Banquet for the Damned (14 page)

'Just a little,' she replies, and he marvels some more at the melody in her voice.

A silence falls between them. Dante raises his eyebrows; he is nervous, and considers another cigarette to hide behind.

'I am sorry that we had to meet like this,' Beth says. There is something in her manner that makes him presume she is relieved to see him. 'But you came, Dante. I am so happy. Your letters were lovely.'

His voice seems to originate from outside his body. 'You read them?'

'All of them. And I want to make it up to you. For all of this. You have every right to be angry.'

'Angry?' Dante says, transfixed by her. 'I'm not angry, Beth. I'm grateful. It's a dream come true. It's an honour to meet Eliot. And you . . . You took me by surprise. I'm sorry for staring like this.'

'Thank you,' she says, and as her stare pierces him, the hairs rise along his spine, from the nape of his neck to his tailbone. She moves forward, her coat covering a hush of static as her long legs descend a stair between the chapel arches. Leaning forward, her smooth face moves closer until it nestles against his cheek, where she leaves a cold kiss. A press of lips that pass tiny arctic prickles across his skin and encourages him to close his eyes. 'Eliot wants us to become friends,' she whispers, bathing his face with her sweet breath. 'We have so much to share, Dante. We both have a bond with Eliot. A bond existing before we even met him.'

'You liked
Banquet
too?' he asks, unable and unwilling to open his eyes in case she vanishes.

'It was the reason I went to him.' Her voice is strong in his ear, and her slender body sends out little charges of electricity across the narrow divide between them, stinging him in a way that feels good.

'You were a student here?' Dante asks. He opens his eyes, but it is hard to focus. Her blurred face is at an angle, and occupied with a study of his mouth.

'Yes,' she says.

'And Eliot, he is all right, isn't he? The Hebdomidar said he had an illness.'

Beth steps back, away from Dante, the look on her face mischievous.

'He is well enough for me.'

'I wasn't suggesting anything,' he stammers.

Beth smiles. 'I'm teasing you already. Sorry.'

'No worries,' he says, instantly relieved that she is not really displeased.

She stares past him and into the distance. 'It may surprise you, but you were my idea. I saw your pretty photo that came with the music.

And I knew you would be right for him. Your arrival is important to us. We are so close now.'

'Why do you have enemies?' he says, astounded that anyone could hold anything against so fair a girl.

'They?' she says. 'They are nothing. Even though they want to remove us, Dante, they are nothing. They can't even imagine what we have seen. What you will see.' Beth looks up at the sky and a tear moistens the corner of her eye. Her bottom lip trembles. Dante feels a surge of emotion inside, a need to comfort her, to do anything to soothe her. His hands make an ineffectual movement forward and then fall back to his sides. He wants to say something meaningful, but he is still full of the beautiful young face, as if this sudden longing has become a seizure. 'I'll help,' he whispers, a lump in his throat.

'So much has happened. And we need you now.'

'For what?' he hears himself ask.

'There isn't time for me to say. We must meet again.'

'Anytime. We could . . . You could . . . There's coffee back at mine. It's still early. I could take you home later.'

Beth shakes her head and dabs her eye. 'Meet me in St Mary's Court the night after tomorrow. Come at eleven. There will time for us then. Tonight, I just wanted to see you. For his sake.' Her eyes widen just enough to suggest the unthinkable, and Dante feels his stomach turn over. His vision dances, drunkenly, and he blinks hard, as if trying to stay awake in a warm car on a long drive. She turns to go.

He feels a sudden pain in his gut. 'Wait. At least let me walk with you.'

'No,' she says, with her back to him. Then she issues a gentle little laugh, as if to mock but also cherish his ardour. His face reddens, and he feels dizzy again. His head fills with a swarm of recriminations, doubts and ecstasies as she walks away. He loses his balance and takes a step back. What is he thinking? She could be involved with Eliot. Didn't Eliot refer to her as his partner? But what does that mean? It seems like such a tame expression, lacking in commitment: an association without an emotional tie.

Her soft voice floats through his confusion. 'You'll know soon.'

He nods and struggles to understand her strange signals, but she has already folded away, through the dusk of the cloisters. And as she goes, he sees her face in profile, looking out toward the Quad's perimeter walls, black with ivy and rustling with draughts. In the dark, her eyes appear to have closed, and her lips part to suggest the anticipation of a passion about to be requited. And then she is gone from sight and all he can hear is her heels tapping as she runs away from him, across the cobbles and through the arch to North Street.

He wavers on the path, stunned. He feels sleepy, as if she has physically fatigued him, but he is ecstatic too: a schoolyard princess has smiled, a crowd has roared, his voice has reached an operatic peak. Anything seems possible. And she kissed him; he can still feel the alien frost of her lips freezing through him.

Unconsciously, he finds himself walking through the arch after her, testing the air for her perfume with his nose and tongue. He looks along the wide tarmac river of North Street, hoping to see her with some equally delightful friend. But Beth is gone. All that remains of her is an imprint of her face in his memory, set alight by eyes so green and clear they astonish him. Eyes that read his letters and understood him.

Dante pulls his cheeks down with his fingers, the way he does when trying to wake up and shrug off a doze. The wine must have been strong, he guesses. Maybe the sea air and the shock of Beth's beauty have added to the effects of the drink and have deepened this muddle in his head. He is reminded of being drunk in a rock club, where sensual opportunities lurk around the flashing dance floor, and new faces look across to lure him over to fresh mouths: the high Tom could never resist. Something has come to life in him.

He turns back into the Quad and combs his fingers through his hair. How long has he spent scratching around in Birmingham, when all this was waiting a mere road trip away, like some beautiful dream you try to return to every night? Dante crosses the lawn and, as he walks back to the hall, he thinks of Tom inside with the blonde girl. Tom's contact with her reassures him. Competition between them for Beth could prove fatal. And all he wants now is another opportunity to be with Beth, alone. It will be for the best.

Something runs down the Wynd at speed, on the other side of the Quad's western wall. Dante pauses to listen to the skittering sounds. A new breeze stirs through the rose bushes and the ivy. He shivers. A dog? He feels relief when the sound fades . . .

Whistling, he tries to shake the remnants of the dizzy spell from his head; he still feels odd. With a yawn, he fishes inside his pocket for a cigarette and decides to head for home. Eliot and the Hebdomidar have worn him out. He just wants to roll a fat one, open a cold beer, and allow nothing else to interrupt his thoughts of Beth.

CHAPTER TWELVE

He knows the story well: why the tunnel is there, who built it beneath the castle, and how it once worked, for a short time, to belay the Catholic French as they besieged the Bishop's Palace. The invaders threw cannon shot from the town centre to break the walls, and the ardour of the defence of John Knox and his Protestant supporters. But why he should be standing in the tunnel, shivering, with no watch on his wrist, and only dressed in the underwear he climbed into bed wearing, is a mystery to Mike Bowen.

He's been here before, in the castle grounds, against his will, and well after the sun has set. But never has he been this far within it, deep inside the bowels of the crumbling fortifications that overlook St Andrews Bay. Before, he awoke near a parapet, or found himself sitting on one of the lawn-courts inside the decrepit walls, having crossed the drawbridge, or climbed a fence bordering the moat without any recollection of having done so. But to actually have made his way through several Wynds from Dean's Court to the cliff edge, and to then descend the mineshaft, built nearly four hundred years before: this is a new development in his case of what the American doctor called night terrors.

He is at the bottom of the tunnel, at the east end of the defences, having crawled down the smooth brown stones, damp with seepage, to where the mineshaft begins, before it crosses beneath the Scores to the place it originally met with the burrowing French; in the middle of the road, where a subterranean skirmish took place to push the Holy Roman warriors back, for a time at least.

Extraordinary; no other word for it. His presence here is beyond his orderly and above-average faculty for reason. How did he not wake on this nocturnal journey to the mineshaft? In the amber glow of a security light, situated at the summit of the tunnel, he looks at his hands and the soles of his feet. They are black with grime from where he's walked, unshod, and then scrabbled down as if to find something after midnight in the mineshaft. Or rather, he now feels, it is as if he's been summoned to this place by something in his sleep. The presence, the hallucination, or whatever it is that visits him in his mediaeval chambers at Dean's Court, or appears beside him in the university library, is responsible.

Mike rises to a crouch and dismisses the idea as suddenly as it strikes him: it is ludicrous. Despite the dark and the silence underground, profound save for the far-off murmur of the tide against the black rocks, his reason fights back and answers the instinctive and primal cry of terror inside him. 'A sleepwalk,' he says aloud, to comfort himself with the sound of his own baritone. 'Nothing more,' he adds, his voice quieter. But is this not the conclusion of something that first began that afternoon? On the top floor of the library, in a study cubicle facing the sea, where he has been disturbed before?

Earlier that day – less than an hour before the library closed at ten in the evening – he swore he was not alone while he worked between the Theology and Ancient History sections. As far as he determined, in the still and silent top floor, where only the odd flicker of a strip light or gurgle from a radiator could be discerned, no other student was working. There was no sound of the fire doors by the stairwell opening or closing, or any noises of heels scraping along the linoleum of the aisles. No one else was there with him, not even the two librarians on duty, as he made the final amendments to the bibliography of his thesis. And yet, when he left his seat to seek out a volume in which to double-check a page reference, or be certain a publication date was this and not that, and that it was published at the University of Massachusetts and not by the Cambridge University Press, he became aware of a presence. Nearby, in the next aisle, or at the end of the column of books he searched through, just beyond sight, he was sure he saw a shadow. Or heard a whisper. Or maybe, out of the corner of his eye, saw someone move quickly. Twice he called out, embarrassed at having to do so, and inquired if anyone was there. Twice he went unanswered.

Never prone to flights of fancy, and absolutely certain, as certain as any intelligent man could be, that there is no such thing as the supernatural (as fascinating as it was, in the interests of folklore and mythology), he still felt distinctly uncomfortable. It was a little colder in the library than usual too. Perhaps the lowered temperature set his nerves on edge, because he became prone to occasional glances over his shoulder, and began a frequent peeking into an aisle before entering it, as if to avoid the shock of coming across another scholar he'd mistaken for something else. Even a man with little imagination would not have felt at ease in the library that evening.

His ears were the first things to play tricks on him. While at his desk near the window, he heard a quiet voice repeat a word – more a hiss than a whisper – as if the speaker were learning to pronounce the word. It had sounded like 'You'. Like someone was trying to get his attention, quickly, and knew of no other name to call him by. 'You,' 'You,' twice more, as he tried to concentrate on the bibliography and its minefield of cross-references.

He stood up and said, 'Look here. It's not funny. Who is it?' And he left his snug cubicle with its view of the white breakers and grey troughs, out there in the unusually excited sea, and peered down every aisle, half a dozen near him, where the mutterings must have arisen, if they had sounded at all. And seen no one. Nothing besides a flutter of something at the base of the last aisle, although it could have just been his eyes, or his mind telling him he should see something because someone had spoken nearby. But he thought he caught sight of someone, or the end of their garment at least, or the last of their shadow, as it flitted from view the moment he poked his head out.

He turned sharply at the sound of something falling to the floor with a rustle, back where he'd been sitting. That was the last straw, to turn around and see your own overcoat upon the table, where it had been upset from the window sill, lying as if face down with the shape of a body still inside it, on the desk where his books and folders were open.

Then he fled, angry at the prankster, angry at the draughts in the building (to have shaped his jacket so), and angry at himself for running to the fire doors, taking little backward looks at the corridors of books, disused terminals and empty desks, all left in his wake. But still he made his way to the ground floor, with some haste, and reported the disturbance to the first librarian he came across. And before he'd properly gathered himself too, which made his cheeks redden when he thought back on the affair over dinner. 'Someone is messing about upstairs,' he said to the man on the front desk, with whom he was on nodding terms after his three years of study in the library. The man gave him a quizzical look, and seemed ready to offer the wry, patient, though condescending smile of a librarian disturbed by a fool, but corrected himself at the last moment, convinced perhaps by the sincerity behind the complaint.

They climbed the stairs together, saying little to each other, and entered the second floor. All was how he had left it. Near the desk where he'd been working, Mike spoke. 'Right here. Every time I get into my work, some idiot whispers something, and then runs down the central aisle when I investigate. And it's not the first time it's happened.' The librarian smiled and turned his back on Mike. Saying nothing, and only announcing himself by the squeak of his rubber-soled shoes, the librarian walked into the midst of the Classics section and peered about, probably bemused by the fact that Mike was working late in the library rather than drinking over at the West Port with the rest of the postgrads. When he stopped, at the end of a bay that ran thirty feet long before it joined the main concourse of the library, the librarian did something that Mike thought unusual. He rubbed the outside of his arms and moved his shoulders in the slight but perceptible way that shoulders move when bodies are cold.

With Mike in tow, the librarian then walked down the central concourse, looking left and then right into every aisle until he reached the far westerly wall, before turning and walking all the way back. 'No one up here besides you, I'm afraid. And a particularly strong draught. There must be a window open somewhere. I'll check them when we close. In about twenty minutes,' he said, as if to prompt Mike to leave and allow the staff to go home.

Immediately, he read Mike's dissatisfaction. 'I've been on the front desk for the last two hours, and you're the only person to have gone upstairs. Sorry,' he added, accompanied by the smile Mike had begun to find detestable, as if he were being pitied for getting spooked on his own, in a well-lit library, as the midnight hour drew close.

So what is wrong with him? Disturbed in the library, and now to be crouching in an underground passage beneath the castle, shivering, in just his smalls. And how the temperature drops, he thinks, the closer you get to the sea. With that thought, he turns and begins to clamber back up the tunnel, moving on the balls of his feet and the palms of his hands. It is a difficult space to move through, and impossible to make quick progress with gravity against you and the inhibitions of space preventing a man from walking upright.

But he gets no further than six or seven feet upward when something moves behind him, with a heavy sound. If he's not mistaken, something has just been dragged across the stone floor, like a thick covering, reminding him of the sound of the gym mats at boarding school, pulled by obedient boys into place behind the vaulting horse.

Turning his head, he stares back into the throat of the tunnel, toward the pit, where it opens out in a rough cavern, hewn from the sandy rock. In the base of this cavern, he knows, from his many visits to the fortifications, there is a manhole and an iron ladder descending ten feet down into another, deeper chamber: the only visible part of the mineshaft proper still open to the public. There is a cave down there, no bigger than the living room of a town house, with a low ceiling, uneven walls, and a metal grate to stop the curious and the foolhardy from walking any deeper under the town. Down there – the sound has come from down there. And whoever, or whatever, is making the sound is at it again: dragging something across the floor to the ladder that connects the mine to the tunnel he is currently cramped up inside.

A dog perhaps? Lost, seeking shelter and unable to resist the powerful scents of a dark cave, it may have fallen down the ladder to the lower annex and hurt its legs. 'Who's there?' Mike calls out, after clearing his throat, his body frozen into the undignified crab-crawl he is making back up the tunnel.

No answer.

'Are you all right?' he asks, after suddenly thinking of the possibility of a person having fallen down there: a drunk, or student on a dare. He's heard reports that such things have happened in the past. 'Can you hear me?' he asks, his voice insistent.

The dragging noise ceases, but is immediately followed by the clink of something hard against the metal of the ladder.

One of his legs starts to shake – from the cold, from this sudden plummet in temperature, he tells himself. The shakes seize hold of his jaw next and he has to swallow hard to regain the power of speech. Not moving, but taking a quick glance up the tunnel, in order to estimate how soon he can cover the ground on limbs curiously strengthless, Mike calls out again. 'Will you answer me?'

There is a momentary pause in the clinking sound – a noise that follows the pattern of hands mounting the rungs of a ladder – and a sigh is announced. A sound of air passing from a mouth, but not from exertion, from excitement. And then a rustle and the clinking of fingers on the rusty rungs recommences.

Something moves in the shadows around the manhole. 'You,' it says. And other things are muttered – too low for him to hear, and too quickly for the patterns of ordinary speech – before Mike begins his ascent in greater haste than before.

One foot slips backward as his toes fail to find purchase. His knees graze against the floor of the stone chute. His breath grows loud in his ears, and his mouth opens, ready to cry out.

He makes it no further than the neck of the tunnel, and knows with all the power of his logic that the moment he heard the scrape of bone and the flap of rags against the walls of the well, he would get no further.

But how could he have guessed his body would descend the tunnel at so great a speed? Or that whatever seized him by the ankle would be so insensitive to the cries he makes as his naked torso, with T-shirt now ruffled around his throat, is dragged across the rock floor to the pit? And then down the manhole he goes, and into the grave beneath it.