Banquet for the Damned

CHAPTER NINETEEN

And even in sleep, Dante can smell the damp concrete. Sleep has transported him back to the cellar and rehearsal space of the band's house in Birmingham. Silhouettes of the drum kit and Marshall amplifiers, covered with rustling polythene sheets, rise up from the depths of the vision. A single lightbulb illumines the four walls. White paint gone yellow with age peels off the powdery bricks. Water pools on the floor where he lies. The ceiling is lost in darkness.

A gust of wind blows the wooden coal hatch down, built into the wall at the bottom of the brick staircase that runs into the cellar from the ground floor. And with its clatter two figures become distinct. 'He's here for you, Dante,' Beth says in the dream.

'No,' he tries to say, but his voice dies. It is hard to breathe, let alone speak. When he tries to move, there is no strength in his arms and legs, just an infuriating numbness, like an attack of pins and needles spreading over his whole body. All he can sense is the dead weight of his own shape. It is useless and cold.

Eliot stands beside Beth, smiling. 'I needed someone stupid,' he says, and then laughs in his wheezy way. 'An idiot was required.' Beth laughs too. It feels like his heart will break. His face screws up but no tears will flow; even that part of him has stopped working. He just grunts.

'They used to put people in the ground for him,' Beth says.

Dante's voice returns. He whispers, 'Not in the ground. Please God. Not in the ground.'

'Yes, darling,' she says. 'Underneath everything.'

'It's required,' Eliot adds. He nods his head too, looking grave now, the smirk gone.

Beth and Eliot look behind them at the coal hatch. Something comes to life, in the hollow at the bottom of the coal chute, where it is clogged with wet leaves. A small shape flops down from the drain cover above. Inside the chute, the shape stirs and then moves. Catching skeins of greyish light in the place where its face should be, the thing's head is no bigger than that of an infant. Wet where the winter light touches it, the creature mewls like a lamb. Then it drops to the floor of the cellar with a plop, as if it has slipped into a pail of oily water. Unable to see, Dante can hear it, travelling across the uneven concrete floor toward where he lies. Now it is harder to breathe than before, and he is unable to turn his head.

'See,' Beth says. She seizes his jaw and turns his open mouth towards the sound of its coming.

'Put him in with it,' Eliot says. With one foot, he then presses the sole of his shoe against the side of Dante's face. It is gritty where it touches his cheek. 'Put the stupid bastard in.' Useless, his numb body is rolled into a hole that has appeared in the cellar floor. Curled up in the foetal position, he drops several feet down and into the ground, below the surface of the floor and into a concrete basin, which seems to have been moulded for the shape of his body. It holds him fast. Against the sides of his head and along his spine, the hard stone hugs him into a ball. Eliot removes his foot and moves from sight, only to reappear with Beth, both of them struggling under the weight of a thick concrete slab. 'Once you're in, you just get forgotten about. Oubliette, you imbecile. It means to forget.'

Hysteria boils inside Dante. A loud rushing sound like seawater, frothing through a tunnel, fills his ears. The air is thin and although he gapes like a fish, he is unable to breathe. Slowly, the slab is lowered and the light dims. Just before everything goes to black, something slips from the cement floor of the cellar, and drops into the tomb with him.

Sitting up violently, Dante wakes and spits the chewed corner of his duvet from his mouth. The cellar has vanished, and his room reassembles around the bed. Mackerel light shines through the wispy curtains, and the outside world is silent except for the far-off whisper of the tide below the cliffs. Pulling his knees up to his chest, he backs into a corner and struggles to suppress a sob. He holds his face, and tells himself it was nothing more than a nightmare. Then he peers into every corner of his room, and searches for any sign of a visitor.

The vapours of sleep clear from his mind and are replaced with shock. Desperate for an answer, he tries again to remember what preceded the nightmare — what exactly occurred in St Mary's Court to induce the terrible dream. It is as if Beth left him suspended in the tendrils of some sudden sleeping sickness, vulnerable as a sacrifice. It is like nothing in his experience, to have been so aroused and then so frightened. And were they alone? When Beth left him on the cold bench, he remembers a sense of a presence behind his back. Something yearning for him, excited. Something he never quite saw, but something he heard as it rose up behind him. And he ran desperately, as if his life depended on escape. But ran from what? He's known danger before: the expectation of a biker's fist that would turn his nose to squelching gristle; the foolhardy step before a hurtling bus; a sliding foot on the edge of a cliff in Cornwall, on holiday as a child. He remembers the dryness of real fear and the way words evaporate before they become sound. And the kind of ether it leaves at the top of the nose, hormoney and rich. But never has his own fear been so ever-present and yet diffuse, and not able to fix on any one individual or place. It just hovers inside him, waiting for something he cannot understand to reappear.

Here he is again, scrunched up on a corner of his bed, afraid for his life without understanding the threat, and all within a week of arriving in Scotland. What was on Beth's lips? Were they coated with some plasma that sedated him and then fooled his eyes with living shadows? Vague and evasive Beth. Beautiful, cold and estranged Beth. She emerges from the same intoxicating breed of woman that disturbs sleep, kills appetite, and clouds every thought. She is everything a muse could be. It is like the first time he saw Imogen in a rock club. Then, there was a flash of eyes, a pale shoulder turning through a cascade of hair, her perfume on a draught of air, a smile triggering a dizziness inside him until his stomach seemed to drop away. Same thing with Beth, only it goes deeper. With Beth there is terror. It is as if Beth walks him between this world and the next.

You are right for us, she said. But what did that mean? What has she planted in his head? Maybe the whole seduction routine is trickery, a plan to stir him up with her beauty and indifference until he believes anything she and Eliot say. Eliot has changed her; she said as much. He wants you to be with us.

He is losing control. With one philandering episode after another, he expected Tom to drain him in St Andrews, but now he's on the slippery slope, threatening their new start and putting the second Sister Morphine album in jeopardy. And all because of a girl.

Too afraid to sleep, he makes himself comfortable by sitting up in bed with the duvet wrapped around his chest and the bedside light switched on. Nothing will make him sleep again. Something is wrong with the town; he can feel it and has felt it since they first blundered across a severed arm on the West Sands. Tonight, he was in real danger. And the dream. It was too real. He was suffocating. He actually felt it. Just like before when the night took him back to the soil pipe.

But who can he confide in? And how can this anxiety be articulated without him appearing mad? He has to see Eliot. Even if he has to go as far as forcing a meeting by barging into his study or home, wherever the hell that is. There is no other way to get an answer. Maybe Eliot is doing something up here he shouldn't be doing, and something has gone wrong and now he is involved.

Dante lights a cigarette and places it between his swollen lips. He winces when the filter touches the flesh Beth's teeth have opened. He pulls his toes under the covers and keeps lookout for the people who buried him alive. And it is then, listening to the gentle sounds of early morning, with the initial shock of the nightmare subsiding, that he becomes aware of something in his body. Tickling the back of his throat with a threat to rub it raw in the coming hours, combined with a dull ache hovering in the wings of his brain, something unclean has begun to flourish in his blood.