The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Beneath
by Alyson Faye

The local children swarmed like flies over the giant rocks, calling out to each other, giddy on fizzy drinks and fresh air, the older ones sneaking fags behind the raised claw-like rocks. In the rock’s hollows nestled coke cans, scraps of paper, feathers, and tab ends.

‘I see a baby whale. Just there on the bottom left hand side,’ shouted one child to his mum, who barely glanced up from her phone.

‘Nah, it’s an alien planet and we’re the invading soldiers,’ cried her brother, armed with his bright orange Nerf gun.

A hiking couple paused, gazed up at the late dusk ombre sky, and commented on how the piled up rocks resembled a giant playing a game of prehistoric Jenga.

Another child clung to the thumb of the mittened fist rock shape, swinging out over the moor, shouting, ‘I’m Tarzan!’  His scraped knees bled a sprinkling of droplets onto the moss and was soon absorbed.

When night fell, all the human traffic vanished, leaving the rocks alone with the stars and its memories. The moss buzzed with life, the insects scurried and burrowed and beneath the ground the monster slept, as it had for hundreds of years.

Most of its carcass was hidden in the caves below, only its furthest extremities were on display up above. Only the tips of its tail, and its rock-like scales protruded.

As the behemoth slept it dreamed of minute insects making high-pitched sounds, scrabbling over its hard-plated body, irritating and bothersome, but not worth waking up for. Occasionally in its sleep the creature would shift and above ground a corresponding crack fractured the rocks. Blood split above fed its carcass, soothing it.

Once it had been hungry and consumed everything in its path, but the spell placed upon it kept it somnolent. The Ancients had plied their magicke well, with skill.

Inside its heart an ancient strand of code lay dormant, waiting for the day it would spark to life and erupt, tearing apart the world above.

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!