Prologue: Crazy

Reid: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable must be the truth." – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Reid was alone in his apartment. It was late Sunday night, well, technically it was Monday morning. It was dark in his dimly-lit living room, dark, and silent. The only sound was that of him turning a page. He really should have gone to bed hours ago and tried to get some sleep, instead he'd just sat there, reading every book he has been able to find at the library earlier, on the subject of ghosts and hauntings. The texts in front of him looked at the issue from a variety of angles, from non-specific believers, self-proclaimed mediums, so-called experts of the afterlife as defined by each of the various major religions, and skeptics who tried to explain the phenomenon with some sort of scientific explanation. Now one might ask, why a man of science would entertain the idea of a supernatural phenomenon. The answer was simple… he was starting to think that he was being haunted.

In the past few weeks, he'd had strange dreams that didn't seem to be based on anything he'd ever seen, heard or read about, or experienced in his own life. The main character of these dreams was a small boy with red hair and blue green eyes, he appeared to be between six and eight years of age.

For the last week or so, Reid had seen the same child following him wherever he went, literally everywhere, he never said a word, never made a sound, but he was as solid and clear as any other child, but no one else seemed to be able to see him. None of the others had commented on or acknowledged his presence in any way… something for which there could only be one explanation. No one else could see the boy, just Reid.

At first, he'd been absolutely terrified, certain that the boy was a hallucination and a sign that he was following in his schizophrenic mother's footsteps, but the child was vivid and clear, which was in direct conflict with hallucinations indicative of schizophrenia and Reid didn't seem to be able to control him whatsoever. These deviations from the traits of schizophrenic hallucinations, along with the fact that at thirty-one and a half, he had finally aged out of the peak vulnerability for a schizophrenic break, had led Reid to conclude that the boy was not merely a figment of his own mind, but something real and separate from him, and if that was true while it was also true that no one else was able to see him, then the most likely explanation was that he was a ghost, one who had chosen to reveal himself to Reid and to no one else.

From what he was reading, it was believed that ghosts typically haunted either people, or places and when they haunted people, it was usually either their murderers, or a loved one they left behind when they died. Reid was neither, he had never seen this child before in his life and certainly hadn't killed him, and in fact he spent most days putting people like that behind bars where they belonged.

According to his research, the most common motivations for a ghost to haunt a stranger were either because that person had invaded or made unwelcome changes to the ghost's place of residence, which was often either their place of death or their home from when they were alive, or because they wanted or needed something from the person they revealed themselves to.

Reid had lived in the same apartment, in the same building, since moving to DC, and had made no major structural changes to it in the ten years he'd lived there, and he'd checked the hotel in Chicago the team had been staying at when the dreams had originally begun. There was no record of that being haunted either. So this probably wasn't about where he'd been or what he'd done with the place. The question was, what could this kid possibly want from him?

When he'd started reading, everything had looked and felt normal. There was nothing out of place, and there was no sound, no indication of life anywhere else in the apartment. Nothing strange was going on at all.

When Reid looked up from a book detailing the different reasons for a ghost to haunt the living, he noticed that the boy was standing there in front of him. He looked to be about three feet eight inches tall, and wore blue shorts, a red shirt with short, blue sleeves, thick, oval-shaped glasses, and a red and blue Chicago Cubs baseball hat. That certainly lent credence to the theory that he'd picked up this apparition during the last case in Chicago, but that still didn't explain why it had chosen him for whatever it had in mind.

As usual, the boy didn't make a sound. He just stood there silently, but there was a pleading look in his eyes that yanked at Reid's heart strings. There was something eerily tragic about this child that activated Reid's untried paternal instincts.

"What do you want?" Reid asked.

The child didn't respond.

"What's your name…?"

Still, the little ghost stayed silent and motionless.

"I can't help you if I don't know who you are and what you want…" Reid told him.

"Nolo enim vos ignorare ambigebam homicidium" I want you to solve my murder the boy finally replied, as he said the words, they appeared, as though they were being written in white chalk, the sort that would have been used on classroom blackboards, on the wall across from where Reid sat, the boy's voice was even, but there were tears in his eyes.

Latin? Had Reid just heard, what he thought he'd just heard? Latin seemed an odd choice, but Reid decided to just run with it. The boy had asked him to solve his murder, but he couldn't do that without an identifiable victim or a place and time of death.

"Quod tibi nomen est?" He asked. What is your name?

The boy shook his head. It wasn't time for Reid to know that yet.

Then, just as quickly as he had come, the boy disappeared once again.

It didn't make any sense, who was this kid? Why and how had he been killed? And why was he under the impression that Reid would be able to solve what was most likely either a cold case or a murder that had gone entirely unreported?

Maybe because the case that you worked just before he started appearing to you had been a cold case that had suddenly grown hot again.He thought to himself.

Then there was the matter of how to work the case even once he found evidence of the boy's murder, without arousing suspicion from Maeve or the rest of the team. After all, what reason could he possibly give them to explain his sudden interest in a case involving the murder of a child whom he had never met and who likely had been killed years previously? If he told them the real reason, they would probably force him to endure a drug test and a psychological evaluation. They all knew that he was at risk for having inherited a predisposition to Schizophrenia, which Reid was well aware was exactly what this would look like to anyone else.

There was no way that he could tell them. They were his family, he wanted to tell them, he desperately wanted their input, but every bit of their training as profilers would lead them to completely misunderstand this. He couldn't afford to let them in this time, nor could he face the looks on their faces when they would think, as he had at first, that he was finally losing it.

He sighed, washed the boy's chalk message off of the wall, and put his research materials in a box, which he then carried with him to his room and hid under the bed. That way no unexpected visitors would find them.

He set his alarm, got into bed, and allowed exhaustion to carry him out of consciousness. He fell asleep pretty easily, which was unusual for him, but the dream he had that night was strange, and anything but peaceful.

He was standing in what he first assumed to be a grassy field, it was a clear day, warm, windy… without knowing how he knew, Reid was instantly aware that this was an afternoon in late spring, and that this was the past…

As he looked under his feet, he saw that he was standing on sand, not grass. That's when he realized that this wasn't a field, it was a baseball diamond. All around him, there were small boys running around the diamond, and based on their differing uniforms there were two teams who were in the middle of a game. It was almost like he was watching the game itself in fast forward.

He noticed that one of the teams was wearing the same outfit as the little boy he'd been seeing, so he looked around trying to see if he was among them. He was. He was currently up at bat. Reid watched as he swung, once, twice, on the third time, he hit it and the ball went sailing into the air and flew past the third baseman. Granted, the ball was low by adult standards, reaching a maximum altitude of eight feet off the ground, but that was plenty when all the other players were only an average of four feet tall.

The little boy ran as fast as he could around the bases, and just narrowly escaped being tagged out by a player on the opposing team by diving into home. His teammates didn't dog-pile on top of him, or lift him into the air cheering, but they did surround him, giving him high fives and recounting what had just taken place from their own various perspectives. The boy took all this in with pride and elation, smiling from ear to ear at what he had accomplished.

That made Reid smile. It reminded him of his own game-winning homerun when Morgan had roped into playing against the Secret Service with the FBI's softball team.

That's when the dream changed. Suddenly the baseball field faded away and was replaced by a suburban neighborhood on a windy, stormy night. Reid stood beneath a willow tree in some random stranger's front yard but strangely, and in evidence that this was indeed a dream, he remained utterly and completely dry despite the fact that the rain was coming down in sheets.

The storm was so thick that all he could see was the light from the windows of the house across the street. Thunder roared above him, every so often a streak of lightning would crash into the ground somewhere in the distance, between that and the rain, the noise was deafening.

Suddenly, something with bright, red and blue flashing lights came barreling toward the house, its lights and siren cutting through the noise and blackness of the night. It took Reid a moment to figure out what it was. When it finally came onto the actual street, it became obvious that it was an ambulance. It pulled up in the driveway of the house across the street. Two paramedics jumped out, dragging a gurney behind them.

Reid watched as they came back just a couple of minutes later with a small child wrapped in a blanket on top of the gurney, a child that, to Reid's horror, he realized was the same one whose ghost had been following him. The boy's mother jumped in the back after her son, and the ambulance sped off into the darkness, back the same way it had come.

Reid knew in that instant, without knowing how he knew, that what he was seeing had to do with, and may actually be part of the murder the boy wanted him to solve… but before he could work out how to determine exactly where and when the events he was watching had taken place, he was pulled back to consciousness and out of the dream/vision, by the ringing of his alarm clock.