Adam Nevill - Banquet for the Damned

'I can't get through to Janice,' Harry says. 'Can you pick her up on the way over?'

'Yes,' he says, vague. Harry hangs up.

The phone rings again. Arthur picks it up in a daze. It is Marcia. 'Arthur, a young man has just been in here asking for you. The same one that was harassing Janice, I think. I tried to get him to make an appointment, but he just walked straight past me.' Arthur hears the sound of heavy boots pounding down the corridor to his office. Marcia continues talking. 'What's with young people these days? Shall I call the front desk?'

There is no knock. The door is flung wide. It strikes the wall with a bang. A picture frame shakes. Arthur's skin seems to contract a full inch all over. 'It's all right, Marcia. He's here now.' Arthur replaces the receiver.

Rising from his seat, Arthur then leans against his desk, as if he needs the support. 'Dante. This really isn't a good time. I'm just off to a meeting.'

Softly, Dante closes the door behind him. But the action seems more threatening than his entrance. 'There's never a good time in this town.'

'I can see you tomorrow, but not right now.'

'No. Right now, you and I are going to talk.'

Arthur sweeps a piece of paper off his desk and tucks it into his jacket pocket. 'If it's about Eliot, it's not a matter for discussion. His dismissal is out of my hands.'

'I don't have a problem with that. Maybe you should have booted him out a long time ago. The man's a lunatic.'

Arthur looks at Dante with surprise and, slowly, slides back into his chair. He wipes his forehead and points at a seat before his desk.

Dante refuses by shaking his head. 'This won't take long. When was the last time you saw Eliot?'

Arthur eyes the cuts on Dante's face. 'Is there a problem with the research?'

'There is no bloody research. That'll put a smile on everyone's face.'

Arthur fidgets. He stops staring at Dante's broken lips and looks him in the eye. 'What makes you say that?'

'Do you think I'm incapable of reading between the lines? I've got long hair, mate, but I'm no dummy. You did your best to put me off in College Hall. Remember?'

'I was merely outlining the problems you could face.'

'Cut the crap. I want to see Eliot, and I'm not going out to that cottage alone. It's not safe to be near him.'

Arthur swallows. 'No, I wouldn't advise going. Eliot must be having a pretty tough time at the moment.'

'I don't give a monkey's. My friend has gone missing, and I know Eliot's behind it. If you don't fetch him for me, I'm going to take a walk across the road to the cop shop and get them to do it.'

Arthur raises both hands. 'You're angry. I understand.'

'What do you understand?'

'A lot more about Eliot than you.'

'Now we're talking.'

'Let me know where I can get hold of you. Do you have a phone number?'

'Don't stall. I want Eliot today.'

'Please!' Arthur shouts.

Dante flinches, surprised, finding it hard to equate the aggressive tone with Arthur. He suddenly seems unbalanced.

'Please, Dante,' he adds, in a softer voice. 'I must go immediately.

I'm not stalling you, and we will talk. I give you my word. I will be in touch. Today. I promise.'

'When?'

'This evening.'

Dante scribbles his address on Arthur's desk pad. 'If you're not here by seven, I'm coming back with the police. I have a feeling you wouldn't like that. I want the answers tonight.' Dante turns on his heel and leaves the office.

Arthur pounds across town. The storm that has blown in from the sea and raged all day passes further north, allowing the town an opportunity to dry out for a short spell: a brief respite to facilitate the student invasion. And they are desperate to fully explore their new home. He can see it in the faces that watch the sky from doorways. They have been arriving all day like a victorious army, eight-thousand strong. Car engines, noisy greetings shrieked in a variety of accents, and the occasional stereo, create a triumphant fanfare. On every curb and doorstep, young friends welcome each other back with dramatic gestures that involve the flinging of arms around each other. And before them, cyclists tear, two abreast, through the streets, weaving between the Volvos. Ordinarily, it is this motion and sound and colour that seizes his spirits and sends them soaring, but not this year. Arthur is unable to manage so much as a smile. Now, the sudden car-borne explosion of young faces and stuffed rucksacks, of rolled duvets and young blonde girls on mobile phones, fills him with dread. He watches the anxious but proud faces of parents delivering final kisses and the nervous grins of freshers, cautious in their new groups of enforced acquaintance. He can almost smell the excitement and anxiety of leaving home, rising in invisible clouds off the young first years, some of them only sixteen, who begin to line up outside the Quad to matriculate. At the top of North Street, the second, third and fourth-year students, free from Fresher halls, heave cases and boxes as they file into the Victorian houses. But is the town they flock to safe?

Arthur takes a short cut to the School of Divinity, between Salvator's Hall and Ganochy House. Administrators scuttle about with brightly coloured information packs, and bicycles are stacked in gleaming rows alongside the trim lawns. The windows of the halls have been thrown open and voices swoop down and through the courts: 'Helen, can we use hair dryers?'

'Brian, you old scratcher, when did you get back?'

'Have you got a plastic mattress in your room?'

On the Scores, the weak afternoon sunlight still manages to burnish the walls of mediaeval stone with a tinge of gold, and the wide streets seem to suck the new pilgrims up and along their gracious aisles toward the cathedral. 'We're going to the Sands,' a girl cries out from the door of her flat, beside the School of Divinity. Arthur wants to stop and tell her that she must never venture down there. It is dangerous. Someone has lost an arm and the police are clueless.

How could they know? Upon his arrival in St Andrews five years before, only Eliot sensed the unrest beneath every flagstone. It was Eliot who constantly remarked on how he could feel things, how he was able to intuit unsettling vibrations beneath his feet, and often catch the strains of distant voices from distant eras in the streets after they had been deserted by the living at night. The town was built upon land, he claimed, that seethed with unrest. Enough unrest to become power. You only had to let the imagination leap far enough to see things .

'So much has happened here, Arthur, and it doesn't sit well, down there, under all this stone. Don't you get a sense of that? Old things. Old beliefs. And you cannot burn old beliefs out of existence, and merely replace one system with another. Every revolution and reformation can be undone. And what of the lives and aspirations cut short here? Can't you sense them? The weight of injustice? Does it just disperse? Or does it linger for the careful eye to see, and the trained ear to hear? I wonder about this town, my friend. Reminds me of Salem. What's that you say? It's all in the past? It's history? History! A mere construct, my friend. Something we've created to make sense of our cruel, absurd and unco-ordinated scrabble through time. What do we actually know about our place amongst the stars? We're blind to anything beyond the material. There is power beneath these flagstones, Arthur. You mark my words.'

They laughed back then — he and Harry — laughed at the old vagabond. A grown man, back from North Africa, still full of the nonsense they all delighted in at Oxford. But today, as Arthur speeds across the gravel drive toward the School of Divinity, light on his feet for a big man, he doubts whether he will ever laugh at anything that Eliot said again.