Patty and Robert had experienced passion's highs, as high as one gets when one thinks about the best moments of one's life. When those rare moments are destroyed, life stops.
For fun, the couple had scheduled their wedding on Halloween, but three days before the spooky nuptials, Patty turned up and told Robert she was not going through with it. She had met "someone else." The tattered, shoddy wings of Robert's "faerie princess" became clearly visible to everyone.
Everything, he concluded, had been a lie.
*******
Three days later, Robert asked Yoru to come over for a Halloween party. He had fallen hard when Patty dumped him, but to put on a brave face, he was going ahead with the festivities. "I'm not calling this a wedding," he growled, "I'm calling it a 'wedding wake!'"
She didn't know it, but he wanted revenge on the duplicitous woman who had shipwrecked his life, and unsuspecting Yoru was in his cross-hairs.
On her way to Robert's house, Yoru had passed ghosts, goblins, and witches, all in colorful costumes, begging at every door for candy. When she arrived at Robert's door, he seemed in no mood for sweets, but she attributed his behavior to the creepiness of the holiday.
Still, something more seemed afoot. Patty had left Robert flat, literally almost at the altar. The man had sent out wedding invitations, which added to his severe loss of face, and he was acting unhinged. Patty was very, very gone.
He was rough with Yoru that night, so much that he frightened her a little. But she reasoned once more that it was a spooky night, with zombies eating the living, that sort of thing, and she still didn't think it overly odd. He tied her hands angrily behind her back, rendering her helpless, but Yoru loves rough treatment and enjoyed it.
*******
Twisting her in her ropes, Robert slammed Yoru into a position where she was facing the bedroom window, and through it she noticed Patty's Italian boots. The stylish, blood-red leather boots had been placed neatly on top of what looked like a large table next to the pool.
To her horror, Yoru realized it was shaped more like a steel coffin than a table. It must have been a joke meant for Patty, putting her boots on a coffin. All the same, it was then that the thought occurred to her that he might be punishing her for the treachery shown him by his jilting ex-fiancee.
"I wonder," Yoru thought, "if this is Robert's way of getting even with her? He wouldn't put Patty in a coffin, would he? I mean, he might I suppose, only symbolically of course..."
Yoru twitched in her ropes. Such a macabre sight would normally have made her want to leave instantly, but the fact that she was tied and immobile wasn't her only motivation for lingering. She knew the reason behind this macabre, presumably empty, burial relic.