Apologies and Story

Well, after that dreadful drivel I posted last night I was up thinking for ages while I was supposed to be sleeping. This blog has been an experiment in supposed "writing" and yet I haven't actually written a damn thing. I started this not knowing what blogs really were and now I've realised what I need to do to make this shitty thing my own.

My name on here is Returning Writer. However, what I write is fiction. I've had a pretty exciting life so far, certainly more so than some and yet writing about that is boring and not interesting to anyone - least of all ME. So I'm going back to the beginning and I'm going to start writing stories again and posting them here. If people like them, great, if they say I'm crap then maybe Ill just close this and go back to the drawing board haha.

Here is the first installment. This is a story I wrote for Year 8 English class in England. It's the first and last good story I wrote of which I have a copy. I was 12 or 13.


Notebook murders

The rain beat down on the window as Caroline stared into the black of the night’s sky. Her eyes reflected clearly the stars of the cloudless blanket of darkness. Crystal blue, the iris of her eye seemed to look into the glass of the window. She was absorbed into the glass pane. Thoughts raced through her mind as if running, a never ending line of ideas. A smile slowly spread across her face as her thoughts stopped on one idea. The moon was full; it framed her latest plot perfectly. Caroline moved away from the window and sat in her large armchair. She picked up her notebook and started to write. She gazed thoughtfully into the fire inside the large fireplace, her mind dancing among the flickering flames. They taunted her, wanting her to join them. Caroline shook her head to try to leave the flames, it was not that easy. She moved her head and twisted her body to look again at the window. The soothing rain, still beating on the glass was there to calm her mind. When she felt sufficiently settled, she returned to her writing.
The room was large and very dimly lit. The black shadows moved together along the wall on Caroline’s left hand side. The firelight was all the light in the room apart from a tall lamp stand positioned close to Caroline’s head, in order to enable her to write more easily. Caroline switched hands and wrote with her right as her left hand had become tired. She continued to write in the same printed writing, with every letter perfectly formed and identical to the other letters of its kind that were previously written in her notebook. This writing was completely different from her everyday writing and was reserved for the notebook only. This meant that there was no way of identifying the notebook as hers. Caroline continued to write throughout the course of the evening, only to be interrupted by the fire needing more logs.
The sun cast a line of light across Caroline’s face as she awoke the next morning. It hurt her eyes and made her curse under her breath. She quickly got washed and dressed, ready for the day’s work. She was careful to put her notebook inside the door before she left. She had purposefully hollowed out a gap in the breadth of the door as soon as she knew what she was going to do. She took her time in getting the things she needed for the day so that as she left the house she would not look flushed and hot. Her room looked very different in the sunlight from her open curtains. Caroline walked over to the fireplace where the flames had beckoned her the night before and she begand to sweep the ask and soot away. The fire place looked less mysterious than it did the night before in the firelight, in fact, it looked nothing short of magnificent. A grand fireplace with scroll-ending design that made the fireplace authentic, however, though is was an antique, Caroline had no intention of getting it valued to sell. When Caroline had finished lovingly sweeping out the fireplace, she left the house.
The door locked itself behind her as Caroline walked calmly down the drive. It was a sunny day and a good day for work. As she walked down the main road she saw the main headlines but they didn’t interest her; she could tell you the words without reading or even hearing them. She herself might as well have written the whole article on the murder, the words were taken from her notebook anyway. She pushed the door open to the office where she worked. Caroline walked straight past quite a few people who ignored her as much as she ignored them, she didn’t like to socialize with her colleagues and because of this she wasn’t socialized with. She sat herself down at her desk and flicked the switch on her computer. She immediately started to type what had been put on her desk, word for word without even looking at the pages. She never knew how she did the things she did, she just did them. She usually just used her head. She knew the words on the paper because she could see and read them in her head. Caroline typed without stopping throughout the day until she had finished the work she had been given to finish by the end of the week. It wasn’t much of a pity that she had finished it a week early; it meant she didn’t have to do anything over the week.
Caroline headed straight for number 47 and stopped at the gate. She had to go home for the notebook before she could do her last job of the day and indeed the rest of her life. Number 47 looked dark and foreboding. A perfect look for the last job she was to do. The windows were boarded up and the gate hung off its hinges, unable to lock or even shut properly. The grass was overgrown and the weeds shrouded the path. Caroline felt the sense of doom and disaster and turned her back on the misused house. Her key slid into her own front door easily and Caroline let herself in. She readied herself for the inevitable and collected her notebook; she would need this for later, once her job was done.
Again Caroline found herself staring into the face of hers and Taylor’s doom. She walked to the door and forced her key into the rusty lock. The door creaked as it opened. Silently, Caroline slid into the room, like a snake looking for somewhere to sleep. It was larger, bigger than her own, and dark, darker than she imagined the sky to be out in space; darker than the emptiness that consumed her and Caroline tried to look around. She had been in this house many times and yet the stair case made her feel uneasy today. The black metal steps wound their way into the blackness. They seemed to go on forever. Caroline knew she would have to climb up the old Victorian staircase as she had done so often before, yet she had not felt that familiar tremor of joy as she looked at the steps she had to climb. With her hand firmly clasped to the guard rail, Caroline ascended the stairway.
The one candle that lit the room upstairs cast an eerie glow over the broad back of the man who was to be the latest notebook on the pile. The candle was placed in front of Taylor so Caroline was truly in the shadows. Taylor had no noticed his intruder as she entered his house, nor did he as she ascended the staircase into his library. Caroline slowly advanced towards Taylor, trying not to disturb him until the very last second. She crawled to her intended position, just behind Taylor’s back and prepared herself for the worst. She sat in silence as she slowly polished her knife. This was usually the bit that Caroline enjoyed the most, she felt powerful and she was in charge. She felt as if she were taunting her subject, like talking about them behind their back, as it were. Caroline felt no joy, no satisfaction and yet she felt almost complete. Caroline stood up slowly and carefully. She wanted a good view of Taylor’s face as he saw his assailant before he closed his eyes forever.
Taylor noticed nothing until the gloved hand covered his nose and mouth. The silk glove smelt musty and old. Taylor felt sick to his stomach. He dared not turn round for fear of seeing something he did not wish to see. Unfortunately, as his attacker showed him her weapon, he saw her reflection. Taylor inwardly sighed. He knew there was nothing he could do, she was much too strong for him. She had once told him that if she were to kill someone, she would draw the pain out in front of her victim if they struggled. At the point Taylor had remembered this, the blade ran across his throat, with just enough pressure to split his skin but not cut the oesophagus. Taylor’s eyes closed soon after but not before Caroline had spun him round in his chair. His wrists split as the knife was held at a point where it would collide with both wrists, one after another. When the knife cut into his left wrist, his eyes popped open and as the right wrist was cut, his face went dead. He was only just alive but no one knew he was there and so he would drown in his own blood, both inside his body and outside. Caroline carefully placed the first notebook on his desk for the police to find. That was the only notebook of all the books she had written that would give the police any answers. She took one last look, and left.
On her doorstep, Caroline turned and looked across the world that she knew. She had put the key in the door and unlocked it already. She entered her house looking outside and as she shut the door, she was closing the last chapter of her own book. Caroline turned, looking into the lit fire. She had known that the fire would be lit when she came home; it always was when she finished a job. Again she stared into the frolicking flames. She knew she would be lost if she stared for too long. Without taking her eyes off the flames, Caroline picked up the phone and dialed the police. She told them anonymously where they would find the body and then hung up. The flames were waiting for her, she couldn’t wait any longer. They seemed so free, tempting her to join them, to dance with them, to stay with them…
Taylor was dead when the police arrived at his house but the ambulance was called for medical assistance nevertheless. The constable saw the notebook on the desk by Taylor’s head and picked it up to read. He didn’t bother watching for finger prints as he had been at each of the other murders which had been called the “Notebook Murders”. He flipped the first two pages over as the notebook murdered never wrote on the cover or the first page of the notebook they left. The constable began to read of the crime that had taken place, step by murderous step. Another constable pulled the notebook out of his hands. He closed notebook to look at the front. On finding it identical to the other notebooks he turned to the first page. On the first page, Caroline had written: “The Penultimate Chapter” Nothing else had been written on the first page. It took an hour for the two constables at the scene of the crime to each read the notebook. It took them ten minutes to get the backup at Caroline’s house. Caroline was dead when they found her, sprawled over the dead fire. It was written in the notebook that she would be dead when they found her, although they would not immediately know what she had died from.
Caroline’s life was in that room. As she died, the whole room died with her. The one candle that was lit had gone out at the same time as the fire. The curtains were almost entirely closed and the one stream of sunlight that entered Caronline’s room was that which fell upon her lifeless body.
Her final chapter was found on the glass coffee table. It described the flames, her only friends. It described her empty life before her book and how Caroline had become too involved with her story and of the flames tormenting her. It stopped at the point when Caroline turned her back on the world for the last time.