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

by Stephen Graham Jones

whispering because there’s something solemn about being awake when everyone’s asleep.

“Depends on what you consider dead,” Mismatched Gloves adds. “Greyson Brust,” Shooting Glasses says, being respectful with the name.

“If I get too close to this and go up in flames, then I’m going to come back in five years and carve through this town like, like—but I forgot to tell you all the other stuff.

They don’t stay up late praying to Craven and Carpenter to send one of their savage angels down, just for a weekend maybe.

Or just leave them unsorted, floating facedown in the shallows. That works too.

lake. She’s seventy percent certain a misshapen face is looking up at her from the murk, its mouthful of gravestone teeth trying to grin. She smiles back,

It's almost October though, and horror is my religion. Can I not celebrate orthodoxly and honor my church's holy days?

years ago there was some prank or crime that hurt someone and then the slasher comes back to dispense his violent brand of justice, and he's not listening to excuses or apologies because there's not one single one that could ever be even halfway enough, his mission is carving and he's not stopping until he's stopped.

really. A little bloody maybe, but all the dead people are people who were asking for it. Which is my argument in a gory nutshell.

OJ-white county Bronco—the

but what she always finds herself watching instead of the crowd that night is Sheriff Hardy, coming up out of the shallows with her in his arms, giving her all the body heat he has to give, his sixty-one-year-old jowls quivering with each bellow he lets out about how this girl is goddamn well not going to die, not on his watch.

In slashers, the local cops are always useless. It’s a hard and fast rule of the genre. Sheriff Hardy not sticking to that is just one more nail in the coffin of Jade’s dreams. By now that coffin’s pretty much all nails.

All the best things in life are stolen, Jade knows.

will this slasher be punishing the graduating class due to some long-ago forgotten prank their parents were part of, or will this have more to do with trespassing, with waking something that should have been left sleeping?

In the high sloping meadow just past the tall line of trees right on the shore, spread out so you can kind of still see the formation they were in, are ten or twenty dead elk, their legs and heads all twisted and contracted into grotesque configurations.

What night might we all be in one place for for this bloody business?

mining history or with Henderson-Golding or with Glen Dam or with Indian Lake or with Caribou-Targhee National Forest,

As for the slasher in question it's Stacey Graves the Lake Witch,

The solution to all that heaviness was to use rawhide string or a belt to tie the elk's mouth shut, and also plug up their aft end, as Mr. Krabs might say and I don't want to think about, and then using your mouth to blow as much air as you could into the elk's nose holes and plug them up with mud before the air can whistle back out.

Christine Gillette told me that the boogeyman of Indian Lake used to not even be Stacey Graves in the first place, OR Ezekiel with his big hands. It used to be Stacey Graves's MOM, always walking around the shore line looking for her lost daughter, and taking any kids after dark back to her cave where she would hold them to her, in Christine Gillette's picture painty words, "leathery dugs" and make them drink her milk, which pretty much did the opposite of real mother's milk, so the lesson there was to not go out after dark, kids, get it?

As near as she can suspect, it’s either going to look like or be Stacey Graves, which will be pretty wicked,

What if he wants her to wash his Bronco? What if he tells her to use her litter stick out in the shallows of Indian Lake, where every third piece of flotsam is going to be not just a rubber, but the rubber of someone she knows?

It rises to right the wrongs, then when it gets all carried away, nature spits up its governor, its throttle, its one-woman police force, its fiercest angel: the final girl.

No, when he carried Jade up from the shallows, no, he wasn’t going to let any more girls drown in his lake.

“Judgment Day.” Except it’ll probably be “Wilderness Massacre,” something insulting like that.

Unless whoever it is is actually wearing some giant Stacey Graves getup, in which case: The Lake Witch Slayings.

while my mom was having a conversation with herself in the car about will she won't she and then this movie was in the bargain bin like trash. But let me tell you it wasn't.

What I'm telling you is that pretty soon, probably at our annual July Fourth party on the water, Proofrock is going to be turning INTO A Bay of Blood, I promise. Instead of explaining pranks and revenge and red herrings and final girls and reveals all right here I'm just going to instead fold in a lot of the papers and interviews I wrote for Mr. Holmes in History Class, including a bonus

and starts ambling over to his Bronco, so bright white in the darkness.

sees an eight-year-old girl named Stacey Graves living like a cat in some pioneer version of Proofrock, always looking across the rising lake for the mother who abandoned her.

"But Jefferson Stoakes. None of us knew what to make of… what can you even think, when a kid you know turns up dead with a wasp nest not just crammed into his mouth, but kind of in PLACE of his mouth?

But I guess, living back in the trees at their place, one of her older cousins had maybe told her about the Lake Witch, I don't know. And she took it to heart, maybe. She wasn't right in the head, I'm saying. It probably didn't help that all us junior detectives around the campfire -- to us it was even money that it was Stacey Graves who'd got Jefferson and Crane.

to get behind her so close, push her in." BECAUSE WE HAVE TO PROVIDE CONTEXT FOR NON-LOCALS, WHEN THE SHERIFF ABOVE SAYS THEY WERE ALL SCARED OF THE "LAKE WITCH," THE STORY HE'S REFERRING TO THAT YOU AND ME KNOW BUT NOBODY NOT IN PROOFROCK KNOWS IS THAT A 100 YEARS AGO SOME BOYS AND STACEY GRAVES THE 8 YEAR OLD WERE PLAYING "WITCH" IN THE SHALLOWS OF THE RISING LAKE AND THEY SWUNG HER AND THEN THREW HER OUT AS FAR AS SHE COULD TO PROVE SHE WASN'T A WITCH, BECAUSE WITCHES FLOAT, EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT, BUT SURPRISE, THE WATER WOULDN'T LET HER IN, SO SHE FLOPPED OVER ON

IT, HUNCHED UP LIKE A CAT, HISSED AT THE BOYS THROUGH HER CRAZY HAIR AND RAN AWAY ON ALL FOURS TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LAKE TO FIND HER MOM THAT HER DAD HAD PROBABLY KILLED AND HIDDEN OVER THERE ALREADY, AND THIS IS HOW LEGENDS ARE BORN, SIR.

made for the water. That was the 1 place we knew Stacey Graves couldn't go, because of Ezekiel's holy singing being already under there, and his tolerance for witches being so famously low, so that was where I hid,

but all that meant was that in my head I had to see her scratching and

clawing at the surface of the water right over my back, not able to reach into it.

Smelled them before I saw them, you know how I am when there’s a donut in the room.

would Ezekiel have to come up from Drown Town to put a cap on this slasher cycle? Can an evil preacher count as good when he’s stopping a masked killer from slicing a town open? Jade shakes her head no, she can’t let it come to that. Meaning she has no choice but to try to talk Letha into being the final girl she’s meant to be. Everybody has a function, everybody in a slasher cycle has a role—isn’t that a line from the Bible, even?

“Stacey Graves,” she finally gets out, batting her deer eyelashes. “That was the paper you wanted me to read, right?” “All of them can save your life,” Jade mumbles. “But that little girl,” Letha says. “What I’m—why is she so important, I guess that’s what I’m asking.” “Because whoever’s doing this is probably dressing up like—” “To you, I mean. I read your letter six times, standing by the mailbox. By the end I was crying.”

We can—you and me, we’ll come to the ten-year reunion for the sequel, how’s that sound? That’s when Ezekiel will finally be coming up from the lake. We’ll stand back-to-back in the middle of the gym floor, crepe paper floating down all around us in slow motion, and—and you’ll have the sword from the trophy case, and I’ll have ripped the blade off the paper cutter in the main office, and we’ll, we’ll—”

“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.

“This isn’t over,” Mr. Holmes says to Jade, just for Jade—meaning her one-answer out-loud test is still coming, and probably when she least expects it, so he can feel like he’s getting a real answer.

THE LAKE WITCH SLAYINGS. That’s definitely what they’re going to call it the morning after, when all the bodies are floating facedown in the water, blood blooming out from their sides like wings. It’s going to be glorious.

The reason there’s pockets of air in Swiss cheese, Jade knows but doesn’t say, is that there’s corruption in there, eating all around itself.

Shooting Glasses huffs air through his nose in a sick laugh. “We had to loop him like a goddamn pig,” he says, wiping his lips with the back of his sleeve. “He kept—he kept running away from the light we’d shine down. Like, running on all fours, like he’d forgot he was even a person.”

“Finally we shined all our lights into this one kind of corner he kept running to. So he had to cross under the hole to get out of the light, right? We dropped a cargo net on him, and when he tried to fight out of it, it tangled him up. He fought it the whole way, was making these… these like noises, I don’t know.”

“When we went to see him that… that night, he—god. He was still walking on all fours, right? Like he was thinking like a bug or something.” “That night?”

One she claws out of as an angel of death. For Letha so far, it’s been the Dutch boy in the lake, his skin sloughing off in her hands,

“A Bay of Blood,” Jade says, chest heaving, mind reeling, face numb, and because they’re off to the side now, she knows Shooting Glasses has to be able to see what she’s talking about: Clate Rodgers’s frothy blood lapping up against Hardy’s hull, some of the chunks adhering to the fiberglass. Not quite as high as the little airboat’s name, Melanie, but when Hardy passes by, the water laps up a few inches, baptizes those eight letters in what’s left of the boy who was with her the day she drowned.