Banquet for the Damned

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

There is no wind, no traffic in the empty lane, and little sound beside the patter of rain through the trees and hedges by the road where he crouches, at the edge where the tarmac cambers into a drainage trench. Little can be seen in any detail around him, save the indistinct shapes of lime-green weeds, or pieces of pale rock. And for the moment he can go no further toward the cottage. The fire of anger and the cold suck of anxiety — or is it impatience? or desperation? — in his stomach, that forced him to drive out to the cottage within an hour of Harry and Arthur's departure, are gone, leaving him immobile now, twenty feet from the cottage gate.

In the Land Rover, he crawled at no more than twenty miles an hour through the unlit narrow lanes for the last stretch of the journey to Eliot's home, his courage gradually fading to futility, a sense of weakness before a greater foe. Traffic on the minor roads thinned once he was past the golf course on the outskirts of town, at nine. Cars behind and ahead passed away like the last few familiar faces in a threatening crowd, leaving him alone in the Fife countryside beneath a cloudy night sky, with only the headlights on full-beam to guide him, and they produced nothing but a comfortless glow of yellow before a backdrop of treeless hills. After a final small settlement of grey cottages, whose orange lights peeking from deep casements seemed to plead with him to turn back, Dante found the last turn on the map to take him to Eliot's home, where it all began.

While he laboured with the contagion of Beth, and when he defied her in the court, and then again, a final time, on the beach, were plans being made for a more suitable candidate? For Tom? For what? To join them? And it was all happening so quickly. There had been a haste in Eliot, a desperation for him to meet Beth. And in Beth too, for him to accept her companion. Instinct warns him their haste is for a reason: a point in time not far away, when something beyond everyone's comprehension will occur. And stifling him, making him all blocked and stopped inside, is the sense that Tom is gone. The moment Tom came out here with Eliot, was he lost? And he drove his best friend to this end. Dante dips his head and lets the worst of it pass.

He stands up and looks behind him at the road he has travelled and can now barely see. The Land Rover is parked half a mile back, tucked inside a shallow opening to a field, bordered on either side by a dry stone wall. Near the field was a sign indicating that Knoxville was two miles away, a landmark he chose so he could find the Land Rover again, in a hurry if need be. But if he is chased from the cottage, will he make it that far? Vivid recollections of his night on the West Sands start to leap through his mind. Quick nervous thoughts make him swallow and then take deep breaths.

For what seems like an hour, he is unable to move at all, and twice convinces himself to turn back and run to the War Wagon. Maybe he should wait for the following day and return, as planned, with Arthur and Harry. Then they can search for Tom by daylight, with the confidence of being in numbers, of not having to face uncertainty alone: like his trip to Scotland in the first place, when he took Tom — the sleek head beside him, the banter, the goading, the twitches of anger, the camaraderie, the bond that seemed unbreakable, the interest in one another inexhaustible. 'Jesus, Tom. What have I done?' he says.

But the following day will be too late. Missing for two days, Tom has been out here. Ill perhaps, a captive for sure. One more night is too long a time to wait for your best friend. Tom would do the same for him. He'd be right here too, looking for Dante, waiting for the moment to pounce at the cottage, knife in hand. Inside the inner pocket of Dante's jacket, the plastic handle of the kitchen knife — the only thing resembling a weapon he could find in the flat — pokes into his armpit. It is one of those long knives with a point and a serrated edge and a handle dimpled for grip when slicing vegetables, bread and cheese. It will mean he'll have to use it up close. Briefly, he imagines forcing a knife into a body. It makes him feel sick, and there is no strength in his arms after the thought has passed.

It's no good; he just isn't made that way. In his two fights at school he came away second best, and the one time he was attacked by a biker at a rock club in Nottingham, the whole episode became nothing to him but a blur, painless despite his many bruises, chaotic so no single image or word could stay in his memory. Just a tumble of emotion and a whirl of lights that left him nauseous and trembling when it was all over. He is no fighter.

But he must go in there with the knife and the screwdriver and torch from the War Wagon's tool box. Into the cottage to find Tom and bring him out. His throat closes and a cold sweat moistens under his arms. Fear is winning again, now he is no more than twenty feet from the gate.

Something else will have to do the terrible things for him. When the moment comes he must count on anger, fear and adrenaline to kick in, to remove his finer parts, and provide strength. 'Come on,' he whispers. It is a struggle to breathe steadily, and he's gritted his teeth without noticing, until the sound of them grating together makes him relax his jaw. Unsteadily, he rises to his full height and stretches his back. A long shiver runs over his body. His fingers are too cold to feel much. Before he freezes, or summons the virus back, he has to make a move. Now or never. For Tom and the poor bastard who lost his arm on the beach. They might get him, but he'll do some damage first. Yes, go. Go now. Pumping faster, his heart spreads a welcome heat through his body.

Running bent over, close to the grass verge between the drainage trench and the road surface, Dante makes it as far as the front gate then drops down from sight of the front windows. There it is: the pale stone of the wide front wall; the large square paddock-style garden, unkempt and clotted brown with leaves; the roof indistinct and lost amidst unpruned foliage: the dilapidated hovel Harry and Arthur entered in May and never since. The guttering is half gone, and the skeletons of two large floral arrangements are sunken beside the door.

He clambers over the wooden gate, not wanting to risk the clinking of metal or the squeak of hinge by using the latch, and drops to the path on the other side. He is in. Every nerve sings in soprano; his ears seem to hear the snapping of twigs on every side; there is a rush of blood and hormones to his head; panic rises like a wave and tries to swamp him into flight.

He runs to the left side of the front garden and follows the hedge all the way to the corner. Long grass, thick with rain, drenches his jeans to the knee. Branches from the hedge bordering the side of the front garden whip his face. Clouds cover one half of what's left of the moon and stars. But that is good. If someone were to walk out the front door, it would be hard for them to see him crouched down here. But if they do not need to use their eyes to find a trespasser, what then?

Wide-eyed with emotion, he remains still, and watches the property from his corner, looking for the next hiding place like a mountaineer peering up to see a crack or ledge in which to place his chalky fingers. A stone wall protects the cottage from the road, and scruffy hedges grow down both sides where lines of poplars and thorn bushes bend out of the privet, offering shelter from the winds and concealing the two barren fields beyond. The rear of the property is lost to him.

Screwing up his eyes, Dante examines the outside of the cottage. There are two storeys with sightless windows, glazed and set back inside grey brick. From the sides, it is protected completely from an outer view, and any inspection from the front is partially obscured by the wall. Subtly and in a disorderly fashion, it is as if the building has been shaped into a hideout that no one would suspect of foul deeds because no one can see it. But now he is on the inside, he must be certain he is not seen from those blank windows. Looking for a way in will follow.

Through a tiny chink in what may be curtains on the top floor, he thinks there is a slither of reddish light, but beside that, if indeed it is a light, the building suggests total abandonment. Squinting, he peers across the silhouette of the gables and chimney breast, and then down the walls. At the sides of the building, two narrow grass paths, obscured by the overhang of privet and tree limb, lead away to shadow. The rear garden?

Clinging to the trench of night at the base of the tree row, he moves down to the side of the cottage to check the back, raising his knees high above the wet grass as if wading through murky water. Then along the length of the cottage, between the treeline and house, he moves slowly through a funnel of total dark with one hand placed against the stone wall of the cottage for support, while his other arm knocks wet tree branches from his face.

From out of the shadow, he emerges, grateful, his heart pounding up around his ears, and sees the rear garden: long, devoid of flowerbed and tree, covered with long grass and a seemingly impenetrable tangle of weed that concludes in what appears to be a high, though sagging, wooden fence. There is little beyond other than a field or rocky meadow leading to foothills, dotted with sleeping sheep. Long ago, precautions were taken against the curious.

With his senses keener, Dante drops to a squat and surveys the back of the house. There is a single large back door in a solid stone frame and five windows around it: two to the side, and three on the upper storey, before the steep roof, made from grey slate, makes its conical ascent into the elements. Is Tom somewhere under that roof? Can anyone live here? But it is the thought of what else could be in there that keeps him in the cold shadows of the garden.

Trying to establish entry will be difficult without a crowbar. How do burglars do it? They force windows or break them. Can he risk the noise if someone is inside?

In a renewed effort to focus his courage, he imagines crashing the lock in and booting the front door aside. But what then? Will Beth leap on him and smash him like a toy against a wall? Or will the other one be waiting, like a guardian, to tear an arm off? Every faded bruise and scratch on his body suddenly sings out in a tiny shrill voice of its own. Are keen eyes looking out too, up there right now, behind those dark panels of glass, watching him? Or can they sense him? If they come to him in dreams, are they not able to feel his presence, now he is so close?

The sound of a car and the dim pattern of headlights down one side of the house makes his head turn in one direction, his stomach in another. A car pulls up in the lane at the front of the cottage; a door opens, then closes, and is followed by the sound of tipped heels on a slabstone path.

Edging forward and trying to stifle his ragged breath, Dante moves back into the dark at the side of the cottage, back through the tight tunnel of dankness and tugging sticks, and on toward the front, one careful step at a time. Maybe Tom is with them, the visitors, or owners, or worse.

Someone is knocking the front door now. When he draws level with the corner of the front wall, he crouches down, below eye-level, and steals a quick glimpse around the cold brickwork before pulling his face back into the dark. A woman is out front, crouched down on her knees in the weeds before the door, with her scarfed-head bowed. She is wearing an overcoat, but is too short to be Beth. Mystified, he looks again.

At the front of the house a door is opened, followed by the clatter of a latch, and then what sounds like a low mutter of awe from the kneeling woman. Then there is silence. A dark arm stretches out from the doorway. It touches the woman's scarfed head, tenderly, as if stroking an obedient pet.

What little edgy strength has been in his body seeps away, draining from his legs like the water of a bath he's suddenly stood up in, to pass from his feet into the cold earth. One of his eyebrows twitches and for an insane moment he thinks of rushing forward, knife drawn, to do his work — the town's work. Reaching inside his jacket, he places the pads of his fingers on the knife handle.

The kneeling woman rises to her feet; a joint cracks, the skirt swishes. The woman then shuffles to the side of the path, and from the doorway steps someone tall and covered in black to their feet. It is Beth. Slowly, Dante pulls his head back from the corner, and presses his body into the wall.

He hears the front door close, followed by the sound of their heels, kicking and scraping down the weed-choked path. Then there is the grind of the garden gate being opened. Peering back to the front of the property, he can also see the headlights of a car shining over the wall and into the corner of the garden where he first crouched. He draws the knife from the inside of his jacket. It takes a second for the pain to register, and he hisses more from shock than from the slice he has cut, carelessly, against the flesh beside his armpit. Down by the gate, Beth immediately pauses. She turns around and looks back to the cottage.

There is a pale suggestion of her face angled in his direction. As if smelling his blood, she has become still, one hand on the gate, the other lost inside the folds of her coat. Dante stiffens; not even the blink of an eye will he allow himself. For a moment the whitish oval of her head seems to be confronting him from afar. The other woman comes back to where Beth stands, but keeps a respectful distance behind her. Then Beth raises her face, slightly, as if to afford the thin nose an opportunity to sniff at the night air. He thinks of her bony fingers becoming vices on his arms and the sound of his lips being torn once her mouth is upon him. Giddy now, convinced she has sensed him, he wonders in a moment of madness if he should scream, or will it be better to run to them and fall down where he can plead for her to make it quick?

Then, at last, when he feels dizzy from holding in his breath, knowing that even a faint exhalation might give him up, Beth turns her head away from the house and walks, out of sight, to the car. The scarfed woman follows Beth in a haste he thinks obsequious.

Dante exhales. Something heavy and cold drops through his body, to leave a hollow which fills with a sudden tumble of emotion. An overwhelming desire to shout for his friend dies to a whimper in his mouth. Tears fill his eyes and something wet drips from the end of his nose. His fingers tighten on the knife handle. Fear is replaced by anger. Bitter tears are close.

The engine of the car starts and the light from the headlamps arcs over the hedge and wall with white light. Dante wipes his eyes. The car drives past the front of the property. Its roar fades to a distant hum. Unable to dissolve the lump in his throat, he steps from the shadows and wanders onto the front lawn. He listens to the sound of the engine diminish into silence. Seeping through his jeans and against his buttocks comes the damp of the air, and he turns his attention to the cottage. Dante walks to the front door and kicks it. Wood booms; the door shudders in its frame. If it opens, he will rush whoever stands in his way.

The hammering of his fist against the door brings no one to answer him. Stepping back, he looks up at the windows of the house, all blacked out and latched shut and too high up. With the screwdriver from the Land Rover's tool box, he attempts to lever the door from the frame. No good; his hands are cold and shaking with nerves and he can't find purchase for the wedged end of the tool. His efforts succeed in a useless scraping against the wood of the door. Thwarted, he runs back down the side of the cottage to the rear, and begins an inspection of the windows on the ground floor.

The frames are old; he can feel the rough and flaky putty with his fingertips, and the glass windowpanes move when he touches them. Concerned about slashing his wrists on a shard of broken glass, he stabs the screwdriver at the bottom of a pane. The screwdriver tip slips. His knuckles bang against cold glass. He swears under his breath.

Sweating under his clothes, which the night air quickly turns to shivers, he examines the back door. Not as sturdy as the one at the front, and there is a gap at the base. With all his strength, he forces the screwdriver blade against the edge nearest the Yale lock. Wood splinters on the fourth attempt and the blade sinks until it meets stone with a grind. With all his might he leans against the screwdriver handle until it digs into the palm of one hand. 'Open, you fuck,' he swears, panting with frustration. The blade bends and then snaps out of his hand. 'Shit,' he cries out, immediately clutching his chin. His fingers come away from his face wet. The end of the blade has nicked his chin.

Angry at his uselessness, he begins to kick the kitchen door, sole first, again and again. Until something snaps inside the lock. The door swings inward and crashes against a wall in the dark interior. Instinctively he jumps back, and then scrabbles on the grass to find the knife he's dropped there.

Nothing stirs in the unlit house. No one comes out. Silence returns to the hidden place.

Breathing hard from his efforts and nerves, he reaches inside his jacket and removes the penlight torch. The thin beam of light is immediately swallowed up in the darkened doorway. Moved to the sides of the frame, it begins to shine against the edges of wooden cupboards and corners. Approaching the threshold, he makes ready to step inside, but stops.

Quickly, he pulls his scarf up high, over his nose and mouth, coughs, and then blows through his nose to clear his throat and sinuses. Something has gone bad in there. Thick like the stench from a pig farm he once canoed through while exploring the canals in the green belt of Birmingham, a miasma wafts from the doorway: offal tinged, sawdust-fresh, and incongruously mixed with a spice that has a church smell — like incense. He is reminded of butcher's shops, of old tombs with unreadable inscriptions, and of wet dustbin bags in disused allotments, left for too long with meat scraps inside them.

Feeling nauseous, taking shallow breaths, Dante creeps inside, slowly, with the feeble light from his torch illuminating the places his feet tread. Wiping sweat from off his eyebrows and feeling the sting from the cut on his chin, he stands inside the kitchen. 'Jesus,' he mutters. He is reminded of the paper round he used to plod through before he went to school, when he nosed around the inside of a derelict flat in a tower block. Cupboard doors hang open, crockery has been smashed across the tiled floor, black-spore fungus clouds what was once white paintwork. And a smell hangs in the air as if he is about to trip over something recently dead.

Through the kitchen, he walks to the hallway, and watches the house in Arthur's story open around him under thin strobes of torchlight. Things have not changed, unless they have worsened. Dark paper, the colour of a pope's robes on a faded painting, coats the walls, emitting a velvety sheen under his thin beam. Clouds of damp and the wet fustiness of neglect soak uncarpeted floors and stained ceilings. In what must have once been a dining room, curtains the colour of heavy grapes left too long on the vine hang over the window frames. Judging by the thick cobwebs along the metal rails, they have not been opened in years.

Beside the long table, which is covered with cardboard boxes, wet to the touch and brimming with paper, folders and books, there is a clutter of dark furniture. Backing out of the dining room, he inches along to one remaining door on the left side of the ground floor. He turns and shines his torch across the hallway, to light the cellar door, set beneath the staircase. At the top of the frame, he can see a latch, to lock the door from the outside. Although the latch is pulled back, leaving the door unsecured, that is the last place he intends to go looking.

Ahead on the left of the hall, he finds the parlour, cramped and crowded with chairs, upholstered but sagging, and there is a deep couch, set low to the floor. Yellowy newspapers spill from another collection of cardboard boxes. Across the side of one box is a supermarket logo reading SOUTH AFRICAN APPLES. Another advertises bleach. Again there is no carpet, and only a wet rug beneath the legs of a cluttered coffee table. The floorboards feel sticky beneath the soles of his boots.

When he raises his eyes to scan the bookshelves, he immediately notices something odd. Above the blocked fireplace and on two other walls, he can see three paintings set in new frames. Murky-looking paintings, with indistinct subjects. He walks around the table and squints at one, shining his torch at the canvas. After a few seconds, he closes his eyes.

He knows he'll be seeing the figures in the picture again, and probably for the rest of his life. It is the work of a madman. A splash of anger from a broken mind, primitive, childlike. But whence came the inspiration? Are the dense and faintly glistening oils telling a story? A story so few know…

Something large rises out of the central shadow in the picture. An indistinct face, grinning or moving its mouth, can be seen in the very middle. And if it is a face, then the thing below its sharp jaw, cowering and made shiny with red, is its prey. It looks like a girl, stripped white, and speckled with pinhead-sprays of crimson. Pasty flaps are open on her body, into which the face of the shadow must have been recently dipping.

Catching the kitchen stench in the paint makes Dante stifle a gag. His only thought is to destroy it.

Stronger now, the smell of the paint thickens and becomes almost palpable, clinging to him like a freezing fog. As he spins away from the picture, tripping his way back to the door, a foolish urge makes him shine the torch on another painting. He likes the story this picture tells even less than the first.

Again, it is completed in an impressionistic style, but the subject is made all the worse for it, especially the look on the youth's face as he attempts to pull himself through the black water, knee-deep, that makes his escape so sluggish. There is just a suggestion of the howl of a mouth and the flash of wide eyes about the boy's head, as hope vanishes and the pursuer closes in. There are few bright colours in the frame beyond the stars, the red of the boy's coat, and the white of the water's surface under moonlight, disturbed into froth. The shadow that sweeps behind him is defined only by the way it obscures the dim horizon in the rear of the scene. But what little definition exists hints that this figure, making so sinister a haste to catch its quarry, is too thin and too tall and too quick for any man to escape. A lunatic painted it, and it should never have been hung on a rust-coloured wall.

Clutching his knees outside in the hall, his lungs filling with the poisonous air that seeps through the wool of his scarf, he looks at the stairs, going cold, colder than he's ever been, or wanted to be, or could be again. No man can suffer much more of this. Empty inside, the wear of it all blunting his edges, he staggers to the stairs and begins to climb.

Darkness, unrelenting and impenetrable, presses against him. His stomach sick through, he turns his torch beam upward and calls out for Tom. It is like striking a waterproof match at the bottom of the deepest sea. But this world without light comes alive around him — seething and jostling, as if every molecule is animate with unnatural energy, threatening to douse him and his feeble light at any moment. Seeing no further than a few feet in either direction, he opens a door.

In here, her smell is strong. There is a dresser and some shelves. In the mirror of the dresser, before the cushioned stool she must sit on, he almost expects to see her face, with all its beauty and confusion and cruelty, looking back at him. Something seizes up inside his chest as he looks at the flickering glass. He turns away from it and swallows. Across the floor are strewn the clothes of a missing girl. Unwashed underwear tangled around sweaters and skirts. An odd shoe, dirty with stains, lies against a broken tape recorder. The bed is sunk into the wall, its furthest edges lost in the dark walls. The impression of a resting head indents one of the pillows. By a bedside table, strewn with sheets of sky-blue writing paper and make-up, is a leather jacket. Its red lining faces outward. It is Tom's biker jacket, with 'Sister Morphine' painted carefully above one elbow in silver paint.

Dante falls to his knees and holds it in his hands. His breath comes fast and turns to condensation about his face. Desperate, he looks about the floor and knocks things over, wanting more, hoping to reassemble his friend from fragments so Tom will stand up before his eyes, smiling. But then he finds it, as his clumsy body bangs against the dresser in his desperate search. Stretched across the top of the dark chest-of-drawers, beneath the mirror and between two bowls, and now looking like some rag in an antique shop that was once thought valuable, or a poacher's quarry left in a glass jar above a bar in a public house full of dust and faded paintings of horsemen hunting in red coats. The way it lies, the shine eerily present as if each strand is still attached to the scalp, makes him think of a horse's tail, used to switch flies. But where the long silky plume of hair begins, it is still wet from the head from which it has been torn.

Staggering back, a great sob fills him. He wants to cry and be sick and sit down from the shock all at the same time. His whimpers are strange to his own ears. In the dark, they sound rough and hard, the crying of a man grown and brought down in the world like a boy before a bully. 'Tom!' he calls, at the top of his voice this time, making the violence in his voice cover the panic that wants to stutter from his throat, from deep down where all the screams and the prayers are ready.

He runs from the room and the thin white beam shoots out from his torch and strikes walls that may have faces in them, and it flashes over doors that appear open, and then cornices from another age, and empty light sockets, rotten skirting boards, until finally it shines across the last flight of stairs he knows he must climb.

And he is not alone with his madness. Nothing speaks, nothing touches him, but something moves, behind him, before him, he even walks through it and feels a chill pass over his skin and into his body, slowing him, taking his strength away, suffocating him. And then someone speaks out there, above him perhaps. Words he can't understand. Mutterings from a low voice. And noises from a child or even a small animal, scuffling about up there, crying to itself.

From the stairs, which are short and cramped, he enters the attic, and the sounds are clearer, emerging, finding a centre, ahead of him. The penlight's beam flickers a few feet ahead before being swallowed again. Every hair sticks out from his neck and scalp. And the smell is worse in here than anywhere else he's been in the cottage; it is the stench of an occupant he silently prays is not home, for if it is he is finished.

Now Dante feels ready for death, going beyond terror, beyond flight, ready to deal blows against anything that moves as he falls. 'Who's there?' he hears himself shout. Invisible spittle leaves his mouth. Ahead of him now, the cries cease. 'Who's there?' he says. 'Tom? Mate? Tom?' He says it again and again until something smashes against his nose. Grunting, he falls with the knife held out. There is a sound of splintering wood, and the whimpering begins again. It takes him a moment to realise, as he heaves at the knife, stuck fast, that it is a wall he's just walked straight into, while holding the blade before him.

Something white skitters sideways across the floor, grazing the torch beam that flashes about in his free hand. Dante tugs the bent knife free, and then lets his ears follow the noises of the scrabbling thing until they settle in a corner of the attic, where the roof slopes down and vibrates with the sounds of someone panting.

Somehow he knows the eyes of this man creature that cowers in the dark are closed, because it expects the worst, and has done day after day in this terrible place. Maybe the light has gone out behind the closed eyes too. Maybe the mind is ready to close also, and the body is about to subside, to offer itself to the intruder. There is fear in the attic, not an enemy. 'Tom,' he says, in a voice thick with phlegm.

He flashes the torch at the corner where he knows the creature is huddled and now waits for its end. There it is: a bundle of pink sticks, gnarled and grey-headed, shrunken on the bare boards, unclean, tethered to a rope that cuts into its leg.

'Eliot,' Dante says to the ruin, the wretch.

Both hands are clutched across eyes that would consider blindness a mercy. The pale body, scarred in places, shivers. A shrivelled penis dangles between pointy hips. Messy grey hair hangs over the cage of hands on face, and through the middle and index fingers is the glint of an eye. 'Eliot,' Dante says, his voice no more than a rasp. Wide eyes retreat from the torch beam into a squint, burned by light. 'It's me, Dante,' he says, approaching the figure.

It is the man who betrayed him and Tom. Watched carefully by Eliot, he unzips his jacket and then offers it to the wretch on the piss stained planks. 'Put it on. Get up,' he says, surprised at the strength of his voice in the dark room. The battered jacket is taken by a frail hand and pulled around a red neck. 'Get up, damn you,' he says, sawing the leash from Eliot's ankle with the bottom of the knife blade, where it is still straight. 'My friend, Tom?' he asks, without faith, already knowing the answer.

Eliot's eyes dip. His body begins to shake, and he tries to sit down again from the crouch he's risen to.

'No,' Dante says, gripping him under the arm. 'Let's go,' he tells his hero, and drags him through the dark and then down the stairs.

Clinging to his arm like an old woman he once helped outside a shopping centre, Eliot shivers, his thin legs absurd beneath the leather jacket. 'You've done this,' Dante says, shaking. 'You brought this here.' His voice starts to tremble. 'You killed my friend.'