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Chapter two

Scratching the Itch

I think Inspector Quinn and I were equally surprised when his crazy idea worked.

We both knew that drinking is a strong trigger for my grip on reality to collapse. Time, space and dimensions buckle under their own weight and drift past me like wisps of reality turned fog. Tonight, Quinn talked me into provoking an episode, just so I could help him solve a suicide case. He was so sure it would work, he'd even supplied the bottle of booze to set off an attack. As the shadows began moving around on their own, I gritted my teeth and cursed at my friend.

Of course it had to happen right now while my bladder was about to spout yellow rivers.

The milky white outline of a male in his late forties floated through the closed door, where it hovered for a second. Then the ghostly visage floated right through me, drifted across the room and stopped before a framed photo of a sailboat.

He lifted the painting off the wall, opened a safe behind it, and deposited something into the depth of the safe. As the vision calmed and settled I now saw the whiteness came from his clothes. He was wearing a white labcoat and a pair of pale green hospital issue trousers.

This had to be the late Dr. Gill.

"There's a safe behind that painting," I tried to tell Quinn, but it turned out to be a near impossible task. Talking while enduring an episode is like trying to talk in your sleep. Your jaw locks up and you can only gasp out a few words with every breath.

The image of Dr. Gill seated himself behind the desk. He leaned back, relaxed and rested his feet on the table. That was, until he noticed the bottle of bourbon. The sight made him wince and he leaned forward to examine the label. Then he pushed the bottle away. He looked in my direction with a faint smile on his lips. He kept looking at me and for a moment I thought he had seen me spying on him, before I realized he was smiling at someone else. Someone unseen. I spun around and the oversized head of a snake poked through the door. I jumped back, startled, but the snake-head remained unmoving, stuck halfway in the wooden door. I expected Dr. Gill to respond in a similar way. Maybe to freeze or scream or panic. Maybe the terror of seeing a snake monster in his own office had made him bolt and flee out the open window. But Gill stayed calm and merely nodded at the visitor, as if greeting a colleague. Dr. Gill just sat there for minutes, lost in his own thoughts. Slowly he rose from his seat and almost waltzed toward the window as if dancing to a silent tune. Here he stood, calm, just taking in the night air. Then he climbed onto the balcony and leaned out. He looked to the sky for a brief moment, before opening his lab-coat as if spreading his wings.

"No! Don't!" I cried, and the hallucination burst like a soap bubble, bringing colors back into the world.

"Ow! Damnit!" I groaned. This wasn't doing my head any good. I slumped into the leather couch to catch my breath.

"Who pushed him?" Quinn asked eagerly, choking the life out of a plastic mug of vending machine coffee with both hands.

"Where'd you get the coffee?"

"Down the hall," answered Quinn, wrinkling his nose. "I'd give it a one out of ten."

He offered me a mug of the same hospital coffee. He was right. Even without having Quinn's senses I could tell it was bad. This whole thing was turning sour.

"No one pushed him," I said finally. "The doc simply waltzed out that window and forgot to flap his arms."

"Suicide, huh?" Quinn looked at the safe behind the painting. It was exactly the way I had seen it during the episode. About a square foot large with a rotary lock on a hinged metal door.

"Did you memorize the combination for the safe?" Asked Quinn. He had taken the picture down from the wall and caressed the dial knob in loving anticipation as if he was teasing a woman's nipple.

I shook my head. "The visions are never that clear. Imagine watching a badly worn VHS recording from some thirty feet away - that's how clear it gets."

"Then we'll need a techie to drill the safe open," said Quinn and reached for his phone. I leaned into the couch, closed my eyes and let go of the coffee, letting gravity do its job for the second time that night.

---

I was awakened by the shrill sound of someone drilling into my brain. I lashed out, halfway believing I was back in the MI-16 compound, where Agent Burris interrogated his prisoners with microwaves [*], and I hammered my fist into a leather-bound cushion, hoping to connect with his face. A surprised looking janitor in blue dungarees gave me a concerned look, then returned to drilling into the dial-lock of the wall mounted safe.

Quinn was standing by. Hands in pockets, watching the techie do his thing.

"Almost there," he said, smiling.

"How long have I been out?" I asked and looked around for a wastebasket, in case I needed to puke.

The dial lock dropped to the floor and the janitor let out a triumphant "Ha!"

Quinn reached into the safe and withdrew a large stack of bank notes. We looked at the stack in silence. There must have been several thousands worth of bills in that stack alone, all tied together with a red rubber band. I could have lived off that bundle for months. Maybe even pay my overdue rent.

"It's packed in there," Quinn said. Fistful by fistful, he took out stacks of cash, mostly hundred dollar bills, piling them loosely on the desk. Now and then, a stack toppled over and dropped off the table where it landed silently on the carpet.

"There's got to be million bucks here," whispered the awe-struck janitor.

"Does the hospital pay its staff in stacks of greenbacks?" Asked Quinn.

"Ha! If only."

Quinn grinned. "Then it looks like the good doctor had himself an extra-curricular source of income."

My head was throbbing, and I massaged my temples. "What does it all mean?"

"It means you'll get paid for working on the case with me."

A sense of relief spread through the haze of hangover; I could sure use the money.

"It also means I've got good news for you... and bad news."

"Bring it on," I moaned.

"The good news is: your powers are very real, and so are mine..."

I grunted. This proved nothing. I had seen the ghost of a man and predicted the presence of a safe behind a painting. Even The Amazing Criswell could have pulled off a feat like that.

"-and the bad news?"

"The thing about curing a bad hangover with pepsi and junk-food..."

"Uh-huh?"

"That part, is a myth."

---

Morning.

A handsome marmalade cat padded across my bedroom floor. He chased a trail of sunlight that extended from my window to the closed bedroom door. With a tail held high, he barely afforded me a glance as he eased towards my bed on silent paws.

Hi there little fella, how did you get in here?

I stretched out my arm from underneath the warm blanket and snapped my fingers to catch his attention, but he only continued his lazy stroll. Then he scaled the wall like a fly, and wedged himself into a corner between the wall and the ceiling, ignoring the dull reality of gravity.

Cute! But you're not even for real, are you?

The cat didn't reply. He was frozen in time and space and stayed unmoving in his corner under the ceiling plaster. The vision of the animal dissolved into mousy gray artifacts that faded every time I blinked my eyes.

Time to get up.

The moment I put my feet down, a black spidery leg appeared from under the bed and clawed at my ankle.

The spider creature under my bed must be back, I thought and lit a cigarette. Smoking helps on a day like this.

I badly needed to piss, but I already knew there's a man in my bathtub. He's been there for years and he's not likely to go anywhere, because he's got no arms or legs. He gets in my way when I take a shower, but if he moves too close, I can always kick him. Then he screams like a baby on fire. It's a terrible sound, so I skip showering whenever he's in there. Instead, I passed the bathroom door and relieved myself in the kitchen sink.

The phone rang again. To one part of my brain, this was the first time it rang that morning, but another part of my mind insisted that it had rung all morning without me answering it.

"Daniel here," I mumbled.

"It's Quinn. The bottle of bourbon has disappeared."

"Are you for real?"

"You betcha. You doing bad?"

I wedged the phone between my ear and my shoulder, and opened the breadbox so I could make myself a toast. The bread had gone off and thick maggots were digging in and out of every pore. Real or not, I wasn't gonna touch the damn stuff.

"I'm doing bad alright."

"You need to change," said Quinn.

"I skipped shower because there's a living torso in my bathtub!" I snapped. "I know you've got the nose of a werewolf, but there's no way you can smell body odor from across the city."

Quinn laughed at the other end. "No, dummy. You need to shift into your other form. The energy from the abyss is bottling up inside you. That's why you're hallucinating."

"When you say crazy shit like that, it makes me feel normal."

"Just do it," insisted Quinn.

I lit another cigarette and inhaled so deep that every alveolus was sweating tar. When you're seeing things, Winston and Pall Mall are your two best friends. they ease the symptoms and never change on you - or abandon you.

"Come on, man! Change!" urged Quinn in a harsh mid-tone voice through the receiver.

I have a cousin Tyler in Colorado. He lives a quiet life as editor for the Denver Herald. Every morning he makes sure the paper is printed on time, that it carries stories and local sports news. He doesn't have to worry about people changing into werewolves or demons, and I envy every second of his quiet life.

"Alright, one demon coming up."

I stubbed out the cigarette and stripped out of my clothes because they always rip when I shift. Then I willed the change to happen. My arms grew long, hairy and muscular. My hands transformed into clawed monstrosities and my teeth extended into fangs that can penetrate a skull as if biting into a Twinkie. My voice dropped two octaves, and I growled

"Happy now, motherfucker?"

My hands had grown too large to hold on to the tiny NOKIA and it kept sliding out between my claws. It flopped onto the linoleum floor, face down. I was about to kick it all the way to the abyss with a clawed paw, when Quinn's human voice called out from the phone.

"Now, shift back."

I had been in my other form for less than a minute and changing back was still easy. I'd only shifted a few times before, but enough to know the longer I stay in my other form, the more I want to remain that way. For the first few minutes, I'm always conscious of being in a demon form, until my demon self eases in. Then, I dislike my weak, human form and I loathe the task I've been assigned at birth.

• to protect humans from aggressors that escape the abyss, and from themselves.

I picked up the battered phone from the floor with human hands.

"Feeling any better?", asked Quinn.

There was a sense of released tension in the apartment. The colors were bright, and the shadows didn't move any more.

"Hang on!" I headed for the bathroom. The bathtub was empty, the spider creature under the bed was gone, but so was the marmalade cat.

"You should have been a shrink instead of a cop," I said. Making me focus on the demon delusion and taking control of it was an idea I hadn't thought of before.

"There is no delusion," said Quinn. "You really have a demon side."

I sighed at his imagination. "And you're a werewolf. I get it. Goodbye Quinn!"

I gathered my clothes and headed for the shower. I wondered why my clothes always ripped when I shift.

Did I tear them up in rage?

Dr. Campbell, my therapist tels me the demon delusion somehow represents an aggressive side of me. She doesn't know I've already killed two men in this form, and that's not a detail I want to share with her. The deaths of agents Burris and Bruckner never reached the front page. They lived and died undercover, and if the MI-16 was pissed off with me, they had never said as much. I only knew I had to be careful never to shift in public.

The bread in the breadbox was no longer infested with maggots, and I whistled while I made myself a ham and cheese sandwich. I leaned back against the counter and enjoyed a cup of coffee. The shift had drained the dopamine and whatever hormones that send my brain into warp drive. I felt refreshed and I smiled to myself. It would make my life so much easier if slipping into my demon delusion now and then relieved the symptoms. I closed my eyes and let the sunlight warm the back of my retinas. Maybe I could even control the hallucination of the cat. I'd like to keep a pet, but my landlady Mrs Schultz didn't allow pets in the building.

"Cats leave marks," she insists "Scratch up the wallpaper too."

I'm lonely, I realized. My best friend was a cop who believed himself to be a werewolf, and visiting my sister once every week was not enough to fill the void of loneliness.

Then I noticed a set of deep grooves in the linoleum floor that hadn't been there before. I put down the coffee and knelt down to examine them. There were four parallel grooves, about a quarter of an inch deep and three inches long. Mrs Schultz was already annoyed with me because I was two months behind with my rent, and she would freak out is she knew I'd torn holes into her cheap linoleum. But right now that was the least of my worries. These were not furniture scratches

• they were claw-marks.

---

[*] in: Havana or Hell