I arrived at Emily's house at eleven in the morning, a taxi dropping me off just two doors away. At first her neighbours, mostly little old ladies and young couples, were friendly and chatty. A gentlemen leaning against his porch door smoking a cigarette sparked up a conversation about the weather as though he saw me everyday and Old Mrs Tate asked me to help her carry her dustbin to the curb.
When I mounted the steps up to Emily's front door, however, an icy silence fell over the people congregating in the street. They stared at me with a mixture of quiet fear and suspicion. The front door was locked and my knocking was greeted with silence.
I left my bags on the doorstep and walked around the side of the house into the back garden. Here, I discovered the empty shallow grave in which Emily had buried Molly. I stared at the grave for sometime, trying to imagine how it must have felt for Emily to have had to kill her roommate.
The next thing I knew, I was on the ground, the back of my head seething with pain.
I woke up an hour or so later and vomited into Emily's mother's wildlife pond. Someone had attacked me, this much was true from the congealed blood in the back of my hair and the fact that my iPod had been stolen. It occurred to me then to walk around to the front of the house, to check that my bags hadn't been pinched and to see if any of Emily's neighbours had seen my assailant. When I turned around, however, I saw the conservatory for the first time and those thoughts left my mind.
Of the nine windows that used to make up the front of Emily's mother conservatory, only three still had glass. On those three panes, somebody had spray painted three separate messages. Which were as follows:
Day sleeper deserves a quiet night
Welcome to the circle
For the fairy folks thou need'st fear not
More unnerving than these messages was what was actually in the conservatory. I entered via one of the broken panels and found the tiled floor to be coated in blood. Dead rats, mice, birds and even a badger were strewn all about the conservatory, all torn to pieces, all lacking skin or plumage.
And then I noticed a cactus in the corner and was reminded of something Emily had told me before Christmas. She had said that she had put her present from her brother under the cactus, in lieu of having an actual tree. There was no present there now, unless her brother had bought her dead sparrow.
Perhaps Emily had made it to Christmas day unharmed and had opened the present then? Although, it could have been stolen, I guess.
I tried the door from the conservatory to the kitchen but it was locked. Next I climbed up onto a chair to peer into the window. The kitchen was normal, save for a little bit of blood in the sink. I tapped on the window for fifteen minutes or so, hoping to see Emily come rushing in from the living room, but there was no reply.
When I returned to the front of the house, I was pleased to find that my bags (one of which contained the laptop on which I am writing this entry) were still where I had left them. I went back to the road and asked Old Mrs Tate if there was anywhere in town that I could sleep for the night. Hesitantly, she suggested that I could stay at the Half Moon Inn down by the train station. However, as I headed that way, she added, "I wouldn't stay here long if I were you. Strangers don't last long in this town."
Her words rang in my head that entire afternoon. I checked into the Half Moon, telling the lady behind the bar that I'd probably be staying for two nights. Tomorrow, I intend to upload this entry and then head off to see if I can find David - maybe he did visit Emily on Christmas Day. The day after that, if I have no luck with him, I'm going to go to my old house and see if my father's treasure chest holds any clues.
Of all the things I've seen and heard today, the most alarming is that nobody seems to recognise me.
I left you a present, Mark. I hope it found you.
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