I unlocked the door to my studio, flipped on the light, and settled myself into my worn out swivel chair at the computer desk. There was something nagging at me I wanted to track down.

When I was a student, I'd shot hundreds of hours of video, which was now uploaded to my hard drive. Some of it was for assignments, but the majority was my own work, creative ideas I'd had or homages to my favorite films.

Quickly I found the file with Freddy's work on it. Freddy had been a theater major before he was expelled, and he was happy for any experience in front of the camera, as one of my subjects. I opened the file marked "Fate" and saw him as I remembered him, a twenty year old Czech kid, with porcelain skin and jet black, curly hair.

Watching him laugh and drink coffee, improvising dialogue far goofier than what my script called for, I was reminded of a delusion I used to have, or a fantasy. I believed that my films were real life, the real world, and that everything else that happened was just rehearsal, or daydreams. My camera captured reality and close watching of my films would foretell the future.

There were more than a few spooky, eerie coincidences when I would screen the films for my friends, to the point where I would hold back some cuts, not wanting to upset or traumatize anyone. Like when a freak snowstorm locked our entire group in the library for a weekend, and we were forced to fight a hibernating raccoon. I had filmed the whole weekend with stand-ins for my friends, and they would watch in amazement and sometimes horror as what they had done was depicted on tapes recorded weeks before the events. Marianna sat me down and asked me a lot of pointed questions about my work, a detective even then.

After awhile, my friends started to act like I knew why my movies predict the future. I never knew. I just got ideas, and sometimes they come true. Maybe it's intuition. That strange predestined feel to my films stopped once I got to Hollywood. When I "sold out" and made commercial entertainment, there was nothing in my work that predicted anything.

I had picked a video of Freddy to watch and suddenly the hair in the back of my neck stood up. Freddy, shot in black and white, it was approaching a trussed up, struggling older man. He took out something from his pocket, and the close-up showed fish hooks and wire between them. Freddy fit the hook into one side of the man's mouth as he screamed, and then to the other side, behind his neck.

Through the neck of the chair where the man was tied, Freddy slowly drew the fishing line taut, until the man wore a rictus smile.

I closed the window on my computer right away. I didn't remember shooting that. I had no recollection of writing it or being present when it was filmed. But that was Freddy, Freddy as a 20 years old, not Freddy at 43 like he is now.

I sat back in my chair and looked at my hands. Was someone framing me? Had I somehow given Freddy the idea for the murders decades ago? Had I caused them to happen, or predicted them?

A knock at my office door startled me, and I whirled around. I expected to see Mariana, gun, drawn, and badge out held, flanked by a SWAT team.

Instead, it was John Minuit.