A knock at the door. Groans from the couches as sixteen men shook themselves from dreams of long-awaited showdowns with long-imagined foes.

Only Brian was up, beer in hand, pacing the silent room and waiting. Now he could fling himself at the door, banishing the whirl of hopes and guilt and excitement and memory for another time.

It wasn’t the Lamborghini. It was just a beat up black Corsa, one that he knew far too well for his own good.

Its driver gasped his surprise from the doorstep. “Hiya, bud! Didn’t expect you here.” He peered around him from beneath the edge of his black woollen cap. “What the hell is this place? I’ve been driving round and round for two hours. My phone went haywire.”

Brian shook his head knowingly. He understood Raughnen as much as he ever wanted to. He hoped he understood it as much as he needed. “Never mind, it’s just a town. Just a town.” It was his turn to gasp as the man pulled a stack of enormous cardboard boxes from his bag. “Cheers mate. See you around.”

“Back in Boro I hope,” said the driver swiftly. And he was gone into the night.

When Brian returned to the living room, the masters were alert. One had pointed out the hands on the mirrored clock above the timeless mahogany mantelpiece. Only four hours until midnight. Preparations had to be made. In twos and threes they rose, hauling up ancient bodies with withered talons of hands, straining and wheezing and cracking. Some of the livelier ones had diffused to the edges of the room, where laboriously they rummaged through the heavy wooden cabinets that enclosed their shadow-strewn parliament.

Brian put a stop to it by waltzing in and plonking his booty down on a coffee table with a booming, satisfying slap. Grease oozed from a torn corner to pool in mouth-watering orangeness upon the dusty glass.

He looked round at his new friends. They had been very good to him. They were all stark raving mad, but they had been very good to him.

“Lads!” Brian roared, louder than he had wanted to. He glanced down at his can. Perhaps this beer was a little bit eternal after all. “Lads... you’ve welcomed me to your town... I mean, back to our town, really nicely all day. I just can’t wait to get back out on the road in my own cars again!”

The ring of pale faces surrounding him scrunched up like prunes, turned to regard each other, pressed themselves weakly back into their cushions. “You mean you are not leading the charge against the Ankle?” someone stammered.

“Oh yes!” Brian cried enthusiastically. The aroma of cheese upon cheese engulfed him, lived through him, became his very essence. He couldn’t wait much longer to satisfy his girth. “I’ll be finger collecting somewhere else tonight, I’m sure. Some... top secret threat that only I can stop.”

“Ahhhhh!” came the satisfied chorus from all around.

“But before I race off in my wonderful, unbelievable, amazing Huracan, I thought I’d pay you back a bit,” Brian lectured. “Liven this party up. You can’t live off fruitcake forever, boys.”

“It’s the virgin goat’s blood that does that,” the Grandmaster explained.

“Whatever,” said Brian. “But I needed to show you some proper grub. If we’re all really so happy that you have fully and freely consented to give me some cool cars,” he said, very loudly, glancing meaningfully along the skirting boards, “Then we should celebrate with something decent. Also, I can’t fucking stand fruitcake. So, gentlemen, I give you.... the parmo!”

He whipped the lid back from the first box, to reveal a limp, dying bog of sweaty lettuce.

“I said scrap the fucking rabbit food, Scott!” Brian yelled to himself, and he cast the box aside. “I give you... the parmo!”

The parmo was golden. The parmo was crispy. The parmo was cheesy. The parmo has always been, and the parmo will always be. It blessed the room with its divine scent, sanctified the table with its holy goo.

“It’s the food of heaven!” Brian announced.

The few frail wizards who had braved a couple of shuffles closer recoiled. A hiss of unrefined horror cut through the thick green clouds that clung to the artex defilements of the ceiling. “Heaven!” the Grandmaster howled, rising furiously from his chair. “Is it treason then, Grimmult? You mean to undo us?”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Brian reconsidered. “Actually, it’s a horrible evil mess that makes you beg for mercy the next morning, but it’s bloody delicious at the time, is all I meant.” He waved his arms in what he hoped was a reassuring manner. It might just have been the smoke, but he thought someone’s eyes had turned green just across the way. “It’s home - or what I thought was home for the last three years.”

Slowly, the wizards approached. A circle of wizened, shrivelled heads beheld the tumults of badness that awaited them in the box. “What is it?” one asked.

“There’s chicken in there somewhere,” said Brian. “But it’s deep down, beneath-”

“Oh good! I like chicken,” the master boomed over him. “Tuck in, boys. To the honour of the Feared Father!”

“To the honour of the Feared Father!” the circle intoned. Then, as one, sixteen hands dived down into the parmo and pulled it to shreds.

“Oi! Save some for me!” cried Brian in terror. He had wandered to the door to listen for his newest ride,, but now he turned, swooped down upon the crowd like a vulture.

He stopped just in time.

With fingers that were mere nets of skin over bone, the men shovelled the dish into their mouths, sighed with bliss, and crumbled.

In their last moments, there was no time for pain or surprise to break through the happiness upon those slobbering chops. Skulls and ribs, shoulders and shins, shed their suggestion of flesh, decided that even that was not enough, and dissolved into dry ash upon the grease-spotted carpet. Empty cloaks cascaded after them. A cigar and a comb suddenly realised that gravity was their new master and hurried their descent. The cacophony of croaks and sighs and hacking coughs that had filled the room with a tenuous strain of life ceased instantly and mercilessly with the black, cloying finality of annihilation.

Only Brian remained, poised motionlessly amid the dust and decay with one hand extended towards the now-empty pizza box. Then, he retracted his arm, stared around for a someone to tell him what to do, who in fact never appeared, and began to poke his boots uncertainly through the remains. “Come on, mate,” he whimpered to a shard of cheekbone he unearthed from beneath a robe. “Stop pissing about.”

He stood like that for three minutes before the soft click of the latch poked through the numbness in his head. Brian had time to think, stupidly, that at least the numbness of head wasn’t quite as severe as the Grandmaster’s before the slow tapping of feet revealed a figure in the doorway.

The figure looked at Brian with cool, assessing eyes. One gnarled hand reached out to grip the doorframe. The figure looked from Brian’s startled expression to the whorls of dust about the coffee table.

“I’m sorry,” said Brian. It was all he could think to say.

The man began to laugh.

It started as a thin, grating chuckle in his throat. Then it sunk into his rumbling belly and became a boom of cold, cruel hilarity. The man threw his head back and roared at the ceiling.

And Brian just stood there while he laughed.

At long last, the laugh trickled away to a sneer. The man stepped into the living room, testing the dust with one steel-capped toe. He was a mountain with a builder’s arms and a wrestler’s thighs, and a deep, midnight-purple jacket was doing all it could to contain his bulging torso. Upon the breast of the jacket, a blue rose scowled out at the timid little visitor from behind its pin. It didn’t have eyes, of course, and it didn’t have a mouth. It did, however, scowl.

“So, that demon was right about one thing,” he said. The man, not the rose. He looked down at Brian for a moment, then ground the cheekbone into the carpet hard with his heel. The crunching of the old wizard’s face was the last sound he would ever make. “A whole nest of fools up in that sorry place, just waiting to be used. No plan required.” He leaned closer, and Brian could smell something that had once been alive upon his breath. “You’re just natural fuck-ups.”

“Wh-what demon?” Brian blurted. He needed a wee, now that he thought about it. It was rather distracting. “What are you on about? This... this wasn’t my fault. Honest! I just-”

“Fucked up,” finished the man, flashing blackened shards of teeth. “Just like we thought. And you’re not even one of them really.”

“I don’t understand,” Brian said.

The man grinned wider. “Exactly.”

He whistled, and the door opened again. Slightly less scarily proportioned men and women, all in those purple uniforms verging on black, entered and started to bustle about. Some trotted off up the stairs, chattering about ancient artifacts that legend suggested may just have been put into the tub of cookie cutters in the spare bedroom by the late Grandmaster’s even later wife, after a cheeky glass of bubbly at a summer fete long behind them. Others came to look into the grey mess about the two men in the living room, vague hope on their faces, as if struggling to take in the news that an entire order had vanished forever.

Brian realised that a couple of them were about to speak to him. He didn’t want that. He looked pleadingly up at the big one, the one who smelled like death.

“Next time,” he said with slow relish, “Maybe don’t feed a steaming pile of crap to a load of ancient masters and expect them to come out on the other side.”

Brian blinked down at the crisp remains of the one who’d sat on the very right. He’d said he’d heard a song by Pet Shop Boys once. Brian had liked him. He tried not to cry.

“I didn’t know...” he flustered. “I mean, my mate’s got a granddad that’s had it every Friday teatime for thirty six years.”

“Oh? And how old is he?” said the man with the rose.

“Thirty eight.”

The rose smiled bitterly, as if that explained everything. Brian flinched as something came flying at his face, but it was only another key fob. This time free of valet. “Take your toys,” its bearer snarled, “And get the fuck out of here.”

Brian got the fuck out of there.

A moment later, the door opened yet again.

“I’m sorry,” said Brian as he fussed his way across the room. The echoes of an angry exchange died with his appearance. “I think there was another couple under there.” He brushed the empty box from the table, and felt the comforting luke-warmth of calories upon his shaking hand. Then he turned round and saw the murderous look on the faces of the men that had gathered there. Gritted teeth, deadly eyes. Hands pressed white around the cold glint of switchblades.

“See?” one announced to the others. He smiled at Brian, and it was a smile of pure, sure complacency. “See? Completely harmless.” He stepped neatly to one side, palm open, pointing out the open doorway at the end of a long line of twitching thugs. “Enjoy your supper, Feared Father.”

He left the house for the final time on a breeze of mocking laughter. There were swirls of colour in that wind too, colours which convalesced into flapping shreds of meaning that marked the way as he fled down the path. A round table in the merry shadows of a beer garden, sopping with spilled cider. A quiet alley behind a shuttered butcher’s shop, a half-open doorway glowing blue in the moonlight. A statue of a silver dragon, dimly glimpsed in a lone sunbeam which had negotiated the latticed boarded windows of a council house.

A sceptre. A finger. A knife.

Harmless visions.

He certainly felt harmless as he folded his body into the soft embrace of the Lamborghini’s exquisite leather seat.

But he knew he wasn’t.

The engine roared. He screeched off into the sunset.