My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(26)

Every town he builds a house in.

Jade can’t be sure, but, from the angle of his head, she’s pretty sure Mr. Holmes is either watching him too, or memorizing all the Terra Novans’ faces, to burn them in effigy later. Some people count sheep, and some light matches under their enemies, Jade imagines. She knows which of those types Mr. Holmes is. Except he doesn’t use matches, just flicks his lit cigarette to the gas-soaked tinder under their feet.

Go, sir, Jade says again.

This is what she’ll remember, she knows. That she wasn’t the only one at this laughable, embarrassing event who would rather have burned it all down. It’s good being the horror chick, sure, always standing away from the rest of the crowd, smoking bitter cigarette after bitter cigarette, she’d have it no other way, but it’s nice to make eye contact with someone else with a black heart, too, and then breathe smoke out slow, like judgment.

When it’s time to throw the hats, Jade holds on to hers, smuggles it off the football field, and leaves it smiling up from the last trashcan on the way back to the high school for her mop and bucket, and whispers to the camera surely watching to hold on those X’d-out eyes for a few seconds more.

They’re a good preview of what’s coming.

SLASHER 101

For my Interview Project on Proofrock History, since I couldn’t interview an ACTUAL slasher as they don’t take appointments and are kind of known for leaving anyone within slashing range dead, usually along with their pets and classmates and family, I had to interview someone who had once been slasher ADJACENT, which you said I could do if I could find such a personage. Well I did, Mr. Holmes. I think you were joking when you said it, but if you were then allow me to introduce you to the punchline. It’s Mrs. Christine Gillette at Pleasant Valley Assisted Living, who will be 100 2 years from now.

Perhaps this will be a break from all the other interviews in this stack of papers having to do with mining history or with Henderson-Golding or with Glen Dam or with Indian Lake or with Caribou-Targhee National Forest, which I’m guessing must taste like backwash to you since it’s all stuff you told us already this semester, which a student would only know if she had been studiously listening the whole time and hardly that absent if you think about how much she’s HERE when she’s here, and yes this is supposed to be 5 pages, but since I haven’t started the actual interview, I’m not even counting yet, this is all just bonus introducing material I’m doing now.

As for the slasher in question it’s Stacey Graves the Lake Witch, surprise.

Common knowledge known locally is that she’s an urban legend like Bloody Mary, that she’s the Idaho version of Slender Man for the generation that lived and died by Leave It to Beaver. But this is just due to the rust of time covering up the truth, sir, and this interview is the rust remover, bam.

My original and initial plan was to find a survivor of the rampage at Camp Blood, but this is better in that it’s previous to that. And it’s even got old timey details that I could never in a hundred tries make up. Let me give you a perfect example.

Evidently when mining collapsed from all the producing mines in the new town of Proofrock getting swamped by Indian Lake having risen and risen, people started having to boat across the new lake to hunt elk if they didn’t want to starve. No seasons, no limits other than how many bullets you had and how smart the elk were. But the problem that came up really fast was getting those big heavy elk back across the lake to town. You can search online that they weigh anywhere from 500

to 730 pounds.

The solution to all that heaviness was to use rawhide string or a belt to tie the elk’s mouth shut, and also plug up their aft end, as Mr. Krabs might say and I don’t want to think about, and then using your mouth to blow as much air as you could into the elk’s nose holes and plug them up with mud before the air can whistle back out.

What you’ve done now is turn this big dead animal into a flotation device, sir.

So one day Christine Gillette’s friend’s dad Mr. Bill got an elk, and only shot it in the head instead of the side so there wouldn’t be another hole to plug with mud.

And there he is floating that kill back to town like a champion hunter when that elk thrashes awake in the water and blows its two nose plugs of mud up onto Mr. Bill’s boat like dog droppings fresh from the dog, and you can tell we’re in the interview now, since this is Paraphrase and Distillation instead of Transcription, just like the example you gave us.

What had happened, Christine Gillette says because she wants me to get an A for this project and therefore save my semester grade in one fell swoop, was Mr.

Bill had evidently shot that elk only in the BASE of its horn, not the skull, so the elk was only knocked out. And Mr. Bill hadn’t dressed it out by cutting its stomach open because then all its air would leak out too.

So now this awake and severely unhappy elk was tied to his actual boat, which has to be a panic situation. What Mr. Bill had to do in order not to sink down to Drown Town, which was still Henderson-Golding to him, was shoot that elk between the eyes and then cut the rope, at which point that elk sunk and sunk.

End of story? Not even close, sir.

That was too much good meat to just kiss goodbye in starvation times, see. So Mr. Bill came back with an iron hook from the hardware store and paddled back and forth all night until he hooked onto what he was sure was that elk. Either that or a submarined log. But he didn’t think it was going to be a log. Because it was too heavy to lift with arms and shoulders, he brought in this local dude Cross Bull Joe, who drove the model A version of a tow truck. This means he had a cable and winch on his truck. And what he did was back that truck all the way down the old pier, as Christine Gillette called it, the outsides of his rear tires hanging over the actual edges on both sides.