Ten

54.2K 2.6K 6K
                                    

The night was as black as it was dark and as dark as it was black, which was very. Mist washed over the sleeping town, but its ethereal silver was lost in the shroud of night. I sat hunched over my laptop, my room lit only by the screen's dusty glow. Sleeping hadn't been my forte since Sunday, and once again I found myself scouring newspapers and police reports at 3am for any sign of our mysterious dead Purple Shirt Guy. I wouldn't say it had been haunting me, considering the circumstances I thought I was coping pretty well. It was early days yet, but I was pretty sure I wasn't traumatised for life. I ran my fingers through my hair. Maybe that was a bad thing. I was more guiltily and morbidly fascinated by the whole thing than horrified. Once I'd got over the initial shock, it was kind of... exciting. Oh God. I closed my laptop forcefully, slipping into bed and firmly holding my eyes shut.

*

"Oh, I almost forgot, you up for filming the sequences today? The dance studio's free from four onwards."

I gulped audibly, and Chris laughed. "I'm sure we can find someone else if you don't want to do it, I mean..."

"Oh, shut up. Yeah, fine, but I haven't choreographed anything because you haven't given me any music or anything?" I tried to keep the rising panic out of my voice, running my fingers through my hair. It was an annoying habit, I'd developed it in secondary school to hide my anxiety in social situations but now I couldn't shift it. (My hair had been completely static by the time Knuckles had finished his sadistic 'induction'.)

"I think the plan at the moment is just to film you doing some random leaps and shit and then just mash them all together. Don't worry about it, if we decide we need a full blown routine we'll give you plenty of warning-"

Chris was cut off by a squealing girl hurtling through the middle of our conversation on a spinning desk chair with a shout of laughter.

The theatre building was always the same: loud, raucous, and melodramatic.

The thick black curtains that swathed three sides of the stage area were rippling constantly as people forced their way past at high speed with swords and cutlasses. Another group was putting on a modern take on Hamlet and were trying to figure out how to stage a shoot up, resulting  in strobe lights and explosion effects every few seconds — much to the distaste of the tear drenched couple rehearsing 'Romeo and Juliet'.

A tiny girl balanced precariously on a ladder adjusting the lighting while another struggled with a heavy spotlight. Everyone was whipped into frantic activity, the final exams just weeks away. Chris and I lounged across a faux-marble table trying to juggle several plastic vegetables and a pig's head.

"It's weird that they still haven't released anything about the dead guy." Chris mused.

"I told you. It was definitely murder, and they don't want anyone else killed. They just told us they reckon he was killed on Thursday and not to worry because we weren't suspects." I shrugged.

"But what about his family? They'll want to have a funeral, but they can't invite anyone because it's all hush hush. And presumably he had some friends, so they will have to be told, and you know how word gets round. Unless they solve this pretty quick, everyone's gonna know anyway. They might at least have told us seeing as we were the ones who discovered it."

I rolled my eyes. "Technically, it was me that discovered it. You were all too chicken to go near it. Anyway - why does it matter? People turn up dead all the time. We didn't know him, he wasn't even from around here."

Except, he was. The little voice in the back of my head whispered. You saw him just a few days before. Only from the back, but a purple shirt is a purple shirt. And most people wouldn't wear a purple shirt while out jogging...

Human - phanWhere stories live. Discover now