The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

She Speaks in Confession  
by Elaine Pascale 

The door groans when she opens it. She knows the sound belongs to the wood and not the creature in the dirt. The creature speaks in growls.

She was grateful that the barn was in such a secluded location. No one can hear the crimes being committed nor smell the evidence.

Being in the country had meant for peaceful, starry nights. Until the night that they had argued. Were they viewing a falling star, or a comet, or an airplane? What they had been looking at was worse than they could have imagined. It was all teeth and digestive tract and it spoke to them in dreams.

Her father had refused to feed it. That had been the last they had seen of him. As the oldest, she had been monstrously betrothed to the creature. Meaning she would tend to its hunger.

This was the second body this month.

Its’ hunger was growing. She feared the creature was growing too, but she committed to not looking at it. She rarely looked at the bodies she fed it either, as there was no need to clean them. Simply toss them in and wait for the creature to eat and secrete on an endless loop.

Being in the country meant that people disappear from time to time. No one pays any mind as long as there is no mess to clean up. She and the creature make sure there is no mess.

Her mother was growing old, and the farm would soon be hers. She had sent her siblings to the city to live creature-free lives. She was resigned to her role until the creature spoke again in a dream. Now it wanted to reproduce.

.

Fiction © Copyright Elaine Pascale
Image courtesy of Rie Sheridan Rose.

More from Elaine Pascale:

The Blood Lights

They victimize all…

Jezzie Mitchell is in anguish; with her brother’s murder still on her mind, she’s noticed strange behavior among the girls in the residential treatment center where she works. Is there a connection between the contagion on Cape Cod and the deadly Bahamas vacation that changed her life?

Jezzie reaches out to former lover Lou Collins, a scholar who has chased proof of the lights for decades. Will he be able to solve the mystery of the lights in time?

Intensely competitive, reporter Bridgette Collins knows the lights are a way to secure fame in her career. And while it’ll put the final nail into the coffin of her ex-husband’s career, she vows to know the secrets of the lights. Even if it means unleashing a world-wide epidemic…