipers.

“My friend,” replied Father Anton, regarding me solemnly with his watery eyes, “God will take care of the spirit and leave the underwear to look after itself.”

It took us about ten minutes to drive the back way around the village to the Passerelle’s farm. The trees all around us were bare, and clotted with rooks’ nests; and the fields were already hazy and white with snow. I beeped the Citröen’s horn as we circled around the farmyard, and Madeleine came out of the door in a camel-hair duffel-coat, carrying an electric torch and an oily canvas bag full of tools.

I climbed out and helped her stow one kit away in the back of the car. She said, “I got everything. The crowbars, the hammers—everything you told me.”

“That’s good. What did your father say?”

“He isn’t so happy. But he says if we must do it, then we must. He’s like everyone else. They would like to see the tank opened, but they are too frightened to do it themselves.”

I glanced at Father Anton, sitting patiently in his seat. “I think that’s how the good father feels about it. He’s been dying to tackle this demon for years. It’s a priest’s job, after all. It just took a little coaxing.”

As I opened the door to let Madeleine into the back of the car, I heard Eloise calling from the kitchen. She came out into the dull afternoon, holding her black skirts up above the mud, and she was waving something in her hand.

“Monsieur! You must take this!”

She came nearer, and saw Father Anton sitting in the car, and nodded her head respectfully. “Good day, father.”

Father Anton raised a hand in courteous greeting.

Eloise came up close to me and whispered: “Monsieur, you must take this. Father Anton may not approve, so don’t let him see it. But it will help you against the creatures from hell.”

Into my hand, she pressed the same ring of hair that had been tied around the model cathedral in Jacques Passerelle’s parlour. I held it up, and said, “What is it? I don’t understand.”

Eloise glanced at Father Anton apprehensively, but the old priest wasn’t looking our way. “It is the hair of a firstborn child who was sacrificed to Moloch centuries ago, when devils plagued the people of Rouen. It will show the monsters that you have already paid your respects to them.”

I said: “I really don’t think—”

Eloise clutched my hands in her own bony fingers. “It doesn’t matter what you think, monsieur. Just take it.”

I slipped the ring of hair into my coat pocket, and climbed into the car without saying anything else. Eloise watched me through the snow-streaked window as I started up the motor, and turned the car around. She was still standing on her own in the wintry farmyard as we drove out of the gates and splashed our way through the melting slush en route to Pont D’Ouilly itself, and the tank.

Twisted into the hedgerow, the tank was lightly dusted with snow, and it looked more abandoned than ever. But we all knew what was waiting inside it, and as we got out of the Citröen and collected together the torch and the tools, none of us could keep our eyes off it.

Father Anton walked across the road, and took a large silver crucifix from inside his coat. In his other hand, he held a Bible, and he began to say prayers in Latin and French as he stood in the sifting snowflakes, his wide hat already white, with the low cold wind blowing the tails of his cape.

He then recited the dismissal of demons, holding the crucifix aloft as he did so, and making endless invisible crosses in the air.

“I adjure thee, O vile spirit, to go out. God the Father, in His name, leave my presence. God the Son, in His name, make thy departure. God the Holy Ghost, in His name, quit this place. Tremble and flee, O impious one, for it is God who commands thee, for it is I who command thee. Yield to me, to my desire by Jesus of Nazareth who gave His soul. To my desire by sacred Virgin Mary who gave Her womb, by the blessed Angels from whom thou fell. I demand thee be on thy way. Adieu O spirit, Amen.”

We waited for a while, shivering in the cold, while Father Anton stood with his head bowed. Then he turned to us, and said, “You may begin.”

Hefting the canvas bag of tools, I climbed up on to the tank’s hull. I reached back and helped Madeleine to scramble after me. Father Anton waited where he was, with the crucifix raised in one hand, and the Bible pressed to his breast.

I stepped carefully across to the turret. The maggots that I’d vomited yesterday had completely disappeared, as if they’d been nothing more than a rancid illusion. I knelt down and opened the canvas bag, and took out a long steel chisel and a mallet. Madeleine, kneeling beside me, said, “We can still turn back.”

I looked at her for a moment, and then I reached forward and kissed her. “If you have to face this demon, you have to face it. Even if we turn back today, we’ll have to do it sometime.”

I turned to the tank’s turret, and with five or six ringing blows, drove the edge of the chisel under the crucifix that was riveted on to the hatch. Thirty years of corrosion had weakened the bolts, and after five minutes of sweaty, noisy work, the cross was off. Then, just to make sure, I hammered the last few legible words of the holy adjuration into obscurity.

Breathing hard, I stood still for a while and listened. There was no sound except for my own panting, and the soft whispery fall of the snow. In the distance, it was almost impossible to see the trees and the farm rooftops any more, because the snow was thickening and closing in; but Father Anton stood alert with his white hat and white shoulders, still holding the silver crucifix up in his mittened hand.

I tapped on the turret, and said, “Is anyone there? Is anyone inside?”

There was no answer. Just the dull echo of my cautious knock.

I wiped my chilled, perspiring forehead. Madeleine, her hair crowned in snowflakes, tried to give me a confident smile.

“Well,” I said, “this is the big one.”

With a wide steel chisel, I banged all the way round the hatch of the turret, breaking the rough welding wherever I could, but mostly knocking dents in the rusted armour plating. I was making my seventh circle of the hatch when the blade of the chisel went right through a deeply corroded part of the metal, and made a hole the size of a dime.

Even in the freezing cold, even in the blanketing snow, we heard the sour whistle of fetid air escaping from the inside of the tank, and a smell came out of that Sherman like I’d never smelled anywhere before. It had the stomach-turning sickliness of rotten food, mingled with an odor that reminded me of the reptile houses at zoos. I couldn’t help retching, and Madame Saurice’s rough red wine came swilling back up into my mouth. Madeleine turned away and said, “Mon Dieu!”

I tried to hold myself steady, and then I turned back to Father Anton and said, “I’ve broken a hole through, father. It smells really disgusting in there.”

Father Anton crossed himself. “It is the odor of Baal,” he said, his face grey in the afternoon cold. Then he raised the crucifix higher and said, “I conjure bind and charge thee by Lucifer, Beelzebub, Sathanas, Jauconill and by their power, and by the homage thou owest unto them, that you do torment and punish this disobedient demon until you make him come corporally to my sight and obey my will and commandments in whatsoever I shall charge or command thee to do. Fiat, fiat, fiat. Amen.”

Madeleine whispered: “Dan—we could seal it up again. There’s still time.”

I looked at the tiny hole, out of which the polluted air still sang. “And then how long before it gets out of here, and comes after us? This thing killed your mother, Madeleine. If you really believe that, we have to get rid of it for good.”

“Do you believe it?” she asked me, her eyes wide.

“I don’t know. I just want to find out what’s inside here. I want to find out what it is that can make a man puke maggots.”

I licked my lips, and raised the hammer once again. Then I struck the turret again and again until the hole grew from a dime to a quarter, and eventually the armour plating began to break off in leaves of black rust. Within twenty minutes, I’d broken all the metal away around the hinges of the hatch, and the hole was the size of a large frying-pan.

Father Anton, still waiting patiently in the snow, said, “Can you see anything, monsieur?”

I peered into the blackness of the tank’s interior. “Nothing so far.”

Taking a crowbar from the canvas bag, I climbed up on top of the Sherman’s turret, and inserted one end of the crowbar into the hole. Then I leaned back, and slowly began to raise the hatch itself, like opening a stubborn can of tomatoes with a skewer. Eventually, the welding broke, and the hatch came free. I stood there breathless and hot, even in the sub-zero temperature of that gloomy afternoon, but at least the job was done. I said to Madeleine, “Hand me the flashlight.”

Her face pale, she passed it over. I switched it on, and pointed the beam downwards into the Sherman’s innards. I could see the tank commander’s jumpseat, the breech of the cannon, and the gunlayer’s seat. I flicked the beam sideways, and then I saw it. A black sack, dusty and mildewed, and sewn up like a mailbag, or a shroud. It wasn’t very large—maybe the size of a child, or a bag of fertiliser. It was lying next to the side of the tank as if it had fallen there.

Madeleine touched my shoulder. “What is it?” she whispered in a frightened voice. “What can you see?”

I stood straight. “I don’t know. It’s a kind of black bag. I think I’ll have to go down there and lift it out.”

Father Anton called, “Monsieur! don’t go in there!”

I took another look at the bag. “It’s the only way. We’ll never get it out of there otherwise.”

The last thing in the whole world I wanted to do was get down inside that tank and touch that bag, but I knew that if we tried to hook it out with the crowbar we’d probably tear the fabric. It looked pretty old and rotten—more than thirty years old, maybe more than a hundred. One rip and whatever was inside it was going to come spilling out.

While Madeleine held back the jagged hatch for me, I carefully climbed up on to the turret and lowered my legs inside. Even though my feet were freezing cold, I had a strange tingling feeling, as if something inside the tank was going to bite them. I said hoarsely, “I always wanted to see what a tank looked like inside,” and then I lowered myself into the chilled, musty interior.

Tanks are claustrophobic enough when they’re heated and lighted and they’re not possessed by demonic sacks. But when I clambered down into that cramped and awkward space, with wheels and instruments hitting my head and shoulders, and only a flashlight for company, I felt a surge of fear and suffocation, and all I wanted to do was get out of there.

I took a deep breath. It still smelled pretty foul in there, but most of the odor had dispersed. I looked up and saw Madeleine’s face at the open hatch. She said nervously, “Have you touched it yet?”

I shone my torch on the sack. There was something or somebody inside it, whatever it was. As close as this, the fabric looked even older than I’d imagined. It could almost have been a piece of the Bayeux tapestry, or a medieval shroud.

I reached my hand out and touched it. The cloth was soft with age. I ran my fingers gently along the length of it, and I could feel various protrusions and sharp knobs. It felt like a sack of bones—an old and decaying sack of bones.

I coughed. I told Madeleine, “I’m going to try and lift it up to you. Do you think you can take it?”

She nodded. “Don’t be long. Father Anton’s looking very cold.”

“I’ll try not to be.”

I wedged the flashlight against a hydraulic pipe so that it shone across the inside of the turret, and then I knelt down beside the sack. It took a lot of summoning-up of nerve, but in the end I put my arms around the black fusty cloth, and lifted it a foot or so upwards. It was saggy, and whatever was inside it, the bones or whatever they were, tumbled to one end of the sack with a soft rattling sound. But the fabric didn’t tear, and I was able to gather the whole thing up in my arms and lift it towards Madeleine. She reached down and gripped the top of it, and I said, “Okay, heave.”

For one moment, for one terrifying moment, just as Madeleine took the weight of the sack and hoisted it upwards, I was sure that I felt it wriggle, as if there was something alive inside it. It could have been a bone shifting, or my own keyed-up imagination, but I took my hands away from that sack as fast as if it was burning.

Madeleine gasped. “What is it? What’s happened?”

“Just get that sack out of here quick!” I yelled. “Quick!”

She tugged it upwards, and for a few seconds it snared on the rough metal around the broken-open hatch. But then she swung it clear, and I heard it drop on the hull outside. Taking the flashlight, I climbed out of the tank on to the turret, and I haven’t ever been so glad to see snow and miserable gloomy skies as I was then.

Father Anton was approaching the side of the tank where the black sack lay. He was holding the crucifix and the Bible in front of him, and his eyes were fixed on our strange discovery like the eyes of a man who comes across the evidence, at last, that his wife has really been cuckolding him.

He said, “Enfin, It diable.”

I touched the sack tentatively with my foot. “That was all there was. It feels like it’s full of bones.”

Father Anton didn’t take his eyes away from the sack for a second.

“Yes,” he said, “the bones of a demon.”

I swung myself down from the hull of the tank, and helped Madeleine to jump down after me. “I didn’t know demons had bones,” I remarked. “I thought they were all in the mind.”

“No, no,” said Father Anton. “There was a time, in the Middle Ages, when demons and gargoyles walked the earth as living creatures. There is too much evidence to refute it. Paul Lucas, the medieval traveller, tells how he actually met the demon Asmodeus in Egypt, and the demon Sammael was said to have walked through the streets of Rouen as late as the twelfth century.”

Madeleine said, “We don’t yet know that it’s really bones. It could be anything.”

Father Anton returned his Bible to his pocket. “Of course, of course. We can take it back to my house. I have a cellar where we can lock it up safely. It seems to be acquiescènt enough now.”

I looked at Madeleine, but she simply shrugged. If the priest wanted to take the sack back home with him, then there wasn’t much we could do to stop him. I just hoped that the thing wouldn’t decide to wake up and take its revenge on any of us for being disturbed so unceremoniously on a cold December afternoon.

I opened the back of the Citröen, and between us we carried the sagging, musty sack across the road and laid it gently in the car. Then I collected up the tools that Madeleine’s father had lent us, and climbed into the car myself. Father Anton, taking off his hat and shaking the snow off it, said, “I feel strangely elated. Can you understand that?”

I started the motor. “This is what you’ve wanted to do for thirty years, isn’t it? Open the tank and find out what the hell’s happening.”

“Mr. McCook,” he said, “you should have come here years ago. It takes unusual simplicity, unusual directness, to do something like this.”

“I’m not sure whether that’s a compliment or not.”

“I didn’t mean naïveté.”

We drove through the gathering dusk, and the thick snowflakes whirled and tumbled all around us. But the time we reached Father Anton’s house in the middle of the village, the church clock was striking five, and we could hardly see through the pouring snow. The housekeeper opened the door as we arrived, and stood there with a sour face and her hands clasped across her apron as I helped Father Anton into the porch.

“Il a quatre-vingt-dix arts,” she snapped, taking the old man’s arm and leading him inside. “Et il faut sortir dans la neigt pour jouer comme un petit garcon?”

“Antoinette,” said Father Anton reassuringly, patting her hand. “I have never felt so healthy.”

Madeleine and I went round to the back of the Citröen, and lifted out the sack. From the dark hall, Father Anton called, “That’s right, bring it inside. Antoinette—will you bring me the keys to the cellar?”

Antoinette stared suspiciously at the black bundle we were carrying through the snow.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” she demanded.

“C’est un sac de charbon,” smiled Father Anton.

With one last backward look of ultimate distrust, Antoinette went off to fetch the cellar keys, while Madeleine and I laid our unholy bundle down in the hall.

Father Anton said, “If these are bones, then I have a ceremony for disposing of them. The bones of a demon are just as potent as the live demon itself, so the books say; but they can be scattered in such a way that the demon cannot live again. The skull has to be interred in one cathedral, and the hands and the feet in three others. Then the remaining bones are laid to rest in churches all around the intervening countryside, in ritual sequence.”

I took out my handkerchief and blew my nose. It was so cold that I could hardly feel it. “Supposing we ask the Pentagon how to get rid of it?” I asked. “After all, they put it there in the first place.”

Father Anton looked down at the black sack and shook his head. “I don’t know. I think the most important thing is to exorcise this beast as quickly as possible.”

Antoinette came bustling back with the cellar keys, and handed them to Father Anton. She pursed her lips in disapproval, but then Father Anton said gently, “I would love some of your barley broth, Antoinette,” and she softened a little, and went off to the kitchen to prepare it.

Madeleine and I lifted the soft, yielding sack once more, and Father Anton said; “Follow me.” But as we shuffled off down the long polished hallway, I glanced back at the place where the sack had been lying, and a feeling went down my shoulders like ice sliding down the inside of my shirt.

The wooden floor had been burned, as if by a poker. Where the black sack had been laid, there was the distinct, unmistakable outline of a small, hunched skeleton.

“Father Anton,” I whispered.

The old priest turned and saw the burns. He said, “Lay down the sack, gently.” Then while we settled the decaying black fabric on the floor again, he walked back on creaking boots and knelt stiffly and painfully down. His fingers traced the pattern that was scorched into the woodblock flooring, touching it as respectfully and gently as a fine medieval brass. I stood behind him and said, “Do you know what it is?”

He didn’t look up. “Oh, yes,” he said quietly. “I know what it is. It is the mark of the demon. This house is holy, you see. It has been the vessel of years of prayer and blessings. And a demon’s bones cannot touch it without making a mark.”

“It looks very small. Not much more than a child.”

“It is no smaller than the devils and gargoyles that are carved on medieval churches, my friend. We forget that many of those were carved, secretly, from the actual bodies of such fiends. I have the memoirs upstairs of a stonemason who worked at Chartres, and he tells of how the monks would bring him skulls and bones of creatures that he could never identify.”

Madeleine came up and took my arm. “What are we going to do?” she asked softly. “What if it tries to break free?”

“We must take it to the cellar at once,” said Father Anton. “I can confine it there by the power of the crucifix and the power invested in me by Our Lord Jesus Christ. Then, at the first opportunity, we must take the skeleton to pieces and scatter those pieces according to the Sepher Ha Zohar, which is the most important book of the Kabbalah.”

We returned to the black sack, and this time all three of us took hold of it, and we walked with it as quickly as we could to the carved oak door of the cellar, way down at the end of the hall. Once we were there, Father Anton took out the largest of his keys, and put it into the lock.

Inside the door, it smelled of limestone and must. Father Anton switched on the light, and said, “Be careful of the stairs. They’re very old and uneven.”

Like the cellars of most French houses of any size, Father Anton’s was enormous, and divided into several rooms. I could see wine racks through one half-open door, and inside another, garden tools and pieces of medieval masonry. But Father Anton directed us down to the very farthest recesses of the cellar, to a heavy door studded with black iron nails, and opened it up with another elaborate key.

This room was totally dark inside, and airless. There were no windows, and the room was empty but for a few broken flowerpots and a rusted mangle. It was floored with dusty clay tiles, and whitewashed with lime. Father Anton switched on the single bare bulb and said, “Lay the sack down here. This room was originally used for storing valuables and furniture. The lock is very strong.”

We set the black bag down in the centre of the room, and stood back from it with considerable relief. Father Anton reached inside his coat and took out his worn brown spectacle case.

“First of all, we have to find out what kind of a demon this is,” he said. “Then we can do our best to dismiss it. Mr. McCook—you’ll find a garden sickle in the next room. Perhaps you’d be kind enough to bring it in.”

I went to fetch the sickle while Father Anton stalked impatiently around the flaccid, lumpy bag, staring at it closely through his gold-rimmed spectacles, and coughing from time to time in the cold air of the cellar.

There were five sickles of varying sizes, so being a native of Mississippi I chose the largest. I took it back to Father Anton, and he smiled, and said, “Will you cut it open? Or shall I?”

I looked across at Madeleine. She was tired and tense, but she obviously wanted to know what horrors were contained inside this sack just as much as I did. She nodded, and I said, “Okay—I’ll do it.”

I leaned over the sack and pushed the point of the sickle into the ancient fabric. It went in easily, and when I tugged, the bag ripped softly open with a dusty, purring sound, as fibre parted from fibre after centuries of waiting for unimaginable reasons in places that could only be guessed at.

The bag was full of dust and bones. I stood back, and stared at the bones with a kind of horrified curiosity, because they weren’t the bones of any human or beast that you’d recognize. There were narrow ribs, curved thighbones, long claw-like metatarsals. They were dull brown and porous, and they looked as if they were six or seven hundred years old, or even more. I’d once dug up the skeleton of a Red Indian at my father’s place at Louin, in Jasper County, and that had the same dry look about it.

It wasn’t the bones of the body that frightened me so much—though they were grotesque enough in themselves. It was the skull. It had its jawbone missing, but it was a curious beaklike skull, with slanting eye-sockets, and a row of small nib-like teeth. There were rudimentary horns at the back of the head, and if it hadn’t have been for the reptilian upper jaw, I would have said it was the skull of a goat.

Madeleine took my hand, and squeezed it hard. “What is it?” she said, in a voice unsteady with fear. “Dan—what is it?”

Father Anton took off his spectacles, and closed them with a quiet click. He looked at us, and his eyes were red from tiredness and cold, but his face was alive with human compassion and religious fortitude. He had been a priest for seventy years, twice as long as either of us had been alive, and even though he was elderly, he had seen in those seventy years enough miracles and enough demonic fears to give him strength where we had very little.

He said, “It is just as I suspected.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You suspected something? You mean, you guessed what this was beforehand?”

He nodded. “It was after we spoke, after we talked about the thirteen tanks. I spent an hour or so looking through the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, and I came across a small reference to les treize diables de Rouen. There is very little there, very little information. But it appears from what Jean Wier says that in 1045 the city of Rouen was terrorised by thirteen devils which brought fire, pestilence, sorrow, and disaster. They were the thirteen acolytes of Adramelech, who was the eighth demon in the hierarchy of the evil Sephiroth, and the grand Chancellor of Hell.”

I reached inside my coat for my stale Lucky Strikes. I said, “Is it that unusual to find devils in teams of thirteen?”

“Well, quite.”

“But what were thirteen eleventh-century devils doing in thirteen American tanks in the Second World War? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Father Anton shrugged. “I don’t know, Mr. McCook. Perhaps if we knew the answer to that, we would know the answer to everything.”

Madeleine asked, “What happened to the devils of Rouen? Does the book say?”

“Oh, yes. They were imprisoned in a dungeon by a powerful spell imposed on them by the medieval exorcist Cornelius Prelati. The book is in medieval French, so it’s a little difficult to decipher exactly how, or for how long. But it mentioned the word coude, which I thought at first meant that the devils were imprisoned very close together, rubbing shoulders. However, when I saw this sack I realized that there could be some connection. The French word coudre, as you may know, monsieur, means ‘to sew up.’ ”

Madeleine whispered, “The devils were sewn in bags. Just like this one.”

Father Anton said nothing, but raised his hands as if to say, c’est possible.

We stood around the bones for a long time in silence. Then Madeleine said, “Well, what’s to be done?”

Father Anton sucked at his ill-fitting dentures. “We must spread the bones across the countryside, as the Kabbalah recommends. But of course we cannot do it tonight. In any event, I shall have to call every one of the church authorities involved, and ask for permission to bury the bones in such a way.”

“That’s going to take forever,” I told him.

Father Anton nodded. “I know. But I’m afraid that it’s necessary. I cannot simply bury the bones of a creature like this on sacred ground without the knowledge of the church.”

Madeleine took my hand. Very naturally, very easily, and very affectionately. She said, “Dan, perhaps you ought to stay with Father Anton tonight. I don’t like to leave him alone with this thing.”

Father Anton smiled. “It is kind of you to feel such concern. But you really needn’t worry.”

“No, no,” I told him. “I’d like to. That’s if you don’t mind.”

“Of course not. We can have a game of chess together after dinner.”

I said to Madeleine: “I’ll run you home.”

Father Anton switched off the light in the room where the demon’s remains lay scattered. For a moment we paused at the door, looking back into the pitch darkness. I could have sworn I felt a light breeze, sour with the same odor that had pervaded the tank, coursing out of the room. Of course, it was impossible. The room had no windows. But all the same, there was this strange, unsettling sensation, as if you were awakened in the night by the breath from some creature’s nostrils on your cheek.

Father Anton closed the heavy door and locked it. Then he stood before it, and crossed himself, and spoke a prayer I’d never heard in my whole life.

“O devil,” he whispered, “thou who hast touched no food, drunk no water, tasted not the sprinkled flour nor known the sacred wine, remain within I command thee. O gate, do not open that the demon within may pass; O lock hold thyself firm; O threshold stay untrod. For the day of the Lord is at hand, when the dead shall rise and outnumber the living, in His name’s sake, amen.”

The old priest crossed himself again, and so did Madeleine. I wished right then that I’d had that kind of religion, too—the kind of religion that gave me words and actions to guard me against the devils of the night.

“Come,” said Father Anton. “Perhaps you’d like a calvados before you take Mademoiselle Passerelle home.”

“I think I could use it,” I told him, and we went upstairs, with only one backward glance at the door that held back the bones of the demon.

After drinks and cakes, I drove Madeleine home through the streets of Pont D’Ouilly to her father’s farm. The snow had eased up, and now the Orne Valley was silent and cold and the hills surrounding the river were as white as furniture covered in dust-sheets. There was a pale moon rising, weaker than last night, and the snow-grey fields were patterned with the footprints of birds and stoats.

I stopped the car at the gate. Madeleine buttoned up her coat and said, “You won’t come in?”

“Maybe tomorrow. I promised Father Anton a game of chess. I think he’s deserved it.”

She nodded, and reached out for my hand. “I don’t know how to thank either of you. It’s like a great weight that’s been taken off my family’s shoulders.”

I rubbed my eyes. I was feeling the strain of what we had done this afternoon, both mentally and physically. My arms were aching from all that chiselling and hammering, and my mind was still a little tender from those claustrophobic moments inside the tank. I said, “Thank me tomorrow, when I can work out why the hell I wanted to do it in the first place.”

She smiled. “I thought Americans were just naturally helpful.”

“More like naturally nosey!”

She leaned across the car, which wasn’t difficult, because the 2CV’s so tiny that you’re sitting pressed together like canned frankfurters in any case. Her lips touched my cheek, and then we kissed, and I suddenly discovered that Norman farm girls have a really good flavour that almost makes demon-hunting worthwhile.

I said quietly, “I thought French people kissed each other on the cheeks.”

She looked at me closely, and said, “That’s only when they’re handing out medals.”

“Isn’t that what you’re doing now?”

She didn’t answer for a long time, but then she said: “Peut-être, monsieur. Qui sait?”

She opened her door and climbed out into the snow. She stayed where she was for a while, looking up and down the white and silent road, and then she leaned into the car and said, “Will I see you tomorrow?”

“Sure. Why don’t you come up to Father Anton’s sometime during the morning? I guess we have a lot of phoning to do. Calling up all those priests and getting rid of all those bones.”

Her breath smoked in the reflected light from the Citröen’s headlights. She said, “Sleep well, Dan. And, again—thank you.”

Then she shut the car door, and walked through the snow-topped gate-posts into her father’s farmyard. I watched her for a while, but she didn’t turn round, so I backed up the car and drove off towards Pont D’Ouilly, with only a quick sideways glance at the hulk of the Sherman tank which now rested in the hedge like the black discarded chrysalis of some monstrous insect.

The library, with its rows of leather books and its dismal portraits, was chillingly cold; so while we played chess after dinner, Father Anton allowed us the extravagance of two large elm logs on the fire, and we sat with glasses of Napoleon brandy beside the flickering flames, talking and playing slow, elaborate games until almost midnight.

“You play quite well,” observed Father Anton, after checkmating my king for the third straight time. “You’re out of practice, though, and you’re too impatient. Before you move, think—and then think again.”

“I’m trying to. I guess I have other things on my mind.”

“Like our demon? You mustn’t.”

“It’s kind of hard to forget.”

Father Anton took a pinch of snuff and poked it ceremoniously up his left nostril. “The devil thrives on fear, my friend. The more you fear him, the fiercer he becomes. You must think of what we have downstairs in the cellar as nothing more than a heap of stray bones, such as any hound might have buried in the cabbage-patch.”

“Well, I’ll try.”

Father Anton moved his pawn to rook six, and then sat back in his studded leather armchair. While I frowned at the chessboard and tried to work my way out of a situation that, on the face of it, looked like a fourth checkmate in three moves, he sipped his brandy ruminatively, and said, “Does it surprise you that demons actually lived? That they had flesh, and bones?”

I looked up. He was staring at the fire, and the flames reflected from his spectacles.

I said, “I don’t know. I suppose it does. I wouldn’t have believed it unless I’d seen it for myself.”

Father Anton shrugged. “It seems strange to me, you know, that in an age as pragmatic as ours, an age so bent on seeking evidence and demonstration, that the tangible manifestations of religion, like demons and devils, should be scoffed at.”

“Come on! Not many people have ever seen a demon.”

Father Anton turned his head and looked at me seriously. “Haven’t they? They’d be surprised. Demons and devils have evolved like the rest of us, and it’s remarkable how many of them still hide on the face of the earth.”

“Does the same go for angels?” I asked him. “I mean—do we have anyone on our side?”

Father Anton shook his head. “Angels never existed as actual creatures. The name ‘angel’ describes a state of divine energy that is terrible in the classic sense of the word. I know that angels are the messengers of God; and that they often protect us from harm and from the temptations of Satan. But I know enough about them to say that, in this life, I would prefer not to meet one. They are fearsome to say the least.”

“Can they be summoned, like demons?”

“Not in the same way. But if you’re interested, I have a book on my shelves on the invocation of angels. It was a great favourite of the Reverend Taylor when he was here during the war, surprisingly. Perhaps his involvement with your country’s demons alarmed him sufficiently to seek some assistance from the cohorts of God.”

We fell silent for a few minutes while I made my next move on the board. Outside the tall windows, the snow began to fall again, thick and silent, piling softly on to northern France until it looked like the moon. An easterly wind was blowing across Poland and Germany and Belgium, bringing low clouds and an endless winter of grey cold.

Father Anton inspected the chessboard. “Ce n’est pas mal, ça,” he said, nodding his head in approval. But then his bony, liver-spotted hand moved his queen across towards my king, and he said: “Malheureusement, c’est o’ léche et le mat.”

With one move, he had stymied my king; and all I could do was lift my hands in surrender. “I guess I had to learn the hard way. Never play chess with nonagenarians.”

He smiled. “We must play some more, if you’re staying in the Suisse Normande. You’re a worthy opponent.”

“Thanks,” I said, lighting a cigarette. “But I’m afraid that baseball’s more my style.”

We finished our brandy as the carved mahogany clock on the mantelpiece struck twelve. The logs in the grate sparked and dropped, and all around us was the silence of a dark clerical mansion in the heart of a small wintry village in the shouldering hills of Normandy. Father Anton spoke. “This is a brave thing you have done today. You must realize that. I know that Madeleine is appreciative, but I am, too. I’m very sad that, for all these years, there hasn’t been a man among us with sufficient courage to do what you did, and open the tank up.”

“You know what they say,” I told him. “Ignorance is bliss. If I’d known as much as you do about devils and demons, I probably wouldn’t have gone near it.”

“Nonetheless, monsieur, I am grateful. And I want you to wear this tonight, my crucifix, as a protection.”

He lifted the large silver cross from around his neck and passed it over. It was weighty, and embossed with the figure of Christ. I held it in my hand for a moment, and then I offered it back to him. “I can’t wear this. This is yours. You need protection as much as I do.”

Father Anton smiled. “No, monsieur. I have my wits and my training to protect me, and above all I have my God.”

“You don’t think that it—well, might attack us?”

The old priest shrugged. “You can never tell with devils. I don’t yet know which devil this is, although we’ve guessed it might be one of the thirteen demons of Rouen. It might be powerful, it might be weak. It might be treacherous or wrathful. Until we have done the seven tests on it, we shall not be able to find out.”

“The seven tests?”

“Seven ancient tests which identify whether a devil of hell or of earth; whether it spreads its evil by pestilence or by fire; whether it is high in the ranks of the evil Sephiroth, or whether it is nothing more than a servile thing that creeps upon the face of the earth.”

I rose from my chair and walked across the room. Outside, the snow tumbled and twisted through the night, and the front of Father Anton’s house was like a pale execution yard, untrod, unmarked with blood.

“Are you frightened?” Father Anton said, in a husky voice.

I paused for a moment to think. Then I said: “Yes, I think so.”

“Then kneel here, monsieur, if you will; and I shall say a prayer for you.”

I turned round. He was sitting by the dying fire with a look of real concern on his face. I said gently: “No thank you, father. Tonight I think I’ll trust to luck.”