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Of a girl known as Red Riding Hood I can speak only with extreme terror. You see, gentlemen, nobody in our godforsaken village but her deathly pale disturbed mother knew her birth name or had ever seen her face. The girl always kept her silence and concealed her features under a riding hood made of red velvet and embroidered with strange symbols, and the villagers spoke in hushed whispers that her reclusive maternal grandmother had given that hood to the girl as a gift on the day when the girl had been born.
Red Riding Hood lived with her mother in a small house facing the forest, and on the other side of that forest her grandmother lived in another village, where population had been slowly dying out due to a most peculiar disease. Strangely enough, neither the girl nor her mother seemed worried about that. And there was one more thing that I then foolishly paid no heed to: no-one in the village knew a thing about the girl's father.
As the only local hunter I had been entrusted with a sacred duty of protecting peace of the villagers, so I took it upon me to patrol the village grounds every evening until after dark. That is how I became witness to the most horrible events that almost stripped me of my sanity and made me the shivering wreck of a man I am now.
Two nights ago I had just finished my patrol and was about to retreat to my house when I saw Red Riding Hood. She was heading to the forest holding an oil lamp in one hand and a small basket covered with a piece of dark cloth in the other. I was mortified that a young girl — no matter how bizarre she looked or behaved — had to walk alone through the thick woods swarming with wild beasts, so I decided to follow Red Riding Hood discreetly, without alarming her to my presence — so that I would protect her if such need arose.
The forest was pitch-black — the weak moonlight couldn't penetrate the trees with their sinisterly thick canopies — and alive with myriads of ghastly sounds. Red Riding Hood kept walking steadily along the narrow path, and I followed her, clutching my trusted hunting knife in my trembling hand.
Suddenly a hideous beast — a great black wolf with yellow eyes, which were burning brightly in the dark, leapt out of the forest before the girl. It bared its enormous teeth, and I swear I saw them glinting wetly in the dim light of the girl's lamp. And then to my horror the beast spoke to Red Riding Hood in a low, gurgling voice.
"Where are you going, little girl?" it said.
I became so numb with fear that I couldn't move or even cry out. But Red Riding Hood seemed inexplicably unfazed by the hellish creature in front of her.
"I am going to my grandmother's house," she calmly answered and then cocked her head slightly, "Oh, have you just heard that sound? Must be a beast close by. I have to make haste or else it will catch me and eat me."
"But doesn't your grandmother live far from here?" the wolf asked quickly.
"Oh, no," the girl said. "Just a thousand steps more, and you'll see the house. It's the first house on the left."
"Well," the beast drawled, "It was a pleasure to talk to you, little girl. I believe we will meet again soon."
And immediately the wolf started running in huge leaps towards the grandmother's house. Finally shaking off the debilitating terror that had ensnared me, I started running after the hideous creature. But then I must have tripped over some treacherous tree roots, hit my head and lost consciousness for a short time, because when I recovered the girl had already been gone but I could still see the flicker of her lamp far ahead.
I ran to the grandmother's house as fast as I could, in hope that I could save the girl, if not the old lady, from being devoured by a werewolf — for I had finally realised the true nature of that creature. Soon I ran up to the house and was about to barge through the door, when I heard the girl talking — and froze on the spot. Now that I could hear it clearly, her voice was unnatural, almost inhuman. I vaguely wondered why the werewolf who was there with her didn't hear it. Perhaps it was too hungry to notice.
"Oh, grandmother, what big ears you have!"
"All the better to hear you with, my dear."
"Oh, grandmother, what big eyes you have!"
"All the better to see you with, my dear."
"Oh, grandmother, what a big mouth you have!"
"All the better to eat you with!"
Suddenly there was violent movement inside the house — and an ear-splitting shriek, a high-pitched howl that turned into a human cry of extreme pain and only seconds later, the unmistakable gurgle of death. Then there came the sound of laughter, a gleeful laughter of a young girl, and some other sounds — and for the love of all that is holy don't ask me to describe them to you AGAIN!
Teetering on the brink of my sanity I crept around the house and peeked through a small dusty window. The room was lit only by a candle and Red Riding Hood's lamp, but there was enough light to see what was inside. And I saw everything… in nauseating, terrifying, maddening detail.
A yellowish skeleton on the bed, with several wispy strands of long grey hair still stuck to its skull in some inexplicable way.
A man's naked body, lying supine on the floor in a pool a blood, a sickly glistening silver dagger buried to the hilt in his chest.
And that girl crouched over the dead man's throat with her red riding hood thrown off.
I must have made some kind of noise — or she just knew I was there — for she lifted her face and looked right into my eyes. Her hideously deformed face, the upper part of which was unmistakably human, but the lower part... the lower part of her face was a round hole surrounded by a mass of slowly writhing tentacles wet with red blood.
12.09.2015