Banquet for the Damned (10 page)

This is everything he's been working toward and studying, but overnight his objective distance has closed. As an anthropologist, he's always studied the social and cultural aspects of folklore and traditional sorcery: why people feel a need to weave magic and the supernatural into their beliefs and lives. Tales of nocturnal pests used to be no more than passing distractions, a little extra colour to enliven the sawdust and sweat of hard academic work. But while he trudged across North America and Canada for his Masters degree, he first heard of the night terror. In Newfoundland, the Old Hag tradition connected directly with the witchcraft existing at the time of the Pilgrim Fathers initiated his preliminary interest. He interviewed farmers, bank clerks, students and doctors, and found a recurring pattern: terrifying nocturnal disturbances experienced by his subjects. Nearly every research candidate, besides the inevitable cranks who responded to his adverts in the small newspapers of rural communities, had been struck by paralysis and aphasia while asleep, and all within the same locale. Against their wills they'd entertained the whispers and touches of something they couldn't see or were reluctant to address. Some candidates were even plagued by a sense of something sitting on their chests after being awoken in the middle of the night.

Those brave enough to seek medical advice had found doctors dismissive, and their troubles were passed off as the side effects of stress, or medication, or even the menopause. But Hart was unconvinced. The experiences in men and women, young and old, were too similar, and shared a historical connection, dating back to the early European colonisation of North America.

By the time he was completing his doctoral thesis in the Americas, funded by the University of Wisconsin, his interest in night terrors began to interfere with his concentration on tried and tested ethnographic studies. The patterns in the data, similar to what he found in Newfoundland, and gathered from tribesmen's tales of night-time phantoms during his peripheral fieldwork in northern and southern Guatemala, unleashed ambition in his system like molten lava. His original doctoral study of folklore and occult systems soon developed into a specialisation in what seemed to be a universal malady of sleep disturbances, directly related to some form of witchcraft. Hart had found religion.

This was his chance to make an original contribution, attain his own niche in the sprawling and encyclopaedic reaches of anthropology. That in itself was hard. What had not already been written? As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, he remembered gazing at the library's Anthropology section and being swamped with a sense of futility. What could he possibly add to it?

Opportunity, clean and pure, presented itself, and his doctoral study blossomed into a book-length project. The choice of title –
Transcendental Magic
– and original synopsis were cautious, but flavoured with something fresh, only raising the eyebrows of those scholars he'd expected to be averse to new ideas. The conclusions he'd drawn, connecting many states of mind previously disregarded as mental illnesses or drug-induced hallucinations to rare but actively effective occult systems, he'd saved from his tutors and banked for the book.

His angle was radical, avant-garde, and would encourage a serious expedition into neglected regions of society and mind, extinguishing the New Age flimflam and spiritual hocus-pocus that tainted his subject like indelible ink.

And now the evidence is within his grasp. In St Andrews he's stumbled, from a whim, into the first signs of an epidemic of fear and confusion. His own winning lottery ticket to original thought. It is actually happening around him. No one will expect part of the sophisticated Western world to be disturbed by something as inexplicable as the night terrors. That is the milieu of naked savages in hidden tropical depths, not the domain of modern Great Britain.

Before Scotland, the closest he'd actually ever been to a night terror was in steamy Santiago al Palma, a village in south-western Guatemala. Hart arrived six months after the execution of the local shaman, the nagual, and his entire family. Amongst a Mayan tribe, Hart saw the devastation allegedly caused by the shaman. In the second month of his fieldwork, a guide took him to a deserted village in a valley. At the nearest missionary station he was told the natives of the blighted settlement had willed death upon themselves, believing they had been cursed. An official in a government land-reclamation office confused this with an outbreak of yellow fever to explain the reported hallucinations and near disappearance of the entire population of the village.

But officialdom failed to warn Hart off, and he proceeded into the jungle with the guide, catching amoebic dysentery from bad water before eventually making contact with the survivors. Two gnarled elders, hiding in a neighbouring settlement, who smoked a foul tobacco to keep the insects off their leathery skin, explained to Hart that six months after the initial wave of night terror, described as a plague of bad dreams, that swept through their village, neighbouring tribesmen resorted to extreme tactics. By this time half of the village felt
its
embrace in sleep, others had fled, and the neighbouring hunters, afraid of the contamination spreading, slaughtered the local shaman. As a result of his death, the epidemic of night visitations ceased overnight. Allegedly, the original shaman had invited something into himself, described by the villagers as a 'Win', an evil-doer. But Hart had only seen the bones – the scorched bones of the shaman's clan, and the remains of the victims – all that remained of the Win's feasts. One of the elderly tribesmen saw the barely disguised horror on Hart's face after describing the plague of nightmares they'd suffered. Infants and youths were stolen from their beds and found half eaten miles from home.

He then explained to Hart how the shaman had been caught transforming, and quickly despatched. It had been necessary to dismember the shaman and his infected family before torching their remains. 'If you commune with the dead and feast on the living,' he instructed, 'you give up your right to live.'

They had ways of dealing with unwelcome hosts, Hart learned, and knowledge as old as the steaming depths of the forest about them. And the words of their own patron saints to expel unwanted companions, that whispered and waited, full of hate, only rising to the surface when the time was right to breathe the air of man. The community had exercised their own brand of social control over a deviant in Santiago al Palma, but now those technical terms that served an anthropologist – 'social control' and 'deviant' – seemed to lose their weight. This phenomenon defied scholarly language. It was a realm of nightmare.

From Guatemala, Hart travelled to the Amazon Basin, excited by a journal article reporting an outbreak of demonic possession amongst the Mundurucu Indians. Once more, he arrived months after a violent backlash from terrified locals, but a line of thin poles, set back from a waterfall and shadowed by dark-green foliage, brought him to his knees in shock. On top of each pole a brown head had been placed, mounted above grisly remains in wooden bowls that still buzzed with crowns of flies.

A possessed sorcerer and his disciples had been exorcised by the most bloody means a head-hunter legacy could devise. Hart lost his appetite not solely as a result of dysentery.

Word of mouth outlasted any missionary's bible in that lost region of the Americas. And again, in the Amazon villages, he glimpsed more of the insanity surrounding the night-terror legacy. According to witnesses, a dozen teenagers had disappeared within the course of a few months, each of them having complained of a sleeping illness. The Mundurucu Indians blamed an errant sorcerer – one of a caste of holy man feared for centuries, predating the Spanish conquest. The ritual execution of the sorcerer followed. It was merely a way, his academic discipline would instruct, for a culture to deal with a scapegoat. But Hart began to think otherwise. He had seen the ravaged remains of the children's bones in the undergrowth – the victims of the sorcerer and his night terrors.

Once again, when the sorcerer was executed, the epidemic stopped.

Old footsteps left heavy prints. The further Hart looked the more evidence he uncovered. In the thirties a French trader called La Faye had written a short book about nocturnal manifestations of spirits throughout Asia. A man had to get down on all fours and understand the world in different tongues, and that is what La Faye had done with the Kachin tribe in Burma, detailing how, in 1934, a contagion of the night terror, or the Hpyi, had been ruthlessly suppressed, resulting in the executions of some ten tribesmen believed to have been possessed by the Hpyi spirits.

Different names, different places: from the highlands of New Guinea to the frozen ground in Newfoundland, Hart chased night terrors and the people who dealt with them. Old tongues and strange magic protected the tribes. Bloody executions and ritualistic magic were accepted without doubt as cures. But what do they have in St Andrews?

Having reviewed European occultism as an undergraduate, he knows something of witchcraft, and the 'evil eye' myths of Greece and Ireland, but night terrors? There is little written from an anthropologist's perspective on the occult in Europe, so his knowledge suffers limitations. It is more the role of an historian to delve into the sinister offshoots of European culture, while the anthropologists concert their efforts in Asia, Africa and the Americas. As far as he knows it takes belief, real belief, hallucinogens, self-discipline, and an entire hierarchy of traditional practice and lore to even get close to an aberrant spirit. In Europe, Christian belief has taken man out of nature. Mystics and visionaries have gone. Science and economics are the new faiths. So how has something broken back through? It cannot just occur: where is the ritual, the knowledge, the decade of mage-like study, the creation of the right environment for contact, and the final leap of faith in St Andrews? Where is the source?

CHAPTER EIGHT

Illumined by something more than the first stars and the moon, the sky remains bright. It's as if the night is unwilling to release the sun completely after it has baked the ground hard and warmed the stones of St Andrews throughout the long day. From the air, the orderly skeleton of streets in neat rows of interlocking white and grey, lead to the fallen cathedral and the Eastern harbour beyond.

Amongst the cathedral's tombs and graves, still protected by walls beaten by coastal weather for centuries, the lonely sentinel of St Rule's Tower stands, solid and rectangular between sands East and West, the sea to its front and the town in line behind. Like a stage, the cemetery is lit by the electric lights on the perimeter walls and only awaits its players.

Elsewhere, the slow airs of late summer have drowned the town in deep slumber. Within firm walls and behind curtains that sway and then brush together it is time to sleep. Sacred sleep. Sleep from the heat; sleep after a day in the hot office and shop; sleep from the drowsy meander the day makes toward nightfall; solace in sleep after evening hours endured before flickering television screens. Some of the town lights, however, have refused to wink out; some people read by lamplight or laugh in early-hour gatherings where glass after glass of wine puts back the time for bed; others are unable to settle, and a few will not allow themselves rest.

Maria checks her bedroom door-lock for the third time in an hour before returning to her black tea: no sugar. Cupping the steaming mug, she watches the slice of lemon float in the dark liquid: no calories in citrus fruit. Strained eyes in her thin but pretty face flick across to a brass alarm clock: two minutes to midnight. Would Chris forgive her? His perfect face smiles back from the photograph beside her clock, framed in pewter.

'What's wrong with you?' he'd shouted that morning in a voice she often heard bellowing from the rugby pitch – a voice he uses when he demands the ball from a team-mate, when he believes he can reach the touchline and control the game. A voice she hears when he's drunk and angry and someone has dared disagree in the pub. 'I can't touch you anymore. You keep pulling away from me. What's the matter with you?'

But how could Chris even begin to understand? Those big brown eyes, with a solid and ever-confident stare, beneath a floppy fringe, would mist at the very first sign of an expressed emotion, or doubt, or inner query, or at anything not as material as a computer or car. Maria envies him: able to charge through life in a blazer and silk tie, his thoughts ordered meticulously like his possessions and neatly pressed clothes; able to do things that are instantly justifiable to himself, or not do things because they aren't right, because he says so. There are no abstractions or subtleties in Chris's life – he can hold the world in his hands as something measurable and tangible, like concrete.

'You scare me. Did you throw up again this morning? Christ, girl, I don't understand you. No one can stay awake for that long. It's not right. It's not normal. Listen to me, don't roll your eyes or shrug your shoulders. Get something from that doctor.'

'But I have had some sleep. And I missed my appointment.'

'Yeah, for two hours this afternoon while I watched you. I can't do this every day. Eat a proper meal and get some rest for God's sake. I have training and work to do.'

Maria hates him. Maria loves him. And at least her anger and hunger may keep her awake for the third night running.

The little brass hammer on her clock smashes between the bells announcing midnight with a tinny racket. Maria flinches and spills her tea. She rushes across her room, her small and wire-thin body casting strange shadows in a chamber illumined by three strong lights: one in the ceiling, plus two desk lamps. She pushes the clock's hour hand forward until 1 a.m. and stops its clamouring. Then she returns to her chair. The clock's bell is a lookout and the changing of its noisy guard has become a familiar routine, a successful ritual to stave off sleep – because sleep wants to drift before her eyes, deep languid sleep beneath a thick duvet, so she's wrapped up and healed in a warm cocoon . . .

Maria's head drops across her chest and jars her neck. Snapping herself awake, she stands up, furious. Stay angry, that is the answer. Stay brittle and annoyed at the slightest thing: at every inanimate object, at food, at Chris, at anything. But don't fall asleep. Just two more days of this, the thesis will be complete, and then she can go home and sleep for a week.

It is somehow all connected to this room in New Hall and the university. Maria refuses to believe she's mad, or frigid as Chris says when baffled and hurt that she will not open her bedclothes to him, as she has done every other night since the first year: back in those halcyon days when their sweat would dampen the clean white sheets, and her hot face would nestle across the broad chest of the man two blonde girls had fought over at the KK ball. They made love everywhere: in the afternoon, late at night when tipsy and adventurous, and first thing in the morning, all sticky and basic. He had selected her; she had said no. He had pursued her indefinable airs and quick tongue, sensing something unknowable but within the classification of a suitable girl. And eventually she had succumbed to his hesitating attempts at romance, until the tall figure was her own: handsome in the classic sense and always in control. And so they had loved and then slept. Slept through heady summer afternoons, as she lay on his hard and flat stomach, when her whole body became heavy with a pleasing, satisfied fatigue.

Maria jolts awake. Leaden eyelids spring apart. A noise startles her and now it's too late. Something scrabbles on the wall outside, beneath her third-floor window. A whimper detaches from the back of her throat.

Desperately, she wants to run to the door and escape the prison cell, tinted a pastel shade, that once was her little home and now only seems to trap her in a stink of new carpet. But her skin is alive with a familiar attack of cold pinpricks: not quite pain, but a spread of numb bloodless lethargy.

After moving as far as the bed, she collapses upon it, her brain starved of oxygen and blood. Phosphorescent lights explode in her sight. Maria hauls air into her lungs and claws her fingers on the thick red duvet, before each digit switches off, one by one, until she is still, deathly still, except for the heart-beats and startled breaths inside.

The curtains are closed but she senses it out there, grinning as it hangs from the ledge like some giant bat. And the sounds of something dragging itself up a wall find their way into her room. Then she hears the voice: a low babble and incoherent mumbling of old words and . . . her name, 'Maria.' Just to hear it makes her want to change her name. She'll remember the rasp of its tone if anybody calls her Maria again.

If? Again?

The lights go out. There is just one click and they are all doused together. Enveloped with panic, she feels the voice again creep through her pores like winter cold, to freeze her bright spirit until it shatters, until she does not know herself amongst the vile things that chase other vile things through her imagination. Maria closes her eyes. She cannot abide it; the thought of seeing it will snap her mind like a dry twig.

Out there, in the dark room, the curtains now swish over a window she remembers locking. Who opened the window? Did it make her? And there is the thumping sound of its weight dropping to the floor after it has spilled over the sill, followed by the rustle of something moving across the floor to her bed.

She hears a hiss of excitement from somewhere near her feet. A sniff too and then the fumble of thin anxious limbs as they begin the search. Maria tries to scream, and pushes her heavy muscles to move her arms and legs, but they will not obey. She can stand no more. Her eyelids unroll. Her lips part and she sucks at the air, to suddenly pull the stench of a slit whale belly into her mouth.

Something dark smothers even the faint light that seeps beneath her door. The smell is unbearable and her stomach convulses, sending an involuntary seizure up to her mouth.

It prods the bedclothes. Then its movements quicken the moment it finds the shape of her legs beneath the duvet. Now it's pulling itself up the bed. Onto the bed. She can't bear to look and shuts her eyes. But the dark creates an anticipation the safe cannot imagine. And as she senses it rising above her, the exhalations that come are tainted with eagerness.

'This stuff is good, but not that good,' Tom says, one eye squinting through the smoke, the other closed. He has draped his slender body, stripped to a pair of cobalt-blue jeans, across the couch in their new living room. 'You used to be such good company after a smoke,' he continues, attempting to provoke Dante into becoming the early-hour companion he is accustomed to. 'A couple of toots and you would be off, man. Your mouth running like a Porsche trying to keep up with your mind. What's up?'

It is an effort to speak after the three joints they have smoked this evening, following an excellent pasta dish and fresh fruit salad with yoghurt that Tom effortlessly rustled up with a fag drooping from the corner of his mouth as he sang, his tight musculature revealed in a white vest as his arms flipped, sprinkled and stirred.

No wonder every woman fancies him, Dante muses; he can cook, as well as sing, play a guitar, light up a party. Tom never stops. Not for a second. Always talking, always making a noise. Is he the real talent? Dante thinks of his books and ideas. Are they worth a damn? He estimates he will have to live for three centuries just to get the gist of what Eliot knows. It all seems hopeless.

A small orange lands on Dante's lap and gives him a start. Anger coils in his belly, fires through an arm, and feeds the hand that returns the projectile at more than double its previous speed. Leisurely, Tom raises a hand and catches the orange. 'Feisty,' he says, and then winks at Dante. After casting a black look at Tom, Dante returns his gaze to the blank wall above the fireplace.

'You should be on top of the world. Today, you met your idol. But you have just sulked.'

Dante sighs. 'I'm not sulking. Jesus.'

Tom starts to smile. 'Sorry, man, but I don't see a problem. You said he was brilliant and charming. OK, a little intimidating too, but you still met him. Eliot Coldwell. Chewing the fat about books and shit. How many people get to do that?'

Still annoyed that he's not been entirely honest with Tom, Dante's feelings are further exasperated by the profound sense of stupidity the meeting with Eliot stirs up in him. It should have been a fairy story meeting of kindred spirits, the mentor and his disciple, but instead, if he is really honest, he returned home ridden with a sense of ignorance and a growing suggestion of unease. A pile of dusty encyclopaedic books on the floor before his chair serves as a reminder.

'I didn't tell you everything, Tom.'

Angling his head, Tom studies Dante.

'It wasn't all books and compliments.'

'I know,' Tom says. 'There was that beautiful freaky Anne Bancroft secretary.'

'It wasn't her, man. Today made me realise that it's too late. That I have missed the ferry. Spent too long in rock clubs wearing fuckin' cowboy boots. I'm just too far behind, it's like I can't catch up. In fact when the boat left the dock, I wasn't running down any pier, mate, to arrive just too late. I was still in bed, on the other side of town, fast asleep.'

Tom chuckles. 'I've told you before, don't smoke this stuff if you're down or in a crowd. It'll make you paranoid.'

'It's not the dope, Tom. Eliot is really cool, but . . .'

'What?'

'I don't know. He mentioned something about him changing. You know, his personality, and there was just this, this air about everything he said. Kind of negative. Not like
Banquet
at all, and he even slated that.'

'I'll tell you what it is, it's a classic case of first-day nerves. You meet a guy, who's like the biggest influence on your life, in a university, surrounded by all this Greek salad. Man, it's bound to rattle you. But it's the first day. As soon as you learn to play the game, it'll be plain sailing. You're a clever guy, a stone's throw away from a boring intellectual. You'll be a nerd by Christmas.'

Dante cannot prevent a smile from creeping across his face.

Suddenly, he feels foolish and guilty for persecuting Tom in his thoughts.

'You just have to learn to count your blessings,' his friend continues. 'Look at this flat. People would pay eight hundred a month for this in Brum. We get it for two, right by the sea and the castle.'

'Bishop's Palace,' Dante corrects him, feeling warmer inside.

'Excuse me, Mr fuckin' professor. It could be a bishop's outhouse for all I care.'

'Sorry, man.' Dante says, his voice breaking with laughter.

'I'm going to come over there and kick your arse in a minute. I'm trying to help and you're taking the piss.'

Unable to stop laughing, Dante's eyes water. He can't remember being so pleased to have his friend by his side. Giggling too now, Tom stares at the side of Dante's head, his own shoulders moving up and down. 'Man, you have really lost it. You'll never make a rock star. You have no stomach for drugs. Look at you man, after a couple of toots on this cheroot.'