Dark Places

not to breathe, knowing if I did it would be a gulp of air that would get me shot in the face, and so I held my breath as I felt their weight nudge the tree roots and Crystal said,
Could she have gone back to the house,
and Diondra said,
Keep looking, she’s quick,
like someone who knew, and they turned and ran deeper into the woods and I breathed intothe ground, swallowed earthy air, my face muffled against the dirt. For hours, the woods echoed with their screams of outrage, frustration—
this is not good, this is very bad
—and at some point the screaming stopped and then I waited more hours, til dawn, before I pulled myself out and hobbled through the trees toward home.

Ben Day
JANUARY 3, 1985
2:12 A.M.
    D iondra was still perched on Michelle’s body. Listening. Ben sat in a bundle, rocking himself while from the hallway came sounds of screaming and cursing, the axe hitting flesh, the shotgun and silence and then his mom going again, not hurt, maybe not hurt, but then he knew she was, she was making gibberish sounds,
whhllalalala
and
geeeeee,
and she was banging into the walls, and those heavy boots came walking down the hall, toward his mom’s room, and then the horrible sound of small hands trying to gain purchase, Debby’s hands scraping along the wooden floor and then the axe again and a loud release of air, and then came another shotgun blast, Diondra flinching on top of Michelle.
    Diondra’s nerves showed only in her hair, which twittered around her head in those thick curls. Otherwise she didn’t move. The steps paused outside the door, the door Ben had shut after the screaming began, the door he was hiding behind while his family lay outside, dying. They heard a wail—
goddammmmm it
—and then the steps ran, heavy and hard out of the house.
    Ben whispered across to Diondra, pointing at Michelle, “Is she OK?” and Diondra frowned like he’d insulted her. “No, she’s dead.”
    Ben couldn’t stand up. “Are you sure?”
    “I’m totally sure,” Diondra said, and unstraddled her, Michelle’s head lolling to the side, her open eyes on Ben. Her broken glasses lay next to her.
    Diondra walked over to Ben, her knees in front of his face. She held out a hand to him. “Come on, get up.”
    They opened the door, Diondra’s eyes widening like she was looking at a first snow. Blood was everywhere, Debby and his mom in a pool of it, the axe and shotgun dropped along the hallway, a knife farther down. Diondra walked over to look more closely, her reflection dark in the pond of blood that was still flowing toward him.
    “Holy shit,” she whispered. “Maybe we really did fuck with the Devil.”
    Ben ran to the kitchen, wanting to vomit in the sink, the heaving feeling comforting,
get it up get it all up,
the way his mom used to say, holding his forehead over the toilet when he was a kid.
Get all that bad stuff out
. But nothing happened, so he staggered toward the phone and there was Diondra, stopping him.
    “You going to tell on me? For Michelle?”
    “We need to call the police,” he said, his eye on his mom’s stained coffee cup, some Folgers still at the bottom.
    “Where’s the little one?” Diondra asked. “Where’s the baby?”
    “Oh shit! Libby!” He ran back down the hallway, trying not to look at the bodies, pretending they were just obstacles to jump over, and he looked inside his mom’s room and felt the chill, saw the breeze fluttering the curtains and the open window. He came back to the kitchen.
    “She’s gone,” he said. “She made it out, she’s gone.”
    “Well, go bring her back.”
    Ben turned to the door, about to run outside, and then stopped. “Bring her back, why?”
    Diondra crossed to him, took his hands and put them on her belly. “Ben, do you not see how all this was meant to be? You think it’s a coincidence that we do the ritual tonight, that we need money, and that—pow!—a man kills your family. You will inherit everything for your mom’s life insurance now, whatever you want to do, youwant to go live in California, on the beach, go live in Florida, we can do it.”
    Ben had never said he wanted to live in California or Florida. Diondra had said that.
    “We are a family now, we can be a real family. But Libby is a problem. If she saw something.”
    “What if she didn’t?”
    But Diondra was already shaking her head no, “Clean break, baby. It’s too dangerous. Time to be brave.”
    “But if we need to get out of town tonight, I can’t