The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Mistress
by Alyson Faye

Lavinia watched her latest victim, encased behind the glass window, with a satisfied smile on her vulpine face.

Her red-painted fingernails clutched the glass containing the precious contents, extracted with such precision. Every drop was priceless. She licked her lips, savouring the moment before she lifted the glass to her lips and drank the yellowish liquid, feeling it calm and soothe her burning bones.

Being centuries old was no easy matter – beneath the scarlet nail lacquer her fingernails were black as a burnt match, beneath her long-sleeved, high-necked clothes her skin was aged like oak, and her face had had more lifts than she could remember.

Behind the glass wall what had once been a man, moaned and lifted his ruined face towards hers. She could read lips – she’d had a lot of practise, and she saw him mouthing, ‘Kill me.’

‘No,’ she mouthed back, carmine lips blown-up with filler. ‘No. You are keeping me alive.’

The creature’s head dropped, his jaw fell open, and drool dripped onto the concrete floor joining a pool of other diverse liquids.

She strolled over to the glass window, and pressed her lips against it. ‘I do love you,’ she whispered, trying to remember what his name had been – in his life before – Marcus? Matthew? It had been so long since she’d enticed him at the bar and taken him home. Two human decades? Perhaps more?

Lavinia turned to another glass-windowed cage, situated to the right of Marcus. ‘Hello, my love. You are so very special to me.’

The man-creature inside threw back his head and howled, his sanity long gone. The chains around his neck and strings of plastic tubing embedded in his flesh, snaked from him, creating a bizarre spider-like vision.

Lavinia turned to survey the massive room, filled with glass cages. She loved them all, her pets, her food source – in her way.

Fiction © Copyright Alyson Faye
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com

More from Alyson Faye:

The Lost Girl & Spindleshanks

The Lost Girl
A nailed-up door. An inheritance which comes with a ghost. A missing girl. A fifty-year-old mystery. Parapsychologist Berkley Osgood is hired to investigate. What he uncovers reveals secrets the living want to hide and the dead will never forgive.

Spindleshanks
Adam is having nightmares about a skeletal shadow figure, who he calls Spindleshanks. Soon his whole class are sharing the same nightmare. Adam’s dad, Rob, knows that Spindleshanks can’t be real. But is he? One terrible night Rob has to face his son’s nightmare creature and fight for his son’s life. What would you sacrifice to have your child back safe?

“A decent two-for-one. Alyson Faye brings the engaging and eerie in equal measure.” CC Adams – horror / dark fiction author

Available on Amazon!