My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)
Stephen Graham Jones
to Debra Hill: thank you, from all of us The slasher film lies by and large beyond the purview of the respectable
—Carol J. Clover
NIGHT SCHOOL
On the battered paper map that’s carried the two of them across they’re not sure how many of the American states now, this is Proofrock, Idaho, and the dark body of water before them is Indian Lake, and it kind of goes forever out into the night.
“Does that mean there’s Indians in the lake, or does it mean that Indians made it?” Lotte asks, a gleam of excitement to her eyes.
“Everything here’s named after Indians,” Sven says back, whispering because there’s something solemn about being awake when everyone’s asleep.
Their rental car is ticking down behind them from the six-hour push from Casper, the doors open because they just wanted to look, to see, to soak all this in before going back to the Netherlands at the end of the week.
Lotte shines her phone’s light down onto the fluttering map and looks up from it and across the water, like trying to connect what she’s seeing in lines and grids to what she’s actually standing in.
“Wat?” Sven says.
“In American,” Lotte tells him for the two-hundredth time.
If they want partial course credit for immersion, they have to actually immerse.
“What?” Sven repeats, the word belligerent in English, like trying to make elbow room for itself.
“That should be the national forest on the other side,” Lotte says, chinning across the water because her hands are struggling to get the map shut.
“Everything’s a national forest,” Sven grumbles, angling his head as if to peer deeper into the darkness at all these black trees.
“But you can’t do that in the king’s forest, can you?” Lotte asks, finally getting the map folded in one of the six different ways it’s possible to fold it.
Sven follows her eyes across Indian Lake. There’s little floating pinpoints of light over there that only really come into focus when you look into the darkness right beside them.
“Hunh,” he says, Lotte coming up behind him to rest her chin on his shoulder, hold his waist in her hands.
Sven breathes in deep with wonder when the lights rearrange themselves, suggesting great yellow necks in the inky blackness: strange and massive animals, piecing the world together one lakeshore at a time. Then, a ways down the shore, a ball of flickering light arcs up into the velvety sky and hangs, hangs.
“Mooi,” Lotte says right next to his ear, and Sven repeats it in American: “Beautiful.”
“We shouldn’t,” Lotte says, which of course means the exact opposite.
Sven looks back to the car, shrugs sure, what the hell. It’s not like they’re going to be here again, right? It’s not like they’re going to get another chance to be twenty years old in America, a whole lake at their feet like it bubbled up just for them to dip their toes into—and maybe more.
They leave their clothes on the hood, the antenna, draped over the open doors.
The mountain air is crisp and thin, their skin pale and bare.
“The water will be—” Sven starts to say, but Lotte finishes for him, “Perfect,” and with that they’re running the way naked barefoot people do across gravel, which is delicately, hugging themselves against the chill but laughing too, just to be doing this.
Behind them Proofrock, Idaho, is dark. Before them a long wooden pier is reaching out over the water, pointing them across the lake.
To get their nerve up for how cold this is going to be, once their feet find those wooden planks, Lotte and Sven stretch out and really run, not worried about the chance of nails or splinters or falling. Sven howls up into the vast open space all around them and Lotte snaps a blurry picture of him with her phone.
“You brought that?” he says, turning around to jog backwards.
“Document, document,” she says, her arms drawn in like a boxer’s now that Sven’s looking back.
He raises an imaginary camera, takes his own picture of her.
Lotte is looking past him now, though, her eyes not as sure as they just were, her strides shortening, slowing, her hands and elbows going into strategic-coverage mode.
There’s a much closer light flickering at what’s got to be the end of the pier, and it looks for all the world like a fisherman in dark rain gear, holding an old-style lantern up at face level.
No, not a fisherman: a lighthouse keeper who hasn’t seen another soul for three years. A lighthouse keeper who thinks that holding his lantern close to his own eyes will improve his vision.
And then the light’s gone.
Sven’s hand finds Lotte’s and they slow to a shuffle, the sky yawning empty and deep above them. All around them.
“Wat?” Lotte says.
“In American,” Sven chides, forcing his smile.
“I don’t anymore think we should—” Lotte starts, but doesn’t finish because Sven, walking now instead of running, is jumping on his left foot, his right splintered or nailed or stubbed, something sudden and unpleasant.
The light at the end of the pier comes on, curious.
“Look,” Lotte says to Sven.
When he stops hopping and grabbing at the sole of his foot, the light goes back off.