Chapter 4: Barricade

It took about another hour -  or perhaps it was 30 minutes - before my mother and Jacob arrived. Mother rushed in, as if she already knew someone had died before we even gave her the grim news, and spent the first 10 minutes post-arrival fussing over Andrew and me. It took Andrew verbally reminding her that there were guests around to wrangle her anxious mind into a usable state, after which she finally turned her attention to other people. Jacob stood awkwardly in the doorway, a similar demeanor to what he had yesterday, but he loosened up a little more after mother handed him a drink.

The arrival of newcomers brought both Iris and Matthew out from wherever they were hiding, Sybil remained in bed though. Iris had explained that she was already asleep when she went in to check. She insisted that Sybil had had a long day and deserved the rest. At first, their arrival managed to lift the mood and we all managed to forget briefly why they had to come in the first place. 

None of us seemed to have any idea how to bring up what had happened, although mother had asked several times. We just kept deflecting the question, saying that we’d explain all later and that for now, we were all okay. She didn’t notice Cory wasn’t included in that “all”. A tension in the pit of my stomach grew.

It might have been 20 minutes when someone finally plucked up the courage to tell her. She had taken a seat 5 minutes earlier and had spent most of her time attempting to smooth out interactions between Jacob and the rest of us.

“Mum,” Andrew said softly. “Did you call the police?”

My mother leaped into action like someone had just poked her behind with a hot iron rod, saying quickly, “Yes, of course! They said they might not be able to make it all the way out tonight, with the blizzard - but they’ll definitely send someone tomorrow!”

“Tomorrow...” Andrew breathed, defeatedly.

“I’m sorry dear, it was all they could do. It didn’t help that we couldn’t tell them exactly what happened...”

“Who’s hurt?” Jacob suddenly asked. “Where is he? Or her?”

Andrew suddenly looked panicked and then annoyed. With my younger brother telepathy, I could tell he was probably thinking something like: trust Jacob to be insensitive at a time like this.

“We haven’t moved him...” Alison managed to say, hoping to convey the information through inference alone, but it didn’t seem to get through.

“No, you shouldn’t!” Mother agreed. “You might make his injuries worse.”

“He’s dead,” Christina said and for once I was grateful for her brutality. Both Jacob and my mother’s eyes grew wide - although not that wide. It seemed they had already guessed the truth and were just grappling with having been right. The rest of us winced at the word, despite some of us having discussed it plenty just a while ago.

“W-where is he...” Mother all but whispered.

“He’s... outside...” Andrew bit out, gesturing with his chin to the glass door that Cory’s body laid just metres from.

Jacob seemed to take this better than most of us did. I could almost see his brain shift gears from socialization to business. Mother seemed to be trying to keep it together and not react, perhaps for our sakes or perhaps to save face.

“Can I see him?” Jacob asked. Andrew nodded and went to retrieve the lantern for him. As he left, he looked like he was sleepwalking.

Behind me, Alison and Rebecca were having a conversation of their own. Part of me wondered why they were bothering at a time like this but a bigger part realised that all normal notions of social decorum were out the window for this situation.

“Hey, Ali. I was thinking about what you were saying earlier. About how the killer probably didn’t have a normal motivation.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I was thinking, since you mentioned it, that maybe they were killing in self defense.”

Light shone into the dark pit that my heart had become over the course of this night. What if this whole thing truly was an accident? A gruesome and brutal one, perhaps but still an accident. An accident that would not result in anyone else being killed!

“You’re suggesting Cory attacked someone?” Alison asked, seemingly intrigued by this suggestion.

“R-right! You say that you, Walter, Christina and Andrew were all in the living room the whole time, and I believe you, of course! I know that me and the girls went to our rooms and Matthew said he went to the toilet, so what if no one’s lying! What if Cory came to us!”

“Hmmm...”

“Think about it, Alison. Cory went into Iris and Sybil’s room and came onto them. Maybe they turned him down and he got angry and...” Rebecca couldn’t bring her train of thought to its final station.

“If that were the case, you would have heard the door open right?”

“Well, I went in first. Maybe he was already in there by the time I heard their door shut?”

Unlike Alison, Rebecca sounded timid and unsure when she shared her thoughts on the logistics of the situation. But from an outside perspective, she was keeping up quite well with Alison.

“That sounds possible... but we saw him go in the other direction, toward the north wing. And no one saw him heading the other way. Wouldn’t you have heard him behind you if he was about to go into Iris and Sybil’s room?  If the three of them had had a fight, wouldn’t you have heard their voices? Besides that, where his body ended up...”

Rebecca seemed dejected. She really wanted to come up with a theory that left us all in relative safety, but its plausibility seemed more and more impossible. Alison felt guilty. Even though she didn’t think Rebecca’s theory was likely, she wanted to cheer her friend on.

“Don’t worry Rebecca, I think you’re onto something!” Hearing this, Rebecca’s hunched over form straightened into an iron rod. “What if one of those two: Sybil or Iris, went to him just like I theorized - but they didn’t go with ill intent. They went for some other reason and when they got there, Cory attacked them.”

Rebecca beamed in absolute relief and delight. “Right! And that would mean no one else will be killed!”

Andrew had returned with the lantern at this point and Jacob had begun walking over to open the sliding door and let in the bone-freezing chill from outside.

“I hope you’re right, Bec.” Alison said, but even Rebecca knew she didn’t believe it. At this point, it was simply a nice thought. What reason would Cory have to attack? What reason would either Iris or Sybil have to go in the first place? It was just a convenient idea invented to stave off the inevitable truth: that there was a killer in our midst. I understood Rebecca’s impulse well, but that didn’t make it any more likely to be true.

Jacob came back inside and closed the sliding door with a dull rattle. He looked solemn. Nobody really knew what to say or if they should say anything at all. Several people opened and closed their mouths like pet fish begging to be fed but no one managed to actually say anything. Even Jacob simply returned to the couch and sat down silently.

The whole situation so far was dire, that much couldn’t be denied. But there’s nothing for a bad situation except to make it worse, right? 

Iris’ scream was bloodcurdling. Everyone had steeled themselves for Jacob and Mother’s inevitable reaction to Cory’s death and while that reaction never really came, we were still not prepared to react to this new development. 

When had Iris even left? Why was she screaming suddenly? The answer might be obvious to an outsider but in that moment, we couldn’t tear our minds from the well-worn tracks they were used to. Even after the first time - after you’ve already seen it once, nobody ever expects that someone might have been murdered. Not intuitively; not without some effort. Despite all the conversation before about how it had to be so, despite my disbelief in Rebecca’s kinder alternative. It couldn’t be possible, right?

Iris burst from the hallway, face wet from streaming tears and face contorted into nightmarish shapes of grief and insanity. It was Sybil. Impossibly, inevitably, paradoxically - the killer had struck again.

“No, no, no, no, no, no, no!” Iris kept chanting between wails. “This can’t be happening!”

She was sharply pacing the space of the living room behind the couch. Mother and Jacob had jumped to their feet in order to turn and face her. As her crying continued, Rebecca went over to comfort her but what comfort could you give in a situation like this? An arm on a shoulder or a squeeze of the hand was like the slimy touch of an eel. Still, Rebecca felt compelled to try.

As Rebecca reached out to touch Iris, Iris swatted her hand away as if it were covered in filth and threatening to contaminate her. “Don’t touch me!” She hissed.

Rebecca thought better than to respond to this and instead, backed up slowly, rubbing her smacked hand and making a concerned expression.

Right at the peak of the tension, Iris laughed. It didn’t seem to be a joyful laugh at all. It sounded rough and coarse, like a knife on concrete. “I guess you were right, Alison.” She said morosely and then continued angrily. “It happened again!”

Alison winced at the mention of her name but, like Rebecca, held her tongue for fear of worsening the situation.

“Which one of you did it!?” Iris screeched, acting like Matthew had. 

I thought it was normal to react to murder with anger toward the killer but, in this case, no one seemed to know who could have done it. The desire to bring justice manifested as a sword being swung wildly at a crowd, the feeble hope it might find the correct target through pure happenstance. But nobody stood forward to be cut.

“Matthew, come here! I know it wasn’t you.” Just as she instructed, Matthew quickly walked over to Iris’ side, causing some confusion from the rest of us. Why was she so certain he couldn’t have done it? “I’m so sorry I doubted you before. Now I know how you felt...”

Iris seemed to be implying something sinister with her tone. Something like “You’re all responsible! No one’s innocent!” but whatever her suspicions were, she seemed to content herself with staring at us like one might a pack of wolves. Which creature would move first? Who would get the first chance to bite at the other’s neck?

“How do you know it wasn’t Matthew?” said Christina. It was phrased as a question but it sounded like an accusation. Unsurprisingly, Christina did not seem anywhere near as bothered by the thick tension in the room as the rest of us.

“Shut up! How do I know it wasn’t you?” 

“Because I’d tell you,” Christina replied smugly. “If I was gonna kill one of you bastards, I’d do it right here in the open.”

Andrew spun to face her and finally reprimanded her on her behavior. “Christina! Why on earth would you say something like that!? Be quiet from now on!”

Christina seemed offended to her core that her fiance would say something like that to her. No - it was the expression of someone who had just been told they were $1000,000  in debt or that their father had been diagnosed with cancer. It seemed like, with this loud pushback from Andrew, Christina was finally starting to feel less safe. Perhaps to get back in Andrew’s good graces, she grit her teeth and did as she was told.

“Nobody panic”, I said, trying and failing to placate the angry crowd. “We don’t know anything yet.”

Iris’ face was red with rage as she yelled at me in response. “That's just the kind of thing you were saying before! How convenient that you don’t want us to find the culprit!” I thought I could feel some drops of saliva land on my cheek as her reddened face spat curses at me.

“I never said I didn’t want us to find the culprit, I do!” I reassured her. “I just don’t want us pointing fingers at each other before we know who’s to blame.”

“No, you’d rather wait until we’re all dead!” Despite her aggression, everyone in the room seemed to be on Iris’ side in this matter. They didn’t like me impeding the instruments to justice. Almost everyone, anyway.

Jacob stood up and everyone turned their attention to his commanding form. “Everyone calm down,” he said gently but firmly. Jacob was apparently the only person in the room who could settle everyone down. Unlike when I tried the same thing, he gave off enough potent masculine energy that most people responded to him by default - the kind of thing I couldn’t achieve with my slimmer physique. Well that or - because he hadn’t come until after Cory’s death, everyone trusted him implicitly. Perhaps it was just the latter.

“We know that someone here is a murderer.” Jacob said plainly. “But, Walter’s right. We don’t know anything about who it is yet.”

Nobody responded.

“We’re all upset and tired right now but the police will be here in the morning and in the meantime, we need to make sure nobody else dies.”

Everyone nodded in varying degrees of agreement, although Iris still looked livid.

“We should all stay here, in this very room. Nobody leaves for any reason. That way, we can all make sure that each and every one of us is safe.”

It was a solid enough plan, or perhaps it was better to say that it was a plan anyone could think of. Just wait it out. But did everyone always obediently stay put in these situations?

“How are we going to stay safe when one of us is a murderer!? What's stopping them from attacking us here!?” Iris spat venomously.

“They won't do that,” I reassured. “Up until now, these murders have been committed in the shadows. The killer clearly doesn't want to be caught. Besides, if we assume there is only one killer, it's 8 against 1 right now.”

Iris went pale. “What do you mean if there's only one killer?”

I realised too late that I had said the wrong thing and introduced new tension to the room. Luckily, Jacob stepped up again to rescue the situation.

“Don't worry. There's definitely only one, and whoever it is will be in a jail cell by this time tomorrow. If they try to make a move tonight, I'll stop them.”

Everyone was silent, agreeing only through the absence of a verbal rebuttal. Did anyone really like the plan, though? I didn’t think so. Most of us went along with it because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time but we had our reservations. What would we do for the remaining hours? Would the police really come tomorrow? What if we fell asleep? 

We didn’t have much of a choice though. The reality was, at this point, being anywhere alone meant being vulnerable. Arguing against Jacob’s plan meant looking suspicious. No one wanted to garner that kind of attention. So we all took a seat in the living room and waited.