The final girl is dead.
Jade looks into the space Letha just was, to whoever just did this impossible thing.
It’s a little girl with long black hair, a little girl with pale dead skin, a little girl with a dress both rotting away and rolled in stabby elk hair, a little girl with forever-cracked lips and shattered fingernails, thin black veins spidering away from her black-black eyes.
Stacey Graves, the Lake Witch.
She opens her mouth to hiss but her own jaw dislocates on one side, falls out of joint, stretching the dry skin on that side of her mouth down. She screeches, draws one hand up to stop this pain, and cocks her head over to some angle she must know, jams her jaw back up into place.
“You,” Jade says, falling back, catching herself on a gunwale, and it all comes home for her in that instant: a little girl, afraid of what she is, gallops across Indian Lake on all fours, away from the boys who played this trick on her, away from the town that never fed her, away from the father who never wanted her. All she’s looking for here is her mother, stashed in a crevice over there, one deeper than the buzzards can find, because Letch Graves doesn’t need any more attention from the sheriff.
But Stacey Graves is no buzzard, and she has weeks to find her mother, and finally does, right at the water’s rising edge.
Stacey Graves wriggles into the shallow cave with her, drapes her mother’s arms around herself, and goes to sleep until the hated water seeps in with them, bringing its faint music with it. Because it’s the water coming up over her, not her trying to get under it, and because she’s wedged so tightly in her mother’s embrace, Stacey Graves is able to go under at last and be with her mother, which is all she’s ever wanted.
But then a sharp black hook finds her, ends her sleep.
She comes up, frees herself, and, looking for her mother again, kills anyone she finds hunting on that side of the lake, making those woods so sacred they become national forest almost on their own. But she does manage to find her mother again, dragged out along with Stacey, just floating at the surface of the lake now.
Stacey leads her to a better cave, a higher-up cave, one the singing water will never find, and then blocks the entrance up behind them, and this works for decades, until the forest becomes a furnace, dripping enough sparks and hissing pitch down that her mother’s dry skin sizzles, flickers, catches flame.
Stacey Graves pats those little fires out, waits for the larger one to die back, and then she climbs up, goes for the first culprits she can find. They’re at the edge of the lake, are in a series of little houses that aren’t the town she hates, but will do.
Afterwards she retires to her cave, sleeps the sleep of the dead with her mother again, hopefully this time forever, but then someone drops in with her. She hisses at him, scratches at him, and then thick grey water starts to spurt down into her cave. But it’s not water at all. It’s melted rock.
Stacey Graves fights through before it can dry, rises that night, and takes the first lives she chances upon: elk, foraging close to shore under cover of darkness. But she’s not done yet.
There are voices out on the water. Laughing, happiness.
Not on her watch.
She rushes out there to that green canoe, silences them both, and, looking for another cave to ride out eternity in, she hides from the sun—it makes her skin hiss, her eyes smolder, her lips and nailbeds steam—in the only cave she can find: the elk she slaughtered, which embed their stabby hair into her rotting nightgown. But it’s nice in there, it’s dark and pressing like a hug, like her mother’s there with her, and for weeks and months, it’s enough, until a saw made of screaming metal tears into her rotting cave, splashing light in.
Stacey Graves retracts from it, squirming deeper into the decay, and then she pushes hard enough that she falls out into the open air again, after which she races to the loudest, most obnoxious sound she can, the one that must be responsible for disturbing her: the yacht. After tearing up and down those tight halls, slashing across those slick decks, crashing through door after door, she hides from the sun again for the day, and then— then this, the party on the water, disturbing her sleep, invading her lake. Her lake.
How Jade knows she’s right about all this, it’s not that the dates or the logic line up, it’s that this little dead girl is standing behind where Letha was— on the water.
It hasn’t been Theo Mondragon impossibly being here and then there at the same time. It’s been a little dead girl flitting across the surface from person to person, a little girl not slowed down by having to wade or swim—she couldn’t if she wanted to, because this Christian burial ground won’t take her Indian self, won’t let her step through.