Mandy Darwin and the Morning Star

            
             The wall paper was blue.  Blue and peeling.  There was a water stain on the ceiling in the likeness of the late President Bush and there was a stain of suspicious origin on the satin sheets.  It was certainly not in the realm of what most considered luxury but to her, these were minute details, not even enough to be considered the proverbial icing on the cake for all she could hear was the pounding of her heart in her ears, a base drum of terror reminding her that she had little time left to continue her story; and what a story it was.  The ink was smeared with her sweat and tears but the letters were legible just the same.  The story these words told was as gruesome and abysmal as their authors fast approaching fate.  Mandy Darwin turns the page of the old yellow notebook, on covered with stickers from princesses from a time of innocence long ago, and putting her pen to paper she beings to write. 
           It all started with a letter.  That damn invitation.  It was made with big bold type and had an orange and red border with little colored balloons on the edges.  Large black letters proclaimed of a twentieth high school reunion.  The kind of letter that instigates vivid memories.  Ones that Mandy would much rather repress and keep locked deep in her psyche.  Memories of being always second to Emily Sherrington, always the secretary, never the class president, for that spot was home to Emily's charming smile.  She vowed this however, not this reunion, this time Mandy Darwin would show the class of Alabama high who was queen. Days passed and the letter in its paisley print beige envelope sat unresponded to,  Mandy spent many a days perched on her kitchen stool sipping at her Columbian vanilla coffee and typing furiously onto her laptop deliberating on the perfect way to show that she was indeed the most successful women to graduate from Alabama’s own Asphodel high.  Oddly enough the solution presented it self with a bang and a bit of bad lack.  Riding along the main road at night was not something Mandy found herself doing often but her boss, a man she considered to be a useless sod, had demanded it.  Her car rumbled down the main road until it came across a pothole left behind from the freeze thaw effect of the thawing ice from last winter.  Mandy felt the air leave her tire in a whoosh.  Cursing under her breathe she maneuvered her vehicle onto the shoulder.  She stepped out of her car words that would leave her momma blushing tumbling out of her lips as she braced her self against the harsh wind of the night.  The wind whipped her dark hair around as her manicured fingertips brushed over the now flattened rubber.  Wincing as she subtracted the cost of this repair from her monthly shopping expenditures in her head she straightened up and turned her coat collar up against the wind.  Hearing a whistle she spun around, brown eyes darting franticly into the night, wild tales of axe murderers and rapists ran through her mind as she backed slowly to her car.  She looked about her, her eyes finally adjusted and she saw that she stood at the intersection of the main road.  The old light swung in the wind above her car, a light that had ceased working some years ago but ted the towns repairman refused to come to the intersection of the main and Morningstar to repair it so it remained dark and docile.  Something across the road caught Mandy’s eye.  It was a man standing at the edge of the intersection swathed in darkness. She swallowed a rising scream and scrambled back to the door of her of her escalade pulling franticly at the door handle it wouldn’t open she did scream then though no sound came out, blind terror clogging her throat.  She pulled on the door handle and saw that the doors had all locked.  Tears were spilling down her cheeks and she turned around certain she was facing her death.  The man was still standing where he had been before she turned and as she watched he stepped into the intersection slowly and deliberately and she felt her throat tighten with terror. Had anyone been there to hear it she would have not been able to scream.  She was frozen with the terror even while her brain screamed to run she could not as if under a spell of fright she watched as the stranger stepped ever so slowly forward and stopped midway in the intersection.  Right under old Mr. Toms light.  The light, the same that had not lit in thirty some years, did light then, though not in green, maize, and red as expected.  The three lights shown red and cast ghastly shadows upon the mans face.  He was young. and devishly handsome.  Dark brown locks and aristocratic cheekbones that spoke of carefully selected bloodlines.  Mandy’s sensed were intensified by her fear and she could hear the soft rustling almost that of a swan above the winds howl which had grown strangely silent since the mans appearance.  Frozen still she watched as he appeared the beauty that of an angel and  a voice just as sweet as he spoke in soft lyrical words.  His voice was whiskey on rocks, sweet sweet sin.  He wove a tale for her of sweet promises.  He offered her all she wanted, the position in her office, a handsome man, and how she didn’t know but somehow he knew she wanted these things for her party.  She told him he was crazy and the man laughed.  He told her that’s what his siblings had often said, he had not offered up his name.  She asked him how he knew this, he had to be omniscient, was he a holy man, perhaps god.  The man laughed, deep and low, he warned her to not confuse him with one of his brothers he told her he was not Michael nor his father. She did not know what to make of this strange man and merely stayed silent.  It will cost you, these words resonated in her ears and her mothers voice that told her never to deal with handsome men sounded in her ears though it was drowned out by the visions of herself at the reunion chatting up Emily with a beautiful man on her arm.  he told her she would have ten wondrous years and then he would come.  She saw herself being admired and envied by her classmates and then looking the man in his golden cat shaped eyes she nodded a yes slipping out from her lips.  The man smiled his devilish smile and nodded as he turned to leave she called after him asking for his name.  He merely replied 'they call me the dawn star' and then he was gone.  Mandy turned back to her car, her tire was inflated. Her doors were unlocked.
                    Mandy dropped the pen and put her head in her hands. she started rocking back and forth wishing, pleading the damn barking would stop.  She knew they were getting closer.  One thing that the man in black did not tell her was the cruel irony of the damned.  Her hair which she would spend hours on had not been brushed and her chic Calvin Cline pant suit was exchanged for a pair of ratty old sweats.  Everything that she cared about in her life lay in tatters before her much as her quickly unraveling mind. Picking up the pen she started again.
                   Mandy licked the envelope of the return envelope closed after checking in the 'plus one' box.  The next morning after she met the man in black a muscular man appeared literally at her door step.  He was training for a duathilon and his bike chain had broken, might he use her phone? Three weeks later she had a rock the size of Rhode Island on her boney left hand.  The party came and went along with her promotion.  She gloated  and rejoiced and did not remember much of the evening after her fifth celebratory mojito after hearing of Emily’s divorce and finical ruin.  Nine years of bliss and narcissism came and went for Mandy.  Then her luck ran out.  Her husband’s bike chain broke in the tour de France and he was run over by the following cyclist.  The company she had so miraculously become CEO of was sued for tax fraud and now she was left with nothing except the fifty dollars she had shoved at the hotel manager before locking the bolt on her door.
               Mandy sat shaking.  She could hear the hounds. She knew they were coming for her.  Her head spun toward the door as she heard a ferocious scratching as if a large dog was scratching upon it.  Hell hounds.  Neither seen nor heard but for those that they were sent for.  She curled in the corner, rocking back and forth the howls ringing in her ears they wouldn’t stop, why wouldn’t they just be silent she asked.  Her hands gripped her hair, once so perfectly style enough to rip it out at the root as the growling continued with frenzy.  the moon shone through the window even through the shade.  She looked around the shabby room, recalling how she had once been gloating to Emily over her and her husbands Paris honeymoon.  The door then burst open and they came in huge hounds the color of sleek black, these children of cebreus with three heads and the tale of a serpent sauntered up to hear and then the largest came before her and halted.  It blew its rank breath on her face the terror had taken hold and she sat unable to move or scream she had only the ability to whisper please.. and then the hounds howled and they were upon her.