Chapter Four: The Shadow That Writes Me
"Every word I write is an unhealed wound, and every crime I commit is an attempt at healing."
— Edgar Wilmore
Edgar had not slept much since reading Eliza Morgan's latest article titled "Who Writes Death?"
She hadn't mentioned his name, but she described "a writer who plants roses over corpses" with such precision that his heart raced as if he had been discovered.
For the first time, he felt that another mind was reading beyond his words.
And inside him, anger was not the first feeling…
but admiration.
He sat in his room with faded green walls, in front of the wooden desk he had bought from an old market in Whitechapel.
The smell of paper and ink mixed with that of melted wax,
and on the table were piles of papers stained with small red spots.
It was not fresh blood, but old, dry, like the mark fear leaves once it fades.
He looked at the small mirrors hanging on the wall and saw his face:
pale, exhausted, eyes sunken.
But what caught his attention was not his appearance, but the voice in his head…
a voice like his, yet not his own.
"I've read you, Edgar," the voice said, "the girl knows."
"What does she know?"
"That you do not write about her… but with her."
He closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to his temples.
This voice had been part of him for a long time, a part he could never rid himself of since the first time he had seen death in its eyes.
In his memory, there was a scene that never left him:
A young boy sitting on the stone steps of an orphanage,
watching a woman dragged from the hallway screaming,
and a man in a black coat saying coldly:
"Who can mend the corrupted? Only fire."
After that, he never forgot the smell of burning.
As he grew older, he realized that burning is not always by fire… sometimes by ink, by words, by blood.
That night, Edgar decided to write a new chapter in his memoirs—but this time, it would be different.
He wrote a small title at the top:
"Eliza Morgan – Part One."
Then he began writing:
"The journalist thought she was watching me, but she did not know that the pen is a double-edged weapon.
She is now in my story, in my language, inside me.
When I write about her, I feel as if I am writing about myself in another body."
The next day, he sat in his usual café on Bishopgate Street.
He occupied a corner, sipping cold coffee, watching people pass by with lost faces.
Then he saw Eliza—walking slowly, her notebook in hand, searching for a table.
She approached the waiter and asked about an empty spot.
He raised his head and said,
"That corner table is free."
She sat without noticing him.
She looked at her notebooks, writing quickly.
He watched her for a long time,
then said without looking at her:
"Writing about death is exhausting, isn't it?"
She lifted her head slowly, eyes widening.
"Oh… Mr. Wilmore? I didn't see you here."
He smiled.
"London is small when one of us follows the other."
That sentence alone made her shiver in the middle of the warm café.
He continued calmly: "I read your latest article—very clever.
I liked how you described the killer as if he were a poet…
But poets are not judged, are they?"
She stared sharply:
"Perhaps they are not judged, but history is."
Edgar chuckled softly, then said:
"History does not matter, Miss Morgan. What matters is who writes history."
After that brief encounter, Eliza was no longer the same.
She began feeling that he was sending her hidden messages in every piece he wrote.
With each new article, a new envelope arrived in her mailbox, written in the same hand.
Once he wrote:
"Well described, but you mistimed it.
The next crime will not be in the East this time."
It was the first time she felt that the game had slipped out of control.
That very night, in Cambridge Street,
a new woman's corpse was discovered—
beside her, a red rose and a small note that read:
"To the journalist's eyes."
Edgar returned to his room, sat in front of the mirror again, and said to his inner voice:
"Do you see her now?"
The voice replied:
"Yes… she's starting to resemble you."
Edgar laughed quietly, a terrifying calm.
"Then perhaps it's time I let her write the ending instead of me."
But as he spoke to the mirror,
he did not know that Eliza was standing behind the door of his old house, holding a key stolen from the building's caretaker.
She knew that this night would be decisive…
either she would write her greatest story,
or become a new chapter in his memoirs.