The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Skin Deep
by Alyson Faye 

Late evening sunshine glinting off glass led her feet to the spot where Lyra guessed he had first fallen and where fear had turned his innards liquid.

Ezra . . .

She could still taste his sweat and kisses on her skin. Remembered how he’d push his spectacles up on top of his head, rub his nose and frown when he didn’t get something.

Lyra bent, bones cracking, and picked up the shattered glasses. She wanted, no needed to find and keep every remnant Ezra had left behind. She placed her keepsake in a leather pouch hanging from her neck.

What else had Ezra left? What had she missed last night in the adrenaline fury and frenzy of the chase?

She glanced at the sun setting over the moors, and felt her skin ripple with anticipation. Night time was her domain, the darkness her cloak and her drug.

A few feet away Lyra found her former lover’s watch, where time had stopped for him, in every sense. She stroked it, before stowing it away.

Onwards she roamed, skin tingling, enjoying the cool evening breeze. Next she found one of his trainers, torn and bloodied, laces chewed.

Then his cap, stamped with BIKERS LIVE FOREVER, next his jacket, a rip off of one some celebrity had modelled. Ezra had bought it the day they mooched round the markets, laughing, kissings, hands always entwined.

We’ll be together forever. She remembered his words, his warm breath on her cheek, the male scent of him.

Lyra pushed on, into the steeper, rockier terrain, up to the caves, where she knew Ezra waited.

Twilight was dimming to dusk, so she was using her nose more than her eyes. To her right she smelled his blood  spattered on a rock, speckling the moss. She scooped up a tuft of hair, a piece of scalp hanging on – grimly, further up a ripped off finger, and, in the deepest part of her that was still human she felt  . . . a flicker of regret.

They’d only been dating six months, met online, which everyone warned was dodgy even dangerous. You never knew who anyone really was. Never knew the real person, till it was too late. Course they were talking about adulterers, bigamists, con men and fraudsters. No one was prepared for what Lyra really was, beneath the skin. She was a myth, a rumour, a movie trope.

Lyra loped into the cave, on all fours she crawled in, and curled up on her nest.

Home . . .

Ezra lay scattered around her. She picked up a femur and chewed on it, relishing the marrow.

Together for always . . .

.

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!