Banquet for the Damned

'Some.'

'Do you go out much? I mean, shopping and things in the day?'

'Not really.'

'Why?'

'I'm needed.'

'By Eliot?'

She moves against him. 'Sometimes.'

'Like as a nurse.'

'No.'

'Evasive creature, aren't you?'

'Maybe you would run away if I told you everything.'

'Try me.'

But Beth laughs: at him, he thinks. He removes his eyes from the girl it hurts to look at. It's the only way to keep his head straight.

'So where do you and Eliot live? I only had the address of the school.'

Her face turns toward him. 'Out on the west side.'

'Nice out there?' Dante asks, feeling as if he is fighting with a blindfold, desperate to peek over the top and see her again, to enjoy even a moment when her eyes are upon him. But Beth stays quiet.

'Did Eliot say when he wanted to see me next?' he asks, looking down at his boots.

'No.' The sound of her voice is closer now.

'How shall I approach things with him?'

Her breath cools on the side of his face. 'Have patience, Dante.'

'I'm not knocking your boyfriend, Beth. I just want to know what's going on.'

'Don't call him that.'

'What?'

'My boyfriend,' she replies, and it seems to have been an effort just to say the word in relation to Eliot.

'Isn't he?'

'You've been listening to gossip. Idle tongues should be cut out.'

Elation at her not being romantically connected to Eliot should be rising and warming through Dante, but that comment about cutting tongues out makes him uncomfortable. Her voice went deeper too when she said it, at odds with her beauty. 'Look Beth, I don't want to pry into your private life, but —'

She cuts him off. 'Dante, will you promise me something?'

'Sure.'

'Don't pry. I don't like questions. Once, a long time ago, I was asked painful questions. Too many questions by terrible people.'

Breaking his resolve, Dante finally looks at her face and watches a change spread like a thin and soundless ice beneath her alabaster skin, now appearing dead beneath the false colours of toner. Her gloved hands grip the bench and he hears a knuckle crack. The hard seat becomes harder beneath his buttocks. Police, he thinks. Maybe she's talking about Johnny Law. She's had a crazy youth and was busted for something. That's why she turned to Eliot's book. Wasn't he roughly the same? But the emotion suddenly drains from her, rage vanishing in the time it takes to beat one lash across a panther's eye.

'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.