Dark Places - Gillian Flynn

“I hear he’s into some scary-ass shit,” Mike said. “Like serious, conjuring Satan shit.”

Trey was a poser, so far as Ben could tell. He talked about special midnight meetings in Wichita where blood was spilled in different rituals. He had shown up at Diondra’s one night in October, cranked and shirtless and smeared with blood. Swore he and some friends had killed some cattle outside of Lawrence. Said they’d thought about going into campus, kidnapping some college kid for sacrifice too, but had gotten wasted instead. He may have been telling the truth on that one—it was all over the news the next day, four cows slaughtered with machetes, their entrails gone. Ben had seen the photos: all of them lying on their sides, big mound-bodies and sad knobby legs. It was fucking hard to kill a cow, there was a reason they made good leather. Of course, Trey worked out a few hours a day to metal, pumping and squeezing and cursing, Ben had seen the routine. Trey was a strutting, tan bundle of knots, and he could probably kill a cow with a machete, and he was probably fucking loony enough to do it for kicks. But as for the Satan part? Ben thought the Devil would want something more useful than cow entrails. Gold. Maybe a kid. To prove loyalty, like when gangs make a new guy shoot somebody.

“He is,” Ben said. “We are. We get into some dark shit.”

“I thought you just said you were fighting him,” Mike said, and finally, finally reached behind him into a Styrofoam cooler and handed Ben an Olympia Gold, icy-wet. Ben chugged it, put out his hand for another, and was surprised to actually get a second beer instead of a load of shit.

“We fight. When you do some of the stuff we do, you’re going to end up in a fight.” This sounded as vague as Alex’s roadie stories.

“Were you one of the guys who killed those cows?” the girl asked.

Ben nodded. “We had to. It was an order.”

“Weird order, man,” said the quiet guy from the corner. “That was my hamburger.”

They laughed, everyone did, and Ben tried to look smooth but tough. He shook his hair down in front of his eyes and felt the beer chill him. Two fast, tinny beers on an empty belly and he was buzzing, but he didn’t want to come off as a lightweight.

“So why do you kill cows?” the girl asked.

“Feels good, satisfies some requirements. You can’t just be in the club, you have to really do stuff.”

Ben had hunted lots, his dad taking him out once, and then his mom insisted he go with her. A bonding thing. She didn’t realize how embarrassing it was to go hunting with your mom. But it was his mom who’d made him a decent shot, taught him how to handle the recoil, when to pull the trigger, how to wait and be patient for hours in the blind. Ben had shot and killed dozens of animals, from rabbits up to deer.

Now he thought of mice, how his mom’s barncat had rooted out a nest, and gobbled down two or three gooey newborn mice before dropping the other half dozen on the back steps. Runner had just left—the second time this was—so it was Ben’s job to put them out of their misery. They’d wriggled silently, twisting like pink eels, eyes glued shut, and by the time he’d run back and forth to the barn twice, trying to figure out what to do, the ants were swarming them. He’d taken a shovel, finally, and smashed them into the ground, bits of flesh splattering his arms, getting angrier, each big loose wield of the shovel infuriating him more. You think I’m such a pussy, Runner, you think I’m such a pussy! By the time it was over, only a sticky spot on the ground remained. He was sweaty, and when he looked up, his mother was watching him from behind the screen door. She’d been quiet at dinner that night, that worried face turned on him, the sad eyes. He just wanted to turn to her and say, Sometimes it feels good to fuck with something. Instead of always being fucked with.

“Like?” the girl nudged.

“Like … well, sometimes things have to die. We have to kill them. Just like Jesus requires sacrifice, well, so does Satan.”

Satan, he said it, like it was some guy’s name. It didn’t feel bogus and it didn’t feel scary. It felt normal, like he actually knew what he was talking about. Satan. He could almost picture him here, this guy all long-faced and horned, with those split-open goat eyes.

“You seriously believe this shit—what’s your name again?”

“Ben. Day.”

“Ben-Gay?”

“Yeah, never heard that one.” Ben took another beer from the cooler, without asking, he’d bumped over a few feet since they started talking, and as the booze chilled him out, everything he said, all the shit rolling out of his mouth, seemed undeniable. He could become an undeniable guy, he could see it, even with that last crack, how that asshole knew his joke was going to whistle out and flop.

They fired up another joint, the girl pulling her clip out of her hair again, the goofy, friendly flip of hair falling back to its normal place, her not looking as nice without it. Ben breathed in, took a decent amount, but—don’t cough, don’t cough—not enough so he got seeds in the back of his throat. This was ditchweed stuff, the kind that got you dirty high. It got you paranoid and talky, instead of mellowing you out. Ben had a theory that all the chemical runoff from all the farms rolled into the ground and was sucked up by these mean, greedy plants. It infected them: all that insecticide and bright green fertilizer was settling into the grooves of his lungs and his brain.

The girl was looking at him now, that dazed look Debby got after too much TV, like she needed to say something but was too lazy to move her mouth. He wanted something to eat.

The Devil is never hungry. That’s what he thought then, out of nowhere, the words in his brain like a prayer.

Alex was plucking at his guitar again, some Van Halen, some AC/DC, a Beatles song, and then suddenly he was fingering “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” the binky chords making Ben’s head ache more.

“Hey, no Christmas songs, Ben wouldn’t like that,” Mike called out.

“Holy shit, he’s bleeding!” the girl said.

The cut in his forehead had opened up, and now it was dripping lushly down his face onto his pants. The girl tried to hand him a fast-food napkin, but he waved her off, smeared the blood across his face like warpaint.

Alex had stopped playing the song, and they all just stared at Ben, uneasy smiles and stiff shoulders, leaning slightly away from him. Mike held out the joint like an offering, on the tips of his fingers to avoid contact. Ben didn’t want it, but breathed in deep again, the sour smoke burning more lung tissue.

It was then that the door-flap made its wavy warble and Trey walked in. He had his arms folded, feet planted, slouchy stance going, rolling his eyes over the room and then jerking his head back like Ben was a fish gone bad.

“What are you doing here? Diondra here?”

“She’s in Salina. Just thought I’d stop by, kill some time. They been entertaining me.”

“We heard about your fight,” the girl said, all sly smiles, her lips thin crescents. “And other bad stuff.”

Trey, his long slick black hair and chiseled face, was unreadable. He looked at the group on the floor, and at Ben squatting with them, and for once seemed unsure of how to play the situation.

“Yeah, what’s he been saying?” He kept his eyes on Ben and grabbed a beer from the girl without even looking at her. Ben wondered if they’d slept together, Trey had the same disdain Ben once saw him direct at an ex-girlfriend: I am not angry or sad or happy to see you. I could not give a shit. You don’t even ripple.

“Some shit about the Devil and what you guys do to … help him,” she said.

Trey got his grin going then, sat down across from Ben—Ben avoiding eye contact.

“Hey Trey?” Alex said. “You’re Indian aren’t you?”

“Yeah, you want me to scalp you?”

“You’re not full though, right?” the girl blurted.

“My mom’s white. I don’t date Indian chicks.”

“Why not?” she asked, running the roach clip feather in and out of her hair, the metal teeth tangling themselves in the waves.

“Because Satan likes white pussy.” He smiled and cocked his head at her, and she started to giggle, but then he kept the same expression and she shut down, her ugly boyfriend putting an arm back on her hip.

They’d liked Ben’s patter, but Trey was spookier. He sat there almost cross-legged, eyeing them in a way that seemed friendly on the surface, but was entirely without warmth. And while his body was folded in a casual way, every limb was held at a tense, sharp angle. There was something deeply unkind about him. No one offered to pass the joint again.

They all sat quietly for a few minutes, Trey’s mood unnerving everyone. Usually he was the loud, smart-ass, fight-starting beer swigger, but when he got upset it was like he sent out hundreds of invisible, insistent fingers to push everyone down by the shoulders. Sink everyone.

“So you want to go?” he suddenly asked Ben. “I got my truck. I got Diondra’s keys. We can go to her place til she gets home, she’s got cable. Better’n this freezing cold shithole.”

Ben nodded, gave a jittery wave to the crowd, and followed Trey who was already outside, tossing his beer can on the snow. Ben was definitely altered. Words clotted in the back of his throat, and as he climbed into the GMC he tried to stammer some excuse to Trey. Trey who’d just saved his ass, for unclear reasons. Why was he the one with Diondra’s keys? Probably because he’d asked for them. Ben didn’t think to ask enough.

“I hope you’re ready to back that shit up, what you were saying in there,” Trey said, putting the stick in reverse. The GMC was a tank, and Trey drove it straight across the farm property, bumping over old cornstalks and irrigation ditches, forcing Ben to grab on to the armrest to keep from biting his tongue off. Trey landed a meaningful glance on Ben’s tight grip.

“Yeah, of course.”

“Maybe tonight you become a man. Maybe.”

Trey flicked on his cassette player. Iron Maiden, midsong, hell yes, the words hissing at Ben: 666 … Satan … Sacrifice.

Ben worked the music in his head, his brain sizzling, feeling angry-frantic, the way he always did to metal, the guitar strum never letting up, bundling him tenser and tenser, bumping his head up and down, the drums shooting up his spine, the whole thing this rage-frenzy, not letting him think straight, just keeping him in a tight shake. His whole body felt like a cocked fist, ready for release.

Libby DayNOW

The stretch of I-70 between Kansas City and St. Louis was hours and hours of pure ugly driving. Flat, dead-yellow, and littered with billboards: a fetus curled up like a kitten (Abortion Stops a Beating Heart); a living room turned red from the glare of ambulance lights (Take Care Crime-Scene Cleanup Specialists); a remarkably plain woman giving fuck-me eyes to passing motorists (Hot Jimmy’s Gentlemen’s Club). The billboards ominously advising love of Jesus were in direct proportion to those advertising porn liquidators, and the signs for local restaurants consistently misused quotation marks: Herb’s Highway Diner—The “Best” Meal in Town; Jolene’s Rib House—Come in for Our “Delicious” Baby Back Ribs.

Lyle was in the passenger seat. He’d debated the pros and cons of joining me (maybe I would have more rapport with Krissi alone, us both being women; on the other hand, he did know this part of the case better; but then again, he may get too excited, ask her too many questions, and then blow it, he sometimes got ahead of himself, if he had one flaw it was that he sometimes got ahead of himself; then again, $500 was a lot of money and he felt somewhat entitled, no offense, to come along). Finally I’d snapped into the phone that I’d swing by Sarah’s Pub in thirty minutes, and if he was out front, he could come. Click. Now he was fussing next to me, flicking the door lock up and down, fiddling with the radio, reading each sign out loud, like he was trying to reassure himself of something. We drove past a fireworks warehouse the size of a cathedral, and at least three bundles of fatality markers: small white crosses and plastic flowers gathering dust on the side of the road. Gas stations made themselves known with signs skinnier and taller than the wilting weather vanes of nearby farms.

On one ridge was a billboard with a familiar face: Lisette Stephens, with that joyful grin, a phone number below for information on her disappearance. I wondered how long til they took it down, drained of hope or money.

“Oh God, her,” Lyle said, as we passed Lisette. I bristled, but my feelings were similar. After a while it was almost rude to ask you to worry about someone who was clearly dead. Unless it was my family.

“So Lyle, can I ask you, what is it that makes you so obsessed with the … this case?” As I said it, the sky got just dark enough to switch the highway lights on, and all in a row, into the horizon, they blinked white, like my question had intrigued them.

Lyle was staring at his leg, listening sideways like he usually did. He had a habit of pushing one ear toward whoever was speaking, and then he’d wait a few seconds, like he was translating whatever was said into another language.

“It’s just a classic whodunit. There are a lot of viable theories, so it’s interesting to talk about,” he said, still not looking at me. “And there’s you. And Krissi. Children who … caused something. I’m interested in that.”

“Children who caused something?”

“Something to happen, something that got bigger than they were, something that had unintentionally major consequences. Ripples. That interests me.”

“Why?”

He paused. “Just does.”

We were the two unlikeliest people to charm information out of someone. Stunted human beings who got awkward every time we tried to express ourselves. I didn’t really care if we got much from Krissi, though, as the more I thought about Lyle’s theory, the more it seemed like bunk.

After another forty minutes of driving, the strip clubs started showing up: dismal, crouched blocks of cement, most without any real name, just neon signs shouting Live Girls! Live Girls! Which I guess is a better selling point than Dead Girls. I imagined Krissi Cates pulling into the gravel parking lot, getting ready to take off her clothes at a strip club that was so entirely generic. There’s something disturbing about not even bothering with a name. Whenever I see news stories about children who were killed by their parents, I think: But how could it be? They cared enough to give this kid a name, they had a moment—at least one moment—when they sifted through all the possibilities and picked one specific name for their child, decided what they would call their baby. How could you kill something you cared enough to name?

“This will be my first strip bar,” Lyle said, and gave his pert-lipped smile.

I pulled off the highway, to the left, as Krissi’s mother had advised—when I’d phoned the only club listed, a greasy man told me he thought Krissi was “around”—and rattled into a pasture-sized parking lot for three strip bars, all in a row. A gas station and trucker park sat at the far, far end: in the bright white glow, I saw the silhouettes of women scuttling like cats between the cabs, doors opening and shutting, bare legs kicking out as they leaned in to line up the next trick. I assumed most of the strippers ended up working the trucker park once the clubs were done with them.