Red laughter

Chapter 3: decisions

Zoe guessed something was wrong, so she sat down next to her mum. "Julia went missing late last night, around the same time Anne was stabbed," she explained as Julia's mum carried on crying in the background. "The police have searched but found no trace of her." All of a sudden, there was a loud crash upstairs and Zoe ran up to see what the noise was. She assumed it would just be one of her things fallen of a shelf, but was shocked to see her bedroom window smashed and a brick beside her bed. Looking around the room, she noticed the brick had a piece of paper attached to the side. It had a picture of the sewage drain near the canal with blood smeared all down the side. She peered outside to find only the street lamps flickering on and off.

Later that evening, after the mess had been cleared up, Zoe sat with her mum on the couch watching the news. More strange deaths had been occurring around town and all of them had some form of indication to Zoe. One had a picture of Zoe's house nailed in to the victims forehead! As she lay in bed that night she thought about how first Anne had been killed, and she was Zoe's sister. Then there was Julie who had gone missing and was Zoe's best friend, and the pictures of Zoe's house. So she decided that early next morning, she was going straight to the sewage drain to see whether or not there was a link to all these deaths. Zoe simply thought it would be a simple investigation, but little did she know that it was going to be the worst decision of her life.