HELL IS A NICE PLACE ON EARTH

All characters, clubs, and situations described in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

The same Ibiza that is described and named, in reality, has no relation whatsoever to the island of the same name.

In all languages the two most beautiful words are always reserved to name butterflies and islands.

But words can be deceiving, because if you look closely at a butterfly and forget about its wings, you only see a nasty insect.

WINTER

SATURDAY

He slept restlessly. It was his first night in a wintry, desolate Ibiza, with ghostly posters along the roads announcing parties that had already taken place, and no one took down for fear of revealing the skeletal horror of the iron structures that supported them. Better to show the past than the emptiness of the immediate future.

The streets were deserted. The sun didn't warm, and it was cold, very cold. He would have wished to arrive at a different time, no matter how much he tried to comfort himself by prophesying that in a few months, the island would be teeming with tourists, that summer would light up the landscape, and everything would return to how he remembered it from previous fleeting visits. Cradling himself with that mantra, it was difficult for him to understand the little taps he heard. In a moment of weightless lucidity, he thought it was a rain shower, perhaps even hail, but then the noise integrated into one of the many nightmares that plagued him that night.

He dreamt of an empty island, of a club closing its doors due to lack of clientele, of a sea that had receded beyond the horizon, leaving a dry salt crust, and with it, ruining businesses that, in just four months, had to suck the blood of visitors to survive the rest of the year in contrite idleness.

The sky displayed an overwhelming blackness that descended on the murky, glaucous horizon, while the first raindrops hit the sand with an incongruous sound. And he was there, alone, standing on Talamanca Beach, clutching a poorly wrapped towel around his shoulders, with his feet buried in the sand, gazing at the desolate distance of the shoreline, not understanding what was happening, while the breeze seemed to whisper his name as it brushed against the abandoned chairs of the beach bars strewn everywhere, rusted and in disarray, as if knocked down by past hurricanes or fleeing customers. 'Mike... Mike... Mike!'

Then he realized that those urgent calls were real. They came from the alley of the port that faced the only small window of the hostel room. He recognized the voice. Then silence fell.

Perplexed, he looked at the clock. It had just struck one. He waited for a moment to confirm if it was a mere echo from the dream, but then a new and urgent call, shouted in a whisper, made him jump out of bed. Learning in seconds the rudimentary operation of the primitive window latch, he opened it to peek outside. He hadn't been mistaken. One floor below, standing in the middle of the street, with a friendly smile and urgent hand gestures, Borja asked him to come down.

Mike wanted to start a conversation, but when he uttered the first sound, it seemed like he was about to wake up the entire island. He gave up speaking to calm his friend with a gesture and an almost inaudible 'I'm coming.' He quickly got dressed, feeling more tired than he had been when he first tried to sleep, wondering if there might be a more opportune time to go for a drink or take a walk around the city.