My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(88)

When she can see again at last, there’s no furniture, just an endless tile floor, already-textured walls—the whole basement’s finished out already. Up near the ceiling there’s those short wide windows that mean this isn’t completely underground, but it’s enough underground to be that clammy kind of cool, and kind of muffled.

Any nails fired down here are probably not nails she heard.

Proof of that turns out to be on the wall behind her. Going from waist-high and up into the ceiling, maybe twelve feet in total, is a zipper line of nails, set close enough to be a stairway for an acrobatic mouse. Meaning, since they start in the corner, that the target was running the other way.

Jade listens hard for creaking above her head, peers as deep into the high windows as she can for gas mask eyes clocking her, and, though she’s still not sure this is the best of all ideas, goes the direction the nails are telling her to go.

For reasons she can’t explain even to herself, she’s still being sure to lead with her right foot. Everything that made sense when she was watching slashers doesn’t seem to matter just one whole hell of a lot while walking through a slasher, does it?

Worse, “It’s July fucking third,” she says aloud, like calling foul.

None of this is even supposed to be happening yet.

How many final rounds does Scream 4 have, though, right?

Maybe, since the slasher’s been going for nearly four decades, the only way to still surprise is by breaking its own rules.

It’s definitely working. Jade has no idea what’s coming.

The next breadcrumb for her eyes is golden again, and nail-shaped again, and in a doorframe again. Either a closet or a bathroom. Or, this is a basement—maybe storage, then? Water heater, furnace?

“H-hello?” she asks.

No response.

She taps on the door with her phone, runs through a mental list of who’s not behind the door—everyone she knows is in Proofrock, and everyone she just saw on the yacht is, you know, on the yacht.

“I’m coming in!” Jade announces as clear as she can, and, using her left hand on the knob, she swings the door out and hustles back into something like a defensive stance, spinning instantly around because how it always works is that the slasher’s right behind you when you least expect it.

She’s still alone.

Trusting neither the space before her nor behind her, she turns back to the door she just opened.

It is a bathroom, what she guesses is a “half-bath” over here in Camelot. For all she knows, her dad carted the tub down for somebody more expert to install.

There’s a body in that tub, too.

His legs are cocked out over the edge, his arms thrown out to the side, and his eyes are open, but they’re not seeing anything anymore.

“Cody,” Jade whispers, in pain.

Cowboy Boots.

He’s still wearing them, along with a golden nail between the eyes, a ribbon of blood unfurling down from it and curling across his face, tucking itself into his mouth at last instead of pooling in the hollow of his neck.

Jade spins around again but it’s still just her in the basement.

Which is when the lights black out.

She nearly falls down from it.

All she can hear now is her breath. It’s coming in hitches, in gasps, then not at all because she’s listening.

“Cody,” she says at last, “CodyCodyCody,” but he’s not answering. Which is surely for the absolute best, thank you thank you, Indians have to stick together. But still.

She was never Jame Gumb, she realizes. She’s Clarice, feeling her way with wide-spread fingers.

The lights fizz back on.

Jade cringes back, sure that’s just step one of her getting rushed.

But… she finally sees it: the light switch she flipped up.

There’s a motion sensor under it, to save energy. The lights go off when it thinks the room is empty.

Jade spins back to Cody.

Still there. Still dead.

Jade leans against the wall opposite the bathroom door and slides down.

“I’m sorry,” she says into the bathroom. “I—I don’t know why, man. You’re not even part of all this, are you? You weren’t, I mean. Until now.”

Was it just because he was there? Is this target practice for tomorrow night? Cleaning house before the big party? What could he have done to have deserved a nail in the forehead, though?

“Nothing,” Jade tells him.

Oh. Unless it’s that he talked to her back in March? Which would matter to the slasher why? Does her knowing the genre and predicting the day and trying to pull Letha into all of this somehow mess things up for the slasher? And, how can she even be thinking rational thoughts, this close to a dead body?

Just as important: it’s Letha’s job to find Cody, not Jade’s. This could be screwing the whole process up.

“But I was never here,” Jade says out loud, and stands, resetting the room as best she can: pulling the bathroom door shut, policing the tile for any mud she’s tracked in, and, back at the stairs, flipping the light switch to down.

The next moment is when she realizes that lights in the high basement windows suddenly not glowing are like a flashing sign for the slasher. But it’s daytime yet, probably not even four in the afternoon. Whoever’s playing slasher out there would have to be watching these windows specifically to catch them going dark.