Matt sat beside her and shifted positions every few seconds in an attempt to find a way of sitting where the springs of the couch didn’t press into his butt and legs like some sort of medieval torture device. He glanced around the room , taking in everything from the deer head mounted on the wall to the yellowed curtains that hung like funeral shrouds over the windows. The panes were so old that the glass had a rippled texture when viewed in just the right light and a draft must have seeped around the edges, for the curtains rustled gently.
Earl and Daryl had excused themselves, saying that they wanted to change clothes and wash up, leaving the newlyweds alone with the old woman. She’d promptly disappeared into the kitchen and they could hear water boiling from the other room as a high pitched whistle gathered strength.
“I want to thank you again, Ms Gruber, for allowing my wife and I to stay the night. You don’t have to go to any trouble for us. We’ll be out of your hair before you know it.”
“No trouble at all, young man.” the woman called out amid the clinking of dishes. “I reckon the two of you woulda caught your death of cold on a night like this. Least we can do is take in a couple down on their luck.”
Feeling the need to add something to the conversation, Mona chimed in.
“You… you have a beautiful home, ‘mam.”
Shaking his head, Matt chuckled softly and squeezed his wife’s leg as he winked at her. Mona, in turn, punched him on the arm and then pushed him away as she arched her eyebrows. This only caused his grin to widen, but he immediately straightened as the old lady appeared in the doorway with a tray of teacups balanced in her hands.
“And please,” she insisted, “call me Mary.”
She shuffled across the room and placed the tray on the table in front of them. As she glanced at Mona, something flickered in her eyes. For a second, her face seemed to be nothing more than a paper-mache mask that hid something dark and twisted behind its pale wrinkles. Something that stared out through the eye holes with the cold, emotionless gaze of a primordial predator; but, as quickly as this image appeared, it faded with her smile.
Mona accepted the tea with a smile of her own and breathed in the tendrils of steam that curled from brown liquid. Raising the chipped rim to her lips, she sipped carefully. Almost immediately, a taste as bitter as a bad walnut flooded her mouth and she took another drink, hoping the heat that flowed into her throat would wash away the aftertaste. If anything, however, it only made it worse.
“Mmmm….” she lied, “it’s really good.”
“It’s a little old, I’m afraid. The boys like their coffee and it seems prideful to put out a full pot just for me.”
“It is just a little bitter.” Mona admitted.
“I reckon I might be able to scare up some sugar if’n you….”
“No, it’s fine.” Matt added. “You’ve went to another trouble on our account.”
Mary lowered herself into a chair that looked as if a cat had sharpened its claws on the armrest with rabid abandon. Tufts of stuffing blossomed from the jagged tears that hadn’t been repaired with patches of mismatched fabric and Mona could just make out the wooden supports, peeking through the batting and flaps of upholstery like an oaken skeleton.
“If you don’t mind my sayin,’ young lady, you’re the spittin’ image of Audrey Hepburn. Hair’s a little different, mind you, but if’n you don’t got her face then the Devil’s my daddy.”
“Why, Ms Gruber, you are far too kind with your compilments.”
Though Mona’s lips moved, it was not the soft lilt of her own voice that passed through them. . The tones were rich and the clear enunciation was colored by an accent that seemed refined and rebellious all at the same time: it was almost as if the spirit of the Hollywood legend had somehow possessed the young girl used her as a mouthpiece to communicate from beyond the grave.
“Well, I do declare…”
Mary’s jaw had dropped open and her eyes grew wide and round behind her spectacles. She glanced at Matt, as if expecting him to share the same expression of shock and amazement; however, he simply chuckled between gulps of tea.
“Mona can imitate just about any voice she hears.” He explained. “You should hear her do Sarah Palin… it’s uncanny.”
Mona blushed and dropped her eyes to the tea remaining in her cup. She seemed to almost pull back into herself, as if the praise were something that she felt the need to instinctively retreat from.
“It’s nothing, really. And I can’t do men’s voices at all….”
Stifling a yawn, Matt blinked several times and shook his head as if he could fling off the exhaustion that had suddenly made it feel as though his muscles were as weak and ineffectual as the tea bag string that dangled over the rim of his cup.
“Gotten you out… of trouble on… on more than one occasion….”
There seemed to be some sort of fog that made the corners of the room look as fuzzy and indistinct as an out of focus photograph. As he watched, the haze consumed more and more of the room and also seemed to seep into his mind; it was like his words and thoughts had become lost in the gloomy clouds. They bumped against one another and struggled to reach out to their fellow refugees before being pulled away by the roiling tendrils.
“I… feel… I don’t… think….”
Matt turned to look at Mona, who swayed back and forth with half-closed eyes. Though she sat so close to him that their hips touched, she somehow seemed to be receding into the distance. As if the fog were attempting to claim her just as it had his thoughts.
“M-Mona….”
He tried to reach for her, to grasp her hand and keep her from drifting into the void, but his arm hung limply by his side in direct defiance of his brain. At the same time, the cup of tea slipped from the fingers of his other hand and shattered against a floor that seemed to rush up to meet it. Reality wavered in and out of focus and Matt felt himself falling backward as the old woman’s face appeared like a thin-lipped specter in the fog.
“What… was… in… tea?”
As darkness rushed in around him, Matt could hear someone cackling as if from a great distance. It seemed to spiral through the veil that enshrouded him, rising and falling on the waves of fatigue that crashed against his consciousness. Tinged with madness and savage glee, it was the sound of a witch who rendered fat from babies in her bubbling cauldron; it was the merriment of a demon bubbling up through the anguish of the damned; it was the embodiment of every insidious creature that had ever sipped from the cup of despair with a thirst that could not be slaked.
“I’ll be pretty, so very, very pretty… so pretty….”
As Matt was sucked into the chasm that enveloped him, one final thought rose to the surface of his mind: Mona…
And then there was only darkness.
SCENE FIVE
For the first time in weeks, Darlene Honnicker felt hope unfurl within her soul. She’d heard the muffled voices from downstairs: the deep tones of a man and the softer, less distinct, cadence of a woman. The words were nothing more than a rhythmic lull that had been robbed of meaning by distance and wood; but they were the sounds of someone other than more familiar voices that made her cringe like a beaten puppy with each uttered syllable. Perhaps cops, she’d thought. Maybe her captors weren’t as clever as they thought. Maybe they’d left some sort of clue behind when they’d snatched her: a credit card that slipped unnoticed from a wallet, tire tracks that were so distinct only a handful of vehicles in the county would match them…. It happened on TV all the time. Just when things seemed at their bleakest, some handsome FBI agent would kick in the door and snatch a broken and crying woman from the clutches of death. She could almost picture them in their dark suits, hands resting lightly on the holstered pistols while their eyes picked up some small sign that the old woman and her sons weren’t alone in this house. They’d exchange a look with arched eyebrows, pull their weapons in one fluid motion, and then their voices would boom through the silence: Get down! Down! Put ’em where I can see ’em!