Banquet for the Damned

by Adam L. G. Nevill

  'What exactly will I be researching?'

  Eliot looks away and mumbles something he doesn't hear.

  'Pardon?' Dante asks.

  'She'll show you. Beth has all the answers,' Eliot replies, with a hint of bitterness, perhaps, but Dante can't be sure.

  'The Orientation you mentioned. What is it? Do we bring wine?'

  Eliot totters on the spot, utterly self-absorbed again, leaving Dante to suspect his questions are distracting the man from an important train of thought. Already, he is annoying his idol.

  'No,' Eliot eventually says, with a dismissive sigh. 'It's nothing more than a gaggle of faculty members and staff in Younger Hall. You will find it in the Quad, where the guests will be discussing the coming academic year. Which they all look forward to. You will see a few fools, I warrant.'

  'Right,' Dante says, feeling the first signs of fatigue in Eliot's company, manifesting as a crease of pain behind his eyes.

  'It is important we form a certain understanding, Dante.'

  'About the work?'

  Eliot nods. 'I'm tied up most of the day with the new book and what have you and, although I am not insensitive to your need for information, I must beg a small favour.'

  'Sure.'

  'For the moment I would like you to become familiar with Beth. She knows how things stand. But you must not come to the school unless I call you, and I am afraid my home must remain strictly private.' He looks at Dante, but can't meet his eye for long. 'You know what it's like. It must be the same with your music. A man needs solitude to contemplate. His own space. I do not, I cannot, tolerate disturbances from anyone.'

  'Of course. I wouldn't dream of interrupting your work. I have the luxury of time, and there's the reading list. Just give me a shout when you're ready.'

  Eliot smiles with relief. Feeling deflated, Dante presumes Eliot is wary about the hell-raising reputation of rock musicians. St Andrews is a conservative place; he makes a mental note to keep an eye on Tom.

  'Can I ask you a frank question, Dante?'

  'Yeah.'

  Now Eliot is agitated and speaks more quickly. 'What are your thoughts on sacrifice?'

  He thinks about the question. It confuses him. 'In what context?'

  'Let's say, to rid yourself of sentimentality to explore . . . No, to satisfy. Yes, to satisfy an extreme appetite.'

  'Well, in a way I have already experienced that. I put my music before anything.'

  'So you are saying you would give yourself to a higher purpose?'

  'I don't know about that. I just hope our music will come to something, eventually. That it'll mean something to a lot of people. We've pretty much sacrificed everything for the band.'

  'Admirable,' Eliot says, impatient, dissatisfied. 'But I sense a reluctance.'

  'For what?'

  'Real sacrifice. What if someone stood between you and . . .' Eliot stops. He looks at Dante with what appears to be sympathy. What is he talking about? And does he feel sorry for him? Does he think him stupid and unable to understand a philosophical question? Feeling out of his depth, Dante looks at his boots.

  'I only ask because I need to understand how you will feel about me. There have been victims in my life, Dante. There are things you don't know. Some say I am responsible for the deaths of several people during my travels. Did I have the right to push companions beyond their tolerance? Is that right? Using people on the mere and improbable chance that I could find my own enlightenment?' But Eliot seems dispirited as he says this, losing his enthusiasm like a man reciting old platitudes that once served him well, but in which he no longer believes.

  Dante looks up, eager for the chance to make his hero feel good. 'I think everyone is guilty of manipulation to some degree, Eliot. And the men who died in the last chapter of Banquet wanted to be there. Before the ceremony, you warned them about what they might see after taking the drug. Surely their deaths were reactions to the hallucinogens.' Dante grins, unsure of himself. What has he just said? He doesn't want Eliot to think him callous, but can't think of anything else to say. The man confuses him, intimidates him. And all he wants is to be liked by Eliot, who now regards him: thoughtful, impressed perhaps, even grateful, or is it just pity in the old man's blue eyes?

  Eliot smiles. 'Maybe you have already excused me.'

  Whistling and suddenly more animated, as if he has arrived at an important decision, Eliot paces about near the edge of the pier. He pauses by the little tower, looks into the sky and quotes a verse of something unfamiliar to Dante, in a tone of voice that sounds like a mocking, triumphant affront to the beautiful view of St Andrews harbour. It is the same tone Eliot used back by the castle when he was disparaging Christians. But there is something in the man's voice that penetrates Dante, to stir a dark melody inside him, something disquieting but seductive:

  'Dead loves are woven in his ghastly robe;

  Bewildered wills and faiths grown old and rotten

  And deeds undared his sceptre, sword, and globe,

  Keep us, O Mary Maid,

  What time the King Ghost goes arrayed.'

  After the brief performance, Eliot places a hand, gently, on Dante's shoulder. 'These are difficult times we have. Strange times. And you've come a long way, I know. Because you knew I needed help. I thank you.' And as Eliot turns and begins the walk back to the shore, Dante stands behind him, baffled, and thinks he hears the great man say, 'Forgive me,' but he isn't sure.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Visiting Doctor of Anthropology seeks students suffering from nightmares, disturbed sleep patterns, night terrors. Completely confidential analysis. Contact Hart Miller.

  Africa's red dust has finally cleared from his eyes, nose, and thick brown beard. The sight of naked children playing in unsanitary water has disappeared too, along with the grease on his skin and the flies that were attracted to it. Milling below his window in the cooler and thinner air, cleansed by the sea, the people of St Andrews have replaced the familiar sight of African tribesmen wrapped in their damask robes, swatting at mosquitoes with lazy arcs of their peroxide palms in the sweltering sun. Smells of roasted goat, crushed ginger and his own sweat are also swept away by the tang of salty breezes and the aroma of stones bleached by the sun. And there are no crippled beggars in Fife singing for their food. Shouting mothers, laughing students and rumbling car engines have changed the soundtrack for Hart Miller. Following six months of fieldwork in Nigeria, he has spent several hours of each day gazing from the window of his flat on Market Street, watching and adjusting to the new world.

  Occasionally a passing tradesman or shopper will glance up and meet his brown eyes, small behind the round spectacles that he repeatedly pushes up his stubby nose. And only when the time approaches for his first interview with a student does he move away from the bright sunlight and rub his face in an attempt to massage some feeling back into his hairy cheeks, and into his small, bullet-shaped forehead. 'Time I started work on some professorial eyebrows,' he says, and begins wheezing and giggling to himself, while padding across the lounge on his hairy feet to reach for the bottle of whisky on the coffee table. A bottle of Laphroaig has been his first purchase in St Andrews. During the headaches and fatigue on the flight to Edinburgh, he dreamed of the Scottish spirit and its distinctive peaty taste. It was earthy. A local product with a smattering of anthropological information on the label: enough professional justification to put a spin on things. Hart tugs on the bottle, sucking the nectar through his dense facial hair. After a gasp he wipes his mouth and begins checking the living room that will double as a study during his stay in Scotland.

  Everything is set up: the couch, with an Ecuadorian throw-rug draped across it; a tape recorder positioned on the coffee table; his books, papers, and a laptop computer, amassed on the desk.

  Exhaling loudly, he checks the diver's watch on his freckly wrist and thinks of the approaching interview. Talking to an English girl about her nightmares should be routine. Pressures of late adolescence and the stresses
of a student lifestyle can create any number of recurring nightmares in a young mind. And perhaps there will be no connection between the reports his e-mail service in Nairobi was receiving from St Andrews, and what he's been studying in Africa, Asia and North America. It could be a waste of time: another one. But he has to be sure.

  When his friend, Adolpho, first sent him an e-mail from the Anthropology Department at St Andrews, two months earlier, the news had been tragic. A fourth-year student, Ben Carter, had committed an unusual suicide. The history undergraduate had burned himself to death in the car given to him by his parents on his twenty-first birthday. According to Adolpho, who knew Carter personally, the undergraduate had been sleeping poorly for months, had become increasingly withdrawn throughout his final year, and failed to show for his exams. More importantly, prior to his death, Ben Carter had become terrified of the night and the vivid terrors that came with it. And, according to rumour, he was not alone.

  With the offer of Adolpho's flat, rent-free for a month, Hart booked airline tickets immediately. Although his sponsorship grant and the publisher's advance for his book on dream culture in primitive society had nearly run dry, Adolpho's e-mail message had excited him enough to make him head for the airport the minute his work in Africa concluded. This new territory was special. Of all places, a night-terror phenomenon could be occurring in Scotland. That would cover Northern Europe and the last ground in Hart's rarely studied global puzzle.

  After spending his first two days in bed, or on the toilet, recovering from jetlag, a hangover, and a recurring bout of amoebic dysentery, he began posting his flyers at strategic locations around the town, invariably popular with students at any university: the library by necessity, the Student Union complex on Market Street, and the Union diner on North Street. And within an hour of the first poster going up, a message from a young student called Kerry Sewell had been left on his answering machine:

  'Hello, Mr Miller. I'd like to see you urgently. I'm a student here. Art History. And when I saw the flyer in the library . . . It's so odd, it's as if you knew. I really need to see you soon. About the night terror thing. The sooner the better. It is confidential, isn't it?'

  Hart had called her straight back and arranged the first interview. Now, in an attempt to relax before the girl arrives, he turns on his small portable stereo and plays American Beauty by the Grateful Dead, an album full of summer memories from his youth in Chicago. And while he nods his head to the lonesome and mellow harmonies, he continues to pull on the Laphroaig bottle and to enjoy the throat-burn and stomach-glow. But right before the first chorus of 'Friend of the Devil', the front doorbell emits a single solemn chime.

  Hart leaps up from the rug, staggers forward, bangs his shins on the corner of the coffee table and shouts, 'Shit!' Hurriedly, he wipes his mouth and runs back and forth with the bottle before he finds a place to hide it, behind a stack of tomes on the dining table. After rinsing Listerine through his cheeks and over his teeth, he then siphons it through his lips into the kitchen sink. Smoothing out the front of his red flannel shirt with the moist palms of his hands, he trots down the narrow staircase to the ground-floor reception.

  Through the glass in the top portion of the front door, he sees the profile of a tall girl. Stylish tortoiseshell sunglasses conceal her eyes. Shoulder-length hair, ice-blonde in colour, is tied at the back of her head with a black velvet band, which gives the effect of sharpening her already striking cheekbones. But her young face, that in any circumstance is arresting, seems distracted. Although she gazes down Market Street, so bright with sunlight, toward the large and modern Student Union building, it is as if she sees nothing. 'Jeez,' Hart mutters. She is nearly a foot taller than him and he can already smell money.

  When he opens the door, she turns to face him. Her tight lips part and there is a pause – a fathoming – before she says, 'Hi.'

  'Hey now,' Hart replies, nodding his head to some inner rhythm and raising both hands as if he has just met an old friend unexpectedly, and wants to do nothing more than spend time with them. 'Let me guess. I'm not what you were expecting,' he says.

  Kerry pushes her sunglasses up and into her hair. 'No.' She slinks through the doorway, blinking her pale-blue eyes quickly as she scans the walls. Sensing distress, Hart manages to sustain his characteristic warmth and endearing smile, in an attempt to put her at ease. 'Up there?' she says, and points toward the open doorway at the top of the staircase.

  'Yeah, yeah, go on up, honey.'

  With his eyes fixed on her wrap-around skirt, which is long and falls to the top of her leather boots, he follows her up the stairs to the lounge. As the stairs groan and creak beneath them, he becomes conscious of inhaling her fragrance across his copper-wire moustache. After Africa, and Guatemala before that, it is a sudden but refreshing opportunity to share time and space with all the things he enjoys about Western women: perfume, shaven legs, and painted lips. He briefly entertains an image of Kerry, naked, in his mind, but then dismisses it, feeling ashamed. After so long in the wilderness he suddenly worries about blowing his first lead with an inappropriate leer.

  'So, Kerry, you saw the flyer in the library,' he says with a chuckle when they reach the lounge. 'I've been pasting those things all over town.'

  She stays quiet. Hart loses his grin, fast. 'Sit down, honey. Umm, let me get you a drink. I haven't had time to go to the store, but I have some coffee. It was in the cupboard when I arrived. Guess I inherited it.'

  Kerry approaches the couch. 'That would be nice.'

  As he gets busy in the kitchen, he hears Kerry sit down in the lounge. When she crosses her long legs, the little whisper created by the innocent gesture runs a prickle down the nape of his neck. Shake it off, he tells himself. This ain't a date. Don't start with some Woody Allen routine. Ensconced in the kitchen, out of sight, he also looks at his hands and sees shakes. Christ, I'm an anthropologist. What if she needs a doctor?

  'Will you be taping this?' Kerry asks, and he thinks her voice sounds even more feminine with the cultured English accent. It drifts through the arched white portal, separating the lounge and kitchen. 'Sure,' he says. 'But don't worry about a thing. If it fits my study, I'd like to use it for my book. With your permission of course, and I can always change the names.' Holding two cups of black coffee that steam in his chubby paws, Hart reappears in the lounge. 'Like it black?'

  Kerry nods. Hart blushes. 'Just as well, there's no milk.' With the cups placed on the table between them, he pulls a wooden chair around to host his bulbous hips.

  'It's OK about taping me,' she says. 'I'm just a little delicate at the moment. I've not been sleeping.'

  'Go on.'

  'Well it's very strange. I . . . I think I could be losing my mind.' The skin across the thin bones of her face blanches, losing its honey coloured sheen, and after she speaks there follows a nervous and apologetic giggle before she dips her head. A long silence follows and Hart begins to fiddle with his beard. Finally, he smacks his lips, and rubs his hands down the front of his weathered combat trousers.

  'Don't be ashamed of anything, Kerry. Just feel free to let go. I got two good ears here and a lot of experience in this field. It doesn't matter how wacky you think your dreams are, I want to hear everything you can remember about them.'

  Taking careful sips from her coffee, Kerry stares across the room and beyond the far wall, her eyes unfocused, looking inward. 'Is it nightmares you study?' she says, breaking from the daze, suddenly uncomfortable with letting herself drift in front of a stranger.

  'Yes, that's a significant part of the whole deal. I'm an anthropologist and I've been studying occult beliefs in primitive or isolated societies – from what we call an ethnographic perspective. I study people and why they believe in the supernatural. Not whether magic works or not, but why some communities still maintain occult practices. This took me down the avenue of primal fears in a wide range of cultures and night terrors became a by-product of my original thesis. Something I picked up alon
g the way. It interested me and I saw my chance for original work.'

  'Tell me about the nightmares,' she says, staring right at him now.