My Heart Is a Chainsaw

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “Jade, wait!” Hardy calls through his speaker, but Jade can’t.

  She falls ahead, the machete tearing away from the tree with a distinct horror-movie sound, and it’s all downhill from there. The slope to Indian Lake lets her be faster than she is, faster than her own thoughts: What’s she going to do, swan dive off the pier, swim to Camp Blood? Ask Letha for asylum on the Umiak? Hope Hardy gives up, which is exactly what cops do when perps holding deadly weapons run?

  More important, why is she even running? It’s Hardy, isn’t it?

  Shit. Shit shit shit.

  She wants this to be Scream so was trying to pair him up with Mr. Holmes, but the feeling she can’t shake is his voice coming out of the darkness outside the library the other night. His shape walking in from Melanie’s bench, sparks trailing from his hand, Clate Rodgers a red smear on the surface of the lake. And he does have that backstory with his daughter dying probably fifty yards from where they are right now, and with someone Jade’s dad used to drink with, and he does have a brush with Stacey Graves, he did grow up with his aunt telling him that rhyme, he did find Deacon Samuels, he did set a fire that killed his own uncle or whatever, and with that airboat, he can skid up onto shore wherever he wants, be gone in an instant. Or, if you’re out on the water, he can be right there beside you before you know it, hardly even dragging a wake, his big fan turned off a hundred yards back, so he just coasts in, the only sound the soft whop-whop-whop of his blades spinning down.

  On the other hand, he did save Jade when she was bleeding out, and he did get her the custodian gig after freshman year, and he does run her dad in whenever he can—could the enemy of Jade’s enemy even be a slasher?

  Jade doesn’t know, but what she does know is she can’t stop running. The slope’s got her now. All she can do is… is sling the machete as far out into the water as she can, dispose of that evidence, not give him a reason to take her in. Never mind that there’s nowhere to go after she does, nothing to do, no way to hide.

  Halfway up the pier she catches on that Letha’s leaning over the rail, is watching this hopeless little effort.

  Jade changes her grip on the machete so slightly, but it makes all the difference.

  “Letha!” Jade yells up to her, and Letha cocks those bug-eyed shades up on her forehead, which is all the invitation Jade needs. She stops hard, her combat boots finding traction for once, and turns all that momentum into one desperate throw.

  The machete goes twirling up into the night, Mars Baker turning around to track it, Hardy’s tires screeching, all of Jade’s hopes and prayers in that spinning blade, now.

  It climbs, it climbs, and, just when it should be lodging in Letha’s chest, instead her hand stabs out as only a final girl’s can, and catches that machete by the handle as perfect as anything, so perfect that Jade hardly even feels it when Hardy tackles her.

  SLASHER 101

  So for a slightly late Christmas present, sir, please accept this gift of a last ingredient of the slasher, whose season will be upon us again soon in only 10 short months, by which time you'll be having to get your slasher information from some other horror fan, since this girl will be graduated and GONE.

  And you would never guess it in a 100 years unless maybe you were Clear Rivers from the Final Destinations, but this ingredient is tied to the incident in the cafeteria just before winter break. But in my defense though Manx wouldn't believe it, I really was projectile puking from sudden onset sickness. This wasn't my attempt to spit pea soup like Regan in The Exorcist. And also it wasn't a prank, sir. I think if anyone else had been sick then the cafeteria monitor would have made tracks to get that student to the nurse's office instead of sending her to the principal's office based on only past History of trying to make high school a fun or just less terrible experience. But that was last year as they say. Well, as everybody says except Billy Loomis, or in 1958, Pamela Voorhees.

  You'll also have to start getting excellent jokes from somewhere else, sir, sorry about that.

  But, since we're already talking puking, that's what final girls are all better than me at not doing in the Third Reel Bodydump. There aren't autopsies to prove this but I think final girls must have an extra valve in their esophagus that keeps them from upchuck city, sir. How else to explain them not losing their lunch when, about 2/3rd's or even 3/4th's through the slasher movie they're in, suddenly they stumble upon the dead and necrogymnastic bodies of their friends and families? Think Laurie Strode in Halloween for example, finding so many of her friends surprisingly dead and suspiciously posed in that bedroom across the street, which would become the basic model to repeat not just for the Golden Age, but all the way to now, sir, which I won't walk you all the way through since you always mark all of them out as extra like that swimming pool of bodies in House on Sorority Row, which I’m not even mentioning. This Third Reel Bodydump though is a most important part of the final girl's development. Or instead, being faced with all this definite PROOF of what terror she's up against is carving away of the rules of her once sane world. It pushes her over the edge, and when she climbs back up again, she's different and more dangerous.

  The question that's never answered here though is why the slasher DOES this, which I'm sure you're right now asking out loud at your desk. Well, WHY he does and HOW he learns all these knot tying and spring loading bodies from ceilings tricks, but if you start thinking like that then Michael Myers would never have learned to drive the car he steals to get back to Haddonfield, and nobody wants to have to think like that, sir. Especially not Yours Untruly.

  But there is a reason the slasher does this kindness, sir, but since I'm nearly at my 2 page limit here I'll save that for a My Bloody Valentine to you, I think. But don't feel cheated either. Really, I've put my own beating heart into every one of these already.

  DON’T GO IN THE HOUSE

  In A Nightmare on Elm Street, after Rod’s been jammed up for Tina’s murder, he doesn’t know not to fall asleep. So, when he does, Freddy’s able to twist a sheet into a noose and hang him, make it look like a suicide, which is pretty much an admission of guilt as far as the cops and parents are concerned.

  Nancy knows better.

  So does Jade.

  All night in her cell, each time her head started to nod forward into sleep, she’d jerk awake, check the bars and cinderblocks for a hidden face, watch the drain in the middle of the floor for bladetips reaching up. And it’s not just Freddy to watch for in a place like this. Wishmaster could step into the passage between the two cells, use his drug dealer voice to ask her if she’d like to walk through these solid bars to freedom, and if Jade was tired enough, she might not remember to word this wish with utmost care, and end up being pulled like taffy through the steel bars.

  No thank you.

  It’s so hard to stay awake without a phone, though. Without a spear to stab trash with. Without Holmes sad-ranting about Terra Nova. Without a videotape playing. Without Fugazi leaking into her ears. Without Letha screaming to fill the night.

  It had been glorious, though, hadn’t it? And—the way she stabbed her hand up, plucked that machete down from the heavens by the handle. If she’s not a final girl, then there never was a final girl, and Jade’s wrong about everything.

  But no way is she wrong.

  Jade stands, paces the meager length her cell affords, tries to grim her eyes down like a real convict but it’s hard to maintain while doing the pee-pee dance. There are no facilities in the two cells, just a chamberpot from, she’s guessing, 1899. Henderson and Golding themselves probably took turns pissing into it.

  So far, Jade’s been granted access to the ladies’ room up front. But that was only one trip, and that was a lunch tray ago, which included two boxes of apple juice.

  More pressing, if it’s halfway through Thursday afternoon—and she’s pretty sure it is—then that means the massacre is seriously looming.

  “Sheriff!” Jade yells, and it’s like she’s yelling into a megaphone while also
being in that same megaphone. Before the first call’s even echoed away, she’s saying it again, and again, louder and louder, until a key announces itself in the lock, giving her a chance to stop before the door opens.

  Hardy saunters in, one side of his face printed with the ghost of a backwards “4”: he was asleep on his desk calendar.

  “I’m thinking you need to charge me or let me go,” Jade informs him, digging hard in her Law & Order dictionary.

  Hardy breathes in deep, lets it out slow.

  “How was the bologna?” he asks, then before Jade can get a comeback together, he’s already following up: “There’s an old song by Tom T. Hall about getting hot bologna every day of his stay here in the greybar hotel.” Hardy pats the cinderblock up high as if confirming its solidity. “He comes to like it.”

  “What am I being charged with?” Jade asks, trying to lock him in her glare.

  Hardy chuckles, strings his keys out from his belt, hauls Jade’s door open, grandly presenting the outer world to her.

  Jade steps through, not trusting this even a little.

  Hardy rubs his mouth so he can smile behind his hand.

  “This is for your own good,” he finally says.

  “Being locked up?”

  “Your dad let me see your bedroom.”

  “What? He let you in the house?”

  “Why wouldn’t he? But it’s official now, Jade, sorry. You’re a runaway.”

  “I’m almost eighteen.”

  “Which means… let me do the math here, let me do the… does that mean you’re still seventeen, and subject to a whole different set of laws?”

  “I’m not running away,” Jade tells him.

  “To say nothing of your attempt on Letha Mondragon’s life,” Hardy goes on, moseying ahead of her to the front office.

  “I was giving her something, not trying to hurt her,” Jade grumbles.

  “And if she hadn’t caught that something?”

  “I knew she would.”

  “More like you’re lucky she did,” Hardy says, presenting the hall to her.

  “Bathroom?” Jade has to ask as it’s sliding by.

  “In a moment,” Hardy tells her.

  “Cruel and unusual,” Jade says.

  “Shit, don’t get me started,” Hardy says back with a chuckle, offering her the perp chair on the other side of his desk and not taking a seat himself until Jade settles in. Her phone is plugged in on the edge of his desk, is pretty much the only thing she can see anymore.

  “I really do need to pee,” she says.

  “If you’d just used the thunder pot in there, we could avoid these little discussions,” Hardy says, taking a fancy silver pen up from its holder, rolling it across the back of his knuckles. “But—kids these days, right? I mean that too, kids. You are still seventeen, little miss. And you were running away. I found your bags back in the trees. Much as this might seem personal, I do have a duty here.”

  “Then this isn’t about… about anything I might have seen the other night?” Jade asks, careful with her phrasing.

  Hardy creaks back in his chair, studying the much-studied ceiling, it looks like.

  “And what do you think you might have seen?” he says. “You want, I can get my recorder from Meg, you can give a statement. Or, no—you can get it. Know right where it is, don’t you?”

  He angles his face down to hers, rubs his lips hard against each other like he just glossed them, is trying to spread it around, get it worked in proper.

  “Nothing,” Jade finally says. “Didn’t see a thing, Sheriff.”

  She’s not sure whether she hopes that’s the exact wording thirteen-year-old Clate Rodgers used once upon a time, or if lucking into that would be the worst possible mistake.

  “Seen more deaths here in the last couple weeks than in the forty years previous,” Hardy says, leaning forward now, his elbows finding the desk. “Then I find the local horror fan running around at night with a machete that’s got a name scratched into the blade?”

  “Jamie Lee Curtis.”

  “Blue Steel, yeah. Don’t think Bogey’s in that one.”

  Jade takes this, tries not to let it show.

  “She’s kind of a final girl in that one too, you know?” she says, trying to keep it casual now. Just talking movies, not passing index card after index card of subtext back and forth, because pretty soon one of those index cards is going to have something to do with what she said to him the other day, about Melanie.

  Hardy just watches her, probably waiting to see if she’s going to go on about JLC being forever the final girl.

  That would be too easy, though. And she’s still got to pee.

  “So that’s what you’re jamming me up for?” Jade says instead. “A weapon? Thought I was running away.”

  “Not supposed to run with scissors,” Hardy says. “Think that goes double for machetes, don’t you?”

  “You’ll be glad I gave it to her.”

  “Because of… what were you saying?” Hardy asks back with a patronizing shrug. “Bear sketched it out for me a bit, yeah? Something about… Scooby-Doo?”

  “It’s a Scooby-Doo build,” Jade spits back, disgusted. “Someone in a mask. Probably her dad, okay?”

  “Her being—”

  “Letha.”

  “ ‘Saturday,’ ” Hardy says, holding Jade’s eyes.

  Jade spins away, stares out across the lake. Mr. Holmes is bucking the wind in his ultralight. “This is where I’m probably supposed to tell you to close the beaches,” she says.

  “That’s from Jaws.”

  “There’s gonna be kids in the water, I mean,” Jade goes on.

  “They see worse on their videogames.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “That they’re in danger.”

  Jade comes back around to him about this but Hardy’s already staring into her soul.

  “Bear also took me through what he says is probably your reasoning for… for Saturday.”

  For the first time, Jade really hears that: “Bear.”

  A bear was supposed to have killed Deacon Samuels.

  “I know this is all very real to you,” Hardy says, standing, taking a step over to the window, to what she guesses is his usual place, like he’s standing sentry over all of Fremont County.

  “It’s bigger than me,” Jade says. “There’s… those two kids in March—”

  “Of which kids we have to take your word about the second.”

  “There’s Deacon Samuels.”

  “Animal attack.”

  “Clate Rodgers.”

  “Boating accident.”

  “ ‘Boating accident,’ ” Jade repeats before she can stop herself.

  Does Hardy’s back straighten a little, though? Has he drawn some breath in that he’s not releasing?

  “But he had it coming,” Jade fumbles in, standing now as well. “He’s probably not even part of the cycle, actually. Just an add-on.”

  “That a thing?” Hardy says without looking around. “Add-ons?”

  “The slasher gets blamed for all of them, yeah,” Jade says. “Winners write the history books, and the slasher’s never the winner.”

  “Doesn’t do much writing,” Hardy adds.

  “Signs all his kills in blood,” Jade says right back.

  Far out over the lake, Mr. Holmes’s ultralight is nearly skimming the water now.

  “That’s how he gets out of the wind,” Hardy says, chucking his chin to Mr. Holmes. “Wonder if the fish think his shadow is the mother of all eagles, that him swooping down like that is the end of the world?”

  He turns to her then, his face easy, says, “Somebody threw a trashcan through the front door of the high school, hear about that?”

  “School’s out for summer,” Jade singsongs.

  “Thing is,” Hardy adds, “all the glass is out on the sidewalk. Not in by the trophy case.”

  “Not my concern,” Jade says. “I’m not the cus
todian anymore.”

  “Just saying,” Hardy says.

  “Just listening,” Jade says. “Not that I know why.”

  Hardy shakes his head, impressed it seems.

  “Your dad started out just like this, once upon a bad afternoon,” he says. “Sitting right in that chair when he was eighteen. I told him he could either—”

  “I’m not my father,” Jade cuts in.

  “You don’t have to be, no,” Hardy tells her. “You should have seen him when he was a yardegg, though. Always underfoot. Everybody wanted him to play cowboys and Indians with, you know that?”

  Jade’s just staring out through the window, trying not to move even one single muscle on her face. On her whole body.

  “Because he already was the skin,” she finally says, obviously.

  “Because he was always carrying a shiner, a busted lip,” Hardy says back—where he was leading her. “Thing is, it would look like the cowboys had beaten him up.”

  “I supposed to care about this trip down memory lane?”

  “Just saying,” Hardy says. “I told him before you were born, I told him he lays one hand on you, just passing down what he’d got, that I’d be all over his ass.”

  Jade swallows, blinks, says, “I see Letha got to you too. Good to know.”

  “I—”

  “He’s never hit me,” Jade says, “you saved me, Sheriff, thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

  Hardy just stands there, lets Jade stew in her own juices.

  “So when’s dinner around here?” she finally has to say just to move them ahead, out of this hole she’s dug. “And what is it? More of that hot bologna?”

  Hardy doesn’t answer, is tracking Mr. Holmes now, it feels like. He’s buzzing Terra Nova. Just a small angry fly, banking high against a gust only he can feel.

  “They hate it when he does that,” Hardy says, tossing his chin across the water. “Just wait, my phone’s about to ring.”

  “And he hates them right back,” Jade says. “All balances out, doesn’t it?”