Adam Nevill - Banquet for the Damned

'I no longer see people,' the voice says. It is slow and tired, as if the mind behind it is preoccupied with physical pain. But there is relief in the voice too, as if Eliot is glad the intrusion is not the one he's been expecting.

'It won't take a minute,' Hart says to the darkened crack in the door.

'I no longer teach here.'

'I'm not a student,' Hart replies. 'I only want a few minutes of your time. It's very important I see you now.'

'Sorry.' Eliot begins closing the door.

Hart panics. 'I'm here about the missing students.' His voice sounds thin and absurd in his own ears. There is a pause in the closing of the door. It opens a fraction wider. Half of a worn face, with an eye as wet and red as that of a beagle hound, peers out. 'Who are you?'

'Not a cop. But it won't be long before one is standing right here.'

'Who are you?' Eliot repeats, agitation entering his tone.

'Let's just say I'm a visitor from overseas who heard a few things.

Things that tie in with my chosen niche of study. I've been rooting around this town and I don't like what I found. And your name's all over it.'

Eliot regards him for a moment and then says, 'It no longer matters.'

'What?'

The scarred face weaves about, and the rheumy blue eyes blink slowly as if even that is an effort that requires concentration. Eliot then begins to look to either side of where Hart is standing, as if he is looking for collaborators, an ambush. 'Goodbye,' Eliot says, after ascertaining that Hart is alone.

'Wait. Is it a coincidence that students who signed up for your paranormal society have vanished?'

The half-seen presence of the man beyond the door suddenly takes a firmer shape. Eliot straightens up, holds the door tighter. The voice is faint. 'Let me have the last of it in peace.'

'Last of what? Or are you gonna make me take a little sleepwalk down to the surf? Turn my legs into driftwood.' Hart frightens himself at the thought of what he's just said. But it affects Eliot too. The expression on the shadowy face confronting him could wither a cornfield. The drunkenness vanishes from Eliot's voice: 'If you're as clever as you think you are, then stay away from me and keep your inquiries to yourself.'

'Because it's not safe,' Hart says, his voice softer. 'But what is it? Did you bring it here? You gotta tell me, sir. I know my field. Been to Guatemala, the Amazon Basin and Nigeria. And I'm finding the same fingerprints in St Andrews. You started something and I wanna know what. Maybe I can help.'

A long, wheezy, and cynical laugh is hardly the reaction Hart expects to spill through the door following his offer of help. It has taken both balls and no brain to even offer assistance, and now the guy is laughing at him. Anger replaces fear: 'Jesus, buddy. Don't you care about the people who have just disappeared? I ought to slap that grin off your face.'

Eliot counters his outburst with a whisper that makes Hart wish he'd never ventured into the basement. 'If you are touched, you'll wish you'd listened.' But in saying this Eliot has been forced to remember something dreadful — Hart can see that. His head drops and he shuffles his feet just to stay upright.

'You giving me a chance? Did the others get one?'

But the door closes and Hart is alone in the corridor again. He takes a step forward and hammers a fist against the door. 'I'll follow you until I know,' he shouts at the wood. There is no answer, but he hears the weight of a man slump against the other side of the door. 'I won't go. Some of your students are still in danger, if it's not too late. I won't go. Do you hear me?' There is no response. Suddenly conscious that others, upstairs in the building, may have heard the exchange, he sits on a chair near the study to calm down and to begin his third vigil of the day.

Forty minutes later, still sitting in the basement, he hears a phone ring inside Eliot's study. It rings for a long time before Eliot takes the call. Hart presses himself against the study door, his ears keen. But Eliot says nothing and Hart hears the receiver replaced. He keeps his ear to the door. There may be a footfall, but nothing more, until he hears the sound of someone sniffing. It is followed by one or two muffled words that Eliot repeats to himself, that he cannot make out, and then he hears the sound of someone — Eliot — crying. In the emptiness beyond the door, in the silence and darkness, Eliot Coldwell is weeping. But he doesn't sound like a man. He sounds like a child.

Hart steps back from the door. While he wonders whether he should knock, the door handle turns. He takes another step back. The door of the study opens and Eliot comes through backward and then starts when he sees Hart still standing in the poorly lit corridor. Gathering himself Eliot then walks past as if they have never met.

'Sir, we have to speak. Please. Do you know what's happening here? Do you intend for it to continue?' Hart follows in the slipstream of stale sweat that trails behind Eliot.

The lecturer stops and turns around, his movements slow. He looks lost and confused, his body especially thin, as if malnourished. The palms of his hands are bright red and his fingers have the appearance of being useless, and permanently cupped into his palms. 'Who are you?' he says.

'Hart Miller. An anthropologist. I study sleep disorders. If you can't speak now, come and see me, please. I'll beg if it makes a difference. On Market Street, opposite Grey Friars. Please. I'm going out of my mind with this.'

Eliot regards him for a moment, and his lips move as if repeating what Hart has just said. 'You can't know,' he then says, softly, his punished face pale in the shadows of the basement, the lines by his mouth creasing the flesh deep. 'It's not safe to know. And if you believe what you claim to, you are in danger.' Eliot turns and continues to walk to the basement staircase. Hart follows. When he places a firm hand on Eliot's shoulder, the old man flinches. Below the sound of their scraping feet and the swish of Eliot's overcoat, Hart thinks he hears the old man whimper.

'Sorry,' he says, automatically.

Eliot leans against the wall, hunched over, his eyes screwed up. When they open they are full of fear. His face twitches and he shivers, or does it just seem so in the failing light? His mind wanders, and he says something Hart does not hear. This is no great necromancer; the man is finished. He is drunk and unwashed and his memory is shot full of holes. 'Sir, you need help.'

Eliot looks at him, his eyes wide like an innocent afraid of the dark. 'They're here. After a while you can feel them.'

Hart feels his body go cold; a cloud passes over the sun in the world outside the School of Divinity. At the end of the corridor, the light that penetrates the dusty glass of the fire escape dims, snuffs out.

'Listen to me,' Eliot says, sounding as if he is trying to catch his breath, his body no more than a thin silhouette in the new darkness.

'If you follow me outside, you're finished.'

Hart swallows and takes a step back. 'How?'

'Because it's too late to undo what has started. Get out while you can.'

'I can't.'

Eliot pushes himself away from the wall. 'Then be damned,' he says, and begins to mount the stairs, every step taken in reluctance. Hart can see that. He gives it one more try. 'OK. I'll leave. You'll never see me again, I promise. I don't want to be hunted down like they were.' Eliot reacts when he says 'hunted'; one of his liver-spotted hands nudges at the wall for support. 'But,' Hart continues, 'I have to know what it is. What came through.'

Eliot breathes out, exasperated. 'Rhodes Hodgson,' he says, unable to even meet Hart's eye. 'See Rhodes Hodgson in the archive.

Ask him about the work. If you believe what he tells you, you have a name for it. Nothing else can be done.' And then Eliot is gone, around the last bend in the staircase and into the reception.