The Red

This was supposed to be part of a large series of short stories. It actually started with one written at the beginning of August inspired by the Four Horsemen. I actually briefly entertained the possibility of a comic book too. However, I only ever managed to write this one. This is another story that gives me a really spiffy image in my head. Let's hope I'm never allowed to make a movie. This content is © copyrighted to Ashley Langdon a.k.a. Eve Reaper 2003.

"How long has she been dead?" Detective Stabben tugged at his coat nervously as the paramedic led him toward the docks. The young man stumbled in the sands as he looked back to talk to the detective.

"At least three weeks, but in the salt water, maybe more." He seemed flustered. The detective wrote this off as simple anxiety, the scene must be horrific. When the two arrived at last at the shoreline, he immediately approached his partner.

"What do we got?" He asked in that usual routine voice of his. The shorter, balder, larger man squinted his eyes as he turned to face him.

"Female victim, aged eighteen to twenty-five, found washed ashore a few hours ago. She has her throat slit, scars and bruises covering her body, might be a repeated abuse victim." He flipped through his notepad.

"Did she drown?" Stabben asked. He was seizing up the white pile of cloth draped over the body.

"Uh yes but no. The cut across her throat was done first, I speculate she was slit and thrown in the water right after to quicken the bleeding." Stabben masked a shudder and walked over to the body.

"Report?" He questioned the officer by the body.

"Possible rape, slightly starved and definetly beaten. A shark took a bite out of her side. It doesn't look to me as if it was post-mortem either." He looked up grimly at the detective who stared back in disbelief.

"You mean to tell me someone dangled her like bait over a shark then slit her throat and tossed her overboard?" He blinked.

"I can't say anything for certain until I get her to the lab."

It took a moment but Stabben finally pulled back the sheet and looked away quickly.

"Jesus christ," he muttered. The pale corpse of the drowned girl lay facing the stars. Her eyes were transfixed on the sky and he hadn't noticed that they reflected nothing at all. Her hair was light brown, though dark from the water and wavy. Her lips were an unearthly shade of cobalt blue. The wound across her throat was still a deep red and the bruises discolored her perfectly white skin. What horrified him was the ten inch bite taking out the flesh below her ribs but above her pelvis. A rib or two was missing and most of her organs. He could see the cleaned, white bones of her spine. It was her eyes that made him freeze. The veins must have burst or something, he speculated. Stabben found the blood red color of what used to be the white sclera coupled with the icy blue of her eyes to be something Hollywood could never account for. He stepped away back to the others. Her index finger twitched.

She sat up abruptly, her head reeled. Clenching her eyes shut as the world tilted rapidly, she could hear him yelling at her. She could still feel the ropes burning as she struggled above the unforgiving black sea water. Voices were drawling on not too far from her but she looked up. The moon was bleeding. She stood up with little effort and began sauntering toward the shadows. She wanted away from the bright, inhuman lights of the docks. Stabben turned around only to see the corpse trotting away gingerly from the scene. His mouth gaped as he tried to utter something intelligible to get the attention of his partner. He watched her chest swaying precariously to one side where she was missing a good piece of flesh. Her spine snaked with every step forward and then she turned around. Stabben's eyes nearly popped out of his skull. Now he clawed at his partner's arm stiffly and when he finally turned around, she was walking toward them. A fully naked bride of some twisted horror flick. The six attending officers were dumbstruck and paralyzed in horror. She blinked and turned her head stiffly from side to side.

"You wouldn't happen to know if a horse drowned around here recently, would you?" Her dark red lips moved smoothly and her eyes stared through them all simultaneously. Her voice was like razorblades against a chalkboard and yet so eerily soothing.

"Uh... y... yes, off the coast." Stabben's partner stuttered absently. She waited to hear the particulars. With a hand on her exposed pelvis bone, she looked at them with a calm smirk. "A beaten animal threw itself off a cliff after charging the fence. The breeder's stock has been afflicted with a sort of madness since. They're all... crazy." His partner continued mechanically.

She tilted her head slightly without a smile or frown and walked back to the shadows. When she had gone the six men turned to each other.

"Wh... what the fuck!" Stabben shrieked into an orderly's face.

"What the fuck do you want me to say?" He shouted back. Eyes narrowed, sanity snapped and all the while, The Red grinned.

It was a cool, autumn night some years later when the beating of hooves was heard. The Red had walked the earth ceaselessly always following the shores of the sea. Seven years had passed since she had died, still, no peace or sleep would she receive. He was still out there with a myriad of others afflicted by his same disease. Arrogant, ruthless beasts in the guise of a sentient species, they made the choice, she didn't. Somehow, someway, she was trapped in this forsaken corpse until she could find her way home and only her mount knew the way. The Red finally stopped her unabated, yet casual, pace at the end of a cliff. She stared down into the waters and a smile twisted her lips.

"There you are." She swan dived from the rocky edge into the black waters. Immersed in the ocean, she could hear them clearer. Souls so long ago torn from their bodies now swimming in a sea of blood. She kept swimming further and further. She passed a group of swimming sharks and caught the black eye of one of them.

I know you, she thought and laughed in her mind. Her hand extended and tangled with soft, chestnut orange hairs. She shined her teeth as the head of a horse reared from the shadows. The young filly was preserved beautifully in the cold waters of the North with her mane and tail dancing aimlessly in the water. She stared up at The Red with pain-stricken eyes and a frightened expression. She rubbed a hand across the mare's white blaze and fixed her eyes with the glassy, unreflective orbs of her companion's. It was when she wrapped her snow white arms around the mare's neck that she sprung to life. The red chestnut equine leapt from her resting place in an unearthly bound. Spiralling upward toward the light of the moon, the shadow of a horse and rider was cast over the silver eye in the sky. When the ivory hooves slammed onto the sandy beach, it sent tremors through the ground unlike any the earth had known.

Someone heard their call.