Concerning the Note

  Renfield didn’t appear to hurt at the snub, and anyway was still beaming like a pained clown. He moved to another topic. “So,” he said cheerfully, “you got the stuff?”
  Renfield and his talents of subtlety were almost as depressing as Eric and his ideas of cloak-and-dagger.
  Taylor affirmed, but kept his hand in his pocket. The scent of coriander floated as he moved.
  Renfield pulled from the ample space in his bulky jacket a crumpled manila envelope. Only then did Taylor pass over the Walkman. He peered inside, absently noted the correct currency as he thumbed through it.
  “Oh.” Renfield tugged something else from his pocket. “He also said to give you this.”
  It was a folded note, trying to act as though it contained all the secrets of the universe that a man might agonize over, yet failing horribly. Taylor feared it would be more of Eric’s pseudo-philosophical crap. The man could be exhausting at times. What was it the poet had said? “To lose thee were to lose myself?” Some other literature but Eric found scintillating. Taylor thought it was Milton.
  His paranoid senses screaming, he took the proffered note and unfolded it.
  Simplicity seemed the tacit rule for underworld correspondence. It was almost depressing. A tersely scrawled “Sorry.”
  Sorry? For what? Taylor started to protest.
  And Renfield was smiling, and Taylor remembered Stanley, but couldn’t move fast enough, and then he was hurling like Lucifer into darkness, into harsh oblivion.