I woke up this morning in the darkness. The sun had not yet risen, and my bed was cold. A chilling wind blew in through the window to my right as I lay naked, my skin damp with the sweat of a nightmare that still gripped me, eyes wide open and staring at the ceiling.It was a nightmare of my old life years ago. My life before Christ.I close my eyes again, and I can hear Mozart's Requiem in my head as the visions spin in my mind and come to life. The cold steel of my gun against my skin. The fine Italian fabric of a Brioni suit tailored against my body. Diamonds and platinum; a Rolex stained in blood that would not wash away, on a wrist connected to a hand that reached under the table in that place of dark intimacy, holding the foot of a woman that drowned me in the lust of the flesh. Her black satin, lace and leather against her pale skin, her hair the color of dried straw falling over dead eyes, icy blue set in dark circles on her pretty face. I had returned to that life again, drunk on cognac, watching their eyes fluttering in cocaine bliss and laughing in slow, reckless silence.The taste of lipstick, sweat and saccharine numbness on my tongue. The sickly, yellowed stench of death hanging in the air, permeating everywhere in the shadow, in the cold and dark. The horror of filth and lies in my head, masked and corrupted and loved, with evil whispering and playing its seductive lyre pleasantly into ears long deaf to the light.Images flash through my mind. I sit in my chair, her leg on my lap under the table, my hands feeling the power of her flesh under my fingertips, hearing her intoxicating breaths of pleasure. She fades, and I run through the night, jumping down flights of stairs, through the industrial wasteyards. I stand alone, my gun raised deliberately, my finger on the trigger. The muzzle flashes explode like thunder and lightning in the quiet night. I lie on the ground in the darkness, looking up at the light of the full moon casting brilliant red, blue and yellow through the stained glass windows of the cathedral above me.Blood everywhere. The blood of man on my clothes. On my hands.And the requiem played on. Kyrie, eleison. Lord have mercy on us.
