Mermaid Effect 《人鱼效应》 Chinese BL Translation by: 黑猫白袜子

Chapter 17

Chapter 17

Rand looked at the departing police car from his balcony.

He silently stood there in place for a while and then returned inside his home. He walked into the kitchen and began pouring coffee beans in the coffee grinder.

Oh, that's right, he surely remembers that he is still in the midst of a vaccination period, but he began feeling that he was unable to resist that type of craving— thirsting for that type of sweet as well as scalding hot cheap instant coffee.

This is very rare because he has never once wanted to drink that kind of thing after that night ever since he was 14 years old.

Perhaps it was just because the unpleasant contact with the police called these memories back to his mind. Rand thought so, but he found that his hands were badly trembling. The dark brown coffee beans fell onto the table and then dropped onto the matte gray surface of the kitchen floor.

I should clean this place up.

Rand seemed to be able to hear another voice inside him talking and muttering, but all he could do was just numbly stand there.

He found himself unable to move.

So cold...

In the high temperatures of Kansas, Rand nevertheless felt that kind of cold in his own kitchen that seemed to freeze people's nerves. He breathed in large gasps of warm air, but the icy chill that seemed to spread from the depths of his body had already frozen his entire being.

Rand felt himself falling into a trance.

He seems to have returned to that night when he was fourteen-years-old once more. The lighting of the police department was dim. There are various kinds of stains on the walls of unidentifiable origins. The air is permeated with a turbid smell—  from those drug addicts, drunkards, and the scent of the heavy perfume brought in by the prostitutes.

He sat in on an uncomfortably hard chair and his body was uncontrollably rocking back and forth.

Everything in his surroundings is just like a viscous liquid wrapped around him. His mind was blank white. Someone came over and asked for his name...

He does not know.

To him, his past was like a vacant dense fog, everything was so muddled, only a vague fear stayed behind in the dense fog.

Then, a boy who was thinner and paler than many of his age group bowed his head and looked at his hand... there were jet-black stains under his fingernails.

But Rand knew that it was not a stain, it was just dried up stains of blood.

The coldness came to hit him right at that moment. His heart was beating like it was nearly about to explode. He forced his mouth open and tried to breathe as if his life depended on it, but the air was unable to enter his lungs at all as if there was an incorporeal hand choking his windpipe.

The strange thing is that he can clearly draw out the outline of the hand's appearance in his mind, withered, slender, damp, and ice-cold skin.

After a few tens of seconds, as he lay flat on the ground with his complexion ashen, a female police officer found his peculiarity (at that time he was desperately rolling on the ground, his legs powerlessly flailing on the floor).

"My God, ah, this child has asthma..."

......

......

......

Hey, calm, calm down, look at me... Rand... Look at me... breathe in... breathe out... breathe in... breathe out... Rand..."