Jade nods, gets it. In one of her papers for Mr. Holmes, she explained that the final girl goes from innocence and obliviousness into a series of staged confrontations with mortality, menace, danger—a funhouse of worse and worse horror—until she finally curls into herself to hide. But that’s really a chrysalis. One she claws out of as an angel of death.
For Letha so far, it’s been the Dutch boy in the lake, his skin sloughing off in her hands, and then Deacon Samuels, turned inside out at Camp Blood, Letha probably stepping into him before even realizing what’s happened.
“Don’t forget the elk,” Jade mumbles.
“What is that?” Shooting Glasses is asking beside her, stepping forward to see better.
Jade clamps onto his forearm, holds him back.
“This isn’t for us,” she says, nodding up to Letha, “it’s for her.”
Letha falls back so the short railing’s hiding her. And now Proofrockers are arriving in robes and curlers, with shotguns, with fire pokers, with glasses of scotch they forgot to leave behind.
“Now he’ll believe you?” Shooting Glasses says to Jade, about the thick red blood churning in the water, under the Umiak’s harsh lights. “The sheriff?”
Jade can only shake her head slowly, no.
Somewhere up on deck, Tiara, in her joke of a captain’s hat, finally thinks to turn the propellers off. The Umiak sighs back into the pier, the one taut line going slack, and then Jade gets it: her dad and his idiot friends, still in high school, the three of them bobbing under the pier, waiting for the ski ropes they’ve tied to the boat to tighten, pull them up onto the surface of the water.
It was worth all the nights in jail, supposedly.
Until now. Until they tried to hook onto a much bigger boat, one with a whole rack of propellers back there to suck them in.
Still, if it hadn’t had that one line moored, it might have worked, right?
Would Letha have forgotten to cast off, though? Would Tiara? Had they ever forgotten just one single line? When they only had one line tied in the first place? And—why had they even tied-off at all, if they were just dropping a couple of Founders off?
“Who is it?” Shooting Glasses asks.
“Who was it,” Jade corrects, backing the two of them out of this gathering crowd. “Pretty sure it was a guy name of Clate Rodge—”
She stops when she clocks a bulky shadow coming in from just behind them, where nobody should have been, where there’s nothing, just… just the memorial bench?
“No,” Jade says, her whole body going cold. Not because she’s not supposed to be the one seeing some Scooby’d up Stacey Graves, but because… because there’s no stringy black wig, no rotted gown. Just a wall of khaki.
She grabs on to Shooting Glasses again, to keep from falling down.
Sheriff Hardy must have been sitting there all along, smoking the night’s last cigarette on his daughter’s memorial bench, like every night.
“Who you say it is, there?” he asks over-innocently, his eyes flicking up to Jade’s for a moment then away before she can register anything.
“N-nobody,” she mutters.
He rubs his cigarette out between his fingers, deposits the butt in his chest pocket, then pats it like telling it to stay put.
“What the hell was that about?” Shooting Glasses asks once Hardy’s stepped onto the pier.
“A Bay of Blood,” Jade says, chest heaving, mind reeling, face numb, and because they’re off to the side now, she knows Shooting Glasses has to be able to see what she’s talking about: Clate Rodgers’s frothy blood lapping up against Hardy’s hull, some of the chunks adhering to the fiberglass.
Not quite as high as the little airboat’s name, Melanie, but when Hardy passes by, the water laps up a few inches, baptizes those eight letters in what’s left of the boy who was with her the day she drowned.
SLASHER 101
Okay, before we talk Red Herrings in the slasher even though it’s official turkey season not fish season, first, it’s ALWAYS slasher season, as there’s plenty of Blood Rage around the dinner table of Home Sweet Home, especially from the ThanksKilling turkey itself, but second, HELLO, MR. HOLMES! I never thought I’d miss 7th period I mean. And since I’ve already done my time, this time I can just say it out right that cutting the fingers off my VERY FAKE glove, or, it was a real glove but not my fingers inside just green slime aka nightmare fuel aka Freddy blood, I should really get a science award for that, not suspension. Ever heard of a senior prank? I’m a senior. That was my prank. And it’s not my fault Tiff did her big faint routine and broke her phone. Probably it was broke already and she just wanted someone to blame for it.