Cavalier On Fire

This is how it happened.

From the pinnacle of the highest mountain tops that towered above Munsgee Hole, Colorado -- and out over the expanse of valley where elk grazed in the dazzling white snow -- the glow of the burning Gaiden Cavalier Inn shone out on the hillside like a lighthouse on a dark sea.

Standing out there in the arctic world with a kind of bold arrogance, and sitting there quite prestigiously as well with its three-stories of high glass walls and elegant craftsmanship melting to the ground, the world could only look on as the enormous hotel smoldered itself up like the transient ashes of a fire pit. A cloud of billowing steam rose into the air from the flames, engulfing the pummeling of hoses that were so dependent on smothering the scorching blaze. The aforementioned blaze had started exactly three hours before – and as town recluse and repair man Radio Ben would have said on the subject – this was all the time it needed for things to get going.

The hotel itself was located slightly off of U.S 550 on an idyllic kind of winding hillside road, sparingly populated by scrapings of tin shacks and abandoned wheat fields. At the time of the burning – and at the time everything went down -- firefighters had been called in from as far as Arapahoe County to run around in a bumbling fashion and spatter water at the rising flames. The hoses spit out dark snakes of water at the fire rising up from the smoking glass walls simmering in the heat, but if anything, it only seemed to strengthen from it, almost like the efforts of the fireman were like a deteriorating kind of sustenance.

And so the inn stood there in the night like a match lit in a snow globe; firetrucks trundling down the hillside with blaring, colorful sirens; the air fresh with the acrid smell of burning pine trees and ash as the hotel and earth beneath it began to crumble into one. There was muffled shouting if you were to watch it all from the hillside, perhaps even the sacrilegious pummeling of water against the burning walls, but the night had become very quiet. The world seemed to be choosing to spectate the cataclysmic event without and whim or reason.

And so while we're at this hotel – this perfectly suitable little place in the little town of Munsgee Hole – we'll have to take a look inside before it's all gone:

The lobby of the Gaiden Cavalier Inn is nothing out of the ordinary. A recent venture into the wonderful field of contemporary architecture has left it with the bleak feel of an office building. The front desk is scrubbed down every day until it shines. The tables are chrome gray and the walls marble black, the whole room devoid of color and likened to the au currant feel of an M.C Escher print. An oriental, rounded chandelier hangs from the pine rafters by the brick fireplace; as innkeeper Burt Henmark would have told you only several days prior, "we got the damn thing shipped right in from the Japs -- went and told me it weighs as much as a full-grown elephant".

The small living area around the fireplace has a homely feel to it. On the good days for the hotel's lodgers – and good days already being far and in between in Munsgee Hole – they'll sit around on the leather couches like layabouts and smoke their cigarettes. If things are going even better for them, they'll delve into chat in an offhand effort to be philosophic about current issues. They'll usually discuss things that quip their interest – among them being screwy politics, baseball, and religion – and most of the time their conversations simply devolve to them all rising up and going for a quick drink together in the Lavender Room Bar across the hall, their conversations having devolved into occasional quips between lousily stirred martinis. Their martinis are usually shaken up by the hotel's favorite bartender Josie Iglesias – a piece of eye candy among the fireplace crowd if there ever was one – but with the survival of both her and them being relatively uncertain at this point, we'll have no choice but to move on.

There's really nothing else left on the ground floor. If you were to continue down the hallway and continued to the left, you'd find yourself faced with the entrance of Jaylett's Ski Rentals, complete with vulgar bumper stickers lining the glass display window and a whole rack of special helmets advertising various images of genitalia hidden under a filthy blanket.

Moderately overweight with a greasy goatee and tinted sunglasses, the ironic part of one Shaun Edwin Jaylett -- owner and proprietor of his own business --was that he had once claimed himself to be a devout Christian. With his tall tales blending together one after another – and his warped outlook of his own faith really not being acquainted to anything in particular – he would have been one of the first to tell you that life was meant to be lived to the fullest. If you were to pay him a visit, you'd typically find him half-baked on marijuana and reclining back behind his counter, absent-mindedly waxing one of his prized helmets and humming some of old anti-war song under his wheezing breath. Shaun had protested the war in Veitnam for all he was worth, and as he was would tell anyone who asked, "On our part, it was a full-blown self-genocide".

The rest of the first floor is overlookable aside from the billiard hall out by the back entrance and the furnished meeting room across the hall from it. If you were to continue up the stairwell – and you'd have no choice with the elevators usually being out of order – you'd find yourself faced with the winding maze of hotel rooms that continued up for three floors. All of the living hallways are draped by velvet carpets and chrome walls, typically showcasing surreal artwork that ranges from Salvador Dali to Escher prints that had been shunned from the lobby.

In the last week or so, most of these rooms have been occupied by the vast canvas of characters in the Ardleton clan. A family of aristocrats through and through – and proudly boosting an old-world mentality that is all the more present at their little get togethers – they've been more or less the centerpiece of the week's festivities. In all actuality though, this isn't a very important matter at all; there are very little Ardletons left now – in fact, there's almost none.

The rooms continue upward for roughly four more floors. It isn't until the fifth floor that we'll come to noticing anything having a semblance of being notable. If you were to take a walk down the hotel's west wing alongside the small sauna and fitness center, you'd find yourself facing a chalkboard sign proudly boasting the directions guiding you to the hotel's own Glass Atrium Restaurant. Still, following those directions isn't entirely necessary; even from the west wing, the sunlight that peeks through the restaurant's enormous glass window still bounces colors and lights down the velvet halls like an aura borealis.

The Glass Atrium Restaurant – as it would tell you in the inn's brochures in the lobby – features five-star cuisine and an elegant dining experience fit only for a king. The class of the restaurant almost comes off as phony, being the kind of restaurant that needs tables draped in white cloth and folded napkins just to prove its self-worth. Its quiet for most of the week, and for the handful of businessman that live at the hotel all year-round, it's a tranquil place to sip coffee in the morning and stare out through the massive glass wall overlooking the gaudy countryside of Munsgee Hole. If you were to ask one Olivia Stoeber – waitress at the Atrium and former bartender at the Lavender Room – she'd gladly inform you that, "the pretty view is the only sweet thing about the shitty, ends-meat jobs they dish out to us here".

Above the fifth floor – the penultimate one -- there is only the sixth. Up there, there are only two things: the penthouse suite of one Robert Ardleton and the Galloway Ballroom. For reasons that will become very apparent in due time, the suite is a place best left undiscovered. It's the kind of place that has the uncanny feeling of a closet for a young person, reeling out the age-old feelings of fairy tales and talismans; the old, "what's under the bed?" kind of childhood mentality that only scarcely vanishes as you grow up. And so just for now, we'll have to stay away.

Our last stop is the Galloway Ballroom.

The figure felt like it was space-traveling for a moment. After that, it was only plaintively hallucinating. It pictured for a moment that the entire hotel was made of ice and it was melting like clockwork; twinkling out white glares under the Colorado sun as the off-season finally drew to a close. Under the sun, the ice didn't only look blue. In fact, the ice seemed to reflect everything that came in contact with it, and so far, it seemed like it had become every color known to man. The figure pictured the colors evaporating and sending steam that rises high up into the sky.

To sum it all up, it was cooling process.

The figure was only somewhat conscious that it's in a ballroom. He was also only somewhat conscious that it was on fire.

Sprawled out in the center of the dance floor with its arms outstretched, the laws of biological function made it apparent that the figure shouldn't have been alive. A letter opener was imbedded into the side of their chest and a pool of blood has formed. There was an occasional kind of guttural squelch from the figure's throat, and as far as they are concerned, they had settled on the grim idea of their demise the moment they felt the piercing crack of the blade ripping through bony cradle. The hotel had been on fire even then, and although the figure only remembered things in faint snapshots, it was fairly certain that that must have been the point where the others left. The figure tried to surmount itself to logistics – faintly attempting to figure out how many people will have died by the time of their death – but it didn't seem to matter now.

The figure weakly opened its eyes and gazed around the ballroom.

In the choking flames, the ceiling seems to extend even further up like a mighty cathedral. The golden curtains had caught fire and were burning surprisingly fast, uncannily reminding the figure of a braid becoming unraveled as the fabric distilled and unthreaded into black ash. Most of the tables in the room were overturned and empty folding chairs scattered the room like lawn ornaments. The dance floor was sullen with broken glass and blood. Only a few days ago, there'd actually been living people in the ballroom. They'd all been gathered there for celebration and the room had been amidst with the clattering of silverware and the sound of omnipresent chatter. The same dinner party had also been when they'd gotten the first surprise of the week – but looking back at those times now – the figure almost felt wistful about the whole ordeal. It thought about the hotel melting like a block of ice and wondered hysterically if you can turn back time.

"You can't then", it decided after a moment. "If you could, so many things would have ended up differently".

Craning its neck over weakly, the figure cringed from the pain in its side and looks at the row of bodies sprawled out on the floor. Whoever had done it had been meticulous – almost creatively so – and had done the murders with a kind of artistic fervor. The bodies were all sprawled out into what seemed like a perfectly geometric circle, and although the concept of reason was beginning to fade away, the figure was able to gather that there were roughly thirty of them. Their faces were bluish and bloated with the look of the dead.

"Thirty people then", it thinks. "You'll be thirty-one. All of those dead people and you still don't even know who did it…"

Wrenching and spitting up blood onto the marble floor, the figure looked at the bodies for a long time. It tried to make sense of them for awhile – but soon after – it just gave up and tried to put names to some of the bloated faces. Some of them were simple, but as to be expected, some of the faces had been disfigured beyond recognition – for some odd reason, that was better. It made them all statistics.

Some of the dead people had been the figure's friends. Others had been the figure's family. All in all though, they sort of blended together into a plaintive vanilla feeling that could act as an epitome for everything. It's all his fault. He had to make it all work o-

There was suddenly a deafening crunch of stone and marble. The figure glanced up again to see one of the retaining pillars in the ballroom's corner crumble. It seemed to lean there for a second – balanced there in space and time – before it fell over onto the dance floor and cracked so loudly that the figure could have sworn that its eardrums were obliterated. The world ringing and the flames rising high onto the ceiling, the figure pondered for a second if the fireman would ever be able to put out the blaze outside. Morning. Won't be out til morning. That's what they said…

And so that's when the choice was made.

The figure sputtered out blood and got a wave of pain up its side from the letter opener as it reached down. With its hand shaking reflexively, it crept across the cold marble speckled with its own blood and innards. Then it rummaged into its own jacket pocket and felt something that was both cold and metal. There wasn't any final epiphany – there wasn't any moment where things were considered. There was only one single moment where the puzzle was completed.

The figure gently pulled out the pistol and looked up at the flames. Then it rested the weapon in its mouth. All the while, it was cringing from the sour taste of rusty copper that stung its dry tongue. The fire surged for a second, but at the same time – and in the figure's mind -- the idea of the melting ice hotel didn't fall completely flat. It sat there stubbornly inscribed into the figure's mind as it stared up at the ceiling, its fingered rubbing gently against the trigger. Any second. Any-

The trigger clicked.

The shot was startlingly loud and echoes through every nook and cranny of the hotel. With the slaughter that had existed over the last seven days drawing to a close, the figure fell back limply against the tiled floor with scrapings of gray brains slumped on the floor behind them. Less than a second later, blood and gun smoke begin to seep out from the corner of its mouth in a faint wisp; the whistling thud of the gunshot still echoing mightily throughout the grand ballroom of the Gaiden Cavalier Inn and all the way down to the ground floor.

The figure's eyes stared forward with its broken mouth agape.

And across the room, adorned on the ballroom's wall in an extravagant banner that is just beginning to catch fire at the bottom:

"We are gathered here to consecrate

the wedding anniversary of

Mr. James Holden Ardleton

&

Elaine Catherine Ardleton

as well as the 87th birthday of

Robert Killian Ardleton

A week of celebration and merriment".