Dark Places

her from the room, Patty turned around to see Krissi Cates in her mother’s arms, her blond hair over one eye. The girl looked at her and said simply, “Ben is going to hell.”

Libby Day
NOW
    I ’d been commissioned to find Runner, but all my feverish, ambitious action of the past week was slopped on the floor next to my bed, like a soiled nightgown. I couldn’t get up, even when I heard the kids make their sleepy duckwalk past my house. I pictured them in big rubber rainboots, clomping along, leaving rounded footprints in the March muck, and I still couldn’t move.
    I’d woken up from a miserable dream, the kind you keep telling yourself doesn’t mean anything, shouldn’t bother you because it’s just a dream, just a dream. It started back at the farm, but it wasn’t the farm really, it was far too bright, too tidy to be the farm, but it was and in the distance, against an orange horizon, Runner was galloping toward the farm, hooting like an Old West cowboy. As he got closer—down our hill, through the gate—I saw that his gallop was actually a rickety, bumpalong motion because his horse had wheels. Its top half was flesh, but the bottom was metal, spindly, like a hospital gurney. The horse whinnied at me in panic, its muscled neck trying to separate from the metal below. Runner leapt down, the creature rolling away, one wheel busted, an irritating grocery cart ofan animal. It came to a stop near a tree stump, its eyes going white, still struggling to pull itself apart.
    “Don’t worry about that.” Runner grinned at the horse. “I paid for it.”
    “You got a bad deal,” I said.
    Runner’s jaw tightened and he stood too close to me.
    “Your mom says it’s fine,” he muttered.
    That’s right!
I thought,
My mom is alive
. The idea felt solid, like a pebble in my pocket. My mom was alive, and how foolish I’d been, all these years thinking otherwise.
    “You’d better fix your hand first,” Runner said, pointing at my stumped ring finger. “I brought you these. Hope you like them better than the horse.” He held up a flimsy velvet bag, the kind used for Scrabble, and shook it.
    “Oh, I love the horse,” I said, batting away my ill will. The horse had torn its hindquarters from the metal and was bleeding a meaty red oil onto the ground.
    From his bag, Runner poured eight or nine fingers. Every time I picked one that looked like mine, I realized it was a pinky finger, a man’s finger, a finger of the wrong color or size.
    Runner was pursing his lips at me. “Just take one, OK? It’s not a big deal.”
    I picked one that was vaguely similar to my lost one, and Runner sewed it to my hand, the ripped horse screaming now behind us, a woman’s scream, terrified and angry. Runner threw a shovel at it, and it broke in two, pulsing on the ground, unable to move.
    “There,” Runner said with a lip smack. “Good as new.”
    Between my two girlish fingers, a bulbous big toe squatted, tied on with lazy, thick stitches, and suddenly Runner’s girlfriend Peggy was there and said, “Honey, her momma’s not here, remember? We killed her.”
    And Runner smacked his head like a man who’d forgotten to bring home milk and said, “That’s right. That’s right. I got all them girls, except Libby.” We three stood blinking at each other, the air turning nasty. Then Runner went back to the horse, and picked up the shovel, which had become an axe.
    I flung myself awake, one arm cracking my bedside lamp to thefloor. It was barely dawn when I turned and watched the glowing lamp on its side, wondered if the lightbulb would burn a hole in the carpet. Now it was morning and still I couldn’t move.
    But the light was on in Ben’s room. My first real thought: that night the light was on in Ben’s room and someone was talking. I wanted to stop thinking about it but I always came back to it. Why would a crazed killer go into Ben’s room, close the door, turn on the light and chat?
    The light was on in Ben’s room. Forget the other stuff: a vengeful Lou Cates, a debt-crazed Runner, a pack of goons who wanted to teach Runner a lesson by murdering his family. Forget the bellowing voice I heard, which—fine, I guess—may not have been Ben’s. But he wasn’t home when we went to bed, and when I woke up the light was on. I remember a flush of relief because Ben was home because his light was on and the fight was over between him and my mom at least for today because the light was on and he was talking