cloaked vampires fleeing from the sun. Slipping one hand into his hip pocket, Daryl heard a slight jingle and remembered the keys they had taken from the unconscious man .
“Oughtta make your skinny ass get down here and do this shit.”
Fishing the keys from his pocket, Daryl allowed them to dangle in his hands for a moment, enjoying the way the beam of the flashlight gleamed on the shiny metal. But then his eyes returned to the car again, taking in the scattered pieces of luggage tucked safely away in the hatch.
He slid one of the keys into the keyhole and heard a soft click as he turned. The pneumatics sighed as the hatchback lifted ever so slightly and Daryl glanced over his shoulder as if half-expecting someone to be standing just behind him. But there was only the darkness waiting just beyond their little island of light, waiting for the moment that it could rush in and….
You just stop that right this minute you hear? Ain’t nothin’ gonna hurt ya out here. Nothin’ at all. Besides, look at the sky. It’s almost morning. Fifteen, twenty minutes more and the sun will be up.
He lifted the hatchback until it was fully open and leaned so far forward that it almost looked as if he were about to crawl into the back of the car.
“What in tarnation are you doin’ up there anyways?”
“Goin’ through their shit.” Daryl answered. “Might have somethin’ good. Be a shame to burn something that might be worth a lot.”
He flicked open the latches on the suitcase and, with his free hand, began pulling clothes from its confines like a magician with a never-ending scarf. Bras, panties, jeans, sweatshirts: all were strewn about the interior of the car in a blizzard of cloth. But, by the time the satin lined bottom of the case had been revealed, there was nothing to show for the flurry of activity other than a mess that looked like a wardrobe had thrown up. Undaunted, Daryl pulled a pink duffel bag to him and tried to get a grip on its zipper with fingers made bulky by his gloves.
“About fuckin’ time. I got the damn thing, little brother.”
He could hear Earl wiggling through the snow as the zipper finally came undone. At first, it seemed as if the bag simply contained more of the same. The top was stuffed with piles of underwear, some loose tampons that rattled in their plastic wrappers, a sheer nightie that smelled lightly of some exotic perfume….
But then Daryl saw it. It looked to be a photo album, or maybe one of those scrapbooks Mama was always putting together. The brown, leather cover was faded and scuffed along the edges as if it had been opened and thumbed through so many times that erosion had finally taken its toll. But what really caught Daryl’s attention was the note card set in the center of a brass frame attached to the cover of the album. In flowing, feminine script were the words Mona’s Secret Delights.
Thoughts of the darkness were pushed from Daryl’s mind as he imagined what lay hidden within those pages: there would be naughty pictures of the dark-haired woman with her boobs hanging out, snapshots of her legs spread wide, maybe even her soft lips wrapped around the base of…
His hands trembled as he flipped the cover open and, despite the stinging bite of the wind, his face somehow felt so warm that it almost made him lightheaded. A grin spread across his face at the thought of uncovering this most private and intimate collection and he felt just like he had that time he’d found those magazines tucked under Earl’s mattress when they were kids.
The grin, however, faded as quickly as snow on a warm windshield. At first, Daryl’s brow was knitted in confusion. He held the book at different angles as if a new perspective might help clarify exactly what he was seeing; but within seconds even this expression disappeared as the color drained from his face.
“What the fuck you lookin’ at, retard?”
Daryl stood as motionless as the dark trees surrounding them as snowflakes swirled in the beam of the flashlight.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
Daryl gulped hard as he spun around to face his brother.
“We gotta get home.” He blurted. “We gotta get home now.”
Daryl’s mouth hung open as he struggled to find more words, but somehow they just wouldn’t come. His stomach felt as something had just squeezed it in an icy grip and every breath seemed to take an act of will; but even then his mind still rebelled against what he was seeing. Surely it couldn’t be… no, it had to be something else… he had to be mistaken…
But part of him knew he wasn’t. And it was the same part that whispered in the depths of his mind that something was horribly, horribly wrong….
SCENE EIGHT
The rising sun cast a warm glow upon the room and glinted off the blade held at Matt’s throat. Mary had pressed it into the skin deeply enough the trickles of blood streamed down his neck and her eyes narrowed behind her spectacles. Her right arm tensed as she prepared to pull the knife across the flesh, severing tendons and arteries in its wake.
“Bleed for Mary, boy….”
At that moment, however, there was a sound from somewhere within the house that caused Mary to freeze. At first, Mona couldn’t quite place what it was: it sounded hollow and insistent, almost like a woodpecker tapping through the bark of a tree. But that was silly… there wouldn’t be a woodpecker in the house, would there? No, it had to be something else. And it was familiar, damn it… something that, if not for the haze of confusion still roiling through her brain from the drug the old woman had knocked them out with, would have been immediately recognizable.
Mary, on the other hand, apparently had no trouble identifying the staccato repetitions. Rather than slashing her knife across Matt’s throat, she pulled it away and slid it into the pocket of her dress so quickly that her hand was nothing more than a blur. There were a few seconds of silence as she shuffled across the room and then the noise repeated again. Opening the drawer on a desk piled with reams of multicolored card stock, glue, and what looked to be albums and photographs, Mary rummaged around until her hand came out holding two red balls. On either side of each ball was a black strap and she hurried back to the bound newlyweds, continually glancing over her shoulder as the sounds from downstairs grew louder. And Mona was sure it was downstairs, now. Things were slowly coming together, her rational mind reasserting dominance over the dazed puzzlement she’d been mired in.
The old woman tried to shove one of the red balls into Mona’s mouth but the younger woman thrashed her head to the side like a dog shaking an injured rabbit. Mona’s lips were closed so tightly that her mouth was nothing more than a thin, hard line.
“Get… the fuck… away… from her.”
In normal situations, Matt’s voice would have boomed out like God issuing proclamations from the Mount. However, his words were still thick and slurred. Rather than resounding through the small room with the force of a thunderclap, they were nearly lost beneath the continued noise from downstairs.
Undaunted by his order, Mary pinched Mona’s nostrils between her fingers and waited. Within the span of a minute, Mona’s mouth gasped open as she sucked in a lungful of air; and, at that moment, Mary plunged the ball into her mouth so forcefully that it almost seemed as if the old woman were trying to cram it down her throat. Her wrinkled fingers fed the straps through a series of buckles and she yanked hard as the taste of rubber flooded Mona’s mouth. Pleased with her handiwork, the old woman walked to Matt and repeated the same process with him.
“Mary!”
The voice was muffled and filled one of the silences between the series of rapping sounds.
“Mary Gruber!”
“Keep your britches on.” Mary yelled. “I’m a’comin.’”
With those words, the final piece of the puzzle clicked into place. Knocking. The sound had been someone pounding on the front door.
“Now, you two don’t go nowhere… I’ll be back quicker than a duck on a Junebug.”
Mary shut the door behind her as she left the room and the couple heard a soft rattle and click as if, perhaps,
