I connected with something, enough to knock her off me for a second, just a small bone crunch, but enough that my fist stung and then I was pulling myself across the floor, trying to find a chair, trying to goddam see and then her hands grabbed my ankle, Not this time, sweetheart, and she was holding my foot inside my sock, but it was my right foot, the one with the missing toes and so it was harder to hold on to, the socks never fit right and suddenly I was up and left her holding my sock, and still no Crystal yet, no gun and I was running away toward the back of the house, but I couldn’t see, couldn’t keep a straight line, and instead I veered to my right, through that open door and fell face-first down the flight of stairs to the cold of the basement, me going slack like a child, not resisting, the right way to fall, and so by the time I hit the bottom I was back up, in the dank smell. My vision flickered like an old TV—off then on—and then I could just make out the shadow of Diondra lingering in the rectangle of light at the top of the stairs. Then she shut the door on me.
I could hear them upstairs, Crystal coming back, “Are we going to have to—”
“Well—now we are.”
“I can’t believe, I just, it just came out of my mouth, so stupid—”
Me running in loops around the basement, trying to find a way out: three walls of concrete and one wall toward the back, covered to the ceiling in junk. Diondra and Crystal were not worried about me, they were jabbering at each other behind the door upstairs, me pulling away at the pile, looking for a place to hide, trying to find something I could use as a weapon.
“—doesn’t really know what happened, not for sure—”
I opened a trunk I could hide in, and die in.
“—knows, she’s not stupid—”
I started tossing away a hat-rack, two bicycle wheels, the wall of junk shifting with each thing I burrowed past.
“—I’ll do it, it was my fault—”
I hit a mountain of old boxes, sagging like the ones I had under the stairs. Push those away and out falls an old pogo stick, too heavy for me to wield.
“—I’ll do it, it’s fine—”
The voices angry-guilty-angry-guilty-decisive.
The basement was bigger than the house itself, a good Midwest basement made to withstand tornados, made to store vegetables, deep and dirty. I pulled junk out and just kept going, and as I squirmed behind a massive bureau I found an old door. It was a whole nother room, the serious part of the tornado cellar, and yes, a dead end, but no time to think, got to keep going, and now light was illuminating the basement, Diondra and Crystal were coming and I shut the door behind me and stepped into the narrow room, more stuff stored there—old record players, a crib, a mini-fridge, all stacked to the sides, not much more than another twenty feet to run, and behind me I could hear more of the junk pile collapsing in front of the door, but that didn’t help much, they’d be through that in a few seconds.
“Just shoot that way, she’s got to be that way,” Crystal saying and Diondra shushing her, their feet heavy on the last stairs, taking their time, Diondra kicking things out of the way as they moved toward the door, closing me off like I was a rabid animal that needed to be put down, Diondra not even all that focused, saying suddenly: “That pot roast was too salty.” Inside my little room, I noticed the faintest light in the corner. Coming from somewhere in the ceiling.
I pushed toward it, stumbling over a red wagon, the women laughing when they heard me fall, Crystal yelling, “Now you’re going to have a bruise,” Diondra knocking things away, and I was underneath the light, it was the opening of a wind turbine, the ventilation shaft for the tornado shelter and it was too small for most people to fit but not me, and I started piling things to reach it, to get my fingers to the top so I could pull myself up and Diondra and Crystal were almost past the debris. I tried to stand on an old baby buggy, but the bottom gave out, I ripped up my leg, started stacking things: a warped diaper table, and then some encyclopedias, and me on top of the encyclopedias, feeling them want to slide away, but I got my arms up through the shaft, breaking through the slats of the rusty turbine, one big push and I was breathing the cold night air, ready for the next push to get me all the way out and then Crystal was grabbing my foot, trying to pull me back down, me kicking her, scrambling. Screams beneath me, Shoot her! and Crystal screaming I got her, and her weight pulling me down, me losing leverage, half in and out of the ground, and then I gave one good kick with my bad foot and jabbed my heel right in her face, the nose going, a wolf-wail beneath me, and Diondra yelling Oh baby and me free, back up, my arms bearing deep red scratches from the top of the shaft, but up, over and onto the ground and as I was heaving for air, breathing in the mud, I could already hear Diondra going, Get up top, get up top.
My car keys were gone, lost somewhere inside, and so I turned and ran for the woods, a limping trot, like something with three legs, one sock on, one sock off, mucking through the mud, stinking of manure in the moonlight, and then I turned, feeling almost good, and saw they were out of the house, they were behind me, running after me—white pale faces each leaking blood—but I made it to the forest. My head was whirling, my eyes unable to hold on to anything: a tree, the sky, a rabbit spooking away from me. Libby! behind me. I went deeper into the woods, about ready to pass out, and as my eyes started going dark, I found a gargantuan oak. It was balanced on a four-foot drop-off, gnarled roots radiating out like the sun, and I climbed down in the dirt and burrowed my way into an old animal den, under one of the roots as thick as a grown man. I dug into the cold, wet ground, a little thing in a little hollow, shivering but silent, hiding, which was something I could do.
The flashlights came closer, hitting the tree trunk, the women clambering over me, a flash of skirt, a glimpse of one red freckled leg, She has to be here, she can’t have gone that far, and me trying 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 into the 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 DayJANUARY 3, 1985
2:12 A.M.
Diondra 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, you want 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 wait around for the life insurance.”
“Well, of course we can’t leave tonight. Now we need to stay, it would look suspicious if you left. But you see what a gift this is— people are going to forget all about the Krissi Cates bullshit, because you’re the victim now. People will want to be good to you. I’ll try to hide this,” she fingered her belly, “for another month, somehow. I’ll wear a coat all the time or something. And then we get the money, and we fucking fly. Free. You’ll never have to eat shit again.”
“What about Michelle?”
“I got her diary,” Diondra said, showing him the new journal with the Minnie Mouse cover. “We’re cool.”
“But what do we say about Michelle?”
“You say the crazy man did it, like the rest. Like Libby too.”
“But what about—”
“And Ben, you can never say that you know me, not til we leave. I can’t be linked to this in anyway. Do you understand? You want me to give birth to our baby in prison, you know what happens then, it goes into foster care, you will never see it again. You want that for your baby, for the mother of your child? You still have a chance to be a big boy here, be a man. Now go get me Libby.”
He took the big utility flashlight and went out into the cold calling Libby’s name. She was a quick kid, a good runner, she could have made it all the way down their road and toward the highway by now. Or she could be hiding in her usual place down by the pond. He crunched through the snow, wondering if this was all a bad trip. He’d go back to the house and it would be just like it was earlier, when he heard the snick of the lock and everything was normal, everyone asleep, a regular night.
Then he saw Diondra crouched on top of Michelle like some giant predator bird, them both shaking in the dark, and he knew nothing was going to be OK and he also knew he wasn’t going to bring Libby back to the house. He brushed his flashlight over the tops of the reeds and saw a flash of her red hair amidst the bland yellow and he yelled, “Libby, stay where you are, sweetheart!” and turned and ran back to the house.
Diondra was chopping the walls, chopping the couch, screaming with her teeth bared. She’d smeared the walls with blood, she’d written things. She’d tracked blood in her men’s shoes all over, she’d eaten Rice Krispies in the kitchen and left trails of food behind her, and she was leaving fingerprints everywhere, and she kept yelling, “Make it look good, make it look real good,” but Ben knew what it was, it was the bloodlust, the same feeling he got, that flare of rage and power that made you feel so strong.
He cleaned up the footprints pretty good, he thought, although it was hard to tell which were Diondra’s and which were the man’s— who the fuck was the man? He wiped everything she’d touched—the lightswitches, the axe, the counters, everything in his room, Diondra appearing in the doorway, telling him, “I wiped down Michelle’s neck,” Ben trying not to think, don’t think. He left the words on the walls, didn’t know how to fix that. She’d gotten at his mother with the axe, his mom had strange new gashes, deep, and he wondered how he could be so calm, and when his bones would melt and he’d collapse, and he told himself to pull it fucking together, be a fucking man, do it be a man do what needs to be done be a man, and he ushered Diondra out of the house and the whole place already smelled like earth and death. When he closed his eyes he saw a red sun and he thought again, Annihilation.
Libby DayNOW
Iwas going to lose toes again. I sat outside a closed gas station for almost an hour, rubbing my ringing feet, waiting for Lyle. Every time a car went by I ducked behind the building in case it was Crystal and Diondra, out searching for me. If they found me now, I couldn’t run. They’d have me and it’d be done. I’d wanted to die for years, but not lately and definitely not by those bitches.
I had called Lyle collect from a phone outside the gas station I was sure wouldn’t work, and he’d started the conversation before the operator even got off the line: Did you hear? Did you hear? I did not hear. I don’t want to hear. Just come get me. I hung up before he started in with his questions.
