Down on the desolate street, he shivers. A cold breeze sweeps up from the west and blows a piece of litter across his unlaced boots. His head is suddenly, mercifully clear; the nausea and dizziness pass, but his every nerve hums like a live wire. Tucking his head down, Hart runs across the road, away from the flat, at a slanting angle toward Grey Friar's Street – the nearest exit from Market Street. He drops to a crouch at the corner of Grey Friar's, inside the canopy of a building society.
He zips his jacket up to his throat and looks for somewhere else he can hide. But there isn't time. A car approaches from the top of Market Street by the monument. There are no headlights warning of its approach. It becomes a long black saloon that crawls to the curb outside his flat. The door to the flat is still open and he has left all the lights on upstairs. He can see the orangey glow they make from the top of the staircase. He pushes himself as far inside the entrance to the building society as he can. The tiles on the floor freeze his hands; the glass feels cold enough to stick his face to the windows.
He can hear the engine of the car idling. There is the sound of two doors opening and being slammed shut, followed by a scuffle of heels on the pavement.
An age seems to drag by and Hart remains still and silent, shivering with cold and the fear he can taste like a mineral in his mouth. Whoever is now inside his flat is taking their time. He begins to wonder if it is the police. Maybe he's been turned over to the law and plainclothes detectives are tossing the place right now. He tries to force the theory to make sense. He's been spouting off about missing students and it is only a matter of time before the disappearances of Rick, Mike and Maria are investigated. He's met Mike, interrogated Rick's roommate, and spoken to Maria and her boyfriend on the phone. Every path leads to him. But why didn't the police come straight away? And are the local constabulary capable of psychic attack? Because that's what it was, up there in the flat, where he thought himself safe with a couch against the door. He tries to banish the residue of the visions that assaulted him inside the place he knew as home. Thank sweet Jesus he left when he did.
Hart takes one tentative peek out of the doorway, but draws back quickly at the sound of hurried footsteps descending the stairs of the flat. They scuff off the tarmac and scurry around the car. He hears a door open and then slam again. The car's suspension springs creak down from the added weight of a passenger. But the car continues to idle at the curbside. Wondering why it doesn't drive off, he peeks back at his flat.
His breath catches in his throat and his body tightens to a cramp. The tall woman he saw earlier watching him from the street has paused before she climbs into the front passenger seat. If Hart isn't mistaken, the bleached face with the closed eyes is sniffing at the night air. No longer able to feel his legs, or hear anything save the thunder of his heart, Hart eases his head back inside the doorway and closes his eyes. He remains in the same position for another ten minutes after the car has driven away.
Two taxis pass by and the cold begins to ache in his ankles. He can't stay outside all night. He has to go home. Unsteady on his feet, he stands upright and then drifts across the road, longing to cradle an assault rifle over one arm. Carefully, he enters the unlit staircase. The lights are off upstairs but the door that opens into the lounge is still open.
Creeping up the stairs with his teeth set in a mad grin, he nods his head up and down, and blows short breaths out of his mouth in an attempt to calm down. Another shock and he is sure his heart will go bang.
Peeking around the doorframe into the dark lounge, Hart stretches out a hand, flicks the light switch on and shouts 'Police!' He ducks back from the door and prepares to flee down the stairs in expectation of something in pursuit. With all of his remaining courage he waits for a few seconds to pass. There is no sound of movement from within. The flat remains quiet and nothing comes loping from the door he hovers outside.
He enters the lounge. 'Bastards.'
Whoever forced entry and then searched the flat has been thorough. The cushion covers have been turned inside out and the couch is on its side. The Ecuadorian rug has been thrown into a corner. Drawers have been yanked from the desk and turned upside down. The computer is smashed, the tape recorder spews coloured wires, and his Dictaphone machine has been stomped underfoot. Even more alarming, his books, papers, and cassette recordings are gone. Hart staggers across the room. Bits of black plastic from the obliterated answering machine crunch beneath the soles of his hiking boots.
Things are just as grim in the bedroom: mattress against the wall, split pillows, tossed clothes. Stooping down, he pulls his rucksack out from beneath the iron bedframe. 'Motherfuckers.' His passport and travellers cheques are gone. The bathroom follows suit. The pink candlewick mat is in the tub and the medicine cabinet doors are wide open.
He walks back through to the lounge and slumps on the floor. Holding his head in his hands, he looks up to see if the phone is still intact. But his eyes never move any further than the large map between the mirror and floor lamp. Every red pin, from the little plastic pot he keeps them inside, has been stuck haphazardly across the map. Hundreds of tiny red balls cover St Andrews from the Western Sands to the Eastern Harbour. At the top of the map, on the blue strip representing the bay, someone has scrawled the words Dies Irae in what he hopes is red lipstick.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Although the most active part of the illness is gone, Dante still moans every time the Land Rover bounces over a pothole or bumps across a ripple of tarmac while he drives, alone, through the town toward the sea. Despite the cold of night, a light rash of sweat creates a sheen on his forehead, and there is something tattered about his breathing in between the occasional coughing fit that leaves a taste of cigarette tar and blood in his mouth. He makes the usual vow to give up smoking and to appreciate his health once he's made a complete recovery. And that will be at a time, if he can remain resolute through the impending confrontation with Beth, when the debacle of his journey to Scotland will be a few hundred miles behind him.
Once he passes the Old Course and clubhouse, now darkened and deserted, the silhouette of St Andrews town, spiky against the sodden blues and blacks of night, glowers down at him from up on its perch, as if it too despairs at the scruffy sick man in the beaten-up truck. Which is precisely what he thinks of himself as he glances at the distant spires and towers through the driver's-side window, watching them grow smaller between the far-off trees, where they rise behind the walls on the cliff tops. Tonight, the town seems especially unforgiving, as if it relinquishes responsibility for those not shielded within its stone and beneath its timbers now the sun has waned. Its rocks and foundations have survived revolutions and atrocities and weathered countless storms, and he doubts if he has ever felt so vulnerable as he does now, away from sanctuary and alone.
Once his business with Beth and Eliot is finished, there is no option left for him but to flounder away, back into a pitiful, transient life, in England. Despite the initial hiatus of his arrival, his awareness of yet another defeat has been ever-present, and grown stronger since the first meeting with Eliot. It is just the way things seem to happen in the life he's made difficult for himself by choosing to be a musician. What has the trip north achieved? He's doubted his mentor, deceived his friend, and run from shadows.
Nearing the place selected by Beth, he suffers a fresh pang in his stomach. 'What a mess. What a fuckin' mess,' he says, in a quiet, flat voice to himself.
He passes the sea wall, and slows the Land Rover down to listen to the ocean waves pause and sigh before the roar when the waters are suddenly confronted with stone and sand again. He always wanted to live by the sea. Maybe he can go and sell pasties on a beach in Cornwall, or work in a bar in Spain, now that Scotland is finished. On the journey back, he'll make sure to drive right past Birmingham, and not even stop for cigarettes, in case he becomes caught in the city's magnetic field and sucked back to the very place he started from.
Definition in the landscape ebbs awa
y from around the Land Rover as Dante passes the last outcrop of buildings connected to the clubhouse and putting green of the old course. With both hands on the wheel, he swerves the War Wagon around snaking bends, and makes it hiccup over the speed bumps near the last carpark at the start of the West Sands. The narrow road then straightens, with the golf links on one side and the dunes on the other, and carries him away from town and closer to the oblivious sea.
A final glance in the rear-view mirror reveals the town lights as mere dots about the now indistinct sentinels of St Salvator's and the castle. One quarter of a silver moon adds a bright light far up in the sky that fails to illumine much on the ground. Ahead of him, the coastline slips into a depth of night that throws the weak beam of his headlamps back at his eyes, and the dunes huddle together in the cold, like the bowed heads of giants with tufts of grass for hair. And over their hunched shoulders, the sea at high tide is as black as pitch.
Dante wonders how he will find them. The beach road stretches for at least another mile toward the Eden Estuary. Beth instructed him to meet them where the dunes flatten, near the river mouth. On the map there is an observation point there, before the road ends, but no street lights. He thought the beach was lit at night. Anxious about passing it in the dark, as his headlights only light up the tarmac in front and not the sides of the road, Dante slows the clattering and wheezing Land Rover down to a crawl and pulls his window all the way back in the frame.
'Shit!' Something runs across the road. He stamps on the brake. The Land Rover fish-tails on the sandy tarmac before coming to a stop. Breathing hard, he peers out of the cabin. Whatever the hell it was has vanished. The headlights cast only a brief smear of light on to something running across the front of the vehicle, low to the ground, with its head turned away from the light. A black dog or a dark, freckled deer, perhaps, disturbed from the undergrowth by his lights and the sound of the engine. Fleeing animals always add a sense of urgency and immediacy to the dark when they run through highbeams. That's all it was, he tells himself. He drives on, shaken.
Now, all he can concentrate on is his recollection of the scream, heard on his second night in town. And then he thinks of his last visit to the sands, and how the discovery of an arm prevented a return to the shore. The thing that ran across the road makes him regret leaving the flat. What was he thinking? He trusts neither Eliot nor Beth, and they want him and Tom out here in the middle of the night? What can they say, or show him, only at night and not during the day? He thinks of turning around and driving back. Anger forced him into this reckless journey; his impetuous need to end the Scottish adventure brought him out here, alone. And if he is honest with himself, was it not also a desire to see Beth that brought him to the sands? And does she not know that he will come? He swears at himself.
Moving forward, slowly, he looks left and right, backward and forward, until his neck begins to ache. After another hundred metres, the left side of the road opens out to a wide grass verge, which in turn is gravelled to serve as a carpark. This has to be the place. Turning off the tarmac, he rumbles over the loose stone chips scattered over the hard mud that has been grooved by tyres when wet. His visibility is limited to twenty feet on all sides, so he keeps the engine running and the headlights on. It has gone twelve and if they are here, they can't fail to see his lights – the only lights this far out. With the engine idling, he fumbles with a cigarette. His nerves hum. His voice is ready to break into soprano, and his foot twitches to plant the accelerator pedal against the metal floor.
'What the . . .' There is a boom and a crash close to his ear. Something slams against the side of the Land Rover's fibreglass hardtop and nearly shuts his heart down. Dropping the lit cigarette, Dante twists in his seat to gape at the passenger side of the vehicle that has been struck. Echoes from the crash still resound in his ears. For a moment, he is too shocked to focus, but when his vision clears there is nothing to see but the silent darkness beyond the grimy glass of the windows. Depressing the clutch, he pushes the gearstick into reverse. Just as he is about to rocket backward, a figure appears between the headlamp beams. Someone stands upright, swathed in black, with their head bowed.
Dante jumps. His foot leaves the clutch and the Land Rover kangaroo-hops to a spluttering stall. He peers at the dashboard. His fingers scrabble for the keys and the ignition button. When he dares to look up again, he stares into Beth's smiling face.
Dante swears aloud. She is playing a game. His heart thunders like a drum kit inside his chest. Sweat dries to shivers. Beth turns her hand, palm upward, and beckons to him with her index finger. In the distance, the grin on her white face strikes him as both sly and superior. Something inside of Dante reacts against it. He feels foolish and angry. It wasn't funny, her startling him like that. And the noise of her hitting the Land Rover was horrible; it sounded like an animal. The whole vehicle rocked from side to side and the noise was deafening.
And where is Eliot? Is she alone? He thinks of his fright in St Mary's Court and his anger turns to caution. He restarts the Land Rover. Beth's smile vanishes and a pleading enters her expression. She tilts her head to one side and then mouths the word 'please' at him. Her black overcoat falls open. A satin slip shines against her breasts and hip-bones. Against the dark material, the beam of his lamps reflects off the white of her throat and the pale cleavage below. Never has she looked so beautiful, so dead, so eager.
Dante opens his door and steps out. When his boots touch the gravel, he struggles to remember how he came to be standing there. He just obeyed her; there was no choice.
The silence on the beach is deeper, the air heavier, and only the cold against his cheeks helps to earth him. 'Beth,' he says.
Raising her chin, she arches one brow above a mad eye, and pouts her dark lips. And then for a moment her face trembles with rage, before she throws her head back and laughs like a hysteric. She must be drunk. He stays by the open door of the Land Rover with his hand tight on the handle. But Beth's laughter ceases as quickly as it began. She dips her head to smile at him, sweetly. Then she walks toward him. Slender legs, booted to the knee, but left pale to the hem of her slip, steal his gaze from her eager face. His feeble resistance dissolves into the dark.
When she is no more than a single step away, her expression turns fierce. He flinches, but she is too quick. Clutching his cheeks with her hard fingers, she kisses his mouth, tearing at his lips with her teeth. He cries out, tries to pull away, but she pinches the skin of his face hard, immobilising him with pain. The scabbed wounds on his lips break open with a ripping sound he feels more than hears. It makes him feel sick. He tries to breathe through his nose as he chokes on the perfume clouding his face, before it slips up his sinuses and dulls his mind like morphine. When his body goes limp against her, she withdraws her face to laugh.
Unwinding her arms from his back, Beth steps away from Dante, leaving him tottering on the spot and wiping at his lips. 'Oh precious,' she whispers, her expression now that of the little-lost-girl the first time they met. But her eyes remain wide, disabling his ability to look away. He tries to speak but can't remember how. His face is numb, his mouth traumatised. 'I told you to wait,' she says. 'Why couldn't you wait? You didn't trust me. We were wrong about you.'
He feels a sharp pain in his stomach, which becomes a desperate need to placate her, to make her want him still, but she turns on her Cuban heels and marches away across the gravel, out of the headlight beams and through the grass to disappear amongst the dunes. 'Beth. Wait. Beth! Wait! It's not like that!' he shouts. But she is gone. Dante leans against the Land Rover. 'Beth,' he calls, weakly, 'I'm not well. Don't make me chase you.' Sulphur smoulders in his lungs.
His desire to stray no more than a few feet from the Land Rover grinds with his need to see her again. Her quick and savage introduction arouses a lunatic desire in him. It blinds him, douses his fear. He feels reckless, and trembles on legs that feel especially thin and useless as he calls her name. She never answers, so he crosses the gra
vel partway, slowing down when the sensation of loose stones beneath his boots gives way to the cushion of dune grass.
And soon he is shouting with annoyance. His resolution to stay near the War Wagon is broken, forgotten. He stumbles over pieces of driftwood, and twists an ankle on the uneven ground where the dunes begin to rise. Ascending the first hump of sand, he falls into the harsh grasses growing through the damp sand. They stab at his face and poke an eye. And he is reduced to sitting with a hand pressed against a wet and stinging eyelid, shut tight. But at least the pain revives him, helping him to think straight for the first time since she kissed him.
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