Nothing can adequately describe the feeling of walking into your dorm moments after a suspected murder to find your roommate drenched in blood.
After taking in the devastating scene at the North Tower – it still wasn’t clear who had died, and the police wouldn’t let anyone near the spot where they were hoisting someone into a body bag – I had returned to Willowood to grab a hoodie and another battery for my dead Kodak camera. As sleazy as it sounded, I wanted first-hand evidence of any potentially supernatural elements of the death, whether a ruby in the throat or something else – hell, even Salem looking particularly pleased with herself would sate me.
In the end I found a shot nobody else in the world got that night: Alice Wolfe, sitting up in her bed, covered in crimson from lips to naval.
I should have been afraid. I should’ve run for my life. There was every chance I was mere metres away from a murderer.
But I was calm; almosttoocalm.
It was as though I was being guided through the night by an otherworldly presence; an invisible hand on my shoulder, steering and comforting in equal measure. Both a warm comfort and a persistent push. My body a shared vessel, borrowed by something that had no reason to be afraid. Distantly I wondered whether it had something to do with the ruby in my throat; with the gloomy shadow of the North Tower and the cold hold it had over me. But that all seemed very far away; a sidenote. For now, all I could do was focus on the murders.
The more I thought about it, the more something about Alice as the murderer didn’t quite sit right – it didn’t mesh with my own theories about the North Tower being the killer. Despite her vicious streak, it didn’t tie into the supernatural pulse in a way I could make sense of. Plus, she was only a kid at the time of the original murders. Perhaps she had wanted to recreate one tonight? But why?
My thoughts were clear – and hungry. I wanted to solve this.
Now I’d been handed a lead on a silver platter, and I wasn’t going to let it slip through my fingers.
I had to get Alice’s shirt. Even if I didn’t think she was capable of murder, what if I was wrong? I had to take it to the police. If the blood down its front belonged to the victim . . .
So I left the dorm with my camera in hand, then waited around the corner until I heard the door open and close again. A peek around the wall showed me Alice in a thick black jumper, carrying a towel and her washbag. But had she left the shirt behind? Or was she still wearing it under her jumper, hoping to wash it clean of blood in the sink? Part of me wondered whether she was off to bury it in the woods somewhere, but that probably would’ve been more incriminating than anything. She was smarter than that. If she truly had nothing to hide, she would have left it in the dorm.
As her footsteps faded to an echo in a distant stairwell, I slipped back into the room and found, to my surprise, that she’d just dumped the shirt in her dustbin as though it wasn’t a potentially key piece of evidence in what was likely a murder investigation.
I plucked it out and placed it carefully in one of the envelopes I’d bought in case I ever wanted to write to Frankie. The fabric was still warm and the blood was mostly dry, but a few patches seeped through the white paper in bright red blooms. Dimly I noticed my hands were trembling, but they seemed entirely detached from me, as though they belonged to someone else.
Camera and envelope in hand, I made my way back down to the crime scene. As I walked, my own level-headedness surprised me. I was someone who felt emotions to their full depth.
So why wasn’t I more afraid?
Again there was that invisible hand on my shoulder, at once steady and insistent. I had the vague sense of lagging a few seconds behind reality, watching events unfold while somehow disconnected from them.
Somewhere deep, deep inside my head, a frightened voice told me this wasn’t right, but I couldn’t seem to bring that voice back to the surface.
The atmosphere around the tower had shifted. The body had been removed from the scene, but hysteria among students was rising. The mild night air rang with the sound of cries and shrieks and phone ringtones as people tried desperately to contact their parents. The moon hung in the starry sky, gazing down at us all with celestial indifference.
I had imagined this scene for so long. I had pictured what it would’ve been like to be at Carvell back in the eighties, when the bodies kept falling and the nightmare kept rolling.
And now I was living in it.
It was exactly how I thought it would be, and the almost- familiarity offered a sick kind of comfort. Imagination had indeed opened the door; let the terror walk right in.
After a moment’s hesitation, I trod over the night-black grass to the nearest police officer. She was young and kind-faced, and was holding a walkie-talkie up to her mouth but not speaking through it. Nor was any sound coming out. It was as though she was frozen in place by some existential horror.
I cleared my throat softly, and it seemed to shatter her reverie.
‘Excuse me?’ I asked, dismayed at how childlike my voice sounded. ‘I have something you might want to see.’