Adam Nevill - Banquet for the Damned

'You are a loner, Dante. Like me,' she says, and her face attains a strange vacancy.

'Is that why Eliot wants me? Wants us to be close?'

'We want you to be with us. You wrote to us and we understood.

The unseen world in Banquet touched you. But a book is only words, a shadow. Why not give yourself to something that is real? I need you to. You must.'

'What? I mean, like a cult?' he answers, feeling uneasy, and silently praying she will laugh at his suggestion and then vigorously deny it.

'To be more than you will ever be alone. To be with someone powerful.' Her voice sounds older now; the bashful girl has gone again, with her prickly kisses and gentle hands. Her thoughts have wandered, unhooked themselves from the present and blown away to a place he doesn't understand. 'This is why you came to him,' she says. Her eyes widen with excitement. 'This is why I gave myself to him. I don't remember much about the time before him, and I don't want to. Everything is different now, Dante. I see and hear things I never did before.'

Dante stares at her, dazed. What has Eliot done to her, with his scarred hands and talk of sacrifice? Drugs maybe. Has the mescaline eater found an apprentice? 'I will help him, I want to,' he says, cautiously. 'I think I owe him. But how can I help? I'm a musician. You and Eliot keep dropping hints about this great adventure. But what is it? Where do I stand in all this? I mean, are you talking about drugs? I smoke dope, Beth, but the rest is shit. Did you try things with Eliot?'

Tilting her head on one side, she looks at the floor, and although her lips move he can hear no sound. It is as if she is hearing something whispered to her from an earpiece. Her face becomes dreamy, the green eyes distant, the body lifeless under the long coat, like a beautiful marionette left in a corner.

'Beth,' Dante asks. 'What's wrong?'

She turns to face him so quickly he flinches.

He swallows. 'Sorry, too many questions. But I need to know what it is you want from me.'

She moves her face closer, with her chin raised. And before he can ask another question, she closes the gap between their lips. Against his mouth her lips part. He can see the whites around her irises and smell her strange breath cooling on his face. He thinks of wet stones, dying summers and deserted beaches. 'You are special,' she whispers, stretching her arms out to hold his hands. One of her thighs presses against his own. 'I knew you would be special.'

Dante feels like he is floating before her face. Before anything real starts between them, it's like she is already hurting him, and it feels good. 'He will take you, and your friend,' she whispers. Are they about to kiss? Blood rushes in his ears and he fails to suppress a noisy gulp in his throat. 'You are right for him,' she murmurs.

Not thinking, he reaches an arm around her shoulders. Beneath the coat, where he expected softness to be, she feels brittle. Still, he draws her body closer until her perfume drowns him: a drowsy pine forest in her hair, a heavy draft of juniper berries on her throat. She angles her face against his cheek. Her lips brush against his skin until her mouth returns to his and smothers his breath. Cold kisses sprinkle ice particles down his back. Dante surrenders to her mouth.

Suddenly, she clutches his cheeks with her leather fingers and bites his lips. Streak lightning crackles through his head and blinds him. Sharp aftershocks of agony bring tears to his eyes, and there is a muted sound of something ripping inside his mouth as her teeth go to work.

But the pain is good. Good enough to overcome his instinct to pull away. Blood me, he wants to whisper. No longer does he think of her confounding wiles or her ability to leave every question unanswered. She's promising something decadent and painful that he suddenly craves, to take him somewhere where he can make pacts with writhing, binding things that will leave him paralysed and powerless. And yet still he will yearn for them. Toward her pallid, beautiful face he falls again, asking for the shock of her betrayals, shared with moments of her attention that will exhilarate and inspire. Laying his throat and heart open to the sweetest pain, he bites back at her mouth, knowing his desire for her is a trapdoor he wants to drop through — to feel his entire weight jolt at the end of her rope where it will dangle and wait for more.

But just as suddenly as it began, the kiss ends. Beth releases Dante's face and sits back to pant in the dark beside him, her lips smeared with blood or lipstick. He does not care. The smudged image of her face watches him, eagerly. It is as if she is now using extraordinary powers of will to restrain herself. A little whimper for more mewls from his throat and dies on his tongue. She looks insane, slovenly, a hysteric; the mouth gaping, the stare crude, the body slumped, thighs open. Torture pornography against a black surround.

Coppery blood mingles with the taste of the silvery lipstick she's smeared across his teeth. His limbs are heavy, his body drugged. Shaking his head, he fights the faint, only aware of his need for more of her. Slowly, he moves forward to engage the delicious, biting mouth again. Gentle hands spread wide across his chest and stop him. Baffled but pushing against her hands, Dante implores her for more with his eyes. But his head is like lead and lolls to the side, while one of his feet skitters uselessly through the grass as an unnatural warmth relaxes his body. Thoughts become vague until everything around him seems insubstantial, and even her face blurs in the soft focus of his dimming sight. Forcing one eyelid open, he can barely see her thick lips, crimsoned and spread wide across the dark teeth. There is only a suggestion of her face before him now and it peers into the gloom behind the bench. The private ecstasy on her face is no longer directed at him, but at something he cannot see that makes her lips move but produce no words.

'Be still,' she whispers, as both of his eyes close. She moves away from him.

'No,' he mumbles.

'Be patient.'

She leaves the bench, but Dante keeps his fingers entwined with hers. 'Wait,' he mumbles, just managing to squeeze and hold on to her hand, until her movements to free herself pull him groggily to his feet. She wraps her arms about his waist and whispers, 'Keep your eyes closed for him —' her stomach presses into his erection '— Promise me. It's for the best.'

'Promise,' he says, and Beth kisses him, once on his broken lips and then once on his forehead.

When his eyes open, he finds himself slumped on the bench, alone. Peering between eyelids sticky with sleep, he cannot see Beth. The court is silent, save for the distant sound of a car engine, idling somewhere beyond the walls. He tries to move, but his limbs have become numb, as if anaesthetised, and his neck is stiff with cramp and cold. All he wants to do is fall back into sleep. He is reminded of the occasions when he hears his alarm clock ring early in the morning and he can only find the energy to turn over in bed and shut it off. It is as if Beth's wonderful poison is warming through his blood. She has filled him with her delinquency and beauty until he is drunk with her. Beth is strong wine, sweetened in obsidian cellars. She is rich brown heroin shot through the groin. An acid moment before stainless steel where the angles of the world are tilted.

Falling in and out of sleep, he then experiences a curious inner vision, in black and white, as if it has been left behind by her presence. From above, he sees himself, pale and naked, curled up on the night sand, amongst dunes spiked with coarse grass, beneath an unnaturally bright moon. On this desolate strip of beach, a figure appears in the distance. At first its shape is indistinct, but it gains ground rapidly. Long thin arms become visible, and they are thrown into the air as it rushes forward. Flapping like a tattered flag around a crooked ivory pole, some kind of winding or swaddling linen hangs from the spindly figure. Like thin notes from a bone flute, Beth's whispers swirl about him and move the black sand on which he lies. As if on her command, he arches his back and exposes his throat to the hungry thing in rags.