DeSpayer was a thin Count, mucky, but on the outside top line black waist-coat and bow tie. Only the nose (shaped like an arrow head), gave any indication of irregularity. This quiet statesman kept his poly amorous souls buried in the thickest soil. Deep beneath the villa, golden rays warmed the mountain top and at it’s bottom, Atlantic rapids blanked the rocks to ice the prison boundaries.

Chad and Martin III, the poor Easygate: so young and hard and lost, the richer sibling Grace, Waldo (of gardens), each withered away one by one. In turn, in that carved out hollow, they passed around their stories of who they were before. They passed on their skills. They held each other strongly. After the first month, the captor was only spoken of indirectly: Valiantisha wth the spike in her chest, and Harry, who called himself The Battered, were the last remaining. Raw worm and accidental fish were not enough to keep the scourges gone. Waldo would not last long.

She bound and grabbed Grace’s legs and dug days and nights. Likewise with Harry. Using Easygate’s shoulders, he knocked rocks from out of the way. Valiantisha barely knew Chad, the first architect of their space then and once again as his body held up the fortifications they had hard won. It was Autumn when their white forms emerged from one dangerous side of the cliff. Waldo was first, his lifeless head a shovel. As the way became clearer, Harry emerged but blocked the hole for a while before the situation dawned on Valiantisha. She tossed his body over to the unforgiving expanse below. As ordered she had stripped the shoes from his feet first and marched them towards DeSpayer’s bedroom were she put an elbow bone through the Count’s skull.

The Count’s living room was sofas built of clean sponge parts, baige loungers in an open planned suite, with minimalist features. The glass was open to the sun, wine red shag curtains remote controlled for days of torrential assault. Between the oriental rugs, in the centre a jewel was embedded. When the time suited DeSpayer, the subterranean victims appeared there in hologram. They screamed in dental anguish, dirt leaked from the curtains. Cut open, wounds appeared as the rejected scrabbled against wooden dividers. Over time as the show was uglier, ivy grew, and Valiantisha drew nearer. Her money was enough to buy new cameras and commission a new show, called The Rainbow of Damage Control. DeSpayer’s former business colleagues were murdered in a manner much like the great purges. Assets were seized: it’s okay to call it pest control if pests are culled.

The Rainbow of Damage Control Show featured planes in emergency evacuation missions. Thousands of people airlifted in a 24 hour challenge. Flat pack transformer fortress were dropped for those unable to leave. Valiantisha died an old woman in a happier world.