Chapter 1, before

7.7.1963, New Addington Police Station, England

Paris’ hand found their gun in its usual pocket, and pulled it out, the cold, cold metal a welcome reassurance on their sweaty, hot palms. This was it. One of the criminals were in the room: they’d set a trap and the bait had been fallen for. The slightly askew door was the golden snitch they’d finally caught after all these years of painstaking investigation. The murders were so random it seemed like were unconnected, uncoordinated. But the attacks were all cast upon the same school class who’d bullied the immigrants. It’d taken months of fortnightly interviews to coax the right information from the only victim to have survived an assault from the murderer, one with severe head trauma who was still in rehab.  Paris couldn’t wait to make the culprits rot in prison. Being picked on wasn’t an excuse for murder.

March 1st 1989,

 Another quiet, dark night- almost too quiet for Letumvale city. The usual rusty, rundown cars sped through the silence of the street, slicing through any reassurances left of this damned city. Midnight, yet there’s no crime, hell on Earth, but there’s no demons. I know this city, and there’s something going on beneath the abyss. Something begging me to uncover. The wet leaves crush under my brown, heavy boots, trash camouflaging under the dark brown hues- it hasn’t rained in days, not since that night. Not since any of those nights, I suppose. It only seems to rain when something so gruesome happens that lucifer has no other choice but to cry. I turn a corner into an alleyway, risky, but anything in this city is risky. Besides, there’s more peril going into your local store. The police station is hidden, I think it’s inane, but the concept of police believing they can fix Letumvale is even more so.

The smell of bleach lingers in the room.

She’s already bleached the clothes with the splatters of blood all over them, and she’s thrown them out along with the air freshener she emptied when she was trying to kill the smell.

The damn smell is still here. It’s driving her mad.

I arrived at the ghastly village at 06:15 a.m., an hour or so after the call came in. unidentified male, estimated around sixty, found near the old forest path.

mist engulfed the gloomy horizon, an eerie silence settling over the landscape. cottages appeared and disappeared again as I drove through the quiet town, their windows dark against the early morning frost. I'd been warned by my peers about the unsettling muteness of the neighbourhood — how it was the place detectives were sent when their own city minds had grown too loud. somewhere quiet. somewhere uneventful. somewhere people went when they needed the absence of chaos.

“Wait, didn’t I tell you I never want to see you again?” she gasped. “What are you doing? No, leave me alone! Stop! Aaaaaargh!”

The Next Day

“The court decided you won’t be arrested, but you’ll still have a punishment,” the lawyer said.

“Okay, hit me,” David replied.

“You’re on house arrest.”

The smell hit me before I even touched the handle. It wasn't the rich, earthy aroma of smouldering amber or the fresh lemongrass my mother left to soak on the windowsill. Instead, it was the pungent odour of decaying flesh mixed with a stench of sewage that no ventilation could mask.

“Nia, you know how important this case is,” Mr Calvins stated, “After all, you are new employee. This will give me a first impression of you.”

          “I understand sir, thank you for this opportunity,” I replied, in a tone I thought was sort of professional. But of course, I needed to be professional this was my first case on the job.

          “Thank you for coming, you are dismissed,” he said whilst I was already halfway out the door.

           Once I reached my office, my mind was like a bubble about to burst. How could I start?

Davids’ diary

Micheal Benson. 38 years old of age. The housekeepers of his mansion always hovering over him, craving validation of how they cleaned the house.  He worked as a surgeon. he believed on making a difference in the world, being the hero, being the person people would turn to for help. Saving people’s lives essentially… ironic if you ask me. Instead, he suddenly became the opposite. I mean he’s made a difference on the world, just not as he wanted. He’s ended up as a villain than a hero and he’s the person people would see in their nightmares, like he’s a disease to prevent and avoid. Most importantly of all, the surgeon slaughtered lives. Not just anyone, his own family. Or that’s what it seems.

Prologue

"Hello! ... Hello?"

     Silence. Pure nothingness. I was trapped, again. Yes, I know, I shouldn't have taken that path. Last time when...

    OW

    What? Oh yes. Kidnapped! Almost forgot, I mean I just got hit by a book. Wait! Why did I get hit by a book? Why did I get kidnapped? Well I can tell you one reason!

Let's go back. Back in time.

some time before now

Detective Marques is a tall, mysterious man who never talks to anyone except the corpses he works with. And it has always been that way and people are fine with that. If he was keeping us safe and murder free everything was okay.

 He has solved some of the hardest cases in our small-town that even professional police officers could not. He even solved the Jessica Wang case-which was named the hardest case in the country.

CHAPTER 1

“If the world ended tomorrow, would you forgive me?”

“Forgive you?”

I stare at Emilie, perplexed, as she spins lazily on the desk chair, the hazy October sunlight glinting in her eyes.

“Y’know, hypothetically,” she says. “If I had done something really bad that you would never forgive me for, but the world was going to end tomorrow, would you forgive me?”

I swiped the tissue over the vial and looked at her. She looked as if she was sleeping, eyes closed, laying back in her chair. No. I thought. Snap out of it. It had to happen. It had to.

“I'm sorry,” I muttered. “But if you'd kept your stupid gossiping mouth shut, I wouldn't have had to do this…”.

After all, I didn't do it out of cold blood. I still loved her. I placed my gloved hand on hers.

Prologue

Do you hear it?

It scampers across the autumn leaves behind you, scratching at the trees, and then vanishing without a trace. A flash, of dark, crimson sparks, abstinent in the air despite no longer there. Do you hear it?

The burgundy of the trees melt into the sky; a dark screen of inky black, blotted, smudged, for an instant. Then the lanterns light, clawed to the oaks, showing you a path that wasn’t there before, cobbled with smooth stones, flattened into the soft soil.

It would have been fine if there was no blood on the windowsill- because then nobody would have noticed the body behind the bushes six stories below. It was very well hidden, that was for sure, but as soon as Lea saw the blood, she saw a faint outline of someone in the leaves below. It was around four o’clock in the morning, so it wasn’t light, nor was anyone awake to see what Lea had just seen. The door had shut, after Lea had left it ajar to go see what the noise was, so there was no way of going back in. She was stuck on the landing of the sixth floor of flats in the early hours of the morning with a body just meters below.

 My head pounded as I stumbled through the dark alley. Hot blood ran down the side of my face, it trickled past my mouth, and the metallic smell made me gag.

“Millie!” a voice rasped from behind me, “Come on sweetie, I’m not going to hurt you.”

I forced myself forwards, my legs burning as I rounded a corner into another putrid alleyway. My breath caught in my throat as I collapsed in agony, screams of those poor defenceless girls echoed around me as a strangled cry escaped my throat.

 “Aagghhh!”

  “Woah, Willow, that was awesome!”

  “Thanks Noah. But I think that ‘Awesome’ is pushing it a little. Maybe terrifying beyond belief though! That would work.”

  “Ha, Ha, yeah right, you know you enjoyed it,” I sneer at him. We’ve just finishing the zip lining activity. As you can see, not as fun as I thought.

I absolutely despised my sister but that didn’t mean I was glad to see her hanging from the garage ceiling like a rag doll with a belt around her neck.

The light above her had been left on, humming faintly, bleaching her skin to something waxy and unreal. Libby always loved attention, even in silence. Especially in death.

When people say the word Holmes, they’re talking about the most famous detective that ever lived, Sherlock Holmes.

My role model.

My hero.                                                           

The world knows him as a legend — the man who could solve a crime before the police had even found the body. The newspapers call him brilliant. Scotland Yard calls him impossible. Criminals call him a nightmare.                                                                                                    

I just call him Sherlock.     

Viral Fiction by Tiwalade O

High above the snow-peaked mountains of Everest, far beyond where the weaker, more feeble birds of varied species flock together, three colossal beasts arose from their pits of darkness. They wanted to try one last time.

1ST PLACE. For someone whose birthday was on the 31^st of October, Evie Darnell had never really enjoyed Halloween. The creepy over-the-top costumes, the eerily detailed Jack-O-Lanterns; none of it had ever really appealed to her. So she wasn’t quite sure how, at 11:38pm on her 13^th birthday, she had found herself standing with her best friends in the endlessly snaking line outside her town’s “House of Horrors” that had been open for the past few days….