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

by Stephen Graham Jones

Another part of the game is that, if you don’t give immediate chase, then this particular Lake Witch never knocks on your door again.

If you’re a shark, though, you keep moving, don’t you? Keep moving or die. That’s been Toby’s mental bumpersticker ever since the massacre—a strict policy of constant movement means that bad night in the water gets farther away with every day, with every swish of the tail.

She’s only twenty-two years old, Hardy reminds himself. The world is shit, to not have treated her better.

“Oh,” Jennifer says, steepling both her hands over her mouth and drawing her breath in. “It’s—he’s white.” “Snake Indians would have called him a spirit elk,” Hardy says. “And he doesn’t show himself for just anybody.”

He’s been around long enough to know that every father’s most basic wish is to sacrifice himself to save his kid, that there’s no better way to cash out, and that him wishing that is just… he’s one dad in a sea of dads, all of them perfectly willing to walk open-eyed into a buzzsaw if it means their kid doesn’t have to.

The real proof will be whether bullets can stop him or not, Letha supposes. If they can, then he’s a serial killer. If it takes a final girl to put him down, though, then he was a slasher all along.

“Then it’s not over,” Jennifer says. “It was just on pause.” Because slashers never really die. They just go to sleep for a few years. But they’re always counting the days until round two.

Some slashers, she knows, are all about that: who’s doing it, and why. Figure it out early and you might get to survive. This one, though, it’s more like a fox has gotten into the henhouse, is biting at whoever’s flapping and squawking. A big, dark, scary fox. That doesn’t mean he can’t be put down, though. By the right girl.

You don’t make it long in a slasher, looking up, daydreaming.

“Who did this to her?” Tompkins says then, without looking up to Jade and the teacher, and Hardy can tell from his tone of voice that this is the moment right here when the kid’s grown up into the man. A man of the law.

You don’t investigate mysterious sounds, you don’t go skinnydipping, and you for sure don’t traipse into a place where it’s obvious people are already dying.

In slashers, you die because you don’t know stuff. Therefore, the more knowledge you can collect and piece together, the better your survival rate.

I’ve told you the dream I had once, of how being dead wasn’t actually death, it just meant you and me get to hold hands and roller-skate all through the college campus we met on, forever? Yeah, the reaper’s coming for us all, there’s nothing we can really do about that. But, if I do get to roller-skate into eternity holding your hand, then, there really isn’t anything to be scared of, is there? Here, take my hand. I want to be sure not to lose you.