Prompt 3 - Raggdolly

They’d called for the girl through the empty forests and streets with loaded tongues, her name slipped from their mouths without gentleness, but with force and vigor. Flashlights shook in their trembling hands, the wintry air beginning to penetrate their wool gloves.

Her name echoed again and again. Where had she gone?

A woman, a strong arm wrapped around her shoulders, sobbed into her husband’s thick, hide jacket, darkening the material with her tears. Just then, his cell phone buzzed in his pocket, and by the third, obnoxious ring he spoke into it.

“Hello?”

“Charlie?” the voice said, and he recognized it immediately.

“Emmett, have you seen her?”

“Sir, you’re not going to believe this… I… I think you should come to the Banner farm. We’ve found your daughter.”

Charlie and his wife were piled into their old, clunky pick-up truck in a matter of minutes. Their breaths were icy, swollen lumps in their lungs. A pulse drove hot anxiety to their muscles, but inside they were cold and shaking. Emmett couldn’t tell them anything else because he couldn’t ‘find the words’. He’d simply whispered hurry before hanging up the phone.

“She’s dead,” the woman whispered as the truck bounced over the terrain. “Why else would he call and say that?” She buried her face in her hands.

“We don’t know that.” Charlie squeezed his wife’s thigh.

Upon reaching the Banner’s, the night appeared quiet, like any other in the small town. A group of six people had gathered around a wooden, fenced-in pasture and when Charlie and his wife approached, they could hear the inane chatter.  

“Where is she?” the mother pleaded to Mr. Banner, wrapping her frozen fingers around his forearm. “Where’s Bella?”

Mr. Banner’s eyes narrowed under his thick brow, and he opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Instead he pointed into the dark pasture, and she could see his hand shake. For that single moment, the most horrendous thoughts passed through her mind. Her daughter was murdered, filleted and left in a frozen field. Why else was he acting like this? But, when she looked, she knew those ideas were premature.

There was movement in the middle of the field, not far from where they stood behind the fence.

“Charlie, Renee… something had spooked the cows, so we came out here to check,” Mrs. Banner said as Charlie and Renee squinted into the darkness. “That’s when we saw her.”

“Can someone shine a light, please?! For God sakes you all have flashlights! Why isn’t anyone shining a light out there?” Renee screamed.

Instead of turning it on, Emmett gave Renee his so she could do it herself. “She doesn’t like it when we shine the lights,” he said, skin pale and frowning.

Renee heeded no such warning and flicked on the handheld beam, shining it in the middle of the pasture where the movement was centered. She released a sigh. There, in that beacon was a naked girl, her long, muddy hair cascading down her back in tendrils, as she squatted in front of a black cow, dead and on it’s side. Her hands moved furiously in front of her, working her shoulder blades. Though it couldn’t be seen what she was doing, so Renee called out to her daughter.

“Bella?”

The young woman ceased her movement, tensing throughout her body. Her head and torso swiveled slowly in the direction of the small group. Her face had been cut, as though with fingernails and flesh began to peel from the deep marks upon her cheeks. Red lacquered her mouth, chin, neck and fingers as she held a large chunk of raw, dripping meat in her hands, tearing away at it with her teeth. Inhuman, yellow eyes devoured the onlookers and she dropped the meat, opening her mouth and allowing the remainder to slip from her cheeks.

Her lips parted, and her jaw unhinged as she screeched at them and black muck oozed from her mouth. A once heart-shaped face had become angular and sharp.

She flitted to her hands and feet, stepping sideways in jittering motions toward the fence which separated the humans from the animals. She screeched to the sky, then at them as she crawled and stepped. Feet over hands, over grass and rock until she reached the fence, and stuck her disproportionate, decaying face between the wooden planks. Bella’s jaw remained open, that throaty intake of air cranking at her soft palate. Her yellow eyes fixed on the crowd. She was a haunted painting, following them wherever they moved.

“We hate the light,” she hissed at Renee. “Turns it off of us or you shall spit ink!”

Renee backed away. Shaking, she dropped the flashlight. A tear fell from the corner of her eye.

“Bella, what happened?” Charlie asked, not knowing what else to say. He wanted answers, became angry for them.

The creature, which resembled his daughter, cranked it’s head to him. Placing it’s fingers into the dirt below the fence, it began clawing the area there. “Bella? There’s no Bella here.”

“Who are you then?” Emmett asked, and when the girl-monster looked at him the heavy-set teenager took two steps back.

The crooked, decaying teeth squished together, forcing thick, black ink to fall onto its chin. The thing drew in a long, inhuman breath before releasing it. The word on top of the airy current sent a chill down the spines of the gathered and caused Renee’s tears to spill onto her already wet cheeks.

“God,” it breathed, and the creature smiled.

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Don't you hate it when you're eating lunch and then all of a sudden: possession!? Yeah, me too. Until tomorrow, pleasant dreams, creepers! Thanks for reading!

The Unholy Trinity