The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Mask of Innocence
by Mary Ann Peden-Coviello

The two detectives stood in the observation room, studying the suspect through the one-way glass. She looked bewildered at her situation, innocent, wide-eyed. Her cuffed hands twisted lengths of her hair into spirals without her mind being involved at all, apparently. Small white teeth gnawed at her lower lip. Enormous blue eyes gazed around the interrogation room with more curiosity than the defiance usually on display in that room.

“Are we sure? I mean, she couldn’t look more harmless if she were sprinkled with powdered sugar, man.”

“You weren’t in on the arrest, were you? They cleaned her up downstairs before they brought her up here. She’d been rolling around in the victims’ blood and gnawing on their bodies. Yeah, we’re sure.” The Detective Sergeant shuddered at the memory.

As if the girl in the interrogation room had heard them, she turned her eyes toward the mirrored glass. She got out of the metal chair she’d been sitting in, prowled across the room like a jungle cat, and examined the observation window.

Her expression changed from bewildered innocence to calculating predator. Her hands stroked the cool surface of the window. “I see you there,” she purred. “I smell you. I smell your fear. How delicious it is.”

The DS stepped back from the window. “She can’t . . .”

“I can. Oh, but I can.” She stared straight at the DS through the one-way window. And laughed.

Making double fists of her cuffed hands, she slammed them into the window, shattering it. The next moment, she was climbing into the observation room, disregarding the cuts she received from broken glass.

She leapt onto the DS, snarling and biting. She bit hard into his nose, grinding gristle and cartilage. His screams brought half a dozen officers rushing to the observation room. One of them slammed his baton against the girl’s head, and she dropped.

She rolled away from the bleeding detective, stretched out a bloodied hand, smiled gently through reddened teeth.

 

Fiction © Copyright Mary Ann Peden-Coviello
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com 

More from Mary Ann Peden-Coviello:

Fright Mare-Women Write Horror
Short Story: One Hour Before the Dark

Women write horror and have written it since before Mary Shelley wrote FRANKENSTEIN. This anthology is to highlight the fact women write great horror and to kill the fallacy that they aren’t in some way up to standard. They are. Read here stories by Elizabeth Massie, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Lucy Taylor, and a plethora of other great writers as they work on your nerves, get inside your head, and bang out some of the scariest tales written today. I’m proud to present these women for your consideration, as Rod Serling might say, as I ask you to step into FRIGHT MARE. Lock the door and windows, put on a light, and remember, it’s not real. It’s not real. Midnight awaits, monsters scheme to take you away, the strange and weird wait in the shadows, but it’s not real. Is it?

Edited by Billie Sue Mosiman, the author who brought you the SINISTER-TALES OF DREAD collections and her latest suspense novel, THE GREY MATTER.

Available on Amazon!