Banquet for the Damned

by Adam L. G. Nevill

  '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.

  'You're not well. You should go home. You are not to come here. Do you hear me?' She speaks quickly, her lipstick-tinged breath especially sharp in his nose. When he tries to move, every joint screams along his back.

  'Can I get you a cab?' she asks.

  Dante shakes his head and forces himself to his feet. His head weighs nothing and a river of perspiration turns cold between his shoulder blades. 'I'm going home,' he says, and moves away from Janice.

  By the time he reaches the flat, the worst of the nausea has mercifully passed. Fresh air and sunlight revive him enough to get through the front door. Stripping his leather jacket and damp shirt off, he stumbles to his room. 'Tom!' he shouts, and then flops onto his bed. He pulls the duvet around his shivering skin. Tom appears in the doorway, as Dante kicks his boots off beneath the sheets. 'I'm sick.'

  'No shit,' Tom says. 'You looked pasty this morning. What is it?'

  he asks, unwilling to come into the room.

  'Virus. I felt bad last night and again this morning. But over there, at the school, it was crazy. I puked. I'm getting these attacks.'

  'Settle in,' Tom says, and inches away from the door. 'I'll get you some juice.'

  Dante buries himself beneath the coverings. And when Tom returns with a glass of orange juice, Dante is asleep.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  It is like spending your last ten-spot on lottery tickets and hoping for the billion-to-one odds of winning the jackpot. Within minutes of cracking open the first book at the university library, Hart is overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of occult history before him. The futility of the venture strikes him immediately.

  In the deserted divinity and theology section a surprising number of tiered columns, each packed with hardcover tomes, are concerned with the question of witchcraft in the British Isles. Seated near to this ocean of information, he is walled inside a cubicle with his first, cursory selection of books. He sits near a window on the second floor, overlooking the gardens below and the West Sands in the distance. But the view does nothing to ease his mind. He is living amongst the shadows of centuries of occult lore: book after book filled with stories and records and allegations of witchcraft, possession, diabolism, and the inevitable persecution in Scotland.

  As he reads, he slurps Scotch from a ceramic hip flask, which he bought from the Rainbow Tribe on the final Grateful Dead tour, and begins to wonder which seat Mike Bowen was frozen into. Looking around every few minutes, Hart makes sure the two students in nearby study booths are still there. It is only mid-morning, and Mike may have been paralysed at night, but an instinct for self-preservation will not allow him to relax.

  Students are vanishing, limbs are being washed ashore from the German Sea, and after Jason's story about the visitation in Fife Park Hart has stopped sleeping. Something has been seen in St Andrews; it is corporeal, its manifestation tangible, whole in its horror, complete in its intent. He shifts in his seat; it is like some huge and rising indigestion is making his skin too tight for his body. It passes, and leaves him dizzy and cold and unable to form a thought or do anything but stare at a thin blue pen mark on the laminated surface of the cubicle desk. For a while he holds his head in his hands and it all seems unbelievable, utterly preposterous. He then makes another attempt to read the book open before him. But on the page the words swim, and he is more conscious of the smell emitted from the old bindings than he is of the meaning of the sentences.

  Concentration is too difficult to summon. Thoughts of the people he has met, like Mike Bowen, or the youngsters he has talked with recently, like Rick and Maria, pop into his head. They are not dead. How can they be? To be taken by something not of the same world that he is now sitting, breathing, and thinking in? It is absurd. 'No, no, no,' he says to himself, to cut through the pandemonium of impressions, emotions, and confusion that swirls inside of him.

  In the next cubicle, a man with a podgy face and a goatee beard hears his muttering. He looks across and smiles at Hart, as if to acknowledge a kinship with another struggling student, who has waited for too long to begin his thesis and now sits, stunned, before the heavy thought of where to begin. Hart smiles back, knowing his face is white with anxiety, and then turns back to the book he no longer even sees. Droplets of sweat fall from the hair in his armpits. He takes his jacket off and wants to hang from the window until he is dry.

  No, no, no; the idea of an aberrant spirit operating in this town is preposterous. There has to be another explanation. As he sits on an ordinary chair in a library where computer screen savers click on, and where pages are turned and chairs are occasionally and discordantly scraped about him, he tries to convince himself of it. But a contradictory idea soon strikes him: the ordinariness of life about him, with its distractions and monotony and routine, has allowed others to overlook the first suggestion of the shadow that now creeps through their town.

  He closes his eyes and tries to empty his head of the clamour in there. He manages to steer his th
oughts off and into the emptiness of inner places where thoughts haven't even begun to form yet. He stays like this until his body relaxes and the sweat dries on his back. Hart opens his eyes. He begins reading again.

  But after three hours, the utter randomness of his reading pays dividends in an even greater frustration. His concentration is barely active and he takes in little of what he reads. He knows it's unlikely he'll even secure a gist of what is happening in the town by sitting in the library stabbing at certain chapters of randomly selected books. It takes an hour to read a chapter of one of the larger books, and will involve a day's labour to finish a book in its entirety. Will he happen across something significant by quickly turning half-read pages? Skim reading is rarely of any use and, for some, it has taken a lifetime of study to chronicle the occult, before any synthesis of its occurrences in these haunted isles was achieved. But what else can he do? He is only here because of his desperate desire to improve his understanding of the problem. The trip to the library is an attempt to stay active. And if he is honest, he has nothing else to do. After Rick, no other student has made contact for an interview, and with the first wave of students he interviewed now missing, there is little for him to do with his time other than sit around the flat drinking. And still, he has no idea how many people have come into contact with Eliot in the first place, and whether they have been affected, and if not, why certain members are selected by the night terrors while others have walked free. There is at least one active apparition, but he knows little else. If the Frenchman Laforgue is right, an infestation of one malign influence can spread its influence like a plague, until the aperture from which it has entered is slammed shut. Are people suffering right now who have not seen his flyers? Kerry said Eliot's group was popular with lots of people, but if they fail to call him how will he know of them? It seems unlikely that records were ever kept of a membership, and if such deeds exist, who owns them? It would take official pressure to uncover information like that.

  Returning his attention to another of the twelve books on Scottish witchcraft, Hart glances at the docket detailing its loan history inside the front cover. It has not been withdrawn from the library in ten years. He sighs.

  After another two hours, he ascertains that many people have been tried as witches in the northeast of Scotland, tortured, and then horribly disposed of, but little else. He suspects their deaths were the result of accusations made through fear or envy, sanctioned by religious intolerance, and that the hapless individuals were all innocent of the charges brought against them. That is the tone of every book; the authors disbelieve in the existence of any supernatural basis to the stories. The last story he reads is concerned with an old and solitary woman accused of witchery, who is stuffed into a barrel by an enraged mob, which is then covered in tar, ignited, and finally rolled into a river so she will both suffocate and burn. Her imagined helplessness, confusion and terror in the moments leading to such an inhuman punishment depress him. He wants to flee this, and all of the books, and all of his questions, with another drink.

  Restless, he scrapes his nails on the underside of his chair until his cuticles hurt. What he needs is a definitive guide. And as every clue in the town leads to one man, he has to be found. Even if it carries the risk of arrest, Eliot Coldwell must be hunted down and forced into confessing what he knows. Hart closes the book. All he can do here, he has done.

  He stands up. 'Stakeout,' he says to his neighbour with the goatee beard.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  At five in the afternoon, Hart is still watching the School of Divinity from inside the castle grounds. It has begun to rain – the first sign of winter since he arrived in town – so everything is now wet. What little sunlight penetrates the faded grey of sky turns the concrete and stone to the colour of his own despair.

  For a two-pound admission, he's been able to stay inside the castle for hours. With his arms folded on a wall, he stares across the moat and the Scores beyond it, and into the first-floor window of the School of Divinity. He can see the top half of a blonde woman's head, bent over a keyboard. It is Janice Summers, who turned him away on his first two visits to the Divinity faculty. And if she catches him in the building again, knowing full well he is not a student and is probably harassing Coldwell, she has every right to phone campus security or the police.

  The same feeling of futility that overwhelmed him in the library returns. 'This is twentieth-century Scotland, for Christ's sake,' Hart mutters. Despite his academic background, when it comes to confronting a figure of authority, or a representative of reason, he suffers diffidence. Anything he says to them about his studies into night terrors, by way of explanation, always sounds preposterous. It's why he prefers to work in the developing world, where there isn't an innate inability to fully comprehend a connection between chants, trances and sacrifices and the notion of night terrors. He'd be wasting his time here, telling them his suspicions.

  Right before him, from the coastal path to the Russell Hotel, are lines of gleaming cars parked beside the pavement. A Galaxy transporter plane shakes the town as it comes in to land at the Leuchars airbase, and there are television aerials on every roof. Technology has replaced mysticism. And everyone who lives in this town is so tangled in the mesh and mess of their lives, what time or energy do they have to hear him out? He'll be seen as nothing but an entertainer, or a laughable asshole at worst. It makes him feel adolescent. Will he not be just inventing another anxiety to add to their pile? This is the modern world; people don't just sleepwalk and disappear. Things cannot materialise in rooms and make off with the occupants. And if he, in this time of night terrors and missing youths, becomes discouraged and cannot believe in his own work, then no one else will.

  He forces himself to remember the distress on Kerry's face and the thin pitch of her voice: a young mind made witless by terror. Jason in Fife Park was the same. Something has happened here that is defying logic and traditional wisdom. And it must have started somewhere, with someone.

  Hart sighs, restless. Above all, he is tired of being silent. He is worn out by the thoughts that come with being alone.

  He moves to the drawbridge, wondering when the administrator will leave for home, and when she does if she will lock the front door to the building. It is still the summer vacation, but that afternoon he's seen dozens of students enter and then leave the building by the front staircase, which connects the first floor to a gravel carpark out front. The town is slowly filling up. And it isn't just the greater presence of feet on the sidewalk that warns him of this; the very air seems to zing with the presence of new visitors.

  But after another hour, as the light fades and the evening chill deepens, the only person he can see in, or near, the school is Janice Summers: the guardian, deep in concentration, with the characteristic frown marking her distant profile. Time to move. 'Don't be a pussy, man,' Hart whispers to himself, determined to do something before the cycle of solitude and too much thought beats him up again.

  Hart leaves the castle. Stiff in every joint and now numb from the cold wind that blasts over the stone ramparts and hits his back, he pauses near the gutter of the Scores opposite the school, and rehearses a plan. He'll sneak past the secretary and find Coldwell's study first. Then, at the very least, he can slip a written demand for an audience under the door. In the unlikely event that Eliot is in residence, he'll push his way in and demand answers. Contrary to his nature, he'll have to be assertive.

  But what is making it hard for him to place one foot in front of the other in order to cross the road? Why has something like indigestion suddenly lodged behind his sternum at the thought of confronting Coldwell? Is it fear of the police? For when they eventually tie all the threads and reports of missing persons together, they will look for a suspect, and the more he probes and connects himself to the vanished, and the more people see of his hardly inconspicuous beard around town, it won't be long before an angry Scottish cop rubber-hoses him in a cell downtown. But police questioning,
if he's honest with himself, is nothing but a secondary concern. Something else keeps him dithering behind the walls of the castle: fear of the unknown.

  If night terrors spread in a contagion, and if the sleepwalkers and the vanished all knew Coldwell – the source, like the Nagual in Guatemala – it is possible he is putting himself at risk by making contact with the lecturer. Unwittingly or otherwise, Eliot might be responsible for the spread of terror. Hart has little idea how the occult practices in the West work – whether a hex, a rune, a spell, a rite, or a drug makes a victim susceptible to possession or a haunting: it varies from culture to culture. The Nagual allegedly cast spells, but not every anthropologist agrees. Some speculate it is an animal or dead spirit infesting a witch's body and generating a transformation into the night terror. Others speculate it is connected to the animism he studied in Africa, where the witch doctor's transformation into an evil spirit, or Win, occurs after a long period of preparation – sleeping in cemeteries, worshipping a devil, and making calculations with the zodiac. Laforgue thought it was a form of vodun, or voodoo: an ancient and closely guarded ritualism passed from holy man to holy man until one turns rogue and goes for the virtuous like a tiger in a herd of baby goats.