The Final Girl Support Group

by Grady Hendrix

  Windows fill the screen. She sits in her ergonomic chair and starts scrolling through email.

  “When I realized what was happening I put them all in their own folder,” she says, clicking through. “Here.”

  The email is from orchomenus@hotmail.com. I didn’t know anyone still used Hotmail.

  HELLO,

  I AM A COLLECTOR OF UNUSUAL ITEMS AND OF UNUSUAL PERSONS. I WISH TO OBTAIN A SMALL PIECE OF ART—PREFERABLY CHRISTMAS THEMED—FROM BILLY WALKER OF THE SILENT NIGHT SLAYINGS. DO YOU THINK THIS IS POSSIBLE AND WILL YOU QUOTE ME A PRICE. I WOULD ALSO LIKE YOU TO PASS TO BILLY THIS FOLLOWING REQUEST IN FULL

  “DEAR BILLY,

  I AM A ADMIRER OF YOUR WORK AND FEEL YOU ARE FALSELY ACCUSED OF THOSE CRIMES. I THINK YOUR BROTHER IS A GREAT HERO AND A MAN WHO SHALL LIVE FOREVER. I WANT TO COMMISSION A ARTOWRK FROM YOU OF SOME SIZE. IT SHOULD BE A SCENE OF THE NORTH POLE WITH COLORS AND ON THE LARGEST PAPER YOU HAVE. I LIKE ELVES AND SANTA TYPE SCENARIOS AND WOULD APPRECIATE YOUR IDEAS.

  80-4 38-18 121-24 163-22 28-13 215-15 247-6 247-14 63-1.

  AVID FAN”

  “Did you send this on?” I ask.

  “Of course,” she says. “I visit Billy every three months and I always have commissions for him, information to assist in his defense. I like to bring him books. If you got to know him, I think you’d like him.”

  A nail presses into the center of my forehead, right between my eyes. I didn’t think this would be so hard.

  “That sounds beautiful,” I say.

  She rumbles open a filing cabinet and pulls out a folder stuffed with paper.

  “So I printed this out and took it to him,” she says. “And two weeks later he called and asked me to write down exactly what he said. Here.”

  COMMISSION ACCEPTED. $325, TB TRANSFERRED INTO COMMISSARY $25/TRANSFER x 13 TRANSFERS

  SANTA ELVES RIDING REINDEER BESIDE HOLE IN ICE.

  MRS. CLAUS WATCHING. BIG BREASTS

  134-29 35-3 190-3 190-9 254-2 36-22

  “He made me repeat the numbers back to him three times,” she says. “And that was just the beginning.”

  She pulls more paper out of the folder, printouts of the emails, notes she jotted down during phone calls or visits, and every single one of them ends with a string of numbers. Sometimes they repeat, sometimes they don’t, but there’s clearly a pattern.

  “How many artworks did he commission from Billy?” I ask. It hurts me to talk about Billy like he’s a normal artist, exhibiting in galleries and negotiating with buyers.

  “Six over eight months,” she says. “Although he never did a three-hundred-twenty-five-dollar one again. It’s too bad. I think Billy’s best works are his larger pieces.”

  “How many communications?” I ask, thumbing through the overflowing folder.

  “Almost a hundred,” she says.

  “They’re a code.”

  “Of course,” she says.

  I put the papers down. The barn feels very big, and very dark, and the two of us feel very small huddled together in this tiny pool of light.

  “You already figured it out, didn’t you,” I say.

  It’s not a question.

  “I cracked it by the second commission.” She smiles. “It’s a book code, like they do in Red Dragon, you know, the first Hannibal Lecter book? The letters refer to page and line numbers. It’s the first letter or word on every line.”

  “What book?” I ask. “It’d have to be one that Orchomenus knows Billy has in his cell.”

  “The Diary of Anne Frank,” she says. “Every prison has a copy.”

  I imagine these two perverts, thumbing through their battered library copies of Diary, flipping past Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart, coordinating their sickness.

  “What did it say?” I ask.

  “Orchomenus told Billy about the letters you wrote to his big brother.” She smiles. “And he paid him to tell the police about them and to lie and say he’d buried them where Orchomenus had them hidden. When the time was right, that is. Orchomenus knows you very well, well enough to forge your handwriting on some extra letters they threw in to make your complicity clearer.”

  Elevator in my guts, going down. My legs don’t feel strong enough to hold me up, but there’s no chair and I’ll be damned if she’s going to see me faint.

  “Who is it?” I ask.

  “Don’t you know?” she asks. “After all, you’re not Billy’s final girl.”

  “Whose am I?”

  “You probably would have figured it out eventually,” she says. “You might not be the smartest one of us, but you’ve always been the most stubborn. You’re Orchomenus’s final girl.”

  She smiles at me, all smug and secure, and I’m suddenly aware that there are too many woods around this house and not enough people.

  “Who is he?” I ask. “Orchomenus at hotmail. I know you know.”

  “Do you know what Orchomenus was?” she asks, putting the folder back in her filing cabinet. “It was a city in ancient Greece. Once a year it held a Feast of Dionysus where the priest would wield a naked blade and pursue fleeing women into the night. If he caught any of them he had the right to slay them with impunity. This has been going on for so much longer than you think.”

  “I can make you tell me,” I say, gesturing with my pistol.

  “I thought it would be obvious,” she says. “Orchomenus is Dr. Carol.”

  I thought I was prepared for the evidence when it appeared, but nothing can prepare me for this betrayal. I am validated and destroyed simultaneously. The monstrous knowledge crushes me, slow and heavy, and I couldn’t point my gun at her right now if my life depended on it. And I think it does.

  “I bought those letters in a mini-storage auction a long time ago,” she says. “I’d had my eye on it because I knew the unit belonged to the head of the foster home where the Walkers grew up. I took them right to the public defender. They returned them six months later. Said that an ‘expert’ had reviewed them and deemed them not relevant. Just the typical product of an adolescent girl. Not even worth a mention. I held on to them until Orchomenus contacted me to buy. I asked for an email from their real account. Something I could verify. Plus twelve hundred dollars. People only value what costs them money. It’s sad, really.”

  I breathe deep to calm the panic attack I feel starting to cramp my lungs, but they spasm instead and I hiccup. I lower myself onto my haunches. How many of our secrets does Dr. Carol know? Why didn’t she kill me in her house? What game is she playing with our lives?

  I hear Chrissy rummaging through her drawers and my chest aches. Someone. Please help me. But Dr. Carol is my monster and there’s no one who can help.

  Except Stephanie.

  She’ll come. She’ll come with her pepper spray, and Keith will be in the woods waiting for her. And he’ll have a pickaxe, or a drill, or a butcher’s knife, and she’ll only have my pepper spray and she’s right: that shit doesn’t work.

  “I found out later that the public defender’s ‘expert’ was Dr. Carol. She told him those letters had no value in 2004, and then she bought them from me in 2009,” Chrissy says. “Her understanding must have matured in those five years. Your little support group is just the killing ground she’s created for the ultimate series of sacrifices in which she, the last monster, and you, the final final girl, will transcend together. You needed me to lead you to the heart of the Minotaur’s labyrinth because you can’t face the truth, so you came to Crazy Chrissy. Did you know that all the best oracles in classical mythology were crazy?”

  She knew about the letters. For six years she knew about the letters and she never said anything to me. How long has she been planning this? She even wrote new ones, and I see her in her study, door locked, bent over Holly Hobbie stationery, fabricating sex between me and Ricky Walker, and if
I needed to know how much she hates us, it’s this much.

  The floor tips dangerously. The walls revolve around me. There’s a soft digital ding from the iMac and a pop-up window appears on the screen.

  “Oh, look,” Chrissy says. “Keith just texted. He’s found something in the woods.”

  I am stupid and I am dumb and I underestimated just how crazy Dr. Carol really is. I see Chrissy’s feet standing in front of me and I try to look up, I try to raise the gun, but my entire body is a cramp.

  Something bites my right shoulder and it goes dead, and my legs stop working and I’m looking at the ceiling and I feel pressure on my waist, and the fanny pack is coming off and I see Chrissy and she’s holding my pistol in her right hand and there’s a stun gun in her left. My right arm feels broken.

  “Let’s go into the living room and see what Keith thinks we should do with your little friend.” She smiles. “Sometimes he needs to be let off his leash.”

  Stephanie, I’m so sorry.

  You were never safe with me.

  —“The Monsters, Our Makers: From the First Flood to the Final Girls” by Christine Mercer, first published in the Journal of Comparative Folklore, November–December 2009

  THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP XIX:

  Final Girl’s Revenge

  What have you found, Keith?” Chrissy calls when we reach her living room. “What do you have there?”

  Keith swings open the storm door with his hip and lugs in a bag of bones. He’s holding her underneath her arms and she’s limp. His eyes are red and raw. My heart sinks because Steph must have sprayed him and it didn’t do shit.

  “She’s dead,” I say.

  “Assuming makes an ass out of you and me,” Chrissy says, putting a hand on my arm. “Keith will let us know if he decides to go in that direction.”

  The storm door swings shut on the back of Stephanie’s calves and makes a scraping sound as Keith yanks her inside, shucking off one of her fake Chuck Taylors. He half throws, half dumps her onto a sagging armchair in the corner that’s covered in dirty clothes.

  “You found someone nosing around, didn’t you?” Chrissy asks, like she’s talking to her dog.

  He casually tosses the Mace on top of the layer of McDonald’s bags on the coffee table.

  “Girl,” Keith mumbles.

  I think he has an erection. He presses the back of his forearm against the crotch of his jeans.

  “Stephanie,” I say, starting to walk toward her.

  Her face is pale and blood drools from a black dent in her forehead. Leaves stick to her hoodie. Her eyes are open but I’m not sure she’s seeing me.

  “Don’t,” Chrissy says, grabbing my belt and pulling me backward. “Crowding Keith is a bad idea.”

  She looks me dead in the eyes and holds my gaze until I nod, and then we both consider Keith. He’s squatting on his heels, elbows resting on his knees, hands on Stephanie’s leg, looking like a giant squirrel staring up into her face.

  “What are we going to do with her, Keith?” Chrissy asks in a kindergarten teacher’s voice.

  “It’s Stephanie,” I say. Repeating a potential victim’s name creates empathy. I don’t think it’ll have any effect on Keith, but if it can even get him to hesitate for a second it might make all the difference. “From Red Lake.”

  “We know who she is,” Chrissy says.

  Chrissy stares down at Keith, and Keith stares up at Stephanie, and Stephanie’s eyes roll around the room until they stop on me.

  “Lynnette?” she says, thick-tongued. “I came.”

  I need to keep her thinking I can protect her. Right up until the end. Even if I can’t. She won’t die scared.

  “We should go,” I tell Chrissy, remembering her in the museum: Sometimes he needs to be let off his leash. “We should go and not bother you anymore.”

  “You’re so cute,” Chrissy giggles.

  Keith hunches his neck down and practically wriggles with pleasure. The room is charged and at any second someone is going to commit to the next step and none of us will be able to go back.

  “I want to go now,” Steph says. “Okay? Can we please go?”

  Gillian got that same hitch in her voice on Christmas Eve. I heard it when she walked into the living room, not understanding what was going on even when Ricky Walker turned around and saw her.

  “Lynnette,” she’d said as he’d started toward her. “I want to go back to bed now. I won’t tell anyone I saw Santa. Tell him that I won’t tell. Please, Lynnette?”

  And I hung there, pretending to be dead because I was so scared that when Ricky ran out of victims he would take a closer look at me and I didn’t want to die.

  “Lynnette?” Gillian said right before he picked her up and she started screaming, and it’s Stephanie saying it now and we’re in Chrissy’s junky living room and I need to get out of here.

  Keith stares hard at Chrissy.

  “What is it?” she asks.

  “Want,” Keith demands.

  And Chrissy looks at me, then at Stephanie, then at me again, performing some kind of mental arithmetic, adding up the pros and cons, and then she smiles. It’s a smile that I’m growing to associate with nothing good.

  “An artist needs to practice or his tools lose their edge,” she says. “I don’t want Keith getting dull.”

  “My head hurts,” Stephanie says.

  “You don’t understand,” I say, and inspiration makes me brave. “She’s a final girl. Keith can’t do anything to her; he has to save himself for you. She has her own monster.”

  Chrissy shakes her head and smiles.

  “This isn’t a religion,” she says. “It’s not like Keith’s going to Hell if he goes off his diet.” She turns to Keith and gets his attention. “You need to make her last, lover.”

  Keith nods and holds up two fingers.

  “Two days,” he says.

  “It’s a good thing all the neighbors moved away,” Chrissy says. “She looks like a screamer.”

  “You can’t do this,” I say. “She’s a final girl.”

  “You need to get going, Lynnette,” Chrissy says. “Once Keith starts it’s hard for him to stop. I’m not in any danger, but you’ve got a destiny to fulfill.”

  I’m playing all my cards and they’re not making any difference.

  “With her,” I say. “She needs to go with me. I promise you, Chrissy, just let her go with me. She’s a final girl.”

  Keith stands and begins to search through the piles of garbage on the floor, then puts his chest on the carpet, his butt in the air, and he reaches underneath the couch.

  Chrissy goes and sits in Stephanie’s lap and plays with her bangs. Steph jerks her head away, and Chrissy grabs her chin with her fingers and holds it in place.

  “This one’s no final girl,” she says. “She’s a little monster. Keith loves to work with this kind of material.”

  Keith stands up from the couch, a dented and stained aluminum baseball bat in one hand.

  “Lynnette?” Stephanie says because now she sees the bat and she sees me edging toward the front door, and her eyes are big and wet over Chrissy’s shoulder.

  “ ‘He is the tender butcher who showed me how the price of flesh is love,’ ” Chrissy recites, holding Stephanie’s chin and looking into her eyes. “ ‘Skin the rabbit,’ he says! ‘Off come all my clothes.’ ”

  Keith takes a practice swing with his baseball bat. It makes a sound that goes schwoop.

  Chrissy turns around and raises her eyebrows at me.

  “You’d better run,” she says.

  Keith takes another swing with his bat. This time, it scoops a dent out of the wall.

  I run.

  I close the distance to the door in two long strides, and out of the corner of my eye I see Keith notice my movement and take
a step toward me, and I crash through the screen door, not even opening it first, and I hear the clear plastic panel in the center split, and the back of it bang off the side of their crappy house. It almost drowns out Stephanie’s screams.

  “Lynne!” she shrieks, over and over again.

  Even out here, I can hear Chrissy laughing.

  I’m down the steps in a second and my feet slip on the gravel driveway, but I pump my arms and drive my feet down into the dirt and I run as fast as I can, putting distance between myself and the house and Stephanie’s screams. I only have a few seconds.

  I tried to take Keith down before and I might as well have punched a tree. I race down the dark driveway, shadows on either side, panting and crunching gravel, forcing myself to run faster. I need to be faster.

  You need to protect your sister.

  I reach the Chevy and slide inside. The ignition turns and the engine hums to life and I’m wrenching the wheel to the left and plowing down the dirt driveway toward Chrissy’s house. I keep pressing down on the accelerator, passing twenty-five, passing thirty, passing thirty-five. The car’s tires barely cling to the dirt. I’m hitting potholes and ruts so hard the top of my head slams into the ceiling. The tires leave the road and come down hard again and again. If they land wrong I’ll slide into a tree and die. Passing forty, passing forty-five. I switch on my headlights, and Chrissy’s white house springs into view dead ahead. The house is made of sheet metal and vinyl siding, probably cost twenty-four thousand dollars in the sixties when her parents bought it, and as structurally sound as a wet cardboard box.

  I left Julia behind. I left Fine behind. I won’t leave Steph.

  The world jogs crazily up and down in my windshield. I’m clinging to the steering wheel. Passing fifty, passing fifty-five. The sound of the tires goes quiet when I leave the gravel driveway.

  I’m going sixty miles an hour when I slam into the front of Chrissy’s house.

  The wall fills my headlights, then it fills my windshield, then it’s exploding and the house is collapsing onto the car and the world sounds like it’s splitting in half. The airbags explode into my face and my sinuses are full of white powder and I feel like someone just broke my nose.