The Lake Witch is real, and she’s still out there, coming soon to a nightmare near you, near all of us, we can only hope. Or, if “we” can’t hope, then don’t worry.
I’ve got enough for all of us.
CURTAINS
Stab, Stab, Stab.
Jade jams the sharp end of her litter stick into a Styrofoam cup and imagines the cup writhing, moaning, begging for mercy. She hikes the stick up, uses her gloved left hand to push the dying cup off the stainless steel tip and into the canvas bag slung over her left hip like the most cavernous purse.
Today the bright yellow litter stick is a spear, but in the afternoons since graduation it’s been a pike for bulls, except that made her feel evil; a long push-dart for wolverines and badgers—rabid, of course; a laser beam that cooks whatever trash it comes into contact with （lots of hissing sound effects）; a blood-sampler for crocodiles, also probably rabid; and, like so many of her fantasies, the weapon found sticking up from her father’s right eye socket.
But the left can work too. She’s not picky.
Stab.
In the Scream franchise, that’s what the movie dramatization of Gale Weathers’s tell-all book is called. That and a nickel’ll get you five cents, Jade knows, and can’t help smiling about.
Because nobody’s around to catch her, she can smile all she wants. Smile and sing, thrash with Cyco Miko in her earbuds, even do a cartwheel if the urge strikes and her inner cheerleader just has to express herself. This is what summer-janitoring for the county is about: there are no kids to clean up after in the halls of the schools, so you become custodian for the whole town.
And, to be sure, if Jade has an inner cheerleader, it’s one of those ratted-out punk ones from that Nirvana video—the pep rally from hell. That’s nineties not eighties, but so was Popcorn, so was New Nightmare, so was Scream.
“Without memory, there can be no retribution,” she mumbles, eviscerating a Copenhagen tin’s shiny thin lid with a nice pop. “Without memory, there can be no retribution” is a line from Popcorn, maybe the line. That’s another thing she can do since no one’s out here: quote horror all the day long to test herself, to keep her slasher Q up. It’s just her and the blowing trash, after all, and, somewhere out there, surely, an actual slasher rising from the depths.
As near as she can suspect, it’s either going to look like or be Stacey Graves, which will be pretty wicked, or it’ll look like or be Ezekiel from Drown Town, the scary-ass preacherman with the big hands and too-wide mouth, the better to sing with—think Poltergeist 2, “God is in, his holy temp-le,” which Jade delivers at high and sudden volume to the birds that keep gathering around in case she uncovers something tasty.
One of the early extra credit papers she did for Mr. Holmes had been on him—Ezekiel, not the Poltergeist 2 preacher. It was a two-pager, which she had mostly copied from online: when Henderson-Golding was being flooded with what would become Indian Lake, he’d locked his congregation into his one-room church with him, and they sang until the waters swamped the town, and are maybe, Jade said in her conclusion, still singing, awaiting the day they can rise from the depths to punish the town that replaced Henderson-Golding. And then they turn their attentions to Glen Dam, let the waters of judgment flow forth, down-valley, freeing their beloved, soggy little town.
The problem with Ezekiel, though, it’s that he’s not really slasher material. What’s there for him to revenge? The people of Henderson-Golding had found him in the woods, nursed him back to health, taught him language even though he already had white hair. They’d probably even given him the Bible he would use like a hammer to smite down what-all he saw as sin—everything, pretty much. If Ezekiel was hanging around, it should be to thank all those people who found him, not choke their descendants out with his big hands.
No, Ezekiel’s more like a dark and scary force. The only thing he’s got against teens, or anybody, is that they’re all sinning. But, according to him, the whole world is sin, right?
Therefore, the whole world needs to burn. He’s more like Nix from Lord of Illusions: came for the mayhem, stayed for the massacre.
Stacey Graves, then. Either her or someone dressed up like her. Someone killing like she probably would. Case in point: those two Dutch kids out on the water.
Jade spears a tissue she doesn’t want to touch even with her thick glove, then stabs through the side of a Diet Coke bottle, then goes for a triple-stacker—a long, faded receipt in addition to the Diet Coke and tissue.