Scream 4

Chapter 25

The day you were fired from the hospital, you left the building with a feeling you hadn't felt in a very long time.

Hope.

Hope, that with your regained memories you could finally move on from the past so you could focus on the future.

Hope, that perhaps in some way or another you could help people by sharing your horrifying experiences, turning it into something positive.

And hope, that perhaps Roseville was the place where you belonged, after all. Maybe coming here had been your destiny. Maybe Roseville was the place where things could change for the better.

... But boy, were you wrong.

It all started with another murder, a stranger who had been screaming all kinds of slurs your way for accidentally bumping into him during a random morning walk.

The man was found dismembered in his home two days later. On the walls were listed bloodied pictures of every one of his misdeeds, from images of his battered wife to paper evidence of his financial frauds.

Next was a thief who stole some of your money, homeless and misled down the wrong path because of his circumstances, with no apperent links to the murder prior. Not until after a nurse found the teen covered from head to toe in glossy photos of you.

Police questioned you, but you had solid alibis. Whether it was going for a drink to consume alcohol to temporarily forget about your troubles—if only for one night—or being with Emma, there were too many witnesses, so they ruled you out as suspect.

But these weren't the only events involving you, triggering a spiral of strange and disturbing events, ranging from seemingly sudden violence to bodies being torn to shreds. All had relation to you—an offense done to you. No matter how petty they were, people who harmed you wounded up missing and then dead, their body humiliated in some way.

Every single one of them had photos spread across their form, some of you.

It was excruciating to watch how Ghostface managed to tear everything apart, and there was nothing you could do about it. Sure, you mentioned the stalked and the calls prior to the most recent murders to the investigators, but no one believed you without any proof to back it up.

People drifted away from you, afraid of you as police often took up your driveway, checking on you at least once a week. Suspect or protection, they did not say, but their presence didn't help your frayed nerves at all. All you knew was that after they confiscated your laptop for a few hours, the judging looks you recieved did not bode well for you. They must have thought you a freak for looking up Ghostface as much as you had.

And yet, you weren't going to stop. You were running your own little private investigation, but always came at a dead end. The victims were random, varying in ages. Went missing for a couple of days before being found, excluding the recent ones that the killer used to paint you in a bad light.

And God, was it working. Passerbys avoided walking near you as if you had been contaminated with an incurable disease. They didn't even spare you a glance, and the ones that did, did so cautiously. Nervously. They were nervous, like doing something as simple as staring at you for too long meant they were going to be next on the killer's hitlist.

Last month, you had even gone as far as going to some of the victim's families, but most of them didn't even open their door for you. Two have, but slammed them shut right in your face after you introduced yourself.

It was safe to say, you'd gathered quite the reputation in town, without having a say about it.

Today was one of those days where everything was a bit of a haze, and you couldn't think straight, stuck in some in-between state, some hazy almost-reality brought on by the lack of two certain someones to remind you of yourself.