‘What happens in the end?’

‘There is no end.  The characters disappeared.’

‘Disappeared?  How can they be lost if you created them?’

‘Well, they were stolen to be precise, but that is another story,’ the blind man sighed.  ‘Besides, characters are not purely invented.  They exist in the world, as do you and I, except that they have the ability to choose when and to whom they reveal themselves.

Almo Caniffi was often bewildered by the lucid ramblings of Eduardo and it was times such as these that he found it hard to contest the view of the others that he was on the cusp of, if not plummeting towards, dementia.

‘And after all these years you’ve no idea what might happen?’

‘Guessing would be a futile, if pleasurable, pursuit.’ Eduardo allowed his mind to wander a moment, only to find it empty.  ‘The messenger has no control over the message, only its delivery.’

‘What if the story is never finished?’

‘Then it will float around with all the other unfinishes in the universe in search of its other half, until it is found – in this world or another.’

The internal bell light flashed on the wall, the plaster hanging in heavy flakes around it like potato peelings.  The old relic emitted a strained ringing sound as if it were being strangled.

‘It’s my turn to deal,’ Almo announced, grateful for the distraction.

The frail man nodded and listened to the footsteps as they left the room, the creaking door closing sluggishly behind.  Like his aching bones, it had not been oiled in a very long time. 

The characters first came to Eduardo not long after he lost his sight.  They found him in the night that he could no longer distinguish from day, in the darkness that was now perpetual.  His periphery vision had burnt away like the edges of a photograph, paint bleeding from the familiar canvas as it embarked on its vignette, consuming the light until he was alone, abandoned by the colours and shapes he had relied on to navigate the world. 

At first there were just a few, knocking patiently on the doors to his dreams, but soon they poured in until there were a thousand beating fists, knuckles raw, smashing the windows and jumping over the fences of his subconscious, desperate for their voices to be heard.  He would wake screaming in the night, begging for peace, but the characters pursued him further, into the days, demanding that their tales be told.  Unable to bear the torment any longer, he had relented and dictated their stories, endowing them with embellished personalities and offering them twists and plots galore to satisfy their hunger.

After a while, he no longer feared them but rather understood their plight and relished in their other worlds.  When he was sighted he had struggled to make a living writing obituaries and, in some ways, his blindness was a revelation - an alternative vision - and it was not long before he earned himself a reputation as an esteemed novelist.  Of course, there were trying times, particularly if he killed off a character or wrongly paired loved ones and a few occasions he narrowly avoided a revolt.

When the last of his string of secretaries - some more obliging than others - left his company, she gave him an old Corona typewriter that she had adapted for him to use.  Each key had an object stuck to it representing that letter.  A coin for M, a hairgrip for H, a bottle cap for B and so on.  It was cumbersome and took him a while to adjust to but once he had, he was liberated by his independence and more prolific than ever.  It was around this time that he fell in love with one of his characters.

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Hotel Inter Res had sheltered many an unsuspecting soul in its cavernous womb over the years.  Once upon a time, it served as a refuge for weary travellers on route to distant lands.  Well-heeled train passengers and their entourage would rest for never more than one infectious night, sucked into a delicious abyss where time and morals ceased to have relevance.  Ideas were born while old habits died, and everyone stepped to the same dance.

Ladies of the night became queens and scoundrels became lovers to the royals.  Bourgeoisie intellectuals deliberated the philosophies of the mode, spurred on by a cocktail of opiates and champagne while other, equally inebriated beings abandoned the transcendental for tales of public house jeopardy.  Culinary delights were guzzled down with rare wines plucked by nimble fingers from the conspiring freight carriages that waited patiently under the moonlight.  Heels smacked against the tiles as hems twirled around the ballroom, a mating call for the hands that took theirs in turn, as the band whipped them into a twilight fervour, leaving behind a flurry of painted faces and crimson lips.

As Helios set off to ride his chariot across the sky from the east and the train pulled reluctantly out of the station, those with one eye still open watched as the hotel shrank against the horizon until it was just a speck, a token of the night, and their debauched antics drowned in the seas of their minds, never to be spoken of again.

Many decades have passed since those wanton days and a disease now slowly eats away at its shell, working towards the core.  It suffers in silence, mourning the loss of its patrons whose carriages no longer travel the tracks, melted down when the civil war broke out to fashion an arsenal for the insurgents.  Like a phantom limb, severed from the outside world, it hangs invisibly from its body with only the occasional twitch that bought its existence into question.  Rats and pigeons are the only permanent guests, spiders merrily weave their webs undisturbed, and cockroaches scuttle freely, leaving behind their abstract sketches in the dust.

The skeleton staff left behind watch now as that dust falls around them and they become entombed in the faded glamour of the past.  Waiting in limbo, they go about their business, always arriving at the same place at which they began.  The clocks, once slaves to train times, meal times and show times, have liberated themselves, running away never to look back and reducing time to a mere concept. 

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The damp weighed heavy on the air, seeping through the walls and filling the rooms with a musty odour.  Almo cracked the windows open and observed from the shadows that it was approaching sunset.  He could not see the moody purple that the sky was dressed in because he had been born with eyes that only saw in black and white, and, occasionally, a little grey. 

He had entered the world in room 106.  Abandoned by his mother, he had spent his first three days in a cupboard drawer, and the rest of his life confined to the hotel walls.  He had grown up being told that the world was a thing one temporarily inhabited, all guests in its hotel, but for Almo the hotel was his world.

The storm that was breaking had nudged the clouds with such force that they fell like dominos, one on top of the other, rushing across the sky with an urgency that he could not relate to.  Pulling the curtains over a world he had never known, he turned back towards the others and his heart fell slowly, inexplicably, down his chest.

‘Come on, come on.  Haven’t got all day croupier,’ Guillermo grunted. 

Though his days as a chef were but a distant memory and time now in abundance, Guillermo Saavedra still suffered from acute impatience and its cousin short-temper.

Almo took one of the few remaining chairs whose life had been spared sacrifice to the fire and began to shuffle the cards. 

‘Hold on, get me something to nibble on would you?’  Magdalena Rotundo de Paolillo shifted her considerable bottom in the armchair that she was wedged into, removed her glasses and began to finger knit, her chubby indexes tugging aggressively at the wool.

It was Magdalena, the then chambermaid who had found Almo, a crying newborn wrapped in a bloodied towel, and taken pity on him.  Over the years this sympathy had waned and though she and Guillermo raised him as their own, it was done so begrudgingly and with little affection.

‘Potatoes, potatoes, potatoes,’ Almo incanted.   Rations were low and with only a handful of tins left for winter, they were working their way through a field of spuds.  He made to stand up but Guillermo waved him back down.

‘Leave her be, she’ll not starve.’

Magdalena, salivating over the legs of ham, pot roast and steaming soups that were performing on the stage of her mind, turned to the pair, red-faced and indignant.

‘I just might.’

‘Remember to regulate rations of retreating replenishments,’ interjected Osvaldo Oscar Oderigo, who was standing at the foot of the stairs in his bathrobe.  ‘Wait while winter warms,’ he added before disappearing upstairs.

Osvaldo was a man of very few words but those that he did utter, he favoured with alliteration.

‘Spring?  Well I shall pray that the good Lord grants me survival until then,’ she retorted, elaborately drawing the sign of the cross across her bosom.

Magdalena was short sighted, both physically and mentally, and had a remarkable ability to see no further than the day in hand.  The future never caused her concern, which was in many ways a blessing, but the present vexed her considerably.

‘What’s the old man brattling on about upstairs?’  Guillermo demanded.

Almo remained silent.  He was fond of Eduardo but did not understand the things he told him well enough to defend them.  Guillermo and Magdalena insisted that the blind man had lost his mind, or never been in possession of it in the first place.  Since he was a child, Eduardo had told Almo tales of other worlds hidden by the veils we weave with distorted truths and warped reflections, hanging between our world and the universe.  The rewards of lifting that veil of perception are great, but everyone will most certainly think you mad.

The storm was now in full force and thunder banged its fists against the ground as the wind and rain lashed the windowpanes.  Almo felt a splash of water on his head and raised his eyes to the ceiling.  The dark patch was forming above, peppered with bubbles that were forcing their way through the cracks and floating down to the floor.  All eyes fell on Almo, who got up dutifully and went upstairs, where the only surviving record twirled on the gramophone in Eduardo’s room, and found Osvaldo sleeping in the bath.  The gardener, relieved of his duties in the winter months, had a penchant for long, drawn-out baths, dreaming of the summer months to come and at times he would appear days later, his skin porcelain and puckered.  He was also narcoleptic - a potentially lethal combination - and it was nothing short of astonishing that he had not yet drowned.

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Non essere geloso
se con gli altri ballo il twist.
Non essere furioso
se con gli altri ballo il rock.
Con te con te
con te, che sei la mia passione
il ballo il ballo del mattone.

As the lively vocals of Rita Pavone’s Dance of the Brick pulled on the bell towers of Eduardo’s memory, it was as if his love was there with him again, head thrown back and consumed with laughter as they spun around.  Lola Martinez had come to him one night and whispered in his ear, entrancing him with her dulcet tones and scarlet lips, her sharp tongue and golden locks.  His fingers glided across the keys, carving out her destiny and entwining it with his.  It only took a few pages until he was hopelessly, head-over-heels, in love. 

Eduardo had come to understand that fiction was a false term and that it was, in fact, just another, delicious, visual world where anything could happen.  With Lola, a door had been opened between the two realities and the boundaries had blurred.  At first, he struggled to separate the written world from the other and he would toil for hours, desperate to conjure her to his pages, or waiting long, agonising days for her to find her way to him.  After a while, there was no distinction and they merged into one and the same.

There were advantages and disadvantages of being in love with a character.  He could rose-tint their relationship by writing out any arguments or sadness and was at liberty to satisfy his jealousy by killing off the competition in a couple of lines.  The danger was the vulnerability of a character once developed and put to paper as they were released into the public domain and could be summoned to fulfil a role in another novel or play at anytime. 

They had travelled together to Hotel Inter Res.  Eduardo had been commissioned by the owner to document the goings on of the guests and Lola had arranged to meet with an infamous director and his wife.  They settled in to suite 101 and while Lola, radiant in a scarlet dress, went to the lounge for drinks, Eduardo got straight to work.  The owner, a round, sweaty man with a Dali moustache that reminded him of a lion tamer in a circus, had been keen to show off the bugging system that he had installed, linking up all the rooms to a speaker in the suite.  Though he claimed to have had it made specifically for Eduardo’s task, the dials were worn and Eduardo expected that it had long been used for the man’s private perversions. 

As dinnertime approached he combed his hair and adjusted his turquoise cravat in the mirror before mounting the grand staircase.  It wasn’t until he got to around the seventeenth step that he realised something was amiss.  Casting a keen eye over his surroundings he could see nothing out of place and the scene was accompanied by the sounds of coarse laughter, ice cubes clinking against a glass, and the pendulum of a grandfather clock announcing the hour.

Then it came to him.  There was no piano playing.  Lola should have been singing while the pianist played Unforgettable.  He had just that minute written it.  He ran downstairs, knocking over a waiter carrying martinis and tripping over the trail of a woman’s dress.  Franticly, he searched for those sunshine curls and rouged lips but she was nowhere to be found and though he denied it, he could feel an absence already brewing within him.

As he ran upstairs he was acutely aware that everything was slowing down, a gentle hush fell over the building and he noticed with increasing alarm that characters from his subplots were missing, his exposition fading and description diluting. 

Breathless, he arrived at his typewriter, ripping the last page so violently that it tore away in half.  The last four lines were missing.  He was certain that they had been there, he had checked them before he left and he had not yet had a drink that could have impaired his judgment.  He typed out another line. 

The door to the suite burst open and Lola threw her arms around him, kissing his lips with hungry desire.

He turned to the door, praying that that heavenly vision would appear before him.  Nothing.  He waited a while longer as hope began to chip away at his heart and another while as desire starved his lungs of air and a little more until tears began to fall onto the story he held in his hands, smudging the love that was once his until it was illegible.

In an instant, the love of his life had been cruelly snatched from him, banished to another story at the pen of an anonymous author.

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Almo was rubbing Magdalena’s callous feet, her toenails gnarled and a gruesome stench forced its way through his nostrils, incinerating the nasal cobwebs, and he wished more than ever that he could disappear into one of Eduardo’s realities.  He could not imagine a world outside of the bleak walls that imprisoned him in various shades of grey, with only chores to bring relief to the tedium of the day and never, ever, enough to eat.  Though he despised the daily ritual of tending to the chambermaid’s feet, it was at least something with which to nudge the day forward.

Having ventured out to lock down the grain in the barn, Guillermo appeared at the door, vast pools of water collecting at his feet.

‘It’s damned apocalyptical out there,’ he spluttered, kicking off his boots and throwing his coat at Almo to hang.  The squelch of his sodden socks against the tattered floorboards was the only sound against the silence and the occasional hint of a snore from Magdalena.

Without warning, a haunting, shrill ringing echoed through the building, piercing through to the epicentre of their thoughts.  Its reverberations tickled Magdalena’s ear, hung in Guillermo’s throat and smacked at Almo’s heart.  Upstairs, in his bath, Osvaldo wondered if, for the first time in a long while, something might be about to happen.   It was such a distant and foreign sound that it took them a few moments to realise it that it was, in fact, the doorbell.

They stared at one another, frozen, hiding behind a paralysing wall of shock and fear, which crumbled at the second ring.  Guillermo, the blood having drained from his face, slapped Almo and pushed him forwards, using the boy as a shield, and the trio crept slowly towards the door.

Though he had been assigned the role of bellboy at birth - on the terms that he would some day pay back his debt - he had never had an opportunity to exercise the position and was at once petrified and thrilled by the unknown.  With trembling fingers he brushed himself down and straightened out his uniform, the others following suit behind.  Stretching out a quivering arm, he pulled back the heavy door, so long out of use that it did not seem to know quite how to be a door anymore.  It creaked open, sighing with the effort, to reveal six guests and six sets of luggage, standing expectantly in the rain.

‘Welcome to Hotel Inter Res,’ choked the bellboy.

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At the sound of the doorbell, Eduardo’s heart had skipped to a faster tempo, fluttering against his ribs like a bird trapped in a cage.  Its call woke him from his thoughts, alerting him to their return and igniting the fire of his love.  Now he could hear the hotel rocking on its foundations as it adjusted to the new traffic.  As his mind wandered from his body, the aches of old age lifted and he regained his youthful vitality.  He dusted down the old Corona, speckles of rust mottled its body and his fingers fell short of a few talismans but he caressed it with the tenderness of a returning lover. 

He felt around for the switch to the listening system, doubting if the antique might still have life in it and flipped it with his thumb.  It coughed out a plume of dust, followed by a loud burst of static.  He listened, ear close to the speaker, flicking between the channels.  As the dials scoured the waves he picked up snippets of speech, the unclasping of suitcases, clothes folding, then a cough followed by the distinct clearing of the throat that he recognised could only come from his Colonel Miguel A Mattar.  He could hear the tapping of his pipe as he cleared the tobacco.  The colonel was one of the original characters that had come to him, particularly persistent as he recalled, but he had no place in this story.  It was only as he listened on that it dawned upon him that this was no longer his story.  The characters were muddled up and the plot confused - bastardised by the very author who had snatched Lola from him.  He listened carefully and to his horror discovered that the love of his life - now named Scarlet - was trapped in the plot of some trashy sub-genre thriller, the sort that had been in fashion at the time, churned out by a team of half-witted so-called writers and printed on the back of a cereal box.  

Eduardo cracked his knuckles and gingerly stroked the keys.  All those years ago, after searching for her in the pages of every book, he had put his work to rest and never typed another word again, unable to do so if not for his love.  He would have to rescue her from the story, writing into it piece by piece so as not to cause alarm to reader or author, subtly manipulating the characters, then at the last moment pluck her from her misery and into his arms, shutting the door on his world and becoming forever part of hers.

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In all his life, Almo had only seen five faces, including his own.  As he showed the guests to their rooms, his pupils darting around like flies trapped in a jar, he studied every indent, wrinkle and frown.  The words did not come to him, but he longed to know what stories those faces told, the history of each scar, the cause of every blemish, where it was that the sun had fallen on a freckle.  He eyed their strange costumes, lavish robes and tailored suits.  The only example of a woman he had ever known was Magdalena and these sculpted and voluptuous creatures were so otherworldly in comparison that he wondered if they were something else entirely.  A man wearing a robe not all that dissimilar to the chambermaid’s attire threw him and it was not until he saw the cross around his neck that he understood that he was one of the men of God she had told him of.  The stiff suit of another man was adorned with badges, more ornate and pompous than anything he had ever cast his eyes upon and though he yearned to ask what their significance was, his stern air warned Almo off doing so.

The exhausted guests paid him little attention, save for pushing pieces of paper into his palm, to which he wondered what it was he was supposed to do with.  They said nothing to him and he interpreted their nervous dispositions as reflections of his own.  The exception was the last guest, a young woman, who turned as he left and, with purpose, smiled at him.  In such a simple gesture his world changed forever.  It was a smile that held the breath of his world, forced moths to hang in midair to marvel at its beauty, shadows to freeze and darkness to surrender to light, so that for a brief moment only the smile existed in the world.  He felt a strange pounding in his chest and realised to his astonishment that it was his own heart beating with the force of thunder.  It was then that he saw her lips were red, ruby red, scarlet red, crimson red, he did not know what red, but he knew that they were painted with the colour of his heart.

Eduardo had once told him that colour did not exist within an object, that it was a trick of the light, living only on the surface like lipstick on a woman’s lips.  He had also told him not to fool himself into believing his eyes, that they and the mind are adept at lying to one another.  Almo did not know what to believe in those red lips but he felt them calling to him from some part of him that he did not yet know.

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Con te, che sei la mia passione
Il ballo il ballo del mattone…

Eduardo pressed the receiver against his ear and held her to him.  He envisaged her at his side, hips swaying, lips curved ever so slightly, eyes infinite and desiring. 

Tears of anguish streamed down her cheeks, her red dress splashed with purple droplets.  She should never have come here with him.  He had coerced her into accepting the part and as a result her life was in danger.  The studios were willing to fight to the death over the script and she was already hunted by her peers. Even after it was shot there would be outcry and anarchy.

She dried her eyes, painted her shapely lips and stared back into the mirror.  She did not see the beauty in the reflection, instead she saw only the ugly wretchedness that came from the sadness and loneliness inside.  She longed to be rescued.

............................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Almo, delirious with his recent revelations and in a state of elated confusion, stumbled drunkenly around the hotel.  His body had taken leave of him and he jumped, darted and twirled from one room to the next, images and emotions flitting in and out of his mind, gusts of wind that stirred the autumn leaves of his youth.

Nothing, not even the presence of a rare parrot, could have struck him as bizarre that night.  So when one of the guests asked him to place the bird in the conservatory, he did so without question.  It was an awkward creature, hunched and inwardly, muttering incoherently and coloured in shades of grey with eyes that scrutinised.  Almo admired, rapturously, its yellow irises, pink beak and red tail.  He stood, staring at these details, absorbing the colours that shone out among the grey and shot into the foreground of his sight.  He did not distinguish them from one another but delighted in the sensation that they inspired in him and that was changing his world.   It was only the yelled demands of Magdalena and Guillermo that dragged him away from these new delights and when he got to the kitchen he was dismayed to find that there was not even a hint of colour against the black and white.

‘What’s for dinner?’

‘Three types of potatoes done in three styles pickled herrings and red wine followed by apricots in honey.’ Guillermo announced in one breath.

‘I’ll be keeping an eye on the seasoning,’ Magdalena interjected.

‘I may be colour blind, but I can tell the difference between salt and pepper,’ the chef grumbled.

‘It’s when it comes to chillies and spices that it worries me.’

Almo did the chores that were asked of him but his thoughts were elsewhere, whirling with these fleeting streaks of colour that were now blessing his vision and whichever world it was that he had found himself so joyously caught up in.

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Eduardo fingered the dials and a shudder went through his bones as he heard the unmistakable snap of a magnum revolver being loaded with bullets.

Ana B de Binello draped her white satin dress over the mirror.  The young assassin could not bear to look at her scar-riddled body.  Stepping into the shower, she smarted at the cold water, but endured it as the fog in her head began to clear.  She should have shot her in the carriage when she had a chance; they were close enough to the engine to have muffled the blast. 

She considered herself to be a cleaner, mopping up the murderers, crooks and swindlers of the world.  This time the assignment was an uncomfortable one and if it were not for the healthy fees of the client, she would have been forced to decline on moral grounds.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Almo paced across the landing, his attention on the door of room 106, behind which the red lips dwelled.  Unable to knock, he waited and searched his mind for the colourful tales that Eduardo had told him over the years and tried to piece together his own stories for the guests, who they were and where they came from, but he lacked the experience to fully visualise anything outside of Inter Res.  He wanted to run from that world and into theirs.  It was the world of pigment and tone that he desired, that affected him so and it was then that he realised the cause of the strange, distant familiarity he had felt when he saw the flashes of colour seep into his grey world.  He had always dreamt in colour, and he understood that his fantasies and the other reality Eduardo talked of were slowly sleeping into his. 

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The wife of the revered director Don Enrique de Benedetti settled a peacock feather in her hair and slipped into her black lace gloves, struggling all the while to remember the last time she had loved her husband.  They were strangers these days, finding passion in the beds of others and exchanging cordialities through clenched teeth.  He had betrayed her all his life and she felt no remorse in aiding the colonel in seizing the unfortunate bird.

The parrot had belonged to an old professor of his, a scriptwriter who had a succession of awards under his belt and who had spent his fiftieth, sixtieth and seventieth years living as in self-exile, writing his legacy.  He had become obsessed with developing the perfect formula for the quintessential film that would span all genres, appeal to everyone without exception and be beyond competition.  He pored over old reels, studying patterns, believing that the golden equation would be capable of bringing tears to desert eyes, laughter to hard lips, invoke lustful desires in nuns and make those with even the coldest hearts swoon with passion.

Of course, when the industry caught wind of this, they were up in arms.  The Actors Guild was outraged, at once vying for the roles and fearing for their careers.  Hollywood studios competed desperately for the script that would ensure domination of the industry for all of eternity and the independent studios rallied the streets condemning the project a violation of creative freedom and signalling the death of film.

When the mob eventually tracked the professor down to a hut in the mountains he was trampled to death in the scrum.  What none of them had bargained for was the discovery that there was no script, no typewriter, no pen and no paper.  Only a thin mattress, a lamp, and an African Grey Parrot.

The parrot and the lamp had turned up a week later, sent from his lawyers with a letter that read:

Dearest friend,

I fear that I will be on the other side when you read this.  Please take care of my feathered companion, he was my life and holds the key to my memories, to which I now entrust to you and your skills.  To unlock them, ask after the story that has no end.

Yours, S.S

Her husband had delighted in the cunning of his friend and with raffish arrogance paraded him around, mockingly, convinced that no one could or would even think that the golden script could be inside the talking parrot, committed to memory.  However, his behaviour had drawn plenty of attention and it was only a matter of time before people would figure it out.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

The fog cleared in Eduardo’s mind and he saw what he had to do in order to release Lola from the torment of Scarlet.  He had to pull the backbone of the story, freeing the characters of motivation for the plot and paving the way for their escape.  He put down the final lines, shaved off his beard of two decades and took out his suit from the cupboard.  He patted it down and whispers of dust gathered in the air, he unfolded the cravat, now faded but still the colour of a Caribbean sea, and eagerly prepared himself to leave his crippled body and the life that it was condemned to behind.  Eduardo surveyed himself in the mirror and thought how she would not recognise him as he was now, ragged by years of heartache and the uncompromising decay of age, but, on the other side, and in her world, they would be as they were all those years ago, as if the clock had only missed a beat.

As he descended the stairs for the final time he could hear the diners already at their tables, the chink of cutlery, the glug, glug of wine being poured into a glass and the flap of napkins being unfolded onto laps.  With each step, the world around him flooded in and his bones lightened, his back straightened and the creases of his skin ironed out, the hairs on his head thick and lustre.  He slipped into a corner table, his back against the wall, a front row seat where he could silently observe the guests. 

Lola was due north to the compass of his heart and its needle drew his eyes to her instantly, ravishing and radiant in her red dress, not a note unchanged.  Across from her sat the colonel who had hung up his uniform and decorations, dressed instead in a quilted smoking jacket with a distinctive mustard trim.  He had a dribble of caviar that was rested precariously on the tip of his moustache that vanished when he brought the glass to his lips.  He wore a stiff grin and he distracted the nervous energy within by running his hands through his mane of hair, puffing on his pipe and rearranging his cutlery.  He was sitting with the director - a lavish purple cummerbund hugging his substantial belly and a supercilious air escaping from it – while his wife removed her black lace gloves and eyed her husband with unreserved distain.

The two remaining tables were each occupied by the female assassin, plucking mussels from their shells, her alabaster skin drowning in a white satin dress and the other by the father, an emerald green sash hanging down from his neck, crucifix dangling.  He was, Eduardo noted with some respect, rather convincing with his solemn expression and pious air, particularly for a common thief.  The voices of the guests were muted and the silence was highlighted by the scratching and clinking of knives on plates and glasses on tables as they played with their steaks, thoughts preoccupied.  He craned his neck to the conservatory and felt a twinge in his chest at the sight of the bird, its innocent misfortune and looming fate.  At last, he rested his eyes again on Lola and the words of Nat King Cole found their way into his ears.  He was going home.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Almo flinched at the sound of a weighted thud coupled with china breaking.  He turned to see Eduardo, slumped in his chair, head on the table, lifeless.  It was only a flash, enough time to register his departure to another world, before the lights went out. 

Immersed in darkness, a scuffle ensued that was accompanied by plates smashing, glasses tumbling and footsteps chasing the room before being drowned out by a sudden, discordant, squawk.

Just as Magdalena sparked a match to a candle, the lights flooded the room again.  Almo’s eyes searched for the red lips, the green sash, the mustard trim, but they were met instead with a world of grey.  The only evidence of the night and the existence of the guests were painted in the lip-stained rims of glasses and the half-eaten remains of a variety of potato dishes.

‘Where on earth did all the guests go?’ asked a mystified Magdalena.

‘What’s going on?’ Guillermo shouted as he came out of the kitchen.

‘The guests have disappeared.’

‘Disappeared?’

‘Disappeared.’

The pair made their way over to the conservatory where they found Almo bent over a pile of feathers and a bludgeoned African Grey Parrot.

‘Where the hell did that thing come from?’ exclaimed Guillermo, recoiling in disgust at the sight of its brains smeared at his feet, bloody tributaries winding their way across the marble floor, its grey feathers stained black.

‘I’ve never seen it before,’ protested Magdalena.  ‘Is it dead?’

‘Murdered,’ replied Almo, putting the bird aside and going to Eduardo.

‘Can we eat it?’ Magdalena asked instinctively, then checked herself.  ‘Who would want to murder a parrot?  Do you think it was that odd chap?’

‘What, the father?’ asked Guillermo.

‘What father?’

‘What do you mean what father? The priest.’

‘I didn’t see a priest.  The other one then.’

‘What other one?’

‘Oh I don’t know, you’re confusing me.  You say there was a priest?’

‘Yes, him and that girl in the dress, the one with the…’

‘Alright, alright.’

‘What about the others?’

‘How should I know I was in the kitchen!’ Guillermo barked. 

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 

As they searched the hollow bones of the skeleton in which he had wasted his youth, he knew that they would not come across a single guest.  He had Eduardo’s manuscript in his hands.  The final paragraph, barely legible from the old ribbon, detailed the events that had just passed, down to the bizarre murder of the parrot.  The message was Eduardo’s and he had finally delivered it, taking Lola in his arms and crossing over to the other side with her forever.  Almo stuffed the typewriter into a canvas bag, along with the record and the green pieces of paper in his pocket and slung it across his shoulder with purpose.  It was Eduardo who had always lamented the boy’s existence, urging him to leave the stagnant pit of Inter Res and explore the world, feed his mind that was already too stale for his age and love a woman with all his heart.  Almo did not understand love, he knew from the stories that Eduardo told him that love and hate were brothers, that love was a motive for murder and for sacrifice, that love made people lose their senses, but they were just empty words.  He would step out into the unknown and find his own Lola and a world in colour.

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That night, the remaining trio feasted on the hapless bird, gnawing at the evidence, the piece of another world that had slipped through into theirs, which they would in time reject the very existence of.  Osvaldo, who had missed the entire episode, inspected his dinner with caution and some reluctance.  Guillermo, burping a feather, dug around his mouth with his thumb and forefinger and fished out a scrap of material that had wedged itself between his teeth, eyed it with suspicion, and held it up to Magdalena. 

‘Do you remember what any of them were wearing?’

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