My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(125)
It’s the fire she guesses she probably started. The fire from the lighter she left flickering in that pile of elk. It finally singed some hair enough to rough a little flame up, and that flame caught some more hide, found the grass, felt across to the trees, and… and now Caribou-Targhee National Forest is burning. For the first time in fifty years. Every Idahoan’s worst fear is climbing tree after tree, the crowns bursting sparks and embers into each other like an endless stand of matchsticks.
Jade shakes her head in apology, in regret, and kind of smiles a bit on accident, even.
This too, slasher gods?
“The Burning,” she says, obviously. “1981, Alex.”
It’s the main slasher to have made of fire something formative, but, for an actual forest fire, not a misdirected prank, you have to dial all the way back to The Prey, Jade guesses. The Prey opens with a fire that burns across an innocent family, leaving one of them disfigured enough to Cropsy back up years later, when partying teens show up for a camping trip. But The Prey was only in theaters for a week at most in 1983. Or was it ’84? Never mind that it was actually shot in 1978, meaning that, unlike all the other slashers of the Golden Age, The Prey wasn’t really riding Halloween’s coattails, was probably surfing the same cultural wave that spit Halloween up onto America’s screens in the first place, that wave being the sweet spot where the grindhouse of the seventies and the giallo of the sixties overlapped with someone with Herschell Gordon Lewis dollar signs in their eyes—Sean Cunningham in early 1979, pretty much, taking out an ad in Variety to fund a little horror movie set on Friday the 13th that he wanted to make.
Call it what you want, Jade tells herself. The truth is, the same as you can’t be cruel to animals in the production of your slasher—that poor innocent snake in Friday the 13th—you also can’t light some random woods on fire just to make your movie cooler. What else she tells herself is that she kind of always knew it was going to come to this, didn’t she? Her citing slasher trivia to herself over here in Camp Blood.
Who else would even listen?
She was always trying to be Randy from Scream—the Cassandra Scream 2 would nod to, who would become a literal Cassandra-on-videotape in Scream 3—but she knows that, if anything, she’s Crazy Ralph.
Definitely not the Girl Who Saved Proofrock. Or, as much of it as she could, anyway.
Hugging herself from the chill—it’s always coldest just before dawn—she looks away from the flames consuming Terra Nova and the national forest and probably all of Idaho behind it, considers Proofrock watching this same tragedy unfold across the water.
As if ten or fifteen people floating in pieces in the water isn’t enough, now there’s a fire to try to deal with.
“Sorry,” Jade says, wishing Mr. Holmes were around to shake his head at this prank to end all pranks. In trying to turn her back to it so as to maybe soak up at least the idea of some of that wonderful warmth, she finds herself facing the chalky white bluff behind Camp Blood, the one Hardy said it used to be a big joke to climb, so you could moon everyone at once.
Sounds like fun.
Jade grins a guilty grin—this is no time for smiling—and rocks back on her heels, imagines the cliff of water to the left of that bluff, that she used to dream of someday releasing down-valley, just for kicks and grins, and because she kind of wanted to see Drown Town, not just make dioramas of it for art class.
Now, after the fire feels around this side of the lake, ravages through Camp Blood on its way to taking Proofrock down, now the next generation’s dioramas are going to be of Pleasant Valley, before it burned to cinders.
It’s a foregone conclusion: that’s the way the wind’s blowing, and the skies are clear, no clouds building to release nature’s fire extinguisher down.
Jade can try to climb the cliff when the flames get close, but… does she really want to? Better to just sit in her cabin hugging her knees and rocking. Maybe imagine that the flickering on the windows is from a bonfire burning into the night. Maybe the ghosts of the kids killed here will feel that heat, even, and raise their voices in some campfire song, the rhyme-y one about the dam bursting, and— Jade stops rocking back and forth on shore.
She looks to the chalky bluff again.
Hardy didn’t just tell her about that mooning stunt, did he?
He also made that big deal about… how long ago was this?
Sophomore year, was that when Jade had to do her interview project a second time? Shit.
But: yeah. That story about that other old sheriff, the one who saved Pleasant Valley from the last fire by shooting out the windows of the dam’s control booth and raising the level of the lake, dousing the flames.
Jade looks up the bluff again.
Could she?
If the wind’s blowing the fire towards the lake, and the lake’s rising, then… it should work, shouldn’t it?
Hardy’s not around to drive up to the dam and shoot the windows of the control booth out, though. And everybody in Proofrock’s probably still got shriek-faces on about their dead friends and family, and everybody else is packing their cars and trucks, because this is the big one, this is the end of Pleasant Valley, the end of what Henderson and Golding started so long ago.
But it doesn’t have to be.
Jade lowers her hands, trying to shake blood back into her fingertips, and for the fiftieth time she wishes hard for her coveralls. It was a good and necessary gesture last night, but dealing with that gesture in the morning is seriously sucking.