The Planetarium

PART NINE

MANY STEPS WERE TAKEN over the next few hours, days, months.

But the first step I took was to stumble back, transfixed with horror what my anger had amounted to, and wept. I cried and cried and cried - cried as the sun sank over the hills, cried as the moon drifted out from behind a lonely cloud, and cried at how my dirty hands had bruised her pale swan-skin.

Juliet Emmerson was dead.

And I'd never meant to kill her.

For days, I couldn't return to the cabin. It was a sacred place, but not in the pure sense - it was tainted, fouled, fallen into ashes. My hands wouldn't stop trembling during uni lectures, so constantly that the guy next to me commented on it.

I made up some lie about my blood sugar being low. Not like I could tell him that with these hands, I had strangled the life out of a girl just a few days previous.

Then the missing persons fliers started going up everywhere. The first one was on the notice board in the main hall, then in the library, and then hundreds of identical posters seemed to flood every available space on campus.

Lampposts. Trees. Some well-meaning students with no connection to Juliet even starting handing them out, bothering passers-by with the same grim picture.

'MISSING: JULIET EMMERSON, 20, LAST SEEN AROUND STATHOLM UNIVERSITY ON FRIDAY THE 29th.'

They had no clue their cause was hopeless. Eerily, the photographs of Juliet stared at me when I shuffled past with my head ducked low, green eyes piercing through me with condemnation. You did this to me. 

One of the posters ripped off the brickwork with a sudden gust of wind, the funnel sending it skidding in front of my feet. The kids' heads snapped to look at me. Biting the inside of my cheeks so hard I started to taste blood, I tried to forget how much I resented the rudeness of people's stares. Somehow, every student on campus was familiar with the missing girl's friends.

Then I heard the twang of a well-known accent.

Phil was speaking with a bald lecturer I hadn't seen before. My first impulse was to sneer at him - he still adopted that innocent expression of polite concern, like he couldn't wrap his pretty head around the fact he'd let his girlfriend down.

Never mind that - if Phil ever found out what I'd done, there was no question he had the capacity to tear me limb from limb like a small animal. I wasn't exactly the biggest dude. But he was blessed with the body of a Roman athlete, and no matter how dreamy he was, he could kill me.

"Hey! Hey, Orpheus!"

Oh, dear God.

"Hi, man," I said, using that sympathetic nod we had all been exchanging as of late. "What's happening?"

"Oh, you know," he scratched his tousled blonde head. "It's been a weird couple of weeks. We've all been really worried. But I suppose I don't need to explain that, right?"

"Yeah. These posters make it feel so real."

He had no idea...!

"Listen, I just wanted to catch you real quick to give you a heads up-" his eyebrows furrowed together, giving him a sinister appearance. The wind whistled through the shadows of the trees nearby, the posters fluttering in unison. "The police came over to my place to interview me. I'm not an idiot, I've studied crime cases. The first suspect is always a romantic partner. I was bloody scared, even though I know I have nothing to hide!"

Phil continued describing the interview. I felt like my ghost had left my body, and was descending into the gates of hell. I hadn't considered there would actually be a formal investigation.