Photo by Mischelle
To the inhabitants of Maudsley the girl was as familiar a sight as the village church, though they averted their eyes when she passed. She was a sickly child with spidery veins pressing through her taut skin. She walked with pondering steps through that backwater town, tracing the river bed, circling back time and again, always accompanied by a mangy hound with yellow eyes, a fixed snarl and fur so matted it was unlikely he had ever known the warmth of a fire.
Then one day they disappeared. The villagers mourned her absence, the girl nobody had wanted to mother. Weeks passed and suddenly, after the night of the blood-red moon, there she was again in the village square with her black brute, dressed in rags of azure blue. She called herself Mary and the hound Lucifer, and he bared his fangs while she waltzed barefoot outside the church hall with madness in her gait.
Not long after the crows fled the steeple and the howling began. It was mournful and triumphant all at once, and lasted until the early hours when the villagers woke with rumpled faces and complaints about their poor sleep. They found the girl underneath the railway bridge with eyes startled wide, her neck twisted, her stomach torn. Lucifer was standing over her, yellow eyes glinting in the dawning light, gore dripping from his muzzle. Afterwards they said the hound probably took her straight to hell. I reckon she was there already.