Rainer Razes Cain by Gregory R. Marshall

Author:Gregory R. Marshall
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2022-07-12T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Rainer found himself walking back to his room, sobering up. Solomon must have dismissed him as the Alamut high started to fade, but he didn’t remember the end of the trip. He only knew that he had remembered something important, and that he had to catch it before it drifted away. Rainer locked his door and tore open his desk drawer, searching for a pencil and a scrap of paper. The memories were already fading, growing thin like the air pocket in a capsized boat. He wrote as fast as he could.

“British. CLOWN pin. Sunglasses again. Something wrong with eyes/veins of forehead. Scared to lose glasses. Fought outside Harp & Dragon.” What else? There was something else. God damn it.

He paced the room, then picked up the paper again. What would this look like to a pissed Screech Owl breaking in? It would look like he hadn’t burned up his past life with his Devil’s playground clothes, like he was still trying to be a cop and chasing a cold case, defiling their sacrament by using it to go after Sunglasses. He studied the notes another moment, then took them to the bathroom and ran the sheet of paper under the sink and crumpled them into an illegible spitball. He put the wet knot into an empty toilet paper tube, twisted the ends closed, and put it in the garbage. An old trick his fourteen-year-old self used to get rid of contraband Victoria’s Secret pages back in the day.

Rainer itched his arms, then found that they wanted more scratching once he started. The memory of the sacrament was fading, but he already missed it. Going to Alamut made him acutely conscious of the hideous realities of physical life. One part of your body would itch, then another. Even unscratchable parts could itch, like your ear canals. He was sure that this was not a side effect of the drug. It was more like growing up badly needing glasses, getting a pair that lets you see, and then breaking them. His body was a prison, a crude machine that felt hunger and thirst one moment and an urge to piss or shit the next. It could never strike the right balance between hot or cold, fatigue or jitters, hunger or dyspepsia. He knew the ‘sacrament’ to be narco-trickery, like their scented torches. It wasn’t some astral liberation. But this didn’t mollify his urge for more. Everything in Alamut was serene and coherent nonsense, a gentle unzipping of the mind like when the body prepares for a sound sleep. In the real world, all the insulation was stripped, and everything was jagged, painful, and abrasive.

It all got worse when he sobered more and could listen to his own thoughts objectively. One hit of that stuff, and he already sounded like an addict. He wasn’t on the Narcotics track on the force, but he had seen enough to know what hard drugs could do to a person. A bad heroin habit was a spiritual amputation.

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