“How did he—?” Jade asks, about the shaky opening credits of Kristy starting up.
“Owns the network?” Letha says. “Parent company, I don’t know. Doesn’t matter.”
“Hunh,” Jade says, a little bit impressed. She settles back to watch, hugging the two-hundred-dollar pillow to her.
“Going tomorrow night?” Letha asks. “The movie thing?”
She’s sitting up now like she doesn’t want to, but there’s one pre-bedtime duty left to perform: wrapping her hair up for sleep?
Jade doesn’t understand, just answers the question instead: “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Thirty minutes later Letha’s asleep, snoring cutely into the futon’s backrest, one of her legs hiked up around her body. Jade weighs waking her for Kristy’s excellent lessons against the final girl being tired for her big fight tomorrow night but decides sleep will be the best thing, as each minute in a massacre uses twice as much adrenaline as the previous minute, and it’s probably even harder if you’re having to actually fight the slasher, not just get away from him.
That doesn’t mean Jade’s tired yet, though. But, not like she can step outside and blow smoke up at the stars, either. Anyway, at this point in the game, standing alone in any dark place would be setting out a formal invitation for a beheading. Cigarettes are great and all, but her head staying attached to her body is even better.
Because her fidgety hands need to be doing something, she snoops through the shelf by the bed—Letha’s sleepytime reading. Which are all the extra-credit history papers Jade hand-delivered. The whole sheaf is still folded in the middle. Jade opens them, is ready to be thrilled by all the highlights Letha has to have done, because final girls always do their homework. But these haven’t been read at all, it doesn’t look like. They’re even… Jade checks every third page: yep. Except for the letter Letha evidently keyed on, they’re in the same order even, from revenge and pranks to final girls, on through the big interview debacle of sophomore year, then adding it all together into Jaws: a whole slasher crash course in thirty pages. Just, a crash course Letha doesn’t seem to have bothered with yet, as Jade’s letter was, evidently, so much more fascinating, so much more “revealing.”
Jade has to chuckle. The kind with no smile.
She weighs again the pros and cons of waking Letha to maybe do this Very Important Homework, but finally pulls her phone out instead. Letha wasn’t lying, either: signal’s fine, now. Three bars, same as Proofrock. Not that being connected does anything but remind her that her inbox has zero new messages.
Jade opens her photos, swipes up and up until she finds what she wants: a snapshot of a photograph from that paper they had at the treatment center down in Idaho Falls… Post Register, yeah. The story about Mr. Holmes. The one photo was of him in his ultralight, the sky clear behind him.
Jade touches the heart under the picture, so it’ll be easier to find next time, and then she tries to blink away all the feelings trying to crowd in.
This isn’t the time for that.
Instead, she catalogs the day’s events, plugging them into and out of this or that slasher to see what might fit, and finds herself early on in Scream again. Not the Casey Becker kill, but the Sid-scare, where Sid shows the first glimmer of the survivor she is: when she can’t call the police to her house, she uses her computer to get them there.
Jade’s phone has battery and signal, though. Meaning—meaning she could just dial Hardy up right now, couldn’t she? There are dead bodies over here. And she is a witness, at least to Shooting Glasses. She owes it to him to call Theo Mondragon in, doesn’t she? But if she does, then tomorrow night doesn’t happen like it’s supposed to, either.
Jade studies Letha’s memory wall, all the printed-out photos of her with friends. They’re at dances, scaling cliffs, just walking down streets that don’t mean anything to Jade, but probably mean everything to Letha. And of course there she is with her dad, with Theo Mondragon, both of them with scuba goggles cocked up on their heads, nothing but empty blue water behind them.
If Jade calls Hardy in, then Letha will be taking that photo down, at least. And blaming Jade for it?
Maybe, yeah. Probably.
A half hour later Kristy crescendoes in a beautiful necessary fireball—killing the killer feels so good—then scratches into the credits, and Jade salutes Justine, the bad-ass survivor girl, but all she can think about is Didn’t she have to pee at some point in all that running?
Jade has to pee so bad she can’t keep her legs still, which is only tangling her up deeper in the sheet, making this emergency situation worse.
Instead of jarring Letha awake by pausing the credits—ripping that sound away would have to startle her—Jade uses the remote to bump it back all the way to the pool scene, which gives her like forty minutes to pee. Which, judging by how the whites of her eyes are going yellow, feels like about how much time she’ll need. And the bathroom, Letha was sure to say, is just down the hall to the right.
Jade pulls Letha’s door in, chances a look out into this narrow little Dead Calm, Donkey Punch hallway. It’s just as empty as she hoped, and Jade supposes that, all in all, being in a Dead Calm or a Donkey Punch at least means you’re on top of the water, not down in all that DeepStar Six, Leviathan pressure. Though up here there’s always Triangle and Ghost Ship and Virus. But at some point you just have to find something to pee in, too, ideally a toilet. Jade steps out into the tight hall, immediately feels too exposed. She ducks back into the room, steps out a moment later in Letha’s Italian silk robe, a towel wrapped around her hair. Letha’s tall enough that the robe covers Jade’s combat boots. Score one for the good guys.
Jade speedwalks down to the first door on the right, ducks in, doesn’t turn the light on until she’s got the door closed again.
Right across from her is a gas mask.
Jade flinches back, not ready to die yet, but the mask doesn’t shoot two arms out for her. It’s just hanging there, along with… a full scuba suit, complete with goggles, a slicker and hat Creighton Duke would like, and… no hockey mask. No fedora. Just a rack of scuba tanks, which is a stupid thing to keep all the way down here instead of up on some deck, right? Unless… unless someone’s keeping them hidden?
But why?
Oh, Jade realizes: because of Scooby-Doo. In the big reveal, there’s always the careful walk-through of how the fake ghost or whatever was doing it, isn’t there? These tanks are probably going to be part of that, aren’t they? Someone, maybe Jade, will pull a holding strap and let the tanks roll out into the middle of the confession.
Jade should most definitely not be in here with them right now, though. It’s too early. But still, and mostly just because she’s seen Scream 3, Jade pushes her hand into the belly of each hanging outfit just to be sure none of them are going to reach out for her as soon as she turns her back. She turns the overhead light off, listens hard for footsteps or breathing in the hall, and steps out again, darts across to the bathroom, which is to the right from Letha’s bedroom, but is on the left.
She’s just done, is dealing with the many complications of coveralls and this impossibly soft robe, when she takes stock of the counter, and the beauty toolkit exploded all over it. No, this isn’t a workbench, she decides, it’s an artist’s station. She touches a smudged sponge, runs her fingertip along the spine of a brush, and… what’s this? Cylindrical, electric, surely not…
Jade picks it up as delicately as she can: Oh, clippers. Phew. Meaning… she stares at the door, is thinking about the halls beyond it, and all the rooms it connects to, and Letha saying the yacht’s full tonight, because everybody’s in town for Deacon Samuels, and for the Fourth.
This is a dude’s clippers. She can tell because they’re big to fit big hands, and don’t have any feminine accents. And… the only one of the Founders with a roguish soul patch that probably needs constant attention is Mars Baker.
So: Mars Baker is close enough to also be using this b
athroom.
Jade swallows hard, looks at herself in the mirror, and has to touch her hair to make sure it’s real. It looks more like she smeared glue all over her scalp and thrashed her head around in a New Year’s Eve dumpster.
Touching it just leaves her fingers oily, too. She’s probably ruining Letha’s expensive pillow.
“Fuck it,” she says, and before she can think twice, she takes Mars Baker’s clippers, peels the guard away, and stares herself down while shaving off hank after hank of hair. It’s supposed to turn her into Ripley from Alien 3, when space lice were an issue, but she’s really just a stubbly mess now, a slightly taller Tommy Jarvis, her scalp still unevenly stained from the shoe polish. Her head looks like a kindergarten class’s pottery project.
“Well you asked for it,” she tells herself, and runs the faucet to try to swirl all the hair down the drain. When it clogs, she has to reach into the mucky water, grainy with the spit-out toothpaste of probably ten people, and grab onto the oily clump of her hair, deliver it to the trashcan like the drowned rat it is.
Finally the water gurgles and burps down, leaving the rest of her split-ends all over the steep walls of the sink. Jade runs more water, guides those strays down as best she can, and almost has them all gone—no evidence—when the knob rattles and a shoulder thunks into the metal door.
“Um?” she says.
“Hurry,” someone whispers—female, thank you, not old and male and litigious.
Still, someone’s standing right out there now, waiting.
“Okay, okay,” Jade says in her best Letha-sleep voice, which she knows can’t be very convincing, because final girls don’t let their frustration and grogginess make them snappy.
Jade runs water over her hands, pats them dry on her cloud-soft hips, wraps the towel back around her prickly scalp—a completely new sensation—and turns the light off. She breathes once, twice, and on three she spins out, keeping her back to whoever this is, stepping around them in a way that’s also kind of pushing them into the bathroom they evidently need in a desperate way.
For a flash she sees that it’s one of the twins, either Cinnamon or Ginger, which is the best she could hope for: kids. Not Mars Baker, not Ladybird Samuels or Macy Todd, not Ross Pangborne or Lewellyn Singleton, not Lana Singleton, not—not whatever Ross Pangborne’s wife is named. Donna?
Lemmy, though, Lemmy Singleton would have been all right. Him or Galatea. Kids she can deal with. Kids she can bluff.
“Thanks,” either Cinnamon or Ginger says to Jade’s back, stepping into the bathroom, and Jade nods, keeps moving, the hallway surely free and clear all the way back to—
Facing her now is the other twin, either Cinnamon or Ginger.
She’s looking Jade full in the face, not recognizing her.
“Who—who are you?” this other twin asks.
“Letha’s friend,” Jade mumbles.
“There’s hair in here!” the first twin announces from the toilet.
“Does her dad know you’re spending the night?” the other asks.
“He ordered us a movie,” Jade says, turning sideways to slip past.
“The bathroom’s not even steamy,” this other twin says, which is the same as asking why Jade has a towel wound around her head.
Jade doesn’t explain, just keeps on trucking down to Letha’s room, ducks in breathing hard, feels exactly like Justine in Kristy, always hiding behind this door, in that locker room, certain death around every corner.
She feels for the lock on Letha’s door, twists it over, falls back onto the bed.
Her heart thumps slower and slower, the adrenaline flushing out, and in its wake is lavender and melatonin to inhale. Jade fights through it as best she can, Letha’s light snoring not helping.
“Friday the 13th,” she whispers into the remote, and pulls up The Final Chapter which wasn’t, hoping the carrot of counting machete-strikes into Jason’s head at the end will keep her awake. It’s the scene she always imagined watching with a garageful of classmates, all of them chanting the numbers higher and higher, some of them acting it out, all of them killing Jason together, because it takes a village.
Jade makes it through, does the count alone in her head, then dials back to Part III, is in and out until the headstand, which she suspects is not actually part of sex, but when Jason splits that guy from crotch to head, one side of her falls away with him, and—because all the camera angles and compositions are built around 3-D—Jade tracks it down. To her phone, awake in her hand somehow.
No, not somehow. Very much on purpose.
This is the decision she’s been avoiding, isn’t it? Cutting all her hair off hasn’t made her forget, though. Not quite. Even Jason hasn’t distracted her enough.
She can save a lot of lives if she just makes one phone call, can’t she? If she just touches one phone number?
It means… it means all her slasher dreams don’t come true, but—if they do? Is it really winning if everybody dies? More to the point: if she’d have nipped this slasher cycle in the bud already, by turning that pink phone in, would Mr. Holmes have ended up dying in Indian Lake?
That decides it for her.
She calls Hardy’s office. Not 911, where a dispatcher will answer, give her time to lose her nerve, but the actual office.
It rings three times, four, and on five—
“Fremont County Sheriff’s Office,” Meg says, as chipper as the day is long.
“Ms. Koenig?” Jade says, not speaking too loud.
“Um, who is this?” Meg asks back.
“I just want to report something.”
“May I have your name, please?”
“I saw a—I saw someone die. I saw him get killed, I mean.”
For a moment, nothing, then, so cheery, “And where are you, dear?”
“Across the lake,” Jade says, obviously. “Terra Nova.”
“And who is this?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s…”—quieter, much quieter—“it’s Theo Mondragon who did it.”
“Excuse me?”
“He’s the one who did it. Theo Mondragon.”
“This is Jade Daniels,” Meg says, switching ears it sounds like.
“I’m anonymous,” Jade says back.
“We do have caller ID, dear.”
Jade closes her eyes in pain.
“I’m sorry,” Meg says. “But the sheriff left specific instructions for if you called. He said it would be your next… what was the word? Oh, yes. ‘Gambit.’ Your next gambit. That’s like a gamble plus a ruse, it means—”
“I know what it means.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Grady… he had said you have a vocabulary on you.”
Grady, Bear, Sherlock, Holmes, pirate of Indian Lake, Night Flier—some history teachers have as many names as A Bay of Blood, don’t they?
No: had. Some history teachers had that many names.
More important, “He talked to you about me?” Jade asks, fully aware this is giving away that it’s really her.
“He was proud of you,” Meg says, her mouth closer to the phone now, but all Jade can hear is that past tense.
“This isn’t a gambit,” Jade says. “This is… I saw it, you’ve got to believe me.”
“Was it like a—a slasher movie?”
“Just because… that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. If you don’t—a lot of people are going to die tomorrow night.”
“Sheriff said you would say that,” Meg says. “Something about ‘closing the beaches,’ I believe?”
Jade lowers the phone to the sheets, watches her thumb end the useless stupid idiotic doomed call, and she decides to just count the seconds until her phone dims to half-bright, then completely blacks out: fifteen, then thirty. But to be sure she does it again, gets a count of fifteen and thirty-two, so has to do it again to be sure, but this time—or maybe the next?—when the screen goes dark, it takes her eyelids with it. As she’s sinking, she tells herself it doesn’t matter, she’s saf
e. The door’s locked, the yacht’s still as a tomb, this blanket is soft and warm, the twins haven’t rung the alarm, and, most important, you don’t slash where you live. Theo Mondragon must know that, it’s basic stuff. All she has to do is be sure and wake before dawn, sneak out through the tangle of halls, be gone before Letha can insist on a group breakfast up on deck.
Jade’s first thought when she wakes back up, though, which feels like the same moment she was just in, is the thesis of another paper she wrote for Mr. Holmes: “The Strange Algebra of Horror.” Her lead-in example, and where she got the title, was that hurting the leg of a slasher, instead of slowing it down, it actually makes the slasher faster, just, now it’s got a scary limp. But her main push, with many examples, was that proximity to the final girl greatly reduces your likelihood of survival. Meaning a fly on the wall might just have a chance of slipping through alive—like, talking Fridays, Ted, the prankster in Part 2 who kind of by convention has to die and die hard. Except he goes out drinking on the town, is safe from all the carnage specifically because he increases his distance from the final girl.
Instead of, say, sleeping right alongside her.
Jade yawns a long luxuriant yawn, her jaw nearly popping out of place from it, and apologizes in her head to Mr. Holmes, as that paper must have been wrong, since, right now, Jade’s as safe as she can be. But… what was it that woke her up, here? A sound? Yeah, some sound, something jarring. A wrong sound. Her memory can categorize it as “sudden,” just can’t hear it again, quite.
She tunes in to the rest of the yacht as best she can, squinting to dial whatever it was in. Because she’s listening so hard, the footsteps suddenly pounding past the door are absolute thunder to her. She kicks back into the corner of the bed, eyes wide, mouth instantly dry, muscles tensed and getting tenser.
Moments later the doorknob rattles violently and someone slaps the door high and to the side like a cop.
My Heart Is a Chainsaw Page 29