Jade nods to herself for strength all the same, reminds herself that she knows this genre, and regrips her hand around her phone, blasts across the last of that open space, certain that if she turns around, that gas mask is going to be right there, and gaining.
She makes the door, it’s thankfully unlocked—she hadn’t even considered that it might not be—and she opens it both quietly and as quickly as she can, guiding it shut behind her.
The hall she’s in is dark, but there’s a light glowing in the…
kitchen, it turns out. She pats her pockets for the charging cable she suddenly can’t find, but knows that, because this is a slasher, any plug she finds in here isn’t going to bring her phone back to life, isn’t going to connect her to anyone who can help.
Instead of using it as a communication device, then, Jade holds her phone like it’s the handle for her machete—the one she gave away— keeping it directly in front of her. She tunes in for footsteps, for breathing, for crawling, but she’s really and actually alone, as best as she can tell, and as already suggested by the slasher striding purposefully away from this house. But it’s these kinds of situations jumpscares are made from, she knows.
Moving room by room she clears the first floor, then has the choice of either going upstairs like Sidney says stupid girls in horror movies are always doing, or going downstairs, into the basement, which she’s now insisting will just be that: a basement. Not a cellar, and definitely please not some Evil Dead fruit cellar, because there’s only so much her mind can take.
“Shit shit shit,” she mutters, looking up then down, up then down. And then she sees it: one golden-tinted nail standing up from the frame around the door to the basement.
Her face goes cold, her breathing deep.
She swallows, the sound a thunderous gush in her ears, and, keeping her right foot ahead like that matters, shuffles alongside the stairs, eases the basement door open, the whole while picturing a network of tunnels connecting basement to basement across Terra Nova, so they can scurry from home to home during the winter months.
Except, she reminds herself, it’s rocky over here. Too rocky.
Meaning, of course, that if the basements do end up connecting, it’s going to be by burrowing dead people, left-behind murder victims from the nineteenth century contorting around rocks, gathering in caves, turning their faces up to the hateful sounds above them.
“Shut up, shut up,” Jade hisses to her brain, and takes the first timid step down, deciding at the last moment not to turn the staircase light on, as that would only announce her presence, which might then lead to her bloody absence.
Which, to everyone across the lake, would be good riddance, the best riddance.
At the blind turn halfway down the stairs, Jade’s ninety-nine percent sure anybody down there will be able to hear her heart pounding. When she’s finally down there, she has no choice but to feel on the wall for the light switch. Either that or pull out her trusty Jame Gumb night vision goggles.
The lights come on and instantly she’s blinded, is falling away, swinging her dead phone in front of her like that would do anything. Finally, after all these years, she understands Laurie Strode: you cringe, you fall, you shriek and you cry.
Never because you want to, not because you intend to, but because it’s scary shit. The body’s gonna do what the body’s gonna do, and screams aren’t at all voluntary.
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?