Read part 1: https://www.youngwriterssociety.com/work.php?id=131761
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part 2
7:34am
I decided not to
look further into the contents of the box until I got back home. For some
reason, I felt safer opening and deciphering exactly what had happened if I was
in a very safe environment. The note scared me deeply. The entire drive home, I
couldn't stop thinking about how I could have possibly managed to do this, if
for some reason it was me. Which I knew it wasn't.
Nevertheless, I
called Chris, one of my friends that I went drinking with last night. While I
may not have remembered much of my night, perhaps he did.
"Hello?"
Chris' voice sounded groggy like he'd just woken up.
"Hey, man.
How's it going?" I asked, trying to keep any sign of fear out of my voice.
He sighed on the
other end. "I feel awful."
"Yeah, me too.
Hey, man, I had a question for you last night. After the bar downtown, you took
me home, right?"
"Ummm,"
Chris mumbled. "Yeah."
"Are you
positive? We didn't stop anywhere?"
"Yeah, man. You
were wasted and we took you home."
"And you would
say that I was too drunk to go anywhere. Say, you'd say I was too drunk to
drive and move and stuff, right?"
"Yeah… hey
what's going on?" he asked, his voice becoming more clear.
"Nothing,
nothing. I'm just making sure. Alright man, I gotta go, I'll catch you
later." I hastily terminated the call as I pulled into my driveway. The
box was sitting, closed, on the seat next to me. I rushed into my house with
the box in my arms and sat down on my living room couch. I placed the box on
the coffee table in front of me and opened it up again. I took out the wedding
knife and the letter, reading its threats once more before reaching into the
box and pulling out what seemed like four or five printed photos on photo
paper.
My heart froze as I
spread them out on my table.
The pictures didn't
seem to be in any particular order but there were four of them. Each one
pictured either Ruby or her two girls, Rosalia and Maria, but something was
terribly, terribly wrong. In the first picture, Ruby was in her upstairs
hallway. It was dark and she was lying on the floor in a sick, twisted
position, with her hands above her head and her neck looked like it had snapped
to the side. Some sort of bone was protruding from her neck and her skin was
pale and heavily bruised. Her eyes were closed.
As if the horrifying
pose she was in wasn't enough, she was covered in dark red blood. There were
many obvious signs of cuts and marks up and down her body, across her throat
and her wrists and hands. Her clothes were stained and cut open, revealing flashes
of her skin underneath.
It appeared she was
murdered, somehow, by someone completely brutally.
I covered my mouth
in horror as I looked at the next two pictures, which happened to be of her
little girls.
They were similar in
style to the first one, but these two pictures were shot in the little girls'
bedroom. Both of them were standing on their playchairs with a noose around
their necks. In one picture, they were standing on the chairs, grasping onto the
rope cutting into their skin frantically. In the next picture, the chairs had
been tipped over and each girl was hanging lifelessly by the rope around their
necks. The room was incredibly dark and it was hard to make out much more other
than the two bodies in the middle of the room.
I almost couldn't
look at the next picture, but its content grabbed my attention and made me
nearly vomit.
The photo was a
selfie of me. I was standing in the same hallway that Ruby was lying in, dead
on the ground. I wasn't covered in blood or killed in this picture. No. I was
smiling. I was smiling wide, showing nearly all of my teeth as if to say,
"Look what I've done!"
I shoved the
pictures off of my coffee table and froze, unable to focus on anything else.
How were these pictures possible? I know for a fact that there was no way for
these pictures to exist, and yet they did. They were lying on the floor of my
living room, and they were real. This wasn't a dream anymore. Someone was
seriously messing with my mind and I had absolutely no idea who could have done
this, or why they would have done it.
"Okay," I
whispered to myself, clutching the nearest pillow on the couch to my chest.
"Okay. Okay. What do I know for sure?"
I knew that last
night, I had passed out and my friends had taken me home.
I knew that I had
been woken up by Ruby's call I'd left a something at her house.
There has to be some
sort of creep, some sort of psychopath that wants to watch us suffer in fright.
"Okay," I
said. I picked up the photos off the floor and looked at them again. Obviously,
these were not real photos. As real and as gruesome as they may seem, they are
not real. Ruby and her daughters are not dead. Ruby is not in the hallway, the
girls are not hanging by a rope in their bedroom. They are alive, that much I
knew.
While I'm sure
someone could have photoshopped their faces onto these people, what truly
startled me was the fact that these pictures were taken undeniably inside of
Ruby's home. In looking at the photos again, I could see her family photos
hanging up in the hallway, and a sliver of light reflecting back from the
doorknob to the bathroom. I'd spent a lot of time in her house and I knew that
it was hers. Additionally, the daughters' rooms look exactly the same. The rug
underneath the chairs is the same crazy rainbow rug that they had this very
moment in their house.
Completely at a loss
for answers, I decided to reach into the box to grab another item.
There were two small
necklaces in the bottom of the box. I did not recognize them, and I doubt I'd
ever seen them before. One was red, with faux rubies and golden trinkets. The
other was purple, similar design but pretty, silver metal pieces inbetween the
purple gems. Perplexed, I set them down on the coffee table and laid out all of
the items before me.
The threatening
note. The wedding knife. The four photos. The two necklaces.
I unfolded the note
again and read it.
4 - Be
at 4523 Roxanne Street with Benjamin Reece at 7:00pm tonight, or one of your
daughters will die.
What was 4523
Roxanne Street? I knew that Roxanne street was on the outskirts of downtown.
Perhaps by a shopping mall or something like that. I pulled out my phone and
typed in the address to Google and was surprised at the result.
4523 Roxanne was the
address for a restaurant named Mikey's, a local American-Italian joint. They
were famous for their parmesean garlic lasagna and unlimited breadsticks.
It was also where I
took Ruby on our first date, and that fact made me incredibly sick to my
stomach.
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