My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(11)
That’s all Jade needs in the world, she knows.
Instead she’s got Tab Daniels for a father, Proofrock for a prison, and high school for a torture chamber.
Kill em all, she says in her heart of hearts. Let God sort them out.
Or just leave them unsorted, floating facedown in the shallows. That works too.
Jade chuckles to herself through the tears, pats her chest pocket for the cigarette she doesn’t have, because these coveralls were just hanging on the line.
Once she’s drifted far enough out that the light from the pier can’t reach her, she sits up, takes stock, and keeps monologuing even though the trashfire is just a flickering speck of light on shore: “Did you know that kid the shark eats in Jaws, his name’s ‘Voorhees’ too?” she asks the construction grunts, all three of them so ready to smile with wonder at this.
“Yeah, yeah, Voorhees kids should maybe stay out of the water, think? But that’s not even what I meant to say, okay, sorry. I was just—when Jason comes up out of the water in mossy slow motion for Alice, floating there in her safe canoe, roll-the-credits music already cueing up, that’s Friday’s Carrie moment right there, that’s the stinger that would set the mold for the Golden Age of the slasher, the eighties, and, and… the way he comes up and hugs her from behind, it’s not because he means her any violence, any harm, it’s just that he’s—he’s a little kid, goddamnit, he’s a helpless messed-up little kid and he’s fucking drowning, he’s terrified, he’s holding on to whatever he can, right? He’s scared, and she’s… she’s supposed to protect him, save him, keep him safe.”
Jade lowers her face, because the air at her chest has to be warmer. Her lungs feel like they’re iced over, filling with something solid and permanent.
This isn’t just going to be hypothermia, Sheriff Hardy, Mr.
Holmes.
She’s Alice at the end of Friday the 13th now, she knows, when Friday’s starting to be Saturday, she’s Alice and she’s floating out on the lake in her canoe, waiting for the magic to happen, trying to stay out there long enough that Jason notices her up at the surface, starts rising, rising— “Here I am,” Jade says, loopy with cold now, smiling because it doesn’t hurt anymore, and just to give Jason some color to find her, some of what he likes, she holds her left wrist out, uses her right hand to flick the razor from the utility knife like a sharp little tongue, and she cuts longways and deep like opening a fountain, doesn’t scratch some side-to-side plea-for-help gash.
Her blood pours steaming from the fishbelly part of her left forearm and she studies it, says, “Here I am, I’m—I’m…”
What stops her is how fascinating her blood is, pooled on the surface of the gelid 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, looks all around in farewell, to Proofrock where she grew up, to Terra Nova where she’s never been, to Camp Blood, where her heart is.
“Momma I’m coming home,” she says with that Ozzy lilt, and she knows no arms are coming up from behind her for her big finale, for the slasher version of a death roll, which is really just a hug, but she closes her eyes all the same, pretends.
SLASHER 101
And then there was one. Of me, I mean, Mr. Holmes, one Jade Daniels to take you by the hand and walk you up and down the video rental aisles of slasherland to make up for what I missed from the Freddy Glove Incident at freshman detention, which wasn’t even really my fault, and that Freddy glove has PLASTIC blades anyway. It’s almost October though, and horror is my religion. Can I not celebrate orthodoxly and honor my church’s holy days?
But I need to explain SLASHERS to you now, in under 2 pages.
It’s easy to think that the slasher started with Halloween, previously called The Babysitter Murders, or that it got a face when Friday the 13th III put a certain Black Christmas hockey mask on, but still, a lot fans and true believers will go back to Psycho and Peeping Tom. However though if you ask yourself “Who was the first masked killer?” then you can go all the long way back to Phantom of the Opera, which you might remember seeing on a high school outing probably.
What’s first and almost first isn’t as important as what’s INSIDE the slasher though, sir. And that is REVENGE plain and simple.
To explain, 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.
So in the case of Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger, what made them into a slasher is that Jason DROWNS through massive and obviously wrong neglect, and Freddy is EXECUTED by a mob illegally, and the counselors who allowed this drowning and the parents who became this mob never get punished, just get to keep on keeping on, and it’s that unfairness that powers the slasher. As for Michael Myers, his Ahab Dr. Loomis says he’s evil, but he’s been MADE evil, Mr. Holmes.
The crime done to him is that his sister his BABYSITTER should have been watching him closer not stripping down and sexing it up. Michael could have been run over in the street. He could have choked on candy. He could have found a knife and got all stabby.