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M A R A N A T H A

© Osfer, May 2005

_All rights reserved.

May only be distributed for free.

May not be altered in any way.

Contains material of an erotic and homosexual nature which may be illegal to

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The author takes no responsibility for transgressions on the part of the reader

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Available on paperback in 2005

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Chapter XV - as told by Sybrand Brubaker.

Would you believe me if I told you I love life? You wouldn't would you. You see me as a murderer, who kills for pleasure or diversion. Is it worse to kill for entertainment or out of boredom? Interest or instinct? These questions fascinate me and I pursue them with systematic devotion. One thing which I have come to understand is that I am fundamentally, perhaps even anatomically, incapable of empathy. I have also come to believe that this isn't my flaw, but everyone else's.

When a person dies at my hands they usually didn't deserve it and they usually didn't see it coming. This makes their last moments painful for them, because there are hundreds of little things they would have liked to do if they had been told, calmly, sitting down, that they would be dead in a day. Even an hour would have sufficed if a phone was handy. Call relatives and loved ones, let them know how you feel. At least, this is what some of the people who faced my approach with some measure of courage confided in me.

One man, for instance, knew I was coming for him. A wealthy landowner or drug runner or something. Somehow, he'd been informed of my approach and my reputation. Instead of arming himself, instead of fortifying his villa - instead of this, he fired all his guards with handsome severance pay, opened his gates and invited everyone and anyone into his house for a night's Bacchanalian, drugs and sex and good times. Upon awakening he left the villa and went into the woods bordering his land, and walked and walked. Naturally, I followed him and I found him, sitting on a tree-stump. A bear, a portly older male, greatly similar to the bum Robert Holloway I interrogated earlier. He nodded as I approached and smiled a shaky smile, and said that he was afraid, but he was also satisfied. He had had time to put his life in perspective and make peace.

Of course, he was a fool and I dispatched him with disgust. He defined his life by means of his happiness, company and pleasures and generosity. I make no boast to understand these pleasures, but I know inherently they are shadows and dust. The real and only pleasure of life, my dear readers, is living. This is why so much physical ache and psychological grief is required for the body to separate itself from life - the prospect of one more breath, just one, attains a monumental value when the threat looms of taking no more. This is what is forgotten in films and television programs, which give me headaches because the images flicker too slowly for me to truly perceive as motion, when they portray death. Either it is instantaneous and the victim isn't aware of what is happening, as in action movies where soldiers fall over and die after a manly scream and a bullet in the chest, or it is slow and linear, as a sick or fatally wounded person imparting last words or receiving some pre-mortem epiphany.

What they miss - with the exception of one animated fiction which Tiber once showed me, a bizarre comedy or action story involving the death of a priest who carried a crucifix full of guns, or which was a gun - is the golden moment. The moment after the fear or the peace, after the total realization that death is inevitable and prior to the final cessation of consciousness, in which one feels to its fullest depth the drive for life. People who throw themselves off high buildings experience it on their way down, people who suffocate... Everyone who has a millisecond or more to react before death takes them. It isn't a thought, it isn't even a feeling. It is a revelation, one which lasts no more than the space between one heartbeat and the next, and one which I experience with every fiber of my being every second of my life.

Would you like to know what that is, gentle reader?

Of course you don't.

But don't worry, it doesn't matter if I tell you. You don't have to believe anything I say, because in this regard I'm just another preacher and your instincts and your faith will always tell you what is true and false regardless what others, such as myself, offer to the contrary.

The revelation is this:

The body is animated flesh. The animal that forms is merely a passenger of the life it contains and the mind that lives in it merely a driver. Even when the mind is panicked and the body desperate there is still the perpetual, blind and deaf thrum of the will for life that transcends pain and grief, undecaying. As long as you live there is a part of you that longs for more life.

Isn't that simply miraculous? I can only imagine the sheer elation everyone feels at the moment of death when they realize this, and that it's true for everyone and that the world they leave behind is full of people who in their core want to live and that this means, inevitably, that the world can only get more and more interesting. Sometimes I almost expect them to be grateful, but don't you worry, I don't style myself some type of angel of mercy.

If I were merciful, perhaps I would have killed Ulrich before the ambulance arived to carefully extract the jackal from the windshield I'd dropped him on, immediately buckling him to a stretcher and carting him off while I stayed to talk with the recently arrived representatives of the Maranatha City Police Department.

One of these, a black-furred ram with a warm plush-lined leather jacket on pushes a cup of hot coffee into my hand and I look at it curiously. "Hell of a first day, huh?" he says with sage reservation, looking up at the walkway which spans over the stretch of four-lane street we're walking on, cordoned off from traffic while other, more modest policemen inspect the scene of the accident, collecting samples of blood and taking photographs of the vehicle, in whose trunk I stored the unconscious Detective Lombardi, whom I'm now impersonating. "Hell, you hadn't even signed in at precinct twenty-one, so technically it ain't even your first day. Christ," the ram says, shaking his head. I wince at the swear, without meaning to, which the ram, curiously, notices. "You religious? Sorry, man, just a habit of mine. I'll do my best not to invoke your Lord's name, and you call me on it when I slip, and maybe say a prayer for me to help me out, huh? Oh, by the by, name's Gulliver, people call me Bertram. Which is my first name."

He extends his hand and I take it, squeezing. I've always loved this custom, shaking hands. You learn so much from feeling someone's flesh and looking into their eyes. You see their honesty and pretense as if they were presented on a platter for you to pick through. "Yeah, I've heard 'em all," says the ram, chuckling as we shake hands and I smile at him. I decide I like him. I am intrigued by this feeling and the change in my disposition that it implies. "Bert Ram, Butt Ram, and my personal favorite, Black Betty. You're Lombardi, right? You got a first name?"

I think about this for a second, take a sip of my coffee. I took the real detective's wallet when I put him in the trunk of the car, but I didn't think to look at his ID. "No," I reply with a smile. Another sip of coffee. I'm amazed at how easily I'm imitating a regular person; normally this requires some effort and study. I'm not even thinking about killing any of these people. "Just Lombardi."

"Just Lombardi it is," says the black ram with another chuckle, picking something from between his teeth with the blunt hoofcap on one of his fingers. "It's not official, but you and me are gonna be paired as partners, most likely. Just transferred here myself. Used to work in a little town a little south from here, hoofer country. Not many of you fangy types around there," he chatters on and begins walking to his own car, a plain police roller. No doubt he's been here only so recently that he hasn't bought wheels of his own.

Wheels? Cars? Since when do I care about these things?

"A week ago - bam - word comes down from on high that the constabulary needs some new faces. Carnies, too. Carnivores, that is, not circus folk. Some pee-cee bullshit about equal representation of minorities in government positions. Me and two other guys got the offer to transfer or retire early, but fuck that , I ain't even fifty yet, and me bein' a bachelor and all I figure what the hell, always wanted to move to the city. Jesus, you really know how to get a man to talk, don't you? Shit, sorry."

"It's okay," I say. Without trying, I sound like Lombardi, that same just-shy-of-New-York accent. "It don't usually bother me, just I'm a little shook up by having some poor sap throw himself onto my car." Where are these words coming from? When did I so thoroughly absorb Detective Whatever-His-Name-Is Lombardi into myself?

Bertram buckles his seatbelt and when I've buckled mine he awkwardly starts the engine and, with a sheepish look of shame at the three attempts it took him to get the car started, he rolls past the cordon and onto the road proper, quickly taking an exit to join the majority of inner-city traffic. "Jeez, look at all that..." He's positively fogging up the windshield with his heavy breathing, grinning ear to ear at the sight of the young streethustlers out in droves along the boulevards at the rim of the fancy going-out district, the early birds dressed in their finest and least garish gear, hoping to score the attention of someone looking for an actual escort for a night on the town, and perhaps a few quickies along the way. "Not like we're all so pious back home, but you just don't see people making such a show of it... Is it true the PD here have a don't ask, don't tell policy about police officers employing hookers?"

He's looking at me with the hope in a child's eyes when he asks an impersonator in a Spider-Man costume whether he'll take the child out for some webslinging. "Officially, no," I tell him and a look of disappointment briefly crosses his face, until he sees the smile I show him and understands that the answer is 'yes'. I'm becoming quite good at this game.

We arrive at the precinct after a silent drive and as I step out of the car I take the time to scan my surroundings. Did Lombardi perhaps request a transfer here, and if so, why? It's only barely in the city limits, nothing but a lot of fences and bare, grassy hill separating the humble brick precinct building from the looming concrete presence of the detention and correction-centre just outside the city limit. Where am I getting all this information? My intuitions are rarely this... factual. Something peculiar is happening to me. Am I boring you with my self-analysis?

Walking into the precinct building is an absolute wonder. I've never been in a police station before. My yellow raincoat sweeps behind me as I march into the building with the ram at my side. Beige walls, green floors, a reception and then a large hall full of desks, most of them unoccupied. I sign in - Lombardi , with a beautiful curlicue at the end, just like the signature on the detective's driver's license - and the watch officer informs me that the chief wasn't available and that I can just go upstairs to my office, all my stuff was sent over already.

It's as if I stepped through the looking-glass. Here I am, rubbing shoulders with the police . The off-duty police, having been pulled in from well-deserved rest to man the fort so that the day shift can focus its full attention on what is being named the Sargasso Slaughter or the Maranatha Massacre, depending whether one follows national or local media. Coffee flows as freely as blood did at my hands just a few hours ago, overworked officers feign concern or professionalism as they nurse hangovers and disbelief, ah, the resplendent aftermath. Bertram makes introductions for me, though many of the officers I shake hands with either sneer at the newcomer ram or admit that they themselves are inner-city transfers and are only there on a provisional basis. Walking past desks, empty and uncluttered, occupied and ignored, I head toward the stairwell at the back of the floor and with Bertram in tow, I head up to our office and perceive that I've come to a decision.

I'm going to be a policeman.

This is very, very funny.

Laugh.

The office is at the end of the upper floor hallway to the east, with an uninspiring view out the window of the looming penitentiary. Boxes are stacked along the walls, some marked Lombardi, others Gulliver. "I staked out this desk, hope you don't mind," says the ram, hanging his coat up on the peg by the door and sitting down behind the desk against the wall, leaving me the desk with the back toward the window. He adjusts his underarm holster as he sits and I realize I don't yet have one, so I keep my coat on and rifle through the boxes on this desk. One of them seems to be a collection of post-its from Lombardi's old desk - 'Pick up dry cleaning', crossed out, 'Love in the wild, 9 PM Friday Discovery Channel', also crossed out, 'Meet with Brian H. Friday 9 PM'.

Bertram leans back and closes his eyes, clouds of dust puffing up from the chair he's sitting in. "You got anything you need to do? Case-wise, I mean. I got a feeling there's a fuckton of paperwork heading our way over the jumper you hit today and I think I ain't the only one who's rather put off till to-morrow what one can do to-day," the black ram says, emphasizing the old-fashioned phrase.

"Bertram," I say and I lean forward in my chair, my elbows on the desk. The ram pays attention, sitting upright attentively. "I'm working on a case that's a little off the books. This transfer, it couldn't have come at a worse time. It sort of left a lot of threads dangling that could come back to bite me in the ass. I'll understand if you want to keep your hands clean ­­ -"

Bertram raises his hands and spreads his hoofcapped fingers, smiling a relaxed smile. "Dude, if we're gonna be partners, we're gonna hafta trust each other. You trusted me just now, and I intend to return the favor." Is this, I wonder, how honesty works? What a fantastic concept. "If you cut me in, of course."

Ah.

Not trust, corruption.

My mistake.

"I've got two leads now," I say, sidestepping the issue of profit for the moment, snatching a bit of paper and a pen from one of the boxes littered around. "Hank Corey, and something about blue bandanas worn around the neck. Do me a favor and track down some addresses, will ya?" I say, handing him the paper and standing up, tugging my coat a little tighter around me. "I've got to get some stuff outta my car. The impound, is it round the back?"

The ram's already plugging in his computer's monitor, getting started on his investigation. He cuts a most professional figure, I must say. He nods and I walk out the door, down the hall, once again noting over my shoulder what a perfect view the office window gives of Maranatha Penitentiary. Down the stairs I go, nodding meaningless greetings to the rest of the constabulary and walk out into the fresh air and the dim blue pre-dusk light. It's hardly even dinnertime and already it'll be dark soon. Winter is truly the night-hunter's season.

Finding a car with a smashed windshield and a crumpled hood isn't difficult and, once found, I open the trunk, pull a still unconscious and rather cold Lombardi out and drag him down to a sub-basement of the precinct's garage. This may strike you as a ridiculous compression of time, completely glazing over the difficulties in dragging a body around and bringing him somewhere nice and secure without any of the police noticing, but if it wasn't so pathetically easy I would have made more of a point of it.

It boils down to this. When you look like you know what you're doing and you look like you belong, people who are working won't notice you. You can walk into any theatre if there's rehearsals, with your sleeves rolled up, a headset around your neck and a clipboard and a can of soda in your hands. So dragging something heavy wrapped in plastic sheeting over the parking lot and into the garage isn't strange, nor is asking the resident mechanic where the storage lockers are. Of course, if there hadn't been any storage lockers I might have had a problem, but in this, the fates were on my side.

The sub-basement was poorly lit, as it should be, with half the bulbs lining the long, low-ceilinged corridor broken and the other half dull or flickering. Some of the storage lockers, small rooms about six feet wide and twelve deep, have doors of the cage variety with rotted-away padlocks, filled with boxes of seventies-era paraphernalia covered in dust.

Traversing large sections of corridor where no light is available and I almost trip over some litter on the floor I finally find what I need: an empty storage locker without a lock, but with a solid door on it. I rest Lombardi against a wall inside it, closing the door behind me, and unwrap his plastic sheeting, and by the sound of his sleepy wheezing and the clearly blue pallor he has, even with my nearly color-blind night-vision, I chuckle as I realize I should have probably thought about making some air-holes before wrapping him up so tightly.

Fortunately, the oxygen-depravation doesn't seem to have affected him too severely. In fact as he hacks and gulps in big lungfuls of air, the panther I so resemble actually wakes up, red-eyed and trembling. His eye show their bloodshot whites and his lips struggle to form words as his eyes, adjusted to the dark by hours of unconsciousness, instantly recognize his mirror image. It must be very confusing for him, his last memory being of having someone fall on top of his car, and so I let him work through the confusion, and smile at him.

"Yes," I answer his unspoken question, feeling so certain of the answer even though I don't really know what the question I intuited was.

His ears fold as much as a panther's can, his lips go dry. He's terrified. In near absolute dark, a stone-walled cell, with an exact copy of himself, and still suffering from slight hypoxia, this must all seem very surreal to him. "I'm..." he begins, reaching out to grip my coat, "I'm dead?"

If you don't immediately understand the irony of this, you'd better take a power-drill to your head. Here is the only person I've grappled with in any way without killing him, and he believes he's dead. It's simply beautiful. So beautiful I wish Jeremy were here to share it with me, and briefly, I look around the dark, silent room, but he isn't to be found. I return my attention to Lombardi. "Yes, you're dead. What sort of a person were you?"

He's still shaking, looking at me and at the room, trying to piece the mess of thoughts in his mind together. Looking at the panther, admiring his black hide, I realize he's a rather handsome male and that, by consequence, I must be rather handsome as well. "Is this Hell? What are you?"

I smile benevolently at him, and unbutton his yellow raincoat. It's much nicer than mine. "I'm your judge," I inform him, a concept from some play I once saw. "This is a place of rest for you, for introspection. I will visit you from time to time to give you food and some comfort and hear what you have to say and, somewhere along the line, we'll figure out what sort of person you were, and where you should go."

He looks frightened, this panther, absolutely no skepticism in his eyes as I toss the coat aside and begin to unbutton his shirt. "I... I don't know, I... I don't think I'm a bad person?" he asks with pleading eyes, still slightly bloodshot from his brief brush with asphyxiation. "Am I?"

I shake my head and I feel genuinely touched by his despair. So perfect was my timing, so convincing my delivery, that it genuinely hasn't occurred to Lombardi that any of this is pure fiction. "You don't have anything to worry about. But you must be honest. In life, we people keep many secrets, so in death, they must be, shall we say, exhaled. So tell me," I ask as I pull his shirt off shaking shoulders, letting his torso rest on my lap, cradling his handsome head. "What sort of person are you? Wait, no. That can come later, don't worry about that. Why don't you tell me if there's anything you'd like to do, hmm?"

He looks at me, pupils so large as to completely blacken his eyes, but I'm still fairly certain his night-vision isn't as good as mine. I have freakishly good night-vision. "What do you mean?" he asks, somewhat calming now.

"You're dead," I inform him with a smile. "I am you, more or less. Your body, at least. You now have all the time in the world, and to make you feel at ease, I encourage you to do something you've always wanted to do with yourself." He looks at me and positively giggles. "Come on... What is it?"

"Nothing," he says with a chuckle, much more at ease no, resting his broad shoulders easily on my lap. "You're a guy , man!"

I shake my head at him, and stroke his cheek. "I'm you ," I tell him, and I see him licking his lips as he thinks. My whim, my little stab in the dark, proved correct. When I was younger I used to converse with my prey, either before they were aware I was a danger to them, and simply thought I was just another barfly, or immediately before dispatching them, and I found that many of the straight guys shared the same fantasy - to give themselves a blowjob. Rarely, of course, in those terms... They admitted they'd like to try blowing a guy, but it'd have to be somebody with qualities that, whether they realized it or not, very closely resembled their own. Lombadi, it seems, is no different.

Often have I wondered what the awaits the souls I dispatch and, while I'm all but certain there is nothing waiting for me after death, I'm equally certain that the people I kill go somewhere. That causes me to wonder how they react to entering this new world, how quickly, if at all, they accept it. Sometimes I think they'll be so skeptical they won't believe they're dead until something truly magical is done to demonstrate it to them. Other times I think people are, unknowingly, so very tired of living that the idea of being free of that dreadful pressure is so alluring to them they'd instantly leap at the prospect of existence without mundane responsibilities.

Lombardi falls under the latter category. Narcissism, shock and post-hypoxic giddiness combine and Lombardi rolls over to face my groin. This, I think to myself, is going to be interesting. I smile down to him as he reaches to part my coat, fumbling for my belt. "I can't believe I'm doing this," he chuckles. "What would Katey think­-" He sits up so fast he bangs his head against my jaw and my head snaps back, hitting the wall behind me. "Is she all right? Katey, she's my wife, she lives-"

"Relax, relax," I say and hush him, kissing him on the lips, which indeed seems to soothe him. I would be a very good Judge, I think, if such things were real. "She's alive. It'll be a while before you see her again, but you'll see her. Now go on. You were about to live your dirtiest self-obsessed fantasy," I say with a reassuring chuckle that would make a television psychiatrist proud.

He is comforted and returns to face my lap. His shoulder rests heavily on my thigh, and despite his recent chill he's quite warm. It must feel wonderful, to be relieved of responsibility and doubt... Having never felt either I can't say I truly understand, but if these pressures feel anything like the urges I sometimes experience, I can commiserate. From the look on Lombardi's face, as much as I can see of it in this near pitch-darkness, the idea of taking another male's penis into his mouth isn't something that appeals to him, but the fantasy of doing it to himself is potent enough to motivate him to. A trained police officer, apparently a husband, gingerly pulls my zipper down and pops the top button on my pants, by which time I am, for reasons I can't fathom, achingly hard and just as it occurs to me that I should worry about this charade because my member might not be the same shape or size as his own, he whips it out and sticks it in his mouth, immediately taking it as deep as he can and gagging around it.

I stroke his face as he screws his eyes shut, possibly imagining himself alone in a dark room with his doppelganger, giving him a blowjob - who knows. The taste of salt one finds on any part of a male's body clearly doesn't appeal to him, but by the obvious stirring in his on trousers, that's rather far from his mind. I hear something outside, but I ignore it. This is unusual for me, but I am too keenly focused on Lombardi's face and what it tells me about what sort of person he is.

He looks so very deeply relieved to be doing this, which tells me a lot. He is a man who experiences the pull of temptation, who is far from innocent in the transgressions he has considered... However, the degree of relaxation he displays tells me that this is a man who has almost always won the battle with temptation. I would be very much surprised if he had ever fallen prey to corruption, if he had ever been unfaithful. He's been tempted, quite clearly, and the temptation has only become greater as the years wore on... Here is the relief of one who is glad that the test he endured was concluded before he had a chance to fail it. Interesting.

His face shows much more as well. He is a late riser, with precious few minutes between the moment he wakes from slumber and the moment he leaves for work. He drinks coffee with one sweetener and one lump of sugar. He knows how to use chopsticks, but not what a fish-fork looks like. His girlfriend always ties his tie, he wears the same shoes until his toe pokes out the sole, he brushes his teeth three times a day and far longer than is necessary, he stops at every red light but doesn't even see stop signs any more, he hates the game Scrabble because he always has to play dumb to prevent himself from winning every time and the only birthday he ever forgets is his own. He is a man with character and many flaws, most of which he has kept under control up to now.

"God, no, this is just too weird," Lombardi says, pulling wetly off me and he rolls onto his back on the cold floor, covering his face as he laughs. "You think I'm nuts, right? I mean, who dreams of doing this ? Okay, so, what happens now? Is it a sort of 'It's a wonderful life' kind of deal, making me relive my old mistakes or more of a 'Ghost' thing?"

"You mean 'A Christmas Carol', not 'It's a wonderful life'," I inform the panther as I tuck myself away and zip back up. "And if you even think about moving coins to convince your ladyfriend you're still alive-" I hear something again, but Lombardi, so far, has not. You should know that I don't watch movies, but a policeman does, so thankfully I remember hearing about these movies Lombardi's talking about. I love my memory. I wonder why I haven't had any blackouts recently? "Okay, I think you're due some private time. I'll be back later with some food and some blankets and shit."

Lombardi uncovers his eyes, more quizzically than skeptically, and sits up to blink at me in the darkness. "I still gotta eat?" he asks.

Remembering this scene from the play, I shake my head. "Not really, but you probably still feel like you should. This is a transitional period, after all. Now rest, and think, and we'll talk more when I return," I say decisively. I wrap my coat around myself again and drape Lombardi's over him, deftly removing his wallet and keys and slipping them in my own pocket. I open the door and step out, closing it and bracing the handle with a piece of wood so it can't be opened, and see people in the distance.

Curiously, they aren't coming from the side of the stairs that lead up to the basement of the police-station's garage, they're coming from the other end. This is indeed curious as I can recall smelling no fresh air from that side, and they make a rather raged impression. Large men, all wearing the same black bomber jackets, hushing each other as they march, single file, through the corridor. They pass under a still-functional light-bulb... Four... six... sixteen men, in all, all carrying weapons.

I press my back against the door, blending with the shadows. My fingers curl, itching for the scrape of soft flesh under my claws, but I must restrain myself. I'm a policeman now and a policeman wouldn't rip these men limb from limb, if only because he would be unable to. They pass by me and my night-adjusted eyes see each of them, though none of them notice me. It's like that scene in Silence of the Lambs, a movie which Tiber thoughtfully had remastered at a framerate I could see as actual motion, where the hero is wearing his night vision goggles and sees that FBI bitch, but she can't see him. They're just inches away from me, I can feel the air they displace as they pass me.

After the fourth male passes I can't see the others quite as well, stars beginning to dance in front of my vision due to oxygen deficiency, since I dare not breathe. This becomes an ever increasing problem, especially when they all stop in their tracks to listen to some noise overhead and then dig into their pockets to pull out balaclavas, which they tug over their heads, and various handguns and rifles and shotguns before they continue along, by which time I feel sick in my stomach and I feel extremely warm. My vision has dulled to the point where I can't see the people in the shadows, just the ones further down the hall in the light, and even they are out of focus. I suspect, with ever greater conviction, that I may well be about to die, because I have repeatedly proven that I indeed possess the force of will required to hold my breath not only to the point of passing out, but actual death by asphyxiation.

I wonder if there will be a Judge for me? I wonder if he will look like me when I was still a lynx, or like I am now, a patchwork of two felines. Or perhaps I was something else before I was even a lynx? Would that be possible? I must remind myself to have my skull scanned when the Maranatha mission is over. Perhaps even my lynx body was a disguise Tiber gave me, which I simply forgot. It isn't impossible.

I'm drowsing near the edge of total asphyxiation when I hear their footsteps fading and slowly, gently, take a breath, deep as I can, hold it, slowly exhale and return to normal breathing. My vision clears up, my fingers, delicate instruments that they are, cease to tingle and the cramps in my abdomen subside. How long has it been since I've eaten? I should have donuts now, should have donuts now, shouldn't I? I wonder who those men were. They've vanished up the stairs and I'm alone in the hallway, leaning against the cold door. I can hear snoring coming from the other side. Sleep... how long has it been?

There's stumbling down the stairs, a dampened cry and the wet crack that you learn to associate with a spinal rupture when you've caused them as often as I, all this echoing down the hallway. I feel something driving me to run, and it isn't an urge and it isn't an instinct. I have to take a moment to figure this out, trying to ignore the funny-sounding gurgle coming from the throat attached to the neck I just heard snap after its owner tumbled down the stairs. What the hell am I feeling?

Could it be...

No.

Duty? A sense of right and wrong? Or, wait - maybe I want to protect somebody? No, that's ridiculous. Who would I want to protect? I don't know anyone in the precinct. Except maybe that ram, what was his name? Burt or Betty. I think I actually care whether he dies, and not just because I think it would be amusing if he did.

"Jeremy, what's happening to me?" I ask, a soft whisper I in no way expect to have answered.

"Don't ask me, pal," says that familiar voice and across from me, clear in view as if he were standing out in the sunlight instead of in the shade with me, stands that modest, wise, benevolent and cruel grey fox. "This is all you. Talk about climbing into somebody else's skin, huh?"

Jeremy's accent is much like the one I've adopted from Lombardi. "Are you mocking me?" I ask him with a pained growl.

He shakes his head so gently and immediately I feel sorry for snapping at him and I lower my ears, which feels funny now that they're rounded and not tufted. "You are the apotheosis of predators. You are the closest any sentient has ever come to the pure guiltlessness of an animal without sacrificing any of his intellect or instinct. If you had been gifted with ambition as well, you would empty the world of all life before you died."

"Thank you," I whisper to him, my head still lowered, my hands folded behind me as he strokes y face. "Are you disappointed in me?"

I don't look up, but I know he's shaking his head. "Merely curious. You're molting, I think, becoming something other than what you were. Maybe it's only temporary, or maybe it's the first of many skin-sheddings, who's to say? I should say, really, you have an opportunity to molt. You have to decide for yourself if you want that. Decide who you want to be."

My paws cover my face and I growl angrily at Jeremy. I've never done that before. I wonder what will happen if I move to strike him or to touch him, whether my hand will pass through him, shattering his illusion or whether I'm crazy enough to feel him. "That's like asking a child to decide what he wants to be when he grows up. How can you ask something like that? Choose for me," I plead and drop to my knees, because, dear reader, that is what one does when one pleads. "Please, choose for me, make me into what you want me to be so I can hate you if I don't like it o love you if I do, but I will never have to doubt myself... I couldn't bear to doubt myself. It would unman me, it would make me hollow. Please!" I yell and quickly cover my muzzle because I can hear voices, far down the hall, up the stairs, suddenly going silent. They heard me. "Jeremy, what do I do?" I hiss, but of course, Jeremy isn't there. Footsteps are coming down the stairs and I press back into the shadows, hiding, for the first time in my life, not out of strategy or boredom, but out of genuine cowardice.

A flashlight is shined down the hallway and I hold by breath to avoid even the merest touch of the beam, grey and diffuse in the dank air by the time it reaches me. My heart races, and not like when I'm chasing someone - I'm panicking. I'm so terrified of the choice I have to make, or more precisely, of making the wrong one and denying myself a life of happiness I never imagined, or of guiltless purposefulness that I took for granted. As I hide from the beam, I ponder becoming not just a cop, but Lombardi himself, bedding his girlfriend and attending his family gatherings. He has a lot of family, and they like him, I can tell this.

There is gunfire, and the flashlight vanishes. The gunfire is muted and distant, far above me, far away, and I sink to my knees on the ground, trembling. I have to be what I was or what I might be and I can't move until I decide, which means I can't move. I hear some shouting upstairs. The men with their weapons are actually invading a police station, an occasion as rare as my escapades in the Sargasso building, and I can't be part of it because my legs refuse to move.

Do you think me pathetic, dear reader? Do you now consider my threats to be the ramblings of a harmless madman? Are you beginning to doubt whether I really did all the terrible things I described, or whether I just made them up? I'm crazy enough for that. Maybe I didn't kill all those people in the tall Sargasso tower, maybe I didn't do bloody duel with Claude, with bodies dropping left and right. How outlandish, if you think about it with a rational detective's mind. That even someone as clever as Tiber could somehow magically predict that I would fall down the elevator shaft with Claude and be waiting for me there. That the police would scan only for the facial features of Claude's face when they scanned mine. That I would somehow magically intuit the value of this yellow coat I'm wearing, that I would dine in a restaurant with almost supernatural felines serving me and then walk away from them as if closing a fairy-tale book, that I would toss, so lightly, my jackal companion, if ever I had one, over the edge of a bridge and just happen to do so at the exact second that my mirror image, detective - I quickly check his wallet - George Lombardi would be driving right under me that very second, that the police would accept me into their ranks without further question, that I would drag Lombardi's body down here, that he would perform fellatio on me and that armed men would march into the precinct for whatever purpose...

Maybe none of this is real. Maybe I'm just some lonely beggar, who's been sitting in this dark corridor so long he's spun wild fantasies about how he got there. Maybe I'm not in Maranatha at all. Maybe I'm not really a lynx disguised as a panther, and if I open my shirt, maybe I'll see I'm panther all the way down. Maybe I'll find the storage room behind me empty if I open the door.

Maybe I'm having a sick nightmare. Maybe I'm that wealthy landowner who knew his murderer was coming and spent as much of his money s he could for a night of sex and drugs before the dawn and death. Maybe these are my last seconds, when the blade or the claw has sliced through my neck and I'm riding a gentle brook of heroin, painless, to my death and instead of the freakish hallucination I've been spinning, I should try to remember the trysts I had with beautiful young males and females the last night, when my money and charm made me as attractive o them as a man half my age.

Or maybe...

Just maybe...

All of this was real.

Oh god.

But Jimmy Knuckles... how could you?

To be continued.

Available on paperback in 2005

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