Jonathan Parker was thirteen when he first dreamed of murder. This is not to say he fantasized about murdering people; he actually dreamed about it, and was terrified when he awoke. Jonathan was not an “unusual” boy; to the contrary, he was about as “normal” as can be, save for the dreams.

In the first, he was looking through the eyes of the murderer in question, thinking his thoughts, effectively being him. He felt the man’s obsession with his current target, a woman in her late twenties, with short blonde hair and green eyes. He could hear the internal dialogue that the man was having, being none the wiser about his unwilling voyeur. He felt his rage, his malice towards her, his feelings of entitlement to her affections. And he felt the excitement of the man as he crept up behind her and grabbed her by the throat, all while the poor boy cried out for him to stop, to let her go, for him to wake up. Unfortunately for Jonathan, the dream didn't end there, but suffice to say, by the time it did, the woman’s last breath had escaped her. When he woke with a start, he screamed as loudly and with as much horror as the woman would have if she were able to breathe.

His parents sought out a psychiatrist, and to her credit, Dr. Thompson, a woman of forty-eight with a friendly disposition, tried her absolute best to help the boy. She allowed him to speak freely and plainly about what he was dreaming about, but as the years went on and the dreams only became worse, various medications prescribed seemed to have little effect, seeming to work for a short time, then giving way to the dreams once more.

By the time he went to college, he was reclusive, paranoid, and a voluntary insomniac. He had seen things, felt things that nobody ever should, things that left him feeling as if he were the many murderers whose eyes he had seen through his teen years. One night, he saw yet another grisly scene: a man stabbing another man to death in his bathroom as the victim brushed his teeth. The blood decorated the floor in scarlet, a diagonal splatter across the mirror. Something new happened tonight, though. The killer, once he was finished, turned to look at the mirror. Jonathan thought nothing could disturb him more than what was already shown, but he was proven wrong that night by a simple gesture from the masked man.

He gazed deep into the mirror and raised a finger to his lips, giving a low, “Shh.”