The Devils of D-Day

FIVE

They gave us tea in Lieutenant Colonel Thanet’s upstairs office, and we sat on uncomfortable folding chairs while he took out his files on the special division of tanks—codename Stripes. He leafed through them with the quick, concentrated frown of a speed-reader, pausing now and then to study a chart or a graph, and to glance up at Madeleine and me and give a swift apologetic moue for the time he was taking.

The office was cold, and the pale-blue walls with their defence maps of Britain and Western Europe made it seem even colder. A radiator the size of a small pig rattled and steamed in one corner, but it was all noise and no heat. There were three khaki tin filing cabinets on the opposite wall, and these, apart from Lieutenant Colonel Thanet’s desk and three collapsible chairs, were the only furniture.

I stood up and took my cup of scalding tea across to the window. In the dull, glistening street below, three British Army sergeants were lifting Elmek’s box from the back of the Citröen. The devil hadn’t spoken a word since our arrival, but we knew the risks of ignoring it. It expected to be reunited with its twelve brethren, and if it wasn’t, then God help any of us who were close to a window, or a knife, or anything that could cut into human flesh!

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet cleared his throat, and neatly collated his files in front of him.

“Did you find anything.” I asked him.

He pulled a face. “Not very much, I’m afraid. Not much more than I was aware of already. The whole history of this particular operation was kept under wraps, and there really isn’t a great deal of documentary evidence to go on. It appears from the early approaches made by the Pentagon to the British War Office that General Patton was largely responsible for thinking it up and carrying it through, although Eisenhower certainly knew about it six or seven months before D-Day. There are several references here to Operation Stripes, and this paper here is the requisition order for preparing the tanks. Each tank cost eighteen thousand dollars to refit, mainly because of the steering mechanisms, which were partly remote-controlled.”

Madeleine said, “Does it mention Adramelech? Does it say how they kept him under control?”

Thanet slowly shook his head. “There’s only one reference here that might be relevant. It refers to the transportation of German prisoners-of-war to England, including one French woman, a Nazi collaborator. They were taken to the army camp at Aldershot under the direct authority of Colonel Sparks—that’s your American friend—and Colonel T. K. Allingham, who was his British counterpart, and that means their movement order must have had something to do with Operation Stripes. It’s possible that these prisoners may have been used to appease Adramelech. Sacrifices, for want of a better word.”

“A man for each of the thirteen devils, and a woman for Adramelech himself,” Madeleine suggested quietly.

“Quite possible,” said Lieutenant Colonel Thanet, smiling an uneasy smile. “Your theory is as valid as anybody’s. That movement order is the only written evidence of those prisoners that survives.”

I came away from the window and laid my thick-rimmed government teacup back in its saucer. “Colonel Thanet,” I told him, “we may have only a few hours, even a few minutes, before those thirteen devils get together and call up their master. Then what are we going to do?”

“We’re not going to panic, and that’s for certain,” said the colonel. “First of all, we’re going to make quite sure that the devils’ religious seals are quite intact, because there isn’t much they can do while they’re nothing more than exorcised bags of bones.”

“Supposing Elmek can free them—bring them back to life?”

“It would have to be a pretty powerful kind of devil to do that. Each one of those seals has been blessed by seven Roman Catholic priests and kissed by a Roman Catholic cardinal. You may be cynical about religion, but I can tell you from my own experience, that’s strong medicine.”

Madeleine lowered her eyes. “We have seen Elmek cutting up clerics like so much cheese,” she said softly.

“Well, the best thing we can do is go downstairs and have a look for ourselves,” said Lieutenant Colonel Thanet. “They should have brought your box in by now, so our ANPs are all together again for the first time since the war.”

He stood up, and tugged his tunic straight. “You haven’t finished your tea,” he remarked, in obvious surprise.

I shrugged, embarrassed. “I guess army refreshments are pretty much the same all over the world,” I told him

He peered into my cup. “Funny. I thought our chaps made pretty good tea.”

At that moment, the door opened, and one of the sergeants came in and saluted.

“The box is down in the quarantine area now, sir,” he reported. His beret was glistening with snow. “Very weighty it was, too.”

“Very good, sergeant,” said Lieutenant Colonel Thanet. “We’re on our way now. Mademoiselle Passerelle? Mr. McCook? Would you care to follow me?”

We clattered down the uncarpeted stairs, past the hall where we had first walked in, and along a corridor to the back of the house, where there was a wide cellar door, built of solid oak and hinged with steel hinges. To my right, out of the glass panes of the back door, I could see a sodden, tangled garden, and the dingy houses in the next street. Somewhere deep beneath our feet, a Tube train rattled on its way to Earl’s Court.

The sergeant unlocked the cellar door, and swung it open. When I saw the back of it, I gave Madeleine a nudge, and pointed. Nailed on to the wood was a cross identical to that silver crucifix welded over the hatch of the tank at Pont D’Ouilly. Lieutenant Colonel Thanet said, “That’s what you’d call our longstop, if you played cricket. We have it re-blessed every year by Father Mullaney, just to make sure.”

With his head bowed to avoid the low whitewashed ceiling, Lieutenant Colonel Thanet stepped through the cellar door and down the wooden staircase. I followed, and Madeleine came behind.

At the bottom of the stairs, we found ourselves in a wide white basement, lit by naked bulbs in wire cage holders. Along the walls of the basement were twelve plain trestle tables, six each side, and on each table was a black, dusty sack. The twelve acolytes of Adramelech, nothing but bones right now, but each capable of hideous and warlike life. In the centre of the floor, silent and still, lay the copper-and-lead trunk that we had brought over from France. Elmek, or Asmorod, the devil of sharp knives.

We walked slowly up and down the room, looking at each of the sacks in turn. Then Lieutenant Colonel Thanet said: “Well? What do you propose we do?”

“We have to identify them first, devil by devil,” I told him, looking around the basement. “Then we might be able to exorcise them. I have the books upstairs.”

“You can exorcise them? How?” asked Thanet. He looked sceptical.

Madeleine said, “By the invocation of angels. It’s the only way.”

The Lieutenant Colonel’s face went tight. “Angels?” he said, incredulous. “Did you say angels?”

Madeleine nodded. “You can believe in devils, colonel. Why can’t you believe in angels?”

“Because they’re—well, because they don’t exist, do they? Or do they?”

I rubbed my eyes tiredly. “We don’t actually know, colonel. But it seems to me that it’s the only alternative we have left. Father Anton gave me a book about invoking angels, and so did the Reverend Taylor, and they were both well versed in the techniques of exorcism. I guess it’s the only way.”

There was another deep, rumbling noise; only this time I wasn’t so sure it was the Tube. I looked quickly at Madeleine, and she said, “Please, Colonel. I think Dan is right. We don’t have much time.”

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet cast his eyes around the basement, and then at our box, and sighed. “Very well. If you think you can do some good. But I warn you—if anything looks as if it’s going to go wrong—or if you attempt to damage any of these ANPs—then I shall have you out of here straight away. These things are government property, and it’s worth my whole damned career if you break ’em.”

Slowly, ominously, the lights in the basement began to dim; as if some other enormous power source was feeding off the electricity. I snapped at Madeleine, “Get those books—quick! They’re up on Colonel Thanet’s desk!” and then I pulled the Lieutenant Colonel away from Elmek’s copper-and-lead trunk.

The lights dimmed and dimmed until all we could see was their orange filaments, barely glowing in the darkness. Lieutenant Colonel Thanet called: “Sergeant Boone! Bring three men down here with Sterlings!”

The darker it grew, the quieter it became. We could hear shouting and footsteps upstairs in the house; but down here in the cellar the silence seemed to tall in on us like soft tufted cotton. Lieutenant Colonel Thanet touched my arm in the strange twilight and whispered: “What is it? Do you know what it is? What’s happening?”

“It’s Elmek,” I whispered back. “Ten-to-one it’s Elmek.”

We hadn’t seen or heard the lid of the trunk open, but when I looked down at it, the lid had been thrown right back, and even in the faint light of the glowing electric filaments, I could see the stained, centuries-old silk that lined the trunk’s insides, and I could also see that it was empty. I gripped Lieutenant Colonel Thanet’s shoulder in warning, and I slowly scanned the basement with straining eyes for any sign of our thirteenth devil.

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet said, “This is all most odd. I don’t know what the damned things are trying to achieve.”

“I guess they want their freedom,” I told him. “They’ve been sewn up in these goddamned sacks since the eleventh century, apart from that brief excursion during the war. And they also want to bring their master back into the world.”

“You really think they’re going to raise Adramelech?”

“That’s what Elmek said. And Elmek should know.”

In the depths of that basement, we heard a long, slow breathing noise, like the breathing of a man under heavy anaesthetic. I looked down towards the far end, between the trestles, where it was darkest. For a moment, I couldn’t see anything at all, but when I screwed up my eyes I thought I could make out a darker shape. A shape that I dreaded more than any other. The dwarf-like form of the devil Elmek, with his nightmarish eyes and his hideous rustling body.

“Elmek,” I said softly. “I command you.”

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet turned to me in incredulity. “What are you doing?” he asked me, impatient and fretful. “Who are you talking to?”

I ignored him. There wasn’t time for explanations. The basement was beginning to shake like the engine-room of a ship at sea, and I could hear the wooden trestles rattling against the walls and the floor.

“Elmek, listen. We have fulfilled our bargain. What about yours? Here are your twelve brethren. Give us back our priest, Father Anton, and give us back Antoinette.”

The devil stirred, and chuckled. Lieutenant Colonel Thanet took a step backwards, and tried to tug me back as well.

“Elmek,” I said again.

There was a moment’s silence, and then the devil said: “I have told you before. Only Adramelech can breathe back life into your departed friends. We must first summon Adramelech.”

Thanet shouted: “Sergeant!”

A rush of heavy boots began to come down the cellar steps. Sergeant Boone came first, a solid-looking soldier in light khaki fatigues and a maroon beret, carrying a light machine-gun under his arm. Behind him clattered three others, all with those bullet-like heads and young implacable faces that British soldiers seem to have developed through unnatural selection.

“Down the end there, sergeant,” said Lieutenant Colonel Thanet crisply. “Hold your fire for now.”

I pointed out, rather morbidly, “Do you really think that guns are going to do us any good, sir?”

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet gave me a sour glance. “I’m sure they won’t, Mr. McCook. But we have to be prepared for every eventuality.”

We waited for a few minutes in the dark and silence of that London basement, and I could see the soldiers looking apprehensively at the way the light bulb filaments glowed and pulsed like electric worms. At the far end of the basement, completely concealed in shadows, Elmek watched us and waited.

“Elmek,” I said at last, “what do you want us to do?”

The devil shifted in the dark.

“We can’t help you summon Adramelech unless you tell us what to do,” I prompted it.

Elmek said, in the voice of an old woman, “Bring down the girl. We must have the girl here.”

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet said, “First of all, we have to know what you intend to do with her.”

Sergeant Boone and his men looked at their colonel in bewilderment. To them, he was their superior officer, and nobody hiding in the shadows down at the end of a basement would normally dare to speak to their superior officer with such blatant disrespect.

Sergeant Boone said, “We could always go down there, sir, and snatch him. Corporal Perry and me were both in Ulster, sir. It’s our specialty.”

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet didn’t turn to look at his sergeant. He simply ordered, “Don’t move, sergeant. Not until I tell you,” and kept staring into the darkness.

“The girl’s coming,” I told the devil. “She went upstairs, but she’s coming.”

Among the shadows, I could perceive how Elmek constantly stirred and altered shape. Madeleine had been right about it. It was probably elated at joining its brethren, and it was churning through an endless physical metamorphosis in sheer excitement. I saw suggestions of diseased and slithering shapes in the darkness that made me feel nauseous, and when Sergeant Boone’s men grew accustomed to the dim light, and could make out for themselves some of the sickening and repulsive forms that glistened and slithered at the end of the basement, they exchanged looks of mounting mystification and horror.

Through the muffling, suffocating silence, I heard Madeleine coming downstairs and opening the cellar door. Then she appeared, with my two books under her arm. I nodded towards the dark end of the cellar, and told her: “Elmek. It’s appeared.”

Madeleine handed me the books. She whispered, “What is it doing? Has it said what it wants?”

I shook my head. “It wants you, but I don’t know why.”

Elmek cackled, “You don’t know why? You can’t even guess? Don’t you know what that poor girl Jeanne d’Arc did for the benefit of our help in battle? Can’t you imagine what befell poor Gundrada, the wife of William de Warrenne?”

Sergeant Boone lifted his Sterling machine-gun. But Lieutenant Colonel Thanet raised a hand and warned, “Steady, sergeant. We’re not dealing with the IRA now.”

I called, “What do you want us to do, Elmek? The girl is here now. What do you want us to do?”

The basement trembled and shook again, and there was a low, irritating sound like thousands of blowflies swarming over a dead horse. It was so dark now that we could hardly see at all. One of the soldiers said, “Christ, it’s like a bleeding grave down ’ere.”

“Quiet that man!” snapped the sergeant.

Elmek whispered, in a hoarse, mocking voice, “The girl must open each sack in turn. Only the girl will do. Only the girl has any religious faith. She must open each sack in turn, and say over it the words of the conjuration.”

While Elmek was talking, I was straining my eyes in the dim light to read the pages which the Reverend Taylor had marked in his thin black book. The section was headed The Seven Accurate Tests of An Evil Spirit’s Identity, and it told you what you had to do to discover the true name of a demon or devil. But as I read more and more, my confidence sank. The first test was to ask the devil its name by the power of Sammael, the arch-demon whom they called “the venom of God”. The second test was to burn the devil’s hair or scales and see whether the smoke sank downwards or rose upwards. The third test was to sprinkle various herbs on its skin—borage, fennel, parsley, and dozens of others, because different devils were marked or repelled by different plants. The fourth was to spray a silver spoonful of devil’s blood across twenty-six cards with letters of the alphabet on them, and the blood would fall on every card except those with the letters of its own name. The fifth and the sixth and the seventh were equally impossible, and all of them were obviously devised for a full-scale ritual exorcism. What we had here, in this cellar in Huntingdon Place, was an occult emergency.

“Madeleine,” I hissed. “Madeleine, I can’t do these tests. They’re too complicated.”

She lifted a finger. “Wait,” she whispered back. “There may be some other way.”

“What other way? What are you talking about?”

“You will have to trust me,” she said.

“Well, what do you want me to do. You can’t go around opening up those sacks!”

“I must.”

“Madeleine, I—”

She reached out in the darkness and held my arm. “Trust me,” she said. “As I open up each sack, I will try and discover the name of the devil within it, and I will try to pass that name on to you. These are only lesser devils. They’re fierce and warlike and loathsome, but they’re not wise.”

“And what do I do when you’ve told me their names?” I asked her. “Always supposing that we live that long.”

She pressed her hand against L’Invocation des Anges. She said, “Look up each name in the book, and beside it you will see another name, the name of the devil’s corresponding angel. Invoke that angel by repeating the words of the conjuration.”

I frowned at her. “How do you know all this? I thought that—”

Elmek wheezed, “Come on, girl, open up these sacks for me! Tear open these sacks and release my beloved brethren! Hurry, girl, there is little time left!”

The basement lights pulsed brighter, and then dimmed dark again. I could feel a deep, systematic throbbing throughout the whole room, like the gristly beating of some gruesome heart. Between me and Elmek, Sergeant Boone and his men now stood with their machine-guns raised, and Lieutenant Colonel Thanet was turning towards us with an expression of responsible concern. I suppose they teach them responsible concern at officer school.

He said, “I can’t advise you to do what the devil says, Mademoiselle Passerelle. In fact, I’ll have to order you to stay back.”

Madeleine gave my hand a last, gentle squeeze. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant Colonel. But I cannot do what you ask.”

Elmek, in what sounded like eight vibrant voices speaking at once, called, “Open the sacks, girl! Asmorod is impatient!”

Madeleine took one step forward. As she did so, a hideous shape emerged from the shadows at the far end of the basement—a shape like the black glossy skull of a beetle. There was a shivering, rustling, grasshopper sound, the chirring noise of insects. But it wasn’t an insect, because I could make out tentacles as well, and some grotesque shape attached to its abdomen like a deformed Siamese twin of itself.

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet shouted, “Fire!”

What happened next seemed to happen so slowly that I remember every detail of it, like some repulsive action replay that goes over and over inside your mind. I saw the sergeant and his three soldiers raise their machine-guns. I saw Lieutenant Colonel Thanet taking one pace backwards. Then, out of one soldier’s mouth, in a dreadful torrent, came gallons and gallons of bloody chopped-up slush, splattering all over the concrete floor. It looked as if he was puking a hundred pounds of raw hamburger meat, and Madeleine turned her face away with a mewl of anguish. Transfixed, I watched as the soldier’s whole body seemed to collapse like an empty cushion-cover, and he twisted over and lay flat on his face on the gory floor. Beside him, Sergeant Boone collapsed in the same way, his fatigues black with bile and blood, and then the other two soldiers. The sweetish smell was overwhelming, and I had two dry heaves before I could control my stomach.

The darkness, almost thankfully, closed in again. I wiped cold perspiration away from my forehead, and pulled Madeleine back, away from the four dead soldiers. It was silent for a minute or two; but then I heard Elmek’s creaky laughing, the voice of an old crone, but a harshly inhuman voice as well, as if its breath were piping through a throat lined with black hairs.

“They dared to threaten me,” the devil mocked us. “They dared to raise their weapons against me. It’s almost a pity that you couldn’t see, from the outside, the artistry of what I did to them. But then that’s the elegance of such a death. Their bowels and their stomachs and their lungs and their kidneys were sliced up and vomited out, leaving their bodies as empty as their stupid heads.”

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet, his voice shaking, said, “I think we’d better try to make a run for it, Mr. McCook.”

I said, “I don’t think there’s much point, Colonel. We could be minced up like that before we even got up the first step. Damn it, that’s why we were forced to come here in the first place!”

Madeleine interrupted, “It won’t harm us, monsieur le colonel, if we do what it tells us to do. Now, I must open those sacks. We don’t have any more time to waste.”

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet snapped, “I forbid it! I forbid you to take a single step!”

“Then I shall take several,” said Madeleine, defiantly, and pushed past him into the gloom.

Elmek’s husky rustle of approval made me feel as if my shirt had been suddenly soaked in iced water. I tried to follow Madeleine, but she turned round and instructed me quietly, “Stay there, Dan. Please. Stay back. Just listen to the names when I tell you, and invoke their angels.”

Elmek hissed, “What are you saying? What are you talking about?”

Madeleine turned and looked straight into the convoluted shadows where the devil lurked. “I am doing what I have to do,” she said simply, and went up to the first trestle table.

She stood over the table for what seemed like minutes on end, but was only a few seconds. Then she said: “I summon thee, O being of darkness, O spirit of the pit. I command thee to make thy most evil appearance. I order thee to come forth, and I nullify all seals upon thee, all ties that bind thee. Venite O spirit.”

Then she gripped the musty fabric of the sack, and ripped it open.

From where I was standing, it was difficult for me to see. But I could glimpse strange bones, and smell arcane dusts, and hear the rattle of fiendish vertebrae. Madeleine reached into the sack, and lifted out the devil’s skull, holding it up for Elmek to see.

“The devil Umbakrail,” she said. “The devil of darkness and evil events after nightfall.”

I was so fascinated by what she was doing that I almost forgot to look up the name Umbakrail in L’Invocation des Anges. But as she moved to the next trestle, I hurriedly turned through the pages until I found it. Umbakrail, also Umbaqurahal, also S’aamed. The devil of dark. There was even an etching of it—a grotesque beast with staring eyes and razor-sharp claws. On the facing page, in Henri St. Ermin’s laborious French, was a description of its seraphic counterpart, the angel Seron, and below that were the words which would call down Seron to banish the evil presence of its hellish adversary.

“O angel,” I muttered, fearful that Elmek might hear what I was doing, “I adjure thee in the name of the blessed Virgin Mary, by her holy milk, by her sanctified body, by her sanctified soul, to come forth. I ask thee by all the holy names—Eloy, Jehova, El Oristan, Sechiel, Laaval…”

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet said, “What the hell are you doing?”

I glanced up at him. “You mean what the heaven am I doing. I’m calling down the angels to get us out of this.”

“For God’s sake, man, that girl’s in deadly danger! We’ve got to—”

I hissed, “Shut up! There’s nothing else we can do! You saw what Elmek did to your men! Now, just give us a chance to do it our way!”

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet was about to protest, but a low, unpleasant rumbling went through the cellar, and he turned towards the writhing shapes of the demon Elmek in alarm. Madeleine had spoken the words of the conjuration over the second sack, and was pulling apart the soft medieval fabric to reveal the terrifying skeleton within.

Again, she raised the skull. It was long and narrow, with slanted eye-sockets, and the nubs of two horns. I felt a chilly ripple flow out from it, as if someone had opened the door of a cold-store. The lights in the cellar sank and flickered, and I sensed the mounting presence of unspeakable malevolence and cruelty.

“Cholok,” said Madeleine, identifying the devil for me. “The devil of suffocation. The devil who smothers children and asphyxiates victims of fires.”

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet glared at me in helpless desperation, but I was too busy leafing through my book. There it was. Cholok, sometimes known as Nar-speth. A devil with a face of absolute dispassion, and the leathery wings of a reptile. On the page opposite, I saw that its heavenly opposite was Melés, the angel of purity and happiness. I spoke the words to summon Melés, and then watched Madeleine as she went to the third sack.

Skeleton by skeleton, from the third sack to the fourth, and then to the fifth and the sixth and the seventh, the skeletons of each devil were taken from the ancient material in which they had been sewn up for so long. As yet, they took on no life, but I guessed that when all of them were free from their religious captivity, they would clothe themselves in flesh the way that Elmek must have done in Father Anton’s cellar.

The noise in the cellar was hideous and unnerving. As each devil was freed, the chorus of hellish voices grew louder; until the whole place sounded like an insane asylum, with scratching insect sounds and grotesque shrieks, and voices that whispered incessantly of death and plague and aberrations beyond human understanding. I was sweating so much that my fingers made damp dimples on the pages of L’Invocation des Anges, and Lieutenant Colonel Thanet was holding his hands to his ears in stunned disbelief.

At last, Madeleine spoke the words to free the last devil from his sack—the demon Themgoroth, the hawklike devil of blindness. In my turn, I mumbled the invocation that would bring down Themgoroth’s angelic opponent Asrul.

I didn’t forget to call Elmek’s angel, either. Jespahad, the angel of healing.

Madeleine stepped back towards us. All the bones were revealed now, and the ghastly skulls faced each other across the cellar, with the distorted form of Elmek twisting and shifting between them. The stench was disgusting—a fetid mixing of thirteen nauseous odors that made my eyes water and my stomach tense in physical rebellion. Beside me, Lieutenant Colonel Thanet gagged, and had to wipe his mouth with his handkerchief.

The cacophony of voices and sounds was growing, too. As I leaned towards Madeleine and whispered, “I did it I think I did it,” she could hardly hear me over the shrieks and cries and gibbering noises. She said, “What?”

“I did it. I called all the angels. What happens now?”

“Yes,” said Thanet, his face pale. “Where are they? If they’re supposed to come and help us, where are they?”

Madeleine looked at us for a moment. Her pale green eyes were very bright and very intense. She seemed to have taken on some indefinite charisma of pure strength and determination, as if she knew now exactly what had to be done, and how, and that she was going to carry it out whatever the cost.

She said, “It is not yet time. But the angels will come. First, we must let these devils call up Adramelech.”

“Adramelech?” asked Lieutenant Colonel Thanet, aghast. “But we don’t stand any kind of a chance against Adramelech!”

Elmek’s voice boomed and grumbled over the screams and whispers of his fellow devils. “I am pleased,” it said, in a frighteningly amplified tone. “I am well pleased. At last, my brethren and I are reunited! You will have your reward, mortals. You will have your reward!”

Madeleine turned to the devil, and called back, “We are pleased to serve you, my lord.”

I said, “Madeleine—” and reached for her arm, but she brushed me away.

“We are true disciples of Adramelech and all his works,” she cried out, her voice high and thin over the bellowing and groaning of the thirteen devils. “We will follow Adramelech wherever his chancellorship should lead us, and we will gladly bow before him in the courts of the nether kingdom!”

“For Christ’s sake, Madeleine,” I snapped. But she ignored me, and lifted her arms high.

“Summon Adramelech when you will,” she shrilled. “Let us abase ourselves before his evil glory and his malevolent majesty!”

There was a thunderous roar, like a locomotive at full speed. The lights went out altogether, and we were plunged into a darkness that was loud with horrifying sounds and whispers, and sickening stenches of putrefaction. I said: “Madeleine—” again, but she called back, “Don’t move! Just stay where you are! The devils are taking on flesh!”

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet put in sharply, “We’re going to have to move. We can’t stay here. we’re sitting targets. I vote we go for the steps while it’s still dark.”

“Colonel, these things are creatures of darkness. They can see you standing there as easily as if it were daylight.”

“But, dammit, we can’t just stay here! One of us has to go for help!”

Madeleine begged, “Please, Colonel! Just stay calm and keep still! We do have a chance, if you’ll just stay calm!”

It was a little like asking someone to stay calm in a pitch-black cage of mentally-disturbed leopards. What made it more difficult was that Lieutenant Colonel Thanet was trained for action. His whole philosophy of life was—if in doubt, do something. He said, “I’m going to make a run for it, that’s all!”

Madeleine shouted, “No!” and I tried to grab the colonel’s arm in the darkness, but I guess he was practised at rugby or something, because he ducked deftly out of my way, and was gone.

We couldn’t see them, but we heard them. As Lieutenant Colonel Thanet dodged across the basement floor, the devils abruptly turned on him, their bodies rustling and clattering in a hideous excited rush. He reached the foot of the stairs, and I think he managed to stumble up the first two or three steps. But then he said, “Ah!” in an odd, choked voice, and I heard him trip and fall heavily on to the floor.

Madeleine said, “Oh, mon Dieu…” but both of us knew that it would be suicidal to go to help him. The darkness was total, and we would have been snapped up like baby mice tossed to a rat.

Suddenly, though, the ghastly hustle and flurry of devils died away; and out of the dark I saw a dim phosphorescent outline, which I recognized as Elmek. It shuddered and twisted, changing through images of bizarre and vicious reptiles to formless squids and threatening clouds of ectoplasm. Then, in a voice so grating that it was hardly recognisable, it spoke to its twelve brethren.

“Leave… the man… unharmed… He is a morsel… for our master… Adramelech…”

Gradually, the lights in the cellar began to glow again. They didn’t shine brightly, and all we could see of the devils was a grotesque huddle of shadowy shapes around the foot of the steps. But they showed that Lieutenant Colonel Thanet was still alive, crouched on the floor with his hands held over his head to protect himself from claws and teeth and leathery wings that had only just spared him.

“These mortals… will all be offered…” continued Elmek harshly. “That is their reward… for helping us…”

Madeleine took a step forward, and the cluster of devils whispered and rustled.

“Is that your idea of a bargain?” she said, in a clear tone. “Is that your idea of keeping your promises?”

Elmek laughed, and its laugh came out like shattered splinters of glass.

“You said… you wished… to serve Adramelech…”

“And we will! We will be the two most devoted mortals that his malevolence has ever known! But we cannot serve him if you use us as sacrifices!”

I stayed well back while Madeleine argued with Elmek. For one thing—although I couldn’t guess how—she seemed to have the situation under some kind of control. Either she hadn’t been levelling with me when we first met by the tank in Normandy, or else she was showing a side of her character I just hadn’t guessed at. But whichever it was, she was making a skilful play at keeping us alive, and that was all that mattered.

Apart from that, I stayed well back because those devils, those terrifying gargoyles who lived and breathed and ground their teeth in almost overwhelming blood-lust, were the shadowy stuff of nightmares, and I knew that if I came any closer, I would find out that the nightmares were real.

The devil Umbakrail raised its bony head from the crawling mass of demons, and I saw the dim basement lights blotted out by the narrow goatish shadow of its skull.

“The highest act of devotion which a mortal can pay to Adramelech is to offer life, breath and blood. How can you say you are Adramelech’s loyal servant if you are reluctant to offer your greatest gifts?”

Madeleine said, “I have a greater and more mysterious gift for your master Adramelech than my life, breath and blood.”

The devils whispered and murmured. They were exuding a stench now that made me feel as if I was trapped in a zoo. A sour, dry fetid odor like the urine of bears or apes.

Umbakrail said harshly, “You will soon have the chance to prove what you have, mortal woman. We shall now call up Adramelech from his sleep of many years, and you shall have the honour of offering your gift directly.”

Madeleine was silent for a moment, and then she said, “Very well,” and turned her back on the thirteen devilish acolytes of Adramelech as if they were no more vicious than thirteen chained dogs.

On the floor by the steps, Lieutenant Colonel Thanet coughed, and moaned. I called, “Colonel! How do you feel?”

He coughed again. “I don’t know… pretty rough. I think I broke a rib on the stairs. And something’s dug its claws into my back. I can feel the blood.”

Yet another thunderous rumble shook the basement, and the devils’ groans and whispers rose in a wave of discordant lust. Cholok said, “It is time. It is time for the summoning.”

While Madeleine and I kept ourselves back against the wall, the devils moved themselves into a semi-circle around the centre of the floor. I tried to look at them as they stood there in the dense, clotted shadows—tried to see what they really were. But they seemed to have shadows of their own making, actual cloaks of darkness, and all I could make out were scaly wings and curved horns and eyes that glistened and glowed with hellish lights. They were medieval devils of the most legendary kind—the devils that have plagued men and women from Europe’s earliest times. It was almost no surprise at all to find that they were not figments of some frustrated nun’s imagination, but that they walked the earth with real claws and real teeth, and that we have as much to fear from devils when the nights are dark as we have from muggers or murderers.

Madeleine bent towards me and whispered, “What you are going to see now will be frightening. You will be in danger of your life. But whatever happens, don’t panic or try to get away. You saw what happened to Lieutenant Colonel Thanet.”

I nodded, dumbly. The stench and the darkness were beginning to close in on me now, and I felt as if I was faced with some horrible but inevitable moment of fear, like sitting in a 747 with faulty landing-gear and knowing that you have to come down sometime. I think I would have done anything for a cigarette. I know I would have done anything to be somewhere else.

The devils began to chant some long litany in a language I couldn’t recognize. It had a curiously compulsive rhythm to it, a repetitive harshness that made me feel unexpectedly nauseous. The basement grew stuffier and stuffier, and it was impossible to take a breath that wasn’t ripe with the stench of demons. I wiped sweat from my forehead with the back of my sleeve, and tried to keep my stomach muscles tense so that I wouldn’t heave.

“Adramelech chastu remlishthu narek. Adramelech hismarad yonluth. Adramelech chastu remlisthu narek.”

At first, there was nothing but this unsettling chanting. But then I felt an odd sensation, a kind of singing metallic emptiness, as if I was under novacain at the dentist. The next thing I knew, the temperature dropped lower and lower and lower, and I had the feeling that the far wall of the basement had vanished, and that there was nothing there at all but a void of freezing darkness.

“Adramelech chastu remlisthu narek. Adramelech hismarad yonluth. Adramelech chastu remlisthu narek.”

Now, the walls of the basement seemed to dwindle away, and a chill astral wind blew across us. We appeared to be poised somewhere timeless and airless, and I couldn’t work out which was up and which was down, or how far away anything was, or how close.

The devils were still there, though. They were chanting their conjuration over and over again, in their harsh insect voices, and I could feel whatever it was that they were summoning draw nearer, the way you can feel someone approaching you in the pitch blackness of a darkened room. Something indescribably frightening was coming, called up by this evil and arcane chant that hadn’t been heard on earth since the Middle Ages. I thought I heard Lieutenant Colonel Thanet shrieking, but the piercing sound of it was overwhelmed by the devils’ litany, and by the endless emptiness all around us.

Madeleine turned slowly towards me, slowly, slowly, like a woman in a dream. I tried to say: “Madeleine…” but my voice came out as nothing but an endless blur of whispered sounds. She shook her head, and half-smiled, and turned away again.

“Adramelech usthul! Adramelech hismarad! Adramelech ghuthil!” called the devils.

And then their dark membrane-like wings lifted wide and stiff, and their eyes glared through the darkness, and I saw with my own eyes the first manifestation of Adramelech, the Grand Chancellor of Hell, since Patton and Montgomery had raised him during the war.

The vision was so terrifying that I went cold with wave after wave of shock. In the middle of the reptilian circle of devils, huge and hideous, stood a dark thing that looked like a giant deformed donkey, rearing up on its hind legs. It had a monstrous head, and a chest covered with shaggy hair, but its stomach and its hind quarters were afflicted with some kind of crusty excrescences, like tumours. As it appeared through the darkness, there was a screaming sound all around it, a thousand decibels of feedback, and the air itself was distorted like heat rippling from a road. For endless minutes, the eighth demon of the evil sephiroth stood there, turning its head to gaze with stately malevolence at his thirteen acolytes, and the noise was so overwhelming that I thought it was going to deafen me for ever!

Madeleine went down on her knees, and I followed her. She shouted, unheard by the devils in the howling noise, “This is Adramelech! He takes on the form of a donkey to mock Our Lord’s ride into Jerusalem!”

“What the hell are we going to do?” I yelled back. “Even more to the point—what’s Adramelech going to do to us?”

“Wait!” she told me. “When the moment comes—we’ll act!”

There was a deep rumble, and then the feedback noise dropped off to a low howl. The basement walls began to rematerialize, and within a few moments the awesome Adramelech was standing amongst us in the cellar, slowly taking in his surroundings, and waiting for the subservient rustling of his devils to subside.

I was aware of such evil in the air that my pulse refused to calm down. It was more terrible than I could have imagined possible. It was a hundred times more scaring than being jostled by hoodlums on your way home, or waking up in the night to hear someone breaking the window of your back door. It was absolute high-pitched fear that went on and on and on and never subsided.

Adramelech turned towards Madeleine and me. I heard a clear, cultivated whisper say, “Who are these?”

“They are mortal disciples, converted to the ways of hell by Elmek,” responded Umbakrail.

There was a pause, but I didn’t dare to look up. Beside me, Madeleine stayed on her knees, her hands clasped together as if she were praying. I didn’t blame her. In the face of the demon Adramelech, there didn’t seem to be much else you could do.

Adramelech said, “I am pleased, Elmek. You have brought us together again at last, as the Nine Books of Hell have always predicted. Does it not say in the Third Book that we shall help in a mortal war which shall divide us, but that we shall come together in time for yet another mortal war?”

“Those are the words, master,” said Umbakrail, in a subservient tone.

Adramelech turned his attention to Lieutenant Colonel Thanet, who had been forced to kneel in front of him by two of the devils.

“And which is this?” he asked.

Cholok said, “This is one of the mortal war makers, who has been attempting for years to discover the words which could summon you up, O master, but also those words which could send you back,”

Adramelech laughed. “Only a blood-bargain can send me back, little war maker,” he said. “And each time I am summoned, the blood demanded must be more. You are even more ignorant than those war makers of times gone by.”

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet raised his bruised face and looked up at the demon Adramelech. “Would you really help us?” he said, unsteadily. “If we struck a blood-bargain, would you really help us, like you did during the war?”

“Which war?” demanded Adramelech. “We have fought in many wars! We fought at Agincourt, and we turned the Romans back at Minden! We fought in South Africa, with the Boers; and we fought best of all on the Somme, and at Passchendaele, and Ypres, where we did what you wanted us to do, and exterminated a whole generation of your young men.”

“I know that,” said Lieutenant Colonel Thanet. “But will you help us now?”

“You want to exterminate more?” asked Adramelech. “Then you have a lust for destruction and violence which pleases me. There is a close bond between the hierarchy of hell and mortals like you, and it pleases me. One day, perhaps, when mortals finally understand the purpose for which they were created, they will destroy themselves no more, and despair no more; but I trust that we can stay that day as long as we can.”

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet, for one rare moment, looked up at Adramelech like a man, instead of a soldier. “You know?” he asked the demon. “You know why we’re here? Why there are humans on earth?”

Adramelech’s sardonic laugh sounded like a thousand tons of rock dropping down a thousand empty mineshafts. “Know? But of course I know! But why should that trouble you? Your purpose is infinitely tinier, yet infinitely more exciting! To destroy, and to have in your hands the power of destruction! To inflict pain on yourselves! To pull down everything that the works of man and God between them have created! Why should you concern yourself with philosophy when you have such pleasure at your disposal?”

Clustered around Adramelech like fawning courtiers, the devils hissed and whispered. There was a pause, and then Lieutenant Colonel Thanet said, “We need your power for NATO. Do you know what NATO is?”

“Of course, little war maker. Adramelech is omniscient.”

“Well, it’s been my brief to summon you up, and ask for your help.”

Adramelech looked down on Lieutenant Colonel Thanet with indulgence. “You do not have to ask for my help. But you do have to bargain for it. Tell me what destruction you desire to be wreaked, and I will tell you what price you will have to pay. The price, I warn you, is always blood.”

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet looked disconcerted. “I don’t want any destruction,” he said. “I simply want to have you on hand as a defence unit.”

Adramelech laughed. “Defence is nothing more than latent destruction! Why pretend that what you are arming yourselves for is defence, when all you wish to do is destroy those who you believe to be your enemies? Show me the difference between a weapon of attack and a weapon of defence! Do they kill differently? Is one less dangerous than the other? You are even more of a fool than I thought!”

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet tried to get to his feet. “Now look here!” he snapped. “It was my work that brought you here, and it’s about time you appreciated it!”

Adramelech, for a moment, was quiet. Then he said: “I appreciated the work of Patton and Eisenhower, little war maker. Patton had me summoned through the circle of my thirteen acolytes, and he came to me as a man bent on destruction. He wanted the Germans killed, and killed quickly. I admit that he was frightened of us, and that he kept us in check with his priests. But he desired death for his enemies, and he paid us in blood, and we were satisfied. Patton and Eisenhower were both men that I could be proud of. But you? What are you saying? That you don’t want to kill after all?”

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet was flustered. He was also terrified, although he was trying desperately not to show it. He said shakily, “We can’t ask you to go out on a rampage of death and destruction right now. There isn’t a war. Not like there was with Patton.”

“Why should that matter?” asked Adramelech drily. “If you unleash us on your enemies, we will make a war for you. A war that you will win.”

“I don’t want you to!” shouted Thanet, wincing in pain from his broken rib.

“You have no choice,” said Adramelech. “Now we are summoned, you cannot send us back without fulfilling a bargain. You have absolutely no choice at all.”

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet said: “What kind of a bargain would you settle for? You’ve already killed four of my men.”

Adramelech turned his monstrous head. “I would settle for you,” he suggested, in that sinister whisper. “I would definitely settle for you.”

“Me?” asked Thanet, horrified. “What do you mean, me?”

“I would find it enjoyable to bite off your head,” said Adramelech.

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet was very white. He knelt there for a long while, swaying with shock and stress. Even then, I don’t think that he could truly believe that Adramelech was real. His mind had retreated into itself, and his subconscious was probably busy reassuring him that he’d drunk too much and eaten too many pickled onions, and that he was going to wake up soon.

“What’s the alternative?” he said queasily. “War? Is that it?”

Adramelech said nothing.

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet twisted his head around painfully and looked at Madeleine and me. Madeleine hissed, “Don’t offer him anything! Sit tight and don’t offer him anything!”

Lieutenant Colonel Thanet looked back at the Chancellor of Hell. He said, in an almost inaudible voice, “You have to give me some time.”

Adramelech said., “There is no time.”

“But I don’t know what to do! I can’t let you—”

Adramelech bellowed, in a surge of ear-splitting feedback, “There is no time!”

There was a frozen moment when the demon was glowering at Thanet and Thanet was staring back at him in terror. Then the Colonel heaved himself up from the floor and made a dive for the cellar steps, screaming at the top of his voice at the pain from his broken rib.

It was Askalon, the devil of fire, who stopped him. As Thanet reached the fifth or sixth step, he was suddenly engulfed in fierce, roaring flames. The spectacle was horrifying. Thanet screamed again, and tried to beat out the fire that shrivelled his hair and his skin and burned up his body fats, but his hands were alight, too, and all he did was fan the flames even more ferociously.

He stood for a moment, a man of blackened flesh and fire, and then he dropped sideways off the steps and collapsed on the floor.

Adramelech watched him in grotesque silence. Then the demon whispered: “A coward and a fool. Not a war maker at all. At least Patton gave me blood.”

Madeleine touched my hand. She whispered: “Don’t move. Don’t say a word,” and then she stood up and faced Adramelech and his devils with a calmness and a straight-backed self-confidence that I think I would have found impossible.

She said, “Adramelech.”

At first, the demon didn’t hear her, although some of his lesser devils did, and turned their slanted goat-like eyes towards her.

Madeleine said, louder, “Adramelech!”

The demon lifted his strange mulish head. He said nothing for a while, until Madeleine had walked right up to his deformed feet.

“I know you,” he whispered, suspiciously. “I recognize you from times gone by.”

Madeleine stayed where she was—erect and unafraid.

“I have seen you before,” said Adramelech. “Speak your name, mortal!”

“My name is Madeleine Passerelle,” answered Madeleine. “But you know me first as Charlotte Latour; and you shall know me by another name, too.”

“What do you mean?” growled Adramelech. There was something about Madeleine that unsettled and disturbed him.

Madeleine placed her hands together in the gesture of prayer. She said quietly: “I was the girl given to you by General Patton in payment for Operation Stripes. They said I was a collaborator, and that I had betrayed the French resistance movement. Only God knows that this was not true, and that jealous friends had given the story around. But I had to suffer for it, all the same, and I was taken to England and put before you, to appease your destructive wrath. I shall never forget what you did to me, how you gave me agony beyond any endurance, and how you abused my womanhood to the ends of natural or supernatural imagination.”

Adramelech didn’t answer, but his devils were disturbed, and I could hear their claws scratching impatiently on the floor.

“I died,” said Madeleine simply. “I died and I ascended into the realms of Our Lord, and into the care of Our Lady Queen of Heaven. I know now what heaven is; and because I know what heaven is, I can understand hell. Heaven is the state in which the faith and steadfastness of the heart are rewarded in the very way in which your mind imagines Heaven to be. Hell is the working of ignorance and self-indulgence against the real purpose of humanity.”

Adramelech said, “If you died, Charlotte Latour, how are you here?”

Madeleine lifted her head, “I was reborn on the day of my martyrdom as the daughter of Jacques and Edith Passerelle. I did not know that I was a reincarnation—not until the time came to take Elmek from the tank, and to reunite your acolytes in this cellar. It is only today that my mind has fully realized the wholeness of my destiny, and that, as a reincarnation, I have a heavenly duty to perform.”

Adramelech laughed a torrent of ugly laughter. “Heavenly duty? You’re crazed! You’re as crazed as Jeanne d’Arc! She summoned us up, supposing that to be her duty, and now you’ve done the same! The girls of France are as simple today as they ever were!”

But Madeleine held her ground. She raised her arms, so that she stood like a human crucifix, and when she spoke, her voice sounded so clear and penetrating that I could hardly believe it was her.

“I am more than a human reincarnation, Adramelech. I am a human reincarnation born to be possessed!”

“Possessed?” retorted Adramelech. “Possessed?”

“Possessed by what?” asked Elmek. “By man or by mule?”

The devils rustled in bloodthirsty glee. For my part, I kept as far back in the shadows as I could.

It was then that Madeleine underwent a transformation that had only just been beginning when she had first spoken of angels and had taken the crisis in hand. The air all around her began to darken, and she herself became harder to see, until there was scarcely anything visible at all. Where she had been standing was what you could only call an intense black glow—a darkness so dark that I could hardly bear to look at it.

I didn’t have much in the way of scientific training. After all, I was only a cartographer. But I knew what I was looking at. Whatever Madeleine really was, or whatever was possessing her, she was now so physically dense that no reflected light could leave her body and enable us to see her. She was like a black hole in space, only she was standing right amongst us.

Her voice rang through the basement. A high, clear, beautiful voice. She said, “You recognize me now, Adramelech! You recognize me now for what I am!”

Adramelech ferociously tossed his great donkey-like head, and bared his teeth. His devils scrambled all around him, but he hurled them aside with a brutal sweep of his arm.

“Hod!” he shrieked. “The angel Hod!”

The devils groaned and howled, and retreated away from the glowing blackness. Adramelech himself drew back, but he was changing now, looking less like a monstrously diseased donkey, and more like a black Satanic beast with reddened eyes and a mouth that was thick with fangs.

Madeleine’s voice said, “I have waited centuries for this moment, Adramelech. Now I have you all together, all in one time, all in one place, all in one earthly dimension. You and your thirteen leprous disciples!”

Adramelech roared in fury, and the basement shook. Bricks were dislodged from the walls, and loose cement sifted down from the ceiling.

“I have my devils!” he screamed. “You are nothing against me and my devils!”

He swept his black, scaly arm towards his acolytes, and the air of the cellar became thick with fire and smoke and the rank smell of disease. He swept his arm again, and we were enveloped in swarms of flies and mosquitoes. He raised both arms, and brought them down in a powerful sweep of destruction, and there was a tremor that must have shaken the whole building by its foundations.

“Begone, Hod! Out, deceitful angel! Get out of this place and never return!”

There was another tremor, and part of the cellar steps collapsed, half-burying the burned body of Lieutenant Colonel Thanet. Slowly, cautiously, their reptilian wings lifted, the devils encircled the shimmering darkness of the angel Hod, their claws lifted and their teeth bared in an ecstasy of murderousness. I could see their slanted eyes through the dust and the smoke and the swarming blowflies, and I could smell that stench they exuded whenever they were aroused.

Hod said clearly, “You have no chance, Adramelech! My angels are already invoked! I call you down, my messengers! I call you down, my legions! I call you down to destroy these vile devils, and dismiss their remains to everlasting hellfire!”

I saw, for one moment, the horns of the devils silhouetted against the ultimate blackness of the divine angel Hod. I saw Adramelech rearing in the background, more hideous and bestial than ever before, his rows of teeth glistening with saliva. I saw the whole cellar lit with the phosphorescence of diseased flesh, and clouded with flies.

Then, my vision was blinded by white intense light. Everything was blotted out in brilliance—the brilliance of angels who had not yet attained the ultimate brilliance of total darkness. I clapped my hands to my face, and turned towards the wall, but the after-image still exploded over my retina. Every one of those thirteen angels we had summoned down had arrived; in a burst of holy energy that wiped out human sight, and dazzled human understanding.

The basement trembled. I heard shrieks of agony, and screams of intolerable fear. I half-opened my eyes, squinting against the light, and I saw tall, impossibly attenuated outlines of flickering fire—things that radiated energy in all directions, and cut their way through the devils in swathes of light. I saw Umbakrail fall, its strange ribcage cloven open by light, its insides exploding in ancient dust. I saw Cholok’s flesh torn from its bones in papery flakes, and scattered in a hurricane of light. I saw Themgoroth try blindly to flee, only to be sliced apart by an angel’s dazzling arm. And I saw Elmek, too, a wriggling mass of tentacles that shrunk in on itself in pain, seared beyond endurance by the heat and the light of the angels.

In a few minutes, it was almost over. The devils lay as they had before, as bones. The angels faded, until they left nothing but shapeless memories of what they were on the sensitised rods and cones at the back of my eyes. A cool wind blew across the cellar floor, and seemed to blow the dust away, and the stench of Adramelech’s devils.

Only Adramelech and Hod remained. Adramelech’s encrusted feet were set squarely on the basement floor, his gigantic black bulk overshadowing everything, and the grand Chancellor of Hell itself glared viciously around him. Hod, the shimmering black angel, stood before him like an hallucination.

“Hod,” whispered Adramelech. “You cannot dismiss me. It is not within your power.”

“I am conscious of that,” replied Hod, in the voice of Madeleine. “But you shall go, all the same.”

“You cannot dismiss me! I shall stay! Only a mortal can dismiss Adramelech, and only a mortal with proof that your precious God once lived! You know that as well as I!”

Hod glowed darkly, and remained silent.

Adramelech growled, “For what you have done today, Hod, I shall encourage a war on this earth such as has never been seen before. You have destroyed my servants. Well, I shall destroy millions of your mortal charges. Tonight, such weapons will be used that the earth will seem to burn from pole to pole, and the generations of man will be cursed with sickness and disease and deformation for ever after.”

“The Lord God will—”

“The Lord God will do nothing! The Lord God has never done anything, never intervened, and he will not intervene now! I will see this earth burn, Hod. I will see it burn! And then your precious Lord’s precious plan will be seen for what it really always was.”

With my back against the basement wall, I heard this booming, echoing exchange of hostilities like the voices that you hear in dreams. I was uncertain at first, and desperately scared, but then I took one step forwards into the light, and the warring beings fell silent, and were obviously observing me with curiosity and surprise.

I said, hoarsely, “I dismiss you, Adramelech.”

The grand Chancellor of Hell, looming over me in glistening coils of black snake-like flesh, paused for a while to think about what I had said. Then his yellowish mouth opened, and he laughed such a cruel, evil laugh that I knew that I had probably made a mistake. I took another step, but this time it was backwards.

“So,” said Adramelech, “you dismiss me, you pathetic mortal? You dismiss me, do you?”

Terrified, I nodded yes. I remembered as much as I could of the dismissals that Father Anton and the Reverend Taylor had spoken, and I said: “Adramelech, I adjure thee to go out! In the name of God the Father leave my presence! In the name of God the Son make thy departure! In the name of the Holy Ghost leave this place! For it is God who commands thee, and it is I who command thee! By Jesus of Nazareth who gave his soul, by the blessed angels from whom thou fell, be on thy way I demand thee! Amen!”

Adramelech remained where he was. His teeth gnashed together, and he glared down at me with such fury and hatred that I was ready to do what Lieutenant Colonel Thanet had done, and make a run for it. Maybe the angel could protect me while I got away. On the other hand, maybe it couldn’t. I felt lukewarm sweat running down my back, inside my shirt.

The angel Hod said quietly: “Do you not go, Adramelech?”

Adramelech laughed. “Not until this mortal produces his proof that Jesus of Nazareth actually lived. If he can.”

There was a long, tense silence. I turned towards the angel Hod, but its black brilliance was so intense that I couldn’t see whether it was encouraging me or warning me. I turned back to Adramelech.

“Without proof of Jesus, you are doomed,” grinned Adramelech. “I shall devour you, mortal, and Hod will be powerless to prevent me. The choice of the human race was self-destruction, and not even the greatest of angels can prevent it.”

I coughed. Then I reached into my pocket and took out the pastille tin that Eloise had given me. I carefully prised off the lid, and held it up towards Adramelech.

“What is that?” asked the demon, turning its grotesque head away.

I held the tin higher. “It is irrefutable proof of the life of Our Lord Jesus Christ. It is the ashes of his seamless robe, which was taken from him on Calvary.”

Adramelech twisted and shuddered uneasily. “It’s a fake,” he said, in a harsh voice. “All relics are fakes.”

I felt frozen with fear. But I kept the tin held aloft, and I repeated, as steadily as I could: “It is the ashes of Christ’s robe, and it is not a fake. Christ lived, and these are the remnants of his robe to prove it.”

“You lie!” shrieked Adramelech. “Take that thing away!”

“It’s the truth!” I yelled back. “Christ must have lived because nobody in the whole goddamned universe could have tolerated a world where you and your devils ruled alone! Christ’s life was logical, as well as divine, and that’s all there is to it!”

“You lie!” fumed the demon. “You lie!”

“Do I?” I shouted back. Then take this!” I raised my arm, and hurled the tin of ashes over the serpentine body of the grand Chancellor of Hell in a powdery spray.

There was a second in which I thought that nothing was going to happen, and that the demon was going to attack me with those rows and rows of vicious teeth. But then Adramelech bellowed, so loudly that bricks and dust collapsed from the basement ceiling in thunderous showers, and bellowed again, and again, until I had to cover my ears.

His black snake-like skin sloughed off him in heavy, wrinkled folds. Beneath that, he was all raw glistening flesh—greys and yellows and purple veins. Then his flesh began to slither away from his bones, and evaporate into sickening, stomach-turning steam. Finally, his bones dropped to the floor, and out from his ribs crawled a twitching iridescent slug creature that subsided on to the concrete and shrivelled into nothing.

For a long time, I stood there staring at Adramelech’s remains, and couldn’t speak. It was hardly possible to believe what had happened. Then I turned back towards the dark glow of the angel Hod, and I said: “Is that it? Is Adramelech really dead?”

Madeleine’s voice said, “In this life, yes. We have much to thank you for, mortal. You have acted wisely.”

I wiped dust and dirt from my face. “What about Madeleine?” I asked the angel. “Is she going to come back? Or do you have her for ever?”

The blackness gleamed. “Madeleine is gone now, mortal, just as Charlotte Latour did before her. She is not dead, but will live in another form. Perhaps one day you will meet her again.”

I coughed. The air in the basement was dusty and stifling. I said, “What does that mean? She’s going to be reborn?”

“In a way.”

“Can you tell her something for me?”

“I’m afraid not. She will know nothing of what went before. But she will be happy. I hope that is some consolation for you. She has served us well, and deserves happiness.”

I wiped my face with my handkerchief. “And what about Father Anton, and Antoinette? Elmek promised that Adramelech would revive them.”

If such a thing was possible, the blackness smiled. Or at least, it radiated affection. It said: “The promises of devils are rarely kept. Only the Lord thy God has the final power of life or resurrection. But you may know that Father Anton is in his heaven—where he deserves to be—and that his Antoinette is with him. Those who struggle against evil are rewarded in the life hereafter.”

I was beginning to feel very tired. It was a long, long time ago since those two old men had come down the road on bicycles and interrupted my map-making to tell me about the tank at Pont D’Ouilly.

I said, “What about the devils? Are we ever going to see them again?”

“As long as man makes wars, Adramelech and his thirteen acolytes will survive, in one form or another. A demon of the evil sephiroth cannot be totally destroyed, except by disbelief. The same is true for angels of the divine sephiroth. If no man believed in glory, which is my realm, then I should vanish for all eternity.”

“I see,” I told the angel, although I wasn’t sure that I did. I looked round at the ruined basement, and said, “What do I do now? Is there anything else you want me to do?”

There was no answer. I turned around, and the black glow had disappeared. I was alone again in the world of mortals.

Very wearily, very slowly, I climbed the cellar steps, and opened the door that led out into the hallway. There was nobody around. Up here, the building looked as ordinary and normal as when we had first pushed the doorbell. The front door was open, too, and I could see my rented Citröen parked outside, with a parking ticket tucked under the windshield wiper.

I went down the steps into the wintry street. It was almost dark now, and it was beginning to snow. I lifted up my wiper and took out the ticket, and as I stood there on that wet, cold London pavement, I was glad of the icy drizzle, because nobody could see that my eyes were filled with tears.