Dark Sight chapter II

II

Sleep.

After his family’s brutal murder, good policeman James Vista never really had a good night’s sleep again. It’s not so much the dreams that come to him as the feeling the dreams leave him in the morning.

The dreams leave James feeling he didn’t do enough to save his family… that maybe he could’ve saved his family somehow. But none of that matters now. They’re all gone now, never to return. If only the dreams would go too.

The dreams.

They started out as terrible recollections of his murdered family. How he got the horrific call from dispatch that something really bad happened at his home. It was the call he’d been fearful of getting since he started his job as a cop. He clearly remembers how he almost collided with other squad cars as he pulled up his driveway. How he madly dashed up to his door, leaping up the staircase three steps at a time. He remembers being struck by the strong smell of ammonia, almost like a solid wall of odor as he rushed into his house… only to find out that his world had already gone horribly wrong.

Even though it was a dream, he could see every vivid detail, every drop of blood on the floor, the shattered pieces of Catherine’s favorite figurines amongst the mess where his cozy living room used to be, the ugly droplets of crimson on the carpet running all the way up to his son’s room.

It wasn’t difficult to see that Catherine put up a fight. Obviously to buy enough time for little Josh to hide somewhere safe. But from the violence evidenced by the remains of his home, James could tell that no where was really safe from the madman that destroyed his family.

James felt several sensations when he finally got to his son’s room, where the bodies of Catherine and Josh were found. They were lying face up, perpendicular to each other, the top of their heads touching the other. It was here that the strong smell, not unlike ammonia, pervaded the most. So much so that it was heady and sickening, greatly contributing to the feeling of nausea, rage, revulsion, and insanity clawing at his senses.

He’s been to many crime scenes before, where the poor victims of deranged and depraved murderers were found days, sometimes weeks after their grisly death. Relatively speaking, compared to many of them, the crime scene in officer James Vista’s room was tidy, uncluttered, and less gory, save for a few details.

First off, this was James’ wife and child. That made all the difference in the world. This was not a nameless corpse who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. This was his world, his sanctum, the place where he went to heal himself after having bits and pieces of his humanity chipped away by all the horrors he saw at work.

Secondly, although his wife and child still had their innards where they should be, they were missing important parts of their person, which made even viewing them during the wake all the more gut-wrenching.

The killer had carved out Catherine’s and Josh’s eyes.

The coroner had later told James that the killer made sure that he had severed a good length of Catherine’s and Josh’s optic nerves, prompting authorities to think the killer was not your run-of-the-mill psycho killer that preyed on families. The investigators on the case therefore set their sights on killers who also had organ-snatching on their profiles, although this didn’t really turn out a lot of promising leads.

The killer had also drawn a large, crimson eye on the wall near where the bodies of James’ wife and son were found, lending to the theory that it could also have been a cult killing.

The crimson eye… it had also haunted James’ dreams for the longest time. And his dreams always finished with the eye. At first his dreams were the typical wake-up-in-the middle-of the-night-with-a-sweat-drenched-shirt that stayed on with the relatives of murder victims, until such time as they got closure, got a good shrink, or went downright insane themselves with grief. After this stage, his dreams always ended with the lingering visage of the eye painted in blood… his family’s blood.

And then he’d open his own eyes in the morning, followed by a wish that he didn’t drink so much last night as he was contemplating blowing his brains out.

Maybe if he thought about how he’d feel in the morning… maybe that would help him pull the trigger. There’s a thought. But that’s a thought for another night drenched with suicidal tendencies.

Right now he has to screw his head straight on enough to get to the shower before he keels over with another king-sized headache.

If only the shower were closer than just a few feet away…