My Heart Is a Chainsaw

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Still, her jaw is definitely creaking away from her face, opening her screaming mouth unnaturally wide, and crooked—a dark chasm Jade’s seen a hundred times through the tracking lines of a VHS tape, but up close and personal like this, it’s so much more intense. The top and bottom rows of teeth, they’re—they’re supposed to be parallel to each other, pretty much, but Letha’s lower teeth are angling fast away, and there’s the distinct sound of the hinge of her jaw cracking, the skin there tearing. There’s not any blood yet, this moment is being sliced too thin for the blood to be coming yet, but if the skin is parting like this, if the bones are shattering into the muscle, if the ligaments and tendons are popping like rubber bands—

  And then this instant catches up with itself and Letha is being flung away, her body ragdolling across the remains of Lonnie’s living room, thunking into the side of the jauntily floating but thoroughly abandoned bass boat, and… then sinking, with no ceremony.

  The final girl is dead.

  Jade looks into the space Letha just was, to whoever just did this impossible thing.

  It’s a little girl with long black hair, a little girl with pale dead skin, a little girl with a dress both rotting away and rolled in stabby elk hair, a little girl with forever-cracked lips and shattered fingernails, thin black veins spidering away from her black-black eyes.

  Stacey Graves, the Lake Witch.

  She opens her mouth to hiss but her own jaw dislocates on one side, falls out of joint, stretching the dry skin on that side of her mouth down. She screeches, draws one hand up to stop this pain, and cocks her head over to some angle she must know, jams her jaw back up into place.

  “You,” Jade says, falling back, catching herself on a gunwale, and it all comes home for her in that instant: a little girl, afraid of what she is, gallops across Indian Lake on all fours, away from the boys who played this trick on her, away from the town that never fed her, away from the father who never wanted her. All she’s looking for here is her mother, stashed in a crevice over there, one deeper than the buzzards can find, because Letch Graves doesn’t need any more attention from the sheriff.

  But Stacey Graves is no buzzard, and she has weeks to find her mother, and finally does, right at the water’s rising edge.

  Stacey Graves wriggles into the shallow cave with her, drapes her mother’s arms around herself, and goes to sleep until the hated water seeps in with them, bringing its faint music with it. Because it’s the water coming up over her, not her trying to get under it, and because she’s wedged so tightly in her mother’s embrace, Stacey Graves is able to go under at last and be with her mother, which is all she’s ever wanted.

  But then a sharp black hook finds her, ends her sleep.

  She comes up, frees herself, and, looking for her mother again, kills anyone she finds hunting on that side of the lake, making those woods so sacred they become national forest almost on their own. But she does manage to find her mother again, dragged out along with Stacey, just floating at the surface of the lake now.

  Stacey leads her to a better cave, a higher-up cave, one the singing water will never find, and then blocks the entrance up behind them, and this works for decades, until the forest becomes a furnace, dripping enough sparks and hissing pitch down that her mother’s dry skin sizzles, flickers, catches flame.

  Stacey Graves pats those little fires out, waits for the larger one to die back, and then she climbs up, goes for the first culprits she can find. They’re at the edge of the lake, are in a series of little houses that aren’t the town she hates, but will do.

  Afterwards she retires to her cave, sleeps the sleep of the dead with her mother again, hopefully this time forever, but then someone drops in with her. She hisses at him, scratches at him, and then thick grey water starts to spurt down into her cave. But it’s not water at all. It’s melted rock.

  Stacey Graves fights through before it can dry, rises that night, and takes the first lives she chances upon: elk, foraging close to shore under cover of darkness. But she’s not done yet. There are voices out on the water. Laughing, happiness.

  Not on her watch.

  She rushes out there to that green canoe, silences them both, and, looking for another cave to ride out eternity in, she hides from the sun—it makes her skin hiss, her eyes smolder, her lips and nailbeds steam—in the only cave she can find: the elk she slaughtered, which embed their stabby hair into her rotting nightgown. But it’s nice in there, it’s dark and pressing like a hug, like her mother’s there with her, and for weeks and months, it’s enough, until a saw made of screaming metal tears into her rotting cave, splashing light in.

  Stacey Graves retracts from it, squirming deeper into the decay, and then she pushes hard enough that she falls out into the open air again, after which she races to the loudest, most obnoxious sound she can, the one that must be responsible for disturbing her: the yacht. After tearing up and down those tight halls, slashing across those slick decks, crashing through door after door, she hides from the sun again for the day, and then—then this, the party on the water, disturbing her sleep, invading her lake. Her lake.

  How Jade knows she’s right about all this, it’s not that the dates or the logic line up, it’s that this little dead girl is standing behind where Letha was—on the water.

  It hasn’t been Theo Mondragon impossibly being here and then there at the same time. It’s been a little dead girl flitting across the surface from person to person, a little girl not slowed down by having to wade or swim—she couldn’t if she wanted to, because this Christian burial ground won’t take her Indian self, won’t let her step through.

  Right when Stacey Graves starts to surge forward, for Jade, a bellow stops them both.

  It’s Theo Mondragon.

  He’s standing in Hardy’s airboat, is looking at the bass boat Letha just died against. He’s looking at the water his only daughter just sank down into.

  And then he’s looking at Stacey Graves.

  He’s got the machete back, now, must have had it slid into his belt at the small of his back.

  “You!” he says to Stacey Graves, and she angles her head over, maybe surprised to be called out instead of retreated from.

  But, does she even understand words anymore, or does she only understand death?

  She seems to get it when Theo Mondragon points his machete at her, anyway.

  Stacey Graves darts forward and Theo Mondragon cocks the machete back to cut her in half, but at the last moment she swerves, slides under his swing, stands up behind him.

  Before he can orient, set his feet in the rocking airboat, she’s reached around, has him by the jaw the same as she had Letha. She flings him hard to the side, not even bothering to tear his face in half, just cracking him into the side of the pier, probably fifteen feet away.

  Theo Mondragon’s legs and shoulders try to keep going, and do, folding around the unmoving side of the pier, and something cracks inside him. His back, surely, because people don’t fold sideways, do they?

  He sloughs off, down, and it seems for a moment that the empty green canoe is going to catch him, but it only catches his machete.

  Stacey Graves, after watching that slow drip into the waiting water, maybe even appreciating it, turns, inspects the red surface of these waters, her eyes settling again on Jade.

  “No,” Jade whispers to her, like that can work. But it’s not a completely voluntary thing, either. Is just a prayer, really.

  It’s answered by the night splitting in two from… gunfire?

  Four fast shots, grouped tight in Stacey Graves’s back, flinging her small body ahead, sending her skidding across the surface of Indian Lake, which looks so wrong.

  It’s Hardy, Jade sees. He’s dying, is still trying to save her, because he’s not going to let Jade die in these waters like his daughter did.

  It’s what dads do. It’s what they’re supposed to do.

  After those four shots, though, Hardy slumps forward into the water, and Stacey Graves
is already there on top of the water he just disappeared under. Just like when Hardy was eleven at Camp Blood, she’s tearing at the surface, trying to get to him, but again she can’t. Jade uses this distraction to push back, to hide, to live, and once under she kicks back and back, so that when she rises amid all the floating dead, she’s just one head of many. Right beside her, faceup, is Mr. Holmes. And Misty Christy. Gliding past on a paddleboard is Lucky, the school bus driver, using a long blue paddle to pull himself ahead, ahead. He locks eyes with Jade for a second or two, pleading with her to be still, to be quiet, to let him sneak away, through all this, but then he thunks into the green canoe, over here already somehow, and loses his balance, has to step over the side, slip into the water.

  On the way down his chin connects with the paddleboard and that leaves his tongue jumping on that gritty surface. When he comes up gasping for air, chin bloody, eyes panicked, Stacey Graves is standing right there, the holes in her chest and shoulder not even bleeding, just black at the edges of those craters.

  She hauls Lucky up to her level by what hair he has and, moving slowly, deliberately like an experiment, she pushes her other hand into his chest, rotates it left and right to ease the insertion. Instead of pulling Lucky’s heart back out, she holds it, it looks like, holds it in her small hand until he sags, becomes even deader weight.

  When she drops Lucky’s body back into the water along with his heart, she’s already staring at Jade, treading bloody water, Jade’s friends and enemies all dead around her, and—but it can’t be, she’s not a final girl… she hasn’t been a virgin for six years now, almost seven. But she’s the only one left who can do this, isn’t she? The only one who can stand against the slasher?

  Is she the final girl?

  Jade shakes her head no, but Stacey Graves lived before movies, lived before John Carpenter and Wes Craven, before Jason and Ghostface, so she doesn’t even know what Jade’s saying no to.

  I’m not ready, Jade wants to tell her. I don’t—I can’t—I’ve never—

  It doesn’t matter.

  Stacey Graves lunges ahead to take Jade by the hair the same as she just took Lucky, but Jade has no hair for Stacey Graves to grab on to. Her little fingers scrabble on Jade’s stubbly scalp and Jade slips under, away from them. She drops into a quieter world. Up above it, Stacey Graves is clawing at the surface of the water, clawing and, it looks like, screeching, the same as she was about Hardy. At least until her jaw cranks out of place and she has to stand, line it back up again.

  Jade uses that to drift away, under some boat melting paper down.

  She comes up as quietly as she can right alongside that boat—it’s the librarians’. She can tell because Connie is hanging over the edge, her face in the water like she’s looking for something she just dropped.

  Jade breathes deep and slow, not sure when she’s going to have to go under again, but she’s fighting blind panic, too. It can’t be her! It’s supposed to be Letha! Letha could have done this.

  Jade, she’s—she’s just the horror chick, the fan.

  But then she hears a commotion, looks up. It’s Lee Scanlon, trying to wade-run through the shallows, escape up Main Street.

  Stacey Graves surges ahead, her bare feet on the surface making little sucking sounds, part of her dress ripping away behind her, clinging to the shape it caught on: the machete. It’s stuck point-down into the high side of the green canoe, just as Quint left it—no, no, as Theo Mondragon dropped it.

  This is no time to lose the line between movies and the real world, Jade tells herself.

  With Lee’s first, maybe last, scream, Jade reaches up from the water, grabs on to the handle of that machete, works it free—not as easy as it looks—sheathes herself back into the water.

  You can do this, you can do this, she’s telling herself. You can take down Stacey Graves. You have to. She killed Mr. Holmes. She killed Theo Mondragon. She killed Letha, the actual final girl.

  Making no waves, Jade dog-paddles to the side, just away from where Stacey Graves knows she’s supposed to be. The first body she comes to, she grabs on for purchase, to pull ahead, and it’s Jocelyn Cates, playing possum, making hot eyes to Jade about just keep moving, I’m not really here, don’t say anything.

  Jade can’t help it, she flinches away, surprised to have someone she thought dead making eyes at her, and only realizes the mistake after she’s made it: Stacey Graves keys on that flurry of motion, is already coming over, is that hag from Curtains, moving so soft and perfect across the top of the water.

  In the movie, though, it’s slow motion, it’s beautiful, it’s serene.

  In real life, in Indian Lake, it’s all of about two terrible seconds.

  Jade tries to duck under again, but this time Stacey Graves has her by the shoulder, her sharp little fingers pincering in through the skin, latching onto tendon and bone.

  She hauls Jade up, and now her rancid scent—rot, decay, elk—assaults Jade’s nose, her mouth, her lungs.

  She lifts Jade higher, higher, maybe not sure where her feet are going to be, and Jade’s shoulder is screaming, her neck too even though it’s higher up, and her first instinct, it’s that little-kid response: reach up, grab Stacey Graves’s wrist, take some of that weight that way, just like Letha tried to do.

  But that didn’t work out so well for her, did it?

  Instead, Jade takes the handle of the machete in both hands, knows this is a one-shot-only thing, and slices from right to left with everything she’s been holding inside for the last six years, with every ounce of anger and rejection, all the unfairness and resentment, and she hears herself screaming exactly like a final girl when she does it, and it’s not even on purpose, it’s just coming, it’s pure rage, it’s having so much inside that it’s got to come out, she’s Constance in Just Before Dawn, she’s finally turning around to fight, is insisting on her own life, is refusing to die, isn’t going to take even one more moment of abuse, and, and—

  The machete is factory sharp, and her grip is solid, and Stacey Graves’s side is stretched tight from having to hold Jade up and up—she’s short, never got past eight years tall.

  Jade’s scream dies away, her scream spent, her rage falling from her eyes so she can see again, and… the leading edge of the machete is maybe an inch into Stacey Graves’s ribs, has done no more damage than Hardy’s bullets. Way less, really.

  Stacey Graves looks down to it, drops Jade to lower a hand, extract this irritation, and Jade slips under the water for what she knows is her last time. Now there’s no one left to distract Stacey Graves. Now she’s just going to squat down on the surface like the kid she is, wait for the living girl to come up for the air she needs, isn’t she? And, even if Jade had all the machetes, they wouldn’t matter, would they?

  But… but why did that hook work on Stacey Graves all those years ago, and not the machete now? Is it that Jade’s not the real final girl? But how could that keep a machete from acting like a machete? It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t—

  Steel, Jade tells herself. Of fucking course.

  That’s what the machete is made from, right? Because it needs to be sharp. And because this is the twenty-first century. But, didn’t Christine Gillette say that that iron hook cost two dollars at the hardware store? Key word, there: iron.

  Iron works on whatever Stacey Graves is. Steel machetes don’t.

  Like Jade has any iron ones four feet underwater.

  This is it, she tells herself, and the way she knows it really is is that she’s not running through a list of apologies and regrets, isn’t talking to anybody right now. But—but at least she can deny Stacey Graves the pleasure of eviscerating her, can’t she? At least I can die with my jaw attached, Jade tells herself, and blows all her air out, butterflies her arms out to go lower, lower, into the deep dark.

  After thirty seconds of it, her body bucks, her mouth opens, draws in a deep breath of cold water, and she can’t help it anymore, she’s fighting up, she’s clawing fo
r the surface—

  She gasps up, and almost before she can breathe in, she’s puking water, her body still bucking, her hands out, fingers reaching for anything, please.

  What they find is Stacey Graves’s ankle.

  Jade looks up along the rotted gown, and Stacey Graves is looking back down to her.

  She works her jaw back into place again and steps neatly forward, out of Jade’s grasp, squatting down to look Jade right in the face, her scent a sharp oily assault.

  In the movie version of this, Jade knows, she’d have found Mr. Bill’s old dredging hook buried down on the floor of the lake, and this is when she’d sling it up and around, bury its sharp point in Stacey Graves’s temple.

  Letha was right, though: this is real life.

  Stacey Graves cocks her head to the side, her eyes no longer on Jade’s face, but on… her scalp?

  She’s never seen a bald girl, has she?

  Jade closes her eyes, can’t stop this inspection from happening: Stacey Graves’s nose snuffling against her scalp, trying to get a read on this strange girl-person. Not exactly trying to get away anymore, that’s useless, Jade retracts all the same, slips just barely under the surface, looks back up through it, and what she feels like is Hardy at eleven years old, hiding under the water while Stacey Graves stands right above him, unable to get down to him, because this water, to her, is cursed, is cursed with Ezekiel’s unholy choir, which allows no intruders as corrupt as a little monster of a girl.

  Then Jade finds a calm place inside her.

  There’s a thought bubbling up into her head, with the last of her oxygen. No, an image: Stacey Graves, thrown by the boys, screaming with joy, hanging above the water. But then bouncing on the hard-to-her surface. But—but if that elk hunter Mr. Bill hooked her under the water all those years ago, if the cover she was hiding in got submerged in the rising lake, then that means she can be under it, just… she can’t get there herself. But it can rise over her. She can’t be dropped in, can’t be thrown in, but…