It was a cold, cold day in December and the grandfather clock was striking eleven. I step inside the house, the booming gong resounding inside the house as if to announce my arrival. I walk through the crowd of crime scene investigators, nodding to people I’ve seen a dozen times in settings eerily similar to this. I ignore the thudding in my chest warning me to, pleading with me to stop, not bring more torture unto myself, nightmares to a pleasant slumber, blackness to an innocent soul.
I already know what I would find, what the victim would look like, and what the scene would look like. A stifled sigh, another mark on my soul, blackened with each failure I withstand. I close my eyes for a moment, hardening my heart, strengthening my resolve not to crumble. No, not now. Maybe later, under the cover of a black night, unseen, unheard.
Deja vu hits me with vengeance at the scene in front of me. In the center of the old-fashioned bed-chamber, looking like a relic from the Victorian era is a king-sized bed. Luxurious sheets of Egyptian cotton, feeling like clouds to the touch, stained in curious patterns of vivid crimson. Lying on the sheets, a young maiden in a white nightgown of silk, her throat slit in a macabre facsimile of her bright smile. And clutched in her fair hand, a blood-red rose.
My heart pauses in its steady rhythm, palpitates as if unsure whether my broken soul needs a beating heart or a silent one. I draw closer to the violence imprinted on the majestic bed of elaborately carved ebony. A perfect complement to the crimson, I note with a laugh, not so much of hilarity as it is of hysteria. I make a few notes; the ones I must before leaving the corpse alone.
I make my way outside, keeping my face a stoic mask, to not encourage conversation with the young blood attracted to this investigation. Like sharks, I think. They do not know what they would go through, how jaded they would become. They will someday, I heave a sigh from the depths of my soul, mourning what they would lose for them.
I get in my car, old enough to be expensive but in prime condition. I travel to my house, a sizeable mansion on the outskirts of the town. I pass the town boundaries, feeling not just relief but also a headache, an elusive creature in my head. I panic, no, no, not now, not again, please…
I wake to the sound of the ringing of my phone, an old-fashioned trill I have an emotional attachment to. I open my eyes, focusing on the ceiling, way too clean to be mine. I rise, immediately looking to my right to see who’s lying so near to me.
What my eyes see at that moment, will never leave me. It is imprinted in my very being, a blanket silently but surely suffocating me. The woman next to me cannot be but a mere five and twenty. What will give me nightmares is the way she smiles, with contentment, peace, and what else I cannot decipher in my mad dash off the bed and to my ringing phone. I go to answer, just to stop it ringing, perusing the smiling young woman on the bed, with her throat slit wide, blood bubbling swiftly from the wound, a fresh kill.
The sound stops but another invades, more disturbing than the ringing. The door creaks open, a firearm comes into view. I am a spectator inside my own body, watching as the officials stare in shock. It doesn’t look good, I deadpan to myself, the investigator himself, covered in blood near a corpse that has not even lost its warmth yet. With that thought, darkness conquers my vision and I fall…
The young detective, her chin in her hand, surveys the crime scene with blatant disinterest. “What of Mr. Sharp?” she asks the officer beside her.
“In a holding cell Ma’am. He’s unconscious.”
“Hmmm. Has he confessed?”
“Erm… He insists that he has no idea what has happened. He admits having no recollection whatsoever of the events leading up to the murder after leaving the previous crime scene at eleven a.m. today.”
He continues, “But his prints match, no signs of foul play.”
“He won’t be able to dig himself out of this then. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.” She exclaims mockingly, “The hunter has become the hunted.”
By Nethmi Marcus
