Hotel Auschwitz

Hotel Auschwitz

A Novella

By Drew Gummerson

The candle on the bank manager’s desk guttered once, twice, three times. Benny Lieberman sucked in his breath and rubbed his hands close together. The shoes he had put on especially for the occasion pinched whitely at each of his little toes. A shooting pain.
“After all,” he said, “it is my family’s money” and he placed his narrow elbows perpendicular to his body on the wooden desk. He felt the two of them were reaching a point, or at least, a grim understanding.
The bank manager raised his eyebrows and his face below gave away nothing. It was this implacability that had helped him rise up while others fiddled in the mud.
“This business of mine will be a success,” said Benny. “I have a son to feed, yes?”
Outside the bank a horse whinnied and the air was cut with two dull cracks as stones were thrown against the bell-like body of a milkmaid’s urn.
“Hotel Auschwitz,” said Benny. He ran his tongue along cracked lips and twisted it secretly between a missing front tooth. “They will come,” he said. “I have dreamt it.”
Eight blunt fingernails pressed without shape into the palms of his hands. The candle guttered once more and went out. It was some kind of omen.

Benny’s son Casket sat patiently outside the bank on an overturned dustbin. He was all elbows and knees and he knew it. Longingly he was watching the older boys throw stones at the milkmaid’s urn and understood it was good and bad at the same time. Also, he wanted to ride the horse but was scared with what would happen if he did. Jewish boys were not allowed to ride horses, not these days.
As his father exited the bank he rose.
“Well papa?” he said.
Benny nodded. “We take a taxi, yes?”
Casket clapped his hands and spun around on one heel. Then he set about the serious business of finding a taxi.

The taxi was green in colour and smelt of gum-drops and cheap cologne. The driver had a round face about the size of a child’s football and hair the colour of sage. Shortly into the journey he began talking importantly of the time when he had Goering’s son in his car.
“He had blond hair like one of those white albinos. He wanted to know where he could find a lady. I took him down to the docks but not one of them was right. Too fat. Too tall. Too thin. Too short.” The driver pinched the skin under his nose as if he was testing a grape. “It was like nobody was good enough, you know? And later when I asked him about it he said he enjoyed to see them queue. That was his thrill. You understand? It’s sick if you ask me. Sick.”
He was driving with one hand on the wheel and when he wasn’t looking at the road he was looking back at Benny and Casket scrunched in the back.
“You won’t tell anyone this, will you?” said the driver. “I could lose my licence if my words got out. Talk isn’t cheap. That’s the thing.”
The car rattled up and up and up, out of the neat village and through sparse trees that clung to the horizon like rotten teeth and when it couldn’t go any further Benny told the driver to stop.
“There’s nothing up here,” said the driver. He turned around to confront his charges and pulled a wry face. “Nothing. I’ll tell you that for nothing.”
Benny stepped out of the cab onto a surface of pebbles. Wind whipped his hair so fiercely the strands cracked back painfully against his own skull.
They were on a escarpment of land about as big as a theatre parking lot. Five hundred metres below them an ink-looking sea boiled furiously and just visible through the branches of acacias stood the crumbling remains a brick built building. Somehow it stood apart from the cliff edge on its own pinnacle of rock. It was towards this lone structure that Casket and Benny were looking.
Benny cupped his whole arm around Casket and made his left hand into a sort of trumpet.
“THAT’S THE BABY,” he said. “WHO’D WANT TO LET THAT GOLDMINE GO?”
“There’s nothing up here,” said the driver. He made his lips into a tube and blew hard. “Nothing and nobody. No sir. Bob.”

They moved a week later. Benny hired a horse and cart and after much begging allowed Casket to feed the horse two lumps of sugar he had been keeping for just such an occasion. Its lips felt somehow alien as they brushed against his palm.
“The start of new things is always different,” said Casket. He pressed his mouth close to the horse’s nose. “That’s what makes them different.”
As they were about to leave Casket had a sudden bolt of inspiration. “What about mama? What if she comes back? She won’t know where to find us.”
Benny’s eyes darkened, like they had been lowered, eyeball by eyeball, into a pool of mud, and then, glancing to the boy at his side, he forced a smile.
“We will leave a note,” he said. He clapped his hands together in the manner of a cheap magician. “You write and I will dictate.”
Casket fetched a pencil from his back pocket and a piece of paper from the bottom of a dusty cupboard.
“Gone to the pinnacle of rock,” said Benny slowly. “Did you get that?”
Casket pursed his lips and furrowed his brow. “What was the last bit again?”

The horse made the same journey the taxi had made before it except it did so with less horse-power. This was Benny’s joke and he repeated it several times to Casket and then several times to himself.
As they reached the escarpment Casket saw that the acacia leaves which had been blocking the view of the building had been cleared away, and that the people most likely responsible for this were gathered in a small group.
“Ah,” said Benny. “The builders have arrived.”
Casket got down from the cart and watched as their furniture was removed from it by the men. By the fifth or sixth chair this grew dull so he wandered over to the edge of the escarpment.
Without the trees blocking the view, the building on the rock looked very far from the land and the sea looked very far below. Casket was wondering how the materials were ever got over there, and how he himself would get over there, when he felt a hand on his shoulder.
“Excuse me sonny-me-Jimbo,” said a rough voice, “you’re standing right where we’re putting the temporary bridge. If you could just shift a few feet to the right. We’ve got to put in the footings.”
“Sorry,” said Casket and did as he was bid. As he watched the men work he practised the words he had just heard under his breath.
‘We’ve got to put in the footings’ he said, and surreptitiously he wrapped his fingers around his bicep and silently flexed.

Casket’s favourite builder was the one his father called Kark. Kark spoke in a language that seemed to consist solely of the letter k, but despite this Casket and he spent hours amicably together. They would communicate by drawing pictograms on the back of Kark’s West cigarette packets.
Kark worked primarily on the cable-car that would connect the building to the mainland. In all of his free hours Casket would go and watch Kark as the two steel towers went up like spider’s webs, one on the escarpment and one the area just to the front of the hotel.
One day Benny drew a line through the air with the point of his finger.
“A steel cable will connect the towers. A basket will hang from the cable. You see?”
Casket nodded his head.
“Basket sounds like Casket,” said Benny. “But a casket is used for holding jewels. Or it is another word for coffin.” Benny put his hand over his mouth and then he put this same hand flat on the top of his son’s head. “You are my jewel,” he said. “You do know that?”
Casket nodded.
“The cable will be as thick as your arm,” said Benny. “Thicker probably.”
One day Kark drew the two towers on his cigarette packet. Next he drew the cable between the towers. He turned the pack over and drew a final picture. On this one the cable between the towers appeared to snap and slice off the head of a small stick-boy.
Kark said something that was all ks and Casket went inside the hotel. There, in a dust-cloud of air, he found his father leaning over the half-built wooden counter. He had a stack of holiday brochures in front of him and a pensive look on his face.
“These hotels, you really think they look like their pictures? It is quite unbelievable.” Benny plucked up a pencil and held it tightly in one hand. “Come,” he said. “Describe this hotel to me in thirty words or less.”
“How many less?” said Casket.
Half an hour of frantic thought later they had come up with only five words and they didn’t seem to go together to make a sentence. Thoroughly depressed Benny handed Casket the pad and pencil and told him to explore the hotel.
“Make notes as you go, and later we will write this advertisement thing together.”
Casket grinned. ‘Advertisement’ was the longest word he had ever heard and he wanted to write it down so he would remember it. Only he didn’t know how it was spelt.
The boy’s knees angled as he took the stairs three at a time. At the top of the final flight on a floor of its own was the penthouse suite, two rooms inexplicably linked with a white concertina door. From the window here was a view of the sea, raging white spume moving in crescendos. But Casket chose instead a cupboard, interiors being less fearsome than exteriors, and was rewarded for his curiosity by a stack of colourful looking magazines. He pulled them out and, resting on elbows, spread them before him across the rough carpet like a deck of cards.
Each magazine was like the other up to a point but that was where the similarity ended. On each, in the top right-hand was a gold DC, under this was a garish set of letters, in red, filled out with colour, and much bigger: ‘Aventine’.
It was not a word that Casket knew. He ran a tongue over his dry lips, perhaps in anticipation of the significance of the word, and said it out loud, ‘Aventine’.
Under this title was the drawing of a man. It would always be this man but that was where these magazines differed. In one the man was dressed as a humble janitor, a pencil behind his ear, taking orders from a sly looking foreman, in another, riding a pony across a shimmering desert, in another, on a spaceship in the claws of a giant crab.
At the bottom of the page in black cursive script, ‘Aventine, the man who controls time, at the mercy of his own destiny’.
Casket’s Uncle Trebor, before he was taken away, had once given him a similar thing, only on a much less prodigious scale. Casket knew he had found a comic book collection. He selected one at random, handling it as carefully as he would an egg, licked a finger to the beat of his heart and prepared to turn over the page.
However, as he did so, the air was split in two with his father banging the dinner gong. Casket looked up and saw outside was night and that the eye of the distant lighthouse was looking through it, sweeping back and forth as if searching for a keyhole it would never find.
He replaced the comic books as he found them and as he elbowed and kneed his way back down the stairs looked forward already to a future pleasure in a penthouse suite.

The following nine days were busy ones as work on the hotel continued apace. One day the cable-car was finished and all the workers gathered outside to watch its first journey.
The basket was shaped like a throat lozenge with windows spanning its upper half. Benny had stolen its design from a book on zeppelin cabins he had found in the municipal library in Leipzig and ordered its construction from a Berlin steel turner. The painting of the shell he had done itself.
As the basket grew closer Casket could make out the words on the side, ‘Hotel Auschwitz, Cable Service’.
“I thought of that phrase myself,” said Benny, pumping out his narrow chest.
For once the wind had stopped and the clouds had broken. Casket had never felt more happy and he hadn’t even thought of the other doors of possibility opening yet. Hotel. Guests. Other people. Adventure.
As the basket slipped into its moorings there was a round of applause from the workers. Kark stepped out of the wooden hut from where he had been operating the progress of the basket and opened the car door with a flourish. He gave a small bow as if someone was getting out, although for safety reasons, no one had been inside.
“What would happen if the cable snapped?” said Casket.
“That cable is as thick as your arm,” said Benny. “Thicker. An elephant could travel safely in the basket without harm to a hair on its head.”
“Can I go in it?”
Benny was a small man, with arms and legs like high-tension wire. In some lights, like now, his face resembled a skull which could frighten those who didn’t know him.
“My son,” he said. “First we must bring across the letters.”
Casket walked to the end of the cliff and folded his arms. Far below he could see the rocks. They seemed to have teeth. A lone red bird was hopping from tooth to tooth to tooth.
The boy put out his arms and wondered what it would be like to fly and then he thought of Aventine and wondered if he could fly and then he turned back as he heard the clack, clack, clack coming from the engine of the cable-car motor. He wanted to see the letters coming.
The letters had been delivered three days previously from the back of a flatbed truck by two men smoking long, endlessly burning cigarettes. The letters were invisible to the naked eye being contained in thin rectangular cardboard boxes.
Benny had told Casket the letters were neon although Casket had no idea what this was. Neon sounded like one of those superheroes he wanted to dream about.
“Neon burns most brightly at night,” said Benny, “It’s a gas.”
That didn’t help any. Casket had an understanding of burning but it was usually done by bad people to good things, especially at night. He forget about flying for the moment and stood watching.
Kark operated the movement of the car and Benny made the journeys, his face against pressed the glass of the basket on the way back, flattened like a sponge, cramped in as he was with one of the boxes. Casket half remembered that the previous evening his father had come into his bedroom and sat on the side of his bed.
“This name is important for me, Hotel Auschwitz.”
He said this again and again, the words like sheep jumping over stiles in the young boy’s head until he had fallen asleep.
Finally all the letters were across and only now did Benny allow the workers to unpack them. He walked around and around in an increasing circle extolling patience and haste, solicitude and caution.
“Put them fifteen feet up. I want them in a straight line. Front of the hotel. I want them visible from the bluff. If people can’t see them, they won’t know we’re here. I want it to be a statement.”
Casket saw now that neon was a kind of tubing, colourful pipes that a plumber might use if he wanted cheer a bed-ridden old lady, like flowers from a niece.
A series of pulleys and ropes were employed and one by one the letters went up until disaster struck. There was a large dull space. The ‘c’ had somehow gone missing.
A search was made generally of the area round and about the hotel. Benny put his hands on his slender hips and he shouted at Kark. Kark went into the wooden hut and Benny went into the basket and Casket watched his father making another of those journeys.
He knew it was useless. He could see no ‘c’ on the other side. Neither the box or its outline. It had gone. Disappeared.

“God puts these trials in our way to test us,” said Benny.
“And have we passed the test?” asked Casket.
Casket was in bed. The candle at his bedside cast moon-shaped shadows through the cardboard silhouette he had laboriously made from the edge of one of the neon light boxes.
“That is the beauty of religion,” said Benny. “You don’t know until you die. It keeps you on your toes.”
In the weak candlelight Benny looked more corpse-like than normal. There were deep indents in his forehead like the tracks made by a stagecoach in the snow.
“Don’t worry too much, dad,” said Casket.
“If not me, then who?” said Benny. He stood up and went to the door. There, he paused, came back to the bed, bent, and blew out the candle. This was Casket’s absolute favourite time of day; the transition from semi-light to semi-dark, the smell of an extinguished wick, his father near by, like sleep.
“Boy,” said Benny. “This hotel will be fantastic. Yes it will.”

The next morning, Benny being busy downstairs barking into a Bakelite telephone, Casket was free to sneak back to the penthouse suite and examine his trove in the cupboard.
Once more he sat cross-legged on the floor and fanned the comic books before him. Feeling that the right way to go about it was by chance, chance having put this cache before him he closed his eyes, reached and set himself to read.
Aventine, it turned out, by day worked as a lonely janitor. His home was one musty room next to the generator in the bowels of a hotel on the edge of a desert. His one true friend was his cat Schnapps, who slept on his pillow and often went missing for days.
Casket followed the inked in rectangles with his fingers, his eyes darting from the images themselves to the upright letters in the bubble boxes, missing nothing.
An old lady crying at reception has had a brooch go missing, a present from her long dead husband. The staff sneer, she is old, she has lost it. Aventine investigates.
The brooch is a key to time. The long dead husband Victorius Snaft, Edwardian inventor, hounded by the establishment. The brooch it turns out was taken by Viminal, the hotel proprietor, megalomaniac, entrepreneur, political inveigler.
A tussle follows, the boxes expand and break, lightning strikes, and Aventine is chasing Viminal through the Coliseum.
Casket shifted from cross-legged to his belly, placed one hand under his chin. The pages turned faster. Lions roar, plots are made, an emperor is assassinated and Viminal takes his place after being handed a mysterious book, The Book Of One, by a wily courtier.
On a boat trip down a wide river, with Aventine dressed as a Russian sewer worker, Aventine manages to steal this Book Of One. Time expands, contracts, and Aventine is back in his room. Things are the same and different. The hotel is more sumptuous, ten new floors have been added, Viminal’s wealth and power expanded.
The story ends with a meeting in the bar between the widow of Victorius Snaft and Aventine. Her brooch is not returned but she is stunned by the mention of the Book of One. It must not fall into the hands of Viminal.
She will help Aventine. She knows the formula to shape shift time. He will need this to escape the clutches of Viminal.
“Viminal must not get this book,” she says. “On that, the future and the past, of mankind depends. Let us hope he is only partly aware of its power.”

Benny’s calls were like that of the seagulls outside and for a time they existed on the outside of Casket’s consciousness, like seagulls. Finally breaking through, Casket replaced the comic books and hurried downstairs.
Benny had his elbows on the reception desk, the cord from the telephone around his neck, the receiver hanging down. From it came a tone, a long dead sound.
“I have traced the missing letter,” said Benny. “A policeman is on his way.”
They went out to wait and sent the cable-car across in anticipation. As it came back they could see the blue of the uniform as it absorbed the light from the sun.
The edges of the policeman’s blond hair seeped from the stiff corners of his hat. He flicked open a pocketbook and declined the invitation into the hotel.
“Quite broken,” he said. “The box was found by the juggler’s nephew. We traced it to you by way of the name on the side.” His eyes swept up the façade of the hotel. The other letters were in place, massive lanterns of celebration missing their comrade. “It could be mindless vandalism. It could be a hate crime. With this kind of thing you never know. Do you have your permits?”
Once again the policeman declined entry to the hotel and waited motionless as Benny went in to retrieve his paperwork. This was a thick bundle, fastened with an elastic band.
The policeman went through the documents one by one. Several of them he held up to the sunlight like they were banknotes. The sunlight was weak and he had to squint his eyes giving himself an almost Oriental aura. Finally, he handed them back to Benny.
“If you could bring them down to the station. Several of them need rubber-stamping. The sooner the better.”
As Benny operated the cable-car engine he spoke softly under his breath, the words coming like a prayer or the opposite. Casket knew to leave his father alone. He went to the edge of the bluff from where he could see the sea and he practised making karate chop-like movements through the air.
He liked to feel the air against the edge of his hand. It was visible and invisible at the same time.

Early the following morning Casket was woken by noises. He slipped from his bed and padded down the stairs.
Benny was behind the counter holding a deck of postcards like they were loaded.
“I meant to do this job myself,” he said, “but now it looks like I will be waylaid at the police station all day.”
Casket sashayed closer to the counter, the bottom of his pyjamas skirting where the workmen’s dust still lay on the floor. He tried to catch a glimpse of the cards as Benny shuffled them messily between his two hands.
“We’re having an opening party. I want you to deliver these invitations for me.”
“Can I get dressed first?”
“Wrap up warm and wear a hat. I don’t want you catching anything.”
When Casket came back downstairs Benny had built the stack of invitations into a house of cards. It resembled somewhat the shape of the hotel, wider at the bottom than the top and kind of transitory, like all new things.
“Pull your hat down,” he said, “and fasten it under your chin. If anything should happen...”
Benny dismantled the card house in one swift movement and realigned the cards into neatness. He delved into a pocket and drew out a folio-sized page folded into a square.
“I’ve drawn you a map. The names are on the reverse. Just deliver the cards and go. Don’t get involved in anything. The party is for show. If they come, they come. The real guests will arrive later. You understand?”
Casket nodded and followed his father outside.
It was the first time he had been in the cable-car alone. He put both hands down flat on the wide passenger seat. It felt plush. Halfway across he leapt up and pressed his nose against the glass. Far below he could see the red bird again, jumping from tooth to tooth.
It was like it knew something, or didn’t know; its movements an act of decisiveness or indecisiveness. Or perhaps that was how Casket himself felt, it was the first time he had been out on his own for a long time and he was half aware of the dangers his father had intimated.
Once on the other side, he turned for a final look. The hotel was in full view and suddenly he was filled with a sense of pride that that was where he lived, this grand building. Everything would work out ok, that’s what such solidity said. Didn’t it?

The village was small, neat, self-contained. It was surrounded by fields for the grazing of cattle, for the growing of corn. At the eastern border stood a large ironworks where the men had worked for centuries. For those that wanted to go places there was the train station but there was a general feeling that travel was not necessary. The station was more of a symbol than anything else.
Casket’s first port of call was at Mr Danvers, the dentist’s. At the door he stopped and surveyed a small sign. There was a picture of a rat on it and around the rat, a fan of letters, ‘No Jews’.
He couldn’t remember it being there the year previously. Then he had been dressed up as a soldier. Mr Danvers had tied a rock to Casket’s bad tooth and thrown the rock out of the window. Everyone said how brave he was and he, through his tears, had agreed.
In the street a ragged dog played, chasing its ragged tail. A window was opened and water was thrown out. Somewhere a needle scratched at a record.
After all, thought Casket, he wasn’t attending the dentist on the pretext of being a Jew. This was hotel business. He pushed open the door and went upstairs.
The reception was empty. Pictures of teeth hung silently on the wood-panelled walls. The boy sorted through the magazines lapping each other on a table, found nothing of interest, then noticed a pair of feet through the open door to the surgery.
“Helloa,” he called and went inside.
Mr Danvers was reclining in the dentist’s chair. His glasses were on the end of his nose and he appeared to be reading a newspaper. On the front of it a man hung from the end of a rope.
“Helloa,” said Casket again and Mr Danvers looked up.
“You’ve come about the mince?” he said.
Casket fanned the cards in his left hand and selected one. He had been practising this. It had something of a show about it.
“We always have mince on a Tuesday,” said Mr Danvers.
“It’s Thursday,” said Casket. He bowed, closed the fan of cards in his one hand and flipped the card towards with Mr Danvers with the other.
“Oh dear,” said Mr Danvers. “I see.” He held the card up to his nose, reading it out loud over the top of his glasses.
“Hotel Auschwitz. Stunning location in desirable setting. Enjoy the scenery. Fish. Walking. All rooms have their own candles and bedpans. Reasonable rates. Groups welcome. Cable-Car service must be tried to be experienced.”
“Other side,” said Casket.
Mr Danvers turned the card and read. Then he lowered it and looked over Casket’s shoulder. Casket turned but there was nobody there.
“You are giving these out around the village?”
“That’s the biscuit,” said Casket.
“Oh dear.” Mr Danvers shook his head. He beckoned the boy over to a closet and pulled them both inside.
“Let us be certain of our boundaries. You have a number of these to give out, yes?”
Casket nodded. It was stuffy in the closet. Something sharp stuck into his back and he could smell the dentist’s breath. It was like lemons. Mr Danvers ran a hand over his head like he was an accomplished pianist too bored, or perhaps too proud, to play a tune. His eyes narrowed.
“Wednesdays are very bad for a boy to be about the town. It is the day of the kid-catcher. One look and whoosh, you will be gone.”
“It’s Thursday,” said Casket. “I told you.” The last three words were mere bravado. He was beginning to feel haunted.
“Wednesdays, Thursdays, to be honest, it’s all the same. We will make a deal, yes? I will give out these cards for you and you will go straight home.”
“But my father...”
“He is a good man. When the brush is so big and there is so much tar it is difficult not to get it stuck to you. You see?”
Casket wasn’t sure he did but he wasn’t old enough to slough off the transference of fear.
“And you will deliver the cards?”
“I am a dentist and a man of my word.”
The boy thought of the way the previous year he had arrived in pain and left with none. On top of this was the thought of his stash of comic books. If he wasn’t handing out cards he could be doing something else.

Aventine sits in a café on the moon under the safety of a lunar bubble. Opposite sits Eleanor Snaft, widow of Victorius, draped in a luminescent shawl. Waiters bob between the tables, trays balanced on palms with an invisible precision, while outside giant crabs, six feet tall, glide across the barren landscape.
“We must find a place to hide The Book of One,” says Eleanor.
Aventine raises a glass to his mouth and grimaces. “What is this stuff?” His lips are perfect. His muscles bulge even when seated.
Eleanor reaches a hand across the table. “The future, you may get used to it.”
“I don’t understand,” says Aventine, “if we can travel through time, why don’t we go back to the time when the book was made. Destroy it once and for all!”
The air around Eleanor shimmers. She is surrounded by tiny localised lightning. Suddenly she is young and beautiful. Long and luxurious hair reaches almost down to the ground.
“There are rules to learn. The rules of time. And the most important one is that we must not corrupt it. If we do then we will be like Viminal!”
Eleanor is old again. She leans close across the table. “Tomorrow we hide the book out on the moon’s surface. Then we find Viminal and get back my brooch. Let us hope he has already not done too much damage.”
Frame by frame a crab has been careening closer and closer to the dome of the café. Now it raises its claw and slams it against the glass. A waiter drops his tray. Two diners leap up from their table. Shards of glass fall from the ceiling.
The crab hits the glass again and it is through. Standing behind it in a black suit and space helmet is Viminal.
“He has found us!” shouts Aventine.
“Run for it!” shouts Eleanor.
Casket rubbed his eyes and leant closer to the page. Before turning it he put a finger on the crab and traced its outline. There was no doubt of its believability, its shape too complex to be the product of mere imagination.
Aventine and Eleanor are running down a space-station corridor. Eleanor slips and Aventine twists to help her. Viminal is there. A smile crosses his lips and he reaches into his pocket and withdraws a gun, sleek and black.
“The Book of One,” he says. “It is my destiny.”
Eleanor’s eyes lock with Aventine’s. He has his arm under her neck and is cradling her. From his back pocket juts the spine of The Book of One. Viminal throws back his head and laughs.
“The fire doors,” whispers Eleanor.
In four frames joined in continuous action Aventine pulls the book from his pocket and launches it towards a fire alarm box, this in close up. The book hits the glass. It smashes. Close up of Viminal’s face. His mouth hangs open. Cut to a long shot. A door crashes down sealing off the section of corridor Viminal is in and Eleanor and Aventine make good their escape.
“I want you to tell me about this Book of One,” says Aventine. “Why is it so important?”
Eleanor looks grave. They are in a rocket, Aventine at the controls. Outside the window is an endless map of stars.
“I have to know,” says Aventine.
“I will tell you,” says Eleanor. “But once I do, there will be no going back.”
“It is already too late for me to go back,” says Aventine.
He presses a button. Stars zoom closer. The frame cuts and the rocket gets smaller and smaller and disappears into the distance.

“And you gave out all the cards, yes?”
This was the hundredth time Benny had asked Casket this over the past three days. This time Casket ignored his father and instead eyed them both in the mirror they were standing in front of.
“Hold the candle nearer,” he said. “I want to see myself.”
Benny did as told and Casket licked the two middle fingers of his left hand and attacked some strands of recalcitrant hair. This was a trick he had been taught long ago.
“Mother, she would have been proud, yes?” said Casket.
Something akin to a fog passed over Benny’s face and as quickly, disappeared again.
“Come,” said Benny. “I have something to show you.”
For a second the boy lingered, sniffing the air where the candle had been and then he followed his father from the room and out of the hotel.
“Look,” said Benny, pointing up to the neon sign.
The letters looked like children’s toys grown bored with and tossed aside. Despite this, they had a certain effect, like a naked man on a horse on the day of the parade.
“Well?” said Benny.
“You got the c,” said Casket.
“Yes,” said Benny, “I got the c.”
He slipped an arm around his son and pulled him close. One day, he hoped, he would grow up and be big and strong. He would have children and they in turn would grow up. That was how things were supposed to work.
Behind them was a cough. They spun around and there was Kark. Someone had dressed him in a suit, having had the idea that he would stay on at the hotel now the building work was done; he and two other of the builders. Benny knew that not everyone wanted to work for Jews, even other Jews, and besides, he trusted these people. They had worked long and hard for him.
Kark pointed towards the land on the bluff. A number of cars had already gathered, their headlamps cutting cones of light through the dark air. It seemed the townsfolk were going to attend the opening party after all. Benny rubbed his hands together.
“Send the cable-car across, Kark,” he said. “I will pour the champagne.”

Having neither the money nor the knowledge of how it would be organised, for this occasion, there was no orchestra. Earlier that morning Benny had asked Casket to help him bring down the old Telefunken radio from his bedroom, heavy in its walnut casing.
For some minutes there had been panic as the only sound the speakers would emit was a dull crackle. At last there had been a voice and momentarily relief flared only to fade again when they realised the channel in question was dedicated to Austrian cuisine.
“Take two lobsters,” said the voice, a mildly upperclass lady with the hint of a mountaineer’s spirit about her, “and batter them gently.”
“We can dance the lobster quadrille,” said Casket, spinning on a worn out heel and laughing.
Finally it was Kark who saved the day with a length of fishing wire fused to the aerial. He drew a picture of himself fishing on the back of his West packet and Casket smiled and slipped a hand into Kark’s pocket for no other reason than it was warm.
As the guests entered the hall through the main doors, Benny entered the room backwards from the swing kitchen door wheeling a hostess trolley in front of him.
“Help yourself to champagne!” he said. “And there are snacks!”
Several people looked around with their noses in the air until Kark appeared out of the kitchen door. He had a tray on each hand and each tray contained neat rows of finger-sized white bread with fishes on top, head and tails still attached.
Benny turned up the music, a Scandinavian Waltz, popular he remembered with the National Democrats some years before, and did a semi-Waltz himself, trying to divide his time equally between the guests, answering their questions when they had them, deciding on what to say when they did not.
Soon his jaw grew tired and he couldn’t remember what he had said to whom and when. He thought he had told Himmler twice that each bedroom had a view of the sea and the lady who had asked for directions to the bathroom he believed he had sent to the kitchen. The music in the background was repetitive.
Casket was watching the whole spectacle from underneath one of the corner tables, he believed quite unnoticed, until he noticed three sets of eyes peering at him.
He blinked twice, three times, and three girls, similar in blond hair and corn blue dresses slid into perspective. They were like three spruce dogs nobody would willingly take home from the pound.
“We want to hear you sing,” one said.
“Yes rather. Daddy said let the Jew-boy sing for his supper.”
Casket, feeling rather foolish being seen to be under a table, felt himself going red.
“I...” he started. “And you see...” he added, when he was saved from adding anything further by a general cry from all the guests that they would like to see the hotel.
He joined the end of the procession doing his best to avoid the stiff canes of the men, the swishing dresses of the ladies and the attention of the three little girls. Occasionally he overheard a snippet of conversation, ‘dirty’, or ‘really’ said in a condescending tone and he felt his ears burning again, only this time in anger.
On the second floor, in the cupboard under the stairs that housed the cleaning equipment and spare towels, the boy found himself again facing the line of three girls.
“Einey, meeny, miney, mo,” said one.
“Prick the Jew-boy and watch him glow,” said another.
Casket remembered the rhyme from his days at school, only then it had been sung by the older boys. They would hold him down and urinate on him.
“This is my father’s hotel,” said Casket. This seemed an appropriate response. After all, wasn’t he his own master?
It was the shrillest of the girls who answered. “It’s your father’s hotel only if the will of the government allows it. And besides what is a hotel with no guests. Who do you think would want to come and stay in this fleapit?”
An older woman appeared in the doorway to the cupboard. She was wearing a statuesque blue hat and had a pair of glasses on a chain around her neck.
“Rather small for a bedroom,” she said. “And so many towels. What can it mean? Come children. We are to go downstairs once more. When will this show be over?”

Kark was leaning over the radio. As he saw Benny he grimaced and held up the lead. It looked as though the end had been hewn clean off.
Benny looked hopefully around the hall. Bits of fish clung desperately to the floor, like trout swimming up a dry stream. Bread with teeth marks gave a good impression of a dentist’s moulds. But there was no sign of a plug, and what was a party without music?
It was Himmler who stepped forward. Benny remembered now that he was the local pork butcher and it was rumoured that his sausages were one hundred per cent offal.
Himmler pushed up his round glasses so that they rested almost perpendicularly against his forehead. “Why doesn’t your son dance? That is something I would like to see.”
A chorus of approval rustled through the guests.
Kark’s two helpers, the other two builders, had appeared through the swing door of the kitchen. They were dressed in the same sharp suits as Kark. With their stubble and sun-darkened skin they resembled Cheka agents from the provinces although the truth of the matter was that neither one had ever been to Russia.
Himmler started to clap his hands, slowly, and slowly, the other guests joined in.
Kark went over and said something in Benny’s ear. Benny glanced across at the two builders. He thought of his favourite book, Frankenstein, and the part when the castle is stormed. Then his face clouded over and he wondered if that scene might, after all, have been from Dracula.
He had been working too hard and for some reason had wanted to please these people. But a hotel is not for locals. That was a fact. People who live in a place already have a bed to sleep in. It is the foreigners who are important to the hotelier. That’s what sets him aside from the mainline and opens his eyes.
He had been short-sighted. Benny was about to tell them all to leave, that the party was over, when Casket stepped into a circle of candlelight. He bowed and began to dance.
There was something wild about his movements. Now he was tiger-like. Now stomping like a rhino.
Benny wanted to tell him to stop, tell him all this was a travesty, when he noticed that all those that had been clapping were doing so no longer. The only sounds were those of his son’s shoes hitting the wooden floor. Fish danced around him, having been brought to life by the vibrations.
Benny tried to think again of Frankenstein, or of Dracula. He tried to remember how those villagers had felt when confronted by their monster. He couldn’t, and he couldn’t remember if those books had ended badly. All he could remember was that there was a monster and somehow that monster was the hero.
He started to dance himself, a little stick-man with a face like a corpse. He spun around and around and felt foolish, and happy, and alive and sad.
“Let them eat cake!” he screamed and the fish continued to jump.

In the grate in the kitchen the fire roared like a monster. Two slaughtered ducks hung from hooks above the large metal oven, their beaks half-open. At the large oak table sat Casket, Kark, and the two builders, whose names are known now; Tavarius and Snitch. They are engaged in a game of cards and all dressed only in their underwear due to the intense heat.
Casket laid down a pair of black queens and grinned intensely at Kark. Snitch leant over the table and put a finger to his lips. He told them to listen to the radio.
For the past weeks they had been listening to the progress of a Jewish table tennis team. They were through to the quarter-finals of the state championship.
“Twenty to fourteen,” said Snitch. “We’re going to win.”
Tavarius put down two red queens and burped loudly into his open hand. Snitch leapt into the air.
“That’s it. Through to the semis. Twenty-one to fourteen. Easy.”
They all raised their glasses and clinked them in the middle of the table. As they did so Benny entered the kitchen.
“What?” he said hopefully. “We have a guest?”
Kark shook his head and made a show of going over to the kitchen window. He wiped away a handful of steam and peered out. It was snowing. He turned back.
“No quest,” he said.
“Guest,” said Casket. “Guh.”
In his spare time Casket had been teaching Kark to speak English. He thought that one day he might show Kark the comic books he had found but he wasn’t ready yet. For now, they were still his secret, like knowing that Santa didn’t exist, but pretending that he did.
Benny told Casket to shove up and he sat down at the table. As he did so he pulled a pile of magazines from under his arm and spread them out effectively ending the game of cards.
“I’ve put in some more adverts. The Bavarian Quartet. The Gazelle. And this magazine, it’s aimed at archaeologists. They would want to come here. We’re on top of a rock. That must be unusual.”
They all looked at the advert. It was Tavarius who had taken the photo and it had been his idea to have Benny and Casket standing in the doorway. He said it gave the place a family feel. He said that Kark should dress up as a lady and play the mother and Benny had nearly got angry until he saw that it was just a joke.
That’s what Casket liked. He loved the camaraderie between them.
“The advert is good, yes?” said Benny. “You think they will come?”
“Oh sure sure,” said Snitch too quickly.
“Definitely,” said Casket. He slipped his hand into his father’s. “Dad can I have a tattoo?”
“What?”
“Like Snitch and Tavarius. Those numbers on their arms, I like them.”
Later that night as Benny came to tuck him up in bed Casket asked for a story.
The candlelight entered the depths of Benny’s eyes and the breeze and the flicker caused the light to swim there.
“I don’t know that I know one,” said Benny.
“Then I’ll tell you one,” said Casket. “There was once this hotel and everybody came.”
“Yes?” said Benny, almost smiling. “And?”
“That’s it,” said Casket. He turned over onto his side. “Only they didn’t come at first. That’s an extra bit.”
With a gust of breath Benny blew out the candle, patted his son on his head, and made for the door. Before he was out of it Casket was sitting back up again, sniffing at the air.

The opening page is filled with one huge picture. In the bottom right-hand corner is Viminal’s back, rectangular and inked in black. He is flanked on either side by his cronies, high up on a stone balcony, facing a square.
Across the square, a sense of movement given to each and every one, march hundred upon hundred of soldiers; thick boots, guns with bayonets, helmets like cut phalluses.
But what is remarkable in the piece, apart for its sheer scale, are the eyes of the soldiers. Every eye is focused on Viminal. They say that he is their leader and that they would die for him.
Outside the window of the hotel Casket thought he heard a noise. He stood up, his knees clicking like the keys of a typewriter being struck by a fat man, and went to look.
It was snowing, the fall of the snow captured intermittently by the lighthouse’s rotating cone of light. In the pool of light from the hotel’s ground floor windows Casket could see the red bird. It seemed to be walking with intent, leaving little footprints in the snow, like fork-marks in mashed potato.
The boy wondered momentarily if the bird could have made the noise, shook his head, and went back to his comic. He turned the page.
The first frame is of a narrow tailor’s shop in a deserted street. In an upstairs window two heads can be seen in silhouette through a blind. The next frame reveals Aventine and Eleanor sitting at a wooden table, a half empty bottle of wine between them. Eleanor looks different. She looks younger.
“I don’t know,” says Eleanor. She has her head in her hands. “It is a disruption of time.”
Aventine hesitates, as if he is going to take her hand, then thinks better of it.
“But why?”
“Victorius said that time was fragile. He said that if anyone should use time travel to gain anything to their advantage it could set off massive repercussions.” Eleanor holds up her young hands and looks at them. “I can only think that this is a result of that.”
“You were going to tell me about The Book of One.”
“I..”
“If you want me to help you then I have to know.”
“Victorius, as a leading inventor of his time, had many friends. There was one, Darwin, a quite brilliant anthropologist. They worked on the ideas together. It was supposed to be for good of all mankind but it was only as they reached the end of their work that they realised how it might be used for evil.”
“My God,” says Aventine, “you mean all this is a result of your husband’s work!”
“No,” says Eleanor. “Evil must precede it. Don’t you see that? Survival of the fittest. Who knew where it would lead?”
From outside comes the sound of screaming. Aventine leaps up and goes over to the window.
In the street a woman cowers before the raised arm of a soldier. The contents of a basket of flowers lie on the street. The flowers are red and are the only colour on a black and white page.
Another soldier comes running around the corner of the street. His shoes make sharp noises on the cobbles. He sees his comrade and the woman on the floor. A smile crosses his lips. He says something to his friend and between them they drag the woman towards a dark alley.
The woman’s screams ring out loudly in the night. A cat arches its back atop an overturned dustbin and turns away.
“I must help,” says Aventine.
Eleanor raises her hands to her face and slowly she nods.
“But be careful. We are here to stop Viminal. Don’t forget that.”
There is another scream and Aventine runs down the stairs. His hair flies behind him, the bottom of his jacket catches the wind, billowing. He lands on the ground floor with a thud and is out in the street.
The woman has her hands flat on the floor. She is pushing herself backwards.
“Please,” she says. “Please.”
The soldier grins. “You’re for the train soon anyway, and far worse than this. Why not try and enjoy it?”
“You are monsters,” says the woman.
The soldier throws back his head and laughs.
“Monster!”
The soldier’s trousers fall to his ankles. The other soldier who is supposed to be watching at the mouth of the alley turns to look at his friend, and wham!, he is floored by Aventine with a punch to the jaw. His helmet goes flying and skitters across the cobbles.
“What?” The other soldier looks behind him.
“Looks like your friend decided to put his head down,” says Aventine. His fist is clenched and his mouth is a straight line just off horizontal.
The soldier hastily pulls up his trousers. The woman behind him half sits up. The soldiers puts out his hands, palms out.
“Listen buddy,” he says. “Just a bit of fun. You know?”
“Get lost,” says Aventine.
The soldier looks at Aventine. He opens his mouth, closes it and goes to help his friend who is waking. The friend has stars above his head and is rubbing his eyes.
Aventine bends down and lifts the woman up, one of his strong arms behind her back. He wipes away stands of hair from her face.
“Those brutes,” she says. “Thank you. They were going to...”
“I know.”
She begins to sob harder. “What is going to happen to us? Last week I came home and found my parents gone. The neighbour told me. They were given one hour to relocate. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.”
The woman’s words appear in small boxes. Below these are images of the events she is describing. The parents are small and thin-limbed compared to the powerful bodies of the soldiers.
“It will be alright,” says Aventine. “It has to be alright.”
The next image shows just a brick wall. It is the corner of the alley where Aventine is nestling the woman. Around the corner of the brick wall points a gun. There is a flash from the gun. A soldier, shown from high above, runs away.
The woman in Aventine’s arms slumps forward.
“What?!!!” says Aventine. “Oh no!!!???”
The woman is dead, her mouth hangs open.
Aventine walks back towards the flat above the tailor’s. Standing on a corner, under the cone of light pouring from a lamp post is yet another soldier. His face is bent towards a cigarette in his hands.
Aventine creeps up behind him, grabs his neck in a lock and savagely twists.
“Smoking will kill you,” he says, although his tone doesn’t have an ounce of humour in it.
He looks about him once, twice and then kneels next to the prone body of the soldier.
When Aventine steps back into the room where Eleanor has been waiting he is wearing the soldier’s uniform. Eleanor leaps up, not recognising her friend.
“Don’t worry,” says Aventine, “it is me.”
“But?? What??” Eleanor’s eyes are open wide.
“I have a plan,” says Aventine. “Come on. Let’s go. The sooner we get started on this then the sooner we are finished. I have a feeling it is going to be a very long night.”

Casket stood on tiptoe and put his finger on the window. Condensation immediately collected around it like raindrops. It was colder without than within. The snow was nearly up to the top of the first pane now, collecting there like a wall.
Tavarius and Snitch sat at the table, legs bulging from the elastic of their underpants. Between them was the radio, pumping out a vibrating buzz of static, all they had been able to find for the previous three days, but somehow more comforting than the noisome wail of deathly silence.
The two men were deep in conversation. The day before Snitch had been refused entry to Himmler’s butcher’s shop. Instead he had been made to go around the back and be served among the bins and rats in the alleyway.
“’We don’t want your kind in here,’” Snitch said, imitating Himmler’s voice for the hundredth time. He pinched his nose while he did this and the words came out like the high squeal of a pig in labour.
Tavarius smiled. “’Your kind’. If only he knew the whole story. Gypsy, gay and Jew, a heady combination.”
Casket slipped from the bucket he was standing upon and clattered to the ground. He righted himself, sheepishly rubbing an elbow.
Tavarius and Snitch, perhaps realising the boy was there or maybe just wanting to talk of lighter matters, changed their topic and began to talk of Kark.
Kark had developed something of the legend about him. Each morning he would awake long before the dawn, fill two huge flasks with coffee, put two loaves of bread in a sack, and head out to the motor-room of the cable-car. If a guest arrived, he said, he didn’t want them to wait. At least, this is what he had drawn in a series of pictograms on the back of three used West cigarette packs.
“They say he has liquid nitrogen running through his veins,” said Tavarius, placing a massive hand on the boy’s head.
“And that he once fought two grizzlies for a ten dollar bet and won within a minute.”
“What’s liquid nitrogen?” asked Casket.
Snitch laughed. “It’s very cold,” he said. “Like out there where Kark is sitting.”
“We won’t get any guests now,” said Tavarius. “Not in this weather. I reckon we’s here for the duration.”
Snitch noticed the boy’s downcast face. “We might, you know,” he said. “People are like to want to come here in Winter. The views are spectacular.”
“You think?” said Casket.
Casket shuffled up closer to Snitch and noticing a hole in the side of his friend’s underpants, revealing a white oval of thigh, he put his finger in and tickled.
Snitch’s laughter almost drowned out the sound of the bell ringing above their heads. More than the laughter was the surprise that it was ringing at all.
The bell signified the arrival of a guest.

Tavarius, Snitch and Casket stood in a line in the snow. Each was dressed in their hastily pulled on uniform; blue trousers, blue jacket, blue hat. The blue was the kind of blue a ladybird would have been if nature had made them all this colour.
Casket’s hat was smaller, both in size and proportionally, than the other two. It rested on his head like a tea caddy and was held in place by a snapping piece of elastic that went under his chin.
The snow was falling thickly and it was difficult to make out the journey of the cable-car. It seemed to sag somewhat and Casket reminded himself that it was strong enough to carry an elephant.
He thought about the hole in Snitch’s underpants and thought he would like to buy both Tavarius and Snitch underpants for Christmas. And maybe a new radio. He would have money now, now that the guests had started to come.
At last the car nestled to a halt in its moorings and the three hotel staff took a step forward. Behind them Kark’s head appeared out of the window of the motor-room.
The windows to the cable-car had frosted over and the first glimpse they had of the guest was as he stepped out of the vehicle onto the waiting snow.
The man wore a wide-brimmed black hat. It was pulled down so far it was almost impossible to see his face. This impossibility was only added to by the long black coat the man was wearing, and the way the high collar was drawn tightly around his neck.
Only one thing was clear about this man in the face of all this blackness and that was his enormous size.
Snitch took another step forward and held out a hand, perhaps in welcome, or perhaps an offer to take the heavy-looking briefcase the man was holding. Whatever, the man ignored the hand and set off at a pace towards the hotel doorway.
Tavarius, Snitch, and Casket followed behind, thinking that this was not how they had rehearsed it.

Inside the hotel Benny Lieberman stood proudly behind the reception desk. In his left hand he held a quill pen, the feather of which towered high above his head. On the desk in front of him was an enormous leather-bound book. It lay open at a blank page.
“Hmm, yes,” he said, “I believe we do have a room free. How many nights will you be staying?”
Casket lingered by the wall with his two friends, watching the transaction. In his mind he played out the scene, imagining himself in the role of his father.
“Breakfast in bed? Why yes, that’s how I take it myself. One egg or two? Or three?”
He was brought out of his reverie by the pinging of a small bell. He blinked and saw Benny beckoning him. He was holding out a large key on a fob the shape of a Hong Kong junk.
“Can you show Mr Hess his room?” said Benny. “The penthouse suite.”
The boy felt the heart in his chest jolt. Why had he never thought of such a scenario? His comics were in the cupboard of the penthouse suite. If a guest was there then how wouldn’t be free to read them whenever he wanted. Why hadn’t he taken them to his own room?
“And, bell-boy, if you would be so kind as to take the gentleman’s bag.”
For the first time Casket looked up at the man. It was lighter inside the reception. All twenty candles in the chandelier overhead had been lit. But still the man’s face was indistinct, cast in shadow as it was by the shape of the hat.
“I can manage the case myself,” said Mr Hess, his voice deep and scratchy like he had swallowed an old towel.
“This way then,” said Casket as he had been trained and he set off towards the staircase in front of the man like he was a seeing-eye dog.
As they reached the foot of the stairs there was a shout behind them and both the boy and the man turned.
Benny had a grin fixed on his face and he was waving the quill pen above his head like it was flag.
“Welcome to Auschwitz,” he shouted.
The man nodded, turned back to the staircase and set off, disappearing into the gloom of the stairwell.

Casket, Kark, Tavarius and Snitch were sitting around the table in their underpants. As the cold grew colder outside, so proportionally the heat intensified inside.
Today the quorum of kitchen castaways were attempting to guess the occupation of the newest addition to their living-space.
“Something important,” said Tavarius. “You can tell importance in a man.”
“And he’s got money,” said Snitch. “That coat of his says quality.”
“A high-ranking government official,” said Tavarius.
Snitch nodded. “An ambassador or something.”
“Do you think he will ever come out of the room?” asked Casket.
For the previous three days Casket had taken every opportunity he could to go up to the top floor and waltz past the room. Sometimes he didn’t have an excuse and went up anyway.
There was an alcove next to the hall window and the boy squeezed in here, ostensibly looking out of the window at the grey skies plumped up with clouds, at the sea leaping towards them, but really listening for the sound of the door. An opportunity.
It would be a quick in and out job; collect the comic books and go. Mr Hess wouldn’t want them, surely?
At some points he even believed he would knock on the door and ask for them in person, but each time he raised his fist for action his courage came unstuck and wallowed around his knees, which almost clacked together in what could only be cravenness.
As bell-boy it was Casket’s job to take plates up to the room three times a day. The plates he would leave outside the room like a pair of shoes. And first thing in the morning and last thing at night he collected the chamber pot. For hygiene’s sake this was left nearer to the alcove than the door.
On the second morning Casket had lifted the lid of the pot and taken a good long look. The faeces were long and a dark tree-like brown, curled round end to tip. Like small islands they were lapped by a residue of liquid.
“So he is human, after all,” said the boy to himself, quietly.
Late in bed at night he had convinced himself that maybe the man was a Plutonian or Uranian and he had strained his eyes looking up such things in his book of astronomy. However, the book was surprisingly slack in its description of beings from other planets, and what good is an astronomy book without this information?
“A milkmaid,” said Kark proudly. He jutted out his chin and smiled idiotically at his three comrades around the table.
‘Milkmaid’, was the latest word Kark had learnt, having recently come back from the village where he had seen a certain young lady trawling up the high street heavily laden with two metal urns.
Kark put pen to cigarette pack and swiftly drew a more than passing facsimile of the hotel guest. Only instead of his large suitcase he carried a shimmering urn of pale liquid in his left hand.
They were still all laughing at this when a door slammed and Benny descended into the kitchen.
“A travelling salesman,” he said, still moving, hairs erect on his nearly bald pate.
“Do you know this?” said Snitch, seriously now.
“That’s what he told me. And what reason do I have to doubt? Come, he wants a phone line putting into his room. Tavarius, do you know how to use a ladder?”
Clothes were hastily pulled on and the party trooped outside. The whole of the bluff of rock was thick with snow, cut off perhaps from the rest of the known world.
The cable-car, nesting in its moorings, appeared to be wearing a large white hat. The scene was almost miraculous and the sea, although invisible, was a constant sound, like the murmur in a theatre before a play that was never to start.
Kark appeared around the side of the hotel carrying the ladders and they were set against the side of the hotel. Benny came soon after, walking backward and unwinding cable from a spool before him.
“Good luck,” said Snitch. “And don’t look down.”
“I’m not a virgin, you know,” said Tavarius with mock severity and set off up the rungs, one end of the phone cable twisted around his belt.
The snow was white, the side of the hotel brown, Tavarius’s uniform a bright blue. Casket stepped back to gain a better angle of sight. He had once seen a series of pictures of a monkey climbing a tree. Tavarius looked nothing like this. More, his movements were robotic.
If he fell, thought Casket, then he would surely die.
Like light from the exploding of a firework, for a moment the boy’s head was filled with an image of Tavarius on the ground, his legs and arms twisted back on themselves, blood gushing from his mouth. It seemed real, or at least, had the simulacrum of reality.
Casket forced himself to breath in and out, like he had been taught. He stepped back. He stepped back.
Tavarius was on a level with a high window, his body smaller than it ever had been on the ground. Suddenly a face appeared at the window like a horse looming out of the fog and Casket felt himself rushing forward. He clutched onto the wood of the ladder and held tight. He scrunched his eyes closed so hard he could see lights, diamonds, dancing fire flies.
“Mr Hess has the cable,” he heard his father say. He felt a hand flat on his head. “Bell-boy, will you take up the phone attachment? Ask him to ring one two. That’s reception. We will check to see if this baby is live.”
As Casket made his way up the stairs, sweat both hot and cold, ran down his back, pooled in his armpits. He had soiled himself and he could feel the sludge in the back of his pants, coalescing, sticking.
He knocked once on the door and it was opened immediately, a smell somewhere between oatmeal and a perfume possibly made with roses wafting out.
“Ah,” said Mr Hess. “Communication at last. It’s about time I rejoined the big bad world.”
The boy thought he may have seen the outline of a smile. He wasn’t sure, Mr Hess had his hat pulled down low. Even inside.

Casket heard bumps and bangs in the night, like God was having a game of jacks somewhere within the hotel. When he went down to the kitchen, heavy-lidded, the following morning Snitch was sitting at the table alone.
“Tavarius has disappeared,” he said.
Casket thought of the last time he had seen Tavarius, and of that head appearing at the window, the two images indissoluble in his mind.
“I heard bangs all night,” he said. Then, “What do you mean disappeared?”
He poured some coffee beans into the wooden hand-grinder and sat spinning the crank for a full five minutes, the grinder gripped between his knees. He made the coffee and poured it into cups, hesitating over Tavarius’s but leaving it empty.
“He was there when I went to bed and not there when I woke up,” said Snitch. “Disappeared.”
Casket liked to hold his head over his cup, feel his face enveloped in the steam. He would do this until the coffee was almost room temperature and his face was wet. This habit had been passed down from his father.
“People don’t just disappear. Let’s go and look for him.”
Feeling that this was the best place to start, Casket followed Snitch up to his bedroom. Despite their kitchen intimacy, this was a place he had never been before and the first thing that struck him was its adult maleness, not something he could put his finger on, but there nevertheless. Perhaps it was a crossing of some kind of boundary.
In the centre of the room was a large double bed. He walked up to it and put a hand flat on the pillow. It was indented and there was a single stray hair on its surface.
“This is where he slept?” said Casket.
Snitch nodded.
“And you didn’t hear him get up?”
“We had a late night. Tavarius said I sleep like a log. That was what he always says.”
Winter sun spilled through the window casting a coffin shaped oblong of light over the wooden boards. On a rack fastened to the bathroom door numerous socks hung, perhaps drying or already dry. On the wall opposite the window was a large framed photograph, a naked man was holding a beer crate above his head. It was Tavarius.
Casket got down on his knees and looked under the bed. When he stood back up he was holding a pair of underpants.
“Was he wearing these last night?”
“For some of the time.”
“And his clothes?”
“They are gone.”
Next Casket led Snitch outside. They tramped across the snow to the cable-car motor room. Inside sat Kark, with his hands around a plastic cup, a bobble hat pulled down far over his ears. Through the snow-edged window was the cable-car. The wire above it disappeared into the storm, the mainland invisible.
Casket, having come equipped with a pad and pencil from reception, quickly drew a series of pictures. To show that the stick figure represented Tavarius, he drew a particular type of underpant typical to Tavarius, cocooned it in a bubble and then drew an arrow from the bubble to the figure.
Kark looked at the images and shook his head. Tavarius hadn’t gone across on the cable-car since he had been there that morning. He put his hand on the motor and made a shivering motion. The motor had been cold when he arrived. The cable-car hadn’t been used overnight.
“Then he must be in the hotel,” said the boy. “It stands to reason. We’ll find him.”
They searched each of the rooms in turn, looking under beds, behind curtains, in cupboards. Casket imagined he was Aventine looking for Viminal and when Snitch was out of sight he put his wrists together and held his arms out in front of him.
“Aventine to the rescue,” he whispered and although he was not sure this was something Aventine had ever said it felt right.
At around midday, they met in reception, tired and with cobwebs in their hair. Tavarius hadn’t turned up.
Benny was behind the counter practising his telephone manner. He would pick up the receiver, hold it to his ear, and say, “Hotel Auschwitz, how may I help you?” or “How may I help you? Hotel Auschwitz.” Each time with a slightly variation in tone.
When he noticed his son, he halted, the receiver in mid-air.
“Have you collected Mr Hess’s chamber pot? I haven’t seen it.”
Casket felt himself blushing, red marks like slaps appearing on his cheeks. What with everything, he had simply forgotten. “Tavarius has disappeared,” he said, hoping this would act as a defence.
“He’s probably gone ice-fishing. Go and get it now. We don’t want it overflowing. What kind of image would that give of the hotel?”
Casket took the stairs two at a time. In the corridor outside the room, was the pot. He bent to pick it up and then, impulsively, he pressed an ear to the door.
He could hear something and nothing. Perhaps, like with a conch shell it was the sound of the sea. Or perhaps it wasn’t. His mother had told him that this little bit of magic was nonsense. All the noise was, she said, was the echo of the inside of your own head. Suddenly, he had an idea.
The boy drew back a fist and banged loudly on the door. There were footsteps and it was opened.
“I was wondering if you had seen our friend,” said Casket, quickly, his heart beating loudly in his voice. “He’s disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” There was a hint of amusement in the voice, the same way water can sometimes taste of a hint of lemon. “I do like a good mystery. Let me get my hat and I will come and investigate.”
For the first time Casket looked up. Through the door he could see the diorama of the penthouse suite. The central concertina doors were open, the doors to the cupboard were open. He noticed two things. 1) That his comic books didn’t appear to have been touched. 2) That Tavarius, apparently, was not in the room.

Mr Hess stood in the centre of the hotel reception with the fingers of each hand pressed together forming an arch in front of him.
“Let me see if I have got the facts straight. The man, Tavarius, was here last night. This morning he was not. His clothes are not gone and we know that, as the cable-car has not made a journey either forwards or backwards, he must be somewhere on this bluff of rock. It sounds a simple enough matter. Give me one hour.”
Benny said he had accounting work to do, so Snitch and Casket repaired to the kitchen alone. The fire burnt high, cups of coffee left forgotten, cluttered the table.
Snitch twizzled the dial on the radio. For a while there was only the dull drone of static but then a voice came through; not the sports channel they both wished for but the news from Austria.
Soldiers were collecting on the border and they would soon be ready for the next push forward. They were well fed, watered and dry and this was largely down to the fantastic train network. A mountaineer had climbed a very tall mountain and claimed its peak for the home country. In the local zoo a llama had given birth. The radio station was having a competition to think of names for the eight cubs.
“One of them should be called Tavarius,” said Snitch. “He was fond of llamas.”
“Mr Hess will find him,” said Casket.
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” said Snitch.
The news finished and it was story time, ‘War and Peace’ by Nikolai Tolstoy. “It was a very cold day in Siberia,” the narrator started and Snitch stood up.
“I’m not hungry, but would you like a sandwich?”
“I’m not hungry either, but yes please.”
When they heard the sound of the bell they went back upstairs to the reception, leaving their uneaten sandwiches, like an advertisement for a café, on the table.
Mr Hess nodded once and told them to follow him outside.
“It was a simple matter of deduction,” he said. “He wasn’t in sight, so he must have been somewhere else.”
The wind had picked up and the words were carried away like the cries of gulls. Clouds filled the sky, pumping out snow like sausage from a meat machine.
“It was at the back of the hotel that I found these.”
Barely visible, being almost filled in with snow, were a set of footprints. They led from the back wall of the hotel right to the edge of the bluff. They exuded a meaning that was all too obvious.
Benny stood silently, his cadaverous face set in a grimace. Casket reached up to take Snitch’s hand but he was already lurching forward towards the edge.
“It’s ok,” he shouted, knowing that it wasn’t, and he too, found himself making for the edge, frightened of what he would see but having to see it nevertheless.
Far down below were jagged rocks being caressed by the sea, the water breathing in and out. Halfway up the cliff, fluttering and flapping, caught on a sharp outcrop was a sliver of material. Its colour was the blue of ladybirds if nature had made them that way.
“He jumped,” said Mr Hess. “A simple matter.”
“Jumped?” said Benny, his brow furrowing.
“But why?” said Snitch. His face was crumbling, like a large piece of sugar dropped accidentally into a puddle.
“I am a man of results,” said Mr Hess. “Motives I concern myself less about. Dinner, I take it, will not be delayed by any significant amount?”
Not waiting for an answer and therefore turning his question into an order, he turned around, and set off back towards the hotel, leaving fresh footprints in the snow next to the ones that had recently told so much and so little.

Unusually, Benny was seated at the kitchen table. Before him he had his ink pot, his quill pen, and a fine sheet of writing paper. Through the window the moon could clearly be seen high in the night sky. It was late.
“We must make it sound like an accident, yes?”
They were composing a letter to Tavarius’s mother. Snitch had his head in his hands and there was a nearly empty bottle of cherry schnapps in front of him.
“I most regretfully have the displeasure of carrying a harbinger of ill tidings,” said Benny, playing the words out loud.
“Say he fell,” said Snitch. “But what will we tell her about the lack of a body?”
From outside the sea thumped, answering a question it hadn’t been asked.
“He could have fallen into the sea,” said Casket. It was the first time he had spoken in a while. He was being haunted by that deathly straight line of footprints in the snow. There was something clinical about their exactitude. Death, he had always thought, was a messy business.
“We will fill the coffin with potatoes and nobody will be any the wiser,” said Benny. “As if we haven’t all suffered enough.” And then, changing the subject, “You must keep quiet about your various relations with Tavarius, Snitch. You talk, and what, we have more trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?” asked Casket. He couldn’t imagine anything more troublesome than death, but that was partly as a result of his age.
“Shhh now,” said Benny. “I think I have the right words.”
For fifteen minutes the only sounds in the kitchen were those of the fire, the quill scratching, and monotonous in the background, the sea.
With a flourish Benny signed the document and folded it into three. He sealed it with a drop of wax from the candle on the table and sat back.
“Tomorrow you will deliver the letter, my son.”
The boy’s eyes opened wide in surprise.
“Intimations of the death are best received from the young. We need to see that life will go on. Moreover, he was your friend.”
That night, after his father had tucked him up, Casket got out of bed and went and stood by the window. For the first time he remembered the bumps and bangs he had heard the night before. He wondered if they were of any significance. He remained at the window for a long time, and when he did go back to bed, sleep would not come.

The gravity of his task far outweighed any pleasure he had in going in the cable-car once again.
That morning, it seemed, the sun had given up any pretence it had in lighting the world and for a second, when Kark’s figure had loomed out of the mist, Casket had quite lost his breath. It was some moments before his heart returned to its old routine.
With the letter firmly sealed in a beeswax folder the boy nodded to Kark and the wire above the cable-car started to hum. The cable-car gave a small jolt and began its journey.
“I have this letter to deliver,” said Casket quietly. He shook his head. “May I come in? Good morning and take a seat. You are Mrs Tavarius, yes?” He shook his head again. “Mrs Tavarius, a pleasure. I regret to inform you..”
The village did not yet appear to be awake. Shutters shut out windows, cobbles glistened with salt, shunning the attentions of the snow. The cat, high up on a wall this time, arched its back, scowled and leapt down onto the lid of a bin which rattled.
Casket looked towards the beast, then looked away, his attention caught by another sound. Bent over a step with a dripping brush in his hand was a figure he recognised. It was Mr Danvers, the dentist.
Remembering that the guests had arrived, and that Mr Danvers must have kept his word about delivering the cards, Casket let out a big hello.
Mr Danvers faced flared once with recognition and then with something else, this look more disturbing.
“My boy,” he said, “what did I tell you about Fridays not being a good day for boys in the village.”
“It’s a Tuesday,” said Casket. “And you said Wednesdays.”
“The kid-catcher, these day he is most virulent.”
Mr Danvers put an arm around Casket’s shoulders and leaving the brush sloshing in a bucket he spirited the boy up the narrow staircase. They went past the pale pictures of hanging teeth in the reception and once more into the large cupboard. This morning Mr Danvers smelt of detergent and a very sweet honey. He hopped narrowly from foot to foot.
“You have more cards to deliver, perhaps?” His face clouded over, like the changing colour of fish in hot oil. “But no, I heard about the former debacle.”
“Tavarius has died,” said the boy gravely. “I must deliver the letter to his mother.”
“Tavarius, Tavarius,” muttered Mr Danvers as if he was sorting through a rolodex filing system. “Ah yes.” He snapped his lips together. “An ingrown molar on the left side. Most painful. Extracted last Summer.” He rolled his hand up like it was a newspaper to be placed into a dog’s mouth and coughed into it. He seemed to have come to a prominent decision. “How much do you know?”
“Know?” said Casket. He was thinking teeth. You were born with them, they were hard like diamonds, only sometimes they rotted away and had to be pulled out and buried in the sand for the sea gypsies to find.
“Come,” said Mr Danvers. “I think we will be ok here.”
He took his little guest out, and by placing a hand under each of the boy’s armpits lifted him onto the massive dentist’s chair. He shifted the light on the hi-ab arm away and turned off the pink water that was bubbling in a cistern.
“Not everybody agrees with what is going on, but to fight it, how? These are times of almost religious intensity, when to hang yourself on a cross would help no-one, not even yourself.”
Casket shifted himself on the chair. By his left hand on a tray he noticed glinting knife after knife after knife.
“You saw the sign on my door, ‘No Jews’. At first it was only a sign, a symptom, but now it is becoming a reality. Every night at the same time an engine leaves the station, its cattle trucks filled to the brim with the surplus of humanity.
“But you know what, these trains, they don’t go anywhere. Two hundred yards down the line they stop and then, pouf, they return home empty.”
“Pouf?” said the boy. This was a new word for him, playful and at the same time sinister.
“Today it is the Jews, but tomorrow, what?”
“Dentists?” said Casket, picking up on the fear that was almost audible in the room.
“Anyone,” said Mr Danvers. “Me. You. Who knows?”
“I am a Jew,” said Casket. Sweat had pooled under the palm of his hands and he used this slickness to slide himself off of the leather chair. He put on his most kindly child to adult voice. “I thank you for your warning but I must deliver my letter. It is a matter of utmost importance to Mrs Tavarius.”
The dentist guttered, like a candle, and raised a trembling hand to his left ear.
“That is what I am saying, foolish boy. She has gone. Pouf!”

The station was a single storey red brick building creeping in ivy. Two shining red buffers at the end of straight shining tracks and a large wooden sign with a cross daubed across it in a bubbly black paint indicated that this was the end of the line.
Casket approached the station from a row of overgrown juniper bushes. He was a zeppelin on a secret mission. In the jump seat was Aventine, silent but ready to leap to action at the merest nod. They were faithful comrades.
The platform appeared deserted. A sign rocked gently on its metal hooks, squeaking. The snow appeared, momentarily, to have stopped. The boy pushed away a branch, looked around carefully, and upon seeing no one, stepped out from his cover and set off down the tracks his feet crunching, in what appeared to him, a cascade of noise.
Mr Danvers had said that the trains ‘don’t go anywhere’ and ‘two hundred yards’. Neither distance sounded an awful lot and he wanted to check the story out for himself. After all, people don’t just disappear. In his mind, he could still see those footprints in the snow. If they proved anything, it was that people did go somewhere, even if ultimately, it was down.
As he walked he kept his eyes peeled to the tracks having a youthful memory of train toilets being merely a hole in the floor of a carriage. At the same time he tried to look at what was ahead. He thought he heard a noise and stopped, his heart doing a belly dance. He looked to the left and the right, bushes and bushes. Nothing. He put his wrists together in that imaginary aping of Aventine and set off once more.
A short distance ahead the tracks curved to the left and the ground rose up on either side, the bushes thinning out. Instinctively, feeling that corners were a place where things happened, Casket veered away from the tracks and set off up the left hand hill. As he neared the top, he dropped to his belly, and made the last few metres wriggling like an Indian.
The train tracks crossed a wooden bridge and disappeared into the distance, perhaps ad infinitum. Nearer though, at the bottom of the hill, a siding had been formed. It was about twenty metres square, covered in small rough stones, which weeds had not yet eaten through.
In the siding were two men. They wore long black coats, and had wide brimmed hats pulled low over their faces. The sight of them caused Casket to take a sharp intake of breath and his mind flared in recognition. Not because these men looked like Mr Hess, which they did, more that they were at another scene of alleged disappearance. It had to be more than a coincidence.
Coldness from the ground seeped into the boy’s belly. The snow had started again, falling lightly like frost. One of the men reached into a pocket. His hand came out again and a match flared, a cigarette was lit. The other man walked to the edge of the siding, relieved himself against a thorny bush, came back.
Like Mr Hess’s faeces, the action of smoking and urinating seemed to give the men a resemblance of humanity, although why they should have none without this, he couldn’t say.
Casket closed his eyes and thought he saw Tavarius. He was sitting in the kitchen, the band of his underpants cutting into his stomach, head thrown back in mirth. He tried to imagine him falling from the top of a steep cliff. He couldn’t.
He slithered backwards down the hill and made once more for the station.

“Yes I do,” said Benny. “In the bottom of my wardrobe, wrapped in silver paper. It’s new but you can use it. Nothing but the best at this time.”
Casket scampered up the stairs, one flight, two, and skidded to a halt in front of his father’s door. The uniform was where Benny had said it would be. He pulled it out and took it down to the kitchen.
Through the window Casket could see Snitch, buttoned up to the eyeballs, like someone’s aunt on the way to church.
Snitch had dug a space in the snow, dragged out two charley-horses, and was bent over them with a saw, at work on the coffin. When Casket had asked him, he had been more than pleased that the making of the body would be taken out of his hands.
“Get a good likeness if you can,” he said. “Use a melon for the head.”
Casket cleared the kitchen table, lay the uniform on it in the shape of a body and set to work on the melon with a knife. When Kark came in an hour later he had already hollowed out the mouth and eyes and was at work on the nose which was proving more problematic.
“Khelp?” said Kark. He had opened the door of the oven and was warming his bottom in front of it.
The boy picked up the needle and thread and mimed the sewing up of the uniform. If it was going to be stuffed with potatoes then it had to be airtight. And it also had to be tough, if it was going to go through with what he had planned for it.
They worked together for an hour solid. They filled the trousers through the fly, the shirt through the neck. Then they sealed both of these up, attached the melon, and stood back and viewed their handiwork.
“It needs one more thing,” said Casket.
He told Kark to go out and fetch Snitch and he went upstairs to collect the final object.
The underpants were where he had dropped them the day before, on the floor of Tavarius’ and Snitch’s room. They were like a loyal dog, waiting by the bed for a master who would never return.
By the time Snitch came in from the cold Casket had pulled the underpants on over the top of the stuffed trousers. They seemed to fit perfectly, almost like a glove.
“Is it ok?” said Casket.
Kark had his arm around Snitch’s shoulders. The larger man dwarfing the already large one. Casket had taken a loose hand. The fingers were as cold as sausages fresh from the fridge.
“It’s him,” said Snitch. “I don’t know how you’ve done it, but it’s him.”
Snitch fell to the floor sobbing. Casket put a hand out onto the melon head and promised himself that if he couldn’t change what happened, he would at least understand why.

The boy spanned the flesh of his right bicep with finger and thumb and pinched wildly, sending droplets of water to the corners of each eye. He was awake.
He pulled on a double layer of clothes and a pair of hats and snuck quietly down the stairs. He was careful to touch each step only on tiptoe.
The corpse was where he had left it. In the gloom of the kitchen you could have been forgiven for thinking it was sleeping rather than dead. In the grate the fire was dead. The handle of the coffee grinder poked out of the sink like the head of a snake.
In Casket’s estimation he only had two hours clear before the others would be awake. He checked that the rope he had wound around his waist was secure and he gripped the body under the armpits.
He could feel the potatoes there, firm and solid. Ignoring the shiver in his muscles, the patina of dread, he leant back and heaved and as one the body slid from the table, the feet thumping against the floor. Moving with the ragged motions of a stilt-walker he dragged the body towards the door.
Outside was colder than within, but already slick sweat had pooled in the place where his body met the waistband of his trousers. Whatever footprints had ever been there once were now gone. The snow was as smooth as a bowling green and just as shiny.
As Casket worked his way backwards towards the edge of the pinnacle of rock, hefting the body, the hotel loomed before him. Two tracks connected him to the edifice, the sharp evenly spaced indents of his own shoes, and the flat runnels of Tavarius’s heels. But there was a deeper connection too; this place was his home, and glancing up to the window behind which Mr Hess more than likely was still sleeping, Casket felt not for the first time that he had suffered an invasion. Invasions, he considered, could be repelled.
He reached the edge sooner than he expected and turned to face it. Waves chopped at the horizon, cutting it into bits. The sky was low this morning, the sea high.
“So what do you say Tavarius,” said Casket, “did you jump, or were you pushed?”
The melon head was lolling forward, a victim of its own thoughts, or its complicity, or simply gravity.
The boy removed his supporting arm and first the legs buckled, like the arms of a fairground ride bringing a flying saucer safely home, then the arms drooped and the head shimmered over the precipice.
For a moment there was doubt, the body hung by its own volition in one place between two others, but there was a gust of wind, or something else, and like the swinging arm of a metronome come loose, the body tumbled.
It hit the cliff face once, in the place where the blue jacket still clutched, and jacket and body then fell together, down. There was no sound of impact. Even leaning over Casket could not see where the body had landed.
Lifting up his two jumpers he unwound the rope from his middle like he was a bobbin. He attached one end to a kindly jutting out rock and the other to a belt loop on his trousers which he had triple-stitched for the purpose. He gave a testing tug, and began, hand over hand, to lower himself downwards.
The cliff face was shaped like a fat man’s belly. It curved out in the middle and inwards towards the bottom as if sucked in with a belt. Casket’s palms were ripped raw by the journey, the muscles in his arms, back, buttocks, legs, fought for space in his receptacles of pain. But one benefit of this, was that it ruled out any chance for consideration of what he might find at the bottom.
“I mustn’t look down,” said Casket, “I mustn’t look down” and as he said this for the hundredth time his feet touched solid earth.
Surprisingly soft was the sound of the sea. Moss grew here, like green velvet. He twisted around, put a hand in a line with his eyebrows, and set off walking towards the water, counting his paces, ‘one, two, three,’ until he reached twenty and he was at the shore. He turned again, only now having the courage to look.
There was one body there, resting in a heap like the sack of potatoes that it was. Of the real Tavarius there was not a hint.
“Tides perhaps,” said Casket thinking out loud. He wet a finger, pushing it between his lips, and held it up to the air, hoping it would tell him something. It didn’t.
“So, maybe tides,” he said.
An image of Tavarius came into his head, the dead man’s body rocking and rolling like a surfer in paradise, having being picked up by the water, at one with it, the flesh turning blue and then he dispelled the image like it was an air bubble making for the surface. He walked back to the body and knelt next to it. He folded the arms and legs into a semblance of straightness.
“Father will know of tides, I will ask him,” he said and then he saw the answer.
Next to where the body had fallen was a bundle of twigs, formed into a circle. In the centre of this circle lay three eggs, point to point to point. There was a squawk and a red bird appeared. It hopped once, twice, three times and landed on the eggs, wings spread-eagled.
“Good morning,” said Casket seriously and touched a finger to his head in welcome.
“Krrrrkkkk,” said the bird in answer.
The journey up seemed easier than the one down. Casket was sure now. Where there was a home for eggs, there was no tide, and where the was no tide there should have been a body. The bird had proved his point. Tavarius had not jumped.
At the top of the cliff Casket lay flat with his arms over the edge and pulled the replica of Tavarius back up, an inverse of the journey the real body had never made. As it came up, the corpse made a banana shape in the air. He smiled at this, finding pleasure in something at last. The pleasure was a warm thing in him amidst so much cold. His breath came in puffs of smoke.
As he returned to the kitchen something black and tall caught the corner of his eye, pulled at it. There crossing the snow, was Kark, heading towards the motor-room.
Kark, seeing the boy, raised a hand, beckoning.
“You be ok?” said Casket, to the melon-head, and he set off towards his friend running, pockets of snow exploding around his footfalls.
“Mr Hess goes to town,” said Kark proudly. His language skills had crossed the Rubicon now and showed little sign of rowing back. He held up eight fingers and two thumbs. “Seven kminutes,” he said.
In three minutes Casket had the potato body back on the table and a minute after that he was hiding in the hotel reception behind the wide oak desk.
He watched Mr Hess leave the hotel and walk in a straight line across to the cable-car. His hat was pulled down low, angled towards the sun, almost in defiance to it.

The corridor felt claustrophobic, the air in it thin, like tulips in a tall vase caught by a strip of moonlight. Casket fingered the key in his pocket, its many serrated edges sharp as so many tiny knives. He looked over his shoulder once, twice, and let himself into the room.
The curtains were tight closed and for a moment his eyes were blinded by the dullness. As sight returned so did the bed, the cupboard, dressing table and wardrobe. What was he hoping to find? The body of Tavarius? His comic books? An answer to the riddle of the missing people?
If Casket had been captured right then and injected with a powerful truth serum he couldn’t have said, being propelled as he was by some childish impulse in which one action logically followed another to an unknown end.
First things first, he checked under the bed. If he was going to hide a body, or a bundle of secret papers, then that was where he would put it. Also, in stories, scary thing always come from under the bed. Better rule out that possibility first. After all, the silence of the room hinted at something happening.
He got down on his knees and pressed a cheek to the carpet, its fibres tickling him like dried worms. Nothing.
In the dressing table drawers. Nothing. In the wardrobe. Nothing. In the cupboard. His comic books. He picked these up, cradling them to his chest, and then, thinking perhaps their presence might be missed he sorted out the ones he had read, and with a heavy heart, placed them back where they had been.
“I’ll come back for you,” he said, “don’t you worry.”
It was as he was turning to leave the room that noticed the case. It was lying flat by the corner of the door, its very presence made almost invisible by its obviousness; like a train in a station, the face of a monkey in a tall tree.
The catches were closed but not locked and they flicked open with a satisfying click. The lid opened smoothly, like a hydraulic door closing on an expensive automobile, revealing plainly what was inside.
“Oh no,” said Casket. “Oh no.”
And his words didn’t do justice.

Mist sweeps across the top of the building like clouds. In the sky the moon hangs, a massive eye, always watching. On either side of the entrance to the building stands a soldier; cigarette smoke and frozen air billowing alternatively out of their mouths.
“You know what to do?” says Aventine, in the next frame, a close up of his head.
Eleanor holds a hand up to her mouth. “Are you sure this is wise?”
“Wise?! Where did wise ever get anyone?”
Aventine is dressed in the uniform he stole from the soldier. The hat is pulled low over his eyes, the trousers bulge at the seams around his crotch. In front of him, almost like a shield, is Eleanor, her hands tied behind her back.
“It’s two am,” says Aventine, “the best time for any attack. The brain will be slow now, off guard. Trust me.”
He pushes Eleanor out of the shadows and into the street. They cross rapidly to the door the soldiers are guarding. The soldiers glance towards each other, then together cast down their cigarettes and stand straighter.
“I have brought the prisoner,” says Aventine.
The soldiers look towards each other once more and a large question mark passes between them.
“Quickly! Viminal will be waiting. Do you want to incur his wrath?”
At the name of Viminal Eleanor crumples in the middle a little and lets out a scream. This seems to win the argument for the guards and they open the door.
“Now to find the man himself,” says Aventine.
“And when we do?”
Aventine twists his head slightly. His lips are set in a defining line. “Kill him.”
The corridors are lit with night lights, cast in shadows. At one point Eleanor and Aventine pass a group of doctors clutching clipboards and heading in the opposite direction. Another time they look through a circular window in a door and see a large canteen filled with soldiers. At every chance they get they take the stairs upwards.
“It is the nature of powerful people that they like to be at the top,” says Aventine.
“Why does no one stop us?”
Aventine smiles. “That is also the nature of powerful people, they come to believe they are untouchable.”
At last they come to a corridor different to the others. It is more brightly lit. Paintings hang along the walls in thick gold frames and the carpet is so thick it shows footprints.
Outside a door inlaid with flower patterns sit two soldiers. Their heads are in the hands and they appear to be between sleep and wakefulness.
“I think we are here,” says Aventine. “Viminal’s lair.”
“Do you think our bluff will work again?”
“No need,” says Aventine. He pulls a long thin pipe from out of his side pocket and puts it to his lips. He blows once and then twice.
The soldiers put a hand up to their necks, pierced as they have been by tiny darts. They make quiet ‘grrrhhh’ noises and slump to the floor.
“It is not only Viminal who can do time travel,” says Aventine. “I got this device in Africa one hundred and fifty years ago.”
“You are learning quickly,” says Eleanor.
“I have to, don’t I? Our future depends upon it. As does those of everyone. We need the brooch.”
Aventine and Eleanor step towards the door and then through it into a room. This is a bedroom, dominated by an enormous four-poster double bed. Drapes hang from each of the post but clearly between them, caught in an imprecise shaft of light, lays the sleeping figure of Viminal.
“We have found him,” says Aventine. “At last.”
Outside the window Casket heard a noise, like an elephant eating a biscuit and he looked up quickly. The noise came again. And again.
He uncrossed his legs, climbed from his bed, and padded over to the window, flattening his nose against the coldness of the pane.
There, lamp-lit by the moonlight was Mr Hess making his way across the snow, away from the hotel. His footsteps made that sound again, crisp and heightened in the deadness.
Without stopping to think Casket pulled on his jumper, trousers, shoes and was hurtling down the stairs like a pinball newly sprung.
Through the door, the air was cold as frost, almost burning his lungs like heat. Casket spun his head left, right, arrowing stares, and in the distance saw his quarry, a darker black space against blackness. Trusting to luck that he wouldn’t be seen he set off at a run.
This was the side of the hotel he had explored more rarely; like certain parts of deepest Africa it had an unwelcoming aura that was perhaps more reputation than inclination. There were bushes here with prickly branches giving the ground a sense of wildness.
Tonight Casket was glad of them. As he neared Mr Hess he used them to hide behind, hopping from one to the other, twisting himself as much as he could to the shape of their spindles and points. However, the man didn’t appear to be looking behind him at all, moving as he was like that rabbit in the story who had to get down a hole.
The sea grew louder and they were heading down a narrow path. Under feet scree screamed and bucketed down the cliff side. Casket didn’t think of discovery now as his eyes buzzed in their sockets with adrenaline.
At the bottom, the path dwindled into the coastline, the sea was a dark blanket here. Mr Hess’s feet crunched on wet sand. Casket sucked in his breath and hid behind a large boulder placing flat hands on its cold gritty surface and peered around the edge of rock. All around, the sound of the waves was like a thousand sailors quietly counting sheep.
From his pocket Mr Hess took a small brass lamp shaped like a minaret. There was a flash of intense light as a match was struck and then a more steady light as the wick within the lamp caught flame.
“What gives?” said Casket without giving the words any sound and then there was a sound, two splashes in stereo quickly followed by another two and a shout.
“Ahoy there!”
Mr Hess raised the lantern above his head, casting a long thin shadow, almost more real than himself, along the shore.
On the pancake surface of the ocean loomed a craft, a rowing boat packed with two bodies. As it neared the shore one of the bodies flipped out into the water and there was a scramble of arms and legs as the boat was pulled up onto the beach. Mr Hess went to meet it.
Casket wasn’t sure but the two men appeared to be the men he had seen along the railway tracks. At least, they looked the same; black hat, long black coats.
“Any problems?” said Mr Hess.
“Not with this baby,” said one of the men.
“Easy as taking chickens off an old lady,” said the other.
“And you’ve got the goods?”
Casket noticed each of the briefcases as they were passed to Mr Hess.
“Oh no,” he said again, soundlessly.
One of the briefcases was laid down flat on the sand. There were clicks as the catches were released and the lid was raised.
“Perfect,” said Mr Hess. His voice was joyful. “Perfect.”
“Beauty, ain’t it?” said one of the men.
Mr Hess raised himself from where he had been kneeling. He pulled something from out of his pocket. Its wide cone gleamed, glinting in the moonlight. To Casket it resembled nothing more and nothing less than a ray-gun.
“You are ready to take your place?”
“Ready,” said both the men together and they raised their arms high in the air and started spinning slowly around and around, indenting circles in the sand.
There was a flash of bright white light, like a shooting star, from the ray-gun and Casket fell back covering his eyes and the next thing he knew he found himself running back up the path, back towards the hotel.
He could imagine what had happened to the men. He could still see in his mind what he had seen in the suitcase in Mr Hess’s room, as if it was burnt there like a mark on the side of a cow.
He saw the miniature train-line, the line of wooden sheds, the smoke billowing from four three-inch chimneys. More than anything he remembered the hundreds and hundreds of tiny tiny people who populated the briefcase, the uniformity of their clothes, their shaved heads.
He could still smell their fear.

Casket sat up in bed, the covers pooling around his waist. His eyes were open wide like discs and he recalled a dog in a story that Benny had once read to him as an infant. The dog had problems sleeping.
He slipped out of bed and crossed to the window. All was quiet, the world was asleep. Not peaceful, as Casket knew, but asleep.
“Benny,” said Casket experimentally. It seemed appropriate to address his father by his proper name in this kind of situation. “Benny,” he said again, “Mr Hess is shrinking people and keeping them in a briefcase. More than one briefcase. I spoke to the dentist and I’ve got a feeling all these people are Jews.”
Somehow the words didn’t sound right. The boy almost didn’t believe them himself. It was too not real, like a comic book. A comic book. Casket twisted.
The book he had been reading was where he had left it, lying face down on the bed, like a cast off sock.
“I’m not sleeping,” said Casket, “and perhaps Aventine will help me. Perhaps.”
He slid back into bed, pulled the covers up to his chin, and rested the open comic book at the base of his ribcage. He continued from where he had left off.

“We have found him,” says Aventine. “At last.”
The next frame is a close up of Aventine’s belt. Slipped inside it is a gun. Aventine takes the gun and points it towards the sleeping figure on the bed. There is a flash of light, the bullet hangs in midair, zooming towards its destination, the centre of Viminal’s head.
“Take that,” says Aventine, but something is wrong. The bullet passes straight through the bed, which shimmers now, and explodes in the wall.
“What???!!!” says Eleanor.
“An optical illusion,” says Aventine. “We’ve been tricked.”
In the next box the ceiling is revealed. From it drop a series of ropes. They fall around Aventine and Eleanor, binding them neatly and from a side door steps Viminal. He is dressed splendidly in a suit with wide arms and legs. On the lapel of his left breast is the time-travelling brooch.
“You thought you would trap me that easily, my friends?” He throws his head back and laughs. “It seems that I have you trapped like a Christmas goose.”
“You won’t get away with this,” says Eleanor.
Viminal links his hands together and looks imperiously towards his captives.
“But my dear, don’t you see, I already have. My soldiers are everywhere, people are dying. That book of your husband’s, it was very useful.”
Eleanor’s eyes flash. “That book should be destroyed!”
Viminal laughs at this and shakes his head. “It is too late for that now. And even it was there would be no point. The book is no longer of any real use. It is passed from your husband’s imagination, to text, to knowledge. The book’s practices are in operation. You destroy the book and so what? People will remember this fear. Whatever you do now it is part of history. And the future.”
The frame has been filled with half Viminal and half his words, the words almost acting as a container for the madman. As Casket saw the next frame he gasped and sat up quickly in bed.
Aventine is now standing behind Viminal with a gun in his hand. He is completely free from the ropes.
“I’ll take that,” he says. He steps forward and snatches the time brooch from Viminal’s lapel.
“What??!!!” Viminal’s head twists from side to side, the speed of it indicated by there being four heads drawn simultaneously.
“You’re not the only one who can use time travel to suit their ends,” says Aventine. “I merely rematerialised myself five minutes earlier.”
“Noooo!!!!” says Viminal and he lunges forward towards Aventine. The guns flares, Viminal clutches his chest and falls to the floor dead.
“He did it,” said Casket and punched the air. Outside the window are the sun and the moon both, one high and one low, like a misplaced round of applause.
“It’s not over yet,” says Eleanor, “we have to hide the time travel devices. Who knows what disruption Viminal has already caused to the time line.”
In the corridor outside are the sound of many footsteps. The frame shifts location. Many soldiers are shown heading towards the room.
“We must flee,” says Eleanor. “And quickly, or we will be toast.”
“The window,” says Aventine.
He picks up a heavy lamp and throws it towards the window. The glass smashes. Aventine holds a hand out towards Eleanor.
“Come on, it’s time for us to go. Our job is done.”
Casket turned the page. He expected to follow his friends as they fled through the streets of the city being chased by the guards. Instead there is bright sunlight and Eleanor and Aventine are sitting in a train carriage. Outside fields with cows and sheep in go past.
Aventine puts down the paper he is reading and folds it neatly in half.
“The allies are winning,” he says. “The front moves forward. And already one camp has been freed.”
Eleanor looks sombre. “But so many dead. And all because of my husband.”
“There will always be evil in the world,” says Aventine. “Always. Good intentions can be put to evil designs. That is a problem that has plagued man since the very beginning.”
A train guard in a tight-fitting uniform moves down the carriage. “Auschwitz,” he says. “Next stop Auschwitz.”
“Come on,” says Aventine, “that’s us.”
Eleanor and Aventine are standing on a platform. Eleanor is young now, as she has been for a while. Children are playing on the platform with a top and hoop and over a fence appears the head of a horse, watching the scene.
The couple head outside and climb into a taxi. The driver is a kindly looking gentleman with long grey whiskers and a bald spot on the top of his head like a saucer.
The taxi climbs upwards leaving the pretty little village behind. In the distance is the sea. A large steamer ploughs its way across it shedding smoke into the sky.
At the top of the cliff the taxi stops and the driver turns.
“You’ll have to walk from here, I can’t get across that bridge.”
On a pinnacle of rock stands a grand building. “Hotel Auschwitz,” it says in tall letters on the front. The pinnacle of rock is connected to the mainland by a narrow wooden bridge.
“I don’t understand,” said Casket.
The man behind the counter within the hotel is plump like a pincushion.
“You have a booking for a Mr and Mrs Aventine,” says Aventine. He places a hand around Eleanor’s waist.
The plump man smiles. “The penthouse suite.”
Aventine declines the service of the bellboy, indicating their one small bag, and the couple make their way up flight after flight of stairs, letting themselves into the room at the top.
It is a wide space, divided in two by a concertina door in the centre. Sun floods in through the open windows.
“What I have never understood is why we don’t destroy the time travelling devices,” says Aventine.
Eleanor turns. She is quite beautiful now. “They have been used for evil this time, but somewhere deep inside I feel that one day they may be used for good.”
Aventine goes over and stands by the window. “Perhaps you’re right. What could ever happen in this sleepy little town?”
“Look,” says Eleanor, “this floorboard in the cupboard is loose. I will hide them in there.”
“And what about us?” says Aventine. “What shall we do?”
“Why,” says Eleanor and she smiles, “I think we should live happily ever after, don’t you?”
“Sounds grand,” says Aventine. “Happily ever after....”
Casket turned the page. Here there were advertisements for something called Sea Monkeys and a powder to make your body grow big and strong. That was the end of the story. He didn’t understand. It had ended here, in his home.
Did the creator of the story have some connection with the hotel? Or was the story real? Was the time travelling device hidden upstairs in the room Mr Hess was currently staying in? And if it was could he use it to stop this new evil like Eleanor had said?
Casket flopped back onto the pillow. Last month he wouldn’t have believed in time travel. But neither would he have believed in people being shrunk and hidden in briefcases. That, at least, he had seen for himself.
He wouldn’t sleep, he decided, he would think of a plan and he would save the people of Auschwitz and then the next thing he knew he must have been asleep for he felt a hand on his head and he was opening his eyes. Benny was there.
“Come down to the kitchen little one,” he said. “I have some good news.” Then, standing, he leant back down to the bed. “Have you had your candle on all night? Haven’t I told you about that? It’s dangerous.”
With a puff of breath Benny blew towards the knob of wax. The flame tilted, then transformed itself into smoke. As Benny made for the door, Casket was already sniffing at the air.

Kark and Snitch were sitting on opposite sides of the kitchen table, a mound of beaten eggs in front of them in a large earthenware bowl. At the end of the table, standing on a dilapidated wooden shoe box, was Benny. As Casket walked in, his hair standing on end like a cat’s, Benny gave a little bow.
“And now for the news.”
“What is it?” whispered Casket as he squeezed next to Kark.
“Kreckret so far,” whispered back Kark as if his mouth was full of large marbles.
“The hotel is fully booked,” said Benny, smiling broadly like a mouse who has found a piece of cheese in a dry paper bag. He clapped his hands together. “All the rooms are taken.”
Casket imagined a bus of old ladies turning up on the cliff top. Or a Bavarian orchestra, lots of fat men in red suits . Perhaps the noise would disturb Mr Hess and he would move out.
“Mr Hess’s colleagues will be arriving shortly,” said Benny. “They are holding a large and important conference. I want this to go smoothly. It’s a big thing for us.”
Casket felt the blood draining from his fingertips and flood towards his throat. The remainder of Benny’s words washed over him like dust through a dust cloud. The next time he blinked his father had gone and Kark was standing at the cooker pouring the beaten eggs into a large sizzling pan.
“I don’t like this,” said Snitch.
“Put radio on,” said Kark.
It was the final of the table tennis tournament. The crowd were buzzing like ants, the voice of the commentators sliding over them.
“The Jewish team have yet to show,” said one.
“You can’t trust those Jews,” said another, in a voice that sounded like dry wall rot.
“Hang on, what’s happening. The tournament director is heading out towards the table. He is speaking to the commentator. It appears the Jews have been disqualified for a no show. The home team have won. They have been declared the outright winners. What a dazzling event”
The crowd had started to go crazy, whooping out shouts like sea lions in mating season. From across the kitchen Kark pulled his spoon from out of the eggs and threw it towards the radio, hitting it square in the speaker, smattering it with juice.
The radio tottered once, twice, on the edge of the table and crashed to the floor, going out like a bright light.
“Eggs benedict,” said Kark.
“I think I know where Tavarius has gone,” said Casket. “I think I know where all the Jews have gone.”
“Tavarius was only half-Jew,” said Snitch.
“Those too,” said Casket, and he told his two friends what he knew, not even leaving out the bits he only half believed himself.

Kark was armed with the end of a broken off broomstick, Snitch with a short length of lead piping. The three of them had pulled old tomato bags over their heads and cut out holes for their eyes.
Casket fingered the sharp tines of the skeleton key and slipped it purposefully into the door lock. He twisted once, twice and the door slid open. Inside the air was musty, like damp onions.
“You keep watch,” he said. “I’ll get the time travelling device.”
In telling the story it had become reality, as if it was only its secrecy that heightened its unbelievability. Casket strode towards the cupboard. He shifted aside the comic books he had left in place and ran his fingers over the floorboards looking for a groove.
“It must be here,” he said quietly at the same time as he found it, filled with the dust of ages. He forced the key into the space, gouging out the debris and then he prised upwards.
The floorboard gave a bit, then a bit more and came up in his hands. There would be a space under it, and two brooches laid end to end. He would take one and he would travel back to the time when Mr Hess arrived at the hotel. He would be in the room before him and when he went to sleep that first night he would tie his hands and legs and demand that he let his captives go.
Or he would go back further in time to when the first Jew was shrunk. He would stop the thing ever happening.
He wasn’t sure of the plan yet. Plans he had decided were best left to the spur of the moment, like Aventine did.
The boy placed down the floorboard and looked. There was the space but there were no brooches. All there was was dusty floor.
He prised up another plank, then another, then another, until the planks were spread around him like a giant’s dropped box of matches. And under each one it was the same. Nothing. He had been wrong. He turned towards where he thought Snitch and Kark should have been waiting at the door. Instead he found them leaning over the open lid of one of the three briefcases in the room.
“It’s true,” said Snitch. “Hundreds and hundreds of tiny people. It looks like they’re in some kind of camp. I don’t like the look of it.”
“It must be here,” said Casket and he turned back for one final look and that was when he saw it.
What he had thought was dusty floor was in fact the back of a piece of paper. Carefully Casket lifted it up and almost breathlessly he read the small neat handwriting.
“Eleanor was wrong, the brooches are too dangerous a gift for anyone. They will stay with me. Time has already been destroyed too much. But if you are reading this Casket then you will know that I am watching over you. You have already done so well. And it is not brooches you now need, it is something else that will help you. You need to give Mr Hess a dose of his own medicine. Stop reading and look behind you.”
“What?” said Casket and he turned around.
“I found this,” said Kark. He smiled and like a space cadet with an extremely interesting moon rock he held up a cone nosed object.
“The ray-gun,” said Casket and he smiled.

The clouds hung in the sky like so many fingers. Sunlight splintered between them, lighting certain parts of the snowy ground and ignoring others, creating a dappled effect not unlike an enormous pelican crossing.
Kark was in the machine-hut, and due to a lack of space, Casket and Snitch were outside. All three looked towards the mainland where one by one, long sleek black cars were arriving. Out of each car emerged a tall man with a wide-brimmed hat and a long black cloak.
“Do you think our plan will work?” said Casket.
Snitch rubbed his chin. With his three day old stubble the sound created was not unlike crickets exercising their legs.
“If it doesn’t,” he said, “there’s worse things in the world than being small. Remember that Tom Thumb? He had quite a life by all accounts.”
“It’s not so much being small. It’s what done to you when you are small.”
Casket recalled the ominous looking chimneys in the briefcase pumping a dense black mist towards the hotel ceiling. At the same time he realised that Snitch was trying to make light of the situation for him.
“Tally ho,” said Kark within the shed and pushed the lever that activated the cable-car. With a lurch it started across the ravine. Packed inside were the first eight delegates and so pressed against the glass were they that they reminded Casket of the pickled person his mum had given him on his fifth birthday, squeezed as it was, in an old Bailey’s tangerine jam jar.
As the cable-car landed and its door slid open Benny appeared from the entrance of the hotel. On the flat palm of his left hand was balanced a silver tray holding squares of pineapple and cheese on cocktail sticks.
He scurried over to the delegates and made a bow while still holding the tray aloft.
“An aperitif?” he said, thrusting the tray forward.
Beneath eight dark hats sixteen eyes glowered.
“I trust the conference room is ready,” said one of the men. Casket had once heard a radio documentary on Neptune and the man’s voice reminded him of that.
“Oh quite,” said Benny, transferring the tray from one hand to the other and wiping a bead of sweat from where it had gathered on his forehead like early morning dew. “I laid the doilies myself.”
“Then we will adjourn. See to it that we are not disturbed.”
“Except by our comrades,” said another.
In total the cable-car made eight trips. As it came back each time, and eight identical tall men in wide hats disembarked, Casket folded a finger. So when it docked for the last time’ he was left with only two thumbs upstanding. He raised these to Kark and Snitch.
“Ok, you ready?”
“Ready,” they both said together and they headed back towards the hotel, only pausing for Kark to give the cable-car machinery a gentle rub. He had never felt it so warm. This was a sign of