“More waiting?” she asks, throwing herself back against the seat.
“More waiting,” I confirm.
The woods are silent and their dimness shades into blue, then gray, then the road loses the last of the light. Darkness presses against the car windows from all sides. Chrissy doesn’t emerge from the dirt driveway and I can only hope it’s not a shortcut that leads to another stretch of blacktop running parallel through these hills. I have to hope this is where she’s gone to ground.
Stephanie folds the Sour Brite Crawlers bag over, then over again, folding it into increasingly smaller rectangles before unfolding it, pressing it flat, and starting all over again. I watch our blind spots, I watch the end of the dirt driveway, I watch the woods, and finally I can’t put it off any longer.
Opening up my fanny pack, I pull out my little .22 and make sure it’s loaded.
“I need something, too,” Steph says.
“I’m going in alone to talk to Chrissy,” I say. “I should be back in an hour. If not, I want you to come after me.”
“Unarmed?” she says.
“If I’m not back in an hour, or if I don’t call your cell phone by then, sneak in through the woods and find me.”
“Great,” she says. “So I’ll use harsh language, or what?”
I hand her a can of pepper spray from my fanny pack and zip it back up tight. I open the car door and the door buzzer screams in the night.
“This shit doesn’t work!” Steph calls after me.
I close the door fast to turn out the light and get my night vision back. The trees are full of shrieking crickets. I jog along the shoulder of the road and cut through the woods to where the dirt driveway turns off. My feet crunch loud through the dead leaves as I enter the darkness to find Chrissy, the fallen final girl.
—Lynnette Tarkington, personal diary, January 3, 2001
THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP XVII:
Bride of the Final Girls
I keep my pistol in my hand as I slip deeper into the woods. Who knows what’s out here, who knows what Chrissy’s going to think when she sees me, who knows how bad this could get. The trees bunch together, sucking the moonlight from the air as I crunch deeper into darkness. Then I see a dead body hanging from a tree limb. I drop to one knee, stomach fluttering with moths.
It spins slowly, and it’s a child, maybe a baby, and then I walk up and touch its foot—wet, moldering, plush. It’s a Pink Panther hung from a noose. On the other side of the tree is another noose, and in this one it’s a baby doll, stripped naked to reveal its hard plastic head and soggy pillow body, hanging by the neck. I see more of them suspended overhead, an orchard of rotten fruit: Barbies hung by their hair, six to a branch, stuffed animals rotten with rain, a dead tree with Disney characters nailed all the way to the top. There’s Pluto with a nail through his throat, Minnie with both gloved hands crucified to the trunk, Mickey with a spike through his forehead, still smiling. The trees are covered in cartoon tumors.
I keep moving through this toy cemetery, slower now. These are woods that someone uses, that someone is familiar with. I come to a washer, glowing white in the dimness. My head bumps a wind chime made of screwdrivers. They clack against each other crazily. I see abandoned appliances half-buried around me, rusty painted metal sprouting from the ground.
I am knee-deep in someone’s crazy. Chrissy’s crazy.
Up ahead the tree trunks thin and in the clearing I see a sagging ranch house, the spine of its roof broken and bent. There are lights on inside. It’s surrounded by mossy outbuildings. A shed leans against one side; on the other is a doghouse stuffed with scrap lumber. There’s a carport getting absorbed into the trees farther back with a bunch of oblong lumps wrapped in blue tarps stashed underneath. Behind the house rises a massive, hulking black shadow: an enormous prefab barn, looming over the roofline to menace the fifties home slumped in the foreground.
I step back and bump into a warm tree trunk. It moves. It’s a man. Huge, solid, he towers over me. My first instinct is to run, but I have training. I throw an elbow into his midsection, then drop into a squat and sweep his feet. My elbow feels broken, my shin hits his boots, and pain rockets up my leg. I drive my knee into his crotch and it’s like cracking my kneecap against a wall.
His eyes are tiny; his head is a lumpy tennis ball. He’s wearing a black sweatshirt and military pants tucked into his boots. He grabs my wrists and grinds the bones together and I drop my gun. I bite his hand. He doesn’t even flinch. He keeps bearing down as I kick his shins, stomp his toes, grind my teeth into his filthy skin. He stinks. His BO suffocates me.
He grabs me by the hair and pushes my head down between my knees. I lose my balance and stumble and feel fire in my forehead as he hauls me up by my scalp. He lifts me, and I have to grab his wrist with both hands so my hair doesn’t rip out at the roots. The pain nauseates me. My weight doesn’t bother him at all.
If Stephanie could see this she would lose all her confidence in me.
Then we’re out of the woods and walking across the yard, into the light, and up three brick steps and he’s kicking open the screen door. The pain in my scalp flares and I pull my box cutter out of my front pocket and in one swipe I slice off my hair, taking off some of my skin along the way. He lets go and I drop three inches and stagger sideways on shattered glass ankles, touching one knee to the floor.
The house is too warm and it smells like yesterday’s cooking. When I look up, he’s walking into the kitchen. I bang out of the storm door and run for where he took me, finding my gun in the rotten leaves, then I’m barreling through the door as he comes back out of the kitchen with a knife. My arms go up automatically into a Weaver stance, finger on the trigger, both hands cradling my gun.
“Stop!” a woman shouts.
I’m already squeezing the trigger and then Chrissy is standing between us. I shift my aim at the last minute and the air snaps and there’s a hole in their drywall and gunsmoke hanging in the air.
“Both of you stop,” she shouts, holding a palm flat out to each of us.
I don’t move and neither does Pain Freak. He keeps staring at me, still holding his knife, not even breathing hard.
“I should have known it was you, Lynnette,” Chrissy says. “You don’t actually have those photos, do you?”
“Tell him to put the knife down,” I say, not lowering my gun.
“You broke into our home,” Chrissy says.
I keep my .22 right in the middle of his deflated head. There are nicks all over his skull from where he shaves himself bald. I keep my front sight rested on the black scab covering his right temple.
“She’s an old friend, Keith,” Chrissy says to him. She caresses his biceps. He stinks like a horse. How can she bear to touch him? “Why don’t you go out to your workroom while we catch up?”
He turns and walks back into the kitchen. I hear a knife drawer open and metal clatter as it slams shut. The back door swings open, then slaps closed. There’s silence in the house.
“You wasted my entire afternoon,” Chrissy says. “How do you propose you make it up to me?”
“I wanted to warn you,” I lie. “Someone’s trying to kill all of us.”
Chrissy evaluates me for a minute, then smiles.
“I know what you can do,” she says. “You have to sign a few books before you go. Come into the kitchen.”
She leaves the room like I don’t matter and I hear the fridge door open. I lower my pistol.
I always knew Chrissy was dangerous. While the rest of us pasted our shattered lives back together and tried to put these monsters behind us, Chrissy embraced them. She became their loudest advocate and their most vocal defender. She pursued every conspiracy theory and used the settlement from her homecoming night massacre to fund legal challenges to their convictions.
Dr. Carol had a theory. She thought that becau
se the prosecution relied on Chrissy’s eyewitness testimony, and because her monster was her godfather, maybe she had a deep-seated sense of guilt and needed the monsters to forgive her. I had a simpler theory: she was batshit crazy. And crazy people are dangerous people.
But I didn’t come all this way to stand around a living room by myself, so I muster my courage, lower my weapon, and follow her to the kitchen.
The house either never got finished or it’s being taken apart. There’s unpainted drywall nailed up in the living room, the doorframe to the kitchen is an unfinished two-by-four, and the kitchen has orange extension cords strung everywhere. There’s a coffeepot on the table, next to a blender. The counters are crammed with shopping bags, cookie jars, pie plates.
“Why don’t I make us a nice cup of tea?” Chrissy says.
She’s standing at a dishwasher that’s been pulled out from under the counter, filling a kettle from a gallon jug.
“Just sit anywhere,” she says.
I move a stack of mail off a wooden dining room chair with loose joints and sit, back to the wall, where I can cover the door and the window. I put the .22 on the table in front of me. Its grip shines with sweat. I wipe my palm on the leg of my jeans. Pill bottles cover the table, advertising mailers, plastic shopping bags stuffed with yellow rubber gloves and dish towels with their price tags still on.
“This was my parents’ first house,” Chrissy says, putting the gallon jug down by the overflowing sink. “It’s actually worth less now than what they paid for it in the sixties, isn’t that crazy? You’d think the land would be worth something at least.”
“Sorry about that,” I say.
She plugs in the kettle and hunts through cupboards for tea. None of her kitchen cabinets have doors.
“This is coal country but there’s no more coal,” she says. “The chemical they use to wash the coal impurities contaminated the groundwater. They say it’s safe to drink, but babies get boils inside their mouths, and people’s gums bleed. They’ve been suing that chemical company for almost eight years.”
She goes elbow deep in a cabinet by the fridge and comes out with a single Lipton tea bag. She finds another dried tea bag in the sink, peels it off the top of a pile of dirty dishes, and rinses two mugs.
“Why’d you come back?” I ask.
“Keith likes it here,” she says.
The crazy comes off Chrissy like perfume.
“Someone killed Adrienne,” I say. “Did you hear about that?”
Chrissy smiles. It infuriates me. The kettle screams. She pours the tea.
“Here you go,” she says, putting the cup down in front of me, not making a grab for my gun. I take a sip. It’s too hot and tastes bitter. Chrissy dumps two shopping bags off a chair and sits. “We’ve always disagreed on the meaning of our experiences.”
“A psycho and his brother tried to kill me,” I say. “Same thing happened to all of us, essentially. What’s to disagree on?”
“You say tomato and I say shamanistic vision quest that uses an ordeal to lead us inward on a journey of spiritual discovery and eventual synthesis and peace.”
“You’re right,” I say. “We do disagree. But at the end of the day, someone’s targeting final girls. They’ve killed Adrienne and they’ve done their best to kill me, they’ve put Julia in the hospital and burned down Heather’s halfway house. We need to work together. You think they’re not coming after you?”
“That’s always been your biggest flaw,” she says. “You’ve always had this the wrong way around, and as long as you do you’ll live in fear.”
“So you won’t help?” I ask.
“With what?” She laughs. “I’m not going to join some kind of final girl superteam.”
“You keep up with Billy Walker and Harry Peter Warden,” I say. “You communicate with them regularly, right?”
“Those men don’t deserve what’s been done to them,” she says.
“And you sell their . . .” I have a hard time with the word. “Art.”
“No comment,” she says.
“Don’t be coy, Chrissy,” I say. “We found your name all over Billy’s visitor sheet. We’ll probably see it all over Warden’s. You’re being used. Someone’s turned you into their private messaging system.”
Then I realize Chrissy hasn’t blinked once since she sat down. I’ve assumed she’s the middleman, but what if she’s the full thing? What if Dr. Carol never asked Chrissy for help at all? I thought we were running away from danger, putting distance between Stephanie and me and Dr. Carol, but what if I’ve steered us right into its heart?
“Do you ever hear from Dr. Carol?” I ask, wanting to pick up my gun so badly my hand cramps.
“Does she still run your little sewing circle?” Chrissy smiles. She still hasn’t blinked.
“Has anyone asked you to contact Warden or Walker for them?” I ask. “I don’t care, but I need to know.”
“Of course you care.” She laughs. “You wouldn’t have spent so long suing me if you didn’t.”
“That was Marilyn,” I say. “And she finally dropped it. Right now, no one cares that you sell this crap for these guys and drop money into their commissary accounts. I mean, it’s sick, and it’s morally objectionable, but right now we’ve got bigger issues. We think whoever’s behind this might be using you to communicate.”
She studies me for a minute.
“Whoever’s behind what?” she asks. “You think I’m a stooge for some mysterious consortium of shadowy men who want you dead? And you want me to violate the trust of these artists so you can take revenge on a conspiracy you’re not even sure exists?”
“It’s not revenge,” I say. “It’s self-defense.”
“It’s a perversion of nature,” she says.
I reach into my fanny pack and take out the folded-up glossy eight-by-ten and spread it on the table. It’s one of the Barb Coard shots. Chrissy sits up straight.
“That’s a rare piece,” she hisses between her teeth. “You’re devaluing it.”
“I’ve got three others,” I lie. “I’ll sign them again and date them. There are only four others on the market. It’ll be worth your while.”
She gives me a patronizing smile.
“I have all the money I need. Right now, it’s more about curating my collection than acquiring new items.”
“Then why were you so eager to buy what I was selling online?” I ask. “Before you knew it was me?”
“Oh, Lynnette,” she says, all smug self-satisfaction. “You really think I didn’t know it was you all along?”
I want to slap that smug smile off her smug face. I could pick up the gun and shoot her, not anywhere vital, just in the kneecap. Somewhere that would hurt. She didn’t play me. She wasn’t playing me. I’m not that stupid. I didn’t just walk into a trap.
“I’ve been following the news out of Los Angeles with a lot of interest,” she says. “I knew this was coming before any of you. I’ve always loved you, Lynnette. I always thought that if anyone was going to come here and ask me the right questions it would be you.”
The kitchen window is a shiny square of darkness. I don’t hear any movement in the rest of the house.
“Do you know who it is?” I ask.
“I noticed the numbers almost two years ago,” she says. “I wondered what they were. Don’t you wish you knew what I know?”
“What numbers?” I ask.
“The numbers in the emails,” she says.
“What numbers? What emails? Who’s been in touch with you?”
“You were always more of an unfinished victim than a real final girl,” Chrissy says. “But it’s a sign that you’re here now. I think this is your crisis come at last.”
Her eyes shine and I realize we’re very, very far from civilization.
“You’re so lucky,”
she breathes. “I think you’re about to become a real final girl.”
There’s a long silence and I check the doors, convinced she’s giving someone a chance to sneak up, but the kitchen is empty.
“I just put it all together,” she says. “Oh, it’s so beautiful. It’s finally your time, and I’m the next step on your path.”
She presses her hands to her breastbone and closes her eyes in bliss.
“Glory,” she says. “Come. My computer is in the museum.”
She pushes her chair back and stands and I do the same. I follow her down a short hall to the back of the house, past her laundry machine and dryer.
“Whenever I get online I have to walk through my museum,” she says, hand on a utility room doorknob. “It reminds me daily of the journey each of us has taken. And now you’ll be taking that journey, too. Prepare yourself, Lynnette. I’m so happy you’ll finally know what it’s like.”
She opens the door and cold air pours out like she’s opened a fridge. She reaches around the doorframe and turns on the lights. I hear fluorescents flicker to life up and down the enormous prefab barn latched onto the back of her house. But in front of us there’s only a small closet with black curtains at the other end. Above them hangs a 10” knife, its blade smeared with something dark and tarry. It’s crossed by a tire iron clotted with hair.
“Those are Dani’s,” she says. “They were very difficult to obtain, but they’ve always made me feel closer to her. It’s the weapon her brother used to transform her friends, and it’s the tire iron Dani used to kill her brother. The yin and the yang. Passing beneath them inspires reflection.”
I feel slightly sickened. Then she’s walking forward, taking a flashlight off a shelf next to the curtains and pushing them open with both hands. Beyond them it’s dim, and this feels like a very bad idea.
“Come, Lynne,” she says. “Let me show you so many wonders.”
“And the emails,” I say, trying to keep her anchored in reality.
The Final Girl Support Group Page 20