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.