A Dream of Death (4 page)

You’re dreaming again.

Wake up.

The flying isn’t real, none of this is real.

Wake up.

Pinch yourself or something.

Wake up.

Put an end to this.

Wake up.

The trees lie below me once again as I soar through clear
blue skies toward a glimmer of light. Would I be spared the bloodbath tonight?
The crippling pain? Or would I experience it all again?

Wake up.

Save yourself the pain.

I refuse to dive and instead stay above the trees until the
glimmer is right below me. I drift down to the treetops and weave through
branches thick with green. My feet find solid ground and I crumple to the dirt
below me.

The pain is back.

Wake up.

It tears through my body and I cannot move. I feel myself
slipping away again but I hold fast and fight against the pain. With every bit
of strength left in me I force myself to stand, to fight the fire that courses
through my veins.

The knife turns ahead of me, rotating in the cool breeze,
its blade pointing to the skull below. Blood makes its way down the edge of the
knife, and as a strong wind blows through the tree the knife swings on its
invisible thread.

The blood drips off of the blade and onto the top of the
skull, a message forming from the drops. I strain to make it out before it is
complete: “Why?”

I read the message before the blood runs into the empty eye
sockets.

I look up to see crime scene tape surrounding me and the
posts and strings of an archaeological survey at my feet.

The sky goes dark once again, thunder claps and flashes of
lightning streak across the clouds. The rain comes down in torrents and soaks
me to my core, water rushes down my face and into my eyes. I lower my head and
wipe the water away from my face.

The skull remains but it is no longer alone. The dirt has
been carefully removed, tools sit beside the shallow grave as rain washes the
bones bright white. A bright red heart pounds in the chest, blood from an
unknown source pours out from an open wound that pierces the muscle of life.
The blood flows into the recesses of the grave covering an errant piece of
bone: a missing rib, and another, the end cut off just above the heart.

Wake up.

I awoke in a sweat; a dull ache coursed through my body and
reminded me of the night’s events. The ache was joined by new pain in my chest
when my eight-year-old son pounced on it like a jungle cat.

“Daddy,” he said, “you don’t work today?”

“Nope. I’m all yours today, Link.”

He smiled from ear to ear, his crooked teeth gleaming in the
morning light.

“Well, all yours and your sister’s and your mother’s, of
course.” I reached to his stomach and began tickling him until he fell off the
bed in a fit of laughter.

“Mommy’s making breakfast. Bacon, eggs and pancakes.”

The enthusiasm of children for the simple things in life
always warmed my heart, although I found my own enthusiasm growing with the
thought of a greasy, home cooked breakfast.

“Give me a couple of minutes. I’ll be right down.”

“Okay Daddy,” he said from the floor where he had landed
moments earlier. Link got to his feet, took off out the door and bounded down
the stairs, prompting the usual reprimand from his mother about a herd of
elephants.

I got out of bed, stretched and tried to push away the aches
and pains that lingered. I had never had a dream so real, never felt such pain
nor had it linger after I woke up.

Was it true what they said? That your mind can make it real?
If you die in a dream do you die in real life?

I wiped the sweat from my brow, took off my damp t-shirt and
boxers and stared at the body-shaped stain that marked my place on the bed. I
would be yelled at for not making the bed as the last one out of it, but I felt
it better to let the sheets dry out before burying them with the comforter. I
got dressed in the jeans and polo shirt that lay folded on the floor.

I wandered into the ensuite bathroom and looked into the
mirror. These days what looked back at me no longer brought me joy; a tired
face that looked older than my thirty-five years, swollen bags under my
red-rimmed green eyes, sallow cheeks and hair desperately in need of a cut. My
hair was thick and curled as it grew, a gift from my African-American father.
The eyes were from my Irish mother. Luckily the brown skin tone that my father
also bestowed upon me helped to hide some of the evidence of my sleeplessness.

The first step was to shave. I hadn’t had time
yesterday—being woken up at three in the morning by a murder had that effect on
a person’s hygiene. It was my day off so shaving wasn’t required, but I never
knew if I would be called in again tonight then forced in front of the press
cameras. So begrudgingly, I took out my shave gel, wet my face and lathered up.

When I took a final swipe at the thin strip of shaving cream
remaining on my left cheek, the blade took with it a small patch of skin. Red
flowed down my cheek.

And I found myself frozen in time.

The slow motion trickle held my gaze as it ran down my face
and dropped silently into the sink. Another drop followed with a third taking
the plunge a moment later. I looked down into the sink and the word
Why
stared back up at me from the blood.

I blinked and reality came rushing back.

I had never in my life hallucinated before. At least not to
my knowledge. But now I began to wonder, had I hallucinated something before
and never known it be a mirage? And if not, why was I beginning to see things
now?

I realized I had dropped into a half-crouch in front of the
mirror. I was trembling. Losing my mind had always been a fear of mine. I had
dealt with delusional people and schizophrenics and listened to people rant
about the voices in their heads and the creatures and demons that surrounded
them. I had always feared that I would one day be on the other side of the
fence. No one knows when mental illness will strike and no one is exempt.

I shook my head, trying to clear my mind but the dreams
still clung to me. They had reappeared every time I closed my eyes and now they
haunted me with my eyes open. A message in blood? And prior to that a message
in light, apparently Morse code that I was at a loss to decipher. The closest I
got was that it nearly spelled
WHY
, something that
would make sense now. I needed to look at it again.

I pulled myself up and wiped my face clean of what water,
blood and shave gel remained, then dabbed a square of toilet paper on my fresh
wound. It was time to face the family. Having been gone so much the past few
weeks and so involved in the case, I found myself drifting away from my wife
and children. The more I blamed myself, the more the guilt poured in until I
was swimming in a pool of it so deep the bottom was out of sight. Now it was
hard to even make eye contact with them without wanting to cry.

I clambered down the steps to the foyer, twinges of pain in
my knees, and made my way onto the porch to collect the morning paper. I knew
it would be there. It was something my wife hated, along with the flyers that
were delivered once a week. She would step over them every time she went out,
refusing to pick them up.

The front page was as I expected it to be. The latest murder
was above the fold. The article would probably include veiled suggestions that
the police weren’t doing their jobs.

I went back inside and closed the door, locked it as always,
then made my way into the kitchen. Greeted by the smell of fresh cooked bacon
and a loving kiss from my wife, my mood lifted. It would not be brought down
today. I threw the paper face down on the side of the counter. I wouldn’t read
it. There was nothing to be gained and too much to be lost.

I took a seat at the table and watched my wife cook.
Katarzyna, or Kat as she now preferred, was a beautiful woman just hitting her
prime at thirty-five. She remained just as stunning as the day we met. At five-nine,
she stood just a couple of inches shorter than me and, when she had heels on, I
had to rise to my tiptoes for a kiss. Her long brown hair accentuated the
eastern European features that had first mesmerized me when we met in
university.

We shared a first year mathematics class at the University
of Western Ontario in London. She was, as she eloquently put it as soon as she
learned the term, fresh off the boat. Her parents had wanted to send her to
Canada for her education in hopes that she would return afterward, get a good
job, marry a good Polish man and have lots of beautiful Polish babies. Only one
of those four happened.

Her English was quite good—a hell of a lot better than my
Polish is now—but it needed some polishing. That’s where I came in. After the
first week of class, I made a point of sitting next to her whenever I could,
chatting with her and complimenting her on her English. Being the nice guy that
I was, I offered my assistance both in class and after. It didn’t take long
before our first date and after that we were inseparable.

After first year we moved in together much to the dismay of her
Roman Catholic parents and against some of Kat’s own beliefs, beliefs she
pushed aside for me. Kat wasn’t supposed to fall in love and there was no way
she was supposed to stay in Canada, but as she tried to tell her parents:
wszystko
dobre, co się dobrze kończy—
all’s well that ends well. They chose
to disagree. Her father flew over from Warsaw to try to convince her to come
back home. His attempts failed, but he left satisfied that I would take could
care of his daughter—not that she required it—and that we would visit. It was a
turnaround neither of us had expected but one that I could not be happier with,
especially since our future children would now have their
babcia
and
dziadzio
to visit.

Kat and I got married shortly after finishing our degrees,
hers a teaching degree specializing in math and sciences and mine in biological
anthropology. It was the odd cultural anthropology and criminal psychology
elective that steered me toward my current career. Kat followed her passion and
became a teacher at a local high school, molding the minds of impressionable
youths and trying to steer them toward a career in science.

At the ages of twenty-seven we welcomed our first-born into
the world: Lincoln Charles Munroe the Fifth, a beautiful and healthy baby boy
weighing in at seven pounds, nine ounces. Link, as we all called him, was
practically my clone—same skin tone and features. His sister followed two years
later, the equally beautiful Kasia Agnieska Munroe. Dark haired and lighter
skinned, she bore many of her mother’s traits and her telltale height, bursting
Kat’s womb at the seams with her twenty-three inch birth length.

“Stop staring at me.”

“Sorry, Kat. Off in my own little world there.”

“It’s creepy,” she said, then let loose a laugh.

“Is it wrong to stare at my beautiful wife as she waits on
me hand and foot?”

My answer came in the form of a wet dishcloth to the face.

“Maybe not, but it’s still creepy.” From the day I met her I
had always loved her accent. Of course I loved it even more when I heard her
speak Polish, which she often did with the kids. Eight and six and fluent in
Polish while I, with only enough to manage light conversation, struggled to
keep up. And now, enrolled in French immersion, the kids would soon be two
languages up on their barbarian of a father. I was learning though—having to
read the correspondence from the school and help them with their homework left
me little choice.

Breakfast was served, hot and greasy and plentiful. A half
pound of bacon, three eggs, four pancakes and two glasses of orange juice later
I was fueled up and ready to go. It was the first real meal for me in ages,
there was no time to eat while at work. By the time I finished and stood up I
felt as though I had swallowed a brick.

I took the kids downstairs and turned on the Xbox. Although
I would have preferred to play some Mass Effect or maybe Halo online, the kids
got their way and we played for an hour and a half with their pet tiger and
black panther cubs. I smiled as they waved their arms like madmen in front of
the Kinect sensor, throwing balls for their cubs, feeding them, petting them
and of course, in Link’s case, driving a remote controlled car into them. He
would follow it up with a treat for the cub. He found his cub’s reaction to
being hit funny but felt bad for having hurt his pet. Boys will be boys I
guess. Better a virtual animal than having him out throwing rocks at squirrels
and frying ants with a magnifying glass.

Abusing animals. The first step most serial killers take. I
pushed the thought away and focused on the screen.

Once the kids were bored of their pets, the only ones
allowed in our household, we moved out to the backyard. The sun was shining
strong this morning, burning off the dew and leaving their playground dry as a
bone. I pushed them on the swings until my arms went limp then chased them
around the backyard until my legs followed suit. It was going to be a long day
followed by the sleep of the just.

I took care of lunch, barbequing burgers and hotdogs while
Kat kept watch on the tray of french fries turning golden brown in the oven.
Without the word-a-day calendar I had to think hard to remember what day it
was. Happy to realize it was Saturday (I had peeked at today’s word—relax: rest
or engage in an enjoyable activity so as to become less tired or anxious), Kat
and I decided to take the kids to the local city pool for an afternoon swim
followed by a run through the splash pad. As always, I found myself the
wettest.

The kids forced me to stand under a large bucket that filled
up with water then dumped its contents onto the heads of unsuspecting targets.
It was like watching the toaster, you never knew when you would get hit until
the freezing cold water came down in a deluge over your head and shoulders. We
tore through the sprinklers, stood beneath a flower that showered us with a
refreshing mist and crawled through a tunnel of tubes that sprayed us from all
angles, leaving not a patch of clothing dry.

Kat stood on the sidelines laughing and yelling
encouragement to the kids as I was put through trials that would make Hercules
shiver with apprehension. I let Kat sit out, not wanting a repeat of the day I
bear-hugged her and held her under the bucket. Twelve years married and I have
never felt so close to once again being a bachelor.

I walked over to the bench Kat had made her home, a book in
her hands and her eyes peering over the top at the chaos in front of her. I
took care to sit a short distance from her, keeping her dry and myself out of
trouble. I put my cold, wet hand on Kat’s bare knee and she shivered slightly.

“I’ve missed this,” she said.

“Me too.”

“How much longer do you think it will take, until you catch
him?”

“I don’t know. We’re coming up empty every time. If he keeps
going like this… never.”

She sensed my feelings of failure and put her hand on mine.
“You’ll get him, Lincoln. I know you will.” She paused. “Just, when it comes
time, don’t kill him.”

I was shocked. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. I
had imagined his arrest many times, particularly parading him in cuffs past the
media so the world could see his face. But I never imagined killing him.

“Hopefully it won’t come to that.”

“You can’t. If you do, you’ll be no better than him.”

I could tell she was becoming upset. I pulled my hand away
and looked out to the kids running through the water.

“We sure make cute kids.”

Kat laughed. “We could make another one, you know.”

We had talked about it in the years after Kasia’s birth, but
now that she was getting older the topic seemed to have been put to rest. I
wanted the kids close together. But maybe Kat was right.

“Girl or boy?” she asked.

I smiled at the thought of either. “A baby.”

“Good answer. Anyway, I wouldn’t mind some more time off
work. Maybe you could take a few months too. Would be a nice break after all of
this. I know the kids would love to have you home.”