The story is about a police detective called Alistair Murkland (often nicknamed ‘Alice’ by colleagues). As a child, he experienced a traumatic event which led to him being mentally unstable (the murder of his family by a masked man). He was put on a case involving a killer similar to the masked murderer from years ago. Keen to find the killer responsible for the death of his family members, he becomes obsessed with the case. The masked murderer kills his victims and then dismembers them – with rumours and some evidence of cannibalism. As what is thought of as a result of his obsession for the case, he begins having nightmares of the murders from the killer’s perspective. This resulted in him regularly taking sleep aids, which affected his work. As he’d become so emotionally involved with the case, and it had had such a negative effect on his health, he was taken off of the case. He was angered by this, and so decided to take the case into his own hands – he would investigate it himself. He set up a faux-investigation operation in his basement, and became increasingly self-absorbed and solitary. As he became more and more obsessed, he lost his job, and so invested all of his time in finding the murderer. In the end, the build-up of his dreams becoming more real, memories uncovered and evidence discovered, he finds that he in fact had been the killer all along, and he mimicked the persona of the murderer responsible for the death of his family as a kind of reincarnation.

Plot for the opening