Blood on the Stage

“Some horrors you stumble into—others you’re forced to perform, with an audience already writing the ending for you.”

"Hey, Luke," Gladys's voice pierced the thick curtain of my shock, anchoring me back to a reality I wished I could deny.

Her words, innocent in any other context, felt like a siren announcing my descent into a bigger nightmare. This was a crime. A murder. And I literally had blood on my hands—Joel's blood, drying tacky between my fingers, crusted under my nails, soaked into the fabric of my jeans where I'd knelt beside his cooling body.

"Shit!" The expletive was a whisper, barely voiced, swallowed by the cavernous space of the truck before it could reach her ears. My body responded with uncontrollable shivers, tremors that started somewhere in my core and radiated outward until my teeth threatened to chatter. My eyes darted around, seeking an escape, a denial, anything other than the truth that lay gruesomely beside me.

Gladys. Of all people, Gladys. She was standing in my driveway, moments away from discovering that I was crouched in the back of a delivery truck beside a murdered teenager.

But instinct, cold and ruthless, seized me by the throat before panic could fully take hold. The part of me that faltered in sentiment was shoved aside by a darker, sharper voice that hissed control the narrative, or be destroyed by it. I couldn't afford to be Luke-the-broken, Luke-the-shaken. Not with Gladys standing there, her presence soon to be joined by whoever she'd brought with her—probably Beatrix, her younger sister, whose reputation for moral flexibility and uncomfortable curiosity had always made me wary.

The timing was catastrophic, and yet opportunity sometimes arrived wrapped in catastrophe's clothing. My mind began its fevered work, assessing, calculating, spinning webs even as my hands still trembled with the aftershock of touching Joel's lifeless throat. Gladys's perception had always been sharp when she wasn't halfway through a bottle; Beatrix's sharper still, honed by years of operating in grey markets and reading people for profit. Any hint of panic, of guilt beyond what discovery warranted, and they'd shred me open without even knowing the full truth.

I needed to bend this horror into a shape that served me.

The trick was simple but perilous: distance myself from the scene, recast myself not as perpetrator or fool, but as the one who discovered the mess, the one reluctantly forced into yet another impossible role. The protector. The victim of circumstance. The man holding things together when everything else spiralled out of control. A mask of shock was unavoidable—but shock could be reframed as grief, as human, as innocent.

Even as bile still stung the back of my throat, I forced my breathing to slow. A trembling hand could be weakness... or it could be witness to my trauma. The blood on my jeans, damning evidence one way, could be spun as testimony to my attempt to save Joel—misguided but noble, a man trying desperately to help rather than a man guilty of anything worse than bad timing.

I straightened my back, forcing the tremors into something resembling stillness, even as my pulse hammered against my ribs. Gladys had unwittingly stepped into a theatre where I had no script, and yet, like all theatre, the power lay with whoever seized the stage first.

Control this moment, Luke. Control them.

Beatrix's scream tore through the air, a raw, visceral sound that shattered what remained of my composure. The sound wasn't just alarm; it was accusation, a primal verdict delivered before any trial could be staged. Her presence, the intrusion of the outside world into this private hell, cast the brutal scene in unforgiving light.

"What the fuck, Luke!?"

I raised my head, meeting their gazes, searching desperately for some glimmer of recognition, some softening of judgement—but there was none. Their faces, twisted in shock and terror, were mirrors reflecting the monstrous possibility of what I might appear to be. In that instant, the world seemed to tilt, reality skewing into a grotesque tableau where I was both witness and suspect, victim and villain. The blood on my clothes told one story. My presence in this truck told another. Neither story was the truth, but truth had become irrelevant the moment Gladys called my name.

Gladys, her composure shattered, paced like a caged animal at the truck's open door, her movements sharp and agitated. Each step was a punctuation mark in a sentence of condemnation. Her face had gone pale beneath the flush that wine usually gave her cheeks, and her eyes—usually warm with the comfortable familiarity of long friendship—now held something colder. Calculation, perhaps. Or the dawning recognition that her friend's partner might be capable of things she'd never imagined.

"You can't do this to me," she uttered, her voice a blend of betrayal and anguish, before disappearing from my view.

"I didn't do it," I found myself saying, the words tumbling out in a desperate rush. My voice, rough and strained from the acid taste of vomit, carried my plea, my denial, my truth. "I swear, it wasn't me."

Yet even as the words left my mouth, a colder, quieter voice inside was already rehearsing what came next: not just protestations of innocence, but the scaffolding of a narrative. Shock could make me weak, or it could make me human. If I was to survive this—survive them—I needed to appear both broken by horror and anchored by sincerity. Their eyes would be searching for cracks, and I had to ensure the ones they found told the right story.

The absurdity of Beatrix's curiosity clashed violently with the grim reality surrounding us. She'd pulled herself up onto the truck bed, ignoring my earlier warnings, and was studying Joel's body with an expression I couldn't quite read. Not horror, exactly. Not grief. Something closer to... interest.

"Who is he?" she asked, her voice carrying that particular tone she got when examining antiques of questionable provenance—detached, analytical, as though the corpse before her were an object to be assessed rather than a person to be mourned.

"Fuck, Beatrix! Don't touch anything!" My warning came out as a hiss, urgent and brittle, a desperate attempt to preserve what little integrity remained in this blood-soaked tableau. The scene was already contaminated—my fingerprints smeared across Joel's skin, his blood saturating my clothes—but adding her traces would only complicate things further if this ever reached the police.

But Beatrix ignored me. Of course she did. My words fell away like smoke in the wind, meaningless against her fundamental inability to resist investigating anything that piqued her interest. With the casual disregard of someone who'd spent her life pushing boundaries, she shrugged and moved closer to the body.

"Sorry," she offered, her tone light, dismissive, as though she were brushing off an accidental interruption of conversation rather than contaminating a crime scene. "I can't help it. I'm curious."

"Curious!" The word exploded from me again, sharp, ragged, a hissed rebuke torn from somewhere deep in my disbelief. My throat felt raw as I spat it. "I'm covered in a dead man's blood and you're fucking curious!?" The words hung heavy in the air, laced with bile, my voice scraping against the edges of hysteria. The absurdity mocked me. I was perched between horror and farce, unable to reconcile the grotesque reality of Joel's lifeless body with Beatrix's blithe fascination.

"Well, yeah. A bit."

Her response—so nonchalant, so appallingly detached—landed like a blow to my chest. How could one be "a bit curious" when confronted with the horror of a life violently extinguished? Each syllable dripped with indifference, with an alien lack of empathy that left me momentarily speechless.

"You're fucking nuts, Beatrix!" The words ripped from me before my mind could catch them, raw and unfiltered.

And beneath the fury, beneath the disbelief, another thought began to stir, cold and calculated: if she was this reckless, this detached, then she was also malleable. A wild card, yes—but perhaps a useful one. Someone who could look at a corpse and feel curiosity rather than horror might also be someone who could help dispose of a body without falling apart.

I hated myself for thinking it. But I thought it anyway.

In that moment, the truck wasn't just a vehicle; it was a mausoleum, a chamber where the breath of life had been violently extinguished. The metallic walls seemed to contract around us, amplifying the coppery stench of blood, trapping me in a space that grew smaller with each passing second. Joel's absence of breath, the stillness of his body, pressed down on me with suffocating weight. And Beatrix—perched there with the glib curiosity of a child examining a dead bird—felt utterly alien. Her indifference cut like ice, a distortion of empathy so profound it made me question whether I was the one losing grip on reality.

The absurdity only deepened when Gladys reappeared, wine bottle dangling from her hand like some grotesque prop, and slurred her suggestion: call the police.

The words struck me like a gunshot. My gaze snapped up to her, eyes blazing wide with a mix of terror, disbelief, and outrage. Police. Investigators. Questions I couldn't answer. Evidence I couldn't explain. The Portal, the truck, Jamie's absence, the dogs in Clivilius—every secret I'd fought to protect would unravel the moment authorities started pulling threads.

"You've got to be fucking kidding me!"

"There's so much blood," Beatrix murmured, almost dreamily, as though she were commenting on spilled paint rather than the violent end of a boy's life. Her tone, tinged with that grotesque fascination, twisted my stomach tighter.

"We can't, Gladys," I countered, the urgency crackling through my voice. The thought of police swarming here, their cold, forensic eyes cataloguing every stain, every fingerprint—it was unthinkable. A single call to the authorities wouldn't save us; it would damn us all.

"Why not?" Gladys's reply was blunt, unfiltered.

I snapped back, my words sharpened by desperation and laced with sarcasm so bitter it curdled in my mouth. "Well, that'll look great, won't it? I'm covered in blood, your sister now has her fingerprints all over the crime scene, and you're standing there drinking wine out the bottle."

The picture I painted was grotesquely accurate: three figures framed against a corpse, each incriminating detail damning us further. A tableau of guilt no jury would ever doubt. Me with Joel's blood soaking my clothes. Beatrix with her hands all over the evidence. Gladys clutching her wine like a comfort blanket whilst a dead boy cooled metres away. We looked guilty. All of us. Even though none of us had done the actual killing.

Gladys's eyes narrowed, her expression hardening into a mask of defiance. She met my accusation not with remorse, not even with argument, but with silence—and then, deliberately, with a long swig from the bottle. The sound of the liquid glugging down her throat was obscene, mocking. That single act—her brazen defiance in the face of our reality—fanned the flames of my frustration, my helplessness, until they licked dangerously close to rage.

"Fuck!" The word ripped out of me like shrapnel as my fist crashed against the truck's side panel. The hollow clang ricocheted into the air, echoing back my fury in metallic protest. The reverberation stung my hand, but the pain barely registered; it was nothing compared to the storm that roared in my chest.

The reality, jagged and merciless, began to crystallise. Jamie's inevitable eruption when he discovered this. The certainty of suspicion falling squarely on me. The very real possibility of detectives pawing through my home, lifting fibres and fingerprints until their notebooks bled with accusations. And beyond that—the most chilling thought of all—the spectre of Joel's killer. Somewhere out there, unseen, still moving. A predator who had already struck once and could strike again. Their presence loomed invisible but heavy, a shadow stretching over every decision I might now make.

Someone had murdered Joel in my driveway. Someone had been here, at my home, while I was in Clivilius discussing concrete slabs with Paul. Someone knew about me, about my property, about the delivery that was scheduled to arrive. The implications spiralled outward, each one worse than the last.

"What happened to him?" Beatrix's voice intruded, sharp and incongruous, cutting through the fog that cocooned me. Her tone carried that same unsettling curiosity, a morbid fascination utterly divorced from compassion.

Her gaze tracked lower, landing on the sour mess at my feet where I'd been sick earlier, her nose wrinkling as she grimaced. "Is that yours?" she asked, each syllable laden with disdain. "It smells disgusting."

I swallowed hard, the bitter tang of bile still raw in my throat. "It is," I confessed. My voice barely carried beyond the confines of the truck, a whisper lost in the copper stench of blood and the acrid tang of vomit.

A sudden wave of dizziness surged through me, tilting the edges of the world. My head spun, the scene smearing at the edges of my vision, as though reality itself recoiled from what we were forced to confront. My stomach knotted again, a warning that my body could betray me once more, whilst my mind screamed for control.

And beneath it all, a dark, strategic whisper began to curl in the recesses of my thoughts: if I didn't master this moment, if I didn't find a way to shape Gladys and Beatrix, to bend their reactions into silence and complicity, then Joel's murder wouldn't just claim his life. It would consume mine.

"What are you going to do with him?" Gladys broke the silence, her judgement dulled by yet another pull from the bottle. The words were casual, almost flippant, her tone carrying the lazy detachment of someone asking about leftovers rather than a corpse cooling metres away. The bottle's rim still brushed her lips as she spoke, her indulgence grotesquely at odds with the crimson-stained horror beside me.

Her indifference twisted the scene into something surreal, unbearable. I bowed my head, pressing my palms hard against my face, my hands a shield against their eyes—and against the unbearable truth pooling inside me. Behind the veil of skin and bone, my mind was a storm, torn between instinctive revulsion and the cold calculus of survival.

The thought of Jamie loomed largest, his name unspoken but present in every jagged beat of my heart. If he learned of this... if I had to tell him that Joel, the boy who wore his features like an echo, was gone—slaughtered—it would unmake him. His grief, his fury, would burn everything I had fought to hold together. And that was assuming he believed I hadn't done it. Given our current state—the betrayal, the distance, the physical confrontation in Clivilius—would he even give me the benefit of the doubt?

"I don't know," I breathed at last, the admission dragging itself out of me like lead. My voice was cracked, uncertain, yet beneath the despair a dark ember flickered—an idea, desperate and reckless, forming in the shadows of my thoughts. "I was thinking of taking him through the Portal."

The words slipped into the air before I could snatch them back. What had begun as a thought barely fit to name had become real, concrete, undeniable. And with their utterance came the weight of what such an act might mean. My head snapped up as if jolted by a live wire. "Shit," I muttered, the syllable rough, scraping against my throat. I had spoken aloud what should never have been heard.

"Don't worry," Beatrix interjected, her voice jarringly light, her fingertips tapping my shoulder with the intimacy of a friend offering comfort. It felt obscene, her touch against skin still sticky with another man's blood. "Gladys already told me about your Portal."

Her reassurance hit me like a blade between the ribs. Betrayal and exposure flooded me in equal measure. My eyes locked onto Gladys.

She faltered under my glare, her lips parting just enough to release a sheepish, "Sorry." The word was muffled, swallowed by another mouthful of wine. She shrank behind the bottle, as though its glass could shield her from accountability, from me.

The air thickened, every breath hard to draw. They knew. Both of them. The secret I had guarded, the one edge I held over the chaos of this fractured existence, was no longer mine alone. Gladys had told her sister about the Portal—probably over wine, probably without thinking, probably as casually as she might share any other piece of gossip about her friends' lives. And now that information sat between us like a loaded weapon, capable of destroying everything if pointed in the wrong direction.

My chest tightened with something deeper than panic—an almost physical sense of being trapped, of walls closing in from every direction. Every choice now felt poisoned: tell Jamie and risk collapse, hide Joel and risk exposure, trust Gladys and Beatrix and risk annihilation. The weight of their knowledge pressed down like a millstone.

And yet—even in despair, a darker part of me stirred, already sifting through the angles, already testing which strings could be pulled, which loyalties bent. If there was no safe road, then perhaps the only way out was to build one myself.

"Can I see it?" Beatrix's voice cut through the thick fog of blood, bile, and panic, her eagerness to glimpse the Portal so wildly out of sync with the horror before us that, for a heartbeat, I wondered if I'd misheard her. The incongruity was grotesque. Here lay Joel—murdered, throat opened—and yet her tone carried the lilt of a tourist asking for directions to a landmark.

"I don't know," I answered at last. In truth, the idea already gnawed at me, uninvited but insistent: using the Portal not for supplies or sanctuary, but as a dumping ground for a body. Joel's body. The thought was obscene, yet it lingered, wrapping itself around my reasoning like ivy tightening against stone.

"Oh, come on," Beatrix pressed, her tone annoyingly bright, an impatience that grated against my raw nerves. "You have to get rid of this body anyway, so you may as well."

Her blunt pragmatism hit like a slap. For her, Joel was not a boy, not a casualty, not an innocent butchered in my driveway—he was a body. An obstacle to be disposed of, a problem to be solved. The reduction of a human life to logistics should have appalled me. Part of me was appalled. But another part—the part that had been calculating survival odds since the moment I saw that foot jutting from the shadows—recognised the terrible practicality of her position.

I faltered, breath catching in my throat. The weight of my silence was its own confession. Was she right? Was this the only way? The moral horror of it clashed violently with the cold whisper growing in my mind: Clivilius will swallow him whole. No one will ever know. The thought was monstrous, but survival—ours, mine—was no longer a clean game.

My frustration tore loose, my voice rising with incredulity, a plea as much as an accusation. "How are the two of you being so calm about all this?" The words rang harsh, splitting the air with my disbelief. Didn't they see the blood? Didn't they feel the weight of what had happened here?

"Calm?!" Gladys shrieked, her voice suddenly pitched and sharp, a wild sound breaking through the surreal composure her sister wore like a second skin.

Beatrix, by contrast, only shrugged, her expression maddeningly detached.

Her composure was not reassuring. It was chilling. And in that moment, watching her regard Joel's corpse with all the gravity one might give a fallen shopping bag, I realised with creeping dread that perhaps I wasn't dealing with allies at all, but with something far more unpredictable—and therefore dangerous. Beatrix operated by rules I didn't understand, motivated by impulses I couldn't predict. That made her useful and terrifying in equal measure.

With a heavy heart and a mind clouded with doubt, I made the decision to move Joel. Rising unsteadily to my feet, I felt the gravity of the moment clamp down upon me like a vice. My breath came shallow, my chest tight, yet my hands—traitorous, automatic—slid beneath his cold armpits as though guided by some grim instinct. The instant my fingers closed around his clammy skin, a shiver jolted through me, but still, I began the macabre task of dragging him deeper into the truck.

Every pull was a grotesque rhythm, a grim dance with reality. His weight resisted me, slack and unyielding, as though death itself conspired to remind me of its permanence. The soles of my shoes slipped against the slick mixture beneath us—blood congealing in dark rivulets, vomit sour and clinging to the air—each drag forcing me to confront the grotesque tangibility of the nightmare.

Joel was no longer a boy with nervous smiles and polite words—he was cargo, and I, his unwilling bearer.

"What are you doing?" Gladys's voice sliced through the suffocating silence, her tone sharper now, a rare note of sobriety leaking through the haze of wine.

"I need to move him forward," I forced out, my voice taut, every word scraped raw by the strain in my arms. "His foot is stopping the door from closing properly."

The practicality of the explanation felt obscene, a banal phrase used to mask the grotesque reality: I was shifting a murdered boy's body like one might rearrange furniture. But what choice did I have? Leave him hanging out of the truck for any passing neighbour to see? The door needed to close. The scene needed to be contained. Everything else could wait until I'd had time to think.

As I heaved and dragged, Joel's form scraped through the mingled mess of blood and bile. The smell clung to me, iron-rich and acrid, turning each breath into a battle. And with it came the realisation—cold, unflinching—that this was no accident, no isolated tragedy. I was enmeshed in a web of my own weaving. Every choice I had made, every secret I had kept, had brought me to this point, and each action now pushed me deeper into territory from which there might be no return.

As Joel's body thudded against the truck wall, the noise jolted through me. The truth was no longer avoidable, no longer a whisper. It screamed in my ears with merciless clarity: I was trapped, every possible path forward lined with loss, danger, and the irreversible stain of choices already set in motion.

"So, who is he anyway?"

The question from Gladys—so casual, so misplaced in this grotesque tableau—caught me like a hook under the ribs. Her tone was inquisitive, almost idle, as though she were asking about a stranger at a bus stop, not a bloodied corpse cooling on the metal floor of a truck.

My stomach clenched. I felt the familiar burn of bile clawing at my throat, threatening to rise again. Forcing the sickness back, I managed, in a voice that rasped more than spoke, "He's just the delivery guy."

The words were brittle, paper-thin, laden with the weight of all I dared not yet reveal. Just the delivery guy. As if that explained anything. As if that erased the uncanny resemblance to Jamie that had haunted me since yesterday, the familiarity I'd finally placed this morning when grief had stripped away my defences.

"Who?" Beatrix pressed, her voice sharper, her eyes narrowing. There was accusation there, suspicion—an instinctual sense that I was concealing something. And she was right. Her question cut deeper than she realised, prying at a truth I had tried to keep buried even from myself.

The air seemed to thicken, heavy and oppressive, each breath a labour as the silence between us became a noose around my throat.

And then—betrayal by my own body. A tear, hot and traitorous, slid down my cheek. I tried to suppress it, to cage it, but it escaped, glistening in the harsh daylight like a beacon of weakness. My gaze, against my will, lifted and locked with Gladys's. In that gaze, in that fracture of a moment, my armour crumbled.

"He's Jamie's son," I confessed, the words tumbling from me with the weight of a death sentence.

The silence that followed was dense, suffocating. I watched the information land on their faces—Gladys's eyes widening, the wine bottle freezing halfway to her lips; Beatrix's perpetual curiosity finally giving way to something that might have been genuine shock.

"Shit," Beatrix murmured, the single syllable laden with dawning horror.

The brittle stillness was obliterated by the crash of glass. Gladys's wine bottle exploded against the concrete, shards scattering like accusations across the ground. The deep red splash bled into the driveway, mingling with the dark stains already there, the scents colliding into a nauseating fog.

"Oh dear," Gladys whispered, her words almost absurd in their understatement, her eyes fixed not on Joel but on the spreading stain at her feet. It was easier for her to study that than to face the reality of what lay in the truck. Easier to mourn the loss of her wine than to process the obliteration of innocence that had taken place metres away.

Beatrix stammered, her voice caught between disbelief and demand. "What the… how… when did—" She couldn't finish. The words dissolved in the air, as fractured and incomplete as our understanding of the nightmare unfolding before us.

"I had no idea. No idea at all," Gladys insisted suddenly, louder now, desperate, her gaze ricocheting between her sister, Joel's still form, and me. Her denial was vehement, too vehement. She clung to it like a lifeline, as though protesting ignorance might absolve her of the weight of complicity pressing down upon us all.

But there was no absolution here. Only blood, silence, and the truth I had just unleashed into the world.

In that moment, hemmed in by the brutal consequences of choices I hadn't fully understood, the weight of Joel's death pressed down like a leaden shroud. It was more than grief—it was an oppressive amalgam of guilt, dread, and responsibility. His lifeless form was no longer just a body in the back of the truck; it was a symbol, a reminder of how thin the line had become between survival and damnation.

And now, that burden wasn't mine alone. We were all bound together in this shared nightmare, an unholy pact sealed by blood, silence, and complicity.

The urge to flee clawed at me. To get away from the truck, from the sight of Joel's still body, from the unbearable stench of blood mingling with my own vomit. My body acted before my mind could rationalise. I leapt from the truck, but the earth tilted treacherously beneath me. My balance faltered, sending me crashing into Gladys. Her startled gasp, the jarring impact of bone against bone, was a brutal reminder of how immediate, how inescapably real, this nightmare had become.

"Luke! Where are you going?" Beatrix's voice chased after me, high-pitched and quivering, tinged with an anxiety that sounded almost childish in its desperation.

"Don't leave us here with him!" Gladys's plea cut deeper. It wasn't just fear—it was dependence. The responsible sister, for once, unable to handle what lay before her.

But I couldn't stop. I pushed forward, stumbling into the house, driven by a visceral need to rid myself of the blood clinging to me. My skin crawled, my clothes reeked of death, and each sticky patch of red felt like a brand, marking me as guilty. Stripping the fabric away was like peeling off a layer of my own shame. Shirt, socks—each one fell to the floor in a grim cascade, the sound of the damp cloth slapping tile louder than it should have been.

They weren't just clothes anymore; they were evidence. And evidence was dangerous.

From the kitchen, Gladys's voice sliced through the silence, almost casual, yet with a tremor that betrayed the fragility underneath. "Hey! Where are Duke and Henri?"

The question caught me off guard, absurd in its ordinariness, yet somehow grounding. For her, the dogs were still anchors to a reality that had not yet completely dissolved into chaos. For me, her question was a knife twisted into the truth of what I'd already lost.

"Oh," I answered, turning my head just enough for my voice to carry. My tone was flat, drained. "Henri accidentally ran through the Portal earlier this morning, and I accidentally took Duke with me."

Her voice wavered, tinged with rare concern. "Can they get back out?"

"Nope," I said curtly, my reply clipped and final, hiding the deeper weight of frustration and regret. Memories of Henri's darting sprint, Duke's confused wriggle in my arms, and Jamie's furious shouts replayed in my mind. Another failure among so many, piling higher until they threatened to topple.

Gladys busied herself in the kitchen, the sound of cupboard doors and the dull clink of glass betraying her intentions. Seeking another bottle, another distraction, another way to dull what her mind couldn't face. Her retreat into alcohol was predictable—and predictable meant controllable.

"Anyway, I'm going to shower," I announced at last, seizing the excuse of ritual cleanliness as both shield and weapon. Solitude was what I needed—time to strip away not just the blood, but the panic, to pull my thoughts into order before they frayed completely. With the stained clothes gathered in my grip like trophies of a battle I had already lost, I turned down the hallway.

Each step away from them, from their wide eyes and frantic questions, was a step into the solitude I craved.

The shower wouldn't cleanse me of Joel's death, nor of the nightmare that was spiralling out of control. But it would give me silence. And silence was where I could think.

Where I could plot.