The Storytellar (Shadows Of A Massacre)

Prologue - The Storytellar

"Every single night since that horrific night, I tend to have these...nightmares." The clock struck eight, a doorknob slowly turned and a door gently creaked open letting in a boy, a scrawny kid with white hair and blue eyes that seemed to glow in that dim lit room.

With his feet cradled close to his chest, he sat on the couch adjacent to the formally dressed spectacled lady who seemed to be in her early thirties and carried on her person, a small pink notepad with a black ballpoint pen.

"You dream?" the lady with the notepad wondered.

The little boy as scared as he was frightened by the lady's aura, so he wasted no time to share his thoughts as he seemed to understand why he was brought here...

"Yes, well... It's actually more like a nightmare." He had a British tone to his accent, same as the lady.

"A nightmare? I see... And what exactly did you see in this nightmare of yours?"

"What I saw...? I didn't just see things, ma'am, I remembered the sounds, touch, and smells. I remembered every single thing that happened that night, vividly; the sound of the pouring rain, the earsplitting police sirens as well as the flickering lights of red and blue that crept into that nightmarish living room."

"Hmm, I see..." the therapist said as she's noted his words down in her pink notepad.

"And most of all, I remembered the thick smell of..."

"Of what, son? What did you smell?"

"Blood... It was blood, ma'am."

She gulped, "Blood, you say?"

"Yes, I remember the thick iron smell of blood, warm blood that streamed through the floor and covered my feet."

"Ah, I see. Could you tell me just where did this... blood come from?"

"..." He kept silent, shuddered and trembled as he did not want to recall his nightmare again.

That is, until he felt a warm hand on his trembling hands, a warmth from the lady therapist who sat in front of him. "It's okay," she said as she assured him that nothing was going to ever happen to him."

"From where I stood, the blood slowly covered the tips of my feet, it flowed from..." The boy paused for a moment and held his mouth as if he wanted to throw up

"From?" the lady therapist urged.

The troubled boy nodded in response to her assertion and courageously answered, "...From the dead bodies of my entire family."

"That does seem like a very bad nightmare, to witness your family, dead all around you."

"It was... Especially for the fact that I witnessed my entire family; my caring mother, my cheerful father, my precious older sister, and my cool eldest brother tortured to death.

"That must have been scary to experience, Harry..." She comforted him some more.

"It really was..." the boy sobbed.

"I see-"

"-But that wasn't the worst of it," the boy immediately added.

"Ok...? What could have been scarier than that?"

"It was the look in those eyes of his..."

"His eyes?" The aura of the room seemed to change when she asked that. There was an intense cloud of oppressive fear and terror that oozed out of him.

And then he said, "Those wicked purple eyes of the murderer..." For the next few minutes, the therapist experienced just how far-broken her young client was.