Adam Nevill - Banquet for the Damned

As it comes into the kitchen, Hart's struggling body bangs against Dante and sends him sprawling against the sink. The risk of falling down snaps him alert and he regains his balance by seizing the cold metal of the draining board. As he stands up and swings his torch around to light Hart's progress, he sees that the American's entrance to the house is complete, and his introduction to the cottage sufficient. Down beside the dripping table, something yellow and runny drops through Hart's beard and splashes onto the floor tiles, adding a new scent to the putrescence already evident in the kitchen.

When he finishes puking, Hart turns and rushes noisily back to the kitchen door. Dante moves in his way and holds Hart's shoulders, his grip useless while he still clutches the torch and axe. 'Let me through, Goddammit,' Hart says, his voice low.

Dante clears his throat of a lump. 'No.'

Hart renews his efforts to escape, and pushes Dante hard against the back door so it slams shut, sealing them inside the kitchen. They wrestle in the dark, their feet skittering on the tiles where they are dry, and occasionally sliding where they are moist. Coughing, Dante turns his head to the side to avoid the gusts of vomit-breath that gush through Hart's beard.

'I gotta get out,' Hart says, panting from exertion, his strength peaking through his panic. Then he gets one hand under Dante's chin, pushing hard so his head cracks against the door behind. But the pain from the blow refreshes Dante. He drops the torch and axe, which clatter on the floor, and then knocks Hart's arms away from around his neck and face. 'Cut it out. Hart, ease off. Just stop, you fuck —' he says through gritted teeth. But Hart continues to fight to get back through the door. With what mobility he can summon with one arm, Dante strikes out at his shadowy opponent. His fist stops short of his arm lengthening, but connects with a crispy beard, and he hears a muffled grunt across the narrow space between them. Then Hart's glasses hit the floor with a tinny clatter.

Suddenly, the struggle stops. All they can hear is their own breathing, hard and trembling with emotion. 'Sorry,' Dante whispers. 'We have to…' he tries to say, but never has the air to finish. Hart falls against him, clutching handfuls of his leather jacket and sniffing into the lapels. Dante seizes the back of Hart's matted head and wants to cry to relieve the pressure inside him, the terrifying tension from seeing what has been done to Arthur Spencer, and so many others too. This is Tom; so quickly he has the realisation. So recently, Tom found the same end in this stinking cottage where foulness is worshipped and fed with innocence. 'Burn it. We got to burn it. We got to kill it,' is all he can say, quickly and repeatedly to his friend. Hart raises his head slowly, but it is too dark in the kitchen to see his face.

'Get the fuel,' the American whispers.

Behind him, as he fumbles to reopen the door, Hart shoves the table aside, no longer worried by the noise he makes by scraping the thick wooden legs across the old floor tiles. Outside, Dante greedily sucks at the fresh air and then rearranges his scarf over his mouth. He drags the cardboard boxes, which make a glassy jingle as they are moved, inside the kitchen. We're still thinking too much, he says to himself as he does this. We need to just stop thinking and do this. If we don't, we'll die out here. God, we could die out here.

As soon as the boxes are on the floor of the kitchen, Hart's small hands are busy inside them. The shock of seeing Arthur and the emotion of the fight seem to have given the American a new and decisive approach to his work. Using the torch by holding it between his teeth, he recovers his glasses from the floor and now pulls the rags from the top of some bottles. Staggering about backward, without a pause, Hart then splashes the fuel across the table and the thing upon it, over the kitchen surfaces, up and against the cabinets, down his own clothes, and across the floor, so the petrol runs across the uneven tiles like olive oil in red wine.

'Careful,' Dante says, gripping his axe in one hand, while lighting Hart's clumsy progress with his torch in the other. 'We should light this room last. On our way out. We could get trapped.' He is unsure if Hart hears him, or even if he does, whether he's taking any notice of the precautions they must take with so much fuel now sloshing around beneath their feet and evaporating into the already close air. He is about to repeat the warning when he hears something that stops him. Hart carries on wetting the kitchen, but Dante angles his head toward the inner reaches of the house, beyond the kitchen door. There it is again. A voice. No, more than one. Voices. 'Hart,' he whispers. 'Hart, stop!' he says in a desperate, hissy voice.

'Nearly there,' Hart says.

'Hart…'

But Hart only stops, and takes a step back from the kitchen door, when he hears it too. Far away, outside of the cottage or inside it, for they cannot be sure of the direction of the voices, or the distance from which they issue, they hear what sounds like an approaching crowd. Not a chorus, but a clamour of whispers and far-off shouts, coming closer. No individual words can be deciphered in the growing but still distant babble, so they stand in the kitchen, looking about them, at the dirty ceiling and the stained walls, dizzy from the suffocating reek of petrol, not moving or speaking, each straining his ears to get a fix on the sound.

Until something strikes the kitchen door with incredible force. The crash of a charging weight on wood fills the kitchen to the foundations. Dante gasps, and Hart drops to a crouch. 'It's here,' Hart says, his voice louder, but somehow empty of the strength required for shouting.

A tremor begins inside the kitchen, shaking the glass in the cabinets and rattling the loose cutlery on the table. The walls vibrate in the dark, and the light from their torches flickers against anything it touches. A sudden drop in temperature follows. 'Jesus, the cold,' Hart whispers. 'It's so cold.'

Too frightened to move, Dante feels his eyes well up with water and his mouth freeze into a grimace he cannot relax. Fumbling in his pocket, he pulls his Zippo free and is ready to end it all right then, to save himself from what he remembers in the painting, and that which swooped and seized his body on the beach. He cannot see it again and survive. It is too much. What are they even doing here? Everything suddenly falls apart inside him: his resolve, his reason, his sense of himself. He begins to fidget on the spot, his movements fast and animal, as instinct takes over. Hart's face is wild in the torchlight and his small arms are moving the crowbar in small circles out in front of him. 'Now, Dante. They're here now!'

Again a tremendous force strikes the door. Both torches flash across the wood. It shakes in its frame and then swings wide open and crashes against the kitchen wall. Hart shrieks, and Dante immediately feels himself afloat in the chaos that rushes through the door and into the room with them.

Around his face, up near the ceiling, across the walls, things are swirling and screaming through the torchlight. Hart clutches himself and shrinks further into the ground. Shadows leap upward from the floor in long and thin shapes. Here he sees an arm, there a long fingered hand, and over there by the table is the sound of many feet coming at him in haste. And with these footsteps comes a cold wind that ruffles his hair and makes him squint, as if he is walking face first into a snow blizzard. It pushes him back a few steps, until he is trapped against the sink. And there he waits for a blow to fall, for the end to come at him, to stop his heart with fright, or for a face to tear at his throat from the dark.

But at the point where he can run no more, or flinch, or beg, he flings the axe up above his head and runs at the bellowing, hammering, scratching things all over the walls. Three times he swings the axe. Glass breaks. Wood splinters. Refuse is swept up and into the angry air.