Story 26 — The Wedding of a Dead Couple

“B-B-But… But aren’t they dead?” I stuttered in horror as I shifted my eyes from the wedding invitation in my hands to Laura, who was sitting on my bed right across the door. “Yeah,” she responded, “that’s the problem.”
I shifted my eyes back to the wedding invitation in my hands, with the name “Billy and Jilly” on it.
The invitation letter itself didn’t look really special. Or seemed out of place, for a dead couple. It was a simple one folio-size paper, it was white, with texts informing details about the wedding and some tiny floral decorations here and there.
“Did you happen to… Maybe saw who dropped the invitation in your mailbox?” Laura asked. “I mean, I didn’t see who dropped mine. I found it in my mailbox when I checked on it one morning.”
I tried to recall the moment it happened, that morning, a few days earlier. “Maybe I kinda do,” I replied. I was sure I sounded really uncertain because then, Laura asked back, “kinda?”
“That morning, about 3 days ago,” I started my story, “I was about to walk back up to my room when I accidentally looked outside the front window and saw a black SUV, parking in front of my house.” I took a deep breath as I tried to remember every detail of what I saw that morning.
“I thought my mom or dad had invited someone, so I walked toward the window to see who it was. It wasn’t until someone hopped out of the SUV that I felt a strange feeling”, I explained. “It was a woman. She wore a black blazer and a black skirt. Also wearing a hat. The hat was large I barely see her face. But I did notice something before she jumped back in the car.”
“When she dropped the invitation in my mailbox, I caught a glimpse of both of her hands,” I stared at Laura as I said it, “both of her hands were fully bandaged.”
“So you didn’t see her face? Maybe just a glance, to confirm if it was actually Jilly?” Laura asked.
“No. Unfortunately, I didn’t,” I replied.
For minutes, Laura and I stared at each other in silence. It felt like hours of silence before something popped into my mind.
“I didn’t remember the detail clearly,” I said. “I mean, it happened 15 years ago.” I sighed before I continued with a question, “how did that accident happen?”
“Well, it was after our graduation, and our class held a farewell trip to Seagulls Mountain,” she started. “Actually everything went just perfectly fine, until the couple asked one of our friends, Jason, to take a photo of them with the sunset as a background.”
Then everything became clear to me. I remembered how the accident happened. The couple, who were asking to get photographed, stood to close to the edge of the cliff. When Jason, our friend who was about to take their photo did the countdown to one, that was when they slipped off of the cliff and fell.
The couple fell off of the cliff that was about 100 meters high to the ocean below.
It happened so fast, everyone froze for minutes, before Jason snapped back to reality, and immediately ran to the edge of the cliff. Everyone who was there followed him and carefully stood at the edge to check on the couple who just fell.
Everyone was screaming in fear and panic. Loud sounds of screams and cries immediately filling the air on that cliff that day.
The cliff where Billy and Jilly fell from, was about 100 meters above the ocean, with some corals below, here and there. If you fell straight to the ocean, there could be a very small chance you’d survive. But falling straight onto the coral from that height? No way.
We called our teachers, screaming in frantic and terror. And in a short time, a search and rescue team were called to the scene.
After long hours of searching, the search and rescue team came back empty handed. They didn’t find any trace of Billy and Jilly’s bodies, but they promised they would still looking for the couple’s bodies.
“Nothing?” Jason asked one of the officers, “what about blood? I mean, they fell straight to the coral below. Even if their bodies were washed away by strong waves, there should still be a bit of their blood on the coral, right?”
Jason looked frantic and completely horrified. I mean, of course, he was. He stood only a few steps from the couple when they fell off of the cliff. Not to mention that he also the last person to have direct contact with them.
“No, kid. I’m sorry. There isn’t even a trace of blood on the coral below,” the officer said. “That could mean 2 things, the blood was also washed away by the waves, or their bodies were blown by strong wind, so they didn’t actually hit the coral below.”
“So they fell straight to the ocean instead?” Jason asked, “there was a chance the would survive then, right?”
“A very very small chance,” the officer responded, “though falling from this height, I doubt it.”
Then I remember seeing Ms. Davenport, one of our teacher, trying to calm Jason down and carefully got him off the scene.
Though the search and rescue team promised to keep looking, for years I haven’t heard any update about it. They most likely were dead, but if their bodies were recovered, it would at least gave closure to everyone, especially their parents.
“But not everyone in the class was invited to the wedding,” Laura’s voice snapped me back to reality.
“What?” I shouted in confusion, “what do you mean?”
“You remember that only about half of our class were there at the scene, making them witnesses to the accident,” Laura explained. “The rest were either on the bus, having lunch in the coffee shop nearby, had a walk, or with the teachers. Anything that made them unaware of the accident, until Jamie ran looking for help.”
“Yeah, and?”
“Only those who were there at the scene, having a chance to witness the accident, who were invited,” Laura closed her explanation.
“How did you know?” my browses furrowed, as I stared at Laura.
“You think you’re the only one I talked to about this matter? You’re actually the last person I talked to about it.”
“I talked to everyone in our class, including our teachers who were also there at the farewell trip. Just this morning. Only those who were there at the scene of the accident who were invited, and we all get the invitation 3 days ago, in the morning,” she explained.
We sat in silence for minutes.
“But, Lau”, I asked, “is this wedding invitation really from them?”
“I mean, they were dead.”
“But, for 15 years, their bodies never recovered. You know what that means. They could still be alive”, Laura replied as she dropped her head onto the pillow on my bed.
“Say they do, don’t you think it makes more sense if they invited us to a reunion first? I mean, it’s been 15 years, why didn’t they let us know that they’re still alive as soon as possible? Everyone would be happy with it, right?”, I stated my opinion. “This way, it felt more to horror than happy”, I added.
“Everyone would be happy”, she parroted, and then she suddenly sat back up.
“What if…”, she started, then suddenly lowered her voice down as if she was about to tell a secret, “…not everyone?”
“I don’t get your point”, I said.
“What if someone, maybe the couple’s parents, or siblings, thought that their death wasn’t an accident?” Laura eventually asking a more horrifying question.
“Murder?!” I shouted out loud in shock over her opinion.
“Laura! You and I both saw it with our own eyes! they slipped off of the cliff and fell off! No one had touched them! How could that be a murder?!” I yelled at Laura, who didn’t seem like joking at all.
“But their families didn’t know that. They weren’t there at the scene when it happened. They could think that their kids were murdered, and then everyone covered it up.”
“Doesn’t make sense!”, I exclaimed, “For what reason? I mean, there were a bunch of witnesses. Also, an investigation results from the local police and the search and rescue team.”
“Losing a child is never easy, Ada. You know how my parents were like after the car accident that killed my brother. For them, there got to be something, or someone, to blame”, Laura explained. And I do remember how her parents had changed after the accident.
I put up the invitation letter in my hand and observed it again.
“There’s a date, and a place”, I murmured.
“Yes, of course, there is, dumbass. It’s a wedding invitation!”, Laura replied, a bit irritated.
“No, no” I tried to explain, “You know that a wedding ballroom has to be booked first, right? it’s already stated here that the wedding will be held next week, at the Hermes Ballroom. And in order to book a ballroom, you have to be there, and hand over your ID.”
“We can go there and checked if it was actually Billy and Jilly!” she shouted in excitement.
In no time, we jumped into Laura’s car and drove to Hermes Ballroom at the center of the town. In there, we talked to one of the employees who was tasked with the booking desk.
“William Summers and Jillian Queens?” the employee asked us back.
“Yes, William Summers and Jillian Queens. Billy and Jilly. August 1st, Sunday, next week”, I gave him the specific details needed. For a moment Laura and I stood there, staring at the employee who was turning the booking pages in his computer.
“Oh”, he murmured.
Why did I not like how it sounded.
He stared at us, looking a bit frightened. “Yeah, they booked for the ballroom for next week”, he said. “And?” I asked him.
“And?” he parroted, looking confused over my question.
“Your face looked like you just saw a ghost”, I said.
“Oh, really? Well, no, ma’am. I… I’m sorry about it…” he explained himself.
“You met them in person?” Laura asked the employee too.
“Yeah, I did. I was the one who booked the ballroom for them. They were there, sitting where you are now”, he answered, still looked frightened.
The employee stared at us in silence for a couple minutes, before he then said, “they’re friends of you both?”
“Yeah. A friend of ours. We haven’t been in contact for 15 years, though,” Laura replied.
“Okay, ma’am. I apologize if this felt inappropriate, and I also don’t want to get any trouble from my superior, but this guest…” he paused for a while, “bugged me”, he finished his sentence. “Well, not physically of course, but they clearly bugged everyone who was here that day.”
“You know what had happened to them? I mean, I’ve been in a job that deals with people for years, and never saw anyone coming at me, looking like that.”
“Looking like what, exactly?” I started to lose my patience.
“This couple”, the employee started his story, coming in dressed all in black. Black suit, black dress, black skirt, black gloves. It was as if they were about to go to a funeral.”
“But?” I lost my patience completely and pushed him to say his point.
“All of the part of their bodies that didn’t cover by their outfit, like faces, hands, and legs of the women”, he took a deep breath before saying his next words, “are all covered in bandages.”
“All of it? Their faces too?” I asked in shock, then I turned my head to Laura. We were staring at each other in silence.
“That was the scariest part for me. Their faces were fully bandaged”, the employee explained.
“They were wearing large hats, though. Also, the women were wearing a veil that covered her face, but when they sat right across me, I could see their bandaged faces very clearly.”
“They handed over their ID cards and marriage book, all of which had photos of them, also covered in bandages. They say that their faces were completely burned in an accident long ago, so when they took a photo for their ID card, no one forced them to take their bandages off.”
“I didn’t ask what the accident was. Seeing them already creeped me out”, the employee closed his story.
I asked him if there was a contact, and that I planned to pay them a visit before their wedding since we had not been in contact for 15 years. The employee gave us a phone number, the only contact they put for booking purpose, and then we took off.
By the time we stepped out of the building, we saw someone very familiar, sitting on a bench in front of the ballroom. He wasn’t as fat as he used to be, back when we were classmates, but he still looked nerdy, especially with that glasses hanging on his nose.
“Jason?” I asked.
“Adelaide?” he responded.
The three of us were sitting on the bench, where Jason explained that he was also there for the same reason as Laura and me, but hadn’t got the guts to get in and ask. So I gave him the pieces of information that Laura and I got from the ballroom’s employee.
“I still feel the guilt,” he said, “if I refuse to take a photo of them on the edge of the cliff, they would still be alive.”
“I understand, Jace. But they invited us to their wedding, so that means, they’re still alive. You could just have the guilt away by now,” I tried to calm him.
“Really? You know you weren’t here for that happy reason. Neither did I,” he replied.
“Well, you wouldn’t know that”, Laura disproved Jason’s guilty statement, “they could’ve asked someone else to take a photo of them and then the accident would still happen nonetheless.”
“The moment I got the invitation letter, I started to think and I immediately suspected that Billy and Jilly were murdered”, Jason said.
“No, no, no. Not you too,” I started to feel annoyed by the murder conspiracy thing.
“You were there, Jace, just a few steps from them. Did you see someone pushed them off the cliff? Or even touched them, at least?” I asked Jason the same question I asked Laura.
“No one touched them but one another,” Jason answered.
“But that was not what bugged me,” he continued. “Ever since I aimed the camera at them that day they asked me, I already felt something was not right. But I can’t put my finger on it.”
“It was when we gathered on the edge of the cliff to check on Billy and Jilly below, I saw something. I didn’t really think of it back then considering the horrifying situation, but when I get the invitation letter, what I saw back then, it popped back into my mind.”
“What did you see?” I asked, full of curiosity.
“A smirk”, Jason answered, “A devilish smirk.”
“Wow! What?! Jason!” Laura shouted. “Are you sure about it? I mean, we are all just graduated from junior high school. Junior high school!”
“The accident haunted me, Laura. So I enrolled in the psychology major in college, originally in an effort to get myself off of the haunting”, Jason explained. “Psychopathic and sociopathic tendencies knows no age. Someone can be a psychopath or sociopath at a very young age.”
“But you said yourself, that no one touched Billy and Jilly except one another”, I asked impatiently.
“Did you know, you don’t have to physically push someone off the edge to kill them”, Jason explained, “you can just push them psychologically. And there would be no trace of you in the murder.”
What Jason had explained, it started to make sense a bit to me. I mean, if you ask if it was possible, yes, it was!
“And… And who was it? You remember him or her?” Laura asked, getting even more curious than before.
“It wasn’t him or her”, Jason replied. His answer got me confused.
“It was they”, he concluded his statement. “And I didn’t remember who they were that day. I was in panic, fear, and guilt. I looked around just as a frantic response to it, while everyone else staring downward to the coral below.”
“They?!” I parroted, out loud from the shock, “a number of our classmates had pushed Billy and Jilly to the limit and murder them?”
“There’s no proof of that, girls. It was just my assumption”, Jason confirmed, “and I don’t think anyone else saw the smirk I saw, either. Even if someone did, would it be a matter now?”
“But are you sure you saw some of our classmates smirking that day?” I tried to make sure of it.
“That, I was sure. I mean, though I accidentally saw it, would you forget someone ever smirking while staring down the cliff where one of your friends just fell off of it a minute ago? I know I don’t.”
We parted ways after that. Laura dropped me back home and then she drove home herself.
On the way home, I kept thinking of what Jason had told us. Say, it was true, what did those people do to Billy and Jilly that pushed them off the limit? I never saw anyone ever bullied Billy nor Jilly. Or, maybe, I was the one insensitive?
Maybe they had problems all along, and as a friend, I didn’t notice.
How terrible of a friend was I?
Anyhow, I completely forgot that I saved their contact number from the ballroom booking service, until that night. As I laid down on my bed that night, I tried to call the number and see if someone would answer.
Out of my disbelief, someone did pick up the phone.
“Hello?” I shouted at the phone in a surprise, “Billy? Jilly?”
“Ada?” a voice responded softly from the other side. A voice I didn’t recognize, but clearly of a woman. That was the only response I got before anyone from the other side of the phone hung it up.
Days had passed until the date mentioned in Billy and Jilly’s wedding invitation. Nothing much we could do but wait and eventually attend the wedding. See it with our own eyes whether it was actually them or not. Hoping to get answers to all the questions we had in mind.
On the bight, sunny afternoon of the wedding, half of the class members, who were there at the scene when the accident happened were there. That includes me, Laura and Jason.
I didn’t see a single happy face from the crowd that day. Everyone attended the wedding for one very same reason: to know if it was actually Billy and Jilly and what had happened to them in the last 15 years.
After waiting past half an hour from the mentioned time in the invitation, no bride and groom were actually showed up. Instead, there was a ballroom employee coming in, forwarding information she claimed to be from the couple. The employee informed us all that something held the couple back, and they would be late, so everyone was told to enjoy the foods and beverages provided.
The foods and beverages were massive, and they tasted very delicious. Clearly something none of us expected it would be.
“Hi, Jace. What are you looking for?” I asked Jason when I saw him looking around the ballroom.
“Everyone was here, but the three of them,” Jason replied.
“Yeah, I noticed,” Laura responded. “I called Ryan, Cory, and Wendy just a moment ago, asking if they would attend the wedding.”
“What did they say?” I asked Laura.
“Nope. They’re not attending,” Laura replied. “I asked them why, because, you know, everyone was curious, but they just say something like they weren’t interested.”
As Laura and I turned our head to Jason, we saw that weird expression on him. “Jason?” I called him. Jason looked back at me, the expression on his face clearly showed that he remembered something.
“I didn’t remember the others”, he murmured, “but I remember Cory…”
“Remember Cory?” Laura and I were staring at each other in confusion and curiosity, before staring back at Jason.
“The smirks”, Jason replied slowly, “one of them was Cory…”
That was the last thing Laura and I heard from Jason before he walked out of the ballroom, not saying a word to anyone.
2 hours had passed, and still, no bride and groom showed up. Everyone started to gave up and one by one walked out of the ballroom and went home. Laura and I were still there until the very end. We were the last person to ever got out of the ballroom.
***
“So it ended up just like that?” I thought to myself when I woke up the next morning in my room. Everything was so weird, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
“They didn’t even show up at the wedding… So, what was that invitation for?” the question kept running around inside my head.
Just hours later, I heard someone knocking on my door. It was Laura. She didn’t say any words, just handed me a newsletter, and pointed her finger at one of the headlines on the front page.
It was one of the news informing a death of the citizens in our small town. Upon reading the news, something hooked me and immediately consumed me with horror. The news informing 3 people were found dead the night before, in an abandoned warehouse near the Hermes Ballroom. The night after the wedding of Billy and Jilly, the dead couple.
Those 3 people were found hanging from a rope, tied to one of the beams inside the warehouse. Every sign indicating a suicide, according to the police. So it was a mass suicide, done by 3 people, inside a warehouse owned by the parents of one of them.
The name of those people mentioned in the news were Ryan Blinks, Cory Duncan, and Wendy Hanhoff.
“Wait, what?! They were the only ones who didn’t attend…” I shouted to Laura in shocked but stopped when another thought passed my mind.
“Jason! Where’s Jason?” I asked Laura. Honestly, seeing him walked out of the ballroom after saying that he remembered Cory, made me think of something. Especially after Ryan, Cory and Wendy were found dead.
“You haven’t heard?” Laura asked back, “I went to his place before I went here. There were police officers everywhere, I even couldn’t get to his apartment.”
“Police? At Jason’s apartment? What? Was he arrested? For what?” though everything wasn’t as clear as the blue sky just yet, I already had thoughts about it. I asked Laura, in hope of an answer that would confirm my thoughts.
“Jason was dead”, Laura replied shortly.
“Wait, what?!” that was the answer I didn’t expect I would hear, “murdered?”
“Well…” Laura looked as confused as I was, “according to the police officer I asked at the apartment, he killed himself. He was found hanged himself, with all doors and windows locked from the inside.”
“What? B-But why?” I asked impatiently.
“And… What did Jason deal with the death of…?” I stuttered. “No, no… Wait…” I put my face in my palms. Everything got even weirder and more confusing. I didn’t get the answers I needed. I had even more questions haunted me.
All Laura could give as an answer was lifting her hands up, making a gesture that told me that she didn’t know either.
“No further information about Jason’s suicide yet, but,” Laura paused for a while, and stared at me with distress in her eyes. “Do you remember what Jason had told us? That thing about killing someone?”
I stared blankly through Laura and onto the street behind her, and I sighed.
Yeah, I did.
You don’t have to physically push someone off the edge to kill them. You can just push them psychologically. And there would be no trace of you in the murder.
No trace means no answers.
Only questions.
