Banquet for the Damned (21 page)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

And even in sleep, Dante can smell the damp concrete. Sleep has transported him back to the cellar and rehearsal space of the band's house in Birmingham. Silhouettes of the drum kit and Marshall amplifiers, covered with rustling polythene sheets, rise up from the depths of the vision. A single lightbulb illumines the four walls. White paint gone yellow with age peels off the powdery bricks. Water pools on the floor where he lies. The ceiling is lost in darkness.

A gust of wind blows the wooden coal hatch down, built into the wall at the bottom of the brick staircase that runs into the cellar from the ground floor. And with its clatter two figures become distinct. 'He's here for you, Dante,' Beth says in the dream.

'No,' he tries to say, but his voice dies. It is hard to breathe, let alone speak. When he tries to move, there is no strength in his arms and legs, just an infuriating numbness, like an attack of pins and needles spreading over his whole body. All he can sense is the dead weight of his own shape. It is useless and cold.

Eliot stands beside Beth, smiling. 'I needed someone stupid,' he says, and then laughs in his wheezy way. 'An idiot was required.' Beth laughs too. It feels like his heart will break. His face screws up but no tears will flow; even that part of him has stopped working. He just grunts.

'They used to put people in the ground for him,' Beth says.

Dante's voice returns. He whispers, 'Not in the ground. Please God. Not in the ground.'

'Yes, darling,' she says. 'Underneath everything.'

'It's required,' Eliot adds. He nods his head too, looking grave now, the smirk gone.

Beth and Eliot look behind them at the coal hatch. Something comes to life, in the hollow at the bottom of the coal chute, where it is clogged with wet leaves. A small shape flops down from the drain cover above. Inside the chute, the shape stirs and then moves. Catching skeins of greyish light in the place where its face should be, the thing's head is no bigger than that of an infant. Wet where the winter light touches it, the creature mewls like a lamb. Then it drops to the floor of the cellar with a plop, as if it has slipped into a pail of oily water. Unable to see, Dante can hear it, travelling across the uneven concrete floor toward where he lies. Now it is harder to breathe than before, and he is unable to turn his head.

'See,' Beth says. She seizes his jaw and turns his open mouth towards the sound of its coming.

'Put him in with it,' Eliot says. With one foot, he then presses the sole of his shoe against the side of Dante's face. It is gritty where it touches his cheek. 'Put the stupid bastard in.' Useless, his numb body is rolled into a hole that has appeared in the cellar floor. Curled up in the foetal position, he drops several feet down and into the ground, below the surface of the floor and into a concrete basin, which seems to have been moulded for the shape of his body. It holds him fast. Against the sides of his head and along his spine, the hard stone hugs him into a ball. Eliot removes his foot and moves from sight, only to reappear with Beth, both of them struggling under the weight of a thick concrete slab. 'Once you're in, you just get forgotten about.
Oubliette
, you imbecile. It means to forget.'

Hysteria boils inside Dante. A loud rushing sound like seawater, frothing through a tunnel, fills his ears. The air is thin and although he gapes like a fish, he is unable to breathe. Slowly, the slab is lowered and the light dims. Just before everything goes to black, something slips from the cement floor of the cellar, and drops into the tomb with him.

* * *

Sitting up violently, Dante wakes and spits the chewed corner of his duvet from his mouth. The cellar has vanished, and his room reassembles around the bed. Mackerel light shines through the wispy curtains, and the outside world is silent except for the far-off whisper of the tide below the cliffs. Pulling his knees up to his chest, he backs into a corner and struggles to suppress a sob. He holds his face, and tells himself it was nothing more than a nightmare. Then he peers into every corner of his room, and searches for any sign of a visitor.

The vapours of sleep clear from his mind and are replaced with shock. Desperate for an answer, he tries again to remember what preceded the nightmare – what exactly occurred in St Mary's Court to induce the terrible dream. It is as if Beth left him suspended in the tendrils of some sudden sleeping sickness, vulnerable as a sacrifice. It is like nothing in his experience, to have been so aroused and then so frightened. And were they alone? When Beth left him on the cold bench, he remembers a sense of a presence behind his back. Something yearning for him, excited. Something he never quite saw, but something he heard as it rose up behind him. And he ran desperately, as if his life depended on escape. But ran from what? He's known danger before: the expectation of a biker's fist that would turn his nose to squelching gristle; the foolhardy step before a hurtling bus; a sliding foot on the edge of a cliff in Cornwall, on holiday as a child. He remembers the dryness of real fear and the way words evaporate before they become sound. And the kind of ether it leaves at the top of the nose, hormoney and rich. But never has his own fear been so ever-present and yet diffuse, and not able to fix on any one individual or place. It just hovers inside him, waiting for something he cannot understand to reappear.

Here he is again, scrunched up on a corner of his bed, afraid for his life without understanding the threat, and all within a week of arriving in Scotland. What was on Beth's lips? Were they coated with some plasma that sedated him and then fooled his eyes with living shadows? Vague and evasive Beth. Beautiful, cold and estranged Beth. She emerges from the same intoxicating breed of woman that disturbs sleep, kills appetite, and clouds every thought. She is everything a muse could be. It is like the first time he saw Imogen in a rock club. Then, there was a flash of eyes, a pale shoulder turning through a cascade of hair, her perfume on a draught of air, a smile triggering a dizziness inside him until his stomach seemed to drop away. Same thing with Beth, only it goes deeper. With Beth there is terror. It is as if Beth walks him between this world and the next.

You are right for us, she said. But what did that mean? What has she planted in his head? Maybe the whole seduction routine is trickery, a plan to stir him up with her beauty and indifference until he believes anything she and Eliot say. Eliot has changed her; she said as much.
He wants you to be with us.

He is losing control. With one philandering episode after another, he expected Tom to drain him in St Andrews, but now he's on the slippery slope, threatening their new start and putting the second Sister Morphine album in jeopardy. And all because of a girl.

Too afraid to sleep, he makes himself comfortable by sitting up in bed with the duvet wrapped around his chest and the bedside light switched on. Nothing will make him sleep again. Something is wrong with the town; he can feel it and has felt it since they first blundered across a severed arm on the West Sands. Tonight, he was in real danger. And the dream. It was too real. He was suffocating. He actually felt it. Just like before when the night took him back to the soil pipe.

But who can he confide in? And how can this anxiety be articulated without him appearing mad? He has to see Eliot. Even if he has to go as far as forcing a meeting by barging into his study or home, wherever the hell that is. There is no other way to get an answer. Maybe Eliot is doing something up here he shouldn't be doing, and something has gone wrong and now he is involved.

Dante lights a cigarette and places it between his swollen lips. He winces when the filter touches the flesh Beth's teeth have opened. He pulls his toes under the covers and keeps lookout for the people who buried him alive. And it is then, listening to the gentle sounds of early morning, with the initial shock of the nightmare subsiding, that he becomes aware of something in his body. Tickling the back of his throat with a threat to rub it raw in the coming hours, combined with a dull ache hovering in the wings of his brain, something unclean has begun to flourish in his blood.

CHAPTER TWENTY

'Wake up, shit-heel.' Dante walks into Tom's room at nine, unable to sit alone any longer with either his thoughts or the worsening effects of the virus. Tom rolls over in bed and squints at Dante before looking at his watch on the side cabinet. Yawning, he collapses back into the crumpled pillows. 'What's the deal, getting me out of the sack before twelve?'

'I need to talk to you, and seeing the morning for the first time in ten years won't do you any harm.'

'Fuck the morning.' Tom sinks his tanned shoulders back beneath the duvet.

Watched by Tom's one open eye, Dante places a cup of tea on the bedside cabinet and then sits on the bottom of the bed with his damaged face turned away.

'Something is definitely up,' Tom says. 'A cup of tea and a wakeup call. What's going on? You couldn't wait to see the back of me last night, and you ditched me at that party.'

Dante smiles. 'Did you sleep all right last night?'

'Why?'

'Just answer the question, butt-munch.'

'Yeah, I did. But it's a wonder I managed to sleep at all.'

Dante turns more of his face toward the top of the bed. 'Why do you say that?'

Tom sits up in bed and reaches for the nearby packet of smokes. 'Last night, when you were with Eliot, I did a little reading. Skimmed through some of those books he gave you. Most of it was boring. You know me and books, I can't concentrate for long. But a couple of them freaked me out.'

'But no nightmare?'

'Nah, but I should have been up all night. There was this thing in one of the books about a German witch cult, who ate kids and stuff.

Horrible. Why do you ask?'

'I couldn't sleep. Bad dreams.'

'What like?'

'You know, old stuff. Claustrophobia stuff I had as a kid.'

Remaining quiet, Tom lights a cigarette. He then asks Dante how the rendezvous with Eliot went. With a stomach immediately swimming at the thought of his planned visit to the School of Divinity, Dante stands up. 'Hard work. Can't get to grips with the guy at all. He might have some problems. So I'm off to see him in a bit, to try and get my head around it all.'

'Hang on,' Tom says, squinting in the dim light. 'What's wrong with your mouth?'

Dante freezes and raises a hand to his scabbed lips. 'I drank too much last night and gobbed it.' Moving to the door quickly, he adds, 'I won't be long. I'll see you in a bit.' As he leaves the room he can feel Tom's eyes studying his back.

Breakfast is skipped too: the virus seems to be growing with the heightening of his temperature, and the anticipation of barging in on Eliot is enough to kill even his mightiest appetite. From the flat, he walks to the cliffs beside the castle. Gazing across the sea, he fills his lungs with salty air and then lights another cigarette. The events of the previous night have dimmed with the bad dream. Was he just spooked, cast in a panic, imagining someone was behind him? And his recollection of the trip to St Mary's now seems to be nothing but a collection of half-formed images his mind struggles to erase or fully recall. The beginning of the night, when he met Beth, and then the ride home in the taxi, are clearer than anything that transpired in between. He remembers the driver glancing back at him via the rearview mirror, saying things like, 'If you needed a taxi that badly, why didn't you go down to the rank? You only live around the corner. What good's it doing me?' But he ignored the driver and was just relieved to be moving away from the court. He even astounded the man by leaving the change from a tenner for a tip.

What is happening to his head? Is he seeing things because he's ill?

But the sense that someone chased him through the court prevails, no matter the effects of daylight and reason, and he remains convinced that Beth manipulated the whole scene. An impression of her stretching her beautiful face toward a third party, after kissing him like a savage, remains clear in his recall. He remembers her becoming distracted in a similar way in the Quad, on the night of the Orientation, when she heard running feet on the other side of the west wall. Was someone with her then too?

Banquet for the Damned
is full of Eliot's carefully recorded visions and bodily sensations induced by hallucinogens. There are transcripts of his dialogues with spirits in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya. Could Beth have slipped something into his mouth when she kissed him? Did he hallucinate? She could have laced her cold lips with one of Eliot's exotic cocktails. People did it in the sixties.

He'll have to be quick this morning with Eliot and then get back to bed. He is dizzy now and wants to puke. His head swims and the back of his skull aches. Dante drops the cigarette and smashes it under his boot. Nicotine is making him feel worse.

He walks across the gravel drive and up to the School of Divinity. Once inside, with the door closed behind him, Dante hurries past the pigeonholes and secretary's office on his way to the stairwell. Mercifully, the school appears deserted. Janice's keyboard is silent and save his own careful footsteps on the stairs that wind down to the basement, he can hear nothing on all three floors.

Feeling increasingly hot beneath his clothes, he enters the basement corridor. By the time he reaches the door of Eliot's study, a sweat has broken across his forehead and his armpits are clammy. Although he felt rough back in Tom's room, at least he was lucid. But whatever is burning his skin now, and lighting flares inside his skull, seems to have accelerated its effect the minute he entered the School of Divinity. Not nerves this time, but a fever. Something is rim-shotting a snare drum inside his skull with a crowbar too, which breaks into a painful swelling, capable of popping his eyes out. His breathing is ragged and he can feel a slop in his lungs, summoning the rust of blood to his mouth. He thinks of news reports about meningitis in universities. But then maybe it is just flu. It's always the same when he kisses a new girl. It's possible he's caught something contagious and fast-acting off Beth. It will just take his body time to acclimatise to her bacteria. The thought turns his stomach. He knocks on Eliot's door.

There is no reply so he tries again, knocking even harder. He waits. Hammers the wood again. On the other side of the door, he then hears a voice, or at least a groan. After knocking again and listening hard for a response, he tries the door handle. It creaks around one full turn and the door opens. Wiping his brow, Dante walks into the dark humid office.

Something stinks in here. In Eliot's undersea world, the fumes of stale booze and unwashed skin fill the air. Dante nearly gags, coughing instead to clear his throat. In response, there is a slow movement over by the desk. Someone moans and shifts their weight in a chair. Squinting through the gloom, he tries to identify the fuzzy shape in the dark corner. 'Eliot?' he whispers.

Only a little sunlight struggles through the curtains behind the desk, but in it he can see the shape of a man, slumped across books and papers, with one arm stretched out beside the silhouette of a whisky bottle. 'Eliot?' Dante asks again, tottering further into the dank study. He bangs his leg against something before the desk and staggers sideward. Thinking better of swearing, he moves around the chair he's stumbled over, and makes his way to where Eliot sleeps. 'Eliot. It's Dante. We need to talk.'

A messy grey head rises off the desk into a band of sunlight made grubby by the unwashed drapes. Coughing, the figure shifts about on the chair before pushing its legs out. This is not the confident figure that strolled the length of a pier or sent his debunkers running for cover, but a sunken, waxy-faced drunk. After belching, Eliot chews something that has gathered in his mouth. Dante winces at the smell emanating from his dishevelled clothes – the same linen suit he wore to the Orientation. One lapel is now streaked with a stain. 'You all right?' Dante asks.

'Water,' the deep voice gasps, before losing itself in a second ragged fit of coughs. Preferring the stale basement air to the stench in Eliot's room, Dante wanders back down the corridor and finds a bathroom on the left side. From the waste-paper bin, he grasps a plastic cup and fills it with water. Stumbling back to the study, he spills half over his hand. Upon re-entering the room, he watches Eliot attempt to stand. When he succeeds in getting his back straight, Eliot then clutches his forehead and slumps back into his chair. With reluctant fingers he proceeds to pull something from his mouth that looks like a tendril of wet hair.

Wiping his nose, which drips with a milky sweat, Dante places the plastic cup before Eliot. With a shaky hand, Eliot cradles the cup from the desk to his mouth and gulps at the water. When it is gone, he drops the cup on the floor. Turning in his chair, Eliot fights with the curtains and unlatches a window. The curtains sway and Dante is instantly glad of the cool breeze that slips through. Muttering, Eliot pulls the curtain aside to illumine the stranger in his study. With Dante suddenly swathed in white sunlight, Eliot makes no effort to speak or move. Breathing heavily, he just stares at Dante, his weathered face etched with surprise, or is it disappointment?

Swaying from side to side, with the fever now coating his entire upper body with sweat, Dante leans against the desk. 'We need to talk. About Beth.'

'Not now.'

'Yes,' he says. 'I'm worried.'

Eliot stares at him. Yes: it is dismay he can read in Eliot's expression. 'Is there a problem?' he asks, looking nervous, or agitated.

'Maybe.'

'I only asked you to spend time with a beautiful woman. Do you like girls, Dante?' The voice is stronger now, bassy and verging on impatience, as his worn face begins to clear of its initial bewilderment.

'That's not the point. Is she all right? I mean, does she need help?'

Eliot slouches in his chair. After a moment of silence he begins to laugh derisively, and his pointy body shakes beneath the greasy shirt and loose tie. Tottering on the spot and wiping the sweat off his top lip, Dante flushes hot, but not from the fever. 'Sit down and have a drink,' Eliot says, with what appears to be amused despair, which makes Dante feel ridiculous. But of more concern than the impression he is making with Eliot is the illness, and he begins to wonder if he'll even make it back to the flat without fainting in the street. Nausea forms a slick in his belly.

'Sit down before you fall down,' Eliot says, in a voice that seems to be travelling to him from a great distance. Briefly, Dante's vision breaks up into white pinheads of light. A fresh convulsion lurches in his stomach. He claps a hand over his mouth and runs to the bathroom.

Gripping the cold porcelain of the toilet bowl, he vomits. Gasping for air, fearing suffocation, and aware of his disgrace, Dante presses his forehead against the rim of the bowl and spits a bitter residue off his bottom lip. His stomach, now empty, still insists on contracting to release a series of dry belches up through his body.

Moving across to the sink, he dunks his head under a stream of cold water and splashes it down the back of his neck. It runs under his shirt and freezes against his spine. Feeling a little better, but astonished at the sudden attack of nausea, he drinks from the cold tap and yanks a dozen paper towels from the dispenser to mop his face.

When Dante re-enters the study, too delicate to feel shame, the window is wide open and the curtains are drawn, halfway across the rail. The whisky bottle is uncapped on the littered desk and he can smell fresh alcohol fumes. There is another spasm in Dante's stomach but nothing follows through. 'Came down with something last night. And these dreams I get . . . I need to go home.'

Eliot just stares at him, but if Dante isn't mistaken, the man now looks alarmed. Pushing himself away from the chair that he holds to support his weight, Dante turns back toward the door. Every careful step sends a shudder of agony through his head.

'Beth is a strange one,' Eliot says, his voice uncertain. 'Maybe she's hasty. It'll be good . . . for all of us, if you accept her.'

'She was not alone last night,' Dante mumbles over his shoulder, wanting nothing more than to reach the door. 'I could swear she brought something . . . someone with her. She made me feel strange. She made me sick.' When he turns in the doorway, he doubts whether he is making any sense, but some part of him still hopes for a response.

Eliot's face is ashen. With his eyes downcast, the man reaches for a glass of whisky, his scarred hand unsteady.

Another ripple of nausea passes through Dante. His skin goes cold all over. As he crosses the threshold of Eliot's study, he thinks of hospital. The room now seems to darken again as if something has moved in front of the sun. He cannot remember ever feeling so weak and now the desk seems so far away too. As he tries to focus on the distant figure of Eliot behind the desk, the light snaps out in his mind.

How he has come to be slumped against the secretary's door is a mystery, but now someone is speaking into his ear. They are shaking one of his shoulders too and holding the rim of a mug to his lips. He guzzles the water, having lost so much fluid with the sweats, and thinks he'll die without the mugful of liquid in his stomach. Gradually, his vision clears and he stares up at Janice Summers. She is crouched over him, her handsome face stricken with worry, and she holds a hand against his forehead. The palm feels cool. He reaches for the hand. In his delirium, it flatters him and pleases him that she would care. An enemy.