Banquet for the Damned

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

When Dante's eyes open, something lies beside him in bed. His desperate need to flinch and turn away is denied. A numbing paralysis weighs him to the mattress, damp beneath his skin. It is the extreme attack of pins and needles again, shutting everything down except for his shallow breaths and faltering heartbeat.

His eyes flick left, right, up, down. He can see the pale ceiling of his room and the simple light shade corralling a bulb he wishes were on. The bare walls appear distant and barely reflect the faint traces of yellow streetlight creeping through a tiny parting in his curtains. An attempt to clench a fist fails; it is no longer there. The hand seems to have vanished from his tingling wrist, like a blind man who has groped off the end of a pier.

Beside him in bed, a head turns on the pillow. Droplets of sweat freeze against his scalp. The pillow dips beside his right ear. There is a faint exhalation and then silence. Something rests against his cheek. A head. He can feel the outline of a large face, a flat forehead, with eye sockets and no nose beneath — just the edges of something dry and sharp.

A petrified cry escapes from his throat. Panic slaps around his skull, like a dizzy child crazed with terror in a burning house. The bedfellow stirs and the movement of its limbs creates a rustle beneath the sheets — black snakes in long grass. Suddenly, it sits up. Dante's eyes flick to the right — a frightened rabbit, trapped in a tunnel beneath a large shadow, expecting the end.

Upon narrow shoulders, an indistinct face opens its mouth and utters a rasp of delight. Something long and thin reaches across his body. Hard fingers grasp his arms and hold them tight against his body. Then the shadow rises and moves across his vision before it settles down, spider-like, covering the bed. Dante closes his eyes and stops breathing. Like a sack of sticks, he hears its creaks and rustles. Outside his clamped eyelids, a face lowers itself. The embrace becomes a crush.

Dante's naked body hits the rough texture of the carpet beside his bed and he wakes with a scream. Moments later, the door blows in and the overhead light is swatted on. Tom stands by the bed, panting, dressed in just his shorts, his hair tousled and his eyes wide with shock. 'Jesus Christ! I thought you were being murdered!' Tom slumps against the wall and tries to catch his breath.

They stare at each other — Dante pallid, his face stricken, Tom about to speak, but in shock. They stay silent. Gradually, the horror of Dante's bruised and lacerated body is comprehended by Tom. He raises his eyes and pleads with Dante for an explanation. Dante begins to sob and covers his face. 'Tried to kill me,' he gasps. 'The window. Must have come in through the window.' He stares at the locked window. The curtains are still.

'Dante, look at you.' Tom's voice is unsteady with emotion. 'You're all cut.'

Rising to his feet, Dante looks about the pastel-shaded walls of his room. He touches the furniture. Everything is solid, real, in its place, and he is alive. He wipes tears from his eyes. Twisting around, he checks the bed. Slapping his hands down on the crumpled bed linen and mattress confirms the departure of the uninvited companion. Dropping to his knees, he peers beneath the bed, half expecting something to reach out and grasp his head with long fingers.

Nothing there.

A hundred-watt bulb and the yellow of sunrise bring reason back to his mind. But his recall of whatever made him scream in sleep dims, infuriatingly. Something was beside him. But what?

Tom's hands shake; he is angry now. His tanned face whitens, his head cocks at an accusatory angle. 'Where the fuck did you go last night? I heard the War Wagon's engine. I checked your room. You went out.'

Dante sits back on the mattress, catching his breath in the early morning charm of sunlight and cool air. He glances across the broken skin on his torso. 'Jesus, look at me.'

'I want fuckin' answers, mate!' Tom shouts. 'I know what makes those marks.'

Dante closes his eyes and sighs, so thankful to be awake, so grateful to be alive, to see Tom again and hear a milk bottle swept off a neighbour's doorstep, to hear birds and the distant shutting of a car door.

'Say something,' Tom says, exasperated.

Dante reaches for his jeans. He has to get up, smoke a fag, drink some tea, shower in hot water, force the small routines of living into the sick and drunken haze he's been wading through for days. Tom moves into the room, watching his friend's poorly balanced struggles to get dressed. He stands close to Dante, his eyes warning him of a serious fracture in their relations. 'Just a smoke and a cuppa, Tom. And then I'll give you the lot. The mess that I've got us both into.' Speech is such an effort for him. His entire coating of skin now stings or aches after every movement. When he tries to walk around Tom to get to the bathroom his friend places a firm hand on Dante's shoulder and shakes his head. 'No more bullshit, Dante. I want to know what's going on with you. You're covered in fuckin' bite marks, for Christ's sake.'

Dante nods. 'Just let me wash.'

Hot water pours through every abrasion on his body and stings the tender, healing flesh. Then he increases the power of the showerhead so the blast of hot water covers the sound of him crying. Standing with his hands against the tiled wall, he sobs not just at the terrors of St Andrews but at the thought of the last five years. Every motive and aspiration as a musician germinated after reading Banquet. Every letter to Eliot was a confession. The concept album proof of an unquestioning admiration. In return, his mentor has given nightmares, sickness, a madness called Beth, and the offer of a violent death on a deserted beach.

When he finishes washing and sobbing he finds Tom waiting for him in the living room. Tom smokes a cigarette and watches Dante take the easy chair opposite the sofa. Nervous, Dante begins the confession.

Ten years of living in each other's back pockets produces frequent conflict, usually only resulting in slight confrontations. But at times something else will take over, something blood-hot, and they stop just in time, and bite back on the words at the last moment to save their bond. On this morning, however, it seems as if the very foundations of their friendship, supporting them for over a decade, are under threat. For once, Dante muses, it is because he is in the wrong.

'You kept that from me?' Tom says, incredulous, after Dante nervously recounts the fuller version of his liaisons with Beth. 'I can't believe you never told me. I've been kicking around this flat day after day, jerking off, looking after you, going insane with boredom. You know, I started to think that this whole deal in Scotland was a mistake. We don't belong here. I only kept going because of you, keeping all of my doubts to myself, because this was Dante's trip of a lifetime. He was going to meet Eliot Coldwell.'

'Tom, I know it sounds bad —'

'Damn straight it does. For Christ's sake, Dante! All this time you've been fucking about with Eliot's wife. If anyone was going to commit adultery up here I thought it would've been me, but it was you and some tart into bondage. Look at the state of yourself. You don't have a fuckin' clue! How could you do it to the guy that wrote Banquet? You've read it a hundred times and turned it into lyrics. He's an old man with a young girl, and you fuck her.'

Something hot flinches inside Dante. 'Tom, forget sex. It's not like that.'

Tom refuses to look at Dante. 'Sure.'

'Tom, I'd never met anyone like her before. Beth was like that muse I was always telling you about. I thought she was the one. Instantly. She seemed so beautiful and so weird. And it was Beth who asked us up here. The letters, the research job, the flat — she claims that everything was her idea. She read Banquet for all the same reasons I did. We seemed so alike. How could I have resisted her? I didn't know what I was getting into. Eliot manipulated the whole thing. He wanted us to get together for a reason. You have to understand how I was pulled in.'

Tom looks at the ceiling. Shakes his head in disbelief.

'Try and understand, Tom. I couldn't tell you. I had to know where we were standing. If we could pull this thing off. I didn't want to worry you with all this in the first week. I mean we're here five minutes and I get fuckin' typhoid or something and…' Dante pauses, swallows. 'There's more, Tom. It gets worse.'

'How could it get any worse?'

'Hear me out… I don't trust Eliot, let alone Beth. I don't know how to say this, but I doubt if Eliot asked me up here to assist his research.'

'What?'

'It's crazy, I know. But being his assistant was just a ruse. Something is going down that Eliot started. I don't know what. Maybe some kind of cult. And I'm their fuckin' sacrifice. It's all starting to make sense to me and I'm frightened, Tom. I'm not kidding. I want to leave St Andrews. Today.'

'You're out of your mind. She's made you paranoid. You never could handle your emotions with a girl.'

'Please, please, just listen. What about these nightmares I've been having? I thought it was because of the virus, but it's not. They're connected to Beth. The dreams are like a prelude, an introduction to something. Same with the time I met her in the court. They're offering a glimpse of someone I'm supposed to meet.'

'You're the only fuckin' nightmare,' Tom cuts in.

'Tom! You're not hearing me. Beth told me something about a third party and she acts all weird whenever she speaks about him. And I don't think this other party is a person. I mean, it's not a man.'

'What the fuck are you on?'

'It sounds crazy, I know. But I saw it last night. Or a part of it.

The thing from my dreams that I can never remember properly when I wake up. Don't you see? It's all connected. At first I thought I was seeing things, being ill and susceptible and somehow dreaming the whole thing. But now I know it wasn't. It's real. That's why she asked me out to the sands last night. And in the court. They have something, Tom. Something up here with them. They were going to give me to it.'

Tom closes his eyes and dips his sleek head between his legs. 'I've heard some bullshit in my time, Dante, but I never thought it would come out of your mouth.' He looks up. 'We came up here to get away from the crazies, remember? I don't know what the fuck that woman has done to you, but she's made an arse of you. A real arse. Do you think you can sneak off behind my back and shag some crazy bitch and then fob me off with this shit?'

Knots of frustration tighten inside Dante until they produce a burning sensation in his chest. 'Is that all you care about, Tom? All you ever care about, the allocation of female affection? That's why you're pissed off, isn't it? Because for once I got the girl, without you getting in first. Without taking over and rewarding me with your castoffs, like I should be grateful. You don't care about everything falling through. Or the fact that we've been deceived, and that I'm ill, and in trouble. You just can't stand the thought of me meeting someone first. It offends your vanity. I've never been more serious in my life and you call me crazy. I nearly died, for fuck's sake.'

Tom's face colours. 'You selfish bastard. Why did you bring me here? Because without me you'd be isolated. You might think you're some kind of radical outsider, but you're not. You're a misfit and a fuckin' dreamer. You meet some arty bitch, some brainy beauty, who gets off on being the centre of attention, who craves it, with some weird-ass psycho sex shit going on, and you think, you convince yourself, she's the one. You betray Eliot and you ditch me. You've been single for so long, your desperation is calling the shots.'

Dante knocks his mug of tea over. 'Fuck you! How can you talk of betrayal? You knew how I felt about Imogen and you just had to have her. You took her when you could have had any girl in or out of the rock scene. And then she became everything that was good for you and you still chucked her. And now you try and judge my problem by the yardstick of your fuckin' bitterness. By your inability to ever accept even a smidgen of imperfection. Your own friends, best friends, can't trust you. You fucked Punky's girl and it killed the band.'

'She was no good, and you know it,' Tom blurts out. 'I did him a favour. If it wasn't me, it would have been the next guy that made a pass. She was going to dump him anyway because of his drinking.'

'Bullshit! You know how he felt about her. That's why he was drinking. The kid always had problems, but he loved that girl and he worshipped the fuckin' ground you walked on. You just couldn't resist flexing your power. Proving that you could have any girl going. Even a mate's. Everyone knows you're beautiful. Every girl wants you, but you always have to prove it. You're poison. That's why the band has two musicians left. You fucked it up. The straw that broke the camel's back. You're fond of gazing into mirrors, mate, but the one I'm holding up reveals a little more than your fuckin' bone structure.'

'Enough,' Tom says, clenching his fists. 'Say another word and I'll break your jaw.'

Dante turns his face away. A thick clot of something cold closes his throat down.

They do not speak or even see each other for the remainder of the day. Both guitars remain silent, as if neither man can bear to touch any symbol of their companionship. The melody and rhythms are gone.

Tom stays out of the flat all day, and only returns for a brief spell in the early indigo-tinted evening, before Dante hears him leave the flat a second time, taking the Land Rover with him. He will go on a bender, that is for sure. After wandering around the town all day in a sulk, he will drink himself stupid and end up breaking a window or blarting in the street.

After laughing, humourlessly, Dante speaks aloud in the empty flat, 'We are truly pathetic. A pair of teenage girls. We ought to be ashamed,' only stopping himself when he longs for an opportunity to share the notion with Tom.

Unable to concentrate on anything in his room, Dante shuffles about the flat. Whether messing with a snack or slouching on the couch, the cuts and bruises on his body refuse to let him concentrate on anything, or relax or forget. Every time he sees Eliot's collection of books, stacked into the small wooden bookcase in the lounge, he wants to boot them all over the floor. They seem to mock him: a symbol of adolescent delusion. All he wants is to leave. There is no way he can spend another night in the flat.