In The Moonlight

Sweet Little Mary Sue

Synopsis: Let's imagine what things might have been like for the man who became the twisted clown if his life had taken a different path after he was chased from Rusty Westchester's Traveling Circus. What if he came upon a massacre in action, what if he became the caretaker of the sole survivor and pledged that no harm would ever come to her again? I think that they could have a very nice life together, that they could be friends and possibly fall in love…but what would happen if the one who killed her family came back into her life?

Disclaimer: I own no part of the AHS: Freak Show universe. I am simply borrowing one of its characters for this work of fanfiction. The only things that belong to me are my OC, Mae Collins, and her family, as well as the persona of a killer who calls himself Flick the Clown. That name is taken from the character in the 1928 film Laugh, Clown, Laugh, which stars Lon Chaney, whose character shared a few features with Twisty, particularly the three tufts of hair, the white costume and white greasepaint.

I would also like to mention that the title for this story is taken from the lyrics of "Tonight You Belong to Me", as performed by Patience and Prudence. The actual song itself was first recorded in 1926, but the version that I have in mind, which coincidently was the opening and ending song of the first season of AHS was recorded in 1956. I imagine it as a nice song for the two main interests in this story. Yes, it can have a bit of a creepy vibe (especially when viewed in AHS), but I like it anyway. There is also a version that is performed by Eddie Vedder and Cat Power that is very pretty, but anyhoo, moving on…..

Author's Note: I hope that you will all bear with me as I try to bring the pre-AHS: Freakshow Twisty, or as I'll call him, John, to life in print in his words. There is very little source material available, so I'll be making up a good deal of it as I go along. I would ask you to also bear in mind that I know very little about Florida, so please don't expect me to know much about either Rood or Jupiter, aside from what can be found on Wikipedia or by looking at a map. Therefore, I will adjust the topography as needed to suit the story.

Just So You Know: This work of fanfiction is rated M for graphic violence, including descriptions of murder, torture and rape, mild to strong profanities, and eventual citrus, both limes and lemons.

Chapter One

John's POV

Rood, FL

Late spring, 1947

Goodness, but my feet were tired. I would have liked to have stopped, to rest my feet and have a drink of water, but I still had a long ways to go before I got back to my home. It was starting to get late, though, and I didn't like to walk in the dark. I was kind of scared of the dark, I knew that there could be bad things in the dark, and I wanted to stop and make a fire, but I supposed that I should go on a little bit longer.

Golly, I was hungry. It would have been nice to have something hot to fill my belly with, but all that I had was an apple to eat once I stopped to have a rest. I had my canteen that I'd filled with water at a stream a ways back, but water wasn't going to make me fill all that full, not with nothing but an apple to eat. I knew I oughtn't to grouch about it; at least I had something to eat, but land sakes my belly was rumbling something fierce.

There was a house in the distance, with an old red pickup truck sitting in the driveway and a tire swing hanging from a tree in front. The house was sitting back a fair distance from the road, a white house with a grey roof, and I reckoned that the folks that lived there must have been rich, because the house had two levels to it. The lights were glowing in the windows and I reckoned that the people inside were probably just about to sit down to dinner. I thought of what they might have been eating and my belly started growling at me as I imagined fried chicken with gravy on the mashed potatoes. That would be a right good dinner, but I wasn't one who'd ever begged for food and I wasn't going to start now.

I was passing through on the far side of the place, with the notion to make my way into the woods and find a spot to bed down for the night when I heard a sound that made me stop in my tracks. I turned to look at the house and wondered if the jitters were getting to me when I heard it again, a sound that would have made the hair stand up on my neck, if I'd had any there. That was a scream, a lady had screamed, and it sounded like someone was hurting her awfully bad.

For a minute or two, all that I could do was stand in one place, with my heart beating something fierce, all scared to pieces. I wanted to run away, I wanted to hide, but then she screamed again and I knew that I'd be an awful coward if I didn't try to help her. I didn't know why she was caterwauling the way that she was, but I reckoned that she wouldn't be carrying on that way unless she was in a heap of trouble.

I slung my bag across my body and ran toward the house, taking care to stay out of the light, so if there was a robber inside he wouldn't see me coming. I felt like a sneak, creeping up to the first window that I came to and having a look inside, but that was the only way that I could find out what was happening. The first things that I saw was the nice furniture settled around the fireplace…but there, in front of the fireplace, was something that shouldn't have been there.

The fireplace was surrounded by bricks, to keep the wooden floor from catching fire, and on the wooden floor there was a braided rug, and on that braided rug there was a boy with blood coming out of his chest and his throat. I gulped and put one hand over my mouth when I saw the way that his blood was pooled up under his body, then made a kind of crying sound as quiet as I could when I saw the way that his mouth opened and closed, like he was trying to say something.

There were two chairs in the sitting room and there was a man in one of them and a woman in the other. I reckoned that they must have been the father and the mother. The father had the same bloody places that the boy had and it looked like someone had done their best to cave in his head as well. The mother…oh, sweet Lord…her head was barely sitting on her neck.

There was a couch sitting against the wall across the ways from the chairs and there was a black doctor's case sitting on the floor off to the side that had F-L-I-C-K T-H-E C-L-O-W-N on it. I knew my letters, but the only word that I was certain of was clown. There was a woman on that couch, I reckoned that she was the one that had screamed. There was a man on top of her, doing something odd between her legs and though I didn't know what he was doing, I knew that it was wrong.

He wasn't trying to get her to hush, the way that I would have thought a bad man would. It seemed to me that he liked to hear her crying, that he liked the way that she was screaming and begging him to stop hurting her. It made me mad, what he was doing, what he had done, and I was all set to make my way inside and stop him…but then I saw the knife that he was holding in his hand.

I didn't know what I ought to do. I wanted to help that poor lady, but how was I supposed to do that when I didn't have anything to fight with? I suppose that I could have hit him, but I didn't know how to fight. A man with a knife wouldn't be scared of me, not even if I was bigger than him, especially when he saw that I had been crying.

The bad man shouted a bad word really loud and stabbed that knife into the couch, right above the lady's head, real close to her eyes. The window was open to let the spring breeze into the house and I could hear the lady whimpering, the sort of sound that someone might make after they'd already been crying for a long time, and the bad man laughed as he moved off of her. That was a sound that sent an awful feeling up and down my backbone, one that sounded like a record that was scratched all mixed up with a witch cackling.

"What shall we do now, my succulent little cunt?" the bad man, the bad clown asked the lady in that scary voice of his. "I think that we should involve Mae in the last part of our game, wouldn't you agree, Josephine?"

The lady called Josephine tried to speak, and I covered my mouth as another gulp tried to make its way out. She had a gag in her mouth, one that kept her from talking, but did not stop her from screaming or from whimpering, and there was barbed wire on each side of it, wrapping it around her head. She raised her head up and tried to say something and I felt a couple of tears slide down my cheeks as I watched the wire cut into her face.

The bad man dashed out of the room, taking the stairs off to the side a couple at a time. The lady on the couch started to cry, taking big breaths of air as she did and making a pained face. I thought that maybe this was my chance to help her, but before I could move I saw the bad man coming back down the stairs, dragging something…or someone…down behind him.

Oh, no, it was another lady. I could see that her dress was torn and she had blood all over her. The bad man was dragging her down the steps by her foot and her head knocked against each and every step. It seemed like that ought to have killed her, or at least knocked her out, but she was awake and she was whimpering just like the lady on the couch.

"Here she is, Josephine!" the clown said in that sing a song voice that felt like icy water on my backbone. "Now we'll really have fun, won't we, girls?"

He dragged the other lady into the sitting room and threw her down on the floor. I would have thought that she'd holler when she hit the floor, but she didn't make a sound. She scurried across the floor on her hands and knees, something that made that bad man cackle like a witch, and took hold of the lady on the couch's hand. She leaned over and whispered something in the lady's ear, and I reckon that the fact that neither one of them was paying him any mind made the clown a little mad.

"What do you think you're doing, bitch?" he shouted, moving quick as a flash to grab hold of the lady on the floor by her hair. "You can't play until I say you can play! There are rules that have to be followed, otherwise you're going to have to pay the consequences, and I don't think that you want to do that, do you….?"

The bad man screamed in pain as the lady on the couch kicked him where it counts. He fell to his knees, holding onto that spot, and the lady on the sofa tore the gag out of her mouth, sending blood flying every which way. "Run, Mae!" she hollered. "Don't worry about me…save yourself while you can!"

Oh, no…oh, no…oh, no…that made the bad man very angry. The lady that was on the floor paused for just a second, crying, and then she started to run into the other room. I saw the clown grab the knife, I almost threw up when he stabbed it into the chest of the lady on the couch, but I didn't let myself because I had to follow the lady that had ran. She made her way through a dark room and into the kitchen. There was a screen door there and she opened it wide and left it open, but she didn't run out of it.

There was another door in the kitchen, one that went into a small room with shelves, where the family kept their canned goods, and there was another door in the floor of that room, one that I reckoned led down into the cellar. The lady went into that tiny room and I knew that she meant to hide down in the cellar. I just hoped that the bad man didn't find her.

After a few minutes had passed, the bad man came tearing into the kitchen, hollering the lady's name. He was covered in blood, well, in more blood than he'd already been wearing and the knife in his hand was dripping red onto the floor. He saw the open door and ran through it, but he'd stopped his caterwauling. I reckoned that he meant to sneak up on the lady called Mae and I was glad that she'd thought to hide in the cellar, but what if he thought to look there?

He ran all over the place, looking in the barn and all over the yard and I was glad that there was a big, tall flower bush close to the house that I could hide behind. I didn't know how long he looked for her, because I wasn't wearing a watch, but he finally went back into the house to fetch his black bag and then climbed into that pickup truck in the driveway and went roaring on his way.

I waited for some time after he had left, because I was sure that he would come back, but after a while I knew that he was really gone. I made my way through the cellar door and looked around for the lady, using the flashlight that I carried around in my sack. There were shelves on all sides on the room, save for the one that had the stairs that led down into the cellar and one off to the left when you climbed down those stairs. That was where the coal chute was, and when I couldn't find her anywhere else, I opened up the door and looked inside.

Yep, there she was, hanging onto the top of that chute with all of her might. I reckoned that she must have been awfully strong to hang on the way that she was. I reckoned that she would have hung on for as long as she would have had to, until she felt safe, but how could she ever feel safe after what that bad man had done to her and her family?

I shined my light on her and said very softly, so as not to scare her. "You can come down now, Miss. I won't hurt you none, cross my heart and hope to die."

She didn't act like she'd heard me, and I didn't want to scare her, but we needed to leave, just in case the bad man decided to come back. I knew that I was going to have to get her out of there, so I reached up and, as gently as I could, as if I was touching a baby bird, I reached up and grabbed hold on her ankle. Boy, howdy, she came to life then, screaming and carrying-on. There was a part of me that said that I ought to leave her alone, but I knew that she needed help, so I took hold of both of her legs and pulled her out of that coal chute just as gentle as could be.

"No, oh, God, please, don't hurt me!" she yelled, as I picked her up, and then she fainted, as if she had no more energy left, and it was no wonder that she didn't, what with all that she'd been through.

It was not easy, making my way up those cellar steps with her in my arms, but in the end I made it. I didn't want to go back into that house, but there were some things that I needed if I was going to help her. I laid her on the kitchen floor, taking care not to jostle her too much, and found a loaf of bread that I tucked into my bag, along with a needle tied up in a hanky and a spool of thread that I'd taken from a sewing box that had been open on the dining room table, right beside a dress that the mother might have been mending. With these things I brought along a bottle of rubbing alcohol and a first aid kit that I found in a kitchen drawer, and golly, but my bag was full after that.

Once I had everything gathered, I picked her up and we made our way out of the house and as quickly as we could across the yard and into the trees. The lady called Mae was still asleep and we had a ways to go before we could stop for the night. I thought real hard as we walked along, doing my best to remember how the Fat Lady at the circus had taught me to make a stitch. I hated the idea of sticking a needle into Mae, but from the look of things she was going to need me to do that lots of times. I just hoped that I could help her, I hoped that I wouldn't hurt her. She'd already had enough of that…too much of that…and I'd do all that I could to keep her from ever being hurt again.