Vulture Eye

I grimaced. The scream was short, electrifying; it lasted no more than a few seconds. But that’s all it took. I knew it instantly. It came from the old mans house right across the street. I had been weary of that house ever since the mad man went to work there. I had once known the mad man. He was a very nice man, of course that was before he went mad.

            He was a young man by the name of Alexander Johnson. He was a tall, handsome, gingerly man, until it happened. Alexander was working for me at the time. Although he knew he would always be poor he wouldn’t complain. He took on a job just to help his mother; everything he did was for his mother. His mother was a generous, kind woman. But she was poor and no matter what she did she could never get out of debt. She endeavored that by the time Alexander graduated from high school she would be out of enough debt to send him to college. Unfortunately she would never live to see him off to college. One day she had gone to the bank, which the old man had owned, to apply for another loan. The old man told her that if she did not pay off her debt bad things would happen. She wasn’t able to repay her debt, and 10 days later she was found dehydrated, dead in a shack outside of town clad in bloody sheets. Though no one could corroborate that it was the old man who had done it, everyone knew that it was he who had committed the foul crime.

            Alexander was never the same. He went to the old man’s house one night and had screamed at him in an abrasive tone until he had no voice left. Next he gruesomely drove a stick into the old man’s eye, knowing that that very eye that had witnessed his mother death. It blinding him forever, leaving the old man with a vulture eye. Alexander would wake up at night screaming for his life. I took inventory of how many times he did this and on the tenth time I succumbed to the idea that I would have to fire him. It was a hard thing to do; of course it wasn’t his fault. I just couldn’t live with a mad man in my house.

            Now, three years later Alexander had secretly changed his identity to evade the police (I only happen to know this because I had accidentally happened to stumble upon some forged documents he had in his room and had given them a cursory glance). He also was able to get a job with the old man as his assistant. I could sense he had a gruesome plan, but I felt pity on the boy after his mother died, so I decided not to turn him in. But the second I heard the scream I surmised that it was the young man getting revenge on the man’s eye that reminded him of his mother’s death. I simulated the death in my head as I lay awake. Maybe he crept up on him in the pitch dark of night and stabbed him brutally. But I knew he wouldn’t have; the man might have been mad, but he wasn’t an idiot. He would know not to leave a trail of blood. I rapidly phoned the police and concisely told them of what I surmised might have occurred. When I spoke to the police as they were leaving the house, I derived information about what happened inside the house. I was told how when the police went in to investigate they initially found nothing, but after a while the man went mad and showed them were he had stashed the suffocated body under some loose planks.

 I was told that the death penalty awaited him in the coming months. I was sad to hear of this, but I decided that he had committed a crime worthy of death. A heartless judge wouldn’t care to hear of the troubles this young man had been through that led to such an atrocity. I guess the young man would die happy knowing he had avenged his mother’s death.