Don't Fear the Reaper (The Indian Lake Trilogy, #2)

by Stephen Graham Jones

The killer is with few exceptions recognizably human and distinctly male. —CAROL J. CLOVER

As Martin Luther says on that poster by your chalkboard, “Blood alone moves the wheels of history.” Our wheels are moving just fine, thank you. Just, don’t look in the rearview mirror if you can help it.

It’s stupid being superstitious like that, he knows, but if you don’t have private little rituals, the days can lose their meaning real fast.

John W. Gardner says that History never looks like history when you’re living through it, yes. What does it look like when you can’t stop living through it, though? When it’s not even history to you yet?

But? Was Rexall supposed to just listen to people with the same skin color as his own? Who would that leave him, Merle Haggard?

Aldous Huxley warns, That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

As Karl Marx says, History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce, which is to say: all these episodes of violence eventually become cartoons. Time mollifies, multiple tellings codify, and then history repackages.

In hindsight, it was a stupid decision, but being smart’s not as easy as everybody makes it out to be.

However, taking Occam’s Razor into account, we have to ask not what’s the most fantastic explanation, but the simplest? Yes, Sherlock Holmes famously tells us that “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth,”

It should have been dead long ago, she knows, but souls are like livers: they regenerate and regenerate, until you’ve finally poisoned them enough that the only thing they can do is kill you, take you down with them.

Fifty thousand ancestors, going back and back, each of them a final girl.

Before Dark Mill South can answer with a hook moving at however fast his chest muscles can swing it, there’s a scream like Jade’s only heard once, when Letha did it over in Terra Nova—a death cry. The kind that tears your mouth open, so your spirit can claw up, take this fight.

Does he not know the rules, though? Slashers aren’t into guns. One of the papers she wrote for Mr. Holmes, even, back in the days of extra credit, was how the reason bullets never can take the slasher down is that they’re not in the gun economy at all, are far outside it, like there’s some unspoken deal in place: I won’t use you, you can’t hurt me. Dark Mill South should know this at an instinctual level. He’s got a hook hand, after all! He might as well be lurking around down at lovers’ lane, where you don’t shoot people Zodiac-style, Son of Sam–style, you eviscerate them, you hang them up above cars. Freddy never uses a gun, does he? Ghostface? Michael? Jade can’t even imagine Michael Myers using a gun. They’re so impersonal, so “all at once” instead of “one at a time.” Jason Voorhees? C’mon. He’ll use a speargun, sure, but that’s just for a 3-D gag. No, any self-respecting slasher finding a pistol in his hand, what he’s supposed to do is look down at it like it’s a strange bug, then shake his hand until this bitey, attention-drawing thing is gone again.

She’s reminded an instant later, when the truck blasts Armitage into her. Along with what must be thousands of pounds of snow, moving at the speed of some serious-ass bullshit.

Pater noster, qui es in caelis in a rhythm Jade can almost clock, and he keeps on saying it, but the words are hardly making it past his lips now. All Jade can tell of them, it’s that it’s an apology. The kind you make when you’re… afraid? Of dying?

“It’s Jade, sir,” Jade says back, and breathes all the corruption in her lungs out. Well, not the blackness, she supposes. Not the horror. Never that.

What did Abraham Lincoln say? Something like—yeah, yeah: “The chords of memory will swell when touched again by the better angels of our nature.”

When she thrusts her right arm up in victory, what she’s holding there for all the gods to see, for the whole world to know, for you to never have in your sacred collection, it’s a hook. From the killer she killed. Because she’s Jade fucking Daniels. And a thousand men like you can’t even reach up to touch her combat boots.