User blog:Joeaikman/Ten Hated Wikians - Chapter 3

The main hall was filled with potential murderers. Grav’s body had been removed, carefully laid in the same room as Coupe’s corpse by Flats and Joe earlier. Bran and Matoro had left them to go find the others, and they had successfully gathered up Sega and GIR. They had found Sega talking to himself about how he would fuck up the killer, and GIR had been in the room with the fuse box and power switches. He had been fiddling around with the buttons next to a small ventilation shaft, barely big enough for a boy to fit inside. Now he was stood by Sega in the main room. They had tried desperately to locate Nail, but they hadn’t succeeded. Wach had arrived back at the room shortly after the others, and Assy had left them to see whether the CCTV cameras had picked up anyone setting up the room for Coupe’s death.

The scene is this then. Joe stood on the stage, Bran and Flats by his side. Bran was cowering slightly, avoiding the glances of anyone who looked his way. He was terrified. Flats stood tall, or as tall as he could get, and looked remarkably like a bloodhound trying to sniff out the killer. Joe was looking down at the poem. ‘’One would find his lost toy’’. The clue was so obvious now, and maybe he could use this to work out how the rest of them were going to be killed off, if this murderer got that far.

Sega and GIR were stood together again, even if they had split up before Coupe’s death. Sega was looking as confident as usual, whilst GIR was pale, and looked even more terrified than Brandon. Wach was sat in the corner, looking out on the group, assessing who here may have been capable of Coupe’s demise. Matoro was pacing again, up and down the back wall of the room. Of all of them he had been the closest to Coupe, only possibly rivalled by Wach and Nail, although it seems that Nail was just a bit of skirt that Coupe had attracted by being the boss of the Wiki.

And that was the problem with the entire scene they had witnessed. Who here had a motive to kill Coupe? He had been a mostly benevolent leader, and had only been invited to the party after an invitation went astray, supposedly. Or that was what he had claimed before his final end came to conclusion. That stray letter had cost him everything, although it seemed likely that his arrival hadn’t actually been a mistake after all.

“Why are we fuckin’ standing around when we could be stomping some killer ass. It was obviously Joe who did it, bruvs. He wasted Glisc after all. Even used poison to do it, innit.” Sega was trying to take charge of the case, but his use of what he called ‘gangsta slang’ brought down his credibility tenfold. He would never be much of a detective. He had jumped upon one of the most obvious solutions. That must have been exactly what this murderer had wanted in the first place. GIR was nodding behind his friend, and Wach had looked up, taking notice of the potential argument that was brewing.

“First off, that is only a rumour, bitch. Second, I didn’t poison Glisc, he tried to poison me and I stabbed him in self defense. Third, I was with Bran the entire time, which is a better alibi than you have. I’m fairly certain I heard that you aren’t too squeaky clean at all, Sega, so maybe learn to shut your mouth in the future.” Joe was defensive, countering all the arguments put against him in his usual over aggressive tone.

“Joe isn’t the only person here to have knocked someone off. We can’t assume that he is the killer purely off that. Nail killed Andrew and Baby in their sleep to gain more status as a consort to the powerful, Grav accidentally killed Hawk once during felatio, and Sega once shot Silent in the neck, just to see how long it would take him to die.” Flats spoke up for his fellow Wikian, and Sega looked down to the floor, admitting that he had been beaten, and possibly even slightly ashamed of what he did.

“The problem is” Wach stood from his seat as he spoke “that no one here has an alibi. Me and Assy separated, so either one of us could have set up that room, and GIR and Sega were apart when we found them. Flats and Nail clearly split up at some point, and Matoro admits that he went into that room before Coupe. He could have set it up for Coupe’s death before anyone arrived. He had the most opportunity to set this up.”

“He was poisoned. There is meaning to that.” Matoro had stopped pacing, and was now standing, staring into thin air. “Coupe was not an innocent man. He poisoned someone once, to gain what he wanted. Grav killed Hawk too. This is revenge. Some ghost is judging us for our sins from the other side. He is coming for me too. I know it.” Matoro slid down against the wall of the room, and Flats walked over to comfort him.

“When we walked into the room the keyboard was hung from the ceiling to mock Grav. This is no vengeful spirit we are dealing with, just a cruel killer with a sadistic sense of humour.” Once again his eyes went across the room. GIR was looking at his feet, but that wasn’t out of the usual, and Wach had retaken his place on the chair. It was then that Assy returned, a look of excitement on his face.

“What ho, my fellows. I bring you news from the cameras. The last people we know to enter that room were Sega and GIR, and then the cameras cut to static, only restarting when you all gathered outside the room.” Joe, Flats and Wach all turned their eyes on Sega. He was capable of murder, they all knew it, but would he make it this obvious? If he had set the room up then why not cut himself out of the clip? He must be innocent and being framed. Unless that was his plan. Really this new evidence changed absolutely nothing.

“See bruvs. We was walking down the corridor when GIR heard bare noises behind us. I obvs wasn’t scared, but he wanted to hide so we ducked inside the room, yeah. It was all nice and clean when we left, but someone must have messed it up after we left, innit.” Joe turned his eyes to GIR, who didn’t disagree with Sega’s testimony. This probably meant that it was true. Everyone here had, at some point, had the time to get to that room and set it up, and whoever it had been had to know about Coupe murdering with poison.

“We still don’t know that it was one of us who killed Grav and Coupe. There might be someone else in the complex with us. Whoever this mysterious D person is. Maybe they set up the room for Coupe to find his enteryr key.” Bran didn’t sound confident as he spoke, but he was true. They had all assumed that one of their fellow trapped Wikians was the murderer, but that wasn’t necessarily the case.

“It has to be one of us” Wach spoke up again “the poem that we found details ten deaths, right? Well, including Grav and Coupe that means there were eleven of us gathered here. That means one person isn’t accounted for. That poem predicts that one of us will survive, and presumably that person is the murderer.” Wach was just as correct as Bran. There were not enough planned deaths to cover everyone that had come here. The killer had to be one of them, and that meant that it was one person alone, not multiple killers acting as a group. The mystery had just expanded, and no one was trustworthy.

-

Matoro remembered it vividly. The night that he had done what he had to do. Coupe had introduced them at first, during some party that he had been hosting a few years before. Icy had always seemed cool, and Matoro had been too nervous to approach him. ‘’Do it’’ he had told himself ‘’what’s the worst that can happen’’, but he had never been able to push himself. He had asked Coupe, and his friend had whisked the other boy over. They had got talking, and Matoro had wanted to see him again. They would talk together for years, and eventually he had desired something more serious. He had begun to desire him.

This was a tragic tale, however, and Icy spurned him, choosing instead to go out with a consort he had found on the streets one night. Matoro had cried, and gone into a rage and cried some more, before eventually deciding to consult Coupe, the person that had introduced the two in the first place. He had told him that there was only one answer to unrequited love, and had handed him his shovel. It had been a heavy thing, with a wooden handle and a flat metal blade. He had tracked down Icy and then brought the shovel down on his love’s skull, cracking it in one fell blow. He had looked pretty in death, almost as pretty as he had done in life. He had always wanted to chill, and his pale white hair stuck up in places, but now it was matted with hot blood. Matoro realised that h couldn’t leave him and, in the dead of night, dragged him out to the woods. He dug the pit himself before throwing the body in. He had condemned his sweet love to darkness and worms, and he had cried. It had been the only choice, however, and would had to be done had been finished. He had left him then, alone forever, lost in an unmarked grave.

There had been no family; no friends; no calls from the police; no funeral. Icy had lost everything, but he had never had much to lose in the first place. Nothing except Matoro, and he had thrown Matoro away. He had never gone back to that forest, too scared to return to the place where Icy held his eternal rest, afraid that if he returned he would find the whole empty, and then justice might find him. That was how Matoro had lived his life after then, constantly afraid that someone would find out and that then he would be punished.

- “Well I’m not going with any of you. You could be the murderer for all I know.” GIR had backed himself to the door, his eyes looking around at the others, fear clear in his irises. He ran after this, but no one followed him. They were all too unsure about the others. Anyone could be a killer. Matoro was leant against a wall, slouched and pale from shock. Brandon looked scared at the prospect of a single murderer and Sega looked out of the door after the fleeing GIR. Joe and Flats were the only ones moving, with Flats comforting Matoro and Joe pacing along the stage. “He’s got the right end of it. The true king should not be spending his time with potential assassins.” Assy left after GIR, reducing the number in the room. Wach slipped out after him, hoping that he could catch one of them in the act. That left Joe, Bran, Sega, Flats and Matoro in the large room, and they were all conscious that one of the others was possibly waiting to murder them.

“If we could decipher the poem then we could work out who the killer might be…” Bran thought aloud, tailing off towards the end of the thought process. Sega was ignoring those that surrounded him, just standing there motionless, whilst Matoro and Flats were preoccupied on the opposite side of the room.

“I’ve tried. I don’t know enough about all of the people here to work out which death equates for which person. I can’t even work out which one is for me and you. For all I know I could be…could be…” Joe gulped, for the first time during the entire affair he looked uncomfortable “the next target.”

-

He wasn’t. The camera cuts away and we see the next person to be killed. Nail was lying peacefully on a bed of white cloth. Or at least it had been white before. Now it was soaked red with her blood. Wounds were evident along her body, a hundred small stab wounds, and the tiny points of a hundred small nails pointing out through each. She had clearly lied down to sleep and never woken up. Her body was limp and gone, but her face didn’t hold the same level of peacefulness. Her mouth was contorted into a scream, and a nail stuck out through the back of her throat.

A gloved hand moves across her face, closing her mouth and shutting her eyes, arranging her features into those of one who was sleeping. There is a sudden flash, as if a camera was used in the room, and then a picture is placed next to her head. It shows three students, all dressed up for a night out. One was wearing a suit in the shape of a green dinosaur, and another wore a labcoat and stethoscope, as if he was a doctor. Nail stood in the middle of them, holding both of them by the shoulders and laughing at a comment that one of them had made. The two men’s faces had already been crossed out, and in a slow, deliberate fashion a red cross was drawn across Nail’s own face.

The last thing that the gloved figure does is move down to her hands, caressing the skin of the arm, and gently cupping and opening up her left hand. Inside there is a scrap of yellowing parchment with blurred words. The gloved hand takes the paper and scrunches it up, in a way that we just about see the last few words oon the paper, ‘’and then there were none’’. Then the camera blacks out.

‘’Nine Hated Wikians, they would try to argue with fate’’

‘’Nail’s name would prove piercing, and then there was eight’’