The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Queen
by Mary Ann Peden-Coviello

Velma Wintergreen, associate city planner for the city of St. Charles, walked to the Metro station. She kept her eyes down, avoiding confrontation with the more aggressive denizens of the sidewalks. Thank you very much, she had quite enough confrontation in her job. She was jostled and shoved a bit as she found her way to the platform. Scrambling aboard the Metro car challenged her patience as well. No one obeyed the mechanical voice telling people to let disembarking passengers leave first. Of course not. Everyone tried to board while everyone else was trying to disembark. Elbows and curses flew. Velma leapt aboard moments ahead of the closing doors.

She grabbed a strap and hung on. A man – none too clean and reeking of alcohol even at this early hour – groped Velma’s hip. She leaned away from him. When she did, she bumped into the woman standing in front of her.

“Hey! Watch it, sister!”

“I’m sorry. It was an accident.”

“Yeah, well, don’t do it again.”

Velma closed her eyes. The Queen – fierce, armor-clad, take-no-prisoners warrior – stepped into view behind her eyelids. Iklwa in one hand, knobkerrie in the other, assegai strapped to her back, she simply laid waste to the entire car, wading ankle-deep in blood, wreaking a terrible vengeance on all who had so much as annoyed Velma this morning.

Velma’s stop was called. She opened her eyes and joined the mob fighting its way out of the completely unblood-filled car and back to the surface. The Queen had been Velma’s escape valve for decades. When being The Good One or The Quiet One or The Studious One had become too much to bear, Velma had called up the Queen. Since being promoted to associate city planner, Velma had found herself relying on the Queen ever more often.

On this morning, before Velma even got from the Metro station to her office, the Queen had dealt with an elevator car of people who deliberately refused to hold the door so Velma was forced to wait for the next car (they never knew they’d all been set afire); and a janitor who intentionally – she was sure of it –sloshed soapy water onto her new shoes and then laughed at her indignant response (not that he knew his head had been bashed in with a knobkerrie).

Therefore, Velma was in no mood for his shenanigans when a real estate developer, Robert Drummond, thundered into her office mid-morning, bellowing about how some old broad was stopping his entire project by refusing to sell her ratty old house to him. And what was Velma Wintergreen, associate city planner, gonna do about it?

She spent a moment glancing at his paperwork. 

“Not a thing, Mr. Drummond. She’s up to date in her taxes. She owns the property outright. There’s not a plausible reason to claim eminent domain. I don’t see anything my office can do.”

Robert Drummond puffed himself up like an angry toad. Even his hair, teased into an Elvis-like pompadour, quivered with rage. “Do you know who I am, you jumped up little nobody? I play golf with the mayor. I have dinner with your boss. I will make this old broad’s life a living hell till she sells out to me.  What’s more, I’ll make your life one, too.” He leaned back in his chair, puckering his mouth into a tight doughnut, seeming sure he’d won.

Velma stood slowly.  The Queen rose behind her eyes, looked through her eyes. Speared Robert Drummond’s eyes with her gaze and held it. The Queen spoke through Velma’s mouth. Slowly. Each word its own sentence.

“Get. Out. Of. My. Office. Get. Out. Of. My. Sight. Never. Cross. My. Path. Again.”

She was barely aware of the little trickle of blood that dripped from his right ear. He stumbled out of her office, never taking his terrified eyes off her.

Exhausted, she dropped into her chair. Something rattled in her hair. She put up a hand. Beads. She pulled her little hand mirror out of her desk drawer. 

Red beads like the ones the Queen wore were woven through braids in Velma’s black hair. Beads and braids that hadn’t been there earlier.

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!