And the houses over here, goddamn.
Somebody’s mixed some Miracle-Gro into those frames, those roofs, those driveways, all that landscaping. It reminds Jade more of a cartoon than a gated community: the outlines of the houses were there all along, all they needed was some great hand to tip a bag of ink over into the chimney, to let color leach down all the lines, find all the corners, fill in all the windows.
All ten are ready by August first, she has to imagine, and then realizes she’s just standing there skylining herself like an idiot, practically asking to be called out, asked what she’s doing over here.
Jade lowers herself slowly, tries to bore her eyes all the way across the lake to see if Hardy’s glassing for her, but Proofrock’s just shapes and shadows. Are students gathered at the flagpole in front of the high school already, for Mr. Holmes?
Jade closes her eyes, isn’t going to think about that.
“Not everybody gets to live,” she says to herself, confident that, at fifty yards, her whisper will dissipate before cranking anyone’s head around.
Not that there is anybody.
Does that mean… has the crew moved on to doing the interiors of the houses now? It makes sense the insides of the houses would be last on the to-do list. You don’t hang sheetrock until that sheetrock’s protected from the elements.
Still: no one?
Jade pats her pocket for the second sandwich she knows is just as gone as the first. It’s less actually looking for it, more showing the world that she’s hungry, that it can deliver her some nuggets or a burrito or fishsticks if it wants. She won’t tell anybody.
In lieu of food, she lights another cigarette, her fourth from last, and then smokes it lying on her back, waving the smoke to tatters, hoping none of the smell wisps down between the houses. But surely some of the crew burns em if they got em.
A harsh clack! rolls her over, gets her studying downhill again.
It could have come from anywhere.
Shit.
Is this what a stakeout is? If so, isn’t there supposed to be coffee and pistachios? But it’s not like Jade can just stroll in and start asking questions, either.
She rests her chin on her crossed hands, situates her frontside against the dirt and grass, and tells herself stories about the houses, how they’re not mansions but cabins, how this is Packanack Lodge from Friday the 13th Part 2, just down from the original’s “Camp Blood,” ha.
She’s Jason, looking through the one eyehole of her pillowcase. Watching the skinny-dipping, seeing seductive shapes through the gauzy curtains. Half the counselors piling into a car and a truck to caravan down to the local honky-tonk, the other half either already dead or in the process-of.
Over here is where all the bodies are buried, right? Mr. Holmes was always telling them. Before there was a lake dividing one side of the valley from the other, people who caught a bullet to the gut or a pickaxe to the head would usually end up over here, stuffed into a seam, a crevice, a crack. Which would have worked fine if not for the buzzards. According to Mr. Holmes, when Henderson-Golding was booming, that was the sheriff’s main job: watch for buzzards.
Jade rolls over, cases the sky, the sun’s position, decides she must have either slept or got Fire in the Sky’d.
Probably noon already, or one, shit.
She’s like the police officer assigned to protect the final girl’s house: dozing off on the job. Then, Clack!
“What is The Nail Gun Massacre, Alex,” she mumbles.
It’s where she knows that clack from.
Jade sits up and scooches forward, looking at Terra Nova all over again, this time with eyes pre-shaped for “nailgun.” What she sees instead pretty much stops her heart, and answers every one of her wishes.
It’s a tall male figure, moving like the Prowler from one nearly-complete house to the next one, never mind the daylight, or that it’s not 1981. At first Jade thinks he’s wearing a military helmet like the actual Prowler, or a motorcycle helmet covered in electric tape, like Bubba in Nail Gun, but it’s just… a black golf cap turned around backwards? Strapped down over that cap is a full-face gas mask with two stubby, close-to-the-face filters coming down, angled away from each other, giving his head a kind of oblong, giant-mouse shape.
“No,” Jade says, even shaking her head like to prove it. Because this can’t be real and actual, can it? Can it?
He’s carrying that heavy nailgun as easily as a pistol, too.
This is really happening. It’s really been happening.
“Makes sense, makes sense,” Jade tells herself about the nailgun, her voice jittery. In—in High Tension, the chase runs through some road construction, so they come out with a huge and just massively dangerous concrete saw, which spins so much faster than any chainsaw. It stands to reason that this Prowler down there would pick up whatever’s handy. Well, handy and deadly. But it’s all deadly in the wrong hands, with the right intent.
Jade should be happy, too, she knows. This is proof, this is what she’s always wanted. She fumbles her phone up to take a snapshot for Hardy, but by the time she gets her phone up from her coveralls’ complicated pocket, Terra Nova’s still again, exactly like this Prowler had been a figment of her overactive, blood-soaked wishful thinking.
If she’d been making him up, though, then, first, he’d have had motorcycle boots on, most likely—those ratchet-buckles are so cool, so metal—and, second, there’d be a reason for the gas mask past just its essential scariness. In My Bloody Valentine, the gas mask is because this is a mining operation, and in the actual Prowler, the sheriff with the covered face is supposed to be a soldier who had probably had to deal with mustard gas on the battlefield or something.
Jade takes the best scent reading she can, identifies no foreign smells—no mustard gas, no horseradish—and finds herself both wanting this slasher to step out again, prove he was real, and also wanting him to have been all in her head.
She’s caught between those for, by her best guess… two hours? Has any slasher ever moved this slow? Granted, movies probably compress events that would take a lot longer, but two hours is long enough for her to spin all kinds of excuses for whoever that was down there to have been wearing a gas mask, carrying that nailgun, and wearing that black hoodie in July. Which isn’t the way to be ready, to be vigilant.
Then, finally: Clack!
Adrenaline floods all through her again, sharpening her senses. By the time it’s washing out of her system, she’s back to trying to make it all make sense. If this slasher were trying to nail someone running across the room, there’d be a barrage of clacks! This guy’s more deliberate, though, isn’t he? That game where two people hide on opposite sides of the same wall, each waiting for the other to burst out?
Evidently he’s the more patient one.
Except… except this is too early, isn’t it? This is supposed to be tomorrow night. Jade wants to stand, wave her arms for everybody to slow down, that they’re blowing their wad ahead of time, aren’t going to have any left when it counts.
She doesn’t know how far a nail from a nailgun can tumble through the air, though.
She looks up to the flurry of motion to her distant right—the yacht.
It’s Tiara Mondragon. She’s in her black bikini, her sunhat and shades on, a book tucked under her arm.
Completely unaware.
She sashays down to the—to whatever the tower part of a yacht is called, kind of two-thirds of the way back. She disappears into it. Moments later she emerges on a higher, closer-to-the-sun deck, drink in hand.
Call Hardy! Call 911! Jade tries to brainwave across, straining so hard her head nearly Scanners.
But, call him to say what, exactly? That someone over here’s wearing a gas mask all suspiciously? That their gait is all slashery? That—gasp—there’s a super-dangerous nailgun over here?
All the same, Jade gets her own phone ready, except… she did really need to plug in last night. All the charge she got from Hardy
is gone, shit. Jade shakes her phone like she can get the battery juice to an important place long enough for just one call, but that works about as well as it usually does.
It’s all up to Tiara to save them now. Tiara who’s just settling down onto the towel she must have spread while Jade was having a panic attack about her battery. On the deck Tiara was just on, though, one of the Founders—Lewellyn Singleton—is walking and reading a newspaper, his robe cinched loose. At the back of the yacht the two girls, Cinnamon and Ginger, mirror images of each other, are tossing bits of something over the railing into the water and giggling, and that short one whose head’s barely taller than the railing must be Galatea Pangborne.
None of them know. Yet.
Including Letha.
“Where are you?” Jade whispers to her. More important, where is this slasher prowling around? Is he, even? Do slashers take naps too?
“Fuck it,” Jade says, and stands.
Nothing happens. No nails whizz in, bury themselves in her gut.
“Well, let’s get this party started,” she announces, and walks downhill with long deliberate strides, all her pockets zipped, her lips set in a firm line. By the time she’s twenty yards from the closest house, past the last of the trees the Founders aren’t going to let anyone cut down, her lips feel more squiggly, more Charlie Brown. And she can feel his cartoon parentheses around her eyes, too.
Thing is, she’s close enough now she can’t see every exit, every entrance, and she’s only eighty percent certain—okay, seventy—that this is the same house she saw the slasher walking away from. Meaning it could be one he’s back inside.
Jade nods to herself for strength all the same, reminds herself that she knows this genre, and regrips her hand around her phone, blasts across the last of that open space, certain that if she turns around, that gas mask is going to be right there, and gaining.
She makes the door, it’s thankfully unlocked—she hadn’t even considered that it might not be—and she opens it both quietly and as quickly as she can, guiding it shut behind her.
The hall she’s in is dark, but there’s a light glowing in the… kitchen, it turns out. She pats her pockets for the charging cable she suddenly can’t find, but knows that, because this is a slasher, any plug she finds in here isn’t going to bring her phone back to life, isn’t going to connect her to anyone who can help.
Instead of using it as a communication device, then, Jade holds her phone like it’s the handle for her machete—the one she gave away—keeping it directly in front of her. She tunes in for footsteps, for breathing, for crawling, but she’s really and actually alone, as best as she can tell, and as already suggested by the slasher striding purposefully away from this house. But it’s these kinds of situations jumpscares are made from, she knows.
Moving room by room she clears the first floor, then has the choice of either going upstairs like Sidney says stupid girls in horror movies are always doing, or going downstairs, into the basement, which she’s now insisting will just be that: a basement. Not a cellar, and definitely please not some Evil Dead fruit cellar, because there’s only so much her mind can take.
“Shit shit shit,” she mutters, looking up then down, up then down. And then she sees it: one golden-tinted nail standing up from the frame around the door to the basement.
Her face goes cold, her breathing deep.
She swallows, the sound a thunderous gush in her ears, and, keeping her right foot ahead like that matters, shuffles alongside the stairs, eases the basement door open, the whole while picturing a network of tunnels connecting basement to basement across Terra Nova, so they can scurry from home to home during the winter months.
Except, she reminds herself, it’s rocky over here. Too rocky.
Meaning, of course, that if the basements do end up connecting, it’s going to be by burrowing dead people, left-behind murder victims from the nineteenth century contorting around rocks, gathering in caves, turning their faces up to the hateful sounds above them.
“Shut up, shut up,” Jade hisses to her brain, and takes the first timid step down, deciding at the last moment not to turn the staircase light on, as that would only announce her presence, which might then lead to her bloody absence. Which, to everyone across the lake, would be good riddance, the best riddance.
At the blind turn halfway down the stairs, Jade’s ninety-nine percent sure anybody down there will be able to hear her heart pounding. When she’s finally down there, she has no choice but to feel on the wall for the light switch. Either that or pull out her trusty Jame Gumb night vision goggles.
The lights come on and instantly she’s blinded, is falling away, swinging her dead phone in front of her like that would do anything. Finally, after all these years, she understands Laurie Strode: you cringe, you fall, you shriek and you cry. Never because you want to, not because you intend to, but because it’s scary shit. The body’s gonna do what the body’s gonna do, and screams aren’t at all voluntary.
When she can see again at last, there’s no furniture, just an endless tile floor, already-textured walls—the whole basement’s finished out already. Up near the ceiling there’s those short wide windows that mean this isn’t completely underground, but it’s enough underground to be that clammy kind of cool, and kind of muffled.
Any nails fired down here are probably not nails she heard.
Proof of that turns out to be on the wall behind her. Going from waist-high and up into the ceiling, maybe twelve feet in total, is a zipper line of nails, set close enough to be a stairway for an acrobatic mouse. Meaning, since they start in the corner, that the target was running the other way.
Jade listens hard for creaking above her head, peers as deep into the high windows as she can for gas mask eyes clocking her, and, though she’s still not sure this is the best of all ideas, goes the direction the nails are telling her to go.
For reasons she can’t explain even to herself, she’s still being sure to lead with her right foot. Everything that made sense when she was watching slashers doesn’t seem to matter just one whole hell of a lot while walking through a slasher, does it?
Worse, “It’s July fucking third,” she says aloud, like calling foul.
None of this is even supposed to be happening yet.
How many final rounds does Scream 4 have, though, right? Maybe, since the slasher’s been going for nearly four decades, the only way to still surprise is by breaking its own rules.
It’s definitely working. Jade has no idea what’s coming.
The next breadcrumb for her eyes is golden again, and nail-shaped again, and in a doorframe again. Either a closet or a bathroom. Or, this is a basement—maybe storage, then? Water heater, furnace?
“H-hello?” she asks.
No response.
She taps on the door with her phone, runs through a mental list of who’s not behind the door—everyone she knows is in Proofrock, and everyone she just saw on the yacht is, you know, on the yacht.
“I’m coming in!” Jade announces as clear as she can, and, using her left hand on the knob, she swings the door out and hustles back into something like a defensive stance, spinning instantly around because how it always works is that the slasher’s right behind you when you least expect it.
She’s still alone.
Trusting neither the space before her nor behind her, she turns back to the door she just opened.
It is a bathroom, what she guesses is a “half-bath” over here in Camelot. For all she knows, her dad carted the tub down for somebody more expert to install.
There’s a body in that tub, too.
His legs are cocked out over the edge, his arms thrown out to the side, and his eyes are open, but they’re not seeing anything anymore.
“Cody,” Jade whispers, in pain.
Cowboy Boots.
He’s still wearing them, along with a golden nail between the eyes, a ribbon of blood unfurling down from it and curling across his face, tucking itself into his mouth at
last instead of pooling in the hollow of his neck.
Jade spins around again but it’s still just her in the basement.
Which is when the lights black out.
She nearly falls down from it.
All she can hear now is her breath. It’s coming in hitches, in gasps, then not at all because she’s listening.
“Cody,” she says at last, “CodyCodyCody,” but he’s not answering. Which is surely for the absolute best, thank you thank you, Indians have to stick together. But still.
She was never Jame Gumb, she realizes. She’s Clarice, feeling her way with wide-spread fingers.
The lights fizz back on.
Jade cringes back, sure that’s just step one of her getting rushed.
But… she finally sees it: the light switch she flipped up. There’s a motion sensor under it, to save energy. The lights go off when it thinks the room is empty.
Jade spins back to Cody.
Still there. Still dead.
Jade leans against the wall opposite the bathroom door and slides down.
“I’m sorry,” she says into the bathroom. “I—I don’t know why, man. You’re not even part of all this, are you? You weren’t, I mean. Until now.”
Was it just because he was there? Is this target practice for tomorrow night? Cleaning house before the big party? What could he have done to have deserved a nail in the forehead, though?
“Nothing,” Jade tells him.
Oh. Unless it’s that he talked to her back in March? Which would matter to the slasher why? Does her knowing the genre and predicting the day and trying to pull Letha into all of this somehow mess things up for the slasher? And, how can she even be thinking rational thoughts, this close to a dead body? Just as important: it’s Letha’s job to find Cody, not Jade’s. This could be screwing the whole process up.
“But I was never here,” Jade says out loud, and stands, resetting the room as best she can: pulling the bathroom door shut, policing the tile for any mud she’s tracked in, and, back at the stairs, flipping the light switch to down.
My Heart Is a Chainsaw Page 26