Free Web NovelChapter 69: From The Diary Of Ruaan Calder — A Man Who Does Not Like Corpses!
Day Twenty-Two | 9:14 PM | March 4th, 2025
Tuesday. Still the worst day of the week.
.
.
Someone died today.
I’m going to write that again because it still feels strange sitting in my chest. Someone died today. In this building. In a corridor twenty metres from where people were eating dinner and talking about the pool reopening or something...
A dark blue uniform. According to the rumours, grey uniforms walked him into a corner with no cameras and when they walked back out, he didn’t.
Cullen told me at dinner like he was delivering important information and expecting a reaction. I gave him a face that probably looked like I was listening. I was listening. I just stopped wanting to hear more of it about halfway through.
There are apparently faces. Numbers. The officers pulled them from the footage. But nobody in the general population knows who they are yet. Everyone is looking at everyone else at dinner with the specific sideways look of people recalculating who they trust.
I ate my bread and thought about something else.
.
.
Before I get to the something else, I have to write about Finn.
Cullen was mid-sentence about the corridor and the body and the grey uniforms when I looked over and saw Finn standing there with the used plates stacked in his arms, waiting to take them back to the kitchen, and I just...
"Why don’t you eat first," I said. "Do it after."
Finn looked at me like I had said something in a language he didn’t recognise. Then he looked at Cullen. Then back at me.
"Are you talking to me?" Finn said.
"I’m talking to you," I said.
I shifted over and he sat down.
Cullen looked at both of us and said something about us being close now and I shrugged and said I’d been trying to care about people more. Which is true. Blackmere makes you either stop caring about people entirely or start caring about all of them whether you want to or not. I seem to be going the second direction.
Finn didn’t say much. He ate. He was quiet. But he ate either way.
That felt like enough for tonight.
.
.
The body.
I stopped listening to Cullen because I stopped wanting to hear it. Not because I don’t care. Because I do care and hearing more details was not helping.
I’ve seen a body before.
One time. Once. When I was ten and living at the manor with my family and I very specifically should not have seen it.
I’m going to write about it because I’ve never written about it and it came back to me tonight sitting at that dinner table and I think it needs to go somewhere outside my head.
.
.
I was ten. It was a regular afternoon. We had eaten lunch together, all of us, which was the kind of thing my family did when schedules aligned. After lunch, I went to my room to finish an assignment and then play games, in that order, because even then I had the discipline to do the responsible thing first.
I finished the assignment.
I put on my headset.
I lost the game three times in a row which in hindsight feels like the universe trying to get my attention.
I threw the headset down in frustration and it broke and in the silence after it broke I heard glass. Something downstairs, breaking. I thought maybe a servant had dropped something.
I opened my door.
My brothers were in the hallway. Heads poked out. Whispering.
"I heard gunshots," one of them said.
I hadn’t heard anything. I’d been wearing the headset.
"Go back inside, Ruaan," my oldest brother said. "Lock your door."
I asked if our parents were in danger.
They looked at each other.
I ran out of my room.
I have thought about that decision many times in the ten years since and I always arrive at the same place, which is that I would do the same thing again even knowing what I was about to see. I needed to know. I have always needed to know things.
We made it to the balcony on the second floor and looked down.
There was a man with a gun pressed against my mother’s head.
My father was standing very still and was waiting for the right moment. There were security personnel around the edges of the room. There were also bodies on the floor that I registered without fully processing because my brain had prioritised my mother.
We stood there. Very still. Very quiet.
Then four gunshots.
The man with the gun fell after he was shot from behind. My mother rushed to my father and grabbed him and cried in a way I had never heard her cry and my father held her and the whole thing was over.
Except...
I was still watching.
And I saw the man on the floor move his hand.
I don’t know why I saw it before anyone else. Maybe because I was looking from above. Maybe because I was ten and hyperaware and my senses had gone into a specific kind of overdrive.
I yelled.
"Mother."
She turned.
The man’s arm came up and the shot went into her chest.
The security shot him again. Several times till he stopped moving. freewebnovёl.ƈom
My mother did not die. I want to write that clearly because this memory has a way of feeling like the worst version of itself when it comes back at night. She did not die. She recovered. She was in the hospital for three weeks and came home and never talked about it and neither did we.
But I saw dead bodies that day.
I have not liked corpses since.
.
.
I didn’t finish dinner.
My appetite left somewhere around the moment the memory finished running and I excused myself and walked back to my room alone and thought about corridors and corners without cameras and grey uniforms and someone who had not walked back out.
I thought about how three weeks ago I arrived here in a silk dressing robe and thought the worst thing that could happen to me was losing my cannolo.
Blackmere has a way of adjusting your sense of scale.
I got to my room and pushed the door open.
Harolin was there.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed. Uniform jacket off. Still and quiet the way he was... still and quiet. He looked up when I walked in.
I closed the door behind me.
Something in my chest that had been wound tight since dinner loosened slightly.
My Harolin was here.
.
.
— R.C
’Day twenty-two. Still here. Still standing.’
’Okay! That’s enough for tonight.’
