Adam Nevill - Banquet for the Damned

The little brass hammer on her clock smashes between the bells announcing midnight with a tinny racket. Maria flinches and spills her tea. She rushes across her room, her small and wire-thin body casting strange shadows in a chamber illumined by three strong lights: one in the ceiling, plus two desk lamps. She pushes the clock's hour hand forward until 1 a.m. and stops its clamouring. Then she returns to her chair. The clock's bell is a lookout and the changing of its noisy guard has become a familiar routine, a successful ritual to stave off sleep — because sleep wants to drift before her eyes, deep languid sleep beneath a thick duvet, so she's wrapped up and healed in a warm cocoon…

Maria's head drops across her chest and jars her neck. Snapping herself awake, she stands up, furious. Stay angry, that is the answer. Stay brittle and annoyed at the slightest thing: at every inanimate object, at food, at Chris, at anything. But don't fall asleep. Just two more days of this, the thesis will be complete, and then she can go home and sleep for a week.

It is somehow all connected to this room in New Hall and the university. Maria refuses to believe she's mad, or frigid as Chris says when baffled and hurt that she will not open her bedclothes to him, as she has done every other night since the first year: back in those halcyon days when their sweat would dampen the clean white sheets, and her hot face would nestle across the broad chest of the man two blonde girls had fought over at the KK ball. They made love everywhere: in the afternoon, late at night when tipsy and adventurous, and first thing in the morning, all sticky and basic. He had selected her; she had said no. He had pursued her indefinable airs and quick tongue, sensing something unknowable but within the classification of a suitable girl. And eventually she had succumbed to his hesitating attempts at romance, until the tall figure was her own: handsome in the classic sense and always in control. And so they had loved and then slept. Slept through heady summer afternoons, as she lay on his hard and flat stomach, when her whole body became heavy with a pleasing, satisfied fatigue.

Maria jolts awake. Leaden eyelids spring apart. A noise startles her and now it's too late. Something scrabbles on the wall outside, beneath her third-floor window. A whimper detaches from the back of her throat.

Desperately, she wants to run to the door and escape the prison cell, tinted a pastel shade, that once was her little home and now only seems to trap her in a stink of new carpet. But her skin is alive with a familiar attack of cold pinpricks: not quite pain, but a spread of numb bloodless lethargy.

After moving as far as the bed, she collapses upon it, her brain starved of oxygen and blood. Phosphorescent lights explode in her sight. Maria hauls air into her lungs and claws her fingers on the thick red duvet, before each digit switches off, one by one, until she is still, deathly still, except for the heart-beats and startled breaths inside.

The curtains are closed but she senses it out there, grinning as it hangs from the ledge like some giant bat. And the sounds of something dragging itself up a wall find their way into her room. Then she hears the voice: a low babble and incoherent mumbling of old words and… her name, 'Maria.' Just to hear it makes her want to change her name. She'll remember the rasp of its tone if anybody calls her Maria again.

If? Again?

The lights go out. There is just one click and they are all doused together. Enveloped with panic, she feels the voice again creep through her pores like winter cold, to freeze her bright spirit until it shatters, until she does not know herself amongst the vile things that chase other vile things through her imagination. Maria closes her eyes. She cannot abide it; the thought of seeing it will snap her mind like a dry twig.

Out there, in the dark room, the curtains now swish over a window she remembers locking. Who opened the window? Did it make her? And there is the thumping sound of its weight dropping to the floor after it has spilled over the sill, followed by the rustle of something moving across the floor to her bed.

She hears a hiss of excitement from somewhere near her feet. A sniff too and then the fumble of thin anxious limbs as they begin the search. Maria tries to scream, and pushes her heavy muscles to move her arms and legs, but they will not obey. She can stand no more. Her eyelids unroll. Her lips part and she sucks at the air, to suddenly pull the stench of a slit whale belly into her mouth.

Something dark smothers even the faint light that seeps beneath her door. The smell is unbearable and her stomach convulses, sending an involuntary seizure up to her mouth.

It prods the bedclothes. Then its movements quicken the moment it finds the shape of her legs beneath the duvet. Now it's pulling itself up the bed. Onto the bed. She can't bear to look and shuts her eyes. But the dark creates an anticipation the safe cannot imagine. And as she senses it rising above her, the exhalations that come are tainted with eagerness.

'This stuff is good, but not that good,' Tom says, one eye squinting through the smoke, the other closed. He has draped his slender body, stripped to a pair of cobalt-blue jeans, across the couch in their new living room. 'You used to be such good company after a smoke,' he continues, attempting to provoke Dante into becoming the early-hour companion he is accustomed to. 'A couple of toots and you would be off, man. Your mouth running like a Porsche trying to keep up with your mind. What's up?'

It is an effort to speak after the three joints they have smoked this evening, following an excellent pasta dish and fresh fruit salad with yoghurt that Tom effortlessly rustled up with a fag drooping from the corner of his mouth as he sang, his tight musculature revealed in a white vest as his arms flipped, sprinkled and stirred.

No wonder every woman fancies him, Dante muses; he can cook, as well as sing, play a guitar, light up a party. Tom never stops. Not for a second. Always talking, always making a noise. Is he the real talent? Dante thinks of his books and ideas. Are they worth a damn? He estimates he will have to live for three centuries just to get the gist of what Eliot knows. It all seems hopeless.

A small orange lands on Dante's lap and gives him a start. Anger coils in his belly, fires through an arm, and feeds the hand that returns the projectile at more than double its previous speed. Leisurely, Tom raises a hand and catches the orange. 'Feisty,' he says, and then winks at Dante. After casting a black look at Tom, Dante returns his gaze to the blank wall above the fireplace.

'You should be on top of the world. Today, you met your idol. But you have just sulked.'

Dante sighs. 'I'm not sulking. Jesus.'

Tom starts to smile. 'Sorry, man, but I don't see a problem. You said he was brilliant and charming. OK, a little intimidating too, but you still met him. Eliot Coldwell. Chewing the fat about books and shit. How many people get to do that?'

Still annoyed that he's not been entirely honest with Tom, Dante's feelings are further exasperated by the profound sense of stupidity the meeting with Eliot stirs up in him. It should have been a fairy story meeting of kindred spirits, the mentor and his disciple, but instead, if he is really honest, he returned home ridden with a sense of ignorance and a growing suggestion of unease. A pile of dusty encyclopaedic books on the floor before his chair serves as a reminder.

'I didn't tell you everything, Tom.'

Angling his head, Tom studies Dante.

'It wasn't all books and compliments.'

'I know,' Tom says. 'There was that beautiful freaky Anne Bancroft secretary.'

'It wasn't her, man. Today made me realise that it's too late. That I have missed the ferry. Spent too long in rock clubs wearing fuckin' cowboy boots. I'm just too far behind, it's like I can't catch up. In fact when the boat left the dock, I wasn't running down any pier, mate, to arrive just too late. I was still in bed, on the other side of town, fast asleep.'