Banquet for the Damned

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 away 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 gravel 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.

Back on his feet, he climbs to the top of the nearest dune. Bending over, he swats the sand from his knees. When he straightens, Beth is standing in front of him. 'Jesus!' he cries out, and staggers back. And he is about to shout at her, when she removes her long coat. She looks down her body, her face concealed by her hair. 'When you left the court, we were punished.'

'What?' Dante asks.

'You were told to be patient and not to ask questions.'

'Can you blame me?' he asks, baffled.

Beth makes a little muffled sobbing sound in her hair.

'What's going on, Beth? Tell me.'

'There is another, Dante. He wants to meet you.'

'Who?'

Beth raises her chin and shakes the hair from her face. A creek of tears shines on her cheekbones. She sniffs and then turns around to show him her slender back. She slips a tiny strap of her slip off one shoulder. The silky garment slides down her pale back. There is a shadow under her scapula. Dante moves closer and the shadow becomes a large bruise. He winces. 'Shit.' As his eyes accustom themselves to what thin light the moon transmits, he catches a glimpse of something that resembles a giant black orchid, with a smattering of red petals around it. The evil flower covers half of her back. 'Who did this?' he says, his voice tight. From his bad eye, tears stream hot and sting his face.

'One whom I love,' she replies, a tremble in her voice.

'Eliot?'

When she answers, her tone changes again. It is soft and hushed, as if she is speaking of someone of great importance. 'Pain can be a reward.'

Dante swallows but stays quiet. He has no idea how to react; what she says seems to diminish him. There is nothing in his experience to compare with the seductive horror of her suggestion.

'Are you afraid, Dante? Of offering yourself to something greater than you could ever be alone?'

He wants to say 'you need help', but is afraid of setting her off and making her violent again. She is ill; this is clear to him now. Schizophrenic even. These mood swings explain it all. There are at least two distinct personalities active in her: she switches from this young and vulnerable girl to something sadistic and out of control. And Eliot is responsible. He keeps her and controls her and beats her. He lures impressionable students into his twisted games, and then uses them as playthings. It is all starting to make sense. Maybe he uses narcotics and some kind of suggestion to beguile and then control his victims. It explains the illness. He must have been drugged. No wonder the Hebdomidar tried to warn him, and it is no surprise that Janice reacted so strongly to his association with Eliot. The Hebdomidar mentioned all of this at the Orientation, and he failed to connect the clues because he was so smitten with Beth and in awe of Eliot. But now, the penny has finally dropped and he'll go straight to the police, and he'll take Beth along as proof.

'We thought you were the one for him. But you couldn't understand,' she says, adrift in her own world.

'Shut up, Beth. Cut the crap,' Dante answers, his voice quick. 'I know more than you think. I know what's been going on, and I want you to come somewhere with me. Tonight. I want you to trust me on this.'

Beth glares at him. Her teeth are revealed in another mad grin. 'Do you think Eliot is my master?' She laughs, crazily, at the sky. Dante looks over his shoulder at the silhouette of his Land Rover. 'Beth, you're coming with me. I've had enough of this.'

'Fool,' she mutters behind him, in a deeper tone of voice. He is shocked to hear her speak like this; it contradicts her youth, spoils her beauty, is incongruous, as if her face and body are a façade to conceal something far uglier. 'There are greater ones to serve than broken men, who only now begin to realise what has begun. And you are privileged. Our lord is hungry. He will take you in his arms tonight, and you will truly know him.' She comes for him without a sound, closing the distance between them with one step. Her arms are colder and thinner than ever as she embraces him. Her hands disappear beneath his shirt. Fingernails tear into his back. Dante cries out in pain. He tries to pull himself free, but she smashes her face against his neck. Immediately, her teeth become busy on the soft flesh. With her fingers locked behind his back, close to his spine, she prevents him from pulling his arms free, and when she begins to squeeze him with her bony arms, the breath is forced from him, and then his ribs began to shift and groan. Overwhelmed by her unnatural strength, and a fear of suffocation, he stamps about in the sand, trying to shake her loose. But his desperate staggers only succeed in toppling them to the ground.

As they roll in the sand and wet verdure, he kicks his legs about, and tries to call out, but his squashed and winded torso can produce no sound beside a rasping noise that vibrates in his throat. Blind with panic, he is sure he will pass out.

When her grip suddenly loosens around his chest and he is able to draw some air into his lungs, she begins to lap at the deep abrasions on the skin of his neck. Her tongue is dry as a cat's and she makes a snuffling sound as she suckles his throat. The sound is worse than the pain that preceded it.

And then she breaks away from his throat, moves off his body, and sits crouched down beside him. She stares into the dark nearby.

Unable to move from shock, Dante looks in horror at the lipstick and blood smeared about her mouth and chin, making her look slovenly, like the insane hybrid of a harlot and a clown. 'He comes,' she mutters. Then tilts her head back, with her eyes closed and her dark mouth open. A desperate scream issues from her mouth. It pierces his inner ear and he rolls his head from side to side to ease the pain.

Beth falls silent, and she looks like a young and pretty girl with chocolate around her mouth. 'He's here for you,' she whispers, and then lowers her lips to his forehead. He flinches. She kisses him, tenderly.

Dante peers up at her, still too shocked to speak or react. And too stunned to avoid the hard punches that soon rain against his face from left and right, Beth making soft grunting sounds as she strikes him. And through the blood and confusion that whirl about his head, he hears her knuckles crack.

When the storm of violence concludes, Beth is gone from him, leaving him numb and half-conscious in the sand. Through his concussed haze, he hears the noise of her feet as she runs away, into the night-blackened dunes.

And in the distance, he hears another sound. Faint, but growing. A sound that makes him feel an instant and profound chill. It is like a sail billowing and snapping against the rigging of a ship when struck by a sudden gust of wind far out at sea. But it grows louder as the sound travels through the night at speed, toward where he lies in the dirt. His mind wants to collapse — to flicker out like a candle's flame before a draught. Only some basic instinct for survival motivates him to move his arms and legs. He rises to his hands and knees as his senses collect to deliver a terrible conclusion: she's blooded me, she's prepared me.

The sound is close now. It is all around him, circling just beyond his vision, carried by a frozen wind that skims off the sand. Remembering the sound of old bones flung through St Mary's Court, he clambers to his feet and staggers about on the spot, fighting for balance. The blood deserts his brain and he nearly falls as he stumbles toward the Land Rover.

Beth screams from behind. A scream of anticipation and wild animal excitement.

Dante runs with tears in his eyes. The pain in his chest, from where she squeezed him, makes him move slowly, barely able to stay upright. When he reaches the gravel of the carpark, he notices a movement on his right side. The motion is joined by a faint sound: not footsteps, but a suggestion of something being dragged or dragging itself across the ground. It stays level with him, keeping pace, content to stalk him from a close distance.

Screwing up his eyes, he sees a shape, or a long shadow, crouching near the turf, before the grass drops away to the beach. He thinks of breaking into a sprint, but knows the idea of the shadow moving more quickly in pursuit will stop his legs with fear and possibly his heart too. Hysteria gains momentum inside him. A sound squeezes out of his throat — a thin note of anguish that trembles and threatens to grow into a scream. Should he shout? Who would hear him? 'Beth,' he says, in a weak voice. 'Beth, call it off. For Christ's sake, stop this,' he cries, as if he is being menaced by a dog while the owner looks on.

She laughs again, like a lunatic pleased after performing some awful deed with a child and a sharp implement. 'Our lord is here. He's here for you, Dante. Just for you.'

In the distance, just audible above Beth's voice, Dante hears a car engine. He looks over his left shoulder and sees headlights approaching, down the beach road. It is the only sign he needs. Forsaking the Land Rover, knowing he will never reach it, Dante suddenly breaks into a sprint toward the road, adrenaline neutralising pain. As he runs, he shouts and waves both arms in the air. But no sooner has he begun to run as fast as he is able, than a wind of pursuit flares up behind him. 'No!' he cries out, and stumbles. He looks back, only once and quickly too. It is sufficient. He sees the silhouette of something long and thin, close to the ground, coming after him.

Ahead, the car turns from the beach road to the open area he runs across. Hope surges. They've seen him. Hope peaks. He wants to cry out. Hope dies.

As if he is whacked by the boom of a boat, something hard thumps his back and knocks him down so quickly his hands never have a chance to break his fall. Before his face hits the earth, his ankles are clutched and slapped together. In the next instant he is being dragged backward toward the sea at an incredible speed. Whatever holds his ankles runs twice as fast as a man. His arms flail and his body skims over the stones and litter and bits of broken turf, as if he is being dragged behind a horse. If he is taken to the sand, he knows he is finished. Using all the might of his lungs, Dante screams.

For a moment his body is airborne. He seems to be flying, feet first, backward and through the air. In both hands, he clutches handfuls of grass from the turf he's just departed. When he lands, face first in the sand, the air is forced from his body, and consciousness is slammed from his head.