It is doubtful whether the couch barricade and chalk circles will serve as even a mild deterrent to something trying to gain access to him, and Hart has surely been added to the list of persons whose existence threatens Beth. Without a doubt, he's been touched too. Beth and her companions are stronger now; nightfall is probably preferable to them, but no longer necessary for their movements. Sleep has ceased to be the only medium through which they can travel, and to it a locked door is not a problem. 'You're just a mosquito,' he told Hart, before he slept as Dante kept watch that morning, with dawn breaking in a tangerine colour across the sea until its brief optimism was engulfed by cloud. 'Just a nuisance, mate. You got time before they come, I reckon. More than me, but now we're together, who can say?'
Others are now in the service of Beth and her god; a woman collected Beth from the cottage the night he found Eliot, and someone, perhaps the same lady, drove Beth to Hart's flat to ransack it. Perhaps whoever she is hasn't the strength or the psychic power of Beth, but she is another adversary all the same. But it is the epidemic that Hart fears most. With every sacrifice, the weight of energy and corporeality in the Brown Man must have grown. Vanishing students and drifters are just the beginning of something greater; Hart is convinced and Dante doesn't doubt him. If the authorities eventually begin searching for the menace, they'll look for a man, and Eliot will be easy to frame.
Perhaps it is their goal to summon the original coven back, so the town will have new rulers, with seven thousand young impressionable students ripe for an unconventional education. 'It could be the start of something really hideous,' Hart said, and took a big gulp of whisky after the revelation. 'Once the right number of sacrifices has been taken, the influence of their society will spread like a corruption. Eliot realised this too late. He tried to placate them with you and your friend. They deceived him and carried on snatching students.'
Taking the confrontation to the cottage tonight, surprise will be their only advantage. They must make their move the moment the town streets and the local roads clear of cars and witnesses. They have to torch the coven, or at the very least, maybe destroying the cottage will uproot and destabilise it, or force it into the open and serve to scatter it. There is no other course of action they can think of taking. It is too late to try and reverse what has been done through ritual, and Eliot, with his vast store of esoteric knowledge, has already failed in his attempts at both banishment and containment. It has come down to violence, an option both he and Hart feel uncomfortable with, but one that both men acknowledge, historically, as being the only method they know to have worked. At least temporarily.
Just the thought of setting fire to a building in the hope of incinerating its occupants makes Dante sick with nerves. And there seems to be only one thing in his character that he can recognise and call upon. Revenge. Avenging Tom's grotesque end, which he unwittingly facilitated, will be the only impulse enabling him to act in the desperate and murderous manner required. But will rage hold its own against the kind of terror that paralyses a man?
'What's the time?' Hart asks Dante for the third time in an hour.
'Eleven,' he answers. 'Not even lunchtime and we're nearly there.'
By means of a small rubber hose, he and Hart have begun to fill an assortment of empty whisky bottles with petrol from the gallon drums. In the top of each bottle they then stuff strips of shredded bed sheets, patterned with tiny floral prints. After exhausting Hart's supply of empty whisky bottles — ten — Dante decides on one more cocktail to be safe, and begins pouring milk from the bottle he found in Hart's fridge down the sink.
'Whoa. Dude, don't be tipping it away. Dairy produce takes the oxygen out of the rivers and reservoirs. Fish die,' Hart says, fidgeting behind Dante, having lost interest in making the Molotov cocktails.
'Unless you want to drink it, there's no other place for it.' Dante looks across at Hart's last two sloppy efforts. 'You'll have to redo those. You have to leave air at the top for the fumes to build up.'
After sighing and blowing, Hart flops down on the chair. 'It's freezing in here with the windows open.'
'Is it?' Dante asks quietly, his concentration taken up with the filling of the last bottle.
'I need a joint. You still have some gear, right?'
'Yup, and I'm gasping for a fag, but we can't risk a naked light with the fumes.' Dante glances at Hart, who now sits in the centre of a chalk circle with his hands clamped between his knees. The small bulbous American bites at his beard where it grows at the sides of his mouth, and rocks his body back and forth, gently. A familiar flush passes over Dante. Seeing Hart on edge does him no good. 'Relax, Hart. Take it easy.' Hart looks at him accusingly, as if he is appalled a man can be without compassion in such a situation. 'There'll be time enough for shitting ourselves,' Dante adds, grinning.
Hart swallows. 'I gotta take a dump,' he says, and rushes for the bathroom.
When he returns, mopping his face with a hand towel, Dante says, 'That big, huh?'
Hart wants to laugh but can't make the effort. He begins pacing instead. 'Sure this is gonna work?'
'No.'
'It's this deal with soaking the place in petrol that bothers me most. We have to get in first, right? And if we get that far, you said it was all damp in there.'
'Yup.'
'And what do we need the cocktails for? They could just bounce off… things, and leave us out in the middle of nowhere with the… you know.'
Dante sniggers. The laughter that accompanies hysteria is not far away. His giggle grows to a chuffing and then to an almost silent gasping. Crouching down, he begins wheezing.
'You gonna get me eaten, and you sit there like it's the funniest thing you ever heard,' Hart says, an undeniable smile twinkling in his eyes and crawling through his beard.
'Stop it,' Dante rasps, 'or I'll wet myself.' He wipes tears from his cheeks and from around his dark wet eyes. 'This is crazy. A bearded hippie and a hair-metal singer with the future of the town at stake. They're fucked.'
'We need to call in an air-strike from that airbase,' Hart says, nodding his head. 'Think I could talk them around?'
In his mind, Dante sees a bearded man in a flannel shirt gesticulating to an armed sentry. He starts laughing again. Hart joins him this time.
'Shit, it's good to laugh again. I don't know why I am. It's that or crying, I guess,' Dante says, between his sniffs.
'Or crawling in my bag, assuming the foetal position, and shivering a lot,' Hart chips in, and starts Dante off again.
'Yeah, your friend Adolpho would come back from Brazil and find a bearded skeleton in his bedroom.' Hart begins wheezing and swatting at the air with his hands. But then the phone rings and each man falls immediately silent. Dante straightens up. 'Should we answer it?'
'No,' Hart says, shaking his head to reinforce the instant decision.
'They like to check up on me. I get calls, but stopped answering yesterday.
So they think I've gone.'
Dante turns to face his curious ally. 'We have to do it tonight, Hart. You know that?' Hart swallows. 'You'll be fine here on your own for an hour or so?' Dante asks.
'Why? You can't leave. It's too risky.'
'Look mate, we need food. We both have to eat. No food and the smell of petrol is making me sick.' Hart looks at Dante, unconvinced. 'There are plenty of people about. It'll be cool. I'll be out and back in no time. We're all right for now.'