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, the old woman had taken the time to lock the door. Then her footsteps padded down the stairs, leaving the two newlyweds staring across the room at one another.
Though the gags kept the couple from speaking in anything other than garbled vowels, the expression in Matt’s eyes told Mona everything she needed to know: they were getting out of this. No matter what it took, they were not going to die in this dusty old house in the middle of nowhere.
As if in response to this unspoken conversation, Matt squirmed in his chair. He tried throwing his head and shoulders back in the hopes that me might be able to make the chair rock. If he could just make it topple backwards with enough force, perhaps the old wood would shatter when it hit the floor. He knew it was a long shot but, if he were completely honest with himself, it was probably the only chance they had. So he continued thrusting as much of his weight backward as he possibly could. If his ankles hadn’t been tied so tightly to the chair’s legs, it would have been a hell of a lot easier; in that situation, he probably would’ve been free almost before Mary had even finished locking the door. This, however, was not the case and Matt had to force these thoughts from his mind. Dwelling on what could have been, instead of focusing on the here and now, would only compound matters: he would grow frustrated and that frustration would further impede his ability to think clearly. So, no… he simply had to work with what he had at hand and do his best to ensure that he and his wife made it out of this room in one piece.
While Matt grunted into his gag, Mona tried a different tact. Closing her eyes, she took a breath through her nose, held it, and then clenched her hands into fists so tightly that her fingernails bit into the palms of her hands. Then she relaxed for a second, exhaled, and repeated the entire process. Breathe, hold, clench, release… breathe, hold, clench, release….
From downstairs, the two could hear the murmur of a conversation. There was definitely Mary’s voice but also another. Possibly male. Though the words were nothing more than a rhythmic drone, both Matt and Mona realized that the person speaking to the old woman wasn’t either one of her sons. For one, they wouldn’t have bothered with knocking; and the woman lacked the strength to have carried Matt and Mona upstairs by herself. Which meant that she’d had help. The boys were in on whatever was going down and they were obviously not around right now. Otherwise, one of them would have simply answered the door and left their mother to finish the job at hand. So, no: there was someone else at the door… an outsider who had no idea that two young lovers were tied up and awaiting death within the house.
Mona switched tactics again, this time twisting her wrists in opposite directions as she pulled at the same time. The ropes rubbed against her flesh like sandpaper and she bit into the rubber ball in her mouth as she squeezed her eyes shut. Her wrists felt as if the skin were being scraped away layer by layer and the coarse fibers of the rope were like tiny needles that jabbed into raw flesh. But still she continued to twist and pull, ignoring the pain that coaxed beads of sweat from her brow; she tried to focus, instead, on thoughts of Matt. She pictured the shallow wound on his neck, the trickle of blood from where the old bitch’s knife had nicked him….
How much longer would the unseen visitor be at the door? How much longer until Mary returned? Pain was not an option… if they were going to make it out of this nightmare, it had to be now. While their captor was still distracted.
Mona wrenched her wrists so violently that, from behind, they probably looked as if they were wrestling one another. More and more flesh was stripped away and the pain was now a stinging burn. It throbbed through her hands and arms as blood oozed from the self-inflicted wounds, the abrasions seeming to make her very bones scream in torment; but this agony, as intense as it was, would be nothing compared to what she would feel if her beloved Mattie were snuffed out right before her eyes. She would gladly endure the fires of Hell if it meant keeping her new husband safe and alive. And if that meant fighting through the pain of a rope burn, even one this severe, then so be it. She would do whatever she needed to.
Her wrists were raw and now entirely coated with blood. She could feel it ooze down her hands, as warm and sticky as the syrup Matt always poured on her pancakes, and she realized that she didn’t have to struggle quite as hard now. It was as if her hands were moving just a bit more freely. As if all that blood were like oil, lubricating the spaces where rope met meat.
From downstairs, the lull of the conversation continued. But it was obvious that Mary’s tone was becoming sharper, growing impatient with her visitor. It would only be a matter of time before she shooed them away and returned to the room with that viscous little knife of hers. And she would then kill Matt as easily as if it were something she did every day. Mona had no doubt about this… and she couldn’t let that happen.
Mona threw her left shoulder down while wrenching her right one upward so violently that the sound of her joints popping was like the snap of a dry twig. The rope shifted positions and peeled away a new layer of flesh. She screamed into her gag, though the sound was nothing more than a moan behind the red ball, and then repeated the action again, this time changing directions on each shoulder.
To Matt, it probably looked as if her entire body were wracked with spasms; but she continued jerking her shoulders again and again, stripping away layers of tissue with each savage thrust. Finally, she felt the coils of rope shift. Ever so slightly: almost as if they were drawing back in an attempt to figure out what this wild-eyed woman was up to… but that was all it took. Mona redoubled her efforts, grunting and groaning as her slender, blood-glazed hands slipped through the intertwined knots of her bindings; she twisted and yanked, pulled and slithered her way through the rope until, finally, her left hand plopped free. After that, it was only a matter of seconds before he right hand joined the first: drops of blood spattered against the floor as she worked at the knots securing her ankles to the chair’s legs and then she scampered across the room, not even pausing to remove the straps of her gag.
She crouched behind Matt’s chair and pulled at his ropes, freeing him much more quickly than she had herself. In less than a minute, they were both reaching behind their heads and undoing the buckles on the ball gags; when, at last, they were completely free of Mary’s little toys, Matt embraced his wife so tightly that it almost seemed as if her were attempting to somehow pull her into the safety of his own body.
Their lips parted and they kissed deeply, their tongues gliding over one another in passionate fury… but only for a moment. Then they pulled away from each other and glanced around the room like a pair of tigers who’d just realized the zoo keeper had left the door of the cage open.
“Oh shit, babe… your wrists.”
Matt practically ran to the desk and shuffled through the scrapbooking material that cluttered its top. At the same time, Mona stalked across the room and pulled back the curtains just enough so that she was able to peek out the window.
The morning sun had crested the horizon now and glistened on the snow as if the rolling dunes had been dusted with glitter. At the corner of the house, and almost entirely out of sight, she could just make out a car. It was a black and white sedan and a row of red and blue lights perched on its top. She turned her head toward Matt, who had found a scalpel-like Exacto knife and was busy cutting long strips of cloth from the hem of his shirt.
“Cops, Mattie… she’s talking to a cop.”
Matt, however, acted as if he hadn’t heard Mona’s report. He ripped free the last piece of cloth and hurried to Mona’s side, where he began wrapping them around her wrists so gently it almost seemed as if he were afraid the makeshift bandages would cause her arms to crumble.
“I’m pretty sure that cunt locked the door.” He said as he worked.
Mona nodded.
“Yeah, I heard it, too. Did you see the bow in the case in the hallway? What I wouldn’t do to get my hands on that.”
Matt tied the dressings carefully, trying to ensure that the pressure didn’t cause his wife any more pain that what she already had to be feeling.
“Think the cop is looking for us?”
Mona turned the question over in her mind for a moment before replying.
“Don’t see how… nobody knows we’re here. Has to be somethign else, I think.”
“Yeah. That’s about the way I have it figured, too. Here, you take this.”
Matt handed Mona the Exacto knife and she grinned despite the deep throbbing that ached in her bandaged wrists.
“Oh sweetie…” she said with a wink, “you shouldn’t have.”
“More practical than flowers and better than a card. Now… what do you say we get the hell out of here, princess?”
The couple crept across the room, their feet creaking so softly on the floorboards that it easily could have been mistaken for nothing more than the warmth of the rising sun expanding the old wood. Approaching the door on the opposite side of the room, Matt turned the knob so slowly that he almost seemed like a cat burglar trying to gain entrance. Pressing one hand against the door, he opened it carefully so that the creaking of hinges wouldn’t give them away.
The room on the other side was much darker and emptier than the one they’d been held captive in. Rather than smelling of lilacs and body powder, this one had an almost coppery, salty aroma in the air. Mixed with this was a stench that reminded Mona of the time their toilet had been clogged for nearly three days: something like shit and stale piss tainted the air and, as her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she noticed the sole piece of furniture in the room for the first time.
It was a large, butcher block table that looked as though its legs had been bolted to the floor by a series of metal fixtures. A naked woman leaned across the table with her hands stretched out in front of her and she seemed to be placing all of her body weight into her torso. Even so, her buckled knees trembled and Mona wondered for a moment why the woman simply didn’t sit down upon the floor. She looked pale and tired and the skin drooped from her frame as if she’d lost a lot of weight in a very short period of time. But there was something else… a series of dark lines marred her skin almost to the point that it looked as though her emaciated body had been used to draw clusters of tic-tac-toe boards onto her flesh.
“What the fuck is this?”
At the sound of Matt’s voice, the oily mass of tangles that was the woman’s hair turned slightly. She glanced over her shoulder and her eyes grew round as she saw the couple in the doorway. Tears streamed from the corner and she mumbled excitedly into the same sort of gag that Matt and Mona had come to know all too well.
Matt walked across the room as if the woman might leap toward him at any second. With steps as slow and deliberate as a big game hunter, he circled around the table while his eyes took in every detail.
“Oh shit, sweetie… her hands have been nailed to the table. She’s cut up bad, too.”
Mona stayed in the doorway and looked back into the room they’d came out, listening for the key to rattle in the door once again. The Exacto knife was leveled in front of her and, if her husband’s words had any impact on her at all, it was not betrayed by the hard expression that was chiseled onto her face.
“Looks like this bitch has been kept here a while.”
The woman probably thought she was thrashing about, but—in her weakened state—she looked more like a fish that had been thrown onto the bank for far too long and was in the final stages of its death throes. She continued babbling into the ball gag and her eyes almost seemed to plead with Matt, who squatted down next to her.
“Look, I’m going to take that gag out, okay? But you have to stay quiet. That old lady? She doesn’t know we’re free yet. And we want to keep it that way, okay? You understand?”
The woman nodded her head as tears glistened on her hollow cheeks.
“Okay… I’m taking the gag off, now.”
Standing, Matt slid the straps through the buckle on the back of the woman’s head and plopped the ball from her mouth. Almost immediately, loud sobs burst from her mouth like water from a crumbled damn. Matt slapped his hand over the woman’s lips so hard that her head snapped backward. Even then, her words kept bubbling up like the snot that was beginning to leak from her noise.
“Look,” he hissed, “I told you… stay quiet. I mean it, okay? I’m not fucking around here, you understand?”
The woman sniffled and nodded her head again as she tried to blink away her tears.
“You sure? Because I’m serious… you only get one more chance, honey.”
More nodding.
Matt eased his hand away from the woman’s mouth, ready to clamp it back down if he had to. But this time the lady with the nails in her hands stayed true to her word. Her voice was nothing more than a whimper that hitched and quivered with tears.
“Crazy, they’re all crazy, please get me out of here, please, please, please.”
“Shhhh… it’s okay… shhhh….”
From outside the house an engine rumbled, causing Mona to spin around as quickly as a ballerina. She now faced the locked door in the other room again as she held the Exacto knife in front of her like a swordsman preparing for battle.
“Cop’s leaving.” She whispered. “I figure that old hag will wait until he’s well out of sight before….”
“Cop? There’s a cop here? What’s wrong you with, you people? There’s a cop!”
Darlene’s eyes darted from Matt to Mona and then back to Matt again. Both of them stared at her silently, almost as if it had never crossed their minds that maybe, perhaps, they could simply yell for help. That all of this could be over, that they could go home, be free…
“Help m….”
The scream that had begun to erupt from Darlene’s mouth was cut short as Matt’s hand slapped over her lips again with a sharp crack. She tried to shake her head free, but he pressed his palm even more tightly against her face and braced his other hand against the back of her head.
“Now, I told you, damn it. One more chance. I told you, didn’t I?”
Darlene sank her teeth into Matt’s flesh and he winced but made no move to yank his hand away.
“Stupid fucking bitch.”
Without another word, he pushed the woman’s jaw in one direction and jerked her head in the other with a violent twist. There was a sharp snapping sound, almost like a wishbone being pulled apart at Thanksgiving, and then he allowed Darlene’s body to limply slump toward the ground. Only the nails in her hands kept her from collapsing like a discarded rag doll as her unblinking eyes stared into eternity.
For Darlene Honnicker, the agony of her torture had finally come to and end….