“Please, Mary, just let me go. I won’t tell anyone, I swear I won’t. Just let me go home. I’ll… I’ll bring you a replacement! My sister! She looks just like me, I’ll lead her here and let you have her, just please, please, please let me go.”
The old woman frowned, pulling shadows into the creases of her wrinkles.
“Let you go? Why in tarnation would I want to do that? No, I like you just where you are, girly.”
The room wavered in and out of focus as hot tears welled in Darlene’s eyes.
“Now, why do you girls always start a’crying on me? This will all be over soon. .”
The old woman raised the knife to waist level and took a step toward her prisoner.
“Mary, please… don’t….”
“Shhhh… you hush now child, hear?”
Darlene tensed as her heart spurted adrenaline through her system; the movement exploded her hands with a napalm run of pain, white-hot agony that engulfed her arms and raced toward her shoulders. A scream strained her vocal chords, made them feel as if they were being stripped away with glass, and she wanted so badly to pull away, to just shrink back into herself until nothing was left.
“Now, you cut that foolishness out right this minute! I could always sew that pretty mouth of yours shut. Is that what you want?”
Darlene whimpered and shook her head so vigorously that tears were flung from her face. She bit her bottom lip as her chest heaved with suppressed screams. Her breath escaped through her nostrils in rapid, staccato bursts and her wide eyes darted about the room as if searching for the appearance of some mystical savior.
“No, I didn’t think so. Now you just be a good girl and this’ll all be over quicker ‘n the lights go out.”
The old woman placed the cool edge of the knife against Darlene’s arm and smiled.
“I need this, you see. I reckon you know that by now, don’t you?”
Darlene closed her eyes again, squeezing out tears like water from a sponge.
“I said open your eyes!”
Her eyes snapped open again and she felt as though she were about to throw up. Cramps wracked her stomach and her legs shook so badly that the floor below vibrated in response.
The old woman smiled again, but there was no joy or mirth reflected in her dark eyes. In fact, she had the same hungry look that possessed Darlene’s father after the month’s welfare check had been pilfered away and the empty bottle of Slo Gin mocked from the trash can.
Without so much as a flinch, the hag pulled the blade across Darlene’s arm with a quick yank. There was a flash of pain as the honed edge severed nerve endings and blood oozed from the wound as if fleeing from the sting. A spark of excitement flared like an ember in the old woman’s eyes and she slashed again, opening a new furrow that quickly filled with crimson liquid.
Darlene tried not to whimper or scream, but instinct pulled her body away from the gleaming blade. She jerked back and a sickening torment erupted from her palms. And she did scream now, her throat raw and burning as the sound rattled from her throat.
Rather than reprimanding her again, Mary replied with another slice. The old woman’s mouth had formed a perfect O and her head was thrown slightly back, like a freeze frame from some geriatric porno. She held the pose for what seemed to be an eternity, but then burst into a flurry of movement: slashing, cutting, slicing, the blade opening her prisoner’s too-frail skin time and time again. Cuts overlapped one another and long gashes formed bloody patterns, like the letters of some dark alphabet that had long been purged from humanity’s collective memory.
Darlene’s heart pounded as if it were hammering out mayday messages in Morse code and she tried to regain control, to keep from recoiling from the fury of the assault. But with each new slit that appeared, the holes in her palms pulled against unforgiving metal with agony so intense that splotches exploded like dark fireworks in her field of vision.
Darlene’s once pale arms were now sticky and warm, coated in blood that glistened like liquefied rubies in the dim light of the room. Numbness blossomed in her shoulder and she felt it creep down her arm, devouring sensation like an insatiable swarm of insects. Her breath escaped in ragged pants and snot bubbled from her nose as tears washed over Darlene’s face and cheeks. Everything wavered in and out of focus as she slipped back and forth between the high definition reality of her torture and blessed, split-second blackouts.
The zeal of Mary’s assault began to lose steam. The cuts became less random, less frequent, and the old woman watched the blood pulse and percolate with the corners of her mouth turned up in the hint of a smile.
Placing the gore streaked paring knife on the table, she backed away, her eyes never straying from the carnage she’d wrought upon Darlene’s arm. The old woman’s chest heaved with each breath and her nostrils flared wide like an excited animal.
“Good… so good….”
Mary slipped the straps of the sun dress over her bony shoulders and the entire garment slid off her body like a curtain at the conclusion of a magician’s trick. It bunched around her feet in yellow folds of fabric and she stood for a moment, frozen in time.
Her naked body was just as pale and wrinkled as her face and her breasts sagged as if the nipples were actually lead weights that pulled them toward her round stomach. Sparse croppings of silver hair jutted out from the mound between her legs, giving the impression of an old dog beset by mange.
“Bleed for Mary, girly. That’s it… bleed.”
She stepped out of the tangles of her dress and walked toward the table with her palms out as if she were finding her way through the dark. Her arms trembled and a soft sigh escaped through her chapped lips as her fingertips brushed Darlene’s wounds. The thick liquid stained the creases and folds in Mary’s palms and left long smears along her victim’s bicep. Not satisfied with that, however, the old woman pinched the gashes between her fingertips and milked more and more blood from the hatch marks of slits and cuts. She rubbed her hands up and down Darlene’s arm: stroking, petting, swirling patterns like a child with red finger paint.
Then she leaned her head back, as if looking toward the heavens, and raised her blood covered hands like a prophet. Something abut her gave the impression of a woman who’d just had the best sex of her life, who was tired and spent and still tingled with remnants of pleasure.
She took a slow breath which quivered in the back of her throat and, with eyes half-closed, her hands traced lazy circular patterns over her naked body. Darlene’s blood left long streaks against the old woman’s alabaster flesh as if Mary were the canvass in an abstract painting of depravity. The valleys formed in her spindly neck, her cumbersome breasts, the tops of her thighs: all were swirled with red, smudged with crimson, and the old woman’s hands dipped again and again into Darlene’s never-ending well.
“I’m so pretty, now… so very pretty…. Just wait ’til the boys get home. They’ll be so pleased and tell me how beautiful and young I look. They love their Mama. Such good boys. Such fine boys. And I’m sure they’ll want to play with you again as well, girly….”
SCENE TWO
The trees on either side of the road were white, leafless, and reached up from the snow-covered forest like skeletal hands intent on raking the clouds from the darkened sky. A few pines were scattered throughout the collective, but on this moonless, winter night they were nothing more than cookie-cutter silhouettes with highlights of snow like frosting upon their boughs.
The worst of the storm had passed earlier in the day but random flakes still swirled like dust motes in the high beams that cut through the night. The car that was responsible for the light that splashed over the encroaching darkness of the woods was a blue hatchback. It wove along the snaking road, occasionally fishtailing in some of the sharper bends, as windshield wipers slapped away the slush that spattered against the glass.