That’s what the machete is made from, right? Because it needs to be sharp. And because this is the twenty-first century.
But, didn’t Christine Gillette say that that iron hook cost two dollars at the hardware store? Key word, there: iron.
Iron works on whatever Stacey Graves is. Steel machetes don’t.
Like Jade has any iron ones four feet underwater.
This is it, she tells herself, and the way she knows it really is is that she’s not running through a list of apologies and regrets, isn’t talking to anybody right now. But—but at least she can deny Stacey Graves the pleasure of eviscerating her, can’t she?
At least I can die with my jaw attached, Jade tells herself, and blows all her air out, butterflies her arms out to go lower, lower, into the deep dark.
After thirty seconds of it, her body bucks, her mouth opens, draws in a deep breath of cold water, and she can’t help it anymore, she’s fighting up, she’s clawing for the surface— She gasps up, and almost before she can breathe in, she’s puking water, her body still bucking, her hands out, fingers reaching for anything, please.
What they find is Stacey Graves’s ankle.
Jade looks up along the rotted gown, and Stacey Graves is looking back down to her.
She works her jaw back into place again and steps neatly forward, out of Jade’s grasp, squatting down to look Jade right in the face, her scent a sharp oily assault.
In the movie version of this, Jade knows, she’d have found Mr. Bill’s old dredging hook buried down on the floor of the lake, and this is when she’d sling it up and around, bury its sharp point in Stacey Graves’s temple.
Letha was right, though: this is real life.
Stacey Graves cocks her head to the side, her eyes no longer on Jade’s face, but on… her scalp?
She’s never seen a bald girl, has she?
Jade closes her eyes, can’t stop this inspection from happening: Stacey Graves’s nose snuffling against her scalp, trying to get a read on this strange girl-person. Not exactly trying to get away anymore, that’s useless, Jade retracts all the same, slips just barely under the surface, looks back up through it, and what she feels like is Hardy at eleven years old, hiding under the water while Stacey Graves stands right above him, unable to get down to him, because this water, to her, is cursed, is cursed with Ezekiel’s unholy choir, which allows no intruders as corrupt as a little monster of a girl.
Then Jade finds a calm place inside her.
There’s a thought bubbling up into her head, with the last of her oxygen. No, an image: Stacey Graves, thrown by the boys, screaming with joy, hanging above the water. But then bouncing on the hard-to-her surface. But—but if that elk hunter Mr. Bill hooked her under the water all those years ago, if the cover she was hiding in got submerged in the rising lake, then that means she can be under it, just… she can’t get there herself. But it can rise over her. She can’t be dropped in, can’t be thrown in, but…
Jade waits until she feels Stacey Graves’s nose right above her forehead, and then she shoves her right hand, her non-suicide hand up through the surface of the water as fast as she can, her fingers forcing their way between the blackened stumps of Stacey Graves’s teeth, because—because the only weakness Stacey Graves has, aside from maybe iron dredging hooks, is her messed-up jaw.
Jade yanks down on it with everything she has, feels bone creaking against bone somewhere in Stacey Graves’s small skull, and she falls back with it as hard as she can, forcing all her air out again, no preparation, and—yes, yes yes yes— Stacey Graves’s face plunges down through the surface, followed by her whole little body.
Her sharp broken teeth bite into and it feels like through Jade’s fingers, but she keeps pulling, keeps dragging, Stacey Graves no longer mad but scared, shrieking under the water, clawing up, up, for where she belongs.
Jade pulls her deeper, deeper yet, until they reach a still point and Jade can hug Stacey to her, hug her tight with arms and legs, caging her, her small body bucking and writhing at first, but then, gratefully and by slow degrees, stilling, stilling enough that… is that music Jade’s hearing through the water, or the end of the movie?
She lets go and Stacey Graves just hangs there, motionless in the silt.
At least until a large pale hand comes up through the muddy water, wraps around her thin ankle, and pulls her away all at once, down into the real and permanent darkness of Ezekiel’s Cold Box.
Jade panics, her last lungful of air long since used up, and now she’s the one bucking, now she’s the one unable to climb up to the surface, but… but it was worth it, wasn’t it? To die killing the slasher? To have got to actually and really be the final girl, right here at the very-very end?