Little Red

A Story by Alexzandria R.

Reckless Ruby is far too curious. So when she hears that there's a "wolf" on the loose, it's essential that she investigate. During said investigation, she learns a disturbing truth about herself.

Ruby sat on the grass in her back yard eating an apple from her grandmother’s tree and eyeing the woods carefully. She had always been curious. Too curious for her own good. And this time she was curious about the woods. The one place Grandmother wouldn’t allow her to go on account of the recent wolf attacks over the past few months. Hundreds of men, women, and children with their throats ripped out. People missing half of their faces. Missing babies, eventually found in the woods or on the side of the road, torn apart. The more people murdered, the more intrigued she was. After finishing her apple, she tossed the core into the woods. The forbidden woods. And started inside. Grandmother was at the kitchen table reading the newspaper, an expression of worry and sympathy on her face. A look of pity for the next victims. She was reading about the latest report on the most recent attacks.
A single mother, two sons, and a baby girl. The baby was found in the front yard, torn apart almost beyond recognition. The two sons were found scattered about the different rooms in the small house. A leg here. An arm there. What was identified as one of their tongues was found under one of the beds. The mother was found in the baby’s room, her abdomen torn open, exposing her internal organs which were entirely mutilated. Ruby found all of this far more exciting than a sane sixteen year old girl should but she’d always found such things entertaining. She had many books on Hannibal Lector and Jeffrey Dahmer and Jack the Ripper. She was fascinated by murder. It was settled. That night, she would explore the woods in attempts to find the wolf.
That night as her grandmother slept, Ruby put on her favorite bright red hoodie and made her way out her bedroom window and into the woods behind her house. She walked slowly, allowing her eyes to adjust to the darkness. It was a cloudy night. Not a single star visible and it was the night of the new moon. Complete darkness. It felt as if the darkness surrounding her was attempting to swallow her up. Eventually, she got lost in all the trees. Everything looked the same and she didn’t know her way back. She was also growing tired. She decided to rest for a bit against a tree until it grew light enough outside for her to find her way back. Within minutes, she was sleeping soundly on the fallen leaves and cool soil with her back propped up against a large oak.
She woke surrounded by seven men. All of them dead on the ground, bled dry. Some with their throats torn out. Some missing large parts of their faces. Some which had died much more gruesome and messy deaths than the others. Ruby looked around at her surroundings, frantic and panicking. Had the wolf been here? Had she missed it? How had she slept through this? As she looked around, she saw that she was coated in blood and unable to remember why. She could feel that there was a large amount of blood in her mouth and small chunks of flesh between her teeth. She felt something small and hard in her mouth as well. She spat it out into the palm of her hand. It was a tiny piece of bone.
Everything was bloody. Her clothes were missing. She had blood dried onto her bare body. Blood dried into her hair. Blood dried under her nails. On the soles of her feet. Nearly her whole body had been coated red
You see, there never was a wolf. Doctors say that sleepwalking is just a person repeating daily events in their sleep. Since Ruby was so fascinated by serial killers and read about them and watched documentaries about them on a daily basis, as she slept, her body began to repeat what she was seeing every day. As she slept, each night she would rise, leave the house, ditch her clothes, which is why no one ever found any shoe prints or clothing fibers at any of the crime scenes, leading them to suspect a wild animal, and go on a killing spree, ripping people apart with her teeth and fingernails. Surprisingly enough, there weren’t even any human fingerprints or footprints at any of the murder scenes. She was quite skilled. Skilled enough to murder in her sleep and not get caught. Then, she would return home, clean herself up, still sleeping, and return to her bed as if nothing had happened and as far as she knew, nothing had.
As she looked around at the mutilated bodies surrounding her, panicking, another man walked toward her, an expression of terror on his face when he saw her and the seven dead men. He turned her in for the murders. When people finally realized what was really killing people, Ruby was taken to an insane asylum. People argued that she should have been sent to prison or even ol’ sparky for what she had done but it was decided that she had only done what she had done because she was mentally unstable. She wasn’t even aware of what she had been doing. So, she was sent to the local crazy house.
When the newspaper let everyone know that the murderer had been caught and it wasn’t a wolf, the story continued, telling anyone reading the paper how the killer was found coated in blood and whatnot. How she was coated in red when she was found. This gained her a new nickname. Sort of like how Hannibal Lector was called Hannibal the Cannibal. Since everyone was wondering how someone as little as Ruby could’ve murdered so many people in such gruesome ways, and she was found coated in red, she gained the name “Little Red”.