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.”