The Angel of Indian Lake (eBook)

SCARY MOVIE

This isn’t Freddy’s high school hallway, this isn’t Freddy’s high school hallway.

If it were, Tina would be twenty feet ahead in her foggy plastic bodybag, being dragged around the corner on a smear of her own blood.

Instead—again, but it always feels like the first time—I’m the one in that bodybag.

I’m helpless on my back, there’s no air in here, my feet are travois handles to pull me with, and the lockers and doorways and educational posters and homecoming banners to either side are blurry, are in a Henderson High I’m not part of anymore.

Not since Freddy got his claws into me.

I want to scream but know that if I open my mouth, what’s coming out is a sheep’s dying bleat. I clap my scream in with my palm, try to clamp my throat shut, tamp the panic down, but my elbow scraping on the plastic wall of this bodybag rasps louder than it should, and—

He looks back.

His face is scarred and cratered, and there’s a glint of humor in his eyes like he’s getting away with something here, a glint that spreads to his lips, one side of his twisted mouth sharpening into a grin right before his head Pez-dispensers back because his neck’s been chopped open, and what comes up from that bloody stump is the grimy hand of a little dead girl fighting her way back into the world, and—

And it doesn’t have to be this way, according to Sharona.

She’s my twice-a-month therapist, courtesy of her champion and main benefactor, Letha Mondragon.

It’s only a movie, it’s only a movie, Sharona’s taught me to repeat in my head.

To fight my way through panic attacks, I’m supposed to think of my life as playing on a drive-in screen. Not that I’ve ever been to a drive-in. But evidently, late in their evolution, there would be six or eight or ten drive-in screens all in this big-ass Stonehenge circle, each with their own parking lot. If you didn’t like what was playing on one screen, you could take your popcorn, cruise over for the next movie, and the next, until you found one that worked for you, that helped you through this night instead of trapping you in it.

“You’re the consumer here,” Sharona told me so, so earnestly our first session. “And what you’re paying with is anxiety and dread and panic, see?”

The first part of me being the one carrying the popcorn, it’s supposed to be buying into this being all a movie, all a movie. Like that was ever enough to keep the horror in The Last House on the Left from touching you where it counts.

Sharona doesn’t know horror, though. Just feelings, regrets, strategies, and how to see through my own rationalizations and paranoia, my bad history and worse family shit.

I say quid pro quo to her a lot, but I don’t think she ever really gets it like I mean it.

The way she explains what I’m feeling in moments like this—“feeling” being clinical-speak for “consumed by”—is that my anxiety is a straitjacket constricting me: at first it feels like a hug, like something I should nestle into, but then . . . then it doesn’t know when to stop, does it, Jade?

StraitJacket of course being a 1964 proto slasher, post-Psycho but very much providing a model for Psycho II nearly twenty years later. Thank you, Robert Bloch.

Sharona has it wrong about straitjackets, though. In a straitjacket, you can breathe. I know this from experience. You don’t open your wrist out on the lake and then get trusted with your own fingernails and teeth, I mean.

Where you can’t breathe, though?

In a bodybag.

When Proofrock and all what I’ve done and not done and should have done if I were smarter and better and faster and louder are collapsing in on me and there’s no air at all, then a knife finger materializes blurry and real through the foggy plastic cocooning me, it materializes and then it loops through a delicate metal tab, to zip me right in.

Sorry, Sharona.

One bullshit tool you’ve given me to work that zipper down from the backside is to write letters to someone I respect or care for, who could and would offer me a helping hand, to clamber up out of this.

Which is just a reminder that everyone I love is dead, thanks.

Sheriff Hardy. Mr. Holmes. Shooting Glasses.

I don’t know if my mom’s in that group or not.

I know my dad isn’t.

Pamela Voorhees, she’s who I should write to, isn’t she? Or maybe Ellen Ripley. Put her in a dark hallway like this one in my head and she would lock and load, call her nerves a bitch, and tell them to get away from her.

I’m no Ripley.

Instead of locking and loading, what I do for about the thousandth time since the semester started is stumble on these stupid heels and lurch to the left, ramming my shoulder into a locker.

Just when you thought it was safe to walk like an adult.

Clear the beaches, mayor, Jade’s coming through again.

God.

Letha’s right about me: I’m always hiding in the video store, wearing all my movies like armor. Never mind that Proofrock’s video store’s been closed for three years now, is pretty much a memorial for all the kids who got skinned in there, are probably still haunting it.

That’s just playing on one screen, though.

Keep moving, Jade, keep moving.

On one of the other screens, though, are the two sleepless nights the weekend of the thirteenth, when Proofrock was in a panic over Jan Jansson going missing. But then word came in that his dad, who had split, had also rented a red Mustang convertible the day before. One fast enough to drive back from Nevada or whatever state he was hiding in, one alluring enough for his only son to want to take a ride in. So all the flyers were peeled off the windows of the bank, of Dot’s, of the drugstore, and a certain excon was finally able to sleep again.

They’ll find him, everybody is assuring themselves. He’s just with his dad, having an adventure—top down, hair in the wind, not a single drive-through window being missed.

Either that or he’s a kid-shaped bargaining chip in an escalating divorce.

There’s no blades looming, though, that’s the important thing. There’s no shadows lurking, no heavy breathing, no drunk shapes suddenly standing in the doorway at two o’clock in the stupid-ass morning.

I right myself from the locker I’ve crashed into—I think it was Lee Scanlon’s, once upon a time—blink my eyes fast like trying to get the lights to come back up in this hallway, but . . . okay, seriously now: Where in the living hell is everybody?

It’s Monday, not Friday, meaning no pep rally for football. Nobody pulled the fire alarm. It’s not senior skip day, and Banner hasn’t instituted some curfew to keep everyone safe—there’s no reason to. Ghostface isn’t out there slicing and dicing. Cinnamon Baker doesn’t live here anymore. There’s no once-in-a-century blizzard spooling up: been there, done that, we’re good for ninety-six more years, thanks.

A shooter drill, maybe? We are eight thousand feet up the mountain, meaning even the guns have guns, but . . . no.

There’s a lot wrong with Proofrock, but not that, anyway.

So far.

Could it be that seventh period just started? Is that what emptied the halls out? All the students dove into their classrooms and fought for seats because they really-really wanted to learn?

Dream on, slasher girl.

A fluorescent tube of light flickers in the ceiling a body length ahead, then sputters out again. It’s not for lack of money—Letha’s bankrolling the whole district, could put her name above the front doors if she wanted.

“Excuse me?” I say up to the light, holding my books to my chest.

The light buzzes back on, holds steady.

“Fuckin A . . .” I mutter to it, and keep moving, my clacking footsteps sounding all around me, and, passing a fire extinguisher I become one hundred percent certain that Rexall’s just caught me on candid camera “engaging in profanity on school grounds,” is going to turn it in to Principal Harrison, just moved up from Golding Elementary.

He’s already not fond of my full-sleeve tats. My hair’s okay in principle, I think—long now, to my waist, and silky as everliving shit—but it’s not all black, either.

C’mon.

And I don’t wear my spider bites or my bull ring or my eyebrow stud to school anymore. Though there may be a piercing or two that are none of a principal’s business.

Sharona says I’m still trying to armor up, can’t I see that?

I tell her back that she just likes the way I was before, which is sort of a line from Return of the Living Dead III, featuring the queen of all piercing junkies—she’s no slouch with the eyeliner, either.

Well, okay, maybe I don’t say it exactly like that. But I think the hell out of it.

What I also don’t say out loud: that you just slipped, My Sharona. That bit about armoring up is pure Letha, which means the two of you talk about me and my progress, which . . . isn’t exactly the key to get me to be forthcoming?

What I did say out loud in reply to that armor line, though? Sort of on accident, sort of not?

“Jealous much?”

Where Sharona went after her high school beauty queen days, after she won the big Blonder Than Thou contest? That adult daycare called college. Where I went, twice? That finishing school for criminals called the clink, the slam, the stir. That old greybar hotel waiting at the end of...