The Devils of D-Day

THREE

I was to sleep in a high green-painted iron bed in a small room on the uppermost floor. Father Anton lent me a voluminous white nightshirt, white bed-socks, and a copy of L’lnvocation des Anges, leather-bound and smelling of dust, to read by the light of my shaky bedside lamp.

We said goodnight on the second floor, where Father Anton himself slept, and then I creaked up through the gloomy house to the long narrow corridor where my own room was. Antoinette had left the light on upstairs, despite Father Anton’s usual frugality, and I was grateful for it. I beetled along that corridor as if the ten evil Sephiroth were panting down my neck, closed my door and locked it.

The room was plain, but it wasn’t bad. Apart from the bed, there was a cheap pine dresser with a mirror, and one of those vast French wardrobes in which to hang my crumpled coat and shirt. There was a washbasin in one corner, and a circular window with a view over the snowy rooftops of Pont D’Ouilly. I washed with hard kitchen soap, rinsed my mouth out with water, and then pulled on Father Anton’s nightshirt. I looked like Stan Laurel in one of those movies where Laurel and Hardy have to spend the night in a haunted house.

The springs complained noisily when I climbed into bed. I sat upright for a while, listening to the sounds of the house and the night outside; and then I opened the book that Father Anton had lent me, and started to read.

My French was so halting that it took me half an hour to read the first page, and that was a lengthy apology from the author, Henri St. Ermin, for his platitudinous style and his lack of talent with a pen. I couldn’t have agreed with him more. I skipped the text and looked at the engravings instead.

I began to understand what Father Anton had meant when he said that angels were terrible. There were drawings of angels that were nothing but intense sources of light with spreading wings. There were angels like fierce, proud beasts. And there were angels who were unseen, but who came at night like violent storms, and laid waste to the houses of the wicked. It was plain from the captions under each of the pictures that you had to invoke the right angel for the right temporal task, otherwise you might find yourself, metaphorically speaking, plugging a flashlight bulb into a nuclear power station. One caption warned of “the angel which comes in a cloak of clouds, in which are the faces of those who have sinned and repented their sins”.

Outside in the snow, the church clock struck two, and I closed my less-than-reassuring midnight reader, switched off my light, and settled down to get some sleep. In the dark, the house seemed even noisier than it had with the lights on. Something scurried and flurried up in the attic above me, and the joists and timbers creaked and groaned and complained to each other like arthritic old women in a doctor’s waiting-room.

I slept for maybe ten minutes; and woke to hear my watch ticking on the bedside table. The house was quieter now, and I fell asleep again, although this time I began to dream. I dreamed I was opening doors in a gloomy building, and behind each door there was something fearful. I could hardly bear to place my hand on the doorknobs and turn them, but I had a terrible compulsion to find out what was there. Through the tenth or the eleventh door, there was a narrow corridor, and at the end of the corridor someone was standing. Someone small, like a child, with its back to me. I began to work my way slowly and glutinously down the corridor to see who it was, and all the time I knew that it was someone frightening, but all the time I was compelled to find out, compelled to go on.

As I came close, the small figure turned towards me, and for one moment I saw a face that grinned like a goat, with hideous yellow eyes. I was so scared that I woke up, and I was sitting upright in bed with my nightshirt tangled around my legs, sweating and chilled, and this time the church clock was just pealing three.

I switched on my bedside light and swung out of bed. I listened, but the house seemed reasonably quiet. Maybe the day’s events were just making me edgy. I tiptoed across to the door, and pressed my ear against the wood panelling; but all I could hear was the faint sad moan of the draught that perpetually blew around the house, rattling window sashes and setting chandeliers tinkling, and the usual creaks of floorboards and hinges.

The house was like an old ship at sea, rolling and heaving through a black silent ocean where no fish swam.

A voice whispered: “Monsieur.”

I stood slowly away from the door, my mouth salt with shock. I was sure that the voice had come from outside—right outside. It was a dry, sexless voice, the voice of an old woman, or a strange eunuch. I backed off, reaching behind me for the reassurance of my bed, when the voice again said, “Monsieur.”

I called hoarsely, “Who’s there? Is that you, father?”

“Of course,” answered the voice. “Who else?”

“What do you want? It’s late.”

“This is my house. I shall walk where I please.”

I bit my lip uncertainly. “Listen,” I said, “I don’t think that you are Father Anton.”

“Who else could I be?”

“I don’t know. Beelzebub?”

The voice cackled. “Perhaps you ought to open the door and find out.”

I waited, with my heart taking great irregular gallops under my ribs, and my pulse banging away in sympathy. I heard a shuffling noise outside and then the voice said, “Monsieur?”

“What is it?”

“Open up, monsieur. I have something to show you.”

“I don’t really want to, thanks. Listen, I’m in bed. I’ll talk in the morning.”

“Are you afraid, monsieur?”

I didn’t answer that one. Whatever or whoever it was outside, I didn’t want them to know just how frightened I was. I looked around the room for some kind of a weapon, and in the end I picked up a cheap alloy candlestick from the washstand. It wasn’t very heavy, but it made me feel better.

The voice said, “The girl is beautiful, isn’t she?”

“Which girl?”

“Madeleine.”

“Can’t we talk about it tomorrow? I’m tired. And anyway, I’d like to know who you are.”

The voice laughed. “I told you. I am Father Anton.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You don’t believe that priests enjoy sex as much as anyone else? You don’t believe that I can look at Madeleine and think of her body? She gets me boiling, monsieur! Oh, yes, she gets me rampant as a goat in the rutting season! Now, don’t you feel that way, too?”

I was shaking with nerves. I took one awkward step towards the door, deliberately stamping my bare foot as loudly as I could on the floorboards, and I shouted: “Go away! Just get out of here! I don’t want to listen!”

There was a pause. A breezy silence. I thought for a moment that the thing might have gone. But then it said, in a treacly, self-satisfied tone, “I’ve scared you, haven’t I? I’ve really scared you!”

“You haven’t scared me at all. You’re just disturbing my night’s rest.”

I felt a vague wind blowing across my room from the direction of the door, and I was certain that I could detect that sour, sickening odor of the demon. Perhaps it was just my imagination. Perhaps I was having a dream. But there I was, defenceless in my nightshirt and my goddamned ridiculous bedsocks, clutching a lightweight candlestick and hoping that whatever whispered behind that door was going to stay behind it, or better still, leave me alone.

“We must talk, monsieur,” said the voice.

“I don’t think we have anything to talk about.”

“But of course we do. We must talk about the girl. Don’t you want to talk about the girl? Wouldn’t you like to sit down far an hour or two, like men of the world, and talk about her bubs, perhaps, or the inner folds of her sex?”

“Get out of here! I don’t want to listen!”

“But of course you do. You’re fascinated. You’re fearful, but fascinated. We could talk about the many ways in which girls can have intercourse with animals and reptiles. The pain of it, and the sheer delight! After all, we must have her for the grand gathering, mustn’t we? We couldn’t do without her.”

I retreated, trembling, back towards the bed. Whatever stood outside my door, its lewd words seemed to crawl all over me like lice. I groped for, and found, the book of angels which lay on my bedside table; and I also picked up, out of plain old-fashioned superstitious terror, the ring of hair which Eloise had given me for protection against devils and demons.

I raised the book of angels and said tightly: “I command you to go away. If you don’t go away, I’ll invoke an angel to drive you away. No matter how dangerous it is, I’ll do it.”

The voice chuckled. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Invoke an angel! How can you possibly believe in angels?”

“The same way I’m beginning to believe in devils.”

“You think I’m a devil? Well, I’ll prove you wrong! Just open the door and I’ll show you.”

I kept the book held high. “I’m not going to. If you want to talk, talk in the morning. But right now I want you to go. I don’t care if you’re Father Anton or not. Just go.”

There was a long, dull silence. Then I heard a clicking noise. I couldn’t think what it was to begin with, but then I looked again at the door and saw, to my utmost dread, that the key was slowly revolving in the lock. One by one, the lock levers opened; and then the brass bolt at the top of the door slid back as if it was being tugged by a magnet.

My throat constricted. I hefted the candlestick and raised it behind me to hit whatever was out there as hard as I possibly could.

The doorknob turned. The door opened, and that soft sour draught began to course through my bedroom again. Then, untouched, the door swung wide by itself.

Outside, in the corridor, it was totally dark. The house stirred and shifted. I waited and waited, my candlestick raised over my head, but nothing happened. Nobody appeared. Nobody spoke.

I said, “Are you there?”

There was no reply. I swallowed, and my swallow seemed like the loudest sound in the world.

I took one step forward towards the doorway. Maybe it was waiting for me to come after it. Well, perhaps I shouldn’t disappoint it. After all, a demon was only a demon, wasn’t it? It was only some croaky voice in the night. Only some whisper in a derelict tank. Nothing more than a scattered heap of bones that Father Anton had sealed in his cellar.

I reached the doorway. The best thing to do would be to jump right out across the corridor. Then, if anything was hiding beside the door, ready to claw out at me, I could turn round and hit it first.

I said, loudly and unsteadily, “Are you there? Answer me! If you’re so damned smart, answer!”

There was nothing. It was so quiet in that moment that I could hear my watch ticking on the bedside table. I cleared my throat.

I tensed the candlestick in my hand, crouched down a little, and then I threw myself out of the open doorway, across the painted boards of the corridor, and scrambled around so that I was ready with my arm raised and my muscles tightened for action.

There was nothing. The corridor was empty. I felt a shiver that was both fear and relief, intermingled.

Perhaps the best thing to do now would be to go down and check that Father Anton was all right. After all, that whispery voice had claimed to be him, and if it was opening doors all over the house, it could have opened his, too. I pulled up my bedsocks, which were falling down round my ankles, and walked back along the dark corridor as far as the head of the stairs. On the landing below, an old French wall clock was tiredly counting away the small cold hours of the night, and a cardinal with a face about as happy as a hundred-year-old horse was looking gloomily out of an ancient oil painting.

I started to go down the stairs. My nightshirt made a soft sweeping sound on the boards, and I paused once to listen for any unusual noises. The wall clock suddenly whirred and struck the half hour, and I froze. But when the chimes had died away, there was silence again. I walked across the landing, and headed down the corridor where Father Anton’s bedroom was.

It was very dark along that corridor. Somehow the atmosphere was different, as if someone else had recently walked down here, disturbing the chilly air. I went as softly as I could, but my own breathing seemed almost deafening, and every floorboard had a creak or a squeak of its own.

I was halfway down the corridor when I saw something down at the far end. I stopped, and strained my eyes. It was difficult to make out what it was in the shadows, but it looked like a child. It was standing with its back to me, apparently gazing out of the small leaded window at the snow-covered yard. I didn’t move. The child could have been an illusion—nothing more than an odd composition of light and dark. But from thirty feet away it appeared remarkably real, and I could almost imagine it turning around and for one moment in my nightmare I had seen a face that grinned like a goat with hideous yellow eyes.

I took one very cautious step forward. I said: “You!” but my voice only came out as a whisper.

The small figure remained still. It was solitary and sad, in a way, like a ghost over whose earthly body no prayers had ever been spoken. It continued to look out over the yard, not moving, not turning, not speaking.

I took one more step nearer, then another. I said: “Is that you?”

One moment the figure seemed real and tangible, but then as I came even closer, the hooded head became a shadow from the top of the casement, and the small body melted into a triangle of dim light from the snow outside, and I stepped quickly up to the window and saw that there was nobody and nothing there at all.

I looked round, but I knew it was useless. I was so crowded with fears and superstitions that I was seeing things that weren’t even there. I walked back to Father Anton’s bedroom door, waited for a moment, and then softly knocked.

“Father Anton? It’s Dan McCook.”

There was no answer, so I waited for a while and then rapped again.

“Father Anton? Are you awake?”

There was still no answer. I gently tried the door. It wasn’t locked, and so I pushed it open and peered into the darkness of his bedroom. It smelled of mothballs and some mentholated rub that he obviously put on his chest at night. On one side was a tall mahogany wardrobe, and on the other was a chest-of-drawers, above which hung a large ebony crucifix with an ivory figure of Christ hanging on it. Father Anton’s oak bed was set against the far wall, and I could just make out his pale hand lying on the coverlet, and his white hair on the pillow.

I crept across the worn rug on the floor, and stood a few feet away from him. He had his back turned to me, but he looked all right. I was beginning to think that I was suffering from nightmares and delusions and not enough sleep. I whispered: “Father Anton?”

He didn’t stir, didn’t turn around, but a voice said, “Yes?”

My grip tightened on my candlestick. It sounded like Father Anton, but on the other hand it didn’t. It had some of that dry, sardonic quality that I had heard in the voice upstairs. I came a little nearer the bed, and tried to lean over so that I could see Father Anton’s face.

“Father Anton? Is that you?”

There was a second’s pause. Then Father Anton rose up in his bed as if he was being pulled upright on strings, and he turned to face me with his eyes glassy and his white hair dishevelled. He said, in that same unnatural voice: “What is it? Why did you wake me?”

I felt there was something curiously and frighteningly wrong. It was the way he was sitting there in his white nightshirt, as if he was unsupported by gravity or anything at all. And it was his peculiar manner, partly calm and partly hostile. There was nothing of the rambling old priest about him. He seemed strangely self-possessed, and his eyes seemed to be observing me as if there was someone else behind them, staring through.

I took a few steps back. “I think I must have made a mistake,” I said. “Just a nightmare, that’s all.”

“You’re frightened,” he said. “I can tell that you’re frightened. Now, why?”

“It’s okay,” I told him. “I guess I just didn’t get enough sleep. I’ll go right back upstairs now, and I’ll—”

“You needn’t go. don’t you want to talk? It’s very lonesome at this time of night, don’t you agree?”

Father Anton’s face was rigidly white, and his jaw seemed to move up and down when he spoke with the same mechanical movements of a ventriloquist’s dummy. Talking to him right then was like listening to a badly dubbed movie.

“Well, yes,” I said. “But I’d really rather go. Thanks all the same.”

Father Anton raised a hand. “You mustn’t go.” He turned his head stiffly and looked towards the door. It swung on its hinges, and silently closed, all by itself.

I lifted my candlestick.

“Now then,” admonished Father Anton. “There’s no need to be belligerent. We can be friends, you know. We can help each other.”

I said, quietly: “You’re not Father Anton at all.”

Father Anton abruptly laughed, throwing his head back in a way that terrified me. “Of course I’m Father Anton. Who do I look like?”

“I don’t know. But you’re not Father Anton. Now just stay there because I’m getting right out of here and you’re not going to stop me.”

Father Anton said: “Why should I want to stop you? You’re a good man and true. You helped me out, so now I’m going to help you.”

I was shivering like a man with pneumonia. I kept the candlestick raised over my head, and I stepped back towards the door. “Just stay away,” I warned him.

Father Anton gave an awkward, empty shrug. “You mustn’t misunderstand me, monsieur.”

“I understand you all right. I don’t know what you are, or what you’re trying to do, but keep away.”

The old priest’s eyes glittered. “If we don’t find the other twelve, you know, we could be in terrible trouble.”

“The other twelve what?”

“The other twelve brethren. There are thirteen of us, you know. I told you that. Thirteen of us. We have been separated for such a long time, and now we must get together again.”

I kept on shuffling my way backwards. “You don’t know where they are?” I asked him.

Father Anton swayed. Then he looked up oddly and said, “They’ve been hidden. They’ve been sewn up and sealed, just like before. I was the only one who wasn’t taken with them. Now you must help me find them. You and the girl together. We need the girl.”

I shook my head tautly. “I’m not going to help you find or do anything. I’m getting right out of here and I’m going to get some help.”

Father Anton lifted one jerky leg out from under the bedclothes, then the other. He stood up unsteadily, his arms hanging by his sides, and he grinned at me. For a split second, I thought I saw a thin dark tongue flick from his mouth—a tongue as forked as a reptile’s—but then it flicked back again and I wasn’t sure if it was just an illusion or not.

“We will have to find the Reverend Taylor in England,” said Father Anton, in a soft, rustling voice. “Then we will have to discover where the Americans hid the rest of us. My lord Adramelech will be deeply pleased, I can assure you. He will reward you, monsieur, in a way that no man on earth has ever been rewarded before. You can be rich beyond any comprehension. You can be powerful as a thousand men. You can spend years indulging your tastes for the finest foods and the greatest wines. And you can have sex with any woman, any man, any animal, you choose, and your virility will be limitless.”

I didn’t know what to say or do. It seemed as though Father Anton had been completely taken over. But was he really possessed, or was he just suffering from nightmarish nerves? Maybe he’d taken too many heart pills, or drunk too much before he went to bed. I just couldn’t look at this elderly shambling priest in his long white nightshirt and believe that I was talking to a devil.

Father Anton took one staggering step towards me. I retreated even further.

“Father Anton,” I said, “you’re sick. Now, why don’t you lie down for a moment, and I’ll go and get a doctor.”

“Sick?” he hissed, “I’m not sick. I’m free.”

“Will you stay back, please?” I asked him. “I’m going to have to hit you if you come any nearer, and I don’t want to do that.”

“You amuse me,” whispered the priest. “But I am never amused for long. Father Anton was not amusing. Fortunately, he was weak. A man who believes in us is so much more susceptible than a man who doesn’t.”

“You took over Father Anton? You possessed him?”

“You could say so, yes.”

“What does that mean?”

Father Anton took another step nearer. “Possession is more physical than mental. I possess Father Anton now, because I am inside Father Anton.”

I went cold with foreboding. I said: “I don’t understand you. What do you mean—you’re inside Father Anton?”

The white-dressed priest came clumsily towards me. His expression was grey and blank, and apart from those dark, penetrating eyes, I might have been looking at a corpse.

“A man, like a demon, is a mechanical device,” he said, in a voice that was even less like Father Anton’s than before, and so much like the voice that I had heard in the tank that I knew—despite everything I was trying to do to persuade myself otherwise—that this was the devil we had tried to seal in the cellar, the disciple of Adramelech who had once brought plague and misery to Rouen.

I said nothing. I guessed I was five or six paces away from the door now. The old priest kept stepping woodenly towards me.

“From inside, I can manipulate his legs and his arms like a marionette,” said the devil. “I can look through the sockets of his eyes, and breathe through the cavities of his nostrils. It’s a secure home inside here, monsieur. Warm and bloody, and sweet with decay already. I could even seduce that shrivelled old housekeeper of his through his own dangling penis!”

I stared at the priest with mounting fright.

“Are you lying?” I taxed him, knowing he wasn’t. “My God, if you’re lying—”

“Your God won’t help you. He didn’t help Father Anton.”

“Well, where is Father Anton?” I demanded. “What have you done with him?”

The stiff figure marched so close that I could have reached out and touched him.

He said, in that coarse, throaty voice, “You’re almost standing in him.”

At first. I didn’t want to take my eyes off the devil. But then I glanced quickly down behind me, and I saw something that made my stomach tighten and turn over. On the floor beside the chest-of-drawers, spread out in pale mucus-coloured strings, clotted with dark-red kidneys and blueish cakes of liver, were Father Anton’s entrails. The devil had disembowelled him, and climbed into his empty body like some hideous kind of parasite.

The devil hadn’t moved. I looked back at it in fear and nausea, and said: “You’ve killed him.”

The devil grunted in evil amusement. “On the contrary, I think I’ve given the old fool some new life. He was almost dead anyway. His heart wouldn’t have lasted much longer, particularly after you dragged him out in all that snow.”

I paused, anxiously biting my lip. If the devil could rip Father Anton open, it could certainly do something equally disgusting to me. I looked quickly up at the ebony crucifix on the wall, and wondered if everything I’d seen in vampire movies was true. Was it really possible to ward off demons and ghosts with the Holy Cross?

Sidestepping Father Anton’s glutinous remains, I reached over the chest-of-drawers and wrenched down the crucifix. Then I brandished it right in the devil’s face, and shouted as heroically as I could: “I dismiss you! In the name of the Lord, I dismiss you!”

With one powerful blow, the old priest knocked the crucifix out of my hand. He gave a hissing snarl, and moved towards me again, his eyes as dark and cruel as an alligator’s.

I swung my arm back, and belted him across the side of the face with my candlestick. His head jerked to one side, and the base of the candlestick raised a weal; but no blood flowed because Father Anton’s heart wasn’t pumping any longer, and his occupied cadaver simply shuddered and stepped forward again.

“Your violence amuses me,” it whispered. “Now let’s see if mine amuses you.”

I edged back. I knew that I’d never make the door in time. I kept my eyes on Father Anton’s grey, bruised face, and I began to wish that I’d never seen that damned tank, and never dreamed of opening it.

“It’s such a pity, you know,” said Father Anton. “You could have assisted me so much. But I have only survived the centuries by protecting myself against the moral and the conscientious, and I’m afraid that I shall have to deal with you as I have dealt with so many others.”

I only had one gambit left. I reached into the pocket of my nightshirt and produced the small ring of hair which Eloise had given me, the hair which was supposed to prove that I had already paid my dues to the hierarchy of hell.

There was an electric silence. Father Anton raised his eyes and stared at the hair with undisguised malevolence. I thought for a moment that he was going to tear the hair aside, just like the crucifix. But then that forked tongue flickered again, and the demon moved warily aside, watching me with a hard, poisonous look that made me so nervous I could hardly speak.

“Well,” said Father Anton, keeping his eyes on the ring of hair. “I see that you’re less naïf than I thought. You’re not a witch, or a necromancer, and yet you keep the firstborn’s locks with you. Now, I wonder how you got hold of them?”

“That’s none of your business. Just keep back.”

Father Anton jerkily raised his hands in a gesture of conciliation. “There is no need for us to quarrel, monsieur. There is no need for us to fight. After all, you must remember that you can protect yourself only once with this ring of hair; and for each protection thereafter you will need to sacrifice some other first-born to Moloch. It will only take the rising of tomorrow’s sun, and its setting at evening, and all the power you have in that ring will have died with the day.”

“I’m not interested. I’ll have you behind bars by then.”

Father Anton threw back his head again, and laughed. Then, without warning, the door banged wide open and slammed shut again, and the windows exploded in a hailstorm of shattered glass. The sheets were whipped off the bed in a screaming indoor hurricane, and the furniture was thrown violently around the room, clattering and bumping.

Most hideous of all, Father Anton’s body was hurled this way and that, its arms flailing wildly in all directions, until there was a shrieking blast of wind, and it was thrown face-first into his dressing-table mirror, the sharp slices of glass opening up his face like a skinned chicken.

The noise died away. I lowered my arm away from my eyes. The room was very dark now, although the curtains were flapping open, and a grey strained light was reflected from the snow outside. With the windows broken, it was intensely cold.

Something small and shadowy was sitting in the far corner of the room., on the oaken post of Father Anton’s bed. I couldn’t make it out very well, but I could see stubs of horns and eyes that slanted like a goat’s. It made a dry, leathery sound as it shifted on its perch:

“Monsieur,” it whispered.

“What is it?” I asked, chilled.

“I must warn you, monsieur, not to interfere again. Next time, you will have no protection.”

“There isn’t going to be any next time,” I asserted.

“Monsieur,” said the devil, “I am going to find my brethren with or without your assistance. Although, if you have any taste for what is best tor you, you will do what you can to help me.”

“What about Madeleine?”

“She must come too.”

“That’s out of the question.”

The devil rustled, papery and ancient as Hell itself.

“I will strike a bargain with you,” it whispered. “If you help me to find my brethren, you and Madeleine, then I will restore this fool to life.”

“That’s insane.”

The devil laughed. “Insanity is a human word which almost always describes the activities of devils. Yes, in that sense, it is insane. But Adramelech can do it.”

“How about you? Can you do it?”

“It is not within my powers.”

I hefted my candlestick again. I wondered what the devil was capable of doing in the time it would take me to cross the room and smash him on his perch.

I said: “I thought only God could give the gift of life.”

The devil shifted its unseen claws. “Life is not a gift, my friend. It is a curse. Adramelech is quite capable of giving such a curse.”

My mouth felt very dry. I said, “How can I believe you? How can I trust you?”

There was a moment’s pause. The winter wind raised and lowered the drapes, and flakes of snow came tumbling over the window-ledge. The devil stirred, and said in that throaty, sexless voice, “You don’t doubt what I can do, surely?”

I moved cautiously across the rumpled rug, trying to get as near to the devil as I could.

“I doubt your existence,” I said. “I doubt if you’re anything more than a nightmare.” The devil cackled. “Then watch,” it said. “Just watch.”

There was a silence. The shadows of the drapes rose and fell, like the wings of dreadful creatures. Then the house was pierced by a high, hideous shriek, and I heard furniture falling, glass breaking; and someone keening and moaning like an animal in agony. I turned. The door banged open again. From out of the corridor came a low, howling wind, and then the sound of someone staggering towards us, mumbling in pain as it came.

There was a crackle of electricity, and the whole room was dazzlingly lit by a blueish light. Then there was darkness again, and a rumble of thunder that compressed my eardrums and almost threw me over. Then there was another fierce blitz of electricity, even brighter than the first, and in the wide-open doorway, her arms raised in desperation, her face blotted white by the demonic lightning, I saw Antoinette, the elderly maid, in a nightdress soaked by torrents of blood—her whole body, her arms, her legs, her stomach, her face—porcupined with knives and forks and scissors and skewers. It was as if every sharp instrument in the whole house had flown from its drawer and stabbed itself into her.

Her voice almost swallowed by another burst of thunder, she moaned: “Father Anton, save me… !” and collapsed to her knees with a clatter of knife and scissor handles.

I turned back to the devil, and I was stunned and furious. “Is that your damned power? Slaughtering old women? You damned maniac!”

The voice came from somewhere else now—on top of the dark mahogany wardrobe, in a corner where I couldn’t see.

“You would consider it powerful if it happened to you, monsieur. Or if it happened to Madeleine. I could make it happen to Madeleine right now. Every pitchfork and castrating knife in the whole of her farm could stick itself into her right now, right this minute. You only have to say the word.”

I said, quaking: “What are you? What kind of a devil are you?”

The devil laughed. “I am Elmek, sometimes known as Asmorod, the devil of knives and sharp edges. I am the devil of swords and daggers and razors. Do you like my work, you with your blunt cudgel and your blunt anger?”

I hurled my candlestick towards the shadows where the devil’s voice came from, but it clattered uselessly against the wardrobe door, and dropped to the floor.

“You have a choice, monsieur,” the devil said. “You can either help me or try to hinder me. If you help me, Adramelech will reward you. If you hinder me, these dead will remain dead, and I will make sure that your precious Madeleine is sliced up like so much meat.”

I pressed my hands to my forehead. I could hear Antoinette gurgling and choking in her own blood, but there was nothing I could do. If I tried to fight this devil any longer, it was going to cut everyone to pieces, including Madeleine and Eloise and Jacques Passerelle, and once the sun had risen and set, it would probably cut me to pieces, too. I knew then that I was going to have to pacify this demon, and play for as much time as I could get. If we searched for its brethren, it’s twelve brother devils, it could take us months, and by that time I might have found some way to exorcise it for good.

I lowered my eyes, trying to look resigned and obedient. I said: “All right. It’s a bargain. What do you want me to do?”

The devil rustled in pleasure. “I thought you might see sense. You are a good man and true, aren’t you?”

“I’m just trying to save people’s lives,” I told him.

“Of course. Very commendable. Life is full of commendable deeds, and it’s such a pity that they usually cause so much pain. I am the devil of suicide by throat-cutting or slashing of wrists, did you know that? I am always honoured when someone slices himself up nicely.”

“Just tell me what to do.”

“Of course,” said the devil. “All in good time.”

“What am I going to do with these bodies? What if the police ask me about them?”

“That’s very simple. When we have left, the house will burn. Not a severe blaze, but enough to gut this room, and the room along the corridor where this lady slept. It will be a great tragedy. Everybody will be sorry that their old priest is dead, but he was senile, wasn’t he, and perhaps he let the candle fall on his bedspread, or a stray-log drop on to his rug. Nobody will think to question you. You will have had no motive for arson, and so nobody will suspect your involvement.”

“For Christ’s sake, I didn’t kill them anyway!”

The devil laughed. “How many murderers have said that! How many witches have protested their innocence! How many Nazis claimed they were only obeying their orders!”

I shut my mouth tight, and told myself, silently and firmly, to keep my fear and my anger bottled up tight. If this devil ever suspected that I was trying to play it along, it would probably cut me up like shish-kebabs in a split-second. I still couldn’t get that sickening apparition of Antoinette out of my mind, and I knew that I was going to have nightmares about those forests of knives and scissors for the rest of my life. There was no sound, now, from the doorway. I guessed she was probably dead.

“How are we going to get you to England?” I asked the devil.

Elmek was silent for a moment. Then it said: “There is a copper-and-lead-bound trunk in the cellar. It was first used for carrying sacramental robes and chalices in the days when the king travelled around the countryside, staying at the chateaux of French barons. I will enjoy the irony of travelling in it myself. You will arrange for transportation across the Channel this afternoon, and all you will have to do is collect the trunk from the cellar and take it with you.”

“Supposing I deliberately forget? Supposing I leave you behind?”

“Then these two people will remain as dead as they are now, and your precious Madeleine will have the nastiest death I can devise. And so will you.”

Outside the shattered window, the sky was growing greyer as dawn approached. I said: “All right. If that’s what you want.”

“That’s precisely what I want. I am looking forward to meeting the Reverend Taylor again.”

I stood in the ruined room, wondering what I ought to do next. I kept the ring of hair curled around my finger, and I couldn’t even bear to look at the carnage around me. I felt a sourish, bilious taste in my mouth.

The devil said, “You can go now. Get dressed. The sooner you arrange our journey, the better.”

I looked up at the gloomy corner where it was hidden. I said: “If I disbelieved in you—if I refuted your very existence—would you disappear?”

Elmek laughed once again. “If I disbelieved in you,” it said, “if I refuted your very existence, would you disappear?”

I wiped my soiled and sweaty face with my hand, and I felt about as desperate and depressed as I ever had in my whole life.

I reached the Passerelle’s farm just after seven, in a chill, thick fog. I parked the Citröen in the muddy yard, walked across to the stable door, and knocked. A black-and-white dog with matted fur came and snifled at my knees, and then loped off round the side of the farm buildings.

Jacques Passerelle appeared at the door, wiping his hands on a towel. His braces were hanging from his belt, and he still had a blob of white shaving cream clinging to his left ear. He was smoking one of his Gauloises and coughing.

“Mr. McCook, quiest-ce que c’est qui se passe?”

“Is Madeleine here? It’s rather urgent.”

“She’s milking. Round the side there, third door. You look bad. A night on the tiles?”

I grimaced. “Would you believe I spent a night with Father Anton?”

Jacques laughed. “These priests! They’re worse than the rest of us!”

I stepped around the thickest ruts of mud until I reached the cowshed door. It was warm and musky in there, scented with the breath of cows. Madeleine was perched on a stool, wearing a blue scarf around her head, jeans, and muddy rubber boots. Her hands worked expertly at the cow’s teats, and the thin jets of milk rang against the sides of the zinc pail. I leaned against the door for a while, and then I said: “Madeleine.”

She looked up, surprised. In her work clothes, she had a casual, gamine attractiveness that, in normal circumstances, I couldn’t have resisted. She said: “Dan! Quelle heure est-il?”

“Seven-Ten.”

“Why have you come so early? Is anything wrong?”

I nodded, trying to keep my shock and nausea under control. I said, “I don’t know how to tell you.”

She let go of the cow’s udder, and set the pail down on the cobbled floor. Her face was pale and strained, and it looked as if she hadn’t slept a lot more than I had.

She said: “Is it Father Anton? Is he all right?”

I shook my head.

“He’s not—?”

I was so exhausted that I leaned my head against the frame of the cowshed door, and when I spoke I could only manage a dull, tired monotone. I felt as if I’d been gutted, like a herring, and left to drain on somebody’s sink.

“The devil broke out somehow. I heard it in the night. I went downstairs and it had killed Father Anton. Then it killed Antoinette in front of my eyes, to prove its power.”

Madeleine came across the shed and touched my shoulder. “Dan—you’re not serious. Please.”

I lifted my head and looked at her. “How serious do I have to be? I was there. I saw the devil cut Father Anton open, and I saw him kill Antoinette. It says its name is Elmck, the devil of sharp knives. It said that if we didn’t help it find its brethren, it would cut us to pieces as well.”

“I can’t believe what you’re saying.”

“Well, you’d better damn well believe it, because it’s true! If you don’t want to wind up like Antoinette, you’d better find some way of making your excuses to your father and getting yourself an indefinite vacation.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that all the time we have is the time that devil decides to grant us. It insists we help it find its brethren, and we’re only going to stay alive as long as we appear to be co-operating. It wants to leave for England this afternoon. If we leave at eight, we can just catch the ferry at Dieppe.”

Madeleine looked completely confused. “Dan, I can’t just walk out of here! What can I say to papa? I’m supposed to be here to help!”

I was so tired and upset that I was near to tears. “Madeleine,” I insisted, “I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t deadly serious. If you won’t make your excuses to your father, then I’ll have to go and tell him the truth.”

“But Dan, it seems so unreal.”

“Don’t you think I feel the same way?” I asked her “Don’t you think I’d rather get on with my damned work and forget this thing ever happened? But I’ve seen it for myself, Madeleine. It’s real, and we’re both in danger of death.”

Those pale Norman eyes regarded me seriously. Then Madeleine slowly pulled the scarf from her hair, and said, “You mean it.”

“Yes, I damned well mean it.”

She looked out of the cowshed across the foggy yard. Over the hills, behind the dim tracery of leafless elms, the sun glowered through the grey haze of another winter day in the Suisse Normande.

“Very well,” she said. “I’ll go and tell my father. I can pack in half an hour.”

I followed her through a flock of grubby geese and into the farmhouse. Jacques Passerelle was in the red-tiled hallway, combing his short hair into a neat parting. Madeleine came up behind him and held him round the waist. He glanced up at her face in the mirror and smiled.

“You’ve finished the milking already?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “I’m afraid that Dan came with an urgent message. I have to spend a little time in England.”

He frowned. “Angleterre? Pour quoi?”

Madeleine lowered her eyes. “I can’t lie. It’s something to do with the tank. We have to go and find some information for Father Anton.”

Jacques turned around and held his daughter’s arms. “The tank? Why do you have to go to England because of the tank?”

“Because of the English priest, father. The Reverend Taylor, who was here in the war. He is the only man who really knows about the tank, and what was inside it.”

I put in, “We won’t be away long, Monsieur Passerelle. Maybe a week at the outside. Then I promise I’ll bring her straight back.”

Jacques rubbed his shiny shaven chin. “I don’t know what to say. All this tank seems to bring is trouble and more trouble.”

I said, “Believe me, monsieur, this is going to be the last of it. Once we’re back from England, you won’t ever hear about that tank again. Not ever.”

Jacques Passerelle sniffed. He didn’t seem to be particularly impressed by that. He turned to Madeleine and asked, “Why does it have to be you? Can’t Mr. McCook go by himself. It always seems that you have to do the work that others should do. And what about Father Anton?”

Madeleine looked across at me appealingly. I knew she didn’t want to leave her father to cope by himself in the middle of winter. But I shook my head. The last thing I was going to do was cross that devil again. My ring of hair was going to protect me only until the sun set, and then I would be as vulnerable as Madeleine.

“Monsieur,” I told him, “we really have to go, both of us. I’m sorry.”

The farmer sighed. “Very well, if that’s what you have to do. I will call Gaston Jumet and ask him if Henriette can come up and help me. You said a week, no more?”

“About a week,” I told him, although I had no idea how long it was going to take us to dig up Elmek’s twelve infamous brethren.

“Very well,” he said, and kissed his daughter, and shook my hand. “If this is something really important. Now, would you like some calvados and coffee?”

While Madeleine packed, I sat at the kitchen table with Jacques and Eloise. Outside, it began to snow again—thin, wet snow that dribbled slowly down the window panes. We talked about farming and cows and what to do when turnips started to mildew in the ground.

After a while, Jacques Passerelle knocked back his calvados, wiped his mouth with his spotted handkerchief, and said, “I must get to work. We have two fields to plough by the end of the week. I wish you bon voyage.”

We shook hands and then he went off into the hallway to pull on his Wellingtons and his thick jacket. I stirred my coffee carefully, waiting until he was out of earshot, and then I said, “Eloise?”

The old woman nodded. “I know.”

“You know? How do you know?”

She said nothing, but reached in the pocket of her apron, and produced a worn sepia photograph of a young cleric. He was holding a boater in his hands, and squinting into the sun.

I looked at the picture for a long while, and then I said: “This is Father Anton.”

“Yes, monsieur. I have known him for many years. When we were young, we were close friends. We were so close, in fact, that we hardly had to speak to know what each other was thinking. Well, Father Anton reached me last night, after a fashion. I woke in the night and felt that I had lost him; and when I saw you this morning, I knew that he was dead.”

“You didn’t tell Jacques?”

“I told nobody. I wasn’t really sure it was true. I hoped that it wasn’t. But then I saw you, and I knew.”

I took out the ring of hair which she had given me. “Listen, Eloise,” I asked her, “is this all the hair you have?”

She lifted her grey head and looked at me closely through her flour-dusted spectacles. “You want more?” Why?”

“The devil is loose, Eloise. It was the devil who killed Father Anton. That’s why we’re going to England. The devil insists.”

“Insists?”

“If we don’t do what it says, it’s going to stab us to death. Madeleine and me. Its name is Elmek, the devil of knives.”

Eloise took the photograph of Father Anton from me with shaking hands. She was so agitated that she couldn’t speak at first, and I poured her a small glass of calvados. She drank half of it, and coughed, and then looked back at me with a face so ghastly with strain that I felt frightened myself.

“Did he suffer?” she whispered. “Did poor Father Anton suffer?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I saw Antoinette die too, his housekeeper, and she was in terrible pain.”

“What’s going to happen? What are we going to do?”

“There’s not much we can do except what we’re told. The devil is going to burn the bodies so that nobody knows what happened—and Eloise, it’s desperately important that you don’t tell them.”

Eloise was weeping. “What about Madeleine?” she said, wiping her eyes with her apron. “It won’t hurt Madeleine, will it?”

I took her hand. “It won’t if we do what it tells us to do. I have to find out how to destroy it first, how to exorcise it. Meanwhile, we’re going to have to go along with it, and help it find its twelve brethren.”

Eloise said, “There is only one thing I can do to help you. Wait for one moment.”

She rose stiffly from her chair and walked across the tiled floor to the kitchen dresser. She opened a drawer, fumbled around for a while with tins and jars and boxes, and eventually took out a small tin with the name of a popular brand of French throat pastilles printed on it. She brought it over to the table and carefully lifted the lid.

I peered inside. There was nothing there but a small heap of what looked like grey powder.

“What’s this?” I asked her.

She closed the lid again, and handed the tin to me. “It is said to be the ashes of the seamless cloak which Christ wore when he was crucified. It is the most powerful relic I have.”

“What will it do? Will it protect us?”

“I don’t know. Some relics have real magical properties and some are simply frauds. It is all I can do. It is all I can give you.”

She turned away then, her eyes filled with tears. I didn’t know what to do to comfort her. I slipped the tin of ashes in my pocket and finished my coffee. The clock on the kitchen wall struck eight; I knew that if we were going to make the lunchtime ferry to Newhaven, we were going to have to hurry.

Madeleine came downstairs with her suitcase. I got up from the table and took it from her, and gave Eloise a last affectionate pat on the shoulder.

Madeleine said, “What’s the matter? Why is Eloise crying?”

“She knows about Father Anton. And she’s worried that the same thing’s going to happen to you.”

Madeleine leaned over the old woman and kissed her. “don’t worry,” she said. “We won’t be gone long. Mr. McCook will look after me.”

Eloise nodded miserably.

“Come on,” I said, “we’re going to be late ”

We went out into the yard, and I stowed Madeleine’s suitcase in the back of the 2CV. The thin snow fell on us like a wet veil. We only had one more piece of luggage to collect—the medieval trunk from the cellar of Father Anton’s house. We climbed into the car and I started the engine. Then we bounced off along the narrow, icy roads, the car’s heater blaring, and the windshield wipers squeaking backwards and forwards.

Although the French rise early, the village was still deserted by the time we reached Father Anton’s house and pulled up in the front yard. I got out of the car, walked round, and opened Madeleine’s door for her.

“What do we need here?” she asked me, stepping out.

“The devil,” I said gravely. “we’re taking it with us.”

“Taking it with us? I don’t understand.”

“Just come and help me. I’ll tell you what it’s all about later.”

Madeleine looked up at the house. She could see the broken window of Father Anton’s bedroom, with the curtains flapping and twisting in the cold wind. She said: “Is Father Anton up there? And Antoinette?”

I nodded. “We have to be quick. As soon as we leave, the devil’s going to set the house alight.”

Madeleine crossed herself. “We should call the police, Dan. We can’t just let this happen.”

I took her wrist, and pulled her towards the house.

“Dan, we ought to! I can’t bear to leave Father Anton this way!”

“Listen,” I told her bluntly, “we don’t have any choice. If we don’t do what Elmek tells us, we’re going to die like them. Can you understand that? And besides, it’s Father Anton’s only chance of survival, too.”

I unlocked the heavy front door and pushed it open.

“What do you mean?” she said. “He’s dead. How can he have a chance of survival?”

I looked at her straight. “Because I made a bargain. If we help Elmek to find his twelve brethren, and the thirteen brethren between them raise the demon Adramelech, then it will ask Adramelech to bring Father Anton and Antoinette back to life.”

Madeleine stared at me. “You don’t believe that—surely?”

“What else can I believe? I saw the devil, Madeleine. I saw it with my own eyes. I saw Antoinette covered in knives. I saw Father Anton cut open like a beef carcass.”

“Oh, God,” she said, in a low, haunted voice. “I can’t go through with it.”

“You have to. Now, come on.”

Together, we walked down the echoing length of the polished hallway. I took the cellar key down from its hook, unlocked the cellar door, and led Madeleine down into the musty darkness. At the foot of the stairs I found a lightswitch, and turned it on.

The copper-and-lead trunk was waiting for us. It was an ancient, dull-coloured rectangular chest, locked with three copper hasps. It must have been six or seven hundred years old, and it was decorated with copper inlays of horses and helmeted riders, and fleurs-de-lys.

Madeleine whispered, “Is that it? Is the devil in there?”

I nodded. “You’re going to have to help me lift it. Do you think you can manage?”

“I’ve been milking cows and mucking-out stables for weeks. I think I’m strong enough.”

Full of foreboding, we approached the trunk and stood beside it. Then we took its curved handles in both hands, and slowly lifted it off the cellar floor. It was staggeringly heavy. It must have weighed all of two hundred and twenty pounds, dead weight, and we had to drag it and slide it across to the stairs. Then we hefted it up, step by step, until we reached the hallway.

It was a matter of three or four minutes to get the trunk out of the house and into the yard. I opened up the Citröen’s rear door, ready to receive it but I was just rearranging my own cases, when Madeleine said: “Look! Just look at that!”

Where the trunk rested, the snow was melting. No snow settled on top of it, either. It was almost as if the snow was shrinking away from our evil and malevolent burden in fear.

“One last heave,” I said dryly, and we lifted the trunk into the back of the Citröen. Then I checked my watch. If we took the Route Nationale from Caen, we could be in Dieppe in about three hours. I shut and locked the back of the car, and we climbed in and settled ourselves down.

I said to Madeleine, softly, “You don’t have to go through with this if you don’t want to. I mean, if you don’t really believe this devil’s going to hurt you, you could take a risk and stay at home.”

“What do you mean?”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure. But I’ve always felt that any kind of devil only has as much power as you’re prepared to concede it. If we weren’t afraid of Elmek, then maybe it couldn’t hurt us.”

Madeleine shook her head. “I believe in this devil, Dan. I’ve believed in it longer than you have. And I started all this terrible killing, too, so I think I have a duty to see it through.”

“It’s your choice,” I told her, and switched on the engine. Then I pulled out of the snowbound yard, and drove through the cold, empty streets of Pont D’Ouilly. I kept glancing in my mirror at the dull shape of the medieval trunk—and also to see if any smoke was rising yet out of Father Anton’s house. But the trunk remained silent and closed, and it only took a few minutes of driving down those winding roads before the village disappeared behind the trees and the hills, and I never saw Elmek’s strange powers at work.

Madeleine said, “I’m sorry, Dan. If I’d only known.”

“We’ll beat them yet,” I told her. “Elmek and Adramelech and the whole damned team.”

But when I looked again at the sinister bulk of that ancient trunk, I felt far from confident; and I couldn’t even guess at what hideous atrocities its nightmarish inhabitant was already scheming.

A French onion-seller wavered across the road in front of me on his bicycle, and I blew my horn at him angrily.

“Cochon!” he shouted, and shook his fist as he dwindled out of sight in the snow.

Dieppe was as grey and tatty as any Channel port, and we only stopped in the cobbled square in the centre of town for a few minutes, just to change some French francs into British pounds. It was almost lunchtime, and we were lucky to make the bank before it closed. In France, they take their lunch seriously. Then we drove out to the SNCF ferry, past the cluttered little cafes and tourist arcades and bars called “Le Bar Anglais” or “Le Bar Churchill”, where day-tripping British tourists spent their last few francs on very ordinary vin ordinaire; past the cranes and the docks and the clutter of crates and trucks; until we turned the corner and saw the black-and-white ship with its red-painted funnel, and the English Channel the colour of pale green soup.

I bought tickets, and we waited nervously in line for twenty minutes before our Citröen was waved down the metal ramp into the bowels of the ship. We parked the car in a jam pack of Mercedes and Audis and Renaults, and then climbed to the upper decks to wait out the three-and-a-half hour journey.

The trip across the Channel to Newhaven is one of the dullest sea voyages there is. We went into the ferry’s restaurant, and ate leek soup and veal with congealed gravy, while the ship’s engines drummed and the sea rose and tipped outside the salt-stained windows.

Madeleine said, “You’re very quiet.”

I mopped up soup with a piece of stale French bread. “I was thinking about last night.”

“Was it really terrible?”

“I was scared stiff, if that’s what you mean.”

She looked out of the window. “Do you think we can exorcise it? Do you think there’s any way?”

“Well, maybe the Reverend Woodfall Taylor will know the answer to that—if the Reverend Woodfall Taylor’s still alive.”

“Oh, God, I hope so ”

They brought the meat and a selection of overcooked vegetables. At least they had a decent wine—a bottle of rich, heady Margaux that almost sent me to sleep with its fumes. I ate because I was hungry, but every mouthful was like balsa wood.

Madeleine said, “Couldn’t we simply throw the trunk over the side?”

I sipped my wine. “I suppose we could do. But I don’t think devils drown, do you? And what if he killed us before we could throw him over? Or after? And apart from any of those problems, the ship’s crew would probably stop us. I shouldn’t think they’re very keen on people tossing strange boxes into the Channel.”

She put down her fork, although she had hardly touched her veal.

“Dan,” she said, “I’m frightened.”

“You have every right to be.”

“No, Dan, I mean really frightened. Like something awful is going to happen.”

I looked at her over the rim of my wine glass, and there was nothing I could say. I couldn’t pretend that things were going to get better, because it looked as if they were going to get worse. I couldn’t even pretend I had a plan to get us out of trouble. All I was doing was playing for time, with the terrible knowledge that Elmek was probably going to sacrifice both of us to Adramelech in any case. Why should he keep his bargain, if he could cut us to shreds by magic at any time he chose, and we were powerless? The ship rolled steadily, and the cutlery and cruets and glasses and ashtrays all rattled and jingled and vibrated in a ceaseless cantata.

Later, we stood by the rail and watched the whitish smudge of England appear on the port side—the seven chalk cliffs they call the Seven Sisters, sloping gradually down on the westward side towards Seaford beach and Newhaven harbour. The ferry turned herself round to back stern-first into the narrow harbour entrance, and a barely intelligible French voice told us over the intercom to return to our cars.

We were both depressed and fearful as we went down the stairs to the car decks and unwillingly rejoined our hellish charge. Neither of us spoke as we sat waiting for the stern doors of the ship to open up, and neither of us looked around at that dark medieval trunk in which the devil nestled. I felt unbearably claustrophobic inside that ship, as if tons of metal were pressing down on me from up above.

At last, the crew waved us out of the ferry and up the ramp to the dockside. It was one of those bright, grey afternoons, with a damp sea-breeze blowing. A cheerful-looking customs official beckoned us towards a vacant inspection bay, and we drove in and stopped.

Madeleine opened her window, and the customs official leaned in. He had that relentless urbanity that always disturbs me in British excise officers—a little different from the laconic gum-chewing lady in the fur coat who always insists you open up all your bags at JFK. He said: “How long do you plan to stay in Britain, sir?”

“I don’t know. About a week. Maybe two.”

“Holiday?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

He shaded his eyes against the reflection from our window glass, and peered into the back of the car. Then he walked all the way around, and came up to my window. I opened it, and sat there with what I hoped was a calm, obliging smile. I probably looked like Sylvester the cat when Tweety-Pie’s bulldog pal suddenly appears in the garden—all clenched teeth and sick grin.

The customs official said, “Do you know that it is a serious offence to try to smuggle live animals into the United Kingdom, sir?”

I nodded like an idiot. “Yes, I knew that. Something to do with rabies, right?”

“That’s right, sir. Now, would you care to tell me what you have in that box?”

“Box? Oh, you mean that trunk.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, that’s just a few odd bits and pieces. I collect antiques. I have a few books in there, a couple of statuettes. Bits and pieces.”

The customs official made a note on his clipboard. Then he pointed with his ballpen to a side bay where a couple of Germans were already having their Mercedes thoroughly searched. He was just about to say something when he frowned, and looked back at me, and then looked around as if he’d lost something.

I said, “Is everything all right?”

He shook his head, as if it was foggy. “Yes, sir. I just had the feeling I was going to say something. I can’t remember what it was.”

I licked my lips tensely, and glanced over at Madeleine. Neither of us said a word.

The customs official said: “Very good, sir. Have a pleasant time,” and stuck a label on the Citröen’s windshield. I started the engine up, and we drove out of the docks and into the town. It was only when we were out of sight of the cranes and the ships that I let out a long whistle of relief.

Madeleine whispered: “The devil must have known what was going to happen! Did you see what it did to that man’s mind? It wiped him clean.”

I took a quick look round at the dull lead-coloured trunk. I was beginning to feel so nervous about it now that I kept imagining itches on my skin, and my right eye flickered with a tic that I couldn’t control. I didn’t dare try to imagine what that thing inside it really looked like. I had seen enough in the darkness of Father Anton’s bedroom, and heard enough of its rustling body and scratching claws and its husky, evil voice.

We drove aimlessly around the town of Newhaven, which wasn’t much more salubrious than Dieppe. Mean, red-roofed houses with primrose-painted gates. Warehouses and shops. Madeleine said, “What are we going to do now?”

“I don’t know. Find a place to stay, I guess.”

She checked her watch. “I think we ought to try to find where the Reverend Taylor lives before we do that. The pubs are open now. Let’s have a drink and something to eat, and then we can go to the local library. They have a clerical directory called Crockford’s in England, and if he’s still alive, we’ll find his name in there.”

We parked the Citröen in a municipal car park, and crossed the road to a big, dingy Victorian pub called The Prince of Wales, which smelled of spilled beer and cooking fat. We sat by the engraved-glass window drinking some tepid Skol lager, and eating cold sausage rolls with no sausage in them. Gastronomically speaking, England is always a miserable experience after France. Mine host behind the bar was a fat fellow with a check shirt and walrus moustache, who kept pulling pints of beer for himself and discussing the relative merits of the A23 and the A24, which turned out to be roads. One of the Englishman’s greatest obsessions, after cricket scores, is route-planning; and when you see the roads you know why.

After our drink, we went in search of the library. It turned out to be a small brick building not far from the car park, where a spinster in a pale-blue cardigan and upswept glasses was almost ready to close for the night. She found a copy of Crockford’s Clerical Directory for us, and brought it over to the checking-out table with a face as long-suffering as a Rhesus monkey with a mouthful of vinegar. We flicked through the pages as quickly as we could, while she pulled on her coat, and huffed, and tugged on her gloves, and huffed again, and switched off all the lights at the far end of the room.

But after a quick search through the directory, we found what we were looking for. Taylor, Percy Woodfall. The vicar of St. Katherine’s, in the village of Strudhoe, near Lewes.

Madeleine breathed, “That’s it! That’s him! He’s still alive!”

I looked up, and called to the lady librarian, “Excuse me, ma’am. Can you tell me where Lewes is? Is it near to here?”

She huffed and sniffed and looked at me as if I was mentally defective. “It’s eight miles up the road. You can’t miss it. It has a ruined castle.”

“And Strudhoe?”

“Well, oh dear, that’s even closer. Three miles along the Lewes road, on the right. Between the main road and the river.”

I turned to Madeleine and I guess I was as pale as she was. If the Reverend Taylor lived that close, and if he knew where the twelve brother devils of Elmek were, then we could have this whole grotesque business finished by tonight.