The Ladies of Horror
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Mercy
by Mary Ann Peden-Coviello

The hunger awakened him. Not the small hunger that sent him to the alleys and the refuse bins, seeking the small lives – the rats and the occasional cat or dog – to satisfy the insignificant pangs till the time of the big hunger. Yes, this was that hunger, the one that came on him and all his kin only once in a decade, the urge that turned him toward the two-legged prey he needed to fulfill his deepest needs.

Slowly, he flexed his wings and stretched his stiff muscles. Ah, that felt good. He launched himself into the night sky, a moonless sky, dark as velvet. The nightbirds fell silent as he passed, huddling in feathery mounds of terror. He grinned in the light cast by the streetlamps, fangs gleaming, as he soared above the park. He settled in the sturdy branches of an old oak to wait for likely prey.

He watched as she left a shop, a straggler amongst other two-legged females. A little chatter rose to his perked ears. A few laughs. None of it made much sense to the gargoyle sitting in the oak tree, but he listened. He always listened. He’d been listening for hundreds of years, in a multitude of different countries, atop any number of stone edifices.

The elderly female set off alone into the park. The gargoyle turned his head to follow her as she passed underneath his oak. Yes, she’d suffice. He leapt into the air and glided silently after her, talons outstretched.

He grasped the woman by the shoulders and dug his knife-sharp claws into her. Ugh! She twisted out of his grip, ripping free of her coat, which now dangled from his grip.

“Oh, no, you don’t! Take that!” And she stabbed him. Him! In the side of his neck! With a long, pointy metallic object she grabbed out of her bag. Then she hit him in the face with the heavy bag. How insulting. He staggered backwards.

“You’re not supposed to fight. You’re supposed to cower in fear.” His voice was like a half ton of gravel tumbling down a rusty metal chute.

“Well, I am gonna fight you. And kick and scream. And make you pay before you kill me, you big ugly son of a bitch.”

He didn’t know why, but that made him laugh. She was a feisty thing. He could smell the illness in her, though, and the fragility. Gingerly, he handed her back her torn coat. He pulled the knitting needle out of his neck and returned it to her as well. She stashed it back in her bag. “But why? You’re old and sick. Why would you fight me so hard? Is your life worth the struggle?” He gestured toward a park bench. They sat. The bench creaked under the gargoyle’s weight.

“Yeah, well, the docs say I’ve got only a few months to live. My kidneys are crap, and my heart’s giving out on me. And they say the end is gonna be a hard one.” Her face twisted, and she clutched her chest, her breath coming in short gasps. “I dunno why I fought you like that. My friends are all passed on or living on the other side of the country. My husband passed two years ago. Heck, even my dog died last week. Nobody’s gonna miss me.” They sat in silence for a couple of minutes, a silence broken only by the old woman’s difficult breathing.

When she spoke again, her voice was barely audible, even to the gargoyle’s sensitive ears. “Can you make it quick? Could you do me that mercy?” She unwrapped the scarf from around her neck.

With a gentleness that surprised even him, the gargoyle stretched out a clawed hand and patted her arm. “Yes.”

He granted her the only mercy he could.

Much later, hunger satiated, he flew back to his post. He carried with him the scarf he’d taken from around the old woman’s neck. He wrapped it around his own. It smelled of her, of old woman and lavender. But not of fear and not of pain.

She would not go unremembered.

 

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!