Banquet for the Damned

by Adam L. G. Nevill

  Newfoundland has a closer connection to the Old World's necromantic past; where forsaken rites and blasphemy are performed in order for an individual to be endowed with powers to leave their body at night to prey upon neighbours or rivals. But a college lecturer and a black mass? He finds it hard to accept. And to whom can he turn if he is able to discover such a thing: the Vatican? The Jesuits blame demonic possession on anything from Ouija boards and tarot cards to rock'n'roll music, which he also feels is hardly Coldwell's style, as none of his interviews reveal anything untoward about Eliot's paranormal group. There are thousands of similar paranormal meetings, held all over the world, run by the curious, or mystics, or cranks, or just plain housewives, and he's never read an account of night terrors occurring as a result. But isn't it also a total ignorance of what exactly the town is facing that leads to the swift ends of its victims?

  'Let it go, buddy,' he whispers, and crosses the road to the School of Divinity.

  Sticking close to the school wall, he realises that if he keeps his head down, it might just be possible to walk up the front staircase without being seen by Janice Summers from the office window.

  Hart creeps up the stairs, his body bent over. He holds his breath until he reaches the top step, and then peers through the windows set high on the front door. The main reception is empty.

  Entering quietly, and leaving the front door ajar, Hart shuffles over the welcome mat and then looks about for clues. Straight ahead, beside the stairs, he sees a wooden board mounted on the wall, similar to the one in Dean's Court, announcing the residential status of staff. There are more than twenty studies spread over three floors in the school, but Hart's flitting eyes quickly lock onto the name 'E Coldwell'. Beside it, stencilled in neat black lettering, is the word BASEMENT. The wooden slide is slipped into the OUT position. He'll leave a note then, with his phone number, just to let Coldwell know he is being watched, and then he'll take off the way he's come in.

  Beside the secretary's door, he spots the BASEMENT STAIRCASE sign on another plain white door. Crossing the reception with his teeth gritted, Hart tucks his long hair behind both ears and listens for any sign of the administrator. Slowly, he turns the handle of the door to the basement. It makes a dry metallic squeak before rotating one complete turn. He eases it open and slips through. Walking at the side of the stairs to avoid the creaking middle, he makes his descent around two bends to the basement. The scent of radiators reheating dust fills the corridor.

  Walking down the passageway, Hart checks all the doors on either side of him. They are all unlabelled. At the very end, the last study by the fire escape, he finds a door marked 'E Coldwell'. He knocks to make sure the lecturer is out. But, to his surprise, from the other side of the door, a man clears his throat. A muffled but elderly voice then says, 'Who is it?' The tone is expectant.

  Hart stands back at the sound of someone approaching the door from the other side. 'Mr Coldwell,' Hart says, fighting to keep his voice straight. 'My name's Miller, Hart Miller. I was wondering if –' He stops talking at the sound of the door being unlocked from the inside. The smell emitting through the narrow gap, which reveals one glinting eye set against the gloom, is one Hart is long accustomed to: the odour of stale booze greets him every time he opens his own front door or climbs into a tent on a field study.

  'I no longer see people,' the voice says. It is slow and tired, as if the mind behind it is preoccupied with physical pain. But there is relief in the voice too, as if Eliot is glad the intrusion is not the one he's been expecting.

  'It won't take a minute,' Hart says to the darkened crack in the door.

  'I no longer teach here.'

  'I'm not a student,' Hart replies. 'I only want a few minutes of your time. It's very important I see you now.'

  'Sorry.' Eliot begins closing the door.

  Hart panics. 'I'm here about the missing students.' His voice sounds thin and absurd in his own ears. There is a pause in the closing of the door. It opens a fraction wider. Half of a worn face, with an eye as wet and red as that of a beagle hound, peers out. 'Who are you?'

  'Not a cop. But it won't be long before one is standing right here.'

  'Who are you?' Eliot repeats, agitation entering his tone.

  'Let's just say I'm a visitor from overseas who heard a few things.

  Things that tie in with my chosen niche of study. I've been rooting around this town and I don't like what I found. And your name's all over it.'

  Eliot regards him for a moment and then says, 'It no longer matters.'

  'What?'

  The scarred face weaves about, and the rheumy blue eyes blink slowly as if even that is an effort that requires concentration. Eliot then begins to look to either side of where Hart is standing, as if he is looking for collaborators, an ambush. 'Goodbye,' Eliot says, after ascertaining that Hart is alone.

  'Wait. Is it a coincidence that students who signed up for your paranormal society have vanished?'

  The half-seen presence of the man beyond the door suddenly takes a firmer shape. Eliot straightens up, holds the door tighter. The voice is faint. 'Let me have the last of it in peace.'

  'Last of what? Or are you gonna make me take a little sleepwalk down to the surf? Turn my legs into driftwood.' Hart frightens himself at the thought of what he's just said. But it affects Eliot too. The expression on the shadowy face confronting him could wither a cornfield. The drunkenness vanishes from Eliot's voice: 'If you're as clever as you think you are, then stay away from me and keep your inquiries to yourself.'

  'Because it's not safe,' Hart says, his voice softer. 'But what is it? Did you bring it here? You gotta tell me, sir. I know my field. Been to Guatemala, the Amazon Basin and Nigeria. And I'm finding the same fingerprints in St Andrews. You started something and I wanna know what. Maybe I can help.'

  A long, wheezy, and cynical laugh is hardly the reaction Hart expects to spill through the door following his offer of help. It has taken both balls and no brain to even offer assistance, and now the guy is laughing at him. Anger replaces fear: 'Jesus, buddy. Don't you care about the people who have just disappeared? I ought to slap that grin off your face.'

  Eliot counters his outburst with a whisper that makes Hart wish he'd never ventured into the basement. 'If you are touched, you'll wish you'd listened.' But in saying this Eliot has been forced to remember something dreadful – Hart can see that. His head drops and he shuffles his feet just to stay upright.

  'You giving me a chance? Did the others get one?'

  But the door closes and Hart is alone in the corridor again. He takes a step forward and hammers a fist against the door. 'I'll follow you until I know,' he shouts at the wood. There is no answer, but he hears the weight of a man slump against the other side of the door. 'I won't go. Some of your students are still in danger, if it's not too late. I won't go. Do you hear me?' There is no response. Suddenly conscious that others, upstairs in the building, may have heard the exchange, he sits on a chair near the study to calm down and to begin his third vigil of the day.

  Forty minutes later, still sitting in the basement, he hears a phone ring inside Eliot's study. It rings for a long time before Eliot takes the call. Hart presses himself against the study door, his ears keen. But Eliot says nothing and Hart hears the receiver replaced. He keeps his ear to the door. There may be a footfall, but nothing more, until he hears the sound of someone sniffing. It is followed by one or two muffled words that Eliot repeats to himself, that he cannot make out, and then he hears the sound of someone – Eliot – crying. In the emptiness beyond the door, in the silence and darkness, Eliot Coldwell is weeping. But he doesn't sound like a man. He sounds like a child.

  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.