There’s… it’s someone floating out there.
Her heart thumps once, deep.
“Don’t,” she says to Letha, not even close to loud enough for Letha to hear, but Letha senses Jade all the same—final girl radar—and looks back for long enough that Jade is aware of each red coal flickering off her mask.
These are just work coveralls, she wants to whisper across these thirty feet. They’re not Michael Myers coveralls, they’re just work clothes.
Her white face isn’t so easy to explain.
Letha, either having seen Jade or not, turns back to her task.
Her duty. She steps out again, again, up to her stomach now, then, all at once, her armpits.
She’s a short pull away from this floating person now.
“Hello?” she says, splashing water up onto him, or her. It.
No response.
This could be a practical joke, Jade wants to warn. Banner Tompkins is kind of famous for them, and this is home ground for him. Maybe it’s a sex doll they keep in the shed for a floatie. Maybe it’s a punching dummy from when he was in martial arts with Mason Rodgers, sophomore year. Maybe it’s a deer some old-fashioned hunter was trying to float across the lake.
Letha gives herself to the water, pulls with her arms to this body and grabs on, turns around immediately, paddles for the shore.
Tiffany K is just sitting there hugging her knees now, crying like you do when you’re drunk and you know it’s not over yet.
She’s not seeing what Jade’s most definitely seeing: the final girl being a final girl, hauling a corpse in. Finding the first body.
Inside her mask, Jade smiles wide, with unadulterated wonder.
This is—this is… this means it’s real, doesn’t it? That it’s not all in her head, but outside it too, for once.
She almost goes to help Letha drag this dead body in, beach it, announce it, but no, this has to be all the final girl. This is all Letha Mondragon. And she’s athletic and capable and determined enough that she should be able to do it.
She gets it into the shallows, anyway.
It bobs in the give-and-take of the lake’s surface, the water cleaning the pondweed from its head at last.
At which point Tiffany K starts screaming. And screaming.
Letha, probably having gone through lifeguard training one country club summer, turns the wide-shouldered body over in a way that says she knows how to administer CPR, and is honor-bound to try.
Except some of the pale skin from the corpse’s back sloughs off onto her right hand, an oozy black welling up where the skin’s torn away.
The only reason Jade sees the next part is that Letha’s white shorts are wet, but they’re still bright. And they’re right behind this boy’s Dutch-blond head. The head that’s in her lap. The face.
There’s no lower jaw.
Jade’s laughter wells up from deep-deep inside, lives inside her mask, fills her head.
“Well then,” she says, striding fast away before the party can convene over this tragedy, and by twenty yards out she’s running just for the thrill of it, the branches tearing at what would be her face, her coveralls keeping anything sharp from touching her. Once she’s far enough away she skids to her knees in a clearing, in the moonlight, and rips the mask off, leans back pushing the heels of her hands into her eyes, because she can’t stop crying.
First the final girl. Now the blood sacrifice—proof that the recording on that pink phone was real.
This is Laurie Strode seeing Michael Myers outside her school. This is Sidney Prescott, seeing that black robe descend in that last bathroom stall.
And now there are steps that must be taken—a letter that has to be typed in and printed out. But first, first all Jade can do is hug herself tight and shake with gratitude.
It leaves her panting on her knees, panting and smiling, looking at the darkness all around her.
He could be anywhere, couldn’t he?
He already is.
SLASHER 101
Hello, Letha Mondragon. You may remember me from the bathroom by the gym. I had blue hair. Enclosed please find A Bay of Blood from 1971 by famed Giallo director Mario Bava, which let me tell you changed my life in 6th grade when I found it. I was in Idaho Falls for a doctor’s appointment I couldn’t do in Proofrock and I was in the gas station for the bathroom while my mom was having a conversation with herself in the car about will she won’t she and then this movie was in the bargain bin like trash. But let me tell you it wasn’t.
The reason I’m selecting to pass that same sacred copy of A Bay of Blood to you in this clandestine fashion is that many including me consider it to be the main grandfather of the slasher genre. When you’re watching A Bay of Blood you’ll notice the eerie similarity in the opening credits to Indian Lake. The first time I was watching it in secret my heart dropped let me tell you. I thought it WAS Indian Lake.