The truth?

Page after page, Alison wrote of her meetings with Paul, painstakingly describing the most lurid, intimate details, in her ungrammatical prose filled with slang words Mildred didn't quite understand.
But she understood enough: that they played all kind of awful, sordid games.

The notebook was filled with drawings, but not of an explicit nature, which was kind of weird, in a sense: it was Alison's usual ink drawings, quite grim stuff. She had been drawing like that since she was twelve.

Mildred, by now, was trembling, as if she was conducting electricity. She was about to throw the notebook in the bin, when her eyes caught a name: Mildred.
She stopped trembling, and went very still.

Alison wrote as if she, Mildred, knew everything about her relationship with Paul, and was in a rage about it. She described little scenes, how “poor Mildred” snapped ironic hints, how sometimes her eyes were red with tears and she pretended to have a cold, and on and on and on.

“BUT IT'S NOT TRUE!!!” shouted Mildred, jumping from her chair.

Six candles went out.

“IT'S NOT TRUE, YOU BITCH!” she screamed at the top of her lungs.

She took the notebok and violently slammed it on her desk several times.

“BITCH, BITCH, YOU BITCH, YOU F*CKING BITCH! I HATE YOU!”

Why did she write this? It was Alison's writing, with the same black ink, and probably the same fountain pen she had been using since childhood. She always liked old-fashioned things, she said this proved she was a witch. And it was her broken English on the pages.
Why invent all this?
Mildred wailed, then looked at the screen: she was in the same exact attitude as the Munch screamer.
She laughed, an unhinged, bitter laughter.

“Right. I don't know what kind of games you were playing, you fat stupid bitch, but I'm done with you.”

She took the notebook, put her shoes on and left the flat, slamming the door.

---

Walking at full speed, she headed to The Seagull. It was two in the morning. She had a key, and the office had no security system. What they did was unimportant, and there was absolutely nothing to steal.ä
She lit up a fire in the vintage corner stove, put the notebook in the burner, and watched it burn.
The lights flickered.

Nonsense. It's me, I fainted, briefly. Who cares.

She closed the burner's hatch and went home.

---

She discovered she had left the candles burning.

Oh, my goodness! I'm out of my mind, really! Do get a grip, girl.

She sat down, looked at herself on the screen, and for the first time thought it was quite weird.

“Burn, Alison, burn. You hear me?
“Even if you and Paul are caged somewhere, if you guys are still alive and suffering somewhere, I won't help the police find you.
“Just die! Slowly.”

She went to the kitchen. She kept a bottle of cognac she used sometimes to bake pastry.

“Where… Here.”

She drank from the bottle, stopped, coughed, spat.
A thought hit her like a knife in the heart.

“What if…”

She rememberd clearly, Paul being out of sight for a few days, right around the summer solstice.

“Paul knew where Alison and her friends wanted to hike” she said, in a dreamy voice.
“Of course he knew” she muttered.
“Maybe he was there with her… No, too old. They are people in their early twenties, most of them. The oldest one is Barry and he's thirty-one. And they are not in the same league, none of them.

“No, Paul went there to retrieve the notebook, after the 21th. He knew where to find it.
“And didn't want the police to find it.

“But then… then he wanted to protect me! He changed his mind, he wanted to protect me!
“He knew Alison was writing this crap, and that it was not true, and that she wanted to leave her notebook to have me arrested, and… and…”

Mildred sobbed desperately.

“He wanted to protect me…”

Then the girl on the screen said:

“Hello? Mildred!”

No, she was not going crazy. She was talking to herself. She was drunk.

“Mildred, then why keep the thing? Why not burn it immediately?”

She answered the girl onscreen, slurring and slobbering.

“Because he believes in dark things. Maybe there was something in the notebook, incantations, malefices. He couldn't bring himself to burn it.”

She took her head in her hands, moaning, sobbing.

“Why did they do this to me? Why? It's horrible.”

“Think again, Mildred. He wants to be a writer, he's writing a novel, he told you so, many times.”

Mildred raised her head, smiled.
Yes- Two souls reaching to each other, telling each other their most secret dreams. They were soulmates, yes. The rest was…

“Yes, it makes sense. Maybe he kept the notebook as a primary source. Maybe he wanted to publish it under his own name, pretend to be The Dark Princess, and…”

“Right” said the onscreen Mildred.

“Yes, he could rewrite the whole thing. Or even, even… leave it as such: the diary of an illiterate would-be dark princess. Yes, that would be have been much more pathetic.”

“Or…” said the girl onscreen. “Or, he wanted to keep a trace of his performances, have a quasi illiterate girl describing their passion with all its monstrous details, and asking for more…”

“WHY ARE YOU SAYING THAT? SHUT UP!!!”

She threw the bin against the computer. The last candles flickered dangerously.

“Why keep it in the office?”

And then Mildred went cold again. Very, very cold. She sat upright on the chair, having seemingly regained her composure.

“Yes, why, indeed” she said in a different, frightening voice, where all trace of drunkenness had disappeared.
“Paul wanted me to find the notebook, read it. To hurt me. Maybe they… because Alison is certainly alive. They want me to commit suicide, or attempt something…”

Poor Mildred, all the mysteries and horror stories she had been reading and watching since she was a teenager were forming a vortex of mad, horrifying fantasies. Everything seemed real, or, at least, possible.

“Or, they plan to reappear all of a sudden, they want me to try to kill them, and kill me, simulating a case of self-defense. A sacrifice. Some initiation rituals require a sacrifice.”

Scenes from hundred of films were screening on her mind, mixing, flashing, howling:

“Look at this, and this, and this! This too is possible! Look!”

“Or, or… he wants to frame me.
“He has killed Alison, a fat, ugly, illiterate girl who was all over him. He didn't know how to get rid of her. He killed her, and wants to frame me. He wrote the diary, it's not Alison's diary. Paul wanted to frame me.”

She felt drowsy.

“Yes…”
“And… and… everything is possible at the same time…. it's terrible.
“Or…”

This time it was Paul, on the screen.

How's that possible? The computer is offline.
I'm drunk.

“No, you aren't. Your computer is not offline any more.”

“Paul? Where are you? What happened to you?”

And now Alison was on the screen, her face smeared with outrageous makeup, grinning.
Paul hugged her and kissed her on the cheek.

“There is another solution, love” said Alison “the notebook is not real. I mean, it's real, of course, but what I wrote innit is not real, alright? None of it. Paul and I are just friends. But it was fun to write that garbage. I'm going to make a career of it.”

“Yeah, you're good at it, lovey” said Paul with a lewd grin, and he licked her ear.
“Stop it!” shouted Alison, in stitches.

“Where are you? Why are you doing this to me? It's not FUNNY!”

And now it was Alison alone, crying, disheveled.

“Please help me. It's not true, none of this happened. I wanted Paul, and I imagined everything.”

“Alison, where are you? Where are you?”

“I… I… I…”

“What happened to you? Where are you calling from?”

“Please help, please, help.”

No more Alison.

Mildred checked the parameters: no, it was offline. No wifi, no wlan, nothing. She checked her files. No trace of any videos, of Paul or Alison, nothing unusual.

Hallucinating, I am hallucinating. Maybe the notebook was poisoned.

She looked at her hands. The fingertips were black.
But then, it could be the cover color: she had been sweating, her hands had been bathed in cold sweat for hours, while she read the journal.

Well, of course a hacker can still…