The Midnight Letters - Mystery on the papers | Read Exciting Stories

 The Midnight Letters - Mystery on the papers

A heavy mist enveloped the city of Greywood on one of those chilly autumnal nights and the street lamps only added a morbid feel to the wet concrete floor. Among the fallen leaves and the smell of rain which was raining somewhere with a grey sky, normal business went on. Soft rumble of cars mixed with distant giggling coming from cafes, unaware of the blackness that was going to engulf the heart of one man. 

 Evelyn Hart, 32, a freelance journalist was sitting in her small apartment alone with the remains of cold coffee on the table. In timeworn rags and scattered between piles of manuscripts waiting to be edited and notebooks which were half filled, lay her old fashioned typewriter; rusty and forgotten. It was a Thursday night when her life would turn at a certain point on a never visible axis. 

 It started with an ordinary looking envelop. 

 Thus, Evelyn had few doubts as to its ordinariness. In the times when using the Internet, social networks and instant messengers are becoming the norm of writing, letters are something extraordinary. She angrily ripped it open and was prepared to read something has-been trying to sell her a story or a bill that she owed. Instead, she found a single sheet adorned with a neat, anonymous handwriting:

 

 The old pharmacy will burn tonight. At 11 o’clock it is time to go; you have one hour. 

 It was a few moments before she could look at the not and properly comprehend the words written on the paper that caused her brow to crease in confusion. The one the Crescent street had been a dilapidated structure that was almost forgotten and buried by the new generation pharmacy. As far as it has always been an object of interest to vandals, a fire? 

 It was 9 O’ clock in the evening. Immediately, without thinking twice she put on her jacket and ran down the stairwell with concrete ideas running through her head. Yellow neon lights of the crescent street intersections merged into each other and Evelyn was walking fast. A feeling of apprehension in the pit of her stomach – this may be the jest of somebody’s sick imagination or a prelude to a disaster. 

 

When she got there, the building of the pharmacy was still intact. The windows were clean and there was no evidence that they have been burnt. She was relieved but the nagging thought still remained in her mind. Had she overreacted? Suddenly, she came to move out from in front of the building and as she did, there appeared fight from the side of the alley. 

 Evelyn was panting; she slid down to the ground and leaned her back against the cold-wall whose bricks protruded through cement. She quietly approached, since she saw two people sitting with their back towards her, lit by the light of the fire barrel. He and his wife were involved in a heated argument or rather they were whispering keenly. 

 ”It is tonight! We can’t afford to get it wrong!” one man stage whispered while his rigid outline betrayed his tension. 

 “The plan fine just… follow it. Or we shall perish for this!” The other retorted back, more assertively. 

 Evelyn took a quick breath feeling that the plot they would be formulating was not merely some silly play. Their shadows only twirled in the dim flame, but she had a cold sinking feeling in her head.

 Turning she walked out into the streets with disbelief written all over her face, she felt her heart quicken. 

 Back at her apartment, Evelyn sat with anger and ponder and then finally putting up the cup of tea and the letter from the mystery writer. Who was watching her? She started to recall her past, pain, memories of which she thought she decided to leave behind her and were now refreshed in her mind. 

 Days later changed into weeks and more letters came in. To avoid the danger of upsetting the crews that were working in these places, each one wrote the plausible crimes that were yet to be committed—a theft at the Greywood Gallery, a poisoning at a local theatre, a robbery at the Hilton Hotel which was as old as the Hill. Every time, Evelyn pretended, running to stop the expected mess each time she was acting as a maid. Each time she was always on time saving situations from being catastrophic to inconveniences only. 

 

Still, as if the perpetrator was always one step ahead, Evelyn was gradually beginning to realize something. The letters murmured something she had long tried to forget: an awful experience in childhood; a trauma that stretched far beyond the mark on her flesh. A gang of forks with penny pinching attitude on moral standards had wrecked havoc and left opposite in her humblets. 

 Fear changed into obsession and Evelyn spent her days reading articles from a certain period of time, trying to identify names that danced at the edges of her mind. The only name mentioned which popped up from the past and was mentioned nearly every time there is an issue is Alex Marlow. His face was reminiscent of church-going ancestors of a bosom heaving aristocracy from photographs of the seventies, yet it expressed a figure consumed with malign intent. 

 But when the last piece of letter reached here, the details were terrible that a shiver ran down her spine. 

 “Tomorrow at dawn, somebody will die, and you’re going to see it. ” 

 Evelyn's heart raced. They named fear as her constant companion but at the moment when the excitement rose to her head she was not ready to let another crime go unavenged. That is why she decided to spend the whole night in her apartment, adrenaline helped her to move. 

 To the first light of the day she proceeded through streets shrouded in the morning fog, the silence was oppressive. Being fueled by intuition, she returned to the places of her memory to the abandoned complex at the edge of the city—a place once vibrant, now a sepulcher of the memories left to rot in the darkness. 

 She could not escape her thoughts & memories – the pain, terror, hopelessness of being tied up with ropes. She did not think twice and although with much difficulty, she was able to push the rotten door to open, while her heart pounded hard. Inside, she got the only thing she had ever wanted to avoid ever seeing—Alex Marlow of all people, threatening a man with a knife at his throat, the man bound to a chair. 

“Why?” The words that came from Evelyn’s lips were weak and her voice was shaking as the coldness of the walls reflected in her tone. 

 Marlow looked at her, a smirk slowly appear on his lips, “You really believe you can stop me, how cute. ” He gestured to the man, one she had seen around the house growing up. “He was part of ruining my life You chose to butt in. ” 

 The blade shone deeply and it was recall – she had a feeling she remembered it but then was thinking it as just a dream and she still had a chance to end everything. The next thing you the caller did was to act in accordance with an animal’s instinct. And with running from beneath the gall, she then reached to get a rusty pipe on the floor and swung it across to Marlow as the adrenaline anchored the hold. 

 The look of surprise quickly crossed his face and the knife fell out of his hand and dropped on the floor. The two fought, anger fighting against desperation. In what would be the climax to the movie, Evelyn cornered him down, both struggling and panting as the sound of incoming ambulance could be heard. 

 “You won’t take any more lives,” Evelyn said finally facing her demons. 

 When the police decided to storm the warehouse, connection disappeared, but in the last possible seconds Evelyn experienced emancipation. When they had led Marlow , the smoke that oppressed the girl departed from her. The letters had stopped, all those stories of future sins had forced her into seizing her present. 

 Over the misty horizon the city slowly came to life—a faint hope remembered in the breaking of the day. The darkness that used to be a part of her life, was at the edge and they didn’t belong to her anymore; fear surrendered to bravery. Finally, she learnt that mystery is also part of the fabric of life and the present, however, belongs to her.