Dark. Black. Destitute. And deathly mute. A set of sparkling porcelain orbs had been looking upon the darkness for some time now. Those empty eyes shifted occasionally to the great, illuminated red markings that cut through the midnight. They were of no great significance at all. They used to be. They used to mean everything. But now it was nothing. The hieroglyphics were just there to meet the glass and bounce back into the nothing where they had originated.
Morton Rainey had been lying motionless in the realm of darkness, so often called his room during the hours of light, for minutes and minutes on end, and hundreds and thousands of seconds. His eyes were fixated upon the ceiling above, as if he were expecting something from it. As if it were going to use divine sorcery to vanquish all of his ailments, fears, and issues. But it wasn't clear if the ceiling was there at all. The author only assumed it was in its place. It could have been stolen and replaced with a black sheet or a vast amount of plastic wrap and Mort wouldn't have been able to determine that it was no longer there. All of it was a shadow. The demon of shade devoured every little corner of the room. Every object. Even the human lying there.
And there he laid, on that strange mattress he had owned. The mattress was unlike any other. There were no springs involved. He loathed it. Tempur Pedic. The super mattress that astronauts used in space. Joy. He was better off sleeping on a giant kitchen sponge. Mort saw the bed as an evil and sinister object. He would sit on the bed. There was no bounce to it. He would fall and hit it with a muffled thud. Faintly at first, and then growing stronger as the seconds passed, there was a hiss. Air. He'd sink in and voila! His ass was stuck in the bed! He would swing his legs over; THUD, hiss...Hiss...HISSSSSSSS. And his legs are grasped by the vile object. He'd lay back. Arms and back hit. THUD, hiss...Hiss...HISSSSSSSSS. Goody! Those were stuck, too! The only thing that saved his head from disappearing into the mattress was his trusty goose-down pillow.
Rainey's mouth opened up and his eyes closed in a long, drawn-out yawn. 'I wonder if there's anybody out there like me,' a thought posed. 'Just one person...' And as he mused this, his lids unhurriedly lowered...Lowered...Slowly...Slowly...SHUT.
With a sudden jolt to the bed frame and a spontaneous gleeful cry articulating words not yet distinguishable by sleep hazed ears, Mort's reflexes forced his body off of the bed and colliding into the near wall, sending the man plummeting into the tight space in between that same wall and the bed. Oh, he knew he shouldn't have moved that bed. He knew it.
The novelist's gaze met those of jubilant green irises after he managed to get the muscles in his neck to synchronize and move. His alert ears were greeted by heavy laughter. He flung his arm over and out onto the bed, grasped the blankets, and pulled. Instead of his body moving into the sheets, the sheets moved into his body and jammed him tighter into the scant amount of space. Another roar of laughter. "Oh, you're too funny!"
"Shmmmff! Gkds! mff!" the voice cried through the blankets.
Seconds after the plea, the frame of the bed inched away, freeing the trapped creature. Flustered, he threw himself back into the mattress and pulled the covers over his head.
"Oh, come on, Sleepy!" the voice rang. There was a sharp jab to the upper arm. He moved not a bit. "Are you okay? It's three in the afternoon! Get up! GET UP!"
"Erg...Cora, this isn't a good time," He groaned wretchedly from under the red plaid covers, not unlike that of a man in bed with critical illness.
She laughed. "Of course it's not! You're going to the orthodontist to get your braces off, remember?"
He paused for a moment, brain computing her question. Orthodontist?..."Oh, SHOOT. Yes, I do!" he returned, slinging the blankets off to the side in a solitary, fluid motion. In a hurried pace he sat and the stood, excessively prompt as he was prone to doing, and ran blindly for just a moment. "You coming with me this time?"
"Eh. I wasn't planning to," responded she from the bedroom as she adjusted the newly made bed. "Why? Do you need some moral support or something?"
Mort sighed," No, no. It's all right. I'm a big boy now." He swiped a fine-toothed comb through his rogue half blonde, half dark brown locks and shuffled down the stairs getting dressed. Cora whistled teasingly as the pajama shirt came off.
"Woo! The pants now! Take the pants off!" she whooped.
A smile found itself coming upon the author's facade. He got such a kick out of her sometimes. "Hey, can I take your Porsche?"
"How much do you have?"
"Err... I'll take my shirt off again when I come home."
"Done deal, bucko. Go ahead. The keys are in my coat. BE CAREFUL with her! I'll bite off your head if anything happens to her!"
Ah. The Porsche 911 Turbo. It was a breathtaking model in its midnight metallic-azure shadow. Well, it HAD to be following the totaled Mustang convertible in the most recent mishap.
White began bleaching the revolting bathroom sink when the front door slammed unexpectedly shut, sounding Mort's leave.
It was the first time in weeks since she'd been back to clean, with her recovering from a seared back and him a busted leg, she hadn't the time or the effort to clean. She persuaded herself that she didn't miss him much at all, and that he was just the ordinary customer. She convinced herself to imagine that she would have been dancing while dusting in any house, getting the Lysol in the customer's face by misfortune, getting assailed by the house owner in her car on the way to the hospital... Dealing with a schizophrenic...Getting into an accident. That terrifying disaster left its most predominant mark upon the maid's soft-fleshed back and a hideous scar on her upper right arm. It resurfaced the memories that she longed to forget.
Brilliant emerald eyes ogled back at her when she peered into the soiled mirror of the medicine cabinet. A dash of Windex splattered against the glass and distorted the somewhat jolly countenance, and reappeared as black orbs as she wiped it away.
"What the...!" The girl leant closer to the reflective glass and laid eyes upon a facade that didn't belong to her.
She leapt back. "Oh, good GOD!' vociferated the maid, leaping away from the mirror in alarm. She reeled around as the bathroom door slid open with a lingering squeal. "Mort, I'm so glad you've"the words of relief cut short abruptly when the rusted blade of an aged hatchet launched itself for her head. Cora peered up rigidly. His frozen, charcoal eyes stared and chilled hers.
The assailant wrenched the axe out of the tiled wall and swung again, just barely missing his horrified victim as she burst into flight. Cora took to the stairs as a flowerpot flew for the back of her skull. Her foot slithered on the edge of the first step and sent her plunging onto the stairs on her bottom, leaving her in a shower of clay shards. No time was left for her to stand, so with a swift thought, she pushed herself off and slid down the rest of the flight, just in time for the hatchet to miss her spine.
The criminal beckoned her with a malicious intention, though he coated it with amicability, "C'mere, you perdy little thing. Come on, Miss White. I won't hurt ya."
The maid fled directly into the modest kitchen and took up a stainless steel butcher's stiletto from the cutting block. Headed on a course for her face, the petite axe launched itself with brute force. She followed it with enlarged optics up until just before contact with the skin of her nose, and then drove the thick blade through the center of the goon's lean thigh. A blood curdling cry filled the still air and he limped away, just incase she had grabbed another knife to strike again.
In roughly an hour's time, as Cora had predicted before, the Porsche came speeding down the road and stopped in the driveway with a skid-screech that left tire markings along the dirt. The music inside was blasting, the mega bass sent vibrations into the ground. A moving discotheque.
Mort, who felt free from the restraint of braces, got out of the car just as the cloud of dust from the extravagant parking settled. He ran his tongue over his smooth teeth and danced his way onto the porch. A tap, a thud, a shuffle, and the key popped into the hole. A tight spin and the door flung open.
"LUCY! I'M HO...Wooaaahh. Some cleaning, Cor. What happened here?" he posed, brushing a blonde tress out of his deep-chocolate eyes and musing over the catastrophe. The house was cleaner before he left! "Lucy, you got some 'splaining to do."
He had expected some sort of precisely thought out explanation coming from his innocent angel-pie of a maid in the kitchen, but he had heard no voice and no movements. The whole house held still with bated breath.
His gaze was caught by a trail of blood almost immediately. The thick, violet-red river oozed from the front porch into the kitchen. The light spirits he once had turned into ash and his pounding heart leapt up into his throat. ...Suicide?
"Cora? Cora?"
Rainey darted into the kitchen, and regretted it. A hatchet lay on the tiled floor amongst shattered china and mugs, all in a concoction of bleach, orange dish detergent, and blood. Knives lay askew on the counter top; all the drawers had been pulled out. Curious footprints led the baffled author towards the pantry when the doors exploded and a blur of color burst out.
Before his skillful mind was able to piece together anything, he discovered himself eye to eye with a bloodthirsty fiend whose optics shone with a maniacal fire of mixed fear and the bravery provoked by that same fear. She had pummeled him to the ground and the poor man was forced to keep still by a menacing blade pressing down upon his neck.
"HOLY CRAP, CORA! What has gotten into you?"
Her eyes softened, the blade moved away.
"Mort, I've something to tell you, and you're going to think I'm absolutely out of my mind."