My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Indian Lake Trilogy, #1)

by Stephen Graham Jones

All Lotte can make out is “Wat is er mis met haar mond?” before his voice gargles down, stops abruptly.

Under her overalls there’s just a girl-cut Misfits t-shirt, probably technically too small if that matters, and her threadbare jeans, most of the holes in the thighs not from washing dishes at the pancake house or moving boxes in a shipping warehouse—Proofrock isn’t big enough for either of those places—but from scraping at the fabric with her fingernails during seventh period, her state history class, which she calls Brainwashing 101. Her fingernails are black, of course, and her hair is supposed to be green, that was the plan one hundred percent, it was going to look killer, but Indian hair doesn’t take the dye like the box says “all hair” should, so she’s got a bobbed orange mop to deal with,

I just can't stand it. It's like he googled "tumblr" and wrote a character off of it

“Greyson Brust,” Jade says, obviously. “That’s—he sounds like horror royalty, I mean. You can hear it, can’t you? ‘Greyson Brust’ is right up there with Harry Warden, with Billy Loomis, with John Wakefield, with Victor Crowley and Sammi Curr. With… I’m gonna say it… Jason Voorhees. Some names just have that killer ring, don’t they?”

She is the WORST

In the high sloping meadow just past the tall line of trees right on the shore, spread out so you can

poor guys, but that is awesome

Calmly, not in any kind of panic, just another wrong number, she hangs up, bends to attend to her right boot, and when she stands, she’s sliding the pink phone under her chunky sole. When she moves ahead with the surge of kids, she’s sliding the phone out into the road, into a puddle. It slurps the phone right in, but then the phone bobs up to the surface—the case must float, shit. It’s just hanging there like a flat cork, so pink, so obvious, ringing again now, two fourth-graders stopped by Jade to watch this unfolding tragedy.

Like That is so immoral

“I read between the lines, I mean,” Letha adds. “Mr. Holmes makes us double-space,” Jade says, not following. “To what you were really saying,” Letha says, her hand on top of Jade’s again. “And—it can’t be easy to ask for help, especially from a complete stranger. It’s really… it’s brave is what it is.”

I would end it right there fr

“No, no,” Letha assures Jade. “I just—I read it to him over the phone, the sheriff, to… to show. To prove. So he could help.” “But the cops are always useless in cases like this!” Jade says, struggling to stand.

I'm so confused. I thought they were there to have her committed or something.

And then Jade sees what everybody else here has already seen: now that high school’s over and she can’t tell Mr. Holmes all her slasher theories, she’s trying to find someone else to latch onto, impress with her slasher Q.

“I know you thought you were helping,” Jade tells her, flabbergasted to the point of no return here. “But, and you couldn’t have known this, authority figures—cops, teachers, parents—it’s not possible for them to believe, not until it’s too late.

Kind of sucks of her. She could have reported her at least after hearing Jade out.

“But we can stop it,” Letha says. “You can, yeah,” Jade tells her back. “That’s why I called Sheriff Hardy,” Letha says, again with that apologetic tone. Jade turns to Hardy about this. “I pulled in Mr. Holmes because I—” he says, fumbling a bit, which isn’t his usual way. “I know he was your favorite teacher. Is, is your favorite teacher.”

“What are you saying?” she says at last. “This is—I was at a random gas station, I happened to look into the bargain bin—” “You were at your most vulnerable, your most broken,” Letha says, about to cry. “And you reached out for the first thing you saw, held it as close as you could, like armor. Like it could protect you. And it has, hasn’t it?” “A Bay of Blood?” “Slashers,” Mr. Holmes says.

“That’s just me,” Jade tells him, blowing her smoke out now, as underline. “Horror’s not a symptom, it’s a love affair.” “Are you saying—?” Letha starts, and Jade finishes for her: “I’d be like this anyway, yeah.” It’s only when she looks up to Mr. Holmes that she hears what Letha tricked her into saying. It’s the same story you hear about drunks on a traffic stop, arguing how they can’t even say the alphabet backwards when they’re sober. Meaning what Jade just said to all three of them was: Even if my dad hadn’t done that to me when I was eleven, I still would have fallen hard for horror.

“Bear also took me through what he says is probably your reasoning for… for Saturday.” For the first time, Jade really hears that: “Bear.” A bear was supposed to have killed Deacon Samuels.

Hmmm ??

Hardy stands fast, his chair crashing back behind him, and he’s fast enough to see the very end of it: Mr. Holmes’s ultralight, not skimming the lake anymore, but skipping on it. Once, twice, and on the third time it sticks, Mr. Holmes’s small body crashing through one purple wing and floating through the air, floating, then cartwheeling across the hard-hard water.

NOOO

There’s a body in that tub, too. His legs are cocked out over the edge, his arms thrown out to the side, and his eyes are open, but they’re not seeing anything anymore. “Cody,” Jade whispers, in pain. Cowboy Boots. He’s still wearing them, along with a golden nail between the eyes, a ribbon of blood unfurling down from it and curling across his face, tucking itself into his mouth at last instead of pooling in the hollow of his neck.

AHHH

It’s Shooting Glasses. He’s scrambling down a roof two houses down, is Jesse Pinkman’ing into what’s going to be the front yard, and already rolling that impact away because it’s the least thing he has to worry about. Jade watches the window he must have dove through but it’s the front door of the house that swings open instead. The Prowler, the killer, the slasher. His chest is heaving, his face unchanging, still gas-masked, the nailgun heavy and deadly by his thigh. Shooting Glasses looks back, shakes his head no, holding his hands up like to ward off flying nails, and he’s saying something over and over but it doesn’t matter.

The Prowler wades in up to his knees, quilting the whole area with nails until his cartridge runs dry. He looks at the gun and tosses it aside, lets it kerplunk down. Now he’s looking up, to the yacht. Letha is up against the rail, calling down. Not shrieking, not screaming, not crying, not asking what or why. “T’s napping!” she whisper-yells, just loud enough Jade can make it out. Below her, knee-deep in Indian Lake, Theo Mondragon peels out of the gas mask and hoodie. “Did you get them all?” Letha calls down, apparently forgetting her injunction against waking Tiara. Theo Mondragon shakes his head no as if disappointed with himself,

Girl huh

Her dad was rooting out a wasp nest or two. Thus the mask, the hoodie. Just, he redefined “wasp” to include Cowboy Boots, and Shooting Glasses.

Through the window she sees him stepping into the one house she’s already been through. Two minutes later he emerges, dragging Cowboy Boots—Cody, Cody Cody Cody—by his right heel, the rest of him wrapped in foggy plastic, Tina-style. Theo Mondragon stands there casing the night for maybe thirty more seconds in which he pulls his own phone out, unlocks it, and stares into it, finally shaking it just as Jade did. His doesn’t get a signal either. He smiles to himself about it, though, nods, slips the phone back into his pocket, and walks a straight line out from Terra Nova, a flashlight or headlamp coming on once he’s in the trees. It dims a few steps later, then fades completely.

what if, for sixty seconds after that, Theo Mondragon stood alongside three construction grunts and watched the little kit plane he’d just shot founder in the air, finally nosedive into the lake, launching its old pilot out into the water?

What if Theo Mondragon had just accidentally killed someone in broad daylight, and done it in front of three witnesses? Probably what he’d do then was what Deacon Samuels had already done: stuff those grunts’ hands with cash, assure them it was an accident, it was just a joke that got out of hand, but someone of his station didn’t need the kind of media attention this could bring, surely they could understand, couldn’t they? And then… he probably didn’t sleep on it, probably didn’t sleep at all. Who would? What he would do, though, what would make sense at two in the morning, would be to involve himself with the construction the next day, and maybe send everyone but those three back across the lake. So he, the quintessential businessman, taking risk analysis and cost-benefit margins into severe account, could take care of business. Nobody on the yacht would think twice about a nailgun going off in Terra Nova. Nailguns were always going off in the houses. And—and from his angle, he’d have to do it, wouldn’t he? If he didn’t, Shooting Glasses and Mismatched Gloves and Cody could pull this whole enterprise down. Pull his whole life down.

Moments later the doorknob rattles violently and someone slaps the door high and to the side like a cop. Letha squirms on the futon, shaken awake. “W-what?” she says, not able to completely open her eyes yet, her lids probably gummed together with airborne melatonin. She reaches up to rub them with the back of her wrist, which is exactly when the wall maybe six inches above her head disintegrates with a blast that can only be Mars Baker’s shotgun. One of the barrels, anyway. Letha rolls away from the wall as if stung with shot. She spills onto the floor just as the next barrel unloads into where she was lying, leaving wisps of foam floating in the air. In the silence after the blast, a single flame flickers at the edge of the crater in the futon, and, through the hole in the wall, there’s a scream, a gurgle, and then that gurgle’s cut sharply off.

Letha falls back shaking her head no, no, and Jade doesn’t want to look, but has to: Mars Baker has been thrust headfirst through the big window, and his jaw has been pulled off too, so his mouth is locked into a forever scream.

“T!” Letha screams, rushing the railing, slamming into it like if she could have just got there a second earlier, she could have reached out, snagged the hem of Tiara’s shirt. Jade tracks Tiara’s ragdoll body all the way down to one of the posts built into this modular pier. The post isn’t sharp, is flat and blunt, but all the same it plunges up and through Tiara’s chest, splashes out the back, and when Tiara’s face slams into the wood or plastic or plastic wood, whatever it is, Jade feels her own cheek tingle in sympathy.

Jade’s next awkward stroke brings her hand into a warm cavity like a floating bowl of oatmeal, a floating bowl that’s… Lewellyn Singleton’s caved-in face? What, is this a Fulci film?

“My foot?” Jade hisses, feeling down her calf with her hands. It’s not a root. “Oh, shit,” Letha says. It’s a bear trap. Of course.

Brutal

“I was going to burn it all down.” Jade tries to process this, finally says, “With that candle?” She feels Letha nodding. “Why?” “We shouldn’t be here,” Letha says, shuddering now, holding the back of Jade’s fingers to her mouth, speaking warmth right onto them. “In Proofrock?” “This side of the lake,” Letha whispers, the hush of her words rushing up Jade’s arm to the base of her jaw, the center of her chest. “But—” “People, I mean,” Letha goes on. “This side of the lake isn’t for people.” “Why do—why?” Jade asks. “I’ve seen her,” Letha says, barely able to get it out before pulling Jade closer all at once. “No, no,” Jade says, letting herself be drawn in. “This isn’t the Golden Age, that’s—it was your dad in a wig. I saw him too, from the water. That’s how these things—” “On the water,” Letha says. Jade’s skin prickles. “Paddleboard,” she says. “He doesn’t know how,” Letha says back.

when she looks up to who’s doing this, it’s an angel in a halo of blazing light, her hair wet with gore, face red and black with chunks, chest heaving, fingers curling open and shut like the talons they are. Letha fucking Mondragon, reborn.

“Thanks for digging me out,” Jade tells her. “You didn’t have to, I know. I’m not worth it.”

Oh my god she is the WORST time and time again

“How’d you get out?” she asks instead. When Letha doesn’t answer at first, Jade looks over just casually, catches her blinking a touch faster than she has been—like Jade just was. Except, Jade was trying not to let her emotions get the better of her, wasn’t she? And… Jade’s dialing back, back—back to Melanie’s bench a week ago, yeah. When she clocked this exact tell from Letha. “What?” Letha’s asking. “How’d you get out of the pile of elk?”

OH GOD SHE IS INVOLVED

“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.”

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.

“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.

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.

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.

this Christian burial ground won’t take her Indian self, won’t let her step through.