Demons of Ghent

by Helen Grant

  She was mulling this over when they reached the point overlooking the spot where Marnix was going to appear. Bram put a hand in his shirt pocket and produced a pair of compact binoculars.

  ‘He won’t be there just yet,’ he said, peering through them. He adjusted something, then shook his head. ‘Nope.’

  He handed the binoculars to Veerle. ‘Want to look?’

  Veerle took them and raised them to her eyes. For a moment she couldn’t see anything at all other than a swimmy greyish blur.

  ‘There’s a thing on top for adjusting them,’ Bram told her.

  Veerle touched the little dial with her fingertip, and slowly the view came into focus. She realized that she was looking at the darkened upper floor of a building, its shutters closed against the night.

  Nothing to see there.

  She lowered the glasses for an instant, trying to work out where she should aim them. Then she looked again, her gaze sweeping slowly across the rooftop. She wondered where Marnix was going to come from. In this part of the city there were a great many buildings of varying ages and styles jammed close together. The rooftops formed an irregular landscape of blocks and gables and chimney stacks, like something a toddler might build out of wooden bricks. Marnix might climb down that low wall to the left, or come clambering over the tiled roof to the right. Veerle studied the rooftop for perhaps half a minute. Then she thought, Why am I looking for Marnix anyway?

  She swung round and focused the binoculars on the tower of Sint-Baafs cathedral instead, glowing golden from its floodlights. After that she picked out the Belfort, and then the Sint-Niklaaskerk. Finally she turned back to the rooftops nearby, stroking the little dial to readjust the focus, and there was Marnix.

  ‘I see him,’ she told Bram.

  ‘Where? He’s early.’

  ‘By that . . .’ She touched the dial again, very gently. ‘The chimney stack on the right, the fat one with the four pots on top. At least’ – she frowned – ‘he was there just now.’

  Beside her, Bram shrugged. ‘I can’t see him.’

  Veerle scanned the area around the chimney, and now she detected a flicker of movement to the side of it. ‘Yes, he’s definitely there.’ She handed the binoculars to Bram. ‘I don’t know why he’s lurking back there, though.’

  ‘Let me see.’ Bram looked through the binoculars. ‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘There’s Marnix, coming down that gully between those two roofs. Over to the left.’

  ‘I don’t see how he can be,’ said Veerle. ‘Not unless he had wings. I just saw him over on the right.’

  ‘Just a shadow, maybe,’ suggested Bram.

  ‘It moved.’

  Veerle reached over and took the binoculars out of his hands again. She trained them on the rooftops below. Almost immediately she saw Marnix where Bram had said he was, moving carefully towards them along a v-shaped gully.

  Odd.

  She shifted her gaze to the right, to the spot where she had seen someone move.

  It couldn’t be Marnix – not unless he can teleport himself. Her brows drew together as she concentrated. Maybe I did imagine it.

  A chill feeling of unease was seeping into her consciousness. She switched her gaze back to Marnix, who was approaching steadily but slowly, picking his way carefully in the limited light from the surrounding buildings.

  ‘Bram? Was Marnix bringing anyone else?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  Veerle swung the binoculars round, self-consciously aware that she was trying to pick up that movement by the chimney stack again, as though whoever it was could tell she was watching and could only be glimpsed if she moved quickly. And indeed, there it was again, a flicker of movement, something dark billowing or swinging. A coat tail? A wing? she thought briefly, her stomach lurching, and rooftop demons cavorted across the red backdrop of her imagination, horned and grinning.

  She suppressed the thought instantly. Come on, that’s impossible. You’re letting that stupid legend get to you. If anyone’s on the rooftops it’s real people, like Marnix. Like me and Bram. Her fingers were clamped very tightly to the binoculars. So who is this? she wondered. Just some random person?

  That was possible. It could be someone else checking out the Gravensteen the way she and Bram had done, gauging their chances of ever surveying the night-time city from its grim heights. All the same, there was something she didn’t like about the way whoever it was lurked in the shadows, never clearly glimpsed. There was something furtive about it, something suggestive of malevolence. Her mind skipped back to the night she had seen that unidentifiable figure racing towards the bottom of the ladder, running at Bram with his arm upraised, in it a glittering blade. She swallowed, fear souring her mouth like bad medicine.

  No, she told herself. Maybe whoever it is just heard Marnix coming.

  That made sense. If she had been alone up there and a stranger came climbing over the next roof, she would have waited to see who it was before showing herself. All the same, her eye was continually drawn back to that shadowy corner by the chimney stack, and that sense of creeping unease was still there, like the sound of a slowly dripping tap. Her mouth was very dry; she ran her tongue around her lips.

  ‘There’s definitely someone else up there, not just Marnix,’ she said to Bram.

  She didn’t give him the glasses; she had to watch now, she had to see who was lurking there, and what they were up to; she felt almost superstitious about it, as though she would be leaving Marnix vulnerable if she took her eyes off him.

  Marnix had reached the end of the gully; she saw him stand there for a moment, the pale speck that was his face turned towards the great bulk of the castle. Bram had switched on the head torch and she wondered whether Marnix could see it, a single bright dot on the dark crown of the keep, like a single diamond on a roughly worked diadem. If he could, he gave no sign of it. He was hesitating, and she wondered whether he had heard something – a stealthy movement perhaps.

  Veerle began to feel unaccountably anxious; there had been nothing threatening so far, and yet . . .

  ‘Bram,’ she said, ‘do you have Marnix’s number?’

  ‘Yeah. Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just thought – maybe if we needed to call him . . .’

  Bram patted his pocket. ‘OK, I thought I had my phone, but I guess I left it in my rucksack.’ He glanced towards the spot where Marnix was now descending carefully to the flat roof below. ‘If he doesn’t see us, I can go and get it.’

  Veerle’s gaze was still fixed on the tiny figure below them, as it made its way down a short section of wall and began to move across the flat roof towards the parapet. A brief sweep of the rooftop around him showed no sign of life, and yet still Veerle felt acutely anxious. She wondered where Bram had left his rucksack; she was tempted to look around for it but didn’t want to take her gaze off Marnix.

  He was walking across the roof towards the parapet, and from here it was like watching a beetle crawling across a brick. Veerle was very doubtful that Marnix would be able to see Bram’s light, and calling to him would be completely useless from here; it would be like shouting across the Grand Canyon.

  ‘Maybe you should get the phone,’ she started to say, and at that moment a second figure burst from the well of shadows by the chimney stack and raced diagonally across the roof, aiming directly for Marnix.

  For a second Veerle was too stunned to react. Shock was blooming inside her, white and silent like the explosion of an atomic bomb preserved in an old film.

  Then she saw it; she understood. She knew instantly what it meant, the deadliness of the speed and the trajectory, the tiny figure of Marnix standing so close to the parapet with his face turned to them, the yawning gulf in front of him.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said in a soft voice, and the words slithered out of her mouth like bitter pips spat into a cupped hand. Then she was holding onto the rough stones of the wall and yelling at the top of her voice.

  ‘Marnix! Marnix! Oh Go
d, Bram, get the phone! Get the phone! The verdomde phone!’

  Bram was at her shoulder and he had seen it too; even without the glasses he could see what was going to happen. He was shouting too, baying at Marnix at the top of his voice. Abruptly he pushed past Veerle, going for the rucksack, wherever it was. He jogged Veerle as he passed her and the binoculars jarred painfully around her eye sockets, but she barely noticed. She was screaming at the top of her voice, screaming so hard that her throat was burning, so beside herself that if the wall had been thinner or lower she might have been in danger of plummeting off it. There were tears in her eyes.

  ‘Marnix! Marnix!’

  It seemed to take an age for the second figure to reach Marnix, an age in which Veerle screamed his name, screamed and raged and clawed at the stone wall, struck at it uselessly with the binoculars, and maybe at the last instant Marnix did hear something across the gulf that separated them, because she saw him react. His head turned and he saw Death bearing down on him. He was forewarned, but too late. The assault was short and brutal.

  Veerle clung to the wall and the scream died in her throat. She knew that Marnix was dead, or dying. At this distance the whole terrible scene was silent. If Marnix had cried out, she hadn’t heard it.

  Veerle lifted the glasses to her eyes again. Her throat was dry with screaming, her mouth full of the dull bitter taste of ashes. Where there had been two figures visible on the rooftop, now there was only one standing there, and something horribly inert huddled at his feet.

  One of the lenses was cracked now, and she had lost focus. Her hands were trembling so much that it was difficult to turn the tiny dial or hold the binoculars still. All she could make out was the dark shape of a man, swathed in some black thing that might be a loose coat or cloak, the head cowled. At this distance she couldn’t tell how old or young he was. With no other person near him for comparison she couldn’t even tell if he were of average height and build or tall and broad. He was simply a black shape, a silhouette against the dimly lit surface of the roof. No way to know who he was.

  All the same, Veerle could feel a terrible conviction rising within her, hot and toxic as radioactive fallout.

  It’s him. The one who tried to attack Bram.

  It flashed across her mental screen then, the moment that dark and hooded figure had raced towards Bram, brandishing a blade that glittered in the amber light. She had the horrifying sense of disaster narrowly averted, of the great white shark cruising past, centimetres below the naked foot that is drawn up into the boat in heart-thumping panic. Her thoughts were a tangled mass of shock and fear and desperate groping for comprehension.

  Bram – he tried to—

  Then the figure on the rooftop raised its head, and although she could not see the face, which was still shadowed, she had the sense of eyes turned her way. He was scanning the ramparts of the Gravensteen, looking for her.

  Something seemed to break inside Veerle. She turned away from the wall, the binoculars sliding from her grasp and landing on the walkway with a terminal-sounding crack. She staggered back, her hand pressed to her mouth as though to hold back the cry of horror and disgust that was welling up inside her. Bram was coming back – he was running towards her, and he was shouting something, but Veerle couldn’t take it in. All she could think was, He wants me. He wants me.

  Terror roared up all around her, like the flames of a self-immolation. She had seen Death in this form before, Death that lunged and swooped and carved the air with claws of cold steel; she saw it pressing at the fabric of reality, snarling, striving to get at her. It had clothed itself in the flesh of De Jager, the Hunter, to pursue her through the ancient castle; now it had wrapped itself anew in the molecules of another killer. It meant to have her.

  Veerle turned and ran. Heedless of the drop at the edge of the walkway, she fled, the boards thundering under her feet. Her chest was tight; panic was enveloping her like poison gas. She blundered into the wall at the corner, righted herself and stumbled on again, one thought blaring through the tangled chaos of her brain: Get away, get away.

  She reached the next corner, and here was a door. Veerle almost flung herself through it, and instantly she was plunged into blackness.

  The stairs. She still had the presence of mind to slow down, to feel for the wall and the metal rail, although the hand that gripped it was shaking uncontrollably. Veerle forced herself to hold on, to keep to the outside, where the steps were widest. Still, she was going down them blindly and far too fast, the frantic rasping of her breathing echoing off the rough stone walls, her free hand flailing the air.

  Bram had started down the stairs after her and was calling for her to stop, to tell him what had happened, but it was no use. All Veerle could think about was putting as much space as possible between herself and what she had seen from the roof, to burrow down into the stony depths of the castle like an animal going to earth. She stumbled down the last of the stairs, and then she was in an open space, but it was still too dark to see anything, so she put out her hands a second before she ran into something with bruising force. Her fingers touched wood, polished wood, and for one confusing moment she thought she had run into a table, but no – the guillotine. Veerle’s head snapped back and she glanced upwards, seeing nothing in the blackness but imagining the tarnished blade suspended above her, shivering with the impact of her body against the wooden frame. She staggered back, turned, and then she was moving again, fumbling with her hands for the wall, uttering tiny sobs of shock and terror.

  Someone was behind her; she could hear footsteps on the polished boards. Now the panic that was threatening to engulf her intensified until it was like a klaxon screaming in her ears. A pale light swept over her and she glimpsed an opening in the wall ahead of her. Someone was calling her name but Veerle didn’t falter. She went straight for the doorway, disoriented now but still running, looking for the way down, the way to the courtyard and the front gate. If it was locked she would bang on the gate, she would scream at the top of her voice until someone came. If it was the police, then all the better because if they locked her up at least she would be safe. She blundered round a corner, and now she was in a room with windows. The windows were small and the panes tiny but the floodlights outside lit them up as though the perimeter of the room were lined with braziers full of glowing coals.

  Where am I? Veerle stood for a moment in the near-dark, her eyes wide, her heart thumping, her chest tight as though she were trying to breathe in a rarefied atmosphere. How do I get out? She put out her hands again, feeling for something, anything, that would tell her where she was. Her fingers closed over something familiar and yet horribly unfamiliar. Hands. Two hands. But they were not warm, living hands; they were unmoving, hard and brittle, with a curious rough texture, and when Veerle gripped them she heard a faint metallic clinking sound.

  The realization was like a punch in the chest, forcing the wind out of her. The dummy in the torture room. I’m in the torture room. She didn’t need to be able to see to know what was in the darkness with her: the row of thumbscrews, the implacable iron face of the scold’s bridle, the heavy executioner’s blade. That bed.

  Veerle realized that she had no idea how to get out. She could not even remember whether the room had two doors or only one. There were footsteps approaching, she could hear him coming, and she had nowhere to go. She was trapped, at bay in a room crammed with the rusting instruments of slow and agonizing death.

  She sank to her knees on the floor, hugging herself, curling into a ball to try to make herself as small as possible, as though she were seven years old again, a terrified child who had just looked down from a height and seen something too horrific to conceive.

  Don’t let him get me. Please God, don’t let him get me.

  30

  ‘Veerle?’

  The voice was close to her. Veerle lifted her head and saw light, an intense point of dazzling white light. She squeezed her eyes tight shut, blocking it out, hugging herself. When he
put a hand on her arm she jumped as though she had been stung.

  ‘Veerle? It’s me, Bram.’

  ‘Bram?’

  Veerle opened her eyes and saw that Bram had taken the blindingly bright head torch off and was holding it in his hand instead. His face was rather alarmingly underlit but he was still unmistakably himself. Bram: amiable and friendly, now not looking as laid-back as he normally did. His expression was distinctly tense and he was studying her with concern.

  ‘Veerle, what happened?’

  Bram touched her shoulder, and then she couldn’t help herself – she flung herself into his arms and clung to him. She was still gasping with shock and fright, and for a while she could say nothing at all.

  Bram held her calmly and after a while he asked her again. ‘What happened up there?’

  ‘Marnix—’ choked out Veerle, and stopped.

  ‘What about Marnix?’ Bram held her away from him and shook her very gently. ‘Veerle, what about Marnix?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ Veerle blurted out.

  There was a long silence.

  ‘No,’ said Bram at last. ‘There must be some mistake.’

  ‘It’s not a mistake,’ said Veerle. ‘He killed him, Bram. He killed Marnix. And I was shouting and shouting and – and Marnix didn’t hear me. And then he looked round and it was too late.’

  ‘Maybe . . .’ began Bram, and then he fell silent. Veerle knew what he had been about to say: Maybe he isn’t dead. But she knew he was. She had seen no hesitation in the attack. It had been brutal.

  ‘Veerle, are you sure that what you saw . . . I mean—’

  ‘Yes, Bram,’ snapped Veerle, much more violently than she had intended. ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘But . . .’ Whatever Bram was going to say, he thought better of it. He felt for his phone, and thumbed in Marnix’s number. He didn’t have to tell Veerle there was no reply; she could see it from his expression.