My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(69)

“We dropped a flashlight down to him,” he says. “Fifteen feet? Probably not even that. It wasn’t a big-ass cavern or anything. Just a little hollowed-out place, maybe fifteen by fifteen. Your history teacher’s right about it being all caves over there. Like fucking Swiss cheese.”

The reason there’s pockets of air in Swiss cheese, Jade knows but doesn’t say, is that there’s corruption in there, eating all around itself.

“But you got him out,” Jade prompts.

Shooting Glasses nods.

“How?”

Shooting Glasses huffs air through his nose in a sick laugh.

“We had to loop him like a goddamn pig,” he says, wiping his lips with the back of his sleeve. “He kept—he kept running away from the light we’d shine down. Like, running on all fours, like he’d forgot he was even a person.”

“Head injury?”

“Finally we shined all our lights into this one kind of corner he kept running to. So he had to cross under the hole to get out of the light, right? We dropped a cargo net on him, and when he tried to fight out of it, it tangled him up. He fought it the whole way, was making these… these like noises, I don’t know.”

“Had he been bitten?”

“What? No. I don’t know, shit. By what? He couldn’t breathe, though. Like, hypo—no. What do they call it?”

“Hyperventilating.”

“Yeah, that. Rabbit-breathing, the kind where your heart’s about to explode. And he was all curled up, kind of spasmy, his fingers crooked but not really broken. I don’t think they were broken. You don’t remember the day the ambulance came?”

Jade shakes her head no, she doesn’t.

“When was this exactly?” she asks.

Shooting Glasses shrugs, says like dredging it up, “It was before you… that night, I mean.”

“Right before I cut my wrist out on the water?”

“The weekend before?”

“You found this car the morning after?”

He looks across at her like how could she know this?

“Finish,” she tells him.

“What?”

“Greyson Brust. Where’d Deacon Samuels hide him?”

“Hide?”

“Stash, store, house,” Jade clarifies, not sure how else to say it.

“That—the old people’s home over on—”

“Pleasant Valley Assisted Living.”

“When we went to see him that… that night, he—god. He was still walking on all fours, right? Like he was thinking like a bug or something.”

“That night?”

“Night we were burning the trash? You gave us that big lecture on… whatever?”

“Slashers.”

“He’d like stop when you talked to him, but it wasn’t the words he was hearing. I don’t know what the hell he was hearing.”

“Greyson Brust,” Jade says, trying that name on again in all its glory.

Did he—did he get bit by something or some one in that cave, get infected, and now was sneaking out his window at Pleasant Valley every night, killing elk and people the same?

Was this a supernatural slasher, even though it’s so long after the Golden Age that it might as well be Bronze? Jade’s heart thumps with possibility.

“You think it’s him?” Shooting Glasses asks.

“I need to look at his feet,” Jade says. “Did you have to sign the visitor log thing to see him, do you remember?”

“Not anymore.”

Jade lets her thoughts keep rolling—Greyson Brust howling at the moon, his maw bloody, fingers sharp and violent—but then: “Beep, beep,” she says, backing up. “What? Thought you said he was walking on all fours when you went to see him that night?”

“That night, yeah,” Shooting Glasses says. “In March. He passed in April.”

“What from?”

Shooting Glasses shrugs like Does it really even matter?

Jade supposes it doesn’t.

“Eight hundred dollars,” Shooting Glasses says again.

“That’s what we sold him for. Eight hundred fucking dollars each.”

“What did Deacon Samuels say?”

“About Greyson?”

“About all of it.”

He kind of squinches his face up, says, “He told us not to tell that other guy.”

“Theo Mondragon.”

“It was the foundation for his house,” Shooting Glasses says, his tone suggesting this is obvious to him, anyway. “Mr.

Samuels, he—he said every house has a story, right? That it’s not always important that everybody know every little part of it. What you don’t know, it doesn’t matter so much.”

“What happened to the cave?” Jade says.

Shooting Glasses pulls the parking lights back on, washing the galvanized chain-link diamond lattice in front of them pale yellow. “We already had the rig and the framing out there to pour the foundation later in the week,” he says. “It was easy.

We just—” he mimes directing a crusty-grey tube into a crack in the ground, cement slurping down. The exact same motion Greyson Brust must have been doing with the leaf blower.