C-5 to K-8:  Checkmate.  Wilson made a note of the score and rewarded the brains with a piece from Elgar’s Serenade for Strings.  Plugging up the following pair of suspended cerebrums, he engaged them in a game of cribbage to alleviate their otherwise tortuous existence and distract them while he scrubbed with a toothbrush at the insides of their jars, clouded with week-old solution.

The chamber housed twenty-seven brains that simmered side by side in their glass homes, connected by a web of tubing and wires that stimulated them by delivering electrical pulses through rods inserted into their frontal lobes.  The spindly fingers of needles darted across the pages of graphs, sketching out their incoherent thoughts, and an artificial heart machine pumped in the centre, its rhythmical spasms breathing life into the dark-grey organs. 

The air was dense with damp that lingered in his aging bones and Wilson moved slowly around the library of brains, soothed by the unwavering blip of the monitors and the gentle bubble of gas fluttering through the liquid to tap delicately against the lids of the jars.  A leaking pipe caused water to drip steadily from cracks in the ceiling andWilson shuffled buckets around intermittently as he sighed his way through his tasks.  The only light was artificial, bathing the room in an awkward yellow that mocked his eyes with its glare.  As he tinkered with dials, twisted knobs and calmed the cerebrums with his sedative humming, he passed some of the greatest minds of the time, and the embezzled property of theIntelligence Liberation Front.

A groundbreaking brain surgeon and experimental neurologist, Wilson Lopez had arrived at the bunker, bound and gagged, as the last hostage of the ILF.  The chamber existed in the bunker’s heart, miles beneath the ground and missing from any map.  Years before, it had been used as a place to torture the freethinking liberals and intelligent minds that were captured and subsequently made to ‘disappear’ during the Dirty War, many of whom had been colleagues of Wilson’s.  The sixty-eight-year-old was placed in the hollow arteries of its claustrophobic walls, running between the hellish heat of the boiler room and the outside of the inner chamber.  Only as wide as the average man, there was no room to stretch aching limbs and it was fitted with half-beds, half-chairs and half-lamps.  Everything Wilson did, though his options were limited, had to be done sideways, and almost always standing up on the order of his captors who prodded him like cattle if his legs buckled beneath him.  The walls were lined with contraptions - racks, ropes, pulleys and spikes - designed to extract information from the hardiest of wills; a gruesome reminder of the disturbing history of the place.  Wilson was subjected to the out-of-time rhythms of thirty-two metronomes that tick-tocked in a cavity in the ceiling, taunting him with their aggressive and insomnia-inducing beats until he screamed to expel them from his mind.  Deprived of food and sleep, his senses suffocated and alone with his thoughts, he had truly understood the torment of his fellow captives on the other side as they bobbed around in their liquid cells.

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A wide-eyed Lorenzo Chaves, with the eagerness of youth, had arrived from the countryside to the screeching lights of the city and its streets flooded with potential but, lacking in labouring skills, education or the intellectual ability or common sense to progress as an apprentice, he struggled to keep his head above its waters.  His temperament was erratic and he failed to understand the reasoning of those around him, often communicating with his fists.  Lorenzo appealed to employers but his pleas were ignored and his line was cast further across the city’s shores. Convinced that his suffering was an unavoidable misfortune, assigned to him by his maker and antagonised by others, he sat on the streets and observed the fortunate ones with great self-pity as they went about the life from which he was exiled.

Lorenzo’s experience led him to conclude that intelligence, which appeared to grant its hosts security and success, was unfairly distributed in the world and would only be righted if it were to be captured and divided equally amongst the people.  Intelligence was an enigma that he did not appreciate or fully comprehend.  In fact, what he knew of it he categorically disliked, but it was the great power and wealth it yielded that he sought after.  Over the years, he managed to rally a substantial group together on the promise of delivering intelligence and they marched through the streets demanding that they be given the right to clever thinking.  They attacked the factions that Lorenzo held in the greatest contempt - the universities, opera houses and public libraries - with petrol bombs, graffiti and other forms of violent protest.  A group with a collectively low level of intellect, the methods of achieving their aim were questionable and it began to fall apart as they came up against authority and lost their way.  Lorenzo, frustrated by his defeat, continued to blindly pursue intelligence in an unconventional manner.  As he was seemingly incapable of coming to an understanding of the true nature of intelligence, he began to doubt if it was what he wanted after all.  Furthermore, he was unsure if he would know what to do with it when it was his.  Around this time, just as he was losing himself, Lorenzo met Natalia - their eyes meeting across the banners of an Intelligent Life rally.

It did not take long for Lorenzo to abandon his liberal ideals and fall in love with Natalia, who convinced him that society was about the individual, not the collective.  A rare amber-haired beauty, Natalia Moron de Diaz came from a family of soul traders.  The business bribed, stole or paid a pittance for the good souls of the poor and homeless in need of funds and sold them on to those with dispensable wealth but wretched spirits and a fear of the afterlife.  People were able to deposit, loan, borrow and even pawn their inner selves on the black market andNatalia was particularly adept at extracting souls from people without them having even noticed, making herself the largest shareholder by the time she had reached her twenties.  However, souls were a volatile commodity, riddled with problems and after a recent increase of suicide and schizophrenia, as souls struggled to adapt to their host selves, the economy had slumped. During their courtship, Natalia, who was at once suspicious and fearful of intelligence, convinced Lorenzo that once captured, it would have to be controlled and distribution carefully monitored.  The night they sealed their nuptials, it was agreed that they would establish together a Central Bank of Intelligence, where they would manage smart assets, loan thoughts and profit from the intelligentsia. 

Requiring a third member and a man of science to bring their plan to fruition, Natalia recruited her second cousin Ramiro Velasco.  A partially qualified doctor of corruptible persuasion who attended to those of the underworld unable to visit medics above ground, Ramiro was not an ideal candidate but his secrecy would at least be guaranteed. After setting up crude tanks of saline solution and electrodes attached to car batteries, the library of bubbling intellect began to grow.  At first, the trio scoured the obituary columns of national and regional newspapers searching for recently departed intellect and brains began to disappear from hospital morgues and university laboratories where the deceased had donated their bodies to science.  Requiring an element of fortune and a degree of timing, the method was certainly flawed and did not produce the cream of wits. 

When Natalia found an article on the greatest minds of the moment, she tore it out and instructed Ramiro and Lorenzo to retrieve the listed intelligence.  They began to systematically murder and extract the brains of scientists, mathematicians, philosophers and various persons renowned for their intellectual capabilities, who mysteriously vanished from society.  Lorenzo and Ramiro had a mutual dislike of each other matched only by their love for Natalia, the balance of which created a violent and skilled duo that were successful in their toils as they competed for the favour of their queen. 

On one of the last brain-pinching excursions,Lorenzo had stayed behind in the bunker.  Ramiro staggered back into the dungeon, eyes red, skin jaundiced and with rasping breath.  Unmasked, he had broken into a laboratory belonging to a professor carrying out a study on a rare airborne bacteria.  The fatal microbes had attacked his liver and respiratory glands before burning away his flesh from the inside out. After he began convulsing, foaming at the mouth and ripping apart his skin, tearing it off in strips as his flesh crawled and smouldered, Natalia concluded that, in order to save themselves, Lorenzo must shoot Ramiro in the head.

Without a man of science or medicine, there was no project, and Wilson was specifically targeted to continue the work ofRamiro.  Snatched from his bed in the middle of the night, bound and gagged, stripped naked and beaten, he had feared for his life.  Thrown into the darkness, he endured days of physical and mental abuse at the rough hands of Lorenzo and cruel tongue ofNatalia.  When he could resist no longer, fatigued and lacking the physical strength to defend himself, he gave in to his tormentors.  Wilson set about restoring the brains that Ramiro had butchered to a semi-functioning capacity and improving their conditions.  Wilson’s passion for science and desire to protect the intelligent beings from the barbarity of his captors spurred him on and he continued to cultivate and stimulate the brains.  At the height of their development, they were able to perform tasks of logic and basic equations, even play chess, but their thoughts at large remained incoherent and incommunicable.  The problem lay in that the brains, without a body to process the information, existed as raw intelligence, which was of no commercial value to Natalia and Lorenzo.  Lacking in self-awareness, human interaction, emotion or context, the readings produced a steady stream of incomprehensible data.  For the brains to function in any real capacity, they would require a mediator.  In essence: to be human again. 

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Many months after his capture and already a shadow of his former self, Wilson was obedient to his masters and carried out his duty as caretaker of the brains with diligence.  Frustrated with the inertia of their captive brains and banished underground while the authorities searched for the missing intellectuals, Lorenzo and Natalia had begun to understand what they would need to do in order to utilise the intelligence and ordered Wilson to create a super-brain of the greatest intellect made from a patchwork of all the brains in their possession, taking the most acutely intelligent parts from each.  Wilson dissected the frontal lobes into slivers and cultivated neurons which, over time, fused the fragments together to form a sizeable portion of monster cerebrum ready for transplant, and in need of a host.

Wilson broke down the science into layman’s terms and explained that the super-brain, in its fragility, would not survive multiple transplants and that it was a once-only operation to transfer the intelligence.  He warned of the side effects and urged them to rethink such drastic surgery, but assured them that he was capable of carrying out the procedure if they decided to take up the opportunity of power and success.  On the advice of Wilson, Natalia urged Lorenzo to undergo the operation which, given her fear of intelligence, had been her thoughts also. Once the image of Lorenzo as the supreme, all-powerful leader of the masses, controller and possessor of intelligence, was conjured up with Natalia’s words and painted onto his ego, he forgot his doubts and was hungry again to seize the intelligence of which he felt wrongfully deprived of.  Natalia, attracted to this projected image of Lorenzo, helped Wilson prepare him for an immediate operation.

Over twenty-two hours of squinting over a magnifying glass, his eyes starved from natural light and his back aching,Wilson toiled away at Lorenzo’s cranium with his scalpel.  After peeling back the skin of the scalp and drilling at intervals into the skull to weaken the bone, he then joined the dots with a saw to remove the upper section of the skull.  Revealed beneath was the delicate, spongy - and relatively small -organ that was responsible for the thoughts and actions of its master. Wilson began to extract segments of the brain from both the right and left hemispheres and placed the removed sections in a jar that he labelled along with the other twenty-seven suspended brains.  He then squeezed the remainder into a corner of the skull and gently inserted the patchwork super-brain.  Natalia watched over him nervously as the hands of the old man, incongruously dextrous and nimble, made delicate incisions, nips and tucks, painstakingly fusing the neurons together.  Finally, he stretched the scalp over the enlarged cranium and, with the skill of a seamstress, sewedLorenzo up.

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The heart monitor began to beep with increased vigour and Wilson and Natalia woke from their respective naps and peered down over Lorenzo.  His head was almost twice its normal size, partly due to the swelling and also the excessive bandaging, which had been nurse Natalia’s duty.  The black circles around his eyes had spread across his face in varying shades of blue, purple, yellow and green.  Behind closed eyelids, his eyes twitched back and forth and his lashes fluttered until they were prised open to survey their surroundings.  His pupils shrinking in the light, he traced the room and came to rest on the blurred faces with gaping mouths that appeared to be singing colours.  Wilson waved a finger to engage his vision and checked his pulse.

‘Lorenzo, Can you hear me?’ Wilson asked.

Lorenzo blinked in response.

‘Lorenzo?’ Natalia shouted in his ear. ‘What are you thinking?’

Lorenzo stared back, unblinking.

‘Do you know where you are?’ Wilson asked.

Lorenzo blinked in response.

‘Why isn’t he talking?’ demanded Natalia, prodding a bony finger at Wilson’s ribs.

‘It is perfectly normal.  He has just survived highly traumatic surgery that he is yet to recover from and we must leave him to rest,’ he replied and placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder.  ‘Just a little patience is all that’s needed.’

As Lorenzo drifted off again, his thoughts vacillating between lucidity and distortion, he heard the sounds of distant voices calling to him from the deepest caverns of his dreams.  Wandering through the corridors of his mind, he discovered previously unexplored chambers filled with memories and thoughts that were not his own and far beyond anything he had ever experienced or imagined.  His palatial quarters were bountiful with delicious treats and adorned with pleasures, a feast for the senses and temptation for the soul.  Thrilled with this newfound voyeurism, he opened doors to illicit adventures in distant lands, orchestras strumming the songs of his youth and beautiful harems of women inviting him to join them in their sexual exploits.  He wandered further into the cavities of his psyche, devouring the fruits it offered with delirious rapture.

‘Lorenzo?’

‘What?’ he choked, irritated at having been forced to leave the erotic fantasies of Jorge Baldivieso, who now counted for one-fourteenth of the previously brilliant mathematician.

‘Can you tell me where and when you were born?’

Lorenzo thought a while, but his mind was blank.

‘Your mother’s maiden name?’

He pondered this but nothing came to him.

‘Right,’ said Wilson. ‘What is the square route of pi?’

‘1.7725,’ he replied, though he did not know what he had answered.

‘Interesting, though not unexpected,’ Wilson said, primarily to himself.

‘Did he get it right?’ asked Natalia.

Wilson nodded and continued to ask the improved Lorenzo about the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics whileNatalia paced up and down the chamber, occasionally tapping her fingers against the glass jars of the brains.

‘I lay over a ravine.  My toes on one side, my fingers clutching the other,’ Wilson said.  ‘What am I?’

‘A bridge.’

‘Do you know why?’ Wilson asked.  ‘Do you know whose bridge it might be?’

Silence.

Wilson found that Lorenzo was capable of regurgitating facts but when asked to put them into his own words, or explain his answers with logic or opinion, he could not.  He struggled to answer personal questions, while he was able to respond to complex issues that he would not have had any prior knowledge of, as if the new brains were answering for him.  The information came from memory but, as with the raw intelligence of the other brains, was being processed without understanding.  In short,Lorenzo lacked the intellectual ability to handle the implanted intelligence.

‘Lorenzo, think about this for me,’ he said.  ‘What is greater than God, more evil than the devil, the poor have it, the rich need it and if you eat it you will die?’

‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

‘Think about it.’

‘It’s money isn’t it,’ Natalia interrupted.

‘It’s nothing,’ Wilson replied.

‘Well if it’s nothing then why are you bothering to ask him?’ Natalia snapped, frustrated with Wilson’s methods.  ‘Lorenzo?  What countries in the world don’t have a moon?’

Lorenzo rolled his eyes and forced himself back into the cinema of his brain, diving into tables laden for a banquet, opium-fuelled parties, lounging in brothels waited on by naked nymphs and sailing across the ocean with his co-conspirators and neighbouring brains.  Taking him under their wing and providing him with a constant source of debauched entertainment in the depths of their wits were, among others, the champion chess player Vicente Blanco, acclaimed composer Antonio Scaglione and leading immunologist Josefina Tapia. Skipping through the cerebral cortex, they paused at the frontal lobe to gamble on a cockfight, guided Lorenzo through the red lights of the parietal district and the visual spectacle of the occipital lobe, before getting stuck in to a cocktail of cocaine and absinth in the temporal lobe where they warmed themselves up for another bout of hedonistic mind-travel.

Over the coming days, Natalia grew increasingly restless, concerned with the future of the project and unsatisfied with Lorenzo’s progress, his demeanour bearing no resemblance to the omnipotent leader-puppet she desired.  Intelligence was proving to be less interesting than she had anticipated and she felt alienated from the group, unable to understand Wilson’s questions or the medicine behind the procedure; her grip on control waning.  There had also begun a strange and unfamiliar stirring in her heart that held her in her sleep and warmed her shadow, tore at her insides and gnawed at her thoughts.  The queen, vulnerable and alone without her pawn, wondered, for the first time, if she might love him.

Lorenzo’s level of intelligence was sustained and he showed increased signs of brain activity.  However, he became withdrawn and developed symptoms of depression and multiple personalities when he was awake.  As he retreated further into his mind, engaging with the memories of the other brains, he appeared reluctant to wake up and when forced to, was distant and unresponsive.  His eyes dulled and his expression became listless until eventually Lorenzo no longer answered his own name, only those on the list of donor brains, as if consumed by their personalities.

‘Where is he?’ Natalia moaned.

‘His brain is highly active, but he appears to be internalising his thoughts rather than communicating with the outside world,’ replied Wilson.  ‘Just wait a while.’

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‘Isn’t it just wonderful,’ asked Josefina, collapsing back onto the bed.  ‘You can do whatever you like here.’

A blissfully spent Lorenzo took the pipe from her bejewelled fingers and inhaled the smoke deep into his lungs.  A voluptuous woman-butterfly fluttered around his head, the wings of her breasts caressing his temple as she was joined by a golden trapeze artist, dangling before him from the chandelier, offering a tray of rose sweets.

‘I never thought intelligence could be this good!’ he replied.

‘Oh yes, it is a great thing indeed…and the best is yet to come.’  Vicente whispered in his ear. 

‘I always wanted it,’ continuedLorenzo.  ‘I just never understood it, how all that power and money could come from something so…dull.  I knew there had to be something more to it than nonsense talk, white coats and dusty books - otherwise it would be hell but here we are in paradise!’

‘Quite indeed,’ replied Vicente.

‘We are going to take you to a place that will surpass your wildest expectations,’ said Josefina, slipping into her gown.

Lorenzo squealed with delight as a harem-nymph appeared from the mouth of an orchid to fill their glasses with a delicious nectar of vermouth, sloe berry and snowflakes.  After brushing her lips provocatively across his cheek she dived naked inside his glass with a splash.

‘Shahmat,’ Vicente said, raising his glass to Lorenzo’s and taking Josefina’s hand in his.

‘Shahmat!’ they toasted in unison, before making their final journey to the centre of the brain.

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It was six days after the transplant andLorenzo’s heart had begun to fail and his other organs were suffering consequently.  His heart was rejecting the donor brain and his immune system working overtime to dispel the unwelcome guest.  With a limited stock of medical supplies and given Lorenzo’s fragile state of health, Wilson prepared Natalia for the worst.  

‘Tell me exactly what is going on,’ she demanded.  ‘I want to know what you’ve done to Lorenzo!’

‘Very well,’ he replied.  ‘There are cells in the body that communicate with one another through neuropeptides. They contain and send information that consists of memories, tastes and personalities, known as cellular memory,’ he explained.

‘Go on,’ she insisted though he had lost her at neuropeptides.

‘These often remain in the organs, particularly the stomach, though they are densest in the heart, even after it has been removed from the donor,’ he continued.  ‘The existing memory of the body can disagree with the intruding memory of the donor and cause it to be rejected by the host.’

Natalia returned his gaze with vacant eyes.

‘What it means is a clash of personalities,’ Wilson sighed.  ‘The brain and Lorenzo’s heart are fighting, so to speak.’

‘What can we do?’

‘As we have no donor heart, we will have to attach him to the artificial heart machine with the other brains and hope that the rest of his organs learn to get along with his brain.’

‘Without his heart, will he still love me?’

‘If we switch him to the machine heart, he will have a chance of survival,’ Wilson replied.  Otherwise he will certainly die.’ 

Natalia felt something tickling her cheek and when she wiped it away, her fingers were wet.  For the first time in her life, she was crying. 

‘I will need to monitor him closely,’ he continued.  ‘I think it would be wise if you and I swapped quarters so that I can get to him straight away if anything should happen overnight.’

That night, Natalia experienced sleep on a half-bed in a half-room in the cramped outer walls licked by the intense heat of the boiler room, while Wilson stretched out in the relative luxury of the inner walls, sleeping soundly and without nightmares for the first time since his capture.  As the invisible sun warmed up the day outside, Wilson dreamt he was playing chess with one of the brains and just as he was about to make his final move, he was woken by the erratic screeching of Lorenzo’s brain monitor and the increased bleeps of his heart as his blood pressure soared.

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Shah mat! The king is dead! Imprisoned in his own kingdom!’Vicente yelled.  ‘Checkmate at last my dear fellows!’

Lorenzo, having been so delightfully lured into the furthest corners of his mind, had just been made aware of his entrapment.  Caressing him with their artful tentacles and sucking him into the centre of the brain, they had blinded him with the ink of their promises and he had given himself over to the pursuit of pleasure.  After ensuring that there would be no methods of escape, the brains had announced to a delirious Lorenzo that, having swallowed him into their minds, he was now their hostage.  Bound and gagged, the brains, thirsty for revenge, had closed in on him.  Given the rationale of their superior minds, he was to be given a trial.  Its outcome, however, had been somewhat predetermined. 

While he awaited his trial, Lorenzo, chained to a wall by a collar around his neck, was tormented by the other brains who mocked him, their laughter ringing in his ears as they danced and twirled before him in a frenzy, a string quartet violently playing out the music of his nightmares.  He wept as they forced him to listen to their ranting theories and howled when they carved out equations in his back with the sharpened point of a quill.  He prayed for sleep but it did not arrive and the others never grew tired of their games.

The court of the brains took no time in finding Lorenzo guilty as charged on all counts of theft, murder, conspiracy to commit murder, torture, crimes against humanity and crimes against intelligence.  He was sentenced to a lifetime of mental abuse, to be carried out by the brains themselves, and with the greatest pleasure.  He would be forced to watch endless reels from their most disturbed and troubled thoughts and nightmares.  The orchestra would subject him to the constant symphonies of the classics he despised, the soundtrack to his torment. He would be made to witness extended debates on topics ranging from metaphysics to the study of soil nutrients and he would be slave to their every whim.  The very intelligence that he so misguidedly desired would be his punishment. Having spent six months suspended in their liquid jars, quietly absorbing their surroundings, they knew Lorenzo well enough to know exactly what would make him crawl up the walls and plead for a forgiveness they had no intention of granting.

What Lorenzo was yet to discover was that these brain snippets had not just been taken from any part of the brain but the parts generally linked with psychosis.  And as it happened his captors, as is a common side effect of intelligence, were a motley crew of addicts, manic-depressives and paranoid schizophrenics with tendencies to bouts of violent and aggressive behaviour when deprived of their medication.

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The following day, Wilson, his toes grateful for the slippers that he had borrowed from Lorenzo, assuming he would have no further use for them, diagnosed total locked-in syndrome.  When he had gone to check on Lorenzo in the early hours, only one eye remained active, blinking furiously, but now it too was still and his body completely paralysed.

‘Lorenzo?’ asked Natalia, wiping her eyes.

‘I’m afraid, Natalia, that he is no longer with us,’ replied Wilson.

‘You mean…he’s dead?’

Lorenzo’s screams fell on deaf ears.

‘No, no, he is very much alive - in fact his brain signals show a heightened level of activity - but what was left of him,Lorenzo the person, has disappeared.’

Lorenzo’s screams fell on deaf ears.

‘How can he just go missing?’ she demanded. ‘Where the hell is he?’

‘He’s lost in his mind.’

‘He’s a vegetable?’

‘Well I wouldn’t put it quite like that…’

Lorenzo gave up screaming.

‘How can we get him back?’ she screeched, grabbing the old man by the scruff of his neck and shaking him with surprising strength.  ‘We have to get him back!’

‘I’m afraid that’s not realistic.’

Natalia collapsed on the floor in convulsions, the world as she knew it had disappeared and it was her own doing. Without Lorenzo, she had nothing left - nothing to control - apart from an old man and even he appeared to be developing an immunity to her ways. Wilson waited for her sobs to subside and put a hand on her shoulder.

‘There is one thing,’ he said casually as he secured the tubing protruding from Lorenzo’s nose and mouth.  ‘But I really wouldn’t advise it.’

‘What?’ Natalia, wiping the tears away with her sleeve, turned to look expectantly at Wilson.

‘The only way of finding him would be to get inside his brain and bring him back out,’ he replied.  ‘That would require another transplant, for part of another brain to enter into his.’

‘You can go,’ she said, once again animated.

‘Well, of course I would, but then who would do the operation?’

Natalia, dismayed, had not given any thought to such details.

‘Can we send someone else?’

‘We haven’t the time to find someone,’ he lamented.  ‘If we are to proceed it must be immediately or we might lose him.  Besides, if we found another donor, once they were inside they would be their own agent and I imagine if they were brought here by force, they would be reluctant to play the game.’

‘Then I will go,’ replied Natalia defiantly, forgetting her fears.

‘You do understand the risks are great?’

‘Of course I do!’

‘Perhaps you should just consider forgetting about it all and get on with living your own life, alone,’ he said, with particular emphasis on alone.

‘No, we are doing the operation right now!’

‘As you wish,’ Wilson replied and sharpened his tools.

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Natalia woke to find herself lying on a bed of cushions, swathed in a Grecian robe as a young servant boy fanned her with peacock feathers.  Reluctant to move, she momentarily forgot her quest, a sense of sublime abandonment washing over her as she sunk back down into the delicious silk.  It was only the sound of applause in the distance that stirred her from her contentment and she leapt towards the golden doors. On the other side, she found herself in a crooked corridor with doors jutting out from all angles, it was dark and glass from the broken bulbs scattered the floor.  She trod carefully and picked her way through the debris, pulling at the door handles but she found them all locked or empty.  Shivering from the cold, she entered further into the maze, following the distant sounds of laughter and music.  In the centre she could make out a light and as she grew closer she felt an enticing warmth and began to run towards it, calling out for Lorenzo as she darted through his mind, but her voice was met only with a fragile echo, drowned out by other voices.  Finally, she burst through the grand double doors at the heart of the brain and into the ballroom.

‘Excellent, another guest, we were so hoping you would join us,’ Josefina purred.  ‘Do take a seat, we were just getting started.’

Natalia observed the sea of faces before her and heard a key turn in the lock behind.  Despite their delirious grins and outstretched arms, she understood that their welcome was false and their intentions malicious.  Her eyes followed the pierce of a scream, which she saw, with horror, was coming from Lorenzo, naked on all fours.  The crowd parted and she moved towards the man she had thought she loved, quivering and howling in the corner.  Jorge Baldivieso paused for breath to acknowledge their guest, then licked his fingers and turned to the next page of Dante’s Inferno.

Covering her ears and sinking to her knees, they pounced upon her, tearing at her hair and whispering incoherently in her ear.  As Natalia joined Lorenzo in their eternal misery, she wondered what the rest of herself was doing, the remainder of her brain and body on the other side, and hoped for her sake that she might be dead, but the distant sound ofWilson’s laughter quietened that thought.

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Wilson Lopez filled in the last puzzle of the crossword on the table and took a healthy swig of whisky.  After adjusting to life above ground again, Wilson had retired from science and returned home to his adoring wife who had almost given up on spending the rest of her days with her husband.  With time on his hands and the delightful indulgence of being the master of it, he took an avid interest in gardening and even had an elaborate shed erected at the bottom of his garden.  Picking himself up from the rocking chair by the fire, he popped his head into the kitchen where his wife was peeling potatoes.

‘I’m just off to the shed to check on the vegetables dear,’ he said as he pulled on his boots.

‘Oh good darling, say hello from me.’

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