My Heart Is a Chainsaw

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “Where the hot girl’s gonna live and take long naked showers,” Jade says for him.

  The dimple in his cheek gives away how right she is.

  “You can pour the concrete so the top’s level,” Shooting Glasses continues, doing his hand left to right in case “flat” is a new concept to her. “The base, not so much. It doesn’t have to be so flat, I mean. But you do want to dig down to pour. Bedrock works best, and like you were saying, it’s shallow as shit over there.”

  “The bedrock you mean,” Jade says.

  “Yeah, what—?”

  “The lake is deepest over there, because that side of the valley’s steeper than over here. Forget about it, sorry.”

  She Theo Mondragons her hand for him to go on, and he does: “I wasn’t running the backhoe, Telly was. Just scraping back and forth with the boom. He’d loosen a big rock then push it out of the way. One or two of them caught the slope, went all the way down to the lake. It was like a game. Anyway, we had this leaf blower, I guess. It was so one of us could blast it around after Telly’d scraped an area pretty clean. So we could know what there was still left to do.”

  “Where’d you plug it in, this leaf blower?”

  “It was gas.”

  Jade nods, chides herself for stopping him again.

  “Anyway,” he says, “Greyson had his safety glasses on, would step in right after Telly lifted out, and he’d—” In the confines of the cab, Shooting Glasses mimes sweeping a great windy nozzle back and forth at foot-level, like herding mice with air. Jade almost has to grin, the picture’s so clear. “I was standing right beside his dumb ass, right? But I had my eyes closed, because Grey was spraying my legs. It was hilarious to him, I guess. He was always screwing around, was an accident waiting to happen. But I had to like close my eyes from it, all that little shit blasting up. Then my pants legs just went still. That was the first way I knew something had happened. At first I thought he’d maybe run out of gas.”

  “And this is in the daytime?” Jade asks, hardly believing any slasher could be so brazen as to take someone with the sun shining down on them, people all around.

  Shooting Glasses nods like that’s not the interesting part. “He’d fallen through,” he says. “I guess—I guess we were on top of a cave? I don’t know how Telly’s backhoe hadn’t crumbled it all in already. But Greyson, man, the leaf blower was still there, wedged across the crack like he’d tried to hold on to it. It was still running. But he was gone, man. Fucking fell his ass all the way in, whatever.”

  “One of you go down there for him?”

  Shooting Glasses winces, having to be there again.

  “We dropped a flashlight down to him,” he says. “Fifteen feet? Probably not even that. It wasn’t a big-ass cavern or anything. Just a little hollowed-out place, maybe fifteen by fifteen. Your history teacher’s right about it being all caves over there. Like fucking Swiss cheese.”

  The reason there’s pockets of air in Swiss cheese, Jade knows but doesn’t say, is that there’s corruption in there, eating all around itself.

  “But you got him out,” Jade prompts.

  Shooting Glasses nods.

  “How?”

  Shooting Glasses huffs air through his nose in a sick laugh. “We had to loop him like a goddamn pig,” he says, wiping his lips with the back of his sleeve. “He kept—he kept running away from the light we’d shine down. Like, running on all fours, like he’d forgot he was even a person.”

  “Head injury?”

  “Finally we shined all our lights into this one kind of corner he kept running to. So he had to cross under the hole to get out of the light, right? We dropped a cargo net on him, and when he tried to fight out of it, it tangled him up. He fought it the whole way, was making these… these like noises, I don’t know.”

  “Had he been bitten?”

  “What? No. I don’t know, shit. By what? He couldn’t breathe, though. Like, hypo—no. What do they call it?”

  “Hyperventilating.”

  “Yeah, that. Rabbit-breathing, the kind where your heart’s about to explode. And he was all curled up, kind of spasmy, his fingers crooked but not really broken. I don’t think they were broken. You don’t remember the day the ambulance came?”

  Jade shakes her head no, she doesn’t.

  “When was this exactly?” she asks.

  Shooting Glasses shrugs, says like dredging it up, “It was before you… that night, I mean.”

  “Right before I cut my wrist out on the water?”

  “The weekend before?”

  “You found this car the morning after?”

  He looks across at her like how could she know this?

  “Finish,” she tells him.

  “What?”

  “Greyson Brust. Where’d Deacon Samuels hide him?”

  “Hide?”

  “Stash, store, house,” Jade clarifies, not sure how else to say it.

  “That—the old people’s home over on—”

  “Pleasant Valley Assisted Living.”

  “When we went to see him that… that night, he—god. He was still walking on all fours, right? Like he was thinking like a bug or something.”

  “That night?”

  “Night we were burning the trash? You gave us that big lecture on… whatever?”

  “Slashers.”

  “He’d like stop when you talked to him, but it wasn’t the words he was hearing. I don’t know what the hell he was hearing.”

  “Greyson Brust,” Jade says, trying that name on again in all its glory.

  Did he—did he get bit by something or someone in that cave, get infected, and now was sneaking out his window at Pleasant Valley every night, killing elk and people the same? Was this a supernatural slasher, even though it’s so long after the Golden Age that it might as well be Bronze? Jade’s heart thumps with possibility.

  “You think it’s him?” Shooting Glasses asks.

  “I need to look at his feet,” Jade says. “Did you have to sign the visitor log thing to see him, do you remember?”

  “Not anymore.”

  Jade lets her thoughts keep rolling—Greyson Brust howling at the moon, his maw bloody, fingers sharp and violent—but then: “Beep, beep,” she says, backing up. “What? Thought you said he was walking on all fours when you went to see him that night?”

  “That night, yeah,” Shooting Glasses says. “In March. He passed in April.”

  “What from?”

  Shooting Glasses shrugs like Does it really even matter?

  Jade supposes it doesn’t.

  “Eight hundred dollars,” Shooting Glasses says again. “That’s what we sold him for. Eight hundred fucking dollars each.”

  “What did Deacon Samuels say?”

  “About Greyson?”

  “About all of it.”

  He kind of squinches his face up, says, “He told us not to tell that other guy.”

  “Theo Mondragon.”

  “It was the foundation for his house,” Shooting Glasses says, his tone suggesting this is obvious to him, anyway. “Mr. Samuels, he—he said every house has a story, right? That it’s not always important that everybody know every little part of it. What you don’t know, it doesn’t matter so much.”

  “What happened to the cave?” Jade says.

  Shooting Glasses pulls the parking lights back on, washing the galvanized chain-link diamond lattice in front of them pale yellow. “We already had the rig and the framing out there to pour the foundation later in the week,” he says. “It was easy. We just—” he mimes directing a crusty-grey tube into a crack in the ground, cement slurping down. The exact same motion Greyson Brust must have been doing with the leaf blower. Except now they were blowing stone.

  “You filled it?” Jade says.

  “You can’t lay a foundation over that kind of hollowed out space,” Shooting Glasses says.

  “It could be him, then,” Jade says.

  “Greyson?” Shooting Glasses says. “Told
you, he’s—”

  “Dead, yeah,” Jade says. What she doesn’t say, at least out loud, is Theo. Because she doesn’t want to mess this up. But it is him who was wronged, here, whose house is now built on a shaky foundation. It is him who had a score to settle with Deacon Samuels. Yeah, “Greyson Brust” is pretty killer for a slasher name. But “Theo Mondragon” definitely has that ring, too, doesn’t it? And, if it’s him—when it’s him—there’s that added twist of the boogeyman being the final girl’s own father, which is perfect for a mystery slasher, no Golden Age supernatural shit necessary.

  It’s not as grand, is even kind of grubby, but it’s pretty perfect, too. Especially since Jade had been right about him from the get-go. It hadn’t just been paranoia. He wouldn’t be the first Black slasher—Candyman, Jimmy Bones, Machete Joe—but he’d be one of hardly any, anyway.

  “You gonna breathe?” Shooting Glasses asks from his side of the car, which is approximately fourteen miles away at the moment. And Jade isn’t sure she can breathe right now, really. She’s spent the last couple of days feeling sorry for herself, not sure what to do now that Letha won’t accept she’s the final girl. But this washes all of that away, doesn’t it?

  Saturday’s three days away now, leaving her one day for reconnaissance, one day to sneak over to Terra Nova, get a sight line on Theo Mondragon, see if he’s sharpening a blade or not, and one day to show that blade to Letha somehow.

  It feels good to be back on track.

  It sucked getting banned from Saturday’s big party on the water, yeah, and she felt like a traitor, not being able to sit all the way through any of her slashers, but that’s just because she’s in an actual hand-to-God slasher. Not at the front, but not in the final tally yet, either. Just hanging around in the between-parts, which is right where she wants to be. With all her viewing, all her self-assigned homework, all she’s ever seen with slashers is the main part of the story, right? The part everybody knows, the final cut. But now she’s moving through the hidden parts, the connective tissue. The real guts, the actual terra nova.

  “Watch a few movies, take a few notes,” she says in her best Stu.

  “You okay?” Shooting Glasses asks.

  It’s the same thing he asked her last time, right before she bailed. And now she’s got her finger on the door handle again.

  “I didn’t do it because I wanted to die,” Jade says, the rise of scar tissue on her left wrist practically glowing in the sleeve of her coveralls. They’re watching ghost-versions of each other in the windshield now. Ghost versions that can waver away with one wrong breath. “I did it because I wanted to be part of the movie. Part of all of them. What was the day that it happened, you remember?”

  “Friday, we were just off work.”

  “Date, I mean.”

  “March?”

  “The number.”

  Shooting Glasses squints, trying to dredge it up, finally gloms onto it, says, “Friday the thirteenth, yeah. Radio kept talking about it.”

  Jade nods once, says, “Jason was supposed to rise up behind me, pull me across to Crystal Lake. Things make more sense there.”

  “That’s that old camp?”

  Shooting Glasses chin-points across the water.

  “Pretty much,” Jade says.

  “But everybody dies in those movies…” he says, pulling the headlights on now, blasting white out across the water.

  “But they really live first,” Jade says, popping her door open to fade into the night. “Now, remember what I told you, be somewhere else this Saturday, cool?”

  “What about you?”

  Jade presses her lips together and stands from the car, is about to shut the door on this, which feels one hundred percent like the perfect gesture, like what would happen in a movie, but then she flinches halfway around instead.

  It’s not Hardy standing there—since the library, she’s been spooky—but a long sustained scream.

  It’s not close, but it’s close enough.

  Shooting Glasses stands from his side of the car.

  “They’re playing my music,” Jade says to him, and leaves her door open, is already running for the pier, Shooting Glasses’s work boots pounding in after her. Behind the drugstore she smacks into her dad and Rexall, hustling the other way, eyes wide, Rexall still carrying a beer bottle, her dad’s jeans wet, maybe… all of him wet?

  The impact knocks Jade down but her dad doesn’t stop, is already gone.

  “Who—?” Shooting Glasses asks. She shrugs his helping hands away, wipes her dad’s gross wetness off and gets up herself.

  “Town drunks,” she says, casting a single disparaging look after them.

  Shooting Glasses turns to look as well, like there’s anything to see—Indians really can turn to smoke—and Jade’s already running again, is the first Proofrocker to get to the pier, though porch and window lights are glowing on up and down the shore.

  Jade leans onto her knees breathing hard, taking in everything she can.

  The Umiak is still there, too big to even really bob, and the screaming—yes. Yes yes yes.

  It’s Letha, not at the steering wheel anymore, but the back of the big white boat. Tiara’s trying to hug her away from whatever’s below them in the water but Letha’s pushing her away, can’t suffer contact right now. It’s like she’s trying to crawl inside herself, shut the world out.

  Jade nods, gets it. In one of her papers for Mr. Holmes, she explained that the final girl goes from innocence and obliviousness into a series of staged confrontations with mortality, menace, danger—a funhouse of worse and worse horror—until she finally curls into herself to hide. But that’s really a chrysalis. One she claws out of as an angel of death.

  For Letha so far, it’s been the Dutch boy in the lake, his skin sloughing off in her hands, and then Deacon Samuels, turned inside out at Camp Blood, Letha probably stepping into him before even realizing what’s happened.

  “Don’t forget the elk,” Jade mumbles.

  “What is that?” Shooting Glasses is asking beside her, stepping forward to see better.

  Jade clamps onto his forearm, holds him back.

  “This isn’t for us,” she says, nodding up to Letha, “it’s for her.”

  Letha falls back so the short railing’s hiding her. And now Proofrockers are arriving in robes and curlers, with shotguns, with fire pokers, with glasses of scotch they forgot to leave behind.

  “Now he’ll believe you?” Shooting Glasses says to Jade, about the thick red blood churning in the water, under the Umiak’s harsh lights. “The sheriff?”

  Jade can only shake her head slowly, no.

  Somewhere up on deck, Tiara, in her joke of a captain’s hat, finally thinks to turn the propellers off. The Umiak sighs back into the pier, the one taut line going slack, and then Jade gets it: her dad and his idiot friends, still in high school, the three of them bobbing under the pier, waiting for the ski ropes they’ve tied to the boat to tighten, pull them up onto the surface of the water.

  It was worth all the nights in jail, supposedly.

  Until now. Until they tried to hook onto a much bigger boat, one with a whole rack of propellers back there to suck them in. Still, if it hadn’t had that one line moored, it might have worked, right?

  Would Letha have forgotten to cast off, though? Would Tiara? Had they ever forgotten just one single line? When they only had one line tied in the first place? And—why had they even tied-off at all, if they were just dropping a couple of Founders off?

  “Who is it?” Shooting Glasses asks.

  “Who was it,” Jade corrects, backing the two of them out of this gathering crowd. “Pretty sure it was a guy name of Clate Rodge—”

  She stops when she clocks a bulky shadow coming in from just behind them, where nobody should have been, where there’s nothing, just… just the memorial bench?

  “No,” Jade says, her whole body going cold. Not because she’s not supposed to be the one seeing some Scooby’d up Stacey G
raves, but because… because there’s no stringy black wig, no rotted gown. Just a wall of khaki.

  She grabs on to Shooting Glasses again, to keep from falling down.

  Sheriff Hardy must have been sitting there all along, smoking the night’s last cigarette on his daughter’s memorial bench, like every night.

  “Who you say it is, there?” he asks over-innocently, his eyes flicking up to Jade’s for a moment then away before she can register anything.

  “N-nobody,” she mutters.

  He rubs his cigarette out between his fingers, deposits the butt in his chest pocket, then pats it like telling it to stay put.

  “What the hell was that about?” Shooting Glasses asks once Hardy’s stepped onto the pier.

  “A Bay of Blood,” Jade says, chest heaving, mind reeling, face numb, and because they’re off to the side now, she knows Shooting Glasses has to be able to see what she’s talking about: Clate Rodgers’s frothy blood lapping up against Hardy’s hull, some of the chunks adhering to the fiberglass. Not quite as high as the little airboat’s name, Melanie, but when Hardy passes by, the water laps up a few inches, baptizes those eight letters in what’s left of the boy who was with her the day she drowned.

  SLASHER 101

  Okay, before we talk Red Herrings in the slasher even though it's official turkey season not fish season, first, it's ALWAYS slasher season, as there's plenty of Blood Rage around the dinner table of Home Sweet Home, especially from the ThanksKilling turkey itself, but second, HELLO, MR. HOLMES! I never thought I'd miss 7th period I mean. And since I've already done my time, this time I can just say it out right that cutting the fingers off my VERY FAKE glove, or, it was a real glove but not my fingers inside just green slime aka nightmare fuel aka Freddy blood, I should really get a science award for that, not suspension. Ever heard of a senior prank? I'm a senior. That was my prank. And it's not my fault Tiff did her big faint routine and broke her phone. Probably it was broke already and she just wanted someone to blame for it.

  Enter me, sir. I always did it. And her mom already bought her a new and better phone anyway.

  But nevermind all that. Something's fishy here, isn't it? It's the Red Herring in the slasher movie. The origin of this is how when you're running from dogs that are trailing you by smell you can put a dead fish on your trail and that like blows the dogs' noses up pretty much. For Agatha Christie the Red Herring was the person all signs and clues SAID was doing all that killing, but really that's just Mrs. Christie being a magician and shaking this hand so you don't watch the other one.