Demons of Ghent Read online

  Darkness closed in on Luc. The interior of the tower was horribly cold, even at this clement time of year; the warmth of the sun was never going to penetrate the thickness of those stone walls. He might have been in the black depths of a well sunken into frozen ground.

  Verdomme, he thought, fumbling for the little torch he had slipped into his inside pocket. He was having to bite back panic, and that was not cool, that was most certainly uncool. He dragged out the torch and thumbed the little rubber button. The light it produced was feeble, but it was a hundred times better than being in the dark. He swept the torch in an upward arc, picking out the stone steps by its faint light, noting the way each one was a kind of wedge shape, with plenty of room for ascending feet at the side by the outer wall, but narrowing to a point where it met the central pillar.

  You wouldn’t want to meet someone on these stairs, thought Luc, and the idea gave him another of those frissons, the ones he had decided were not cool. Stop freaking yourself out, he told himself. There’s nobody in here except you, unless you count spiders.

  He began very slowly to ascend the stone staircase. There were over four hundred steps – someone had told him that . . . or was it five hundred? If you went up to the very top and then turned straight round and came back down, that was somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand steps. Worth it, Luc reminded himself. Wait till the others hear about this. They’ll be begging to borrow the keys. Nobody’s ever done Sint-Baafs.

  The stone stairs went up the flank of the building. Then there was a door and then a metal walkway leading across to the central tower. Luc went across it, conscious of the ringing of his footsteps on the metal. He stopped for a moment and listened, but aside from his own breathing there was perfect silence.

  What are you expecting to hear? You think the bishop himself kips in the tower, just in case anyone breaks in? Or maybe the legendary Demons of Ghent are creeping up the stairs after you . . .

  He hurried along the remainder of the walkway. A few moments to catch his breath, and then he was labouring his way up more of those stone stairs. Perhaps halfway up he began to think that it wasn’t so amazing after all, being the first one to get inside the bell tower of Sint-Baafs. He was perspiring in spite of the chilly atmosphere. His chest felt tight and his heart seemed to be trying to climb up into his throat. He was treading heavily, scuffing his feet on the stone steps.

  The sound echoed curiously.

  It really sounds like there’s half a dozen of us climbing these stairs, thought Luc. He stopped and leaned his shoulder against the wall, resting, letting his heart rate and breathing slow to a more comfortable pace. Experimentally, he held his breath for a moment. Silence.

  Luc sighed, and resumed his painful slog up the stairs, past a stone room looking out over the city, following the dim circle of light from the torch. On and on the stairs went, until Luc began to think that he had been wrong about the number: it wasn’t four hundred and something, or even five hundred; it was at least a thousand.

  It’s like climbing Mount Everest. If I get to the top without having a heart attack I ought to plant a flag up there or something, he thought, and he would have laughed if he’d had enough breath to do it. He was still grinning when he completed another turn of the stairs and opened a door onto the freezing night air.

  Luc found himself in a stone octagon, with eight elegant carved arches. Four of them looked out onto the four turrets that crowned the cathedral tower; the other four looked straight out onto the city of Ghent. None of them were glazed. At street level the air was still; up here there was a cold breeze. Luc felt the wind pushing back the hair from his face, dizzying him with its frigid breath. He ducked underneath the safety bar and stepped between the pillars of one of the arches, the one that looked out over the Sint-Baafsplein. Although there was a stone wall between him and the drop, and although he had been up dozens of high buildings, and thought he’d shed his fear of heights long ago, still he felt a sickening lurch in the pit of his stomach, as though he were perched in the crow’s nest of a great ship that had suddenly plunged down into a great trough between the waves.

  It’s so verdomd high.

  Luc could see the Belfort on the other side of the square, and even though he had seen it hundreds of times before, possibly thousands, it looked subtly different. He was seeing the top section straight on, he realized, instead of looking up at it from below and getting a crick in his neck. He had a clear view of the dragon spitted on the very top of the spire. Empty space yawned sickeningly between him and the gilded creature, as though they were on either side of an immense canyon. He put his hands against the stone parapet, reassuring himself of its solid bulk between him and the drop.

  OK, he thought after a minute or two. Time to do the last section and get to the very top before I freak myself out.

  He turned, so that he was facing back into the octagon, and as he did so he had a sickening shock that instantly sent adrenalin blazing through him like an emergency flare. There was someone there.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Luc, taking an involuntary step back. The shock was so severe that for several seconds he actually thought he would faint. His legs were weak underneath him; it was like a nightmare – one of those in which you need to run, you have to run to save yourself, and yet your limbs won’t do what you want them to do – and anyway, where would he run to? I’m on the top of a fucking bell tower, thought Luc. There is nowhere to run.

  He stared at the figure, half hidden in shadow, and the white was showing all around Luc’s grey eyes, and all the time his mind was running around like a rat in a trap, testing the possibilities. I didn’t see him when I came up here – is it possible he was here already? Did he follow me up here? But the square was deserted. Why doesn’t he move? So silent – so still – like a statue.

  And then he had it; he understood what he was seeing. A statue – yes, it had to be a statue. A grotesque thing, for certain, with that long heavy face and the almost lipless mouth and the myriad tiny wrinkles that gave the skin the appearance of aged linen, all the visible features uniformly sallow in the light of the cathedral illuminations. The eye sockets were sunk in shadow, the hollows under the cheekbones were dark smudges.

  Too ugly for a saint, thought Luc. Why would anyone carve something that ugly?

  His panicked heart was slowing a little, but still it gave him the creeps, that silent figure. He didn’t fancy brushing past it to get to the stairs.

  I didn’t have to brush past it on the way out here, he thought, and almost before the thought was fully formed he realized that he was wrong; that no, it wasn’t a statue after all, because the withered lips moved and it spoke.

  ‘You will not stop me. Go back to your master and tell him so.’

  What the—?

  There was no more time then for Luc; no time to think, no time even to scream. The figure lunged at him, ducking under the safety bar, but Luc still had no idea what was happening to him – not until he felt his legs being seized in an iron grip. He was forced back onto the stone parapet. Up went his feet, down went his head over the wall, and for one appalling second he saw the whole of the Belfort tower upside down. Terror exploded inside him like a supernova. The keys he had so carefully copied slid out of his pocket and vanished into the chasm. The next instant the grip on his legs was released and Luc dropped into nothingness.

  The floodlit Gothic façade of Sint-Baafs flashed past him, faster than an express train, a blurred streak of golden stone. Luc did not scream once as he accelerated towards the stones below. There was no time to form a coherent thought, to understand what had happened. Simply one long inner howl: No no no no no—

  Luc hit the ground with explosive force, splattering the stones with scarlet.

  3

  I am Death.

  He had cast the thing that looked like a man down from the bell tower to its destruction. He did not stop to gaze down from the heights at what he had done. Time was short. Even at this hour someone might
pass by. Interruption now meant failure.

  The climb almost to the top of the tower had tired him; if he had not been used to making such ascents on his nightly excursions it might have exhausted his strength altogether. Going down again was easier, but still, by the time he reached ground level pain was burning with savage brilliance in his hips and knees. His kneecaps could have been fastened on with iron rivets, heated red hot; every step was fiery torture. He endured it as a martyr would, his unbending will carrying him on.

  I must complete it.

  When he emerged from the narrow doorway at the south side of the cathedral he was almost delirious with exertion and agony. The golden light that flooded the great Gothic façade and the square below was indistinguishable from the pain, which was so huge it seemed to fill the world, pulsing and throbbing to the beat of his heart.

  The dead thing lay on the cobbles, with the scarlet radiating out from it like gleaming wings. It looked less like a man now.

  He approached it slowly, thrusting his hands into his pockets for the things he needed. He glanced around once, but the square was silent and empty. His luck had held.

  Bare skin – that was what he was looking for. He had to lean right over the body; with the disordered clothes and the Rorschach spattering of red it was hard to pick out the patch of bluish-white that he needed.

  There – a few square centimetres of unmarred flesh at the side of the throat. And now iron: an ancient nail, gouged from an oak door; let it drop so that it falls onto that pale skin, nestling into the side of the neck like a tumour. And salt, sprinkled carefully so that it powders the exposed flesh.

  He whispered some words too, but he believed in the salt and the iron more than he believed in the words. There was power in them, power to rout his enemies.

  When he had finished he thought of the keys. The man-shaped thing that lay dead before him – had it had keys to the cathedral? From the arcade high on the Belfort tower he had only been able to see that the door had been opened – not how. He thought that something had fallen from the clothing of the thing before he had released it to plummet onto the cobbles, but he could not be sure that the something was a bunch of keys.

  He spent a few precious minutes scanning the red-stained cobblestones, but found nothing. He dismissed regret. There was no Open sesame to let him into the cathedral, no short cut. He must complete every painful step of his great task, like a pilgrim toiling mile by laborious mile through mountainous terrain.

  It was not safe to stay here any longer, as the blood cooled and dried around the body. He turned his back on it, and walked away across the south side of the square until the shadows swallowed him.

  Luc lay on the cobbles for a long time, surrounded by the ragged red stain that was the map of his own destruction. Even after the police came, they didn’t move him immediately. It was obvious that he was dead, and how; the police officers had only to look at the narrow door in the south side of the cathedral, still standing open, and then up at the Gothic façade that towered above them.

  A light wind had picked up; it passed over the still body like a smoothing hand, brushing away much of the sprinkled salt. It lacked the strength to move the iron nail, which still stood out like a dark mole against the white skin at the throat. The iron nail told the police very little, though. Supposing you have a young man who has apparently gone to the trouble of breaking into an ancient building, with the aim of climbing to the top of a ninety-five-metre-tall tower and flinging himself to his own destruction . . . well, you might expect to find a nail or a splinter of wood or some chips of stone with the body, either from damage when he climbed over the parapet far above, or from having hit something on the way down.

  The police did find one thing that Luc’s killer had missed. When the body was finally lifted with useless care onto a waiting stretcher, the keys to the cathedral were found underneath it. They had hit the cobblestones instants before Luc had, and he had slammed into them so hard that even through the fabric of his jacket they left an imprint on his flesh, like a brand.

  4

  Several months later

  Veerle De Keyser sat cross-legged on one of the metal benches in the Sint-Baafsplein, sipping from a can of iced green tea and looking at the cathedral. She watched people going in and out of the main door. Most of them were tourists carrying rolled umbrellas and cameras; perhaps a few were local people going in to pray.

  Trying for a quick fix from God, Veerle thought.

  She wondered whether she should go inside too. She didn’t want to pray, but it might be warmer than sitting out here. It was a sunny autumn morning, but it had rained in the night and the air was cool. If she sat on the bench too long she would probably stiffen up. She sighed. There were bits of her that seemed to ache all the time, even though the casts were off and everything had in theory healed. Good as new, she thought. Only she wasn’t, not really.

  She fished in her pocket, looking for the little foil blister pack with the painkillers in. Nothing too heavy – not morphine or anything – just the same stuff you took if you had a fever or a thumping headache. Or you’d fallen off a castle while someone was trying to shoot you with a crossbow.

  She pressed one of the tablets out of the pack, put it into her mouth and washed it down with a mouthful of the iced tea.

  I wonder if they’ve missed me yet, she thought. She hoped they hadn’t. It was a new ruse, going into school for registration and vanishing afterwards. It might work. If none of the others tell on me. It was the only option, anyway, if she couldn’t face school and wanted some time to herself. Since he’d found out she was cutting school, Geert De Keyser had taken to walking her there himself in the morning, and waiting until she had gone inside. Every morning they’d leave the flat on Bijlokevest together, Veerle with her school bag slung over her shoulder, Geert carrying his battered leather briefcase. Anneke, Geert’s girlfriend, would see them off, her hands over her pregnancy bump. She always kissed Geert, never Veerle, but that was OK with Veerle. Anneke was growing so enormous that she made Veerle nervous, as though a single touch would set her off like a mine.

  Geert never said very much on the way. He probably disliked having to walk his daughter there as much as she disliked him doing it.

  Or maybe he’s just not a morning person, thought Veerle. There was a whole mountain of stuff she didn’t know about her father.

  Geert would walk right up to the school with her, and then he’d stand on the pavement and watch her go in. He’d tried to come in with her once, but Veerle had put her foot down.

  No knowing what he’ll do now, though, if he finds out I’ve bunked off again, she thought.

  Last time he’d been furious; even his habitual stolidness had been disturbed. Veerle remembered him saying several times that she was supposed to be at school. That had struck her as somehow ludicrous.

  I’m not supposed to be in that school, she thought. I’m not even supposed to be in Ghent. I’m not from here. It’s not my home.

  Home, though; where was that? The house she had grown up in, the house on Kerkstraat in her home village, was shut up, the roller blinds lowered, a TE KOOP sign fixed to the front wall. Three boxfuls of Veerle’s stuff had been retrieved from the house, but she hadn’t even been through it all. She’d emptied the first two boxes, but when she’d opened the third there had been a soft toy on top of the other stuff, a big floppy rabbit with large gauche stitches running across the seams. Veerle had taken one look and closed the box again. She’d hated that rabbit for years, and now she couldn’t bear to throw it away any more than she could bear to look at it.

  Thinking about the house in Kerkstraat made her think of Kris Verstraeten. Everything had started with him. He’d been the one who suggested they go up the tower of the Sint-Pauluskerk in the village when she was only seven and he was nine. She’d been up the tower when all hell had broken loose in the village, and her mother, Claudine, had panicked, not knowing where she was. Claudine might have turned out t
he way she did anyway, people sometimes did, but Veerle didn’t think so. That day, the panic, had triggered something, she thought. Then, when Kris had reappeared in her life, no wonder Claudine had reacted the way she did.

  Thinking about her mother made Veerle feel the way she always did, as though a weight had settled on her chest; a feeling that managed to be heavy and empty at the same time. It was no use wishing Claudine were here – no use wishing that ever again.

  Kris, she thought, yearning for a familiar face, a voice.

  Veerle slid her hand into her jacket pocket and pulled out her phone. It wasn’t the same one she’d had before. That had been shattered, alongside several of her bones, when she hit the ground at the bottom of the castle tower. This phone wasn’t quite as good, because Geert didn’t want to spend the money. It didn’t have the same number as the old one either, and Veerle was wondering about that – whether it was possible that Kris had made some mistake, had been trying to call her old number.

  He’s called you on this one before, she reminded herself. She touched the screen and checked the display. No missed calls, no messages. Maybe he’s done something stupid, like accidentally deleting the new number and keeping the old one. She slid the phone back into her pocket. So why doesn’t he answer when you call him?

  Veerle shifted position. The bench was becoming uncomfortable. Sure enough, she was stiffening up.

  What the hell – I’ll go and look at the cathedral. I might as well. Nothing else to do.

  She got to her feet, reached under the bench for her bag, and set off across the square.

  Halfway across the Sint-Baafsplein she had to break her stride when a skateboarder shot across her path, a blur of sun-bleached hair and green shirt, the tails flapping. Veerle ignored him. She had the cathedral door in her sights. A moment later he did it again, but this time he cut it too close and they almost collided.