It lights her up, draws Theo’s glare to her.
“You,” he says, Jade somehow hearing it.
“Go to hell!” Jade screams back, and then tilts the lamp forward. It douses in the water, Lonnie lunging after it.
Jade steps back into the lake too, never mind the cold. She’s roiling with heat, now, has no choice but to keep Theo Mondragon occupied long enough for Shooting Glasses to climb to safety, long enough for the final girl to gather her wits, find herself, and—
The cheerleaders, screaming again?
Jade whips her head around.
It’s… Jocelyn Cates? Proofrock’s beauty queen and onetime Olympic swimmer—the final girl hopeful of her day, surely. Had there been a slasher in Proofrock twenty years ago. She’s standing up from her pink-frilled boat, and Jade’s blood, she’s pretty sure, actually drops a degree or two—all the degrees.
Jocelyn Cates is screaming because her husband beside her, whatever his name is, has black spreading over his chest. From his face, his mouth. Where his mouth used to be.
His lower jaw has been ripped off. All the flashlights within shining distance hold on him long enough that everyone can be sure. Long enough to track his slow slump forward.
Like that it’s panic at the disco.
The bass-boat bassinet fires up its outboard in response, breaking whatever promise this mom-and-dad-to-be had to make to Hardy. It stands up in the water and tries to spin around but there’s no room. Instead of executing a neat flipturn, the propeller wraps in the float beside it, the Henderson High float the teachers always do—the same “classroom” as every year—and all the teachers in the bolted-down chairs of their “desks” grab on to those desks, their hidden beers and glasses of wine exploding up before their faces, and, and—
Among them, Jade sees the last person she ever thought she’d get to see again. All other sound falls away.
Mr. Holmes.
He’s there in a wheelchair, his right leg in a trash-bagged cast in front of him, a cigarette in his hand, hidden down by his spokes. And the float he’s on is being chewed into by an illegal propeller that’s screaming higher and madder, faster and faster.
“Sir!” Jade shrieks, and doesn’t even think, just runs to him, climbing up and across Lonnie’s living room, falling almost immediately back into the water, conking her chin on the hard side of some boat, its mushy paper clinging to her face so she has to duck below the surface, swim under.
She comes up into absolute madness.
On-screen, the Orca is sinking, and right beside her, a much smaller Orca is too. The papier-mâché shark is floating free, getting batted around, and—no. No no no.
The lower part of Jocelyn Cates’s husband’s face is snagged on a half-gone six-pack, is floating with it, right by Jade’s face.
What could even do that? An M-80 in the throat?
There’s no time, though.
Jade jerks away, trying to find Mr. Holmes. The bass-boat bassinet’s outboard is coughing down now, maybe has too much of the teachers’ float wrapped into its propeller. Jade can hear it, not see it. She looks around for anything to climb on, something to latch onto, and—the pier.
Either Cinnamon or Ginger has Galatea up on her hip. They’re waiting for Shooting Glasses, who’s having to find his own way up, and with, Jade can see now, a line of nails angling down across his back. Theo Mondragon did get him. Just, not enough.
Or: not yet.
Jade shakes her head no, can see this happening but do nothing about it: Theo Mondragon is gliding to the pier in—in Manx’s invisible canoe. Which he is using like a paddleboard, Letha. He even has an actual paddle.
Give him a robe, a wig, and he’s Stacey Graves.
And he must be soundless, too, or else his paddle dipping in is hidden by all the splashing around him, by Jaws still playing so loud through the speakers, by all the screaming. Shooting Glasses doesn’t hear him until it’s too late, anyway.
Theo Mondragon pulls him back hard, all at once, hard enough that the nails in Shooting Glasses’s back stab into Theo Mondragon’s chest and stomach, sending both of them spilling over the side, the invisible canoe continuing on invisibly, maybe, who knows.
Jade looks up onto the pier for where either Cinnamon or Ginger is looking, as they might have a better line on what’s going on right under them, and—and it’s Tiffany Koenig standing there now.
She’s got her phone aimed down, is recording whatever’s going on, and probably this whole disaster.
Jade waves as big as she can to Tiff, but her arm’s just one of a hundred, and when she rises up high enough again to see the base of the pier, the foundering librarian float is in her way now.
“No!” Jade says, clawing at the soggy paper, her hand painfully connecting with the aluminum boat hidden underneath.
When she pulls it back to coddle it for a moment, stop the stinging, she makes herself try to remember if Theo Mondragon had his machete or not when he pulled Shooting Glasses down.
No, he didn’t! He had both hands on that tall paddle, didn’t he?
“Please please please,” she says, and a heavy hand plants on her shoulder, its owner just trying to pull past, get away from whatever this is. It dunks Jade before she can breathe, and she comes up sputtering.
To her immediate right, bleary and blurry but clearing up, too many Proofrockers are on Lonnie’s raft, and it’s sinking, the upright-again lamp flickering yellow somehow.
And the screaming, god. Jade can hardly hear herself think. Every mouth is open, and every second face is Stacey Graves—this night isn’t a night, it’s a series of heart attacks waiting to happen.
Jade finally fixes on her father, standing unmolested in his boat, his left hand to the toy saber strapped to his belt—aisle 3, Family Dollar—his right clutching the neck of his beer bottle. In the water at his feet is Alison Chambers, floating faceup, her chest leaking out into the lake. From that bass boat’s illegal motor? But… how does that motor explain Jocelyn Cates’s husband’s jaw being ripped off, especially when that jaw being ripped off came before that outboard even fired up?
There’s Judd Tambor standing in the water, holding a child up above the fray, the image of that wavering in Jade’s head with the image of him at graduation, holding a kid above his head just the same, everybody clapping for her.
They’re not clapping now, even though she was right about everything.
She backs up, feeling the water behind her first, and her fingertips find warmth.
Jade turns and the warmth is the inside of Misty Christy’s chest. Misty Christy’s daughter, the one Jade saved from the bus, is treading water while trying to hold her mom’s head up, but it doesn’t matter if Misty Christy’s airways are clear anymore or not.
Jade pulls Misty Christy across to her.
“Go!” she tells the daughter, “find the sheriff, I’ll keep her safe!”
The girl is about to cry, this is too much, but after a moment more of treading water, she turns, is a minnow cutting for shore, for the sheriff, for someone to save her mom.
Jade lets Misty Christy drift away, and has to swish her hand in the water to clear the blood. Dan Dan the mailman rises up under her hand, his bald head a nervous periscope, the pole vaulter’s pole slips past like a rigid snake, and then some float is jouncing Jade forward. She looks back to who hit her. It’s Dorothy, of Dot’s. She’s holding on to the innertube she has made up like a coffee cup, like every year. Holding on and thrashing. She latches onto Jade, pulls herself up with Jade’s shoulder, which is when Jade sees Dorothy’s face.
The right eye is gone, and a good chunk of the skull, too.
Jade flinches back, gulps bloody water in and swallows it before she can tell herself not to.
Because it’s too crazy up here on the surface, she lowers everything but her eyes under, pulls from this boat to that boat, coasting through either blood or Jell-O. Her main hope now is to drift unobserved to the edge of this, and then float q
uietly out into deeper, more hidden waters. Except—her feet are tangling in something? She jerks, pulls, finally has to just duck under, see.
It’s spokes. Of a wheelchair.
Mr. Holmes.
In this comparative calmness, she studies the water around her but can’t even see past her hands. All the blood, all the silt, all the bubbles. When she comes up she’s instantly swamped by she’s not sure what—somebody cannonballing in? getting thrown in?—and when she clears her eyes, there’s Mr. Holmes right in front of her, trying to float on his back, but the lake is going in and out of his mouth, and his cast is heavy, trying to pull him down.
His head’s been opened at his hairline, about, probably from the prow of the bass boat, is spilling dates and history out into the water. His twitching left hand finds her right, and Jade pulls him to her, looking around for what she can protect him from.
He looks over to her, spits the water from his mouth and smiles, says, “Jenn—Jennifer.”
“Jade,” Jade says back to him, her eyes hot and crying now.
“I—I—” he sputters.
His left hand finds the back of her head. He runs his fingers across her stubble and she pushes back against this touch, shaking her head no but holding his hand all the same.
A spasm passes across him: his head injury. His brain, failing.
Jade pulls him closer, tries to hold him higher.
“Just, just—” she says. “We can, I’ll get you—”
It was a lie when she said it to Misty Christy’s daughter, though, and it’s a lie now.
The corners of Mr. Holmes’s eyes crinkle like he appreciates the effort.
“Will she or won’t she what?” he manages to get out, and the massacre they’re in becomes just mute backdrop for the moment, a movie going on in the next theater over.
Will she or won’t she? Jade repeats, inside, feeling through it.
Where is this from? She knows, she does, she—
No.
She closes her eyes.
It’s what she told Hardy and Letha and Mr. Holmes her mom was asking herself, sitting in the car at that gas station in Idaho Falls, wasn’t it? It’s what she wrote in her letter to Letha.
And—and her deal with Holmes, to get her diploma. She has to pass her orals. She has to answer this one question for him truthfully, the same as he confessed to her about having started the fire in 1965.
His fingers tighten in her hand.
Jade opens her eyes, still shaking her head no.
“Will she—” she starts, breathing so deep now to finally be saying it, after all these years, “will she or won’t she… be a grandma before she’s thirty. The doctor was—was to see if he’d gotten me preg-preg—or not.”
And Jade only thought she was crying before. Her whole face is leaking now, though, and it’s from—it’s from deeper than she’s ever felt.
She’s finally telling someone. She’s finally saying it. It’s not just inside her, now, it’s out in the world, it’s real, it really happened. She wasn’t down in Idaho Falls to get baby aspirin pumped from her stomach, baby aspirin was just the first thing her mom saw on the impulse rack by her register, Keyser Söze–style. No, they were down there to see if—if she had something else inside her.
Mr. Holmes closes his eyes like this hurts him more than his head injury, more than his leg, more than anything.
“I’m—I should have—” he says, and uses his left hand to pull her face to his neck now, and, this close, Jade can feel the tremor passing through his body, the… Twitch of the Death Nerve, yes. Also known as A Bay of Blood.
Thank you, Mario Bava.
Jade pulls Mr. Holmes closer, as close as she can, but she can’t stop it. He’s dying. Right now this actual instant while he’s in her arms, he’s dying.
“Somebody should, somebody should…” he says, and Jade mumbles the end into his neck, her lips right against his rough skin: “Somebody will, sir.”
When she looks up to him his eyes are glassy, and he’s gone, is—say it, she tells herself: he’s history.
Jade lets him float away, back into the frothing blood, the screams, the mayhem, all the volume dialing back up for her now. Where she’s looking is to her father, still standing on his boat in the middle of all this madness, untouched, his black-and-white warpaint not even running.
For the moment.
“You’re getting all the wrong people!” Jade screams to Theo Mondragon, wherever he is, whoever he’s carving through now.
Jade’s not moving stealthily anymore. She doesn’t have to. All around her it’s craziness, it’s blood in the air and screams cutting through it, multiplying. And Letha was right, these coveralls are heavy, but Jade’s fingers are too numb to get a grip on the wet zipper, so she just pulls ahead, pulls ahead.
On the way to her dad’s boat she collects a shattered piece of a wooden pole—a rib from the cheerleader’s shark, probably. Her dad’s not a vampire, but the thing about stakes to the heart is that they work on non-vampires just the same. And this is one bloodsucker that needs to die. And in carnage like this, nobody will question one more body facedown in the mix. That’s a lesson she’s learned from the sheriff.
“This is for you,” Jade tells her eleven-year-old self, a completely weird thing to say, but she’s got to say something.
She comes up behind her dad’s boat, glides up into it as stealthy as any slasher. Everything’s already rocking, so a little more rocking—her climbing aboard—doesn’t draw his attention. Before she can talk herself out of it, she steps cleanly ahead, takes his neck from the back in the crook of her arm, and presses the sharp leading point of the pole into his back, his chest swelling away from this pain but she has him by the neck, so he can’t get away from this.
Of all the lines Jade’s tried to have ready for this moment, all she manages to come up with is, “I wasn’t for you, Dad.”
“J-Jennifer?” he says back, realizing that it’s her, that this isn’t the end he thought it was, and for a bad flash—his tone is so surprised—Jade lets herself believe that he was drunk enough that night that he doesn’t even remember what he did. How else does he get across the last six years in such good spirits?
It doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, though.
It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, Jade’s telling herself. Whether he remembers what he did or not doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
When her dad tries to twist, see her face, she tightens her arm on his throat, shoves the splintered point of the pole maybe a quarter inch in, blood spurting warm onto the web of her hand.
She’s in the shower again, which is where it happened. The water heater’s failing, so they’re doubling up. He’s washing her, his bottle of vodka up by the shampoo, he’s washing her and he’s—he’s—
“What if Janet Leigh was waiting for Norman?” Jade says through her sudden tears, or tries to say, but her throat is clenching, her whole body is trembling, is cringing away from this skin-to-skin contact with him, and—and she wants to spasm her head back and forth faster and faster like Jacob’s Ladder, to shake free of this Lost Highway memory, she wants to remember things her own way, please, she wants to blur that whole year away, smear it into just a bland sixth-grade nothing, and she still isn’t stabbing this sharp pole into her dad’s back like she needs to.
“I’m really going to,” she makes herself say, like hearing it out loud might make it true.
But… she can’t?
She looks down to her hand like to clock where the betrayal is, but it’s not there. It’s in her head. Her head is what’s betraying her. Her heart.
She can’t do it. She’s not a killer.
“Jennifer?” her dad says, a sort of confident chuckle to his voice that makes her want to hurl.
“No,” a voice says from just past him, “it’s Jade,” and then Tab Daniels’s head conks over to the side fast and hard. He falls away, slumps ahead into the water, out of Jade’s arm, blood from h
is face coating the water.
Letha. It’s Letha.
She’s holding a board with a nail in it, but to her it’s a bat. The nail, and the force behind it, tore Jade’s dad’s temple away from his skull. Some of him—cheek muscle, nose tissue, a whole eyebrow maybe—is still on the sharp end of that nail, even.
“He’s never going to hurt you again,” Letha says, breathing hard, which is when the world turns white and fast and stinging. Letha disappears into it and Jade falls onto her knees, shielding her face, her newly exposed scalp.
There’s a sound too, an everywhere sound, a deep dangerous whirring, like a weed whacker the size of a car, which means—
Hardy’s airboat.
He’s got it revved high, all his lights shining through the mist and droplets his great blades are spitting across the water.
Until that fan cycles down, anyway.
Monstrous shadows surge through the light, and all Jade can see is Hardy teetering there now from whatever just happened, one hand still to his high captain’s chair, his stomach open to the night air, his hand already clamped to that line of pain. But his hand’s not big enough for this. At first a little blood seeps through his fingers, and then the rest, slick and bulging, glistening gray.
Jade’s breathing hard now.
She looks back around to Letha, still standing exactly where she was, the nail-board down by her leg, and… she didn’t do this to Hardy, she was right here, doing what Jade couldn’t. And—and Theo Mondragon, Jade can see his hulking shape on the pier, one hand trying to keep his seeping nail-tears shut, the other shielding his eyes from the projector light, Brody huge on-screen behind him, lining up on that oxygen tank one last time.
“I don’t—this doesn’t—” Jade says to Letha, reaching forward not so much to pull Letha in as to just hold on to her, but… a small hand is reaching up from behind Letha, is taking her chin, and is wrenching it to the side, Letha’s own hands coming up fast to try to hold her face together but even her final girl strength isn’t enough.
Her jaw is tearing away, her head trying to go with it, her eyes blown wide because this can’t really be happening, and finally her reflexes and muscles are able to clamp her hands onto whoever’s doing this terrible thing to her, so her whole body can ride this tearing-away motion.
My Heart Is a Chainsaw Page 35