Who Killed Romeo

Chapter 6

Act 1, Scene 4

Hazel Lowell died in hospital earlier this evening. With her parents halfway across the world and betrayal in her memories, she passed from blood loss, completing the star-crossed lovers’ fate.

Now, even as I cowered within the comfort of my dorm room, I couldn’t pluck the picture of her out of my mind. It was etched permanently in the forefront along with the sound of Archer’s retching. Flushed cheeks and piercing blue eyes that were already slipping away by the time we’d found her. Beautiful Hazel Lowell.

Beautiful and dead, Hazel Lowell.

With only the faint yellow light of her bedside lamp, my best friend, Sadie Addison, read the school newspaper’s article about the murders to me aloud. Her voice carried in a faint whisper and I only barely heard her above the sounds of wildlife outside.

She had already pulled her bonnet over her braids and was tucked neatly into bed with her back against the headboard. I wished it were that easy for me to find sleep. Instead, I stared up at the ceiling as I traced patterns in the paint with my eyes.

“This is awful,” Sadie told me. “Isla Yamaguchi – that girl is cruel. This whole article is just monopolizing people’s fears. Describing dead bodies and whatnot.”

She paused a moment, her breathing deep enough to make me think she might’ve fallen asleep.

“I can still hear him.” Sadie finally said. “When I try to sleep, I can hear Archer dying. It was- It was just so loud, you know? I thought he was acting…I should have…” She trailed off gently.

I turned on my side to face her. She was barely visible through the darkness.

“You couldn’t have done anything, Sadie. It was already too late by the time everyone even realised he was having a reaction.”

“I tell myself that but it doesn’t get any easier.”

I let her words marinate in the air. I loved how open Sadie was, nothing was a mystery when I was with her. When everything else in my life was beyond my reach, my best friend wasn’t.

Before I could’ve replied, Sadie beat me to it. “Will you tell me a story, Eleanor.”

I rubbed my eyes and thought for a second. Sometimes in the night like this, when Sadie and I just whispered back and forth with little thought, our room felt bigger. That darkness that festered in the deepest corners of the bedroom felt even gloomier now and the silence that more devouring.

“Okay, I have one. It’s called The Three Sisters of Fate,” I answered.

Carefully, I pulled myself up into a sitting position and pushed my hair behind my shoulders. I caught a glimpse of my Fleetwood Mac poster and breathed out shakily.

“In Greek mythology, there are three sisters, Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos. It is said that together, they are stronger than even the King of the Gods, Zeus. They have very important jobs that don’t very much concern the Gods at all, it concerns us. See, they’re weavers of fate – a human’s fate. With a simple thread, they see to it all.” I paused for a moment and checked to see if Sadie was still awake. She was, so I continued.

“Clotho is the youngest. She twists and spins the threads of life from the very moment a child is born. Then, whilst spinning, her older sister Lachesis shapes and defines the life. She is the middle sister and is responsible for deciding the fate of this person. She is careful and precise while deciding the quality and length of a human life. She decides at what age to end the life but not how.

“Then, the oldest sister, Atropos, has the gloomiest task of all. She decides how to conclude that life and makes the final cut of the string before moving onto the next. She decides how a person will die, why then and not later and so on. Everything that happens to us has already been planned out in a world far away from our own by sisters who see it all but understand nothing.”

Sadie huffs playfully. “Was this a life lesson hidden in a story, again?”

I smiled quietly to myself. “Yes.”

“Explain it to me.”

“You understand it already,” I said because she did.

“Just explain it, Eleanor.”

I pulled and spun the rings on my fingers and thought carefully over my words.

“It means that though you believe you failed Archer that night, it’s not true. You could not have helped him because the sisters had already made their decisions and that was merely fate playing out as it had been weaved to do. Sometimes, our threads intertwine with another person’s and it pulls. When we make friends, when we have a family – that’s the sisters weaving us together. When somebody passes away who was weaved into us, it hurts. You lose a piece of your art and sometimes somebody else’s thread is only a small part, while other times it creates the whole picture. I don’t think grief ever stops hurting, you just get used to looking at the bigger picture without their thread in it.”

“That’s beautiful,” Sadie murmured sleepily. She had turned off her lamp by now and my eyes strained to adjust to the darkness well enough to see her. “Do you believe in fate?”

“Go to sleep, Sadie,” I instructed.

She didn’t answer.

I sunk back into my pillow with a slight frown as a thousand stories of the past came tumbling back into my mind, making it difficult to think. Through the moonlight that filtered in the curtains, I managed to make out the crevices of our room. My old camera collecting dust on the vanity caught my eye, left there from the moment I lost passion in photography and instead turned to self-destruction. Thinking of photography made my hands shake and I tucked them in beneath my back to stop the tremors.

A light knock sounded at my dormitory door before something slipped under the crack at the bottom. It was a piece of white card that caught my attention swiftly. Carefully and quietly not to wake Sadie, I went to the card to read it.

I picked it up between my fingers and brought it to the window in order to read the blocked letters through the dim moonlight that peeked through the trees.

‘Meet me in the dark room at midnight – Heath.’

While I wasn’t stupid enough to believe that Heath Albion had sent me this letter, I wasn’t any less curious as to find out who it really was behind it all. The writing looked like that on the notebook and I couldn’t be sure, but perhaps the mirror too. I didn’t wake Sadie to show her what I had found, she would have told me to report it and that was one thing I didn’t want to do.

The killer was underestimating me and I didn’t much appreciate it. The only thought I had while waiting for the clock to tick by to midnight was that if I were to die tonight, at least I would be able to settle my mind first and identify the killer at last.

I slipped out of our dorm at 11:55 pm, with enough time for me to get from the right-wing of Cosima Memphis and to the dark room. Hopefully, I would solve the mystery while there. My mind raced and I couldn’t help but get excited. It might have been a stupid idea but I had survived stupider. Once again while roaming the corridors, I thought of the apparent ghosts here and how Hazel Lowell would now be a part of that list. I thought of the future, which seemed fuzzy and so out of reach now, and the past that slowly seeped into my mind like a poison, corrupting my thoughts.

I wondered that if I died tonight, would my name be remembered at all? Or would I slip through everybody’s fingertips like thread?

The red lights were on in the dark room creating odd shadows along the walls. They moved slowly, slithering along the floor and across my body. Empty pictures were pegged from wall to wall and I crept along the floor, careful of any other person present. My hands shook and I tried to swallow the fear that had begun to choke me. The smell of vinegar was consuming and dizzying.

The clock on the wall ticked past slowly. It anchored but also made me impossibly aware of how painfully slow time was trickling away. The thought that someone else was in the darkroom frightened me and I refused to look at the darkest corners where the red light barely touched, just in case.

One thing I knew for definite was that Heath wasn’t here. However, after a moment, I did find a photograph pegged on the line that wasn’t blank like the others. There was red ink on it and my eyebrows furrowed harshly. The picture developed steadily, revealing only faint colours to begin with. I pulled the photograph down and turned it around. In red ink, it read:

THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS HAVE VIOLENT ENDS

Another Shakespeare quote.

My breath was stuck in my throat, trapping me, making me cold.

Carefully, I turned it around to see the developed photograph and gasped.

Taken shakily through a window from an outsider’s perspective, was Heath and I sat opposite one another in the library from yesterday. We were deep in conversation, one person’s eyes never leaving the other. It was too far away to make out exact expressions but even looking at the photo made my stomach turn. It was an obvious snapshot into a personal moment, a complete violation of our privacy. Just the thought of somebody taking this made my skin crawl.

Though we had caught somebody listening in yesterday, it didn’t feel as cold as this did. Someone out there had photographs of me, to keep, to watch, to touch.

In a dark red pen, written so recently that the ink still smelt fresh, were too thick crosses. The colour dripped down the photograph like blood from a gash. One cross through my face and the other through Heath’s.