Next up in the Halloween Horror series is a little something from freelancer writer Filamena Young and artist J.R. Blackwell. Together they give us a new look at a bit of myth and legend.

Red Head

Created by Filamena Young
With Photographic Art by J.R. Blackwell

Eloise Renee Canton does not like the term ‘red cap’ and in fact if you mention it when speaking to her she will grow very cross. If you push her on that name, it’s implication or about her ancestry, she is very likely to grow violent and cause great bodily harm to any and all around.

She’s capable of it as well, though her mostly human face would say otherwise, her jaw can unhinge at the joint and her lips split in several places to allow her the rare ability to bite onto just about anything. Her preference is bone, but she does not widely advertise this fact.

According to Eloise, despite her heritage she was actually brought up among humans and went to school with children close in age to herself when she was young. (She has since stopped aging, and will not so long as she keeps killing.) This accounts to her singular ability to speak with humans and behave in a mostly civilized manner.

This puts her in a unique position, as most of her relatives must lurk in abandoned castles or dreary bogs and await unsuspecting prey. Eloise has a rather active social life, though she often must resort to wearing elaborate hats with veils or scarves like veils to keep the charade up for long.

She cannot abide the Sun, like many of her cousins, and would turn to stone in it’s presence, which is fine. She prefers the club scene to garden parties.

Of course, the subtly of her hunt is a bit of a charade as well. She is no seductive succubus who saps away at her lover’s vital essence in romantic tumble. Eloise eats people, and to deny that would be to deny what makes her special. For all the trappings of a careful social monster, the real goal in all of that is not to seduce but to get her prey back to her apartment. As soon as she arrives home with the gullible young man or excitable young woman, all pretenses are set aside. Eloise quickly strips off her couture to reveal the white corpse like skin that had her people confused with zombies and vampires for so many years. She’s not dead though, not in the slightest. Rather, all the flush of her blood vessels pulses through her head causing the red coloration there that contributes to the misnomer ‘red cap,’ which she hates.

It is rumored Eloise’s heart is actually located in her throat, but she will make no comment on that.

Once nude, she tends to take out her victims with a blitz-like blow to the back of the head to knock them unconscious before she unhinges her jaw and starts to bite of hunks of their tissue and bone. She says that traditionally her brothers and sisters like their meals conscious and screaming, but Eloise considers their screams vulgar and has no interest in suffering, which she considers barbaric. She makes note that she must eat them while they are still alive, however, because otherwise they simply aren’t satisfying.

About Filamena Young
Filamena Young is a working freelance writer with work appearing in White Wolf’s Ancient Mysteries and Ancient Bloodlines. Her fiction has appeared at a number of small ‘ezines including www.spacewesterns.com ^[1]. For more information or to contact, go to www.filamena.com ^[2].

About J.R. Blackwell
J.R. Blackwell is a writer, photographer and performance artist. Her essay “Evidence of a Baker” was published in the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster in March 2006. Her stories have been published by Aoife’s Kiss, Kaleidotrope, Bewildering Stories, Static Movement Magazine, EMG Magazine, HeavyGlow Magazine and in the first Podiobook anthology “Voices: New Media Fiction”. She is one of the founding members of 365tomorrows.com which produces a new piece of science fiction daily. J.R. has produced the covers to the Anthology “Voices: New Media Fiction” and the novel “Playing for Keeps”. Her photography has been featured in SubLit Magazine. J.R. holds a Masters of Liberal Arts from the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Philadelphia with her fiancee, artist Jared Axelrod. Vist jrblackwell.wordpress.com ^[3] for more information.