My Heart Is a Chainsaw

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Wes Craven does the same magic trick in A Nightmare on Elm Street, where Rod is the obvious killer to all the cops and parents. At least until Freddy kills him, which is usually the way it goes for stinky fish on the trail. And what's weird is that for the 1st time in slasher history ever probably, in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, which is part V, meaning "5," halfway to "X," Jason Voorhees HIMSELF is kind of the Red Herring. Everyone thinks the killer is him, when surprise, it's far less exciting. Even Randy in Scream SAYS he himself is the obvious right suspect for Casey Becker and Steve, his tastes all being in the horror aisle of the video store, but this is AFTER Billy and Stu have already fake set Billy up into Red Herringhood.

  What to notice here is the magic trick happening before your eyes, sir. Agatha or Wes are just shaking this hand around to distract your nose if you were a dog, but it's all so this real and actual blood soaked party can creep past into non-suspicionhood. And while sometimes the way they be fair is to say "LOOK, he's doing all of this, can't you see?" we've been burned so many times by exactly this that we know that can't be true, so we keep on looking the other way.

  What the slasher does I mean is turn us ALL into the cops and parents who 100 percent know it's Rod who killed his girlfriend Tina, who KNOW it's Jason in V, and that's when it has us right where it wants us, since cops and parents are less than useless in the slasher.

  So are we, I mean, except as carving dummies, which isn't like carving a turkey, except for the end result, I guess.

  Enjoy your meal, Mr. Holmes.

  STAGE FRIGHT

  It’s four in the morning and Jade’s standing half-in, half-out of the front door of her father’s house, not sure if she should take that next step or not. On the couch and in the chair are her father and Rexall, in the same places they were for what she guesses she should be calling The Night of the Carrot—her dad’s joke about her orange hair. They’re already passed out this time, though. Passed out and slobbering, snoring, twitching, Rexall hugging a pillow.

  Jade gives her foot some weight, praying for no creak, and for once her prayer is answered. If they didn’t wake from her hauling the door open, though, then that means they’re really and truly conked, right?

  Surely.

  Where she’s coming in from is the staging area. She sat there with Shooting Glasses until the next Terra Nova shift started to sift in. He’d cracked his can open for a morning dip then opened his door, nodded bye to Jade.

  “Won’t you be tired?” Jade asked him.

  “Sleep when I’m dead,” he said around his first gush of spit, spinning around on his heel to shoot her with imaginary sixguns. “Sam Elliott, Road House, 1988.”

  “1989,” Jade didn’t have the heart to tell him, just launched her fingers off her forehead in goodbye, sloped home with her hands deep in the pockets of her coveralls, her shoulders up by her ears, a sort-of smile on her face. The whole night, her and Shooting Glasses had just talked about nothing, not one single real thing. It was stupid, would be a boring art house film were it on-screen, two kids mumbling in the afterglow of a killing because they’re both too shy to hold hands, but it had been pretty perfect too.

  Its opposite, pretty much, is her dad groaning on the couch now, and scratching himself, doing that kind of shifting and flopping that means he’s about to crack an eye open. Jade stops breathing, doesn’t know whether she’s hitting the floor to be below his blurry line of sight or if she’s stepping cleanly back out the door she just walked through. But no way will she be making eye contact with him when his hands are down the front of his pants.

  He snorts, nuzzles his face deeper into the couch cushion, and drops back into what she hopes is a falling dream, so she can watch his clothes flatten out when he hits bottom. When that doesn’t happen and then doesn’t happen again, she finally allows herself to breathe, and imagine what if… what if she were the slasher here? What if she had been raised by Ezekiel, attended all his black masses, learned all his lessons before she was swapped for a baby in Proofrock? If she were that slasher, then she would know to straighten a coat hanger out, creep up to both of these rejects, and drive that sharp point into their ear all at once, then wait around to dab up any blood that dribbled back out. Hardy probably wouldn’t even have any autopsies run, as this would be good riddance to shitty rubbish.

  It would be so easy.

  Jade opens and closes her right hand, going through the motions, licking her lips with anticipation.

  Except… she’d sort of thrown up just from stabbing that dead bird with her litter stick, hadn’t she? Wouldn’t pushing a coat hanger into a human ear require her to muscle through some membrane or thin bone or something, to get to the brain?

  She’s a gorehound, a horror fiend, the more brutal the better, bring it on, faster, pussycat, kill kill kill, but that’s all on-screen. And at some level she never forgets that all the blood’s corn syrup.

  Still, she tells herself, she could do it.

  Just, not tonight.

  Rather, some other time when her alibi is bulletproof. And maybe not both at once, maybe not even Rexall at all, since he’s no more aware of being alive than a jellyfish or mushroom. And, just one of them doesn’t draw the same suspicion, does it? Especially when that one’s whole life since his car wreck in high school is time he’s been stealing. This is just Final Destination: Death, calling in its marker. That coat hanger in the ear would be more just a function of nature, wouldn’t it?

  Jade nods to herself about all of this, part of her fully aware that she’s made this same plan twenty times before. Fifty times. Ever since junior high, really, with all manner of household implements, with every last screwdriver in the toolbox, with all the rakes and shovels and hoes in the shed.

  This time she means it, though.

  “Bang,” she says, looking down her finger at her father, but she also sort of sees herself standing here, adopting that pose—sees herself as Hardy would, as Mr. Holmes would: another teenager who hates the parent she’s stuck with. And that’s the only way they have to see her, too, which is the catch-22 bullshit of it all.

  Still, Jade angles the barrel of her finger over, drills a bullet into Rexall as well, just for good measure, and then freezes when Rexall hikes a leg up in an obscene pose, almost in response.

  Jade angles her face up to stare through the ceiling, away from this moment, only slowly realizing she’s listening to something. She cocks her head over to let the sound drain in better: somewhere far above Proofrock, Mr. Holmes’s tiny rotors are whapping at the air. Either him or that’s another LifeFlight up there, and, if it is, then who for this time? Who for and how late?

  Let Letha handle it, though. Which means: let Letha witness it. Let it all stack up in her head, because she’s the one who’s going to need it as fuel for her big turnaround.

  What Jade needs is… sleep?

  Except, as much as she hates it, here in her living room are two survivors, two witnesses to what happened to Clate Rodgers. Two idiots who could tell her if the Umiak had been tied to the pier or not. That her father was wet in the alley meant he had to have been the one wading past the crusty pylons to find a latchpoint on that sleek white hull, Rexall high and dry playing lookout, Clate bobbing under the pier, psyching himself up. Well, shotgunning another beer anyway. Same difference.

  Problem is, asking Tab Daniels for a version of this will be putting him up on a throne for as long as Jade needs that answer, won’t it? When she’s promised and sworn and vowed to never ask him for a single thing again, no matter what.

  Jade comes back to her father’s sleeping face. There’s a beer in the crook of his arm, its longneck nestled in his armpit. When he shifts, it starts to seep into his pearl snap shirt, a slow flower of darkness to match all the faded-out flowers in the print. Jade watches it bloom as long as she can, finally has to ghost forward, tiptoe between, sneak the bottle up and out. What she tells herself is that she’s Ripley, crawling over a sleeping alien. She’s Sidney,
squirming over an unconscious Ghostface. But really she just doesn’t want her dad feeling that wetness and waking.

  Much better to let him sleep on.

  Instead of taking a swig of the warm beer, she settles it onto the taped-together coffee table with the other empties. That’s another thing she’s promised and sworn, mumbled vows about: never to drink beer like him. Cigarettes, sure, smoking doesn’t make you stupid, just dead. But if she ever drinks, then that opens the door on a future where she someday shares a beer with her dad, and that’s not a door she’ll ever let life drag her through.

  She could nudge Rexall awake, she supposes. Tricking him into telling her about what happened to Clate would be cake, less than cake. Except… talking to him would mean talking to him, and she’s not that desperate. Even at four in the morning.

  But what could Rexall or her father tell her about Clate Rodgers that would even be useful, right? Doesn’t she already know?

  This is always her favorite part of any slasher. It’s already been established, thanks to the bodies stacking up, that somebody thinks they’ve got a good reason to be doing this, however it is they’re doing it. Now the push is to figure out what the dead might have in common, where their paths might cross. After that it’s just a matter of thinking back to who was where when a prank or accident went down. Who had stepped out to powder their nose, see a man about a horse, make a call?

  Or, before Scream, anyway, that’s how you used to be able to figure a slasher out. Until it was either Billy or Stu who had to be gone from the room long enough to don a certain mask.

  But, it was just and only Hardy ambling down from Melanie’s bench, wasn’t it? Cashing his last smoke and then moseying down to what was left of the idiot that let his daughter die.

  So it’s him, then?

  He is as good a candidate as anyone to bring Stacey Graves back. Except for Christine Gillette—his aunt—he’s the only one Jade knows to have actually seen Stacey Graves. And, what a Prowler-y rush if the slasher’s a law enforcement officer, right? That would… it would be like Nancy’s dad in A Nightmare on Elm Street feeling so much guilt about breaking the law to kill Freddy that he ducks into the crusty fedora himself, doses the kids with something to make them think they’re dreaming, and goes about punishing the whole block for their big crime.

  As for how Hardy could have done Clate Rodgers: with his airboat tied to the pier, he had every excuse to be ambling past the Umiak for whatever he forgot—his lighter for that all-important last cigarette, probably. And if Letha or Tiara called down to ask why was he tying them off, he could just say he didn’t know anybody was aboard, he just didn’t want it drifting away, a big pretty boat like that. What he wouldn’t be saying would be that, when you have the chance to dispense with the grown-up version of the kid you blame for your daughter’s drowning, you do that, even if you’re already involved in something larger.

  When the bodies are accumulating, there’s always room for one more, right?

  Jade nods, says it aloud in the living room, like a test: “Right.”

  Neither of the sleepers objects. Which she takes as permission to go on with this line of thinking. With… maybe one last smoke to keep her company.

  She palms the half a pack of cigarettes from under the lamp and steps out onto the back porch, sits in the open door and chain-smokes two, then one more for good measure.

  The plan, she’s pretty sure, should be to sneak over to Terra Nova tomorrow—today, actually. It’s after midnight, right? Anyway, before Clate Rodgers burbled up from Indian Lake in chunks and smears, it was a lock that Theo Mondragon had to be the one behind all this. And he still could be. She could have Hardy all wrong—Theo Mondragon could have stowed away on the Umiak, been setting a death trap for someone else, for one of those two Founders who were going to have to be picked back up, and Clate just happened to get literally sucked into it. That Hardy didn’t stop it doesn’t mean he actually did it.

  Theo’s got the more immediate motivation, anyway—his house, his literal castle—and since it’s not the millennium, motivations matter. Motivations are everything. Hardy has his daughter as an excuse to let Clate Rodgers get pulled into those whirling blades, but his motivation for Deacon Samuels is a harder nut.

  Oh: unless he wanted a certain golf club, Jade remembers. Do people really kill for golf stuff, though? She wants to say no, except… Jason did kill that one guy for littering, right?

  But if greed or envy or gain is the motivation, then this is a giallo Proofrock’s in, not a revenge-driven slasher, and since this isn’t Italy in the sixties, she has to suspect there’s some other motivation, one that feels a lot more righteous.

  And? She’s not supposed to have it all figured out yet, is she?

  Doesn’t mean she can’t be trying, though.

  Like she can help it.

  So the plan now is to conk out for a few hours then hike around the lake to Terra Nova, maybe stop to wow over the Deacon Samuels stains behind the fluttering yellow tape at Camp Blood, and then she’ll either figure out she’s right, it’s Theo, or she’ll exclude him, easy as that, one-and-done.

  Jade blows a clean line of smoke up into the night and cashes her butt on the sole of her boot, keys on another paper she wrote for Mr. Holmes, about how the reason final girls fall so much when running away is that they’re like those mother birds who flap away from their nests like they’re hurt, so as to draw the predator off of their babies.

  She never turned that one in, though. She burned it half-written and flushed the ashes, because no mothers are actually like that.

  What about Letha, though? Will she continually fall down on Saturday, so as to draw the slasher away from the floating masses? There will be lots of kids in the water that night, Jade knows. Lots of innocents.

  She turns to go in, spinning at the last moment to catch the screen door, keep it from waking the living room, but then she stops: the smallest, saddest bottle rocket is tumbling down out of the sky. Which is to say: a lit cigarette.

  “I’m telling your wife,” Jade says up to Mr. Holmes with a smile, and, when the cigarette spools a trail of smoke up out of the tall dry grass, she steps over and stomps it out, saving the whole town, probably. “And that’s how you do it,” she says to the idea of Letha, and then leaves Mr. Holmes up there to court lung cancer and fight bats.

  The kitchen is empty, the living room still asleep.

  Jade pads through to her bedroom to cue something up and crash, and—

  Shit. Really?

  All her videotapes and clothes and posters are in two black trashbags on her bed.

  Jade just stares at them, stares at them some more, and finally comes up with the only possibility: her dad heard about her OK Corral walk down Main with Hardy.

  “But I didn’t bring him here,” Jade says, picking through the jumbled tapes, finally lucking onto Just Before Dawn. She can’t carry the whole bag around the lake to Letha as one last lesson, but she can at least leave her with that one. Technically—chronologically—Halloween should probably be next in her education, and that’s only if they skip over Black Christmas, but… this isn’t the full course anymore, is it? This is a crash course, a late-night cram session. And if Letha’s going to have to pick one final girl to follow, then don’t pick the one who hides in a closet, don’t pick the one who leaves the killer’s knife behind, don’t pick the one who has to get saved by a dude with a gun at the end. Pick the one who becomes rage, the one who climbs the front of that hillbilly slashing machine and jams her arm down his throat up to her fucking elbow, looking him in the eye the whole time.

  Just Before Dawn, then. That and…

  Jade reaches around under her bed, frees up the machete weaved into the mattress’s undercarriage. It’s from the flea market in Idaho Falls, still has the factory edge. Jade looks around for what else she might need, finally decides to change everything she’s wearing under her coveralls. Because who knows.

  Instead of throwing t
he dirties in the laundry corner, she stuffs them back in the bag.

  After that, the only thing left is to dig out the food coloring in the kitchen, dye her hair one last time in the sink, being sure to lock the door first.

  The food coloring’s dark green, the result more aquamarine shading into turquoise, and temporary as hell. Still, it’s something, right?

  On the way out the front door, a fresh sandwich in each pocket, two garbage bags glistening over her shoulder, she flips the living room off roundly, walks backwards off the porch still doing it.

  School’s out forever.

  Instead of trying to brave the trees and the muck in the pitch black—there is a rogue bear out there somewhere—Jade asks Terra Nova to wait until the light of morning, please. Maybe she can crash out in a storage shed in the staging area until then? Except, on the way there… of course.

  The screen for the big July Fourth celebration is already inflated, for everybody to watch from the lake. They do it early like this now, since the time in sixth grade when they did it the afternoon-of, and had to keep the compressor running all through the movie because of some new holes in the vinyl, which kind of killed the whole “movie on the lake” charm. It was more like “movie nobody can hear over the air compressor.”

  Jade doesn’t key on the screen just because it’s up, though. It’s also glowing.

  On-screen is the giant version of someone’s laptop screen, it looks like. Mac, not PC. Jade steps back into the shadows to watch, cues in that the two Founders who were getting dropped off earlier, they’re back on the deck of the Umiak now—probably with whatever cable or adapter they needed for the projector, it being a few years old, their ports all next-gen.