Banquet for the Damned (23 page)

Hart steps back from the door. While he wonders whether he should knock, the door handle turns. He takes another step back. The door of the study opens and Eliot comes through backward and then starts when he sees Hart still standing in the poorly lit corridor. Gathering himself Eliot then walks past as if they have never met.

'Sir, we have to speak. Please. Do you know what's happening here? Do you intend for it to continue?' Hart follows in the slipstream of stale sweat that trails behind Eliot.

The lecturer stops and turns around, his movements slow. He looks lost and confused, his body especially thin, as if malnourished. The palms of his hands are bright red and his fingers have the appearance of being useless, and permanently cupped into his palms. 'Who are you?' he says.

'Hart Miller. An anthropologist. I study sleep disorders. If you can't speak now, come and see me, please. I'll beg if it makes a difference. On Market Street, opposite Grey Friars. Please. I'm going out of my mind with this.'

Eliot regards him for a moment, and his lips move as if repeating what Hart has just said. 'You can't know,' he then says, softly, his punished face pale in the shadows of the basement, the lines by his mouth creasing the flesh deep. 'It's not safe to know. And if you believe what you claim to, you are in danger.' Eliot turns and continues to walk to the basement staircase. Hart follows. When he places a firm hand on Eliot's shoulder, the old man flinches. Below the sound of their scraping feet and the swish of Eliot's overcoat, Hart thinks he hears the old man whimper.

'Sorry,' he says, automatically.

Eliot leans against the wall, hunched over, his eyes screwed up. When they open they are full of fear. His face twitches and he shivers, or does it just seem so in the failing light? His mind wanders, and he says something Hart does not hear. This is no great necromancer; the man is finished. He is drunk and unwashed and his memory is shot full of holes. 'Sir, you need help.'

Eliot looks at him, his eyes wide like an innocent afraid of the dark. 'They're here. After a while you can feel them.'

Hart feels his body go cold; a cloud passes over the sun in the world outside the School of Divinity. At the end of the corridor, the light that penetrates the dusty glass of the fire escape dims, snuffs out.

'Listen to me,' Eliot says, sounding as if he is trying to catch his breath, his body no more than a thin silhouette in the new darkness.

'If you follow me outside, you're finished.'

Hart swallows and takes a step back. 'How?'

'Because it's too late to undo what has started. Get out while you can.'

'I can't.'

Eliot pushes himself away from the wall. 'Then be damned,' he says, and begins to mount the stairs, every step taken in reluctance. Hart can see that. He gives it one more try. 'OK. I'll leave. You'll never see me again, I promise. I don't want to be hunted down like they were.' Eliot reacts when he says 'hunted'; one of his liver-spotted hands nudges at the wall for support. 'But,' Hart continues, 'I have to know what it is. What came through.'

Eliot breathes out, exasperated. 'Rhodes Hodgson,' he says, unable to even meet Hart's eye. 'See Rhodes Hodgson in the archive.

Ask him about the work. If you believe what he tells you, you have a name for it. Nothing else can be done.' And then Eliot is gone, around the last bend in the staircase and into the reception.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Back inside his flat, Hart closes the front door, and then leans against it to make sure the lock has clicked shut. Quickly, he walks into the kitchen and scribbles the name, Rhodes Hodgson, onto a piece of notepaper. He sticks the note on the tack to which the wall calendar is suspended. He sits down, to take in what Eliot just suggested, confirmed even, to put it together. But before he knows it has happened, he is back on his feet, pacing. He pours a drink and looks at his street map without properly seeing it.

After the confrontation, he's never felt so isolated in St Andrews. He has no companion with whom to share his suspicion and fear. To do something, anything, to hear another person speak, he turns the portable kitchen radio on and then walks to the window in the lounge. Before the glass, he rubs the palms of his cold hands against his temples, trying to slow things down inside his mind.

Outside the sky has darkened. More rain soon. A sheet of cloud tints from grey above the town to black on the horizon, promising a storm. People below in Market Street are looking at the sky, their faces full of blame. A car horn sounds but he cannot hear a single bird. Soon it will be night.

On the radio, tuned to a local station, two journalists talk with a government minister and a local councillor. A member of the Wicca religion joins the discussion. Hart is too distracted to listen. He continues to pace the living room while they argue.

Has he just met a man at the end of his reason? Eliot was drunk; that was certain. But what did he mean when he said he no longer saw students? Has he been fired? He jumped at the touch of a hand and then talked in riddles about 'they'. That you could feel
them
coming. That
they
were near. Are he and Eliot now alone with this knowledge? Or has the man merely lost his mind, while he's been strung along by the suggestion that something truly extraordinary has occurred in St Andrews?

On the radio, the journalists harangue the minister about support for local agriculture; it has been the worst harvest in Fife and Perthshire since records began. The beef industry is on its last legs. What can be done? the councillor asks. Rural community is at risk. In response, the minister recites the amount of money already spent in assistance. Then the Wicca priest talks about an imbalance in the cycles of seasons. No one seems to take much notice of him. The debate is interrupted by the local news. A freight ship founders off the coast. Two crew members are lost, swept away; the coast guard rescued the survivors. No one expected the storm. The news and the weather add a synthesis to his day, to these times: everything is bleak and he wants to escape it. Is it all becoming too much for one man alone?

Hart tries to make a sandwich with a few odds and ends he bought from the Metro supermarket the day before. The sight of the hardening slices of bread and the slabs of cheese on the breadboard make him pine for a hot meal. Besides soup, he's lived off cold cuts and whisky since his first day in town. Gouges of hard butter refuse to be spread across the bread, which rips in his hands. Holding it together with his fingers, he bites into the messy sandwich and then puts the bread back down. He chews at the mouthful, but the thought of swallowing makes him feel sick. He empties the chewed bolus of bread from his open mouth into the kitchen bin.

An increasing discomfort in his stomach, flashing hot throughout the day, is now compounded by a noisy churning. His stomach must be empty, but he is too nervous to fill it. He pours himself a glass of milk, in case these discomforts are the start of an ulcer. Drinking the milk, Hart kneels down to check the answering machine. The digital screen signifies that two messages have been recorded in his absence. Snatching a pad and pen off the coffee table, Hart feels his stomach tighten with anticipation.

The first message clicks on but the tape remains silent. Someone phoned, waited for the end of his pre-recorded message, and then hung up after a pause. The second message follows the same pattern. Hart rewinds the tape, annoyed, and listens again. It may only be interference, but it sounds as if there might have been a suggestion of someone breathing among the crackles on the phone line. Both messages were left in the last hour. He presumes it is the same person, reluctant to leave their name and number. A scared student? Maybe he'll never know.

After turning the kitchen lights off, he douses the lounge lights too, save for his little desk lamp, and moves across to the window, facing the street, to draw the curtains. Dusk casts a spell of gloom across the steeples and towers. Out at sea, the oncoming night sweeps the darker clouds to shore. Heavy drops of rain begin to hit the windowpane. He wants to shut it all out.

Just as he draws the curtains to the centre of the rail, something catches his eye. Standing still, amongst the last few pedestrians who scurry to car doors or the awnings of stores for shelter, is the figure of a young woman. Oblivious to the scurrying human traffic, or the now lashing rain, she stands against a wall on the other side of the road, with her face turned upward. She is looking right at him.

The face is pale where it can be seen through the folds of a dark scarf and straight black hair, and her slender silhouette seems to stretch, with the early-evening shadows, away from the dull amber glow of a street lamp and into the shadows of a nearby wynd. Screwing up his eyes, he tries to see more of her face. It is alabaster, bleached into the grey, unlit stones behind her. There seems to be a strong definition to the face and a hint of eyes impossibly large. But beside these vague suggestions of beauty, discernible from thirty feet, the solitary girl makes Hart uneasy. Her stare is unbroken; it seems to face him like a threat. Moving back from the thin slit in the curtains, he swallows, and wonders what he should do. He considers waving to her, but the thought of attracting her attention unnerves him further.

Hart pulls the curtains further across the small brass rails and retreats fully into the lounge. He begins an immediate rubbing of his mouth and then wonders, despite his reticence for contact, whether the girl is a student looking for a nightmare interview. He thinks of the phone messages. She is certainly young enough to be a student, but then he never printed his address on the flyers. Unless one of the other interviewees passed on the information, there would be no way of her knowing where he lived.

He douses the desk lamp, so she won't see him peeking out. Licking at his beard, he moves back to the window. Opening the drapes a fraction, he peers down into the street. The girl has gone. He leans further against the window and looks up Market Street to the monument and cobbled market square, and then down to the Student Union building. There is no sign of her.

Hart closes the curtains. There is no telling who she is or why she was eyeing the flat. Maybe she was waiting for a return call from the phone box nearby. And just as he is considering the possibilities, the trill of the phone gives him a start. Hart puts a hand against his chest.

Picking up the phone, he clears his throat. 'Hey now.' There is no response. Standing still, taking shallow breaths through his nose, he listens, then says, 'Who is this? I know you called earlier. Don't be afraid.'

They hang up. He listens to the tone, transfixed, until a recorded message tells him to replace his receiver. He obeys the electronic voice and moves about the flat, turning every light back on. On the radio, the announcer begins an emergency shipping forecast.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

'I thought you were going to snuff it,' Tom says, standing over the bed while Dante sucks at a carton of orange juice. He pauses only to breathe the cool and salty air blowing through the open window in his room, before returning to his desperate thirst.

'Look at the state of you,' Tom says. 'You should see your hair. Man, it's like plastered to your head and so knotted.' He lets Tom carry on, sensing the relief in his friend's voice. When he sits up in bed, the slight movement tires him instantly. Beneath his body, the crumpled sheets twist beneath his body, and the creases dig into his skin like twigs beneath the groundsheet of a tent. 'Do you want to know the worst thing? You pissed yourself,' Tom adds.

Dante feels well enough to blush.

Tom winks. 'I won't tell anyone.'

Through the open window, a weak grey light and the noise of hungry gulls flood into the room. Welcome sensations. They revive him sufficiently to make him aware of the chasm in his stomach. 'I didn't have any breakfast, I'm fucking starving.'

Tom laughs, and shakes his head with disbelief. 'Which breakfast was that? You've been out of it for ages. All yesterday, and last night too. I had to call a doctor. You've been delirious for twenty-four hours, mate. And you're lucky it's a small town. He was here in half an hour and gave you an injection. In the arse. I had to hold you down. He took a blood sample too, and I told him to send it to the tropical medicine lab. I thought you had malaria. Never seen anyone sweat so much.'

'What did the doctor say?' Dante asks, stunned by the news of how long he has been incapacitated.

'Pretty clueless. Your temperature was way up, but there's some kind of Hong Kong chicken flu going around. Could be that, he reckoned.'

'Jesus,' Dante mutters, feeling more vulnerable than ever before.

With no family to run to, he feels helpless. Being ill makes you feel it more than anything. And what if Tom hadn't been there? Dante shrugs the thought away.

His memories of the virus are hazy. There are dreams he can't recall, and then periods of wakefulness in which he remembers being terrified of something, but the more he thinks about it, he's not sure he was even awake. But the sense of not being alone, while he suffered in his room, has survived. 'It was awful.'

'You're telling me.'

'It wasn't like a virus. Only at the start. Were you in here the whole time?'

'No way. I got better things to do than watch you sweating cobs and crying like a baby.'

Dante rubs his face. The skin is covered in a gritty layer of salt.

'Run me a bath, buddy.' Tom leaves and begins knocking things over in the bathroom. 'Tom! There was someone in here with me, I swear.

Was the window open?' he shouts above the sound of the taps.

'What you bitching at now?' Tom asks, as he wanders back through to Dante's room. He stands in the doorway and shakes drops of water from his fingers.

'I said, was the window open when I was sleeping?'

Tom looks at the window. 'Yeah. I opened it last night. It stank in here. But it was only open a touch, and I put the latch on too.'

'Did you hear anything strange while I was under? Maybe the sound of someone else in here with me?'

Tom laughs.

'No, I'm serious.'

'Man, this is St Andrews. What are you trying to say, that someone broke in?'

Dante exhales; trying to explain is ludicrous. 'No. Not exactly. It's just that I was certain that someone was in here, standing by the bed.'

'Man, you couldn't testify to anything. You were hallucinating.

You kept sitting up in bed and swiping at things and pointing. That's why I called the quack.'

Whatever raged through his body was powerful, capable of making him see things. Something he's started to do recently. One of his uncles had schizophrenia. He swallows. His suspicion, however, at the idea that it was something else, with no medical explanation, refuses to subside.

After a hot bath Dante wraps himself in towels and moves back to a clean bed, changed by Tom while he soaked. Propping himself up with pillows, he sits, trying to dissect his impressions of the viral attack, when Tom comes into the room, holding a letter between two fingertips, his eyes narrow with suspicion. 'I almost forgot to tell you. This arrived last night. Hand delivered. Someone just dropped it on the mat. Nice linen envelope and it reeks of perfume. Are you holding out on me, mate?'

As he snatches for the letter, Tom pulls it out of reach. 'I nearly opened it when you were under. It's a miracle I didn't. Any ideas who it's from?'

Dante loses his temper. 'Just hand it over!'

Tom's face stiffens. He drops the letter on Dante's lap and stalks from the room in silence. Closing his eyes, Dante whispers a prayer: 'God, let me be well again.' He sighs and stares at the envelope before him. His stomach flops over when he smells the perfume. Beth's scent for sure. How could he mistake that? Suggesting a mystery that is addictive, seductive, physically manifesting by way of a slight intestinal tug and a pang in the chest. It is a smell that haunts him, though he still rejoices that she has made contact. But as he holds the unopened envelope he also feels the same unease he experiences around certain rock-scene acquaintances: the unpredictable ones who turn psycho after a few drinks, with anyone fair game for their compulsive violence. Beth is like that. She twists things; she is unpredictable. Another reason he doesn't want Tom near her.

To assuage his guilt at having snapped at his friend, Dante thinks of Imogen. And then Sophie – Punky's girlfriend and heartbreak-on-hold – whom Tom slept with, breaking the band apart as a result. On the issue of women, above all others, he has to be firm with his friend. Especially here. He begins to feel sick as he wonders if Tom would ever cross him over a woman.

Raising the envelope to his nose, he inhales more of Beth's essence. He shudders involuntarily, and remembers flashes of things, confused and dismembered fragments of the last time they met; he sees her beautiful deep-water eyes and how they developed a hungry, detached gaze. He sees her full and bloodied lips, her hands in tight leather, her long thighs, and recalls her rambling, infuriating talk. Tearing the gummed flap open, he withdraws the letter.

Dante

You are wrong to distrust me. Perhaps we should start again. Come to the West Sands tomorrow night, with your friend if you like. I like to walk there at night, at the far end by the river estuary. There is something Eliot and I need to show you. Everything will make sense if you come. Please do not let us down.

Beth

Exasperated, Dante slumps back into the pillows, the paper loose in one hand. The note was delivered the day before, so she wants to see him tonight. And Beth must be angry on account of his visit to Eliot, who was drunk again, from what he can recall as the fever struck. What do they want from him? Feeling drained and too weak to play this game of theirs any longer, which has done nothing but make him jump at shadows, have bad dreams and fall ill, he decides that if anyone has a right to be angry, it is him. Maybe he should go and confess his fear and his failure to understand what it is they are doing to him. Although he loathes himself for considering it, there is always a chance Beth is nothing more than a girl wrapped up in Eliot's games. Someone he can save. He closes his eyes and thinks of her lethal mouth. It gives him pleasure.

What is he thinking? Dante clasps his face with both hands and does his best not to cry out with frustration. She is poison. How can he still kid himself? She bewitched him with her beauty and her seductive mouth and with all of her hints about great secrets about to be shared, as if he'd been selected for some astounding revelation, and is now annoyed because he won't play the role of her doting, trusting mallard. She and Eliot are conducting an experiment. He has to give himself some credit; suffering from low self-esteem doesn't make him stupid.

It is over. He admits it to himself, hopelessly smitten as he is. Everything is over: the trip, the research, the acoustic album. He and Tom are leaving the moment he feels up to it. 'Fuck it,' he says. 'Fuck them.' He'll tell them tonight, even though it will be tantamount to madness to venture from his sickbed. What if he has another attack? No, he'll take the risk, get it out the way tonight, before he gives himself too much time to talk himself out of it. The worst of the fever is over. And the bowing and scraping before Eliot and Beth is over too. This will be an opportunity to tell them exactly what he thinks of their bullshit. They will be together and he won't even need to get out of the War Wagon. He can keep the engine running. He smiles at the irony: here he is, twenty-six years old and frightened of a girl.

'Tom,' he cries out. 'Get in here, buddy.'