Free The Devils of D-Day by Graham Masterton

wheels and instruments hitting my
head and shoulders, and only a flashlight for company, I felt a surge of fear
and suffocation, and all I wanted to do was get out of there.
    I took a deep breath. It still smelled pretty foul in there,
but most of the odour had dispersed. I looked up and
saw Madeleine’s face at the open hatch. She said nervously, ‘Have you touched
it yet?’
    I shone my torch on the sack. There was something or
somebody inside it, whatever it was. As close as this, the fabric looked even
older than I’d imagined. It could almost have been a piece of the Bayeux
tapestry, or a medieval shroud.
    I reached my hand out and touched it. The cloth was soft
with age. I ran my fingers gently along the length of it, and I could feel
various protrusions and sharp knobs. It felt like a sack of bones; an old and
decaying sack of bones.
    I coughed. I told Madeleine: ‘I’m going to try and lift it
up to you. Do you think you can take it?’
    She nodded. ‘Don’t be long . Father
Anton’s looking very cold.’
    ‘I’ll try not to be.’
    I wedged the flashlight against a hydraulic pipe so that it
shone across the inside of the turret, and then I knelt down beside the sack.
It took a lot of summoning-up of nerve, but in the end I put my arms ‘around
the black fusty cloth, and lifted it a foot or so upwards. It was saggy, and
whatever was inside it, the bones or whatever they were, tumbled to one end of
the sack with a soft rattling sound. But the fabric didn’t tear, and I was able
to gather the whole thing up in my arms and lift it towards Madeleine. She
reached down and gripped the top of it, and I said: ‘Okay, heave.’
    For one moment, for one terrifying moment, just as Madeleine
took the weight of the sack and hoisted it upwards, I was sure that I felt it
wriggle, as if there was something alive inside it. It could have been a bone
shifting, or my own keyed-up imagination, but I took my hands away from that
sack as fast as if it was burning.
    Madeleine gasped. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’
    ‘Just get that sack out of here quick!’ I yelled. ‘Quick!’
    She tugged it upwards, and for a few seconds it snared on
the rough metal around the broken-open hatch. But then she swung it clear, and
I heard it drop on the hull outside. Taking the flashlight, I climbed out of
the tank on to the turret, and I haven’t ever been so glad to see snow and
miserable gloomy skies as I was then.
    Father Anton was approaching the side of the tank where the
black sack lay. He was holding the crucifix and the Bible in front of him, and
his eyes were fixed on our strange discovery like the eyes of a man who comes
across the evidence, at last, that his wife has really been cuckolding him.
    He said: ‘ Enfin , It diable .
    I touched the sack tentatively with my foot. ‘That was all
there was. It feels like it’s full of bones.’
    Father Anton didn’t take his eyes away from the sack for a
second.
    ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the bones of a demon.’
    I swung myself down from the hull of the tank, and helped
Madeleine to jump down after me. ‘I didn’t know demons had bones,’ I remarked.
‘I thought they were all in the mind.’
    ‘No, no,’ said Father Anton. ‘There was a time, in the
Middle Ages, when demons and gargoyles walked the earth as living creatures.
There is too much evidence to refute it. Paul Lucas, the medieval traveller,
tells how he actually met the demon Asmodeus in
Egypt, and the demon Sammael was said to have walked
through the streets of Rouen as late as the twelfth century.’
    Madeleine said: ‘We don’t yet know that it’s really bones.
It could be anything.’
    Father Anton returned his Bible to his pocket. ‘Of course, of course. We can take it back to my house. I
have a cellar where we can lock it up safely. It seems to be acquiescent enough
now.’
    I looked at Madeleine, but she simply shrugged. If the
priest wanted to take the sack back home with him, then there wasn’t much