In a thought, all that had happened sounded insane. In words it sounded far worse. In reality, the worst part was really just how methodical and rational the actions taken were, in contrast to the chaotic facts.

It is a simple story, a love story. Well, it isn't so simple, and love was just the motive. This isn't even about love, it is about hatred, and murder. But it starts out with love, or rather it starts there and goes down a dark and scary rabbit hole. She had killed her rabbit, shoved the body in a hole in the backyard.

An orphan, raised in a Catholic orphanage. Except someone had discovered there was yet more to her past than this. There was a police report; but it only assumed a few facts and failed at details. As a grown woman, there was something about her that was still innocent.

Her first days of womanhood were spent in the memory of a violent assault. Her introduction to the world of men was cruel and predatory. Not one to assume the role of victim: she lashed out and killed her pet. The skinned carcass had provided her with blood. Covered in blood she felt clean and whole again. Perhaps it was true in some way, or perhaps she had gone insane from the brutal encounter.

Her benevolent stalker wrote: "Abuse has a way of seeping back out from the abused, unable to contain the wretchedness and horror of a relentless oppression."

Hers was the world that is perilous for a girl in her station, the world of men. Three men had overpowered her, but part of her had become more powerful, sinister even.

The killings continued. A neighbor's cat and a bluebird. Then it was revealed that she was pregnant. The apocalypse was a bit much and she stabbed the doctor in his right eye with a tongue depressor she had folded in her mouth and broken. Soaked in saliva it had made a decent shank and she surprised him with sudden belligerence.

The recommendation was for institutionalization. She was a ward of the state, but the Church hired lawyers to protect her unborn child. While the state tried to have the child killed in the womb, like an abomination guilty of the violations of its fathers, the Church swore it was an innocent life. She got no say in it, but she wanted her baby. She could feel it growing inside of her and she wanted it.

Then when it was born, they took it away. She had to see this creature, a divine messenger, an innocent cherub. She plotted her escape, climbing free of the imprisonment of Dellfriar Asylum. Like an escaping demon of myth her arm had gotten caught and torn free from her body during the escape attempt. She had not died, the cold water had preserved her, and they had tried to sew it back on. The arm was dead, and they removed it.

The dead arm haunted her, crawling up the walls at night. Her left arm went limp, unable to respond to the return of the phantom limb. To alleviate her torment the Mayo Clinic sponsored the attachment of a sophisticated prosthetic limb. She had seventy five percent functionality of the new prosthetic within a year of physical therapy.

On the anniversary of her escape, seventy five percent was enough. Her second attempt involved killing an orderly and using his keys to escape. She had never driven before and after trying the lock of many cars she found his. She drove away but wrecked the vehicle against a tree, losing control at a curve in the road. With her head injured she wandered the road until someone stopped. While the motorist called the police, she picked up a rock and came up behind him and struck him in the head. He had survived, a private eye himself, Daniel Barrow. Maybe it was his head injury or maybe he just found the girl to be beautiful in some terrible and awful way. Barrow became obsessed.

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He visited her at Dellfriar and met her doctors. She spoke to him, her own voice an alien sound. She told him her secret name because he had innocent eyes like her daughter. She told him he could call her Scarlet. Her old name, Jesse Darling, it meant nothing to her, she only answered to it because their faces turned to stone when she ignored them.

"I say it is because of men that there is evil in the world." Scarlet advised Daniel after a long visit. He went home and added her thoughts to his diary.

On the anniversary of her escapes, she killed again, this time it was Doctor Evens that died at her hands. Two syringes were in his neck. She simply walked this time.

The first place she came to was the trailer of Sirus Gelvin. She recognized him but he didn't remember the face of the girl, so changed and so unrecognizable now. She had sharper and more hawk-like features. One eye had grown lazy and pale and her raven hair wore a streak of shimmering silver, almost metallic. Physical manifestations of her inner rage. She broke a bottle over his head and he went blind.

Then she beat him mercilessly until he went into shock from the broken bones and bludgeoning. While the muscular and powerful man lay helpless at her feet, she tied up his feet and hoisted him upside down with a crude crank fastened to the crook of an old wooden chair he owned. It was an heirloom, an archbishop's throne. The chair served as an anchor for her violent justice.

"You took away my name." She told him. "Made me a stranger in my own skin."

"What?" He begged, whimpering.

Then she skinned him alive as he screamed himself hoarse.

She continued to stalk the others, finding both of them, but unable to reach them so easily. Doctor Solomon had survived as well, a man she despised. He had gained her confidence and then dumped her in Dellfriar, diagnosed as a dangerous psychopath. Scarlet did not consider herself to be a dangerous psychopath.

She caught another ride using her left thumb awkwardly. The man that picked her up never saw the sharpened hooks of her prosthetic arm. Her red hoody was cute and he figured she would put out if he gave her a ride. The pervert paid with his life, little red riding hood was a hook-handed, hitchhiking serial killer.

Daniel Barrow followed each case as she made her way across the countryside. Would this little red riding hood ever reach grandma's house? Would this hitchhiking hookhand become an urban legend? He recalled a quote from a movie that featured Babe Ruth: "Heroes get remembered kid, but legends never die."

A movie where a monstrous dog was actually harmless, and James Earl Jones was a blind baseball hero. Daniel couldn't remember the name of this movie, but it had made an impression on him. Monsters are not always monsters and the real horror in life comes from growing up. There is no mystery, no adventure, just the unknown and the perilous.

He had followed each case of murder that she was involved in. He followed her. He even photographed one of her killings as it happened, from a hidden distance, of course. It was a true story, every story is a true story.

Daniel Barrow had fallen in love. It is always about love. When the police came for his mountains of evidence, they found him standing in front of a fire in his backyard. Everything was burning.

"I could arrest you for destruction of evidence." Detective Winters told the private eye.

"Then do so. I am merely destroying my own pictures and notes. Personal property." Daniel insisted.

The police left him there, smoke trailing away with bits of white ash in his hair.

"What a dick..." Detective Winters used a bad pun, how he stayed sane dealing with such people.

And at large, Scarlet waits on the side of a dark road at night, begging for a ride with her left thumb, her right arm hidden in a red hoody.

And everyone that can see her in the darkness is either dead or in love.