DON PASQUALE KNOWS WHAT HAPPENED TO THE VAMPIRES

My taxi crawled through a winding road. There were cypresses around, dark and quiet. Light was warm orange. What a beautiful country.

I was left by a big house, made of pale stone. The car disappeared behind a dust cloud.

By the door there was a man. He was old, bald, a bit overweight, but looked healthy. He wore a blue tie, a stripped vest and a white shirt.

"Buon giorno!", he said. Waived a hand.

"Hello! What a lovely day."

"You are Mr. Corbetto, I suppose". I loved how it sounded. For an instant I considered officially changing my name to that.

"Miroslav Corbett. Nice to meet you, Don Pasquale."

"Please, come in."

I found myself in a room with a very high ceiling. Three chairs and a table; the tablecloth showed a pattern of light green flowers. There was a bottle of wine, two short glasses and a dish with slices of something. The same reddish light I saw outside flowed through an oval window like a spotlight. A grey mutt was sleeping under it and ignored me with royal elegance.

"Have a bit of pecorino toscano", said Mr. Pasquale. "It's magnificient."

I had a piece. He was right.

He filled the two glasses with wine.

"I'm sorry, no alcohol for me", I said.

He shrugged and took a sip from his glass, visibly delighted.

"So, what do you want to know?", he said, inviting me to sit down.

"As I told you in my letter, my job is documenting things. Specifically, things that are happening after the Great Anomaly."

"That was a very big fuckup", he said. His English was thick but precise.

"It was. Many issues has been fixed since then, but many others are still dangling. A bunch of creatures crossed The Seam, wreaking havoc and spoiling everything."

"You bet it. We had several of those motherfuckers here. It was hard to put them down, but we finally did it."

"I'm sure you did."

"Ain't you one of the Cleaners that many talk about?", he said while having another sip of wine.

"Oh, no, no", I said. "Those are great and effective fellows, but I'm just a documentalist. I just take notes and fill forms."

"You fill Excel sheets, do you?", he said while winking. Microsoft software products were known to be one of the causes of the Great Anomaly and consequently banned forever. I smiled back. A risky joke. But all OK.

"Only paper ones, I swear."

"Superb!"

The dog stretched, sucked his balls and got back to sleep.

I asked Don Pasquale about how hard the Great Anomaly striked here.

"Oh, very badly.", he replied, "There are still some unfixed issues, but mainly just places and images, nothing too severe. We also had a bunch of that filthy bloodsuckers fucking around. You know, the Vampires, they even kidnapped the innkeeper's daughter, never to be seen again."

Through the window a red brick tower could be seen, behind a bunch of hills. It looked smooth, almost painting-like, under the sunlight. I found it very distracting for some reason, so I forced me to look away.

"This is the main reason I'm here.", I said, my mind slightly blurred. "They are usually very hard to eradicate, and I wanted to ask you if you know what happened to them."

"Oh, yes.", said Mr. Pasquale while munching a slice of cheese. "We just took them one by one and forced them to watch several of those awful young adult movies featuring Vampires, you know, the ones with the sparkling skin kids and such. Ha ha. Those filthy flying rats are tough motherfuckers, but they could not swallow the cheessy flicks full of bland, pale, skinny crybabies. Then we hit with a second strike: we read them a bunch of those romance fantasy crappy books with all that cringy sex scenes and stupid dialog and cardboard characters."

"Wow."

"Yes. That was what we did. And then they left. One after another. The Vampires were horrified with how we humans represented them. They flew away because they were ASHAMED."

I was speechless. And then I found myself looking at the chapitel of the shimmering red tower again.

"Try not to look at that tower too much,", said Don Pasquale, suddenly aware, "as it can be dangerous. You know, that is one of the effects of the Great Anomaly we haven't fixed yet. It looks very real, beautiful even. But it makes you think, it makes you wish, that you can just pass over those hills and find the base of the tower and cross the door and climb up to the battlements and toll the bells, but you can't. It's not really there. It's a trompe-l'oeil. You will never get to it, as it's always beyond the horizon, all while looking very close. You can get obsessed about going there and lose your mind and die of thirst and hunger trying to reach it."

I wasn't listening. I was anxious. I was just craving to go to the tower.

Fortunately, Mr. Pasquale took me by the hand and carried me to the back of the house. There, a bunch of kittens were chasing each other. Their mother, a magnificient cat with a pure white fur, was watching them with loving boredom. It was a mundane but captivating scene. I returned to the real world, but not immediately.

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