Banquet for the Damned

by Adam L. G. Nevill

  'Hart . . .'

  But Hart only stops, and takes a step back from the kitchen door, when he hears it too. Far away, outside of the cottage or inside it, for they cannot be sure of the direction of the voices, or the distance from which they issue, they hear what sounds like an approaching crowd. Not a chorus, but a clamour of whispers and far-off shouts, coming closer. No individual words can be deciphered in the growing but still distant babble, so they stand in the kitchen, looking about them, at the dirty ceiling and the stained walls, dizzy from the suffocating reek of petrol, not moving or speaking, each straining his ears to get a fix on the sound.

  Until something strikes the kitchen door with incredible force. The crash of a charging weight on wood fills the kitchen to the foundations. Dante gasps, and Hart drops to a crouch. 'It's here,' Hart says, his voice louder, but somehow empty of the strength required for shouting.

  A tremor begins inside the kitchen, shaking the glass in the cabinets and rattling the loose cutlery on the table. The walls vibrate in the dark, and the light from their torches flickers against anything it touches. A sudden drop in temperature follows. 'Jesus, the cold,' Hart whispers. 'It's so cold.'

  Too frightened to move, Dante feels his eyes well up with water and his mouth freeze into a grimace he cannot relax. Fumbling in his pocket, he pulls his Zippo free and is ready to end it all right then, to save himself from what he remembers in the painting, and that which swooped and seized his body on the beach. He cannot see it again and survive. It is too much. What are they even doing here? Everything suddenly falls apart inside him: his resolve, his reason, his sense of himself. He begins to fidget on the spot, his movements fast and animal, as instinct takes over. Hart's face is wild in the torchlight and his small arms are moving the crowbar in small circles out in front of him. 'Now, Dante. They're here now!'

  Again a tremendous force strikes the door. Both torches flash across the wood. It shakes in its frame and then swings wide open and crashes against the kitchen wall. Hart shrieks, and Dante immediately feels himself afloat in the chaos that rushes through the door and into the room with them.

  Around his face, up near the ceiling, across the walls, things are swirling and screaming through the torchlight. Hart clutches himself and shrinks further into the ground. Shadows leap upward from the floor in long and thin shapes. Here he sees an arm, there a long fingered hand, and over there by the table is the sound of many feet coming at him in haste. And with these footsteps comes a cold wind that ruffles his hair and makes him squint, as if he is walking face first into a snow blizzard. It pushes him back a few steps, until he is trapped against the sink. And there he waits for a blow to fall, for the end to come at him, to stop his heart with fright, or for a face to tear at his throat from the dark.

  But at the point where he can run no more, or flinch, or beg, he flings the axe up above his head and runs at the bellowing, hammering, scratching things all over the walls. Three times he swings the axe. Glass breaks. Wood splinters. Refuse is swept up and into the angry air.

  With a triumphant and insane bellow that echoes off the walls, he drops the torch and runs for the boxful of cocktails. Something dives into his face. He feels its energy rush through the electric blackness as he stands up, holding a sloshing bottle. Fleeting airborne screams break across his face with a force of air so thick and cold, he is blinded by frostbite. But he keeps his feet, and swats the lid off his Zippo with a crossways stroke against his thigh, before running the flint back down the same leg to spark up a huge yellow flame. In the violence of the whirlpooling air, he dips the rag into the fire of the lighter, which is weakening, too full of gas and hit by moving air. Shielded by his body, first blue and then yellow at the edges, the rag becomes fire. He holds the bottle aloft and then throws it hard against a wall, where things are crawling and then spilling across the ceiling as if it were the floor.

  Glass and fluid explode high in the corner, and throw droplets of orange through the undefined room. Half-glimpsed limbs, and stretching faces with open maws, race back across the walls, some of them carrying flames with them. Long ribbons of purple, their spines etched with orange, dash quickly across the floor in every direction and scurry up the table legs. Around the soles of his boots, a lake of liquid fire pools and ripples and stretches to the skirting boards, empty wall sockets, and the littered corners of the kitchen.

  Unseen hands bang the walls of the kitchen as if they are trying to break through from the outside or out from the inside. Dante jumps across the kitchen, flames falling from his heels, with another bottle in his hand. His torch is gone and he runs into a wall and then into the side of the open door. His insane leaping progress, lit by the floor level splash and flicker of a growing fire, takes him out of the kitchen and into the long hall. Something sticky runs down his face from where he's banged his forehead, and one of his hands is numb from where it collided with a wall.

  And it is from here, in the hallway, that Dante hears the new sound, the new chorus, the low mutter of more tangible voices, rising as if from alarm, and coming up the brick stairs into the house where the shadows and the cold fight a battle against the new light and heat of fire. 'Hart! Quick, Hart,' he screams, and then runs to the cellar door, to hold it shut. As Hart emerges from the kitchen, struggling with a box, he hears it too. A set of female voices, their pitch growing higher from the passion of their searching and calling. It is a wail from some forgotten corner of Jerusalem, a song from a dim street in Cairo as the sun sets, a chant from around smoky fires on dark nights in wet Scottish woods.

  'Aquerra Goity, Aquerra Beyty, Aquerra Goity, Aquerra Beyty.' It comes up the stairs of the cellar and through the floorboards of the hall. Behind it, they can hear the scrabble of naked feet on brick, made fast in their ascent by the taint of the smoke that is here to destroy them. At the top of the cellar door is the thick bolt, and Dante's fingers scrabble to work it loose from the rusty mounting. It is a lock he's seen before, and guesses was once employed to keep captives down there – inside the brickwork of the basement where it all started, until the god arrived to banquet with its devotees. Maybe they kept Tom down there.

  Twice his clumsy hands slip off the latch, ripping his knuckles. They are so close now. Feet patter up the last few stairs, and the chatter of their frantic voices resonates through the thin shield of wood. But still he pulls, moaning as he tugs at the metal, because this is something Beth never expected: for them to crawl this far on their bellies, after all they know, and to continue after what they have seen propped up on the kitchen table, and still to light a fire after braving the rush and wind of the spirit guardians.

  When the door handle turns against his stomach, the latch finally moves, and the heavy bolt slides through its rusty fixture to hold the wood of the door firm at the top.

  'Aquerra Goity, Aquerra Beyty . . .' The chant diminishes from three voices to one, and then none. The handle is turned again, frantically, from the other side, clockwise and then anti-clockwise. Then they hear the slap of ineffectual hands on the door, and the mutters of a rising panic.

  Dante crosses the hallway. With all his might, he kicks open the door opposite the cellar, sole-first, and watches it swing inward with a bang to reveal a void from which he expects something to come grinning out. Not waiting for it, he leaps through into total dark, shouting to maintain the oblivion in his head, where no thoughts must jostle and make him hesitate in the red and lunatic world he's chosen to reside in until he falls.

  And he does fall, across a couch, which strikes both his knees, to send him flying headfirst, arms outstretched, through the air, and then onto a suddenly animate mass of sliding things. At first, he thinks the surface beneath him alive, and retrieves his axe to attack it, cutting into it with long blows that begin above his head and then whizz through the umbra until the blade strikes bales of damp newspaper.

  By the time he realises his mistake, the walls of the room are lit up. Hart staggers through the doorway after him, holding his tor
ch and dragging a box of petrol bottles. 'Hold off,' he yells to Dante, shining his torch right into the white and insane face shown to him.

  'Don't let them get out! Watch the cellar door!' Dante lights a bottle and sends it smashing into the bookshelves near the fireplace.

  'You'll burn us too,' Hart yells, his face wild, his hair whipping around his face in the louring air.

  But suddenly, from all around them, the wind and its voices, the sparse and fleeting and half-glimpsed guardians that chased them in a rout from the kitchen, coil into a slipstream and then flee the ground floor and the fire in it. In what was once a parlour, the air thins and becomes hot as the oxygen is greedily sucked into the growing fire. For good measure, Dante picks up another bottle and, without lighting it, hurls it at the corner of the room now ablaze. Glass explodes. Up go the curtains with a rip of fire to the brass rail. From the ancient furniture, thick grey smoke wearily sniffs at the air it will soon claim for its own. Old timbers and the loose sleeves of forgotten papers give themselves to the inferno. Dusty upholstery crackles and spits from the shock of its sudden ignition. A dark-brown cabinet seems to have backed into a shadowy corner, its lower drawer bubbling and seared as the varnish evaporates and the wood blisters.

  Hart grabs Dante's elbow and drags him from the parlour and back into the hallway, their shadows gigantic on the murky ceiling as they stumble out. The hall runs the length of the house, from the closed front door to the oven of the kitchen, now flickering orange and spewing white, caustic smoke across the hall and under the cellar door. A door ready to break open from the efforts thrown against the other side. Wood begins to splinter around the deadlock.

  But just as they watch the door with a growing horror, both fumbling for the axe, the box of gallon canisters they have left in the kitchen is overcome by the fire on the floor, walls and ceiling. Exploding upward, the box shatters glass, and fires a hot bolus of air down the hallway to sear each man's lungs. They turn away with their faces covered, coughing in convulsions, struggling to clear their pipes of burning fuel and cindered wood.

  A woman screams. The word 'fire' is shouted by another panic stricken voice. 'They're burning us!' it shrieks again, and then the handle of the cellar door is yanked until its mechanism snaps free from the wooden fixture. Squinting at the smoke, and sucking air in thin slivers through the drenched wool of his scarf, Dante runs back through the heat and smoke to the cellar door and throws all of his weight against it. 'Do the stairs, Hart! And the other room. Now!'

  Dante hears Hart throw two bottles into the front room, one lit, another unlit. There is a pause, and then the American flees from the room, chased by a ripple of fire – blue at its heart, gold on its skin – before slamming the door behind him. There is a whump from inside the room and a sudden glow of orange light from beneath the door, as something flammable goes up like a truck full of straw. With the last bottle – the milk bottle – he raises his arm, preparing to hurl it over the banisters at the stairwell. But he pauses and then flinches when he sees Dante's body thrown from the cellar door he has tried to hold shut.

  The force of the door, blasted outward, knocks Dante across the hall and into the wall opposite. Winded, he barely keeps his feet, but staggers a short distance down the flickering hallway. He falls to all fours before he can reach Hart. Over his shoulder he sees a stained hand with dark lacquer on its nails reach through and spread its fingers on the hot wall, preparing to pull the body after it.

  'They were in a trance,' Hart shouts, reaching for Dante. 'But they ain't now. We gotta get out.'

  There is so much smoke in there now, pouring from the kitchen as the fire burns and splutters far quicker than either of them could have imagined, through rotted timbers and peeling paints, over pine cabinets and up neglected doorframes. And from the cellar a white body and contorted face come through the doorway. With arms still stained dark to the elbows, as if she's been pressing grapes in a wooden vat, the wild and beautiful thing they know as Beth comes coughing into the hallway. She looks at them and screams something unintelligible. It is a call, a summoning, a cry for help that Dante has heard before on a dark beach. Recoiling inside, he says, 'No,' and his voice sounds distant, and it breaks around the single syllable.

  From between Beth's legs crawls another woman, grey-haired, and yelling like a hysterical mother, her mouth still smeared dark from what she has recently been feeding on. But the rapture of the trance is gone from her face; the words of the chant vanish and she is nothing but a terrified creature, on all fours, trying to escape the smoke and the sound of crackling flames. Another follows, tall, handsome, hideous and crimson-toothed, bellowing in fear.

  Beth staggers into the hallway ahead of her accomplices, no more than ten feet from them now, lit up from behind by the backdrop of flames in the kitchen, which lick around the doorframe as if reaching after her. A moment of disbelief passes across her face, which is now wet with tears from the black fumes. But when she sees them, huddled before the front door, cornered by fire and smoke and unable to unlatch the door, another sound issues from her open mouth. Deep and animal, it is nothing that any woman should be able to utter.

  'It's fuckin' locked. Oh God, I can't open it,' Hart yells, taking quick glances over his shoulder at the parody of a young woman that runs to meet them.

  'Up!' Dante yells, snatching the last bottle of petrol from Hart's hand. Seizing the American by the collar of his jacket, Dante forces a strangled sound from his comrade, and then yanks him away from the door. He lurches up the staircase, through the smoke, dragging Hart behind him, who twists and turns and loses his footing.

  Beth is upon them quickly. The animal sound warbles inside her. Her feet slap the floor. As she rounds the banister and comes up at them, her mouth is howling and black and her eyes are wide, like the face of a berserk thing pressed against the window of an asylum. Both of her fists fall against Hart's back. It sounds as if an empty barrel has been struck so hard all the air is forced from it. He collapses face down on the bottom stairs. Her pale arms rise again and drum down against his back a second time, hammering Hart flat against the stairs. Her clenched fists rebound off his body with sickening thumps. In the split second in which Dante sees the pain pass from his friend's eyes, to be replaced with a white and dreamy confusion, as if he no longer knows where he is, Dante ignites the last bottle with his Zippo and then punches his fist over Hart and into Beth's wild head.

  Glass explodes, her head snaps backward. She stares at him, numb with surprise. But then the liquid that covers his arm, and her face, and her hair, runs with the red streaks seeping thinly from the tears on her skin – slits cut into the wet pastry of her face. She steps backward down two stairs, blinking, and clutches the railing for support. She sits down. Her hands go to her face. She screams.

  Sickened by the sight of the streaky and now howling face below him – cold with nausea at what he has just done – Dante wants to slump there, smoke-choked, his limbs spent, but his jacket bursts into flame. The fuel from the last bottle is splashed all over him, and Beth, and Hart. Mixed in with the stench of burning timber and furniture is the reek of singed hair and blackening leather. Rolling on the stairs, Dante begins to swat and bat at his sleeve, up which creep caterpil- lars of yellow fire on speeding blue legs. Blood flicks and drops between his fingers from where the broken glass has cut deep, to sizzle in the fire on his jacket.

  Rising to his knees, Hart looks about groggily, feels the fire on his exposed neck, and then leaps to his feet. He howls in pain and panic, slapping at the flames on his body.

  Beneath them, at the foot of the staircase, Beth rises and smashes about between the banisters and wall, trying to knock the fire from her body. Her voice is deep, inhuman, incoherent. With what feels like the last of his strength, Dante whips his jacket from his body and smothers Hart's, dousing the large-tongued flame on the American's back, neck and head that his own small arms cannot reach. With his friend coated in stinking leather, he drags himself and
Hart up the remaining stairs to the first floor, where the smoke has yet to steal all of the oxygen from the air.

  On all fours, as if now appealing for help, Beth follows them. With most of the fire gone from her skin, once milky but now dark, her body steams. And when she speaks again, her voice has changed. It is the voice of a confused and frightened child that now comes up at them through the smoke.

  As the light from downstairs flicks upward and across parts of her, Dante sees the blackened silhouette of something that looks like a mannequin caught in the blaze of a department store, and found the day after amongst the ashes. The hair is gone, the head is now skull like and smoking and made all the worse by the whites of the eyes in the middle of it all. She is calling for her mother. Behind her, her two disciples slap and hammer their palms and fists against the locked front door, frantic in the smoke and reaching flames.