The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix
THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP XVIII:
Curse of the Final Girls
Her house is a disordered wreck, the product of a disordered mind, but in Chrissy’s museum everything is filed away, lined up on a shelf, bagged and tagged, cataloged and classified. The second we enter the dim, quiet first room her breathing slows and her movements become liquid smooth.
This room is lit by a few grandmother’s lamps, with a fussy carpet on the floor fresh out of some matron aunt’s parlor, stitched with ruby-red roses that bulge like bloody organs, festooned with looping vines and flowering garlands that look like intestines.
“I apologize for amateur hour,” Chrissy says. “But you’d be surprised at how much demand there still is.”
Shelves line the room. They run all the way up to the top of the temporary walls that Chrissy has capped with wire mesh. Above them I can see darkness, then the metal girders holding up the prefab roof high above. On the shelves, most people would see nothing special: nails, glass bottles of dirt, an old caulk gun, curled leather shoes, a child’s clown doll, rows of ring binders and scrapbooks, an orderly progression of brand-new plastic bags containing nail files and hairbrushes clotted with wisps of hair, a pair of barber’s scissors tarnished with age, an antique iron with white fingerprint powder still on the handle, a brick standing alone.
But I know what I’m looking at.
Nails from H. H. Holmes’s Chicago murder house, gravel from where Bonnie and Clyde were shot, the caulk gun Robert Berdella used to seal his victim’s ears, shoes worn by Albert Fish, a lock of Charles Manson’s hair, John Wayne Gacy’s clown toy, a Christmas card from Ted Bundy, a brick from Sharon Tate’s home.
For a certain segment of the population these are status symbols more powerful than an S-Class Mercedes or a house in the Hamptons. It smells like a thrift store from Hell in here, heavy with the scent of old blood and dried sweat. Sour fear sweat from the people who ran for their lives, musky hunger sweat from the men who brought down the hammer.
“These wannabes had no vision,” Chrissy says. “Come on, we don’t want to hang around here for too long. Their lack of ambition might rub off.”
I don’t want to follow her through the black-curtained doorway on the other side of the room, but I will see this through to the end. I check my phone: one bar, and it’s been thirty minutes. I want to text Steph and update her, but she’s my ace in the hole. I can’t give her away.
“Coming?” Chrissy asks from the darkness.
I know what’s in the rest of her fun house: rare bottles of wine for the high-end collectors. The men for whom price is no object. If you are what you buy, what does it say when you just spent $6,143 on the harpoon that pinned a pregnant cheerleader to the wall of a boathouse in 1978?
But I will not quit. I will see this through. I cross the threshold and enter the dark. Chrissy has dragged in temporary walls and built a maze that winds through her barn. We’re standing in a long hall lined with closed doors and dark doorways.
“Do you know how long it took me to get this right?” Chrissy asks. “Six years. That’s an artist’s timetable. Who spends six years building something that’s not art?”
“It smells,” I tell her.
“That’s their musk,” she says. “And the perfume of our sisters. You know, I’ve always felt for you, Lynne.”
“Thanks?”
“No, I’m serious,” she says. “I always felt like it must be so hard to be you. I knew my calling from the beginning, but for you it must have been so confusing. You were lumped in with the final girls but you were never blooded, you never experienced your initiation.”
“How much of your weirdness do I have to put up with, Chrissy?” I ask. “Because if we can just fast-forward through some of it that’d be great.”
“You’re so funny,” she says. “You stand on the threshold of something magnificent, and you don’t even comprehend.”
She walks forward, leading me into the dark. Something brushes against my face, light as a spiderweb, and I flinch, trying to keep it away from my lips. It’s a dirty crocheted shawl. It was a mistake to come here. I’m betraying everyone I know by listening to Chrissy’s sickness. It’s clear that she’s been festering out here in the woods too long, waiting for someone to show up so she could vomit her crazy all over them. I bite the inside of my cheek hard, the pain giving me something to focus on. I need to know about her emails.
“What happened to all of us?” Chrissy asks. “Do you ever stop and wonder?”
“Like, why me?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “Like why this? Why all these murders?”
We keep walking deeper into her museum, past dark display cases, past rows of Styrofoam heads wearing what I think are wigs, then realize are human scalps. She stops outside a dark doorway and waits for me to catch up.
“Murder is man’s attempt to steal birth from women,” she says. “We make children, they kill them. We create life, they create death. It’s the way it’s always been.”
“What does that have to do with our monsters?” I ask. Monsters. Sometimes the word sticks in my throat because it sounds too big, too mystical, too dramatic. But here it sounds right.
“Don’t you see?” Chrissy asks. “It’s a vision quest. An act of self-creation. For the monster, they aren’t murdering people. They’re murdering parts of themselves. They murder the slut, the nerd, the stoner, the jock, the cheerleader. Those are all different facets of their own personalities.”
“Dani will be excited to hear that you consider her friends aspects of her brother’s personality,” I say.
“Not literally,” Chrissy says. “You’re resisting what I’m saying by clinging to semantics. I’m trying to tell you why they do what they do.”
“Because they’re psychopaths,” I say.
“That’s such a small word,” she says. “Does it make you feel superior to give them a diagnosis, to file them away in a little drawer? You know they’re bigger than that. If it were just a psychological problem we could find a cure. This is a metaphysical problem.”
“It’s a criminal justice problem,” I say.
“These parts of their personalities are problematic because they are weak,” she says, ignoring me. “The monster wants to be tough, he wants to be dangerous, he wants to be hard, so he kills the soft parts of himself. But the journey always ends at the same destination: no one is left except the monster and the final girl. No matter how much he destroys those other parts of his personality, he can’t destroy the essential feminine side of himself. Even destruction can’t unmake creation. That primal feminine impulse, that procreative urge cannot be undone. When you boil everything down, when it’s reduced as far as it will go, that’s what’s left. Creation and destruction, female and male, life and death, birth and murder.”
She leads me into the room. It’s pitch-dark. Chrissy leans to her right and flips a switch and dozens of low-wattage gallery lamps glow and we’re at Camp Red Lake circa 1978. A stained counselor’s sweatshirt is crucified to the wall above me, and camp pennants run along the top of the walls. Shaved logs sliced in half hang from lanyards with Camp Red Lake Cougars wood-burned into their white meat. Camp Red Lake Frisbees are lined up like display plates from the Franklin Mint next to footballs and a canoe paddle signed by all the girls in Cabin 21.
“The guy who ran their camp store was cleaning out his surplus on eBay. I went a little overboard,” Chrissy says.
There are nine framed photographs in a row over the sweatshirt, each one a different smiling teenager. I recognize Valerie Bates, Adrienne’s best friend. She talked about her a lot when she gave her lectures. Then I notice the grimmer souvenirs scattered in between the summer fun. A bow and arrow, the head of the arrow dented and bent. A spear gun with a cracked rubber band. A machete.
The room smells slightly of pine. Chrissy must have an air freshener in here to give it that woodsy scent.
“Camp Red Lake,” she says. “Did you know it was built where the Mono Indians lived? They believed in the Ninitikati, a walking skeleton that had eaten all its own flesh but remained eternally hungry. It pursued women and ate them and their children. Once it started hunting them, it never gave up and their only choice was to kill it. But it never died. No matter what they did, Ninitikati could put itself back together. It’s an idea that haunts those woods, a spirit looking for a vessel. Bruce Volker had no history of mental illness before what happened. According to everyone who knew him, he couldn’t even stand the sight of blood.”
“You’re getting very mystical with people’s lives,” I say. “These aren’t abstract ideas, they were actual human beings.”
“But who cares?” Chrissy asks. “Who cares that they died? Nine little girls and Bruce Volker died at Camp Red Lake and so what? You add up all of our friends and family who have ever died and you’ve got less than fifty people. Fifty million people die every year. So why do people care about us? What happened that made us all so famous? How did we become the idea that stuck? Down the road here, Simmons White realized he’d get steady disability payments if he didn’t have an arm, so he went out and borrowed a chain saw from his neighbor and tried to slice it off. When his daughter went to stop him, he chopped her into pieces, and decided to do the same thing to his wife. You know how much I could buy that chain saw for? About eighty dollars. The sledgehammer that belonged to the Hansen family? The one that killed Marilyn’s boyfriend? It sold five years ago for fourteen thousand. What’s the difference?”
“I’m getting tired of this, Chrissy,” I say.
“No,” she says. “You have to understand. Our deaths mean more. They’re bigger. More symbolic. They have resonance. Don’t you ever stop and ask yourself why?”
She slips back through the doorway and leads me across the gloomy hall. Empty black openings gape from the walls, and hallways curl around corners. From overhead comes the tick of cooling metal as the day’s heat leaches out of the sheet-metal roof.
I step into another dark alcove with Chrissy and hear a snap, and a woman materializes in front of me, floating in midair. My guts jump six inches backward and I’m about to follow when I see it’s an enormous puffy white dress suspended in midair.
“It belonged to Marilyn,” Chrissy says. “Her Jewel Ball dress. The one she wore in ’78.”
It hangs from dozens of monofilament fishing lines, pulling it into shape, giving it body and form. It looks like an invisible Marilyn is inside.
“It was stored in her parents’ vacation place on the Gulf,” Chrissy says. “I saw it on a TV special and had to have it. I paid their housekeeper almost eight hundred dollars to get it for me. Sometimes I come in here and just commune with her.”
The walls are thick with corsages, champagne glasses with flaking lipstick on the rims. There’s a framed photograph of all the debutantes from that year, and there’s Marilyn in the middle, beaming, trying so hard to look like she didn’t just watch her friends die two months before. Above it all, high up on the wall, in the place of honor, is a grimy sledgehammer.
“Is that—” I begin.
“I don’t intend to sell anything in this room,” Chrissy says, cutting me off. “So I don’t want to comment on the provenance.”
“You’re really creepy, Chrissy,” I say.
“Creepy Chrissy,” she says. “That’s what they called me in high school. Well, before homecoming. After homecoming I was a hero, a survivor, a victim. After homecoming I was everything they needed me to be, and everything they were scared of me being, all rolled up into one.”
“Chrissy,” I say. “I want to see those emails.”
“And you will,” she says. “But, Lynnette, when all that’s left is the final girl and the monster, what happens? She pacifies him, like the virgin and the unicorn. The unicorn is wild and ferocious, but when it sees the virgin maid it lays its head on her lap and grows calm. The final girl and the monster are two sides of one person. Think about it. One runs fast, and screams, and is resourceful, and fights for her friends. The other is slow, and implacable, and silent, and he kills, and is alone.”
“And then, fuck him,” I say. “He goes to prison. Or gets killed. So women rule. Awesome.”
“No,” she says. “That’s never what happens. Don’t you know your own story? He comes back. And eventually, she kills him. And that’s the moment when he’s complete. She sets him free and in doing so she frees herself. She’s the yin to his yang. Don’t you see?”
She flips off the light and I follow her back into the hall because I don’t want to be alone with that floating white dress. We wind deeper into the dark maze, and she clicks on her flashlight so neither of us walks into any walls.
“I just want to show you this one real fast,” she says. “I think it might be too hard for you to stay inside for very long, but it’s so striking.”
She pushes open a chain-link door and turns on the light. The two of us stand in the doorway, and I am staring into horror. I want to cry.
“It’s Heather’s,” she beams. “I invited the Dream King here and he built it himself. I had to sell all of my own memorabilia to pay for his services, but I think it was worth it.”
My brain can’t wrap itself around what I’m seeing.
“How . . . ?” I start.
“The Dream King goes where he wants,” she says. “They’ll find eventually that the man they have in prison serving his time had nothing to do with what actually happened. But he’s a servant of the King and he would never tell. The Dream King is very careful about how he feeds now. It’s shocking, isn’t it.”
My mind tries to pick apart the howling insanity in that room, and if Heather were here right now I would forgive her for betraying me. I would forgive her for betraying everyone. It’s so much worse than she ever said.
“Don’t get sucked in,” Chrissy tells me. “We’ve still got a long way to go.”
She turns out the light and closes the gate, and I pull myself away from that room.
“Be strong, Lynne,” she says.
Putting one hand on my elbow she steers me around a corner into another room, and the harsh fluorescent lighting assaults my eyes.
“This is your room,” she enthuses. “I think about you all the time.”
It’s totally empty, just prefabricated walls and a black curtain over the door. The floor is bare concrete, and the slightly flickering fluorescent fixture hanging in the center of the ceiling makes my pupils ache.
“You haven’t gone on your journey yet,” she says. “But there’s so much potential. I’m excited we’ll be filling this one together.”
She snaps the light off and then she’s guiding me into another room. When the lights come on again the room walls are very far away and I’m surrounded by people. I turn and stare at them, and they turn and stare at me, backing away, raising their .22.
“This is Julia’s special place,” Chrissy says. “It’s all done with mirrors.”
I calm my breathing and examine the walls. They’re covered in mirrors, their frames wrapped in aluminum foil or painted silver so they’re barely visible. There’s waist-high glass shelving along one of the walls and on top of it are the heads of the Ghost, two of them, yawning at each other.
“The older one’s actually a replica,” Chrissy says. “The second one cost me quite a bit of money. One of the guys who invented Facebook owns the original.”
“How much have you spent on all this, Chrissy?”
There are X-rays of Julia’s spinal column mounted in a lightbox, photocopies of reports from her physical therapist, a display case containing three stained and corroded hunting knives. My reflections and I stare at it all in sadness and wonder.
“It was worth it,” she says.
“Was it?” I ask. “I mean, I know you’re on this mystical kick, but what’s the point?”
“Come on,” she says. “I’ll show you the emails.”
She leads me into the hall and down another dim corridor.
“I’m so proud of you,” she says over her shoulder. “See, Dani is the jock. Heather is the stoner, Julia is the nerd, Marilyn is the whore—sorry, but she’s been married twice—Adrienne was the cheerleader because she was always rooting for you guys. He’s coming for everyone one by one, and he’s going to come for you last. You’re going to become the final girl of final girls.”
“What about you?” I ask.
“I’m a humble servant who shows you the way.” She smiles.
We come to a large, open office space against the back wall of the barn. A desk lamp burns on a computer table next to an iMac surrounded by packing supplies. Chrissy leans over and boots it up.
“Don’t you realize what purpose monsters serve?” she asks. “Monsters always guard treasure, but it doesn’t have to be literal. It can be knowledge, transcendence. In the center of the Minotaur’s labyrinth lies something precious: monstrous knowledge. Each of us has a monster we must confront, a monster designed to test our personal weaknesses. And in the end, they bring about our deaths. Not literal death, but death as the conclusion of this phase and the beginning of another. Death is the harbinger of transformation, that which precedes a new life. No, dammit. I don’t want to upgrade to OS 10.6.”
She jabs at her keyboard.
“Fearing death is just resistance to change,” Chrissy says. “There we go.”
Windows fill the screen. She sits in her ergonomic chair and starts scrolling through email.
“When I realized what was happening I put them all in their own folder,” she says, clicking through. “Here.”
The email is from [email protected]. I didn’t know anyone still used Hotmail.
HELLO,
I AM A COLLECTOR OF UNUSUAL ITEMS AND OF UNUSUAL PERSONS. I WISH TO OBTAIN A SMALL PIECE OF ART—PREFERABLY CHRISTMAS THEMED—FROM BILLY WALKER OF THE SILENT NIGHT SLAYINGS. DO YOU THINK THIS IS POSSIBLE AND WILL YOU QUOTE ME A PRICE. I WOULD ALSO LIKE YOU TO PASS TO BILLY THIS FOLLOWING REQUEST IN FULL
“DEAR BILLY,
I AM A ADMIRER OF YOUR WORK AND FEEL YOU ARE FALSELY ACCUSED OF THOSE CRIMES. I THINK YOUR BROTHER IS A GREAT HERO AND A MAN WHO SHALL LIVE FOREVER. I WANT TO COMMISSION A ARTOWRK FROM YOU OF SOME SIZE. IT SHOULD BE A SCENE OF THE NORTH POLE WITH COLORS AND ON THE LARGEST PAPER YOU HAVE. I LIKE ELVES AND SANTA TYPE SCENARIOS AND WOULD APPRECIATE YOUR IDEAS.
80-4 38-18 121-24 163-22 28-13 215-15 247-6 247-14 63-1.
AVID FAN”
“Did you send this on?” I ask.
“Of course,” she says. “I visit Billy every three months and I always have commissions for him, information to assist in his defense. I like to bring him books. If you got to know him, I think you’d like him.”
A nail presses into the center of my forehead, right between my eyes. I didn’t think this would be so hard.
“That sounds beautiful,” I say.
She rumbles open a filing cabinet and pulls out a folder stuffed with paper.
“So I printed this out and took it to him,” she says. “And two weeks later he called and asked me to write down exactly what he said. Here.”
COMMISSION ACCEPTED. $325, TB TRANSFERRED INTO COMMISSARY $25/TRANSFER x 13 TRANSFERS
SANTA ELVES RIDING REINDEER BESIDE HOLE IN ICE.
MRS. CLAUS WATCHING. BIG BREASTS
134-29 35-3 190-3 190-9 254-2 36-22
“He made me repeat the numbers back to him three times,” she says. “And that was just the beginning.”
She pulls more paper out of the folder, printouts of the emails, notes she jotted down during phone calls or visits, and every single one of them ends with a string of numbers. Sometimes they repeat, sometimes they don’t, but there’s clearly a pattern.
“How many artworks did he commission from Billy?” I ask. It hurts me to talk about Billy like he’s a normal artist, exhibiting in galleries and negotiating with buyers.
“Six over eight months,” she says. “Although he never did a three-hundred-twenty-five-dollar one again. It’s too bad. I think Billy’s best works are his larger pieces.”
“How many communications?” I ask, thumbing through the overflowing folder.
“Almost a hundred,” she says.
“They’re a code.”
“Of course,” she says.
I put the papers down. The barn feels very big, and very dark, and the two of us feel very small huddled together in this tiny pool of light.
“You already figured it out, didn’t you,” I say.
It’s not a question.
“I cracked it by the second commission.” She smiles. “It’s a book code, like they do in Red Dragon, you know, the first Hannibal Lecter book? The letters refer to page and line numbers. It’s the first letter or word on every line.”
“What book?” I ask. “It’d have to be one that Orchomenus knows Billy has in his cell.”
“The Diary of Anne Frank,” she says. “Every prison has a copy.”
I imagine these two perverts, thumbing through their battered library copies of Diary, flipping past Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart, coordinating their sickness.
“What did it say?” I ask.
“Orchomenus told Billy about the letters you wrote to his big brother.” She smiles. “And he paid him to tell the police about them and to lie and say he’d buried them where Orchomenus had them hidden. When the time was right, that is. Orchomenus knows you very well, well enough to forge your handwriting on some extra letters they threw in to make your complicity clearer.”
Elevator in my guts, going down. My legs don’t feel strong enough to hold me up, but there’s no chair and I’ll be damned if she’s going to see me faint.
“Who is it?” I ask.
“Don’t you know?” she asks. “After all, you’re not Billy’s final girl.”
“Whose am I?”
“You probably would have figured it out eventually,” she says. “You might not be the smartest one of us, but you’ve always been the most stubborn. You’re Orchomenus’s final girl.”
She smiles at me, all smug and secure, and I’m suddenly aware that there are too many woods around this house and not enough people.
“Who is he?” I ask. “Orchomenus at hotmail. I know you know.”
“Do you know what Orchomenus was?” she asks, putting the folder back in her filing cabinet. “It was a city in ancient Greece. Once a year it held a Feast of Dionysus where the priest would wield a naked blade and pursue fleeing women into the night. If he caught any of them he had the right to slay them with impunity. This has been going on for so much longer than you think.”
“I can make you tell me,” I say, gesturing with my pistol.
“I thought it would be obvious,” she says. “Orchomenus is Dr. Carol.”
I thought I was prepared for the evidence when it appeared, but nothing can prepare me for this betrayal. I am validated and destroyed simultaneously. The monstrous knowledge crushes me, slow and heavy, and I couldn’t point my gun at her right now if my life depended on it. And I think it does.
“I bought those letters in a mini-storage auction a long time ago,” she says. “I’d had my eye on it because I knew the unit belonged to the head of the foster home where the Walkers grew up. I took them right to the public defender. They returned them six months later. Said that an ‘expert’ had reviewed them and deemed them not relevant. Just the typical product of an adolescent girl. Not even worth a mention. I held on to them until Orchomenus contacted me to buy. I asked for an email from their real account. Something I could verify. Plus twelve hundred dollars. People only value what costs them money. It’s sad, really.”
I breathe deep to calm the panic attack I feel starting to cramp my lungs, but they spasm instead and I hiccup. I lower myself onto my haunches. How many of our secrets does Dr. Carol know? Why didn’t she kill me in her house? What game is she playing with our lives?
I hear Chrissy rummaging through her drawers and my chest aches. Someone. Please help me. But Dr. Carol is my monster and there’s no one who can help.
Except Stephanie.
She’ll come. She’ll come with her pepper spray, and Keith will be in the woods waiting for her. And he’ll have a pickaxe, or a drill, or a butcher’s knife, and she’ll only have my pepper spray and she’s right: that shit doesn’t work.
“I found out later that the public defender’s ‘expert’ was Dr. Carol. She told him those letters had no value in 2004, and then she bought them from me in 2009,” Chrissy says. “Her understanding must have matured in those five years. Your little support group is just the killing ground she’s created for the ultimate series of sacrifices in which she, the last monster, and you, the final final girl, will transcend together. You needed me to lead you to the heart of the Minotaur’s labyrinth because you can’t face the truth, so you came to Crazy Chrissy. Did you know that all the best oracles in classical mythology were crazy?”
She knew about the letters. For six years she knew about the letters and she never said anything to me. How long has she been planning this? She even wrote new ones, and I see her in her study, door locked, bent over Holly Hobbie stationery, fabricating sex between me and Ricky Walker, and if I needed to know how much she hates us, it’s this much.
The floor tips dangerously. The walls revolve around me. There’s a soft digital ding from the iMac and a pop-up window appears on the screen.
“Oh, look,” Chrissy says. “Keith just texted. He’s found something in the woods.”
I am stupid and I am dumb and I underestimated just how crazy Dr. Carol really is. I see Chrissy’s feet standing in front of me and I try to look up, I try to raise the gun, but my entire body is a cramp.
Something bites my right shoulder and it goes dead, and my legs stop working and I’m looking at the ceiling and I feel pressure on my waist, and the fanny pack is coming off and I see Chrissy and she’s holding my pistol in her right hand and there’s a stun gun in her left. My right arm feels broken.
“Let’s go into the living room and see what Keith thinks we should do with your little friend.” She smiles. “Sometimes he needs to be let off his leash.”
Stephanie, I’m so sorry.
You were never safe with me.