Young Writers Society

It would be days before they saw the blood. Splattered on the dusty wall at the end of an even dustier alleyway, it almost looked like another piece of scrawled graffiti.

Almost.

The alleyway was not special. Like any other alleyway in the city, or any other city, for that matter, it sat between two brick shops, both somewhat decrepit by age, but by no means left to rot. Each day, people, ordinary customers, business people and tourists, walked in and out of both shops, but not into the alleyway. Why would they? It wasn’t the sort of alleyway that led anywhere, or that held fashionable boutiques or hip bars. For the occasional person who glanced sideways down this innocuous alleyway from the street that lead everywhere and nowhere, its end was as easy to see as it was unextraordinary. All that could be seen was the back of the building behind the two brick shops; an accounting firm, or a stockbroker’s, or a real estate agency. Something as commonplace as this alleyway.

The walls of the alleyway were plastered with posters for concerts, and music festivals, and the shows of comedians. Some, old and faded, had been there for so long that the events they promoted had long faded in the memories of those who had attended them. Others, bright and shiny, barely touched by the dust of the alleyway, showed dates that were yet to come.

The floor of the alleyway was covered in dust and grime, the result of simply being a part of a city. Plastic wrappers and cigarette butts adorned the edges of the alleyway, creating a border of litter. Glass and plastic bottles also found their way into this border, some of which still contained the remnants of an unfinished drink, whereas others were remnants themselves. A dumpster surrounded by dark green rubbish bins surveyed the alleyway like a fortress surrounded by plastic turrets.

It was not a clean alleyway, but it was no dirtier than any of the thousands of others that lived in hundreds of cities around the world. Like many such alleyways, it was a much-loved target for wielders of spray cans. The brick walls, plastered with a patchwork of posters as they were, were also painted in an intricate, even beautiful, street art, hastily scrawled tags, and a myriad of graffiti in between. At night, this graffiti was essentially invisible, with the steady, unflinching light of the street lamps, which illuminated the footpaths just well enough for the occasional pedestrian to be able to see ahead, but not well enough to be able to reach into the depths of the alleyway.

A brief beam of light perused the alleyway as a worker from one of the shops stood out from one of the doors which dotted the walls of the alleyway, amongst the posters and the graffiti. He took the seven hasty steps it took to reach one of the bins, then opened the lid, and shoved the garbage bag he was clutching into it. It hit the bottom with the sound of plastic containers and tin cans clanging. At this sound, the worker, who was in truth, no older than a boy, looked around. It wasn’t especially late, but at this time of the year, darkness came early. Even still, the streets beyond the alleyway were empty, at least from where the boy stood. As he rushed inside, unnerved by the dark, the boy had failed to realise one crucial thing.

This was a city. The streets of a city are never empty.

Never entirely.

It was not the darkness which should have made the boy feel uneasy, rather what the darkness held. Only hours after the boy had closed the door on the alleyway, another person entered it. Or rather, two people entered, although the second wasn’t so much a person, as a corpse. No dramatic drops of crimson blood dripped from the corpse to the grimy floor of the alleyway, and the person, the living one, didn’t leave so much as a footprint in the dust. Later, they would only find evidence of the scared boy, and the world would turn him into the very image of evil. They would be wrong, of course, but that didn’t matter, not now. As the corpse was carried to the darkest end of the alleyway, its carrier began to wonder what would happen in the aftermath. This person’s ponderings weren’t a result of fear of being caught, not as such, but rather a scientific, experimental kind of curiosity. The person was too careful, too clever, to be found out.

The corpse was gently laid on the ground, and hidden with the utmost care, before the killer left one final message on the wall of the alleyway. One final message, in blood.

It would be days before they saw the blood. When they finally did, and they saw what had been written, they would never had guessed that this was not the end of the terror, and neither was it the beginning.