Banquet for the Damned

by Adam L. G. Nevill

  When Wilkins writes of St Andrews's birth in 870 as an ecclesiastical centre, he mentions the uneasy alliance of the barbaric Pictish religion and Christianity. Wilkins guesses that the strange fusion of Christian belief and Pictish myth, occurring at this time, created a subversive undercurrent of pagan belief. But one fused with Christian superstition that fostered witchcraft. More importantly, it led to the continuation of a profane worship of the 'Brown Man'.

  Historians placed the figure as a strange amalgam of the Greek god Dionysus, the deity of Athens called Melanaigis, or the 'Black One', and Pan, the leader of satyrs. Elsewhere in Europe, the Gallic stag-god Cernunnous was cited as an influence for the 'Brown Man', while the Romans, busily building Hadrian's Wall to keep 'it' and the Picts out of England, wrote of it as Dispaster, god of the underworld. And by the time the Papal Bulls were brought to the town, the Roman Catholic belief in good and evil associated the deity and the worship of it with the devil.

  Wilkins detailed the survival of the 'Brown Man' cult with a plethora of quotes from bishops and officials, defaming its dreadful rites. In the seventh and eighth centuries attempts to suppress the 'mumming' dances only succeeded in forcing the cult underground. The 'mumming' ceremonies involved the ancient ritual of dressing like the figure in order to rejoice and exult in its honour. The witches, as Wilkins referred to them, would drape themselves in the skins of cattle or the cerements of the dead and literally become wild animals. Others would dance naked, but daub themselves in darkly coloured clay. The feverish dances and ecstatic worship would become orgiastic, in the hope that a union with the god could be achieved. At the Sabbaths, it was believed every conceivable perversion was performed, including cannibalism. Sacrifice of the young was particularly popular and was always preceded by a strange backward dance. Back to back, hand in hand, the witches would skip backward and shake their heads in a frenzy until an animal madness was induced to prepare the coven for the arrival of the Brown Man.

  Wilkins's next chapter takes Hart to the Reformation and the height of the Scottish witch persecutions. In 1643, both John Kincaid of Tranent and John Balfour of Corhouse, master prickers and witch finders, were summoned to St Andrews. Their business: the celebrated interrogation and trial of one Lady Anne Muir for her 'wickedness, impietie and hyneous abominations'. In Anstruther, Dysart, Culros, St Andrews, and other regions on the Fife Coast, her name was associated with chaos, fear, and every expression of black magic. Barley and oats had rotted for successive harvests; cattle were said to have been cursed and calves were stillborn; ships were wrecked and their crews perished; people in the towns became inexplicably ill with fevers. Anne Muir and her malignant carline, or dark familiar, were believed to be responsible. In due course she was, therefore, cleansed of impurity by pain and fire.

  It seems that Anne Muir, in Wilkins's version, was a gentlewoman of great beauty, and had masqueraded as an epitome of nobility and grace. And only when her titled rivals at court began to protest against the nocturnal visitations of 'a misshapen thing in rags', was she charged with witchcraft. The investigation soon discovered a coven of 'persounes, aucht wemene and three men', all in her service and allegedly responsible for the devilry in St Andrews. Hart knows ordinarily he would find the reported hysteria and language in the text vaguely amusing, but he finds it difficult to even read parts of the story. Those passages detailing her suffering at the hands of her inquisitors are particularly distasteful.

  After an immersion with her followers in the Witch's Pool, Muir suffered an inexorable agony under the implements called the Turkas and the Bootes. Her fingernails were removed with pliers, and pins were inserted to their heads in her fingers. Soon after the Bootes were put in place on her legs, crushing and bruising them until they were deemed 'unserviceable'.

  In Wilkins's summary, it was claimed that the devil had entered her heart so deeply that even her blood was unclean and black. And yet, no confession was forthcoming, even after the Pilliwinkes were attached to her already tortured fingers. It was, however, the binding and wrenching of her head that destroyed 'her excellent beauty' and broke the resolve of Muir.

  Apparently dead from her injuries, she was partially torched and then buried in consecrated ground. Her coven were 'burnt at a steake till they be dead' and their ashes were scattered to the winds. After their demise, the Brown Man, who had been known to drag the sleeping town youths from bed by their hair, was not seen again.

  It sounds like a typical reaction from zealots, ridding themselves of guilt, confusion and fear at the expense of an innocent woman. An example of the town's puritanical malice. But the information is frighteningly coincidental and matches his night-terror research at a fundamental level. What's more, Eliot wanted him to see the material. And Ben Carter killed himself as a result of studying it.

  And would it sound so implausible to him, Hart muses, if he heard about it in Africa or the Amazon? Perhaps enlightenment, technology and secularisation haven't cleared Europe of the oldest science of all – the occult.

  The appalling fate of so many witches gives him a new perspective on the town too. He finds it hard to comprehend the sheer scope of brutality and injustice occurring within a stone's throw of where he currently sits. Despite the veneer of tranquillity in present-day St Andrews, he begins to imagine a power of unrest beneath the solid rock of the town's magnificent structures and ruins. Could such stains ever be removed?

  When he nears the end of the long and detailed accounts of merciless torturers and seemingly ridiculous accusations, Hart finds a specific commentary on the Brown Man of St Andrews:

  It seems almost certain that the witch, Anne Muir, was in possession of a familiar. From a covenant with the devil, she owned or was owned by a spectre. The worryings, molestations and nocturnal hauntings were thus made by her Brown Man in the town of S Andrews. Cloaked in invisibility and projected through sleep, it inflicted severe and sometimes mortal wounds upon its victims. There are suggestions that the spectre grew in corporeality, clothed in the fear and blood of the poor wretches visited. Similarities can be drawn with the terrible black dwarf, called Filius Artus, the familiar of Lady Alice Kyteler of Kilkenny, and the black thing called Grimoald, that accompanied Cromwell after his initiation with the rabbi, Menasses Ben Israel, in Amsterdam.

  Anne Muir's Brown Man allegedly resembled the satyr: terribly emaciated and thin-legged with a coif or cowl for its scant raiment. It was said to have accompanied Muir to every social function. At the Bishop's Palace after the estates had met in Parliament Hall, certain guests (among them Mary Campbell – who we can only assume was gifted with the second sight) were filled with a suffocating anxiety and unease upon Anne Muir's entrance. Mary Campbell's faint, and the unnatural epilepsies of two serving girls, were believed to have resulted from a sighting of the Brown Man in all his glory, at Muir's side. It was said to have assisted in the churchyard-Sabbaths and was even noted to sit behind her in church service, its smile matching hers, as they mocked Christ the Saviour and the sanctity of the church by their very presence. In the street at night, it was seen behind her, and there were several sightings of its abominable face at the windows of Muir's residence. Even King James VI of Scotland, in his famous Daemonologie has written: 'To some of the baser sort of them he obliges himself to appear at their calling upon him . . . which he shows unto them either in likeness of . . . an ape, or such-like other beast.'

  It is quite possible that the Brown Man is also connected to King Arcan, as described in the anonymously authored, and frightfully illustrated, An Elizabethan Devil-Worshipper's Prayer Book. Arcan, drawn from life, was pitch-black and long-toothed.

  But even that is not as upsetting to Hart as the final passage detailing Anna's Muir's trial. It seemed that Muir was defiant to the point of death. When he reads of her final cries, in the cathedral where she was tried, he goes dizzy. She cursed the town as she was led to torture. Her work had been postponed, but her last words promised that the Dies Irae – The Day of Wrath
– would still destroy S Andrews.

  After Hart closes Wilkins's Geography of the Black Arts, he sits for a long while, unable to move. The profoundest fear he can remember seems to pull his shrivelled balls up inside his body. It is difficult to even see straight. Hazy but irrepressible images of something thin and brown prance through his imagination.

  'Still here?' Rhodes says, breaking Hart's trance. 'Nearly two. We close the archive soon, you know. We'll be open later this evening, and again tomorrow. But I'm afraid I'll have to turf you out now.'

  Hart turns his ashen face to the old librarian.

  'Was it of any interest?' Rhodes asks, looking concerned.

  'A real page-turner,' Hart rasps.

  Rhodes sniffs and nods toward the book. 'Grisly stuff, aye?'

  'Yeah. I can't thank you enough, Mr Hodgson.'

  'Quite all right,' he says, distractedly, and begins rummaging along the top shelves of the reading room. Hart says goodbye to the elderly librarian and then makes his way back up the stairs to the ground floor. If Eliot sent Hart to the library to find the truth, then the town faces the biggest threat yet in its long existence.

  Unable to face the door to his indefensible flat right away, Hart goes looking for a drink. After a morning of revelation in the library, he needs to be among the ordinary people who walk the streets. He needs to breathe the cool air of the everyday world and buy whisky.

  Choosing a pub at the end of Market Street, he orders a beer and a double Scotch chaser and disappears into a quiet corner.

  What is he to make of the information? Perhaps Eliot's obsession provides the only answer. The man may have eaten too many rotten mushrooms and sunk his mind into too many occult histories to be sane. Did he sway the students' minds into believing they experienced visitations from the Brown Man? Maybe he used hallucinogens on his paranormal group, and everybody was suffering from psychotic delusions. But what about Beth? Can there be a coven? Something Eliot started and maybe lost control of? Through hypnotism, maybe Beth believes she is Anne Muir.

  But Hart has a hard time trying to convince himself and ultimately fails. Eliot's passing beyond sanity, and his move outside the boundaries of taste and common sense, as with so many shamans Hart has studied, may have led to a connection with something even older than the town. He just doesn't know enough about Eliot. His Banquet for the Damned was a defiant cry against too great a dependence on empirical thought, and Christianity's increasing departure from practical spirituality. It was dismissed as some half-assed Hindu phenomenology about seeing a meaning in everything, about raising your consciousness to a level where a man could see new truths. A novel, but quickly repudiated attack on the passivity that eroded the true scope of a person's inner life. And Eliot belongs to a school of thought that believes a certain proportion of the population, when properly trained, can harness what amount to psychic abilities. That must have been the purpose of his group. If Wilkins is to be believed, Scotland would have been perfect for a scholar of second sight. But to practise black magic? Mike mentioned something about Eliot communing with the dead, and Kerry said his group went underground. Isn't that how it always starts? When the world loses faith, because you can't produce results, crude and often disastrous short cuts are pursued. So many shamans basically do the same thing in a misguided attempt to regain favour with their tribes. Eventually, they unwittingly give life to something unholy.

  Hart begins to wonder if he can risk digging any deeper. He buys another Scotch. He thinks back to the phone messages and the girl across the street with the white face. Whoever has taken a sudden interest in him, if indeed it is Beth, knows where he lives.

  For the rest of the afternoon, he only feels comfortable in the society of others. The rain continues to fall on the town, and only the excitability amongst the students, who arrive by the hour in a steady trickle, alleviates his gloom. He feels peculiarly sensitive to the cold, and finds it hard to keep his concentration on anything. Lack of sleep is catching up on him, but he still wants to delay going home.

  After eating his first hot meal in St Andrews at a Chinese restaurant, he finally walks back to his flat at nine in the evening. One or two cars move up and down Market Street, but the weather keeps most people inside.

  Outside his street-level door, he pauses. Could someone be in there, right now, waiting for him in the dark? Hart unbags the whisky bottle he bought from the supermarket before it shut, and creeps up the stairs. If anyone moves inside, he'll use the heavy bottom end of the bottle to bust their head.

  But nothing comes at him when he climbs the stairs, nor when he opens the door and quickly slaps the lights on. He creeps from the lounge to the bedroom to the bathroom, trying to swallow his heart that beats against his Adam's apple. Cupboards and drawers are opened; the bed and couch are looked under. Nothing has been touched since he left that morning.

  Hart stows the groceries away and then slides the heavy wooden couch against the door to barricade himself in for the night. If they try to burn him out, he'll leap from the window like Arthur Brown with a singed beard. Chuckling to himself, Hart secures the flat and congratulates himself for not running out on the most daring and insane experience of his life.

  But the moment he's finished, the phone rings.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Silence on the line. Every molecule in Hart's body stops moving.

  'Who is it?'

  No answer. He strains his ears. In the distance, from the other end of the connection, he hears a car pass and what sounds like a door slamming shut. The call is coming from a public phone box. 'Come on, speak to me,' he says, hoping to sound friendly, but the strength is gone from his voice. The phone clicks down at the other end.

  Pawing his beard, Hart lets the phone receiver go loose in his other hand. He becomes conscious of the silence in the flat. No cars pass in the street below. He wants to hear at least one. There are no gurgles from pipes or drip drop, drip drops from taps in the bathroom. Checking his watch, he sees it is ten after nine. He thinks back to the pale-faced creature he saw outside yesterday. He rushes to the lounge window. Through the curtains he sees the street is empty. But as he looks out at the town, he starts to feel strange. A curious discomfort. One that grows until it overwhelms him, taking control of his movements, emotions and thoughts.

  Dizzy, he feels as if his body weighs nothing. He sits down, like he's just stood up too fast with no blood in his brain. Then his temperature plummets, all over and down and into his boots. His scalp prickles. A feeling of acute nausea rises up the back of his neck and makes the top of his skull icy. You can feel them, he thinks.

  It is a struggle to get his breath. He stands up and tries to move about, half-blind, through the lounge. The only thing he concentrates on is breathing fast enough to keep up with his heartbeat. Maybe closing his eyes will relieve the attack, or the spasm, or whatever it is. But the moment his eyelids shut, concealing the room from his eyes, he is afflicted with an unexpected vision.

  Like an unwanted slide, slotted into a projector in error, he sees a woman in a dark room, its heavy wooden door shut behind her. She is bent over a deep crib fringed with lace. Dark drapes are pulled over the greater part of the cradle. She wears a bodice and long skirts, but he cannot see her face. Laces criss-cross up the front of her chest to her slender neck, where a spray of fine red dots speckle the marble of her throat. 'No,' Hart says aloud, and opens his eyes. Did he hear the sounds of breaking gristle and the slide and crunch of teeth on the thin bones of a child?

  'Jesus,' Hart says, and leaps away from where he's been standing as if that part of the floor is responsible for the imagining. But on they come, the quick flashes of things he has never seen before and would never have imagined independently. Shaking his head, he tries in vain to remove the canopy of dark sky, heavy with rain, that now stretches through his mind. Beneath it stands a triangular pyre of kindling, some of it green and fresh and wet, through which thick plumes of black smoke try to grow from red innar
ds of fire. Tied to a roughly hewn post of wood is what resembles a doll in white rags, dirty with smoke. Then he sees its face, wet with tears, blackened and crimson like bacon. And he sees its head, hairless and partially bound in strips of linen.

  Hart falls down.

  Across a white beach, where the sand looks like salt and the sea like oil, comes a figure fast. Low to the ground, moving at such a rate that speed and distance are impossible to judge. Agile as a monkey, it kicks up puffs of sand and comes at him, driven by a motive he takes for hunger. The vision passes.

  Hart scrambles to his knees and then his feet. He whimpers and uses his hands to snatch at things for support, a sofa leg, the top of the coffee table. A glass hits the rug and bounces onto the wooden floorboards. Something smashes but it isn't the glass. Turning toward the sound, he sees the lens on the wall clock is broken. A long crack runs through the glass and then divides at the top of the case. Hart seizes his jacket and runs to the door of the flat. He heaves the couch away and descends the stairs three at a time.