LOLA - ENDING (TAKE TWO)

Ever since that evening sat talking with Neff in the hills above the Hollywood Bowl, Lola couldn't get that piece of Schubert out of her head. Now, late at night while she desperately tried to sleep through the remaining sticky hot summer nights of July she could still hear the music haunting her carried by the near imperceptible breezes that gently swayed the white lace curtains of her room.

With its ghostly strings and subterranean basses whirring away, Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony could have easily been written for her current fragile, broken state of mind. Thoughts went round and round her head like a never-ending merry-go-round with one notion in particular that she had become obsessed by.

It had bothered Lola greatly that Phyllis had managed to rob both her mother and father of their lives and only pay once with hers. In many ways, she felt as if it should have been her who'd shot Phyllis and not Neff. She should have been the one who enjoyed the exacting of vengeance for the death of her beloved parents. But now she knew the meaning of the word impotent and had nowhere to properly direct her anger. Her on/off boyfriend Nino Zachetti had practically disappeared from her life like a phantom since Phyllis had been shot, meeting only once with Lola since the event and seeming incapable of relating to her suffering. She had wondered if perhaps Nino was a genuine psychopath as she'd read a magazine article about how they tended to lack empathy not unlike Phyllis. They were in many ways perfectly suited for each other which made sense as she'd often notice the extra attention he would give Phyllis when in her company, like a sycophantic student trying to impress the teacher.

Now all Lola had was the Schubert she couldn't get out of her brain for company and it scared her to think she might actually be going clinically insane.

Anxious and unable to sleep in her bed, Lola put on some clothes having made the decision to hail a cab down on the street below to go see the state of her father's home in the hills. She still had the keys to the old place and although it might have seemed like a strange and perverse thing to go back there after all that happened there she wanted to prove to herself that she wasn't afraid of the past any longer.

"Where to miss?"

"Los Feliz, just north of Franklin Avenue."

The driver nodded as Lola took a seat in the back of his vehicle which smelt of fried food and beer.

It must have been only ten minutes into the drive when Lola became flooded with anxiety once again. She could see the cab driver's bloodshot eyes constantly watching her reflected in his rearview mirror and felt like he could read her paranoid mind like a book. She quickly distracted herself by looking out of the window at the passing street lights of the city but he seemed to want to engage in conversation with her.

"You got a date or something miss?"

Unable to utter a simple yes or no to the driver Lola was rigid with fear that he knew what she was up to, returning to the scene of a crime albeit one she had no part in. It had been in the city papers after all. Most people she assumed had read about the story.

"I just got to pick something up."

The heavy-set driver looked unconvinced by her delayed and hesitant answer but suddenly got cut up on the intersection by a speeding car which forced him to re-focus away from his interrogation of Lola.

"Godamn son of a ..."

As the cab crawled slowly around the winding road up to the familiar Spanish-style mansion Lola felt her own 'hunk of concrete' inside her empty stomach and she had a strong sense that perhaps she wasn't ready to return to the cold, lonely house just yet.

"This the place miss?"

Lola nodded.

"Would you wait for me? I don't plan on being too long in there."

"As long as you're paying for my time you can take all the time you need. I don't clock off til six."

As she got out of the taxi cab, she heard the driver strike up a match to light a cigarette and somehow it reminded her of the way Neff used to light one of his thumbnail like some sort of magic trick. Strangely it comforted her to know the cab driver would be smoking that cigarette for it meant that he was relaxed and possibly happy to wait. She always worried about things like that, what other people might do or might think. A doctor once told her she had an overactive imagination, At first she thought it might be some sort of compliment but over the years she saw it as more of a curse.

Walking up the steps to the foreboding-looking mansion on the hill, Lola felt more scared than she had in a long while, at least since those eerie evenings when she would be left alone in the house with Phyllis while her father went off to one of his card nights with his few non-business related friends. Looking back to make sure the driver hadn't suddenly disappeared she kept checking on him like her lodestone in the dark so she didn't feel abandoned.

Then, twisting the key slowly in the stiff lock of the door, Lola took a sharp intake of breath before entering the premises.

"Hello?"

Her voice echoed in the empty house and immediately reinforced to her the creepiness of the place.

"Hello?!"

Lola wasn't even sure why she called out but figured it must have been some sort of instant reflex from all those years of doing it each time she'd return home.

Forgetting that all the electrics had been turned off in the place, Lola could only see in spaces lit by the bright moonlight outside the windows that created strange shadows on the stark white stucco walls and odd-shaped patterns on the terra cotta tiled floor of the lower hallway and kitchen.

Then she remembered the grand piano in the living room and suddenly had a great desire to play it as if by making music she could breathe life into the morgue-like atmosphere of her old home that seemed saturated with the heavy hangover of murder. Silver framed photographs of her late father and Phyllis were still resting on top of the Steinway which she immediately faced down so she no longer had to look at them. The memories were too painful.

Sitting down at the piano in the near-darkness Lola began playing her favorite Chopin nocturne from memory and let the notes hang like lanterns in the air as if to expunge the demon spirit of Phyllis from the place. The more Lola played the more she could feel her hot tears fall down her cheek and onto her delicate hands as she continued to play the somewhat out-of-tune instrument becoming increasingly lost in the melancholic melody.

It was only after she'd finished performing the piece and meditated in the silence that ensued that she heard two hands clapping slow and loud like fleshy crash cymbals somewhere in the dark shadows of the room.

"Oh God. Who's there?!" the young woman said clutching her chest.

"Relax Lola. It's your number one fan."

She recognised the voice instantly.

"Nino?"

And sure enough, Nino Zachetti was sitting in the chair opposite completely naked and with a strange look on his face that scared Lola to her core as she felt the blood drain from her body just like that time she nearly fainted when seeing her late mother's dead body. It was an expression as if to say he had conjured Lola out of thin air like a fantasy from his own twisted mind.

"What the hell are you doing here Nino? You scared me half to death for Christ's sake!"

"I come up here most nights Lola. I just like the atmosphere of the place. I'm assuming that's why you returned here too. There sure are a lot of memories here for you to remember. Some good. Some not so good I guess."

More concerned that Nino was engaging in some dark sexual kink in her father's old home, Lola, frightened and disturbed looked back through the window to see if the yellow taxi cab was still there in the driveway but to her great alarm it had vanished as if she had merely imagined it being there all along.  

"Godammit!" she said under her breath as Nino's ears pricked up immediately and caught the panicked tone of her voice.

"What is it Lola? You lost your ride back into town? Or perhaps your carriage turned back into a pumpkin. It is after midnight after all."

"Look. I don't like you being here Nino. It's scaring me quite honestly. You really shouldn't be here. It's trespassing."

Nino unperturbed appeared to be oblivious to Lola's tangible fear.

"Say, why don't you and me bed down for the night and we can enjoy the stillness of this place together. We never had that luxury when your father and Phyllis were always around. Besides, don't you find you can hear yourself think up here away from the chaos of the city. It's almost like this monastery I stayed at once when I suffered heatstroke on holiday in Mexico as a child"

Thinking what she might do if Nino tried to attack her or force himself upon her, Lola quickly planned her exit strategy in her head figuring she could maybe slowly make her way back to the front door and then make a mad dash for it onto the main road where she hoped she might flag down a passing car, anything to help her get away from the naked lunatic sitting and smirking in front of her.

"I can read you like a book Lola. You're overthinking things again. Does it disturb you that I'm naked. But I mean why would it? You've seen me naked before. I've seen you naked before. Many times. It's not like we were waiting to get married to have sex when we were boyfriend and girlfriend all that time."

"No it disturbs me that you don't know why it would concern me to find you here in my late father's house where a murder was carried out. You're sick Nino. There's something very wrong with the way you think."  

"Takes one to know one Lola."

Standing up from the armchair with his athletic-looking body illuminated by the bone-white moonlight filtering through the dusty Venetian blinds, Lola couldn't help but notice Nino's semi-erect penis. Perhaps he enjoyed the cruel words she'd thrown at him.

"You want to touch it?"

"No, I don't."

"Go on. It won't bite you know."

More concerned with how to get as far away from Nino as possible, Lola started to think that perhaps her only option was to appease him sexually for a brief moment just so she could make him think she wasn't trying to escape from him and finally get away when he was at his most vulnerable standing in front of her.

"I'm not going to bed with you Nino if that's what you're hoping for. And especially in this house of all places."

"That's okay. We can have fun right here where we are now."

Looking back toward the window to check if the cab had returned only to find to her great disappointment it hadn't, Lola sensed she might now have to indulge Nino's depravity in order to buy herself some extra time.

Approaching him slowly and cautiously Lola gently took his stiff manhood in her trembling hand and slowly wrapped her fingers around it securely like a rope knot so as not to reveal any more of her increasing anxiety to him. In this sense, she felt he was like a shark smelling blood.

It was then she instantly remembered the night when she was getting her hair and makeup ready for her first date with Nino that Phyllis came into her bedroom and offered her some strange, step-motherly advice, the kind only she could offer. Of course, she was smoking and wearing those thick black sunglasses indoors even though it was evening.

"You know Lola, if a boy ever seems to be coming on too strong with you and is getting all horny like a bull you know you can twist and wrench his machinery with your hand and he'll soon think twice about doing it ever again. Men aren't so big and strong when you got their delicate balls in your hand."

At the time, Lola found it most peculiar that Phyllis even cared about her own safety going on a date with Nino and it made her feel all sorts of strange to think of that woman with her father in any intimate type of scenario where she might carry out such a response to his sexual advances. But now attending under duress to Nino's erotic needs in the darkness of the creepy old house and genuinely fearing for her own life she wondered if there wasn't some great tragic irony in carrying out Phyllis's advice at this exact moment. It would be like some sort of grand final gesture to a third act that would finally bring the curtain crashing down on the entire mess of events that had seemed to have cursed both her and her late father.  

"That's nice what you're doing there. Real nice," Nino said her eyes closed as he now seemed to be completely at the mercy of Lola's sensual touch.

It was then, just at the point of his near-ejaculation that Lola dug her nails deep into the flesh of Nino's groin, twisting his genitals and wrenching them suddenly and violently from his body in a single maneuver her own body now surging with adrenalin from the bloody and frenzied action she'd just carried out.

"LOLA!!!! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!!!"

Nino fell to the tiled floor writhing and thrashing around like a snake that had been partially shot.

Still holding part of him in her hands albeit separated from his body, Lola found she could no longer utter any words from her mouth. It was as if she had rendered herself mute by castrating Nino the way she had just done.

Slipping around in the fast-spreading pool of sticky blood like a frantic Bambi, Nino began wailing like a distressed animal as the door chime rang echoing like a distant bell in Lola's ears.

"Who is that?" Lola whispered, becoming ever more disassociative just like the strange mad scene in that Italian opera her father had taken her to see that one summer. To say the performance had made a distinct impression on the young Lola would be an understatement, what with the soprano in her pure white dress covered in the dark crimson blood of her betrothed and singing the most heavenly music.  

It was then, Lola looked up to find the cab driver standing in the half-light of the hallway who upon seeing her so obviously upset approached her slowly in concerned fashion.

"You okay miss? I heard screaming. I thought you might be being attacked or something."

Sobbing uncontrollably and too ashamed of what she'd done to hold direct eye contact with the man, Lola found she could still not get any words to come out of her mouth.

"It's okay. You're okay. Maybe you scared yourself in the dark here, eh?"

Holding her hands out as way of a confession to show him the heinous crime she had just carried out, the driver seemed to have no idea what he was supposed to be looking at.

"You want to show me something miss? Why you holding your hands out to me like this?"

Looking down at her bloody hands in a state of exasperation that he was not seeing what she was showing him Lola then realised there was nothing there.

Clasping her hand over her mouth in horror, it now became terrifying obvious to her.

She had completely lost her mind.