Drown Under Earth - Shadows of the Night 3

Chapter 29

Hi!

Two hail storms within two hours, and my car out in the open. Surely this day can't get any weirder... Anyway, back to the story. Another murder - another piece of the mystery. Read, vote, comment - let me know what you're thinking!

Lara

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Chapter 29

Stepping into a fresh crime scene is an adventure in itself. It's almost like your proverbial pig in a poke. You never know what you get. The smells and sounds surrounding crime scenes are different and varying. Most of them misleading, a bag full of attention getters trying to mess with your senses.

Smell, sound, sight, and the taste of auras – all crashing into you at once.

The result? Information overload. Add to that all the emotional baggage: the horror, the fear. Compassion and your damned humanity. Dangle all that in front of a sane human mind. You get one end result, and one only. You and your mental health on the verge of a bottomless, dark pit. One step and you fall. You lose your last grip on sanity in the same moment. All this time you know it would be so easy to just give in and take that step, and you'd believe it would be the right thing to do.

Crime scenes all have a certain sense of familiarity. They all give you a feeling that you've been there before and you know that you're going to end up there again. Death disguised as your long-term business partner always lurking around the next corner. After resisting the bottomless pit for the first time, you return, staring into darkness, and again you have to make your decision. And again, and again. The process repeats itself until you find a way to build a wall around yourself, until you manage to turn it off. The emotions, the fear – the unnecessary sensations.

Reality then turns into a twisted kind of reality that will become your very own version of the reality, of the world we're all living in. Perception is individual. It's not something that can be measured in an objective or quantitative way. Once this transformation of reality is completed, once you managed to shut out all the emotions, ban all the compassion, you'll be finally able to think clearly, to analyze the unwanted gift that is presented to your senses.

However, by doing this, all of it, you give up a part of yourself that can never be retrieved. You'll become someone else. And then there's this lingering question in the back of your mind. Once you start to turn off certain feelings and parts of yourself, is there a way to stop? However, to function, there's no way around it. Because, if you are not going to do the job, who will?

* * *

The yellow tape, the police cars, the usual hustle and bustle that I always associated with the human police force, with people doing their job, as I reminded myself, was loud and shrill, whereas death should have been quiet and peaceful.

Should have been. A violent death was never peaceful. It was a disturbance in itself that was reflected in the aftermath of it. The investigation. Necessary and unavoidable.

I should have been familiar with it all. I should have been prepared for what there was to come, to encounter with. And yet, making my way up to the entrance, I saw myself marching towards a bottomless abyss that I didn't know how to avoid falling into.

The house was upper-classish by all means. Its appearance was like a red flag, screaming the word wealthy at any random passerby, whether he wanted to know or not. Except, there weren't many of those. The house was anything but normal, its environment anything but usual. Located at the outskirts of the southern part of the city, the surroundings seemed like the perfect setting for a movie – a war-zone movie to be precise. It was a riddle to me, how such a thing was even possible in New York City, but there it was: a gated community.