It's late, and the streets are cold. Empty. Nobody with half a brain is out in this neighborhood at this time of night and although the woman shivering next to a beat-up Chevy truck has been accused of stupidity on more than one occasion--and not without reason--she has considerably more than half a brain. What she does not have is an excess of clothing--or a key to her apartment. Thank God for pay phones.

A car pulls up and the landlady steps out, grumbling and fumbling with a ring of keys, and Darla knows that the rent's going up again for this little stunt. For the first time in a long time, she wonders how on earth Sarah manages her comings and goings at all hours of the day and night. She doesn't have a key of her own, unless she went and made a copy behind her mother's back--which is, Darla supposes, entirely possible.

She mumbles a thank you when the landlady lets her into the apartment, still too numb to think of any clever excuses that might save her security deposit.

"Look what you've done...to my sheets..."

Possibly Funboy's last words. Appropriate. And somehow before she knows it she's sliding down the wall without even bothering to shut the door behind her, gasping air in and letting it out in harsh little pants that turn into hysterical laughter.

"Stop me if you've heard this one...Jesus Christ walks into a hotel..."

He is a specter, not human, not even close. Even without the ghoulish clown paint, there's the hair--the posture--that hollow voice and the horrible, empty laugh, and those eyes, wide and dark and full of something that is part hysteria and part laughter and all fury.

"...he hands the innkeeper three nails, and he asks..."

Funboy's shooting at him while she cowers on the bed, not wanting to get between this--this--creature--and his prey but too scared to move. And now he's close enough that she can see the white rims of his eyes.

"...can you put me up for the night?"

"Darla?"

The sound of her own name jerks her back to the present. Someone is sitting up on the couch and for one hysterical moment she thinks it's going to be him again, but no, it's only Sarah, sitting up and rubbing her eyes, still dressed in denim and fishnets.

"Christ, Darla, close the door."

She can only sit against the wall and stare as her daughter climbs out of her makeshift bed and stomps across the room to slam the door shut. Sarah doesn't ask if she's okay and really, there's no reason to; this isn't the first time she's come home like this. Somewhere under the terror, there's a flash of something that might be shame.

"Some freaking mother." Sarah flops back down on the couch.

In the mirror, his eyes are no longer wild. His grip is tight and ungentle, but not actually painful. He doesn't look like a ghoul now, and there's something familiar about his face, something that dances just outside the edges of her conscious mind.

"Mother is the name for God on the lips and hearts of all children."

And he lets her go.

Darla leans her head back against the wall and begins, very quietly, to cry.