When Things Get Dark

by Ellen Datlow

  Lizzie could never tell him she’d gotten stuck in her Beetle with nothing but Red Vines. That was more frightening than the dark. She’d been raised practical—she knew how fast everything went downhill once you were starved out. And her father had never liked the Beetle; said it was impossible to take seriously, that you couldn’t do any hauling in a car like that. Lizzie didn’t care. The magazine ads for the thing made it sound like women couldn’t be trusted to use the fucking brakes, but she’d wanted a car she could push herself, if it came to it, and it certainly had.

  Four hours later, when the truck pulled over and the guy with an umbrella in hand slid out and jogged across the road, Lizzie made herself look welcoming. She was hungry, and alone, and her father helped women on the side of the road when he could. This guy had a face like a father. She couldn’t be rude to a man who wanted to help. And what were her options, out here alone, if things got bad? She could brain him with the wrench, probably. She clamped it under one armpit, so she could reach it if she had to.

  “Looks like you could use a ride to civilization,” he said, grinning. He seemed like a man who had daughters.

  She left the sleeping bag. She’d warm up soon.

  * * *

  Betty frowned up at the motel. In the rain, the sign bled into the air like someone had draped a blue scarf across a lamp. She’d been to a party last year where the girls who lived in the house did that. Very bohemian, to stand around in red and blue light, watching everyone laughing and talking loudly over some sitar record, standing close enough to touch each other. Those bohemian girls touched any boy they liked. Fearless. Tacky. Fearless.

  Her car had begun to make wet rattling noises as the storm got worse, and rather than risk getting stranded on the road—you couldn’t trust any man at all who you met on the road, not even a policeman, her brother had said—she had pulled over here, where from the road the sign had looked bright and safe.

  She shifted in her loafers; her skirt brushed her calves. This motel didn’t look like the sign had looked from the road. It looked haunted, she thought, before she could get hold of her imagination. She’d promised her brother she wouldn’t lose her head about going all alone. It was only five hours to her sister’s; without the rain she’d already be there, and when she heard trouble she pulled over right away, just as her brother had told her. Never be stuck on the road alone, that was the rule.

  Two of the rooms had lights on, yellow teeth in an empty mouth.

  The night clerk had opened the door when she pulled in. Now he stood frowning into the drizzle, glancing down the row of rooms like he could figure out her hesitation.

  Behind the drapes in one of the occupied rooms, a man’s silhouette paused like a shadow play. She could feel his eyes on her, even from here. Betty wasn’t like those slender bohemian girls, who made up their eyes and smiled unkindly at her for showing up with white gloves and her hair in a French twist, but she knew what an unkind glance from a man felt like. You had to, if you were alone.

  “I’ll take a room, please,” she said, already knowing whose room she’d end up beside. The clerk looked like the sort who enjoyed making a woman uncomfortable.

  So Betty didn’t stay there. She was a university girl, and she knew better than to stay in a place with men who couldn’t be trusted. She’d left that bohemian party after an hour, to make sure she could catch a bus home before any of the boys thought she was the sort to touch a man she barely knew. She knew when to get out of a bad situation.

  There was a restaurant beside the motel—almost empty, but warm and well-lit. There were only two other tables, and the waiter appeared silently at her elbow any time Betty even thought about wanting something, like magic, like the place was a Michelin star; she never even felt him watching her.

  * * *

  Liz figured it was just as well her husband wasn’t coming with her— he got so sour whenever she was distracted on a home visit. He’d be sour with her gone, too, but the farther away she was, the less that bothered her. If there was something he didn’t like doing, it was always better to leave him where he was. She was in for an argument when she got back, but at least she’d have a little quiet on the drive.

  “You shouldn’t be starting out on a long drive so late,” he said. He hadn’t come home with the car until seven, and now the last of the light was going. “You shouldn’t even be going to this thing, he’s barely your brother.”

  That was an old fight, and it was already too dark for them to have it again. Her father had made it clear he expected her there for the pictures. It wasn’t going to rain until tomorrow, and the headlamps were in good condition. She didn’t like it—driving at night was frightening for a woman alone—but she had to get back home. Graduation wouldn’t wait, not even for the rain.

  “I’ll be all right,” she said.

  She said it like a promise; she’d learned a long time ago that she could only say that when it sounded like she was promising something to him.

  (He’d come home one night last winter and seen her crying about Rachel, their setter. A car hit it. That was fine with Liz, honestly; the dog had been her husband’s idea, and it ran after cars so often it was obvious what would happen. But she’d named it after Rachel from high school, who’d had the same hair, so red Liz could always see her in the crowd as she walked away from school back wherever girls like that went, making a horizon when Rachel leaned close to spy on her notes.

  “Shouldn’t have named it after a person, what’d I tell you,” he’d said, slamming the two videos he’d rented onto the kitchen table. He’d decided it was date night, and now she’d ruined it by crying and he couldn’t enjoy his surprise and she really wished the dog had waited a day to die. She was so terrified by how it sounded—like he knew her—that she said, “I’ll be all right,” so brightly she’d started laughing at herself even though he just scowled harder and took one of the tapes upstairs to watch by himself.)

  He didn’t move from the couch when she brought her suitcase out. He threw the keys so hard they stung her palm.

  Liz was so nervous she had to stop halfway down the driveway to stretch her shaking hands. She wasn’t even afraid—there were interstates, there were lights, there were pullovers and policemen. It was just that going meant giving in to something, and staying meant giving in to something else, and what she really wanted was to take the car and drive wherever she felt like and not have anyone ask things of her ever again, which was the kind of thing she’d had tantrums about before she got taught better than to have them, and it was all stuck so high up in her throat she thought she would vomit.

  She watched a few exits pass, clutched the wheel with white knuckles, but she didn’t stop. She had to get home. They expected her.

  * * *

  Ellie smoked a cigarette after her boyfriend left, for her nerves, before she started cleaning up the books.

  At first he’d thrown glasses—well, at first he hadn’t thrown anything, but that was before Ellie realized that once you get settled with a man it gets harder to keep him happy—and it had been awful, until she worried they’d have to drink water out of coffee mugs. But he had better control of himself now. Now he reached for her books when he was angry; they didn’t break, so it was more economical, and it was much easier to pick them up than to sweep glass off the floor twice a month.

  She twisted back her dark hair so it wouldn’t fall into her eyes. It was too long, and it felt longer every time she saw a girl in the street with her hair bobbed, but he liked it long; “Virginal,” he said, and laughed when she didn’t laugh. That was back at high school—before she dropped out, after she’d given up the goods.

  She didn’t rush, because once he was out at a speakeasy that was it for the night, and thinking of all the time she had to fill made her think— sudden and so wild she nearly dropped her armful of books—of getting in the car while he was out, turning onto the first long road she came to and driving west until this entire city vanished and he could n
ever reach her. She’d start over from nothing. (She wouldn’t even take the car—he might not chase her, but he’d definitely chase the Ford—but she knew how unsafe it was to get on a bus with strange men.)

  The impression rose as she tidied, until the broom felt like the gear shift and she had goosebumps from the breeze. She could make it to Chicago without stopping. There were boarding houses there. Chicago was lousy with boarding houses—the paper talked about how awful it was that so many young women lived in them alone.

  Ellie’s hair was bobbed, in this imaginary city; bobbed hair with bangs, and a long necklace she wore at night to go watch Theda Bara, and a job as a social secretary. Dancing at night if she wanted. Maybe she would really go, she thought as she set the plant back. Maybe it was time.

  She was packing when he came home.

  * * *

  The first thing Bet did when she realized her car was screwed and her cell phone was dead was to find a scenic pullover still visible from the road, with working streetlights. Then she jammed her jacket in the back window like she’d already gone for help, and crouched out of sight on the passenger’s side so she could still reach the horn, just in case.

  She wasn’t an idiot. Dudes on the road would say they could help you or offer you rides and then you ended up like that girl from Robinson High who went missing from the school parking lot after a field trip, and they found her three weeks later in the river. Maggie something. Meredith? She had long blond hair and the picture on the front page of the city paper—not the little paper you got at the post office, the big one that everybody got delivered—was of her in a princess dress from Into the Woods, like the cops wanted to make it clear she was special. Not special enough for the guy who kidnapped her to dump her body somewhere besides the fucking river, but still.

  For a while it was a whole Thing just to go outside. Everybody had decided that killing one young woman wasn’t going to be the end of it, like killing young women was something everybody was secretly itching to do and after somebody broke the seal on that all the adults assumed it was open season. When Bet went to the library to research her history project, she had to call her mom when she got there and again when she got home, like she couldn’t drive a mile without being snatched.

  (She’d decided to make her history project about old ads that made women sound totally hopeless. She’d seen an ad for a blender and thought it was hilarious, and it was faster to read ads than articles. The librarians loved the idea. There was so much terrible food; she’d thought it would be fun.

  It sucked, actually. After seeing the Volkswagen one that bragged about all the cheap replaceable parts with a picture of a smashed-up car—“Sooner or later, your wife will drive home one of the best reasons for owning a Volkswagen,” it said; “You can conveniently replace anything she uses to stop the car. Including the brakes”—she thought about selling hers. She hadn’t. It was a new Beetle, so it wasn’t the same. People these days knew better. History was just history.)

  They never caught the guy who killed what’s-her-name. After six months, everybody acted like it was a serial killer who left town and it was a near miss for everybody else. But there were still a lot of curfews that never let up, and prom was moved from a hotel to the gym. When Bet left for college, all the dads on her block frowned at their daughters for leaving. Bet’s dad had bailed on them when she was four, and she’d been happy to skip all that shit—dads got weird about things. A girl in her biology class had gone to a purity ball with her dad in seventh grade and she looked like she hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep since.

  A dad can kill his daughter and probably never kill again, but Bet was smart enough not to say. Nobody wanted to hear that.

  That fall, Bet waved to her mother and got in her car with pepper spray in the ashtray and that was it. In three years she’d used it twice—some dudes just did not want to hear “No,” and so you had to explain it again—and her car had never broken down before, but it was fine. This was part of having a car. This was just life. She wasn’t somebody’s shitty wife in a Volkswagen ad from forty years ago. The fear was just some bullshit that somebody else’s dad had shaken into her when she wasn’t looking.

  When the cop pulled up and knocked on the window, she was so startled that she grabbed the pepper spray, pointed it right at him. “Shit!”

  But he just laughed, bending closer and narrowing his eyes like this was a game they’d agreed on, and shook his finger at the pepper spray. For a second Bet went cold all over, but she pushed it aside. She’d have sprayed anyone else, but—he was a cop. What was she supposed to do, say no? Spray him in the mouth and bolt onto the interstate?

  She left it in her car when she got out to meet him. No point in giving him something to arrest her for.

  * * *

  The woman’s hair was wet through. There were leaves tangled in it, from where she had been dragged across the ground. When the coroner turned her over, it made the most horrible sound Eliza ever heard.

  The woman was naked, except one shoe dangling off her right foot. Her back was torn up so badly the coroner hissed sympathetically. Eliza clasped her hands behind her back.

  “Bet you a dollar that’s deliberate,” one of the detectives said to the other, pointing at the shoe. “No way it stayed on the whole time.”

  “So what, we’re looking at the Cinderella Killer? Jesus Christ.” The other one rubbed at his eye. “Bob, any ideas where she was murdered?”

  The coroner winced and glanced over at Eliza. She didn’t know why. Her hands were shaking, but that was more from the cold by now than the surprise. There were so many empty places, so many shallow ponds and stretches of woods, so many trucks, so many roads. You could kill a woman practically anywhere.

  One of the detectives was peering through the trees. This was the narrowest part of the woods behind her house; she’d worn a path in it, a few years back, thinking about going down to the road one night and hitchhiking out. Her brother had caught her one night. She hadn’t tried again.

  “There’s that junction a few miles down the road,” he said.

  The other one sighed. “Fuck. Women are always trying to travel alone.” He turned to Eliza, one sharp look up and down. “Did you hear anything?”

  She hadn’t heard a thing. She’d slept deeply the whole week. Her brother hadn’t been back home for five days; it had been so quiet, all that time.

  * * *

  Elizabeth’s husband loved movies with ghosts in them. He saw as many as he could. Good, old-fashioned ones, not the new ones. He took her to the kind where everyone still dressed for dinner, except most of the women were dead.

  It had been such an awful trip—her mother was sick, and of course she couldn’t go alone (everyone knew what happened to women who traveled alone), so he’d driven her. But there was nothing for him to do while she nursed her mother and tried not to be obvious about crying, in the kitchen making coffee for everyone.

  “Buck up,” her husband told her sternly, the one time that weekend he caught her at it, and she’d nodded and swallowed and wiped her eyes. They hadn’t come down here to snivel. It was just that her mother was dying, and she was so afraid.

  “I’ve been wanting to see this one,” he said on their way back, and pulled into the cinema two towns north of home. It was starting to rain; he hated driving in the rain, because he wasn’t good on slippery roads, and never let her drive when he was angry. She thought it was a little mean—so late, after such a long day, in a town she barely knew, and a movie about something so dreadful—but she’d been thinking of ghosts all weekend anyway. One more wasn’t going to matter.

  So Elizabeth sat next to him and watched translucent women in white wandering the haunted manor at night doing whatever they wanted, and thought how funny it was to be an actor, having to pretend to be afraid.

  She was never scared at movies. Sometimes he got mad (“Jesus, what is it with you, you made of lead? What’s the point of a scary movie if you won’t ev
en be afraid?”) so occasionally she held his hand, because it made him happy to think she was a little frightened.

  This time she skipped it, even when he held his hand out, even when she could see in the line of his jaw that he was angry. But it had been a long day. She was allowed to have long days.

  The women onscreen were talking about men. Women were always talking about men, or thinking about men, everywhere you went. One of the men was a killer. One of the women was going to die. Everybody seemed to know already, despite all the music and the wandering around.

  Her husband subscribed to a movie magazine he told the mailman was for her; he told her a lot about making movies, as if she hadn’t read it herself. Sometimes an issue had photos of the actors sitting in their cafeteria in costume, the monsters and the women side by side, eating dry hamburgers and pretending not to see the camera while someone talked about how everyone got along so well.

  Elizabeth thought it was awfully odd to have to scream and faint and do that kind of thing with people after you’d been eating lunch with them—she couldn’t even hide it whenever she was mad at her husband, he always knew a mile away and the whole house filled with a dark cloud until she apologized—but that’s why she wasn’t an actress. She’d pick whatever role was easiest and line up for hamburgers. Probably the ghosts. The women who played ghosts only had to raise their arms to show off their hands and make sure the trains of their nightgowns kept out of the way. The actresses who stayed alive had to run and breathlessly explain themselves to men who didn’t believe them and scream and scream and scream. The dead had no fear. You could point as many fingers as you wanted.

  The murderer was finally cornered. Once he was dead, the ghost women vanished. (Definitely ghosts, she thought. They got to go home early.)

  His fist pressed against his leg the whole rest of the movie, as if Elizabeth would want to hold it eventually and he wanted her to know she’d missed her chance.