Hugh Grant?
It doesn’t matter.
We’re in his POV, panning the class, just seeing the usual suspects and in-jokes and cameos—maybe even a dingy, striped sweater— and, slowly, starting at the boots so we can see her leg’s healed, there’s Izzy, a year or so older. We can tell by her hair, her new friends, how comfortable she is at the center of them. How much her life has evidently improved since we saw her last.
“And,” the professor’s asking now, dragging it out for pedagogic effect, “and, what is it that every killer these days must first and foremost have, before everything else?”
“A remake!” some guy calls down, like this is a pep-rally.
“Close, close,” the professor says, nodding up to that student in thanks and strolling across the stage, peering out for the better answer.
“A sequel?” somebody else asks.
The professor shakes his head no, sadly. But close, close.
“Blood!” a guy in back yells, already laughing at himself.
“Goes without saying,” the prof says back, not even bothering to look up to this guy. “Though we could all learn something from Tobe Hooper.”
“Breasts!” a different-but-same joker calls out, to muffled laughs.
“Once upon a time, sure,” the professor says, watching the toe of his left foot go back and forth, back and forth, but when the chuckles don’t die he peers up under his romantic-comedy bangs. “These days it’s about titillation, not . . . well.”
The class loves this even more. And him.
“Prequel?” another student tries, biting her lip, hoping she’s right.
“Getting hotter, getting hotter,” the professor says, stopping to balance on the heels of his loafers again, but this time looking up to
→ Izzy, staring right back at him.
The professor nods to her, graciously giving her the floor.
“Izzy Stratford,” he calls, as if announcing her. “We’re lucky to have you here today.”
“Lucky to be here,” Izzy says, twirling a blue-tinted curl of hair.
The professor turns back around to appraise Jason up on the screen, and speaks loud now because he’s facing away: “Tell us what every slasher needs, Izzy,”
→ and like that we shuffle at impossible speed through the key moment of every kill from that homecoming week a year ago, even including the sheriff, and end up back on all the flowers and pictures and beer bottles left in front of the chained-shut double doors of Danforth High School.
“An excellent backstory,” Izzy voices over, and
→ we’re back in the classroom with her, her hands churched over her mouth, that pin-drop kind of silence rippling back and forth, everybody looking down at the professor, still with his back to them.
“Well, Doc?” the joker calls out, no tension just ratcheting up higher, to a screech, almost.
In answer, and smoother than any criminal, the professor slides his left loafer back into the first part of a moonwalk, keeps it there long enough to pop his collar up.
The class erupts, papers in the air, #2 pencils spinning slow and deadly past faces, feet stomping, a bra drifting down from who knows where, “Billie Jean” rolling into a chant under all this, a lone lighter reaching up above, flicking on, and where we go is tight on Izzy’s hands, falling away from her mouth. From her small, lip-biting grin.
“Just you fucking wait,” she says under all that sound, and we rush away from her, go jangly and backwards up the stairs faster than we know we can, push out into the hall, the door shutting back in front of us, the just-made sign swinging on the knob:
Slasher 101
→ but the top right corner’s torn, is already letting go now that the door’s being pushed open again, just wide enough for a hand to sneak its way through, hang a wicked Billie Jean mask on the knob.
Class is in session.
Now turn off the lights.
Piece s and Parts
A slightly older Ben is in the back of Dante’s car, and there’s red paint all over him. Dante’s easing them down the road. To the station is the idea. Meaning Ben really is trying to leave his mark.
“Remember homecoming that time?” Ben says up to Dante.
“What about it?” Dante says into the rearview.
Ben shrugs, looks out his side glass.
“When Crystal Blake, you know,” Ben says. “When she showed her goods like that. You were the only one to keep your head.”
“So?”
“So how’d you do it, man?”
Dante smiles wide, and we’re right on his face for him to say it: “Who says I’m into girls?”
Dante’s at a convenience store deep in the dark hours, taking a report from a flustered clerk, his POV studying the men’s room door. Like it’s calling his name.
“So he didn’t even want the money, you say?” Dante’s saying, already bored with this.
“No, man, that’s just it,” the clerk’s saying in wonder. “It was like, I don’t know. All he wanted was those burritos, like.”
Ben and his friends at the creek by the bridge, the day they brought the black sword there and ground it sharp. They’re all so young, still.
Ben’s looking up and up into that shadow falling across them, and it’s a mummy in a letterman’s jacket, just standing there in the dying light, waiting.
“I’m never coming back here,” Ben says.
The front of Izzy’s old house, her mom and dad out front, trying to Iwo Jima the new piece of metalwork up.
Finally it tilts over, finds its gravity.
From the side, it’s nothing, just twisted metal, but coming around the front, it’s . . . Michael Jackson up on his toes, one hand pulling his fedora down over his eyes.
Behind him, Izzy’s dad takes his wife’s hand in his.
A POV floating down along the cliff, to the river, and then up it some, where we haven’t been.
To that Halloween truck, half under water.
Something thunks down there and a horse head mask floats free, its big eye just staring, but we don’t go with it on its journey.
We’re still with the truck.
Waiting for a rotted hand to hook itself over the top of the cargo box.
What surfaces instead is that turtle.
It climbs onto the top corner of the box, into the sun, and cranes its wet black eyes up, up, so we look too, don’t know what to make of the deep splash that follows.
Just that it won’t be the last.
The
Last
Final
Girl
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This all starts in junior high in Wimberley, Texas. Every Friday night a bunch of us would plunder the horror shelves at the video store then pile into David O’Connor’s garage, watch Michael and Jason and Freddy until David’s dad would sneak outside, put on a mask or some knife-fingers and bang on the garage door at the perfect time to send us out running through the trees, screaming through the darkness, smiling through the tears. It’s what the slasher’s all about. And thanks to Ryan van Cleave, for pulling me to a certain dollar theater in 1996, in Tallahasee, Florida. I was there for six nights after, paying my dollar, waiting for Billy to say it again. And thanks to Joe Ferrer and Danny Broyles and Rob Weiner and Jesse Lawrence and Adam Cesare and Mike Hance and Rob Bass and Jesse Bullington and Jeremy Robert Johnson, for all the discussions, all the help, all the redirects. All the horror. Thanks to Cameron Pierce, for believing in this book, and to Matthew Revert, for the best cover yet, and to Kate Garrick, my agent, for making it all happen. And, as always, to my wife, Nancy, for sleeping on the couch beside me once upon a time in 1999 in a two-hundred dollar a month house, so I could keep watching horror movie after horror movie, not be scared because I knew you were right there with me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Graham Jones is the author of Zombie Bake-Off, Demon Theory, The Ones that Got Away, It Came from Del Rio, Growing Up Dead in Texas, and probab
ly twice that many more. Stephen’s been an NEA Fellow, a Stoker Award finalist, and has won the Texas Institute of Letters award for fiction. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, and teaches in the MFA pro- grams at CU Boulder and UCR Palm Desert.
ALSO FROM LAZY FASCIST PRESS
A PRETTY MOUTH
BY MOLLY TANZER
“The Calipash line, as I am sure all the other members of this club well know, is … tainted. Members of that family tend to be eccentric if not totally insane, and from their origins to the present day there have been reports of Calipashes engaging in such behaviors as voluntary demonic possession, murder, necromancy in the classical and modern sense of the word, black magics of all kinds, sexual perversion, cannibalism, and, perhaps counterintuitively, militant vegetarianism.”
“This is form and content and diction and tone and imagination all looking up at the exact same moment: when Molly Tanzer claps once at the front of the classroom.”
—STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES
“A Pretty Mouth is a fine and stylish collection that pays homage to the tradition of the weird while blazing its own sinister mark. Tanzer’s debut is as sharp and polished as any I’ve seen.”
—LAIRD BARRON, author of The Croning
“If Hieronymus Bosch and William Hogarth had together designed a Fabergé egg, the final result could not be more beautifully and deli- ciously perverse than what awaits the readers in A Pretty Mouth. Molly Tanzer’s first novel is a witty history of the centuries-long exploits of one joyfully corrupt (and somewhat moist) Calipash dynasty, a family both cursed and elevated by darkness of the most squamous sort. This is a sly and sparkling jewel of a book, and I can’t recommend it enough—get A Pretty Mouth in your hands or tentacles, post-haste, and prepare to be shocked, charmed, and (somewhat moistly) entertained!”
—LIVIA LLEWELLyN, author of Engines of Desire
“Had the nineteenth century really been like this—with the flounces and corsets and blood and tentacles and whatnot—we’d all be dead by now. Unlucky us, but lucky you, Dear Reader, as you are alive to read this book.”
—NICK MAMATAS, author of Bullettime
“A Pretty Mouth is many things; erudite, hilarious, profane, moving, learned, engaging, horrific, terrifying, and profound. Molly moves through the multi-forms of prose like a shark in wine-dark seas, rife with allusion, deep in emotion, and sometimes giving you a little salty- mouth. A fantastic collection and not one to be missed.”
—JOHN HORNOR JACOBS, author of This Dark Earth
AVAILABLE AT AMAZON.COM
LAZY FACIST 2012
The Obese by Nick Antosca
Anatomy Courses by Blake Butler and Sean Kilpatrick
A Parliament of Crows by Alan M. Clark
Zombie Bake-Off by Stephen Graham Jones
Chick Bassist by Ross E. Lockhart
The Collected Works of Scott McClanahan Vol. I by Scott McClanahan
The Devil in Kansas by David Ohle
Frowns Need Friends Too by Sam Pink
I Am Going to Clone Myself Then Kill the Clone and Eat It by Sam Pink
No One Can Do Anything Worse to You than You Can by Sam Pink
Rontel by Sam Pink
A Pretty Mouth by Molly Tanzer
Broken Piano for President by Patrick Wensink
Everything Was Great Until It Sucked by Patrick Wensink
COMING IN 2013
Moon Babes of Bicycle City by Mike Daily
Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth by Stephen Graham Jones
The Doom That Came to Lolcats by Douglas Lain
The Humble Assessment by Kris Saknussemm
Dyldoe: A Novel by Molly Tanzer
Colony Collapse by J.A. Tyler
Expletive Deleted by Patrick Wensink
Plus many more!
The Last Final Girl Page 20