Gillian Flynn - Dark Places

“Suck my dick,” Ben muttered.

“Wohhhh! The little guy is pissed!”

“Looks like he’s been in a fight,” the girl said.

“Dude, dude, you been in a fight?” The music had stopped entirely now. Alex had propped his guitar up against one icy wall and was smoking with the rest, grinning and bobbing his head. Their voices boomed up to the ceiling and echoed out, like fireworks.

Ben nodded.

“Yeah, who’d you fight?”

“No one you know.”

“Ah, I know pretty much everyone. Try me. Who was it, your little brother? You get beat up by your little brother?”

“Trey Teepano.”

“You lie,” Alex said. “Trey’d kick your ass.”

“You fought that crazy Indian mother fucker? Isn’t Trey part Indian?” said the boyfriend, ignoring Alex now.

“What the fuck that got to do with anything, Mike?” one of their friends asked. He sucked in some weed with a roach clip, the bright pink feather fluttering in the cold. The girl finished it off, cashed the joint, and snapped the roach clip back into her hair. One mousy curl tweaked out crookedly from her head.

“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.