Tagline: ‘Do not ignore this letter… or you will suffer…’
Back tagline: They all shared the same secret… Now they would share the same terror.
Summary: When Alison first read the chain letter signed ‘Your Caretaker’, she thought it was some terrible sick joke. Someone, somewhere knew about that awful night when she and six other friends committed an unthinkable crime in the desolate California desert. And now that person was determined to make them pay for it. One by one, the chain letter came to each of them… demanding dangerous, impossible deeds… threatening violence if the demands were not met. No one out of the seven wanted to believe that this nightmare was really happening to them. Until the accidents started happening – and the dying…
First impressions: This sounds amazing, I love a good ‘a group of friends commit a crime and it comes back to haunt them later’ story [‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ and season 2 of ‘Slasher’ come to mind]. Did Christopher Pike invent chain letters? I didn’t even know they were a thing until those annoying emails when I was like 10 lol. The letter on the cover is ooky spooky stalkerish and I’m super keen to read this one! I hope it holds up to the only other book of Pike’s I’ve read so far, Slumber Party. Only one way to find out!
Recap
Roll call:
Alison – Our uniquely beautiful heroine.
Fran – Alison’s shy and anxious bestie.
Brenda – Alison’s brash, sharp-tongued bestie.
Kipp – Brenda’s boyfriend who’s super brainy.
Neil – Fran’s crush who’s a sensitive soul.
Tony – Our secondary protagonist who’s a major fox and Alison’s [and my] crush.
Joan – The school bitch who’s also into Tony.
We begin with our main protagonist, Alison Parker, hanging out with her friends Brenda and Fran at Fran’s place. Alison notices an off-purple coloured envelope that ‘reminded her of spoiled meat’ [Gross] amongst Fran’s mail and suspecting it’s a love letter, she eagerly awaits it to be opened because Fran apparently never gets letters or dates [Does she want them though?]. Fran’s hesitant to open the letter in front of the girls, but eventually agrees to after a little wrestle with Brenda [We love a bit of tension between friends!] and Alison mentions she’d like to know who the letter’s from.
This catapults us into a seemingly endless amount of character development [Which I’m not super mad at because at least it distinguishes them from each other]. Basically, there’s some tension between the girls. Fran and Brenda argue a lot, with Alison always in the middle, and they’re all involved in the upcoming school play; Alison with the lead role, Brenda with a lesser part and Fran building props and sets. They’re all attractive but Fran is extremely high strung, which I guess scares the boys off, Brenda is your typical pretty girl, which is why she didn’t get the lead role in the play, and Alison has a unique beauty with a natural talent. The latter two also have no issues getting the boys’ attention either, hehe! Alison and Brenda also both need the same scholarship in order to afford college, where they wish to study drama, but because Alison’s lead role puts her in a better position to score it, she senses a bit of resentment from Brenda’s side [More tension! Will Brenda be our bad guy?].
Anyway, for reason’s unknown, Fran is always trying to please Alison, so she’s more than happy to open the letter for her [Wow, Alison must be some kind of girl!]:
My Dear Friend,
You do not know me, but I know you. Since you first breathed in this world, I have watched you. The hopes you have wished, the worries you have feared, the sins you have committed – I know them all. I am The Observer, The Recorder. I am also The Punisher. The time has come for your punishment. Listen closely, the hour-glass runs low.
[Kinky!]. The letter then continues with a list of instructions, so I’ve attached a photo of it so I don’t miss any information trying to summarise it:
[I love this!]. The girls are unnerved by the letter, but Brenda suggests it’s just a joke from someone at school. Fran disagrees because there’s no way anyone else could know ‘”about that night”‘ and the mood in the room instantly shifts:
An invisible choking cloud of fear could have poured through the windows. Brenda bowed her head. Fran closed her eyes. Alison had to fight to fill her lungs. Whenever she remembered back to last summer, she couldn’t breathe. Were this letter and her recent nightmares connected or coincidental?
[I said it in the Slumber Party recap, and I’ll say it again here – Pike has a way with words!]. All seven people listed in the letter were there that fateful night last summer when they may or may not have killed someone – Brenda wants to believe the guy was already dead, but Fran is adamant she saw him move and heard him ‘making gurgling sounds’. Alison takes charge to halt their little squabble, but accidentally implies they don’t know whether their victim is dead or alive, instead of saying was [Lois Duncan’s ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ came out 13 years before this, so I wonder if it was Pike’s inspiration?].
Fran picks up on Alison’s slip and freaks out that the Caretaker is their victim back for revenge, but Brenda is adamant it’s a joke and suggests it was either Joan, Tony or Neil, conveniently leaving out her boyfriend Kipp as a suspect [Sneaky, sneaky, Brenda] because ‘”Kipp would never have written something so perverse”‘. Similarly, Alison and Fran believe their respective crushes, Tony and Neil, are innocent too, and Alison reckons queen of the school, Joan, would be just as scared as the rest of them to even mention the incident, which leaves one other option – one of the seven of them accidentally, or maybe purposefully, leaked what happened that night to someone else, and now that person’s out to get them [Tbh I’m hoping it’s the guy they didn’t actually kill out for revenge! But I think it makes more sense that it’s one of the seven, this doesn’t quite strike me as a supernatural book].
They check the classifieds and Fran’s task is to paint a goat’s head over the school’s koala mascot on the gymnasium [Easy peasy!]. Fran’s more than willing to obey and avoid the repercussions, but Alison wants to discuss it with all seven of the group first, hopeful that it is just a joke after all. If it’s not, though, she’s worried the ‘small token of obedience’ required by each of them may not be so small once they’re all in Column II [I hope not! We want hard tasks xx].
Later that evening we’re with Tony, who’s called his best friends, Kipp and Neil, to a meeting in his bedroom to discuss Fran’s letter. We learn that although Tony’s the star of the football and track team, he doesn’t really care about sport and hates his teammates’ ‘condescending attitude toward nonathletic students’ [Agreed, sport is boring]. He also knows Alison has a crush on him but has mixed feelings about it for two reasons. First, because Alison doesn’t know the real him, just the superstar quarterback image she sees at games and stuff; and second, because Neil has a crush on her [But Fran likes Neil! I smell a love square!] and Tony would never do that to a friend [We’ll see about that, pal].
Kipp reckons Fran accidentally spilled their secret since she’s highly strung and ‘”speaks without thinking”‘, while Neil thinks that someone in the group is posing as the Caretaker. Tony doesn’t think any of the seven would write such a letter though [I should point out that the girls and boys don’t know each other too well, except Brenda and Kipp obviously, and Joan seems like more of an outlier to the group]. Joan, who’d been out of town, calls and asks what the deal is with the letter, and the boys explain that Fran will do her deed and pass the letter on so they have more time to figure things out. We also learn that Joan and Tony have gotten frisky a few times, but have never gone all the way [Hubba hubba!].
After the call, we learn that Neil’s had some bad luck lately – he injured the cartilage below his right knee a few months ago and was also diagnosed with diabetes recently, so he has to inject himself with insulin daily [Inclusivity! Love it]. His father died when Neil was three, and he and his mother can barely afford to live despite her working two jobs and him working long hours at a gas station, which means they can’t pay for the operation to fix his leg just yet. Although Tony would love to offer some of his own savings to his friend, he knows it’d be useless because of Neil’s pride [The thought was there though. I can see why Alison likes Tony, I think I might be in love with him already!].
Neil mentions how he’s read about a few cases where people have died and resurrected a few hours later completely fine, and some have apparently developed powers [Is that true? That’s kind of cool]. Tony and Kipp shut this idea down, however, because they’d checked and rechecked to see if the guy was alive and there’s no question that he was dead. Tony reassures the superstitious Neil that a ‘”psychotic zombie”‘ didn’t cause his bad luck or write the letter and the boys soon depart.
As Tony sleeps that night, we learn through his dream what happened the previous summer when the three boys took Brenda and Joan to a Beach Boys concert [Beach Boys! This book is oooold. It’s also mentioned Nastassja Kinski several times, who was apparently a big-time actress/model back then but I’ve never heard of her]. When the concerts over, they get stuck in traffic trying to leave the arena’s car park and drink some more beer to pass the time even though Kipp, who’s driving, and Brenda are pretty inebriated already [They’ve all also been smoking marijuana too! Alcohol, drugs and driving, sure to be a fatal cocktail].
Joan and Tony are all over each other until Alison and Fran knock on the window with car troubles. Despite bitchy Joan’s protests, the group offer the stranded girls a lift and they set off, this time with Tony behind the wheel. Two hours and plenty of beers later, the gang is horribly lost on a long, desolate road. Alison’s in the back with the map, but she’s absolutely useless and Tony suspects they may be driving in the wrong direction [Don’t drink or do drugs and drive, kiddies].
After a while of being lost and having fun mucking around, Kipp plays a cassette tape of Joan getting it on with the coach from school. Although it sounds exactly like them, Tony realises quickly it’s just Kipp, an apparent master of impressions, nailing their voices [Hahahaha did Kipp make this tape specifically for tonight? Otherwise that’s a very specific pair of impressions], and everyone starts giving Joan shit for it.
Joan’s not happy that her denials are falling on deaf ears and screams at Kipp to turn it off, while an extremely drunk Fran screams at Tony to turn off the lights [Why, Fran??]. Fed up with being the brunt of the joke, Joan reaches over to the front seat, presumably to turn the tape off, but instead she flicks the lights off [??? Again, why?]. But at that exact moment, Tony swerves to avoid a tumbleweed and promptly veers off the road, with the car eventually coming to a stop after hitting something. Upon investigation, the group find a man lying in the road:
He lay on his back in a relatively casual position, no limbs bent at radical angles, his tan sports coat flung apart, untorn but filthy with dust. He was not old, thirty perhaps, nor was he tall, having Neil’s slight build. The eyes were wide open, drawn up, focused on the mythical third eye, the gaze unnerving in the trembling light and the haunting wind. It was the mouth, however, that dropped Tony to his knees. A ragged trail of blood spilt out the corner of the slightly parted lips, and still, the guy looked like he was grinning.
[Half the time when reading these books I struggle to picture what I’m reading in my head, but I don’t have that issue with Pike. His descriptions are great!]. Kipp suggests he was already dead, but deep down Tony knows how unlikely that is and Joan is quick to dish out the blame, declaring how some of the others played a role in the lead-up to the crash – Fran for wanting the lights off, Brenda for shoving the beer down everyone’s throats [Free alcohol? Can I be Brenda’s friend?], Alison for directing Tony down this road in the first place etc [Fuck off, Joan, you literally turned the lights off].
After a slightly heated debate about whether or not he was already dead on the road when they hit him and finding no identification on the man, the group decide it’s not worth ruining their lives over and opt to bury him in the field just off the road. As they carry him to his makeshift gravesite, Fran claims she heard the man groan, but a quick check shows this to be fake news and ‘Joan belted Fran on the back of the head and dared her to open her mouth again’ [Hahahahaha poor Fran]. Neil places his crucifix with the corpse [Big mistake] and they say a prayer before covering the man in soil [Bless]. Then they head home, Tony memorising the way should he ever need to return to the scene.
Back to the present, we’re with Alison at school and it’s revealed Fran completed her task overnight [Nice one, Fran!]. At lunch time, Joan storms over to Fran and Alison and demands to know where Tony is. Alison’s a total smart ass [And it’s hilarious], but Joan can dish it out just as much and eventually leaves after warning Alison to keep her distance from Tony [Usually when two Point Horror girls are fighting over a guy, I have no idea what they see in him, but I’m also in love Tony so… Also, Tony’s not yours, Joan, so fuck off].
Tony and Neil approach soon but the foursome is interrupted by the principal who offers fran $200 to repaint the mascot in the gym since she was the original artist [Bet the Caretaker didn’t expect that when dishing out her punishment!]. Fran follows him to the office to sign a contract and Neil also excuses himself, leaving Tony and Alison alone [It seems like he’s leaving to give Alison and Tony some alone time, but if he likes Alison himself, wouldn’t he prefer Tony to leave?].
The Caretaker is soon brought up and Alison assures Tony that Fran definitely hasn’t spilled the beans to anyone, while he reveals Neil’s theory that someone in the group is posing as the Caretaker. Alison immediately suspects Joan, ‘whose only redeeming quality was that she did not carry a gun’ [Hahahahaha], but she doesn’t mention her name to Tony because Joan’s hinted several times the two are lovers and Alison’s not sure how involved they truly are. Then they go and have lunch together [Their first date! Cute].
A week later, Tony, Neil, Kipp and Brenda are in the school car park discussing Kipp’s task from the Caretaker. He was supposed to flunk his calculus exam, but of course he went and got an A. Since nothing bad has happened yet, he believes the whole letter was a joke. Meanwhile, Tony’s a little worried about Neil, who’d been out of school all last week. His hair seems to be shedding and he’s lost a bit of weight, but Neil claims he had the flu and has been having trouble sleeping [That’s suss to me. Neil’s sort of the voice of reason among the group, so maybe his conscience has finally got the better of him and he’s the Caretaker?]. Anyway, the topic turns to the play and Kipp mentions how talented Alison is before adding that Brenda is great too [Hahaha good save]. But the damage is already done and Brenda storms off in a huff, refusing a lift home from her boyfriend, so Neil takes her place instead.
Tony encounters Joan on his way to track practice, but he’s kind of sick of her by now, especially after his lunch date with Alison last week went so well. He was surprised by how interesting and funny Alison was and he’s been infatuated with her ever since. But he hasn’t spoken to her since then though, not wanting to upset Neil or be murdered by Joan [I love how scared everyone is of Joan hahaha. I want more of her!].
Anyway, just as Joan’s inviting him over for a play date later this afternoon [Get that D, Joan!], a huge crashing sound fills the air. Tony runs over to the source and finds Kipp’s car at the bottom of a hill, totalled by a brick wall. Luckily, Kipp and Neil are fine, and as Tony inspects the breaks, he finds the lines covered in fluid, and realises they’ve been punctured:
As it was, with the tiny diameter of the holes, he had had to hit the brakes four or five times — about the same number of speed bumps between where Kipp always parked and the hill — before losing them together.
[The Caretaker strikes! Clearly someone who knows what he’s doing, because it’s not like they were just simply cut]. Kipp decides he’ll flunk the next calculus exam he has tomorrow [Surely exams for the same class wouldn’t be this close together?] and heads off. Neil’s limp seems worse so Tony suggests they wait for an ambulance, but Neil hates doctors and wants to head to a bathroom since he may have peed his pants a little [Hahaha bless. Poor guy]. Tony rips his shirt off and wraps it around his friend’s waist and walks him to a bathroom [Tony is so supportive, I love him!].
Now it’s Brenda’s turn for the chain letter and she has to tell the director of the play that he’s the worst director in the world in front of everybody, which results in her getting kicked off the play and being grounded for two weeks by her parents [Oof, that’s a harsh one because that literally affects her educational future. I’m still kind of thinking Neil’s the Caretaker, since Brenda and Kipp, who were basically the first to want to ditch the body, had hard deeds, while Fran had more compassion in the situation and got an easy task. Or Maybe the Caretaker expected her to get caught painting over the mascot’s head or something?].
Tony asks Alison on a date later that week and they go out to dinner Friday night, followed by some kite flying [Cuuuuuute]. They kiss in the car when he drops her home but then Tony goes all distant. He says he really likes her and although she’s as keen as he is for another date, he tells her that going out again ‘”might not depend on you or me”‘ [He’s really upset about betraying Neil :(].
Neil’s up for the chain letter next and his task is to become sick in class [That’s an easy one one]. He fakes a fainting spell and blames it on his diabetes, and when Tony recounts it to Alison, he mentions how good of an actor Neil was [OK, that’s definitely foreshadowing that Neil is the Caretaker. I doubt Tony realises that though. Maybe Neil’s sicker than everyone knows and believes it’s karma, so wanted the others to suffer too?].
Joan’s ‘small token of obedience’ is to come to school dressed like Bozo the Clown. It seems easy enough, but bad girl Joan doesn’t want a bar of it because that would ruin her punk image [Ohhhh I get it, each individual tasks has something to do with their personality traits – Fran is artsy and had to ruin her mascot painting; Kipp is one of the smartest people in school so he had to flunk a test; Brenda is an actor so had to insult the director; Neil has several illnesses so had to take advantage of it; and now Joan has to ruin her image. I wonder what the final two’s tasks will be?]. A week later, nothing bad seems to have befallen her for her disobedience, but Joan decides to call a meeting with everyone, which happens to be the first time all seven of them are in one place since last summer.
The reason Joan called the meeting is because while in bed last night, her bedroom window had exploded inward. As she got up to turn the light on, she found a shitload of cockroaches all over her room. She’s scared of insects, naturally, so it really affected her. The group realise that the Caretaker is targeting things that are important to them with their tasks and punishments [I already figured that out, guys xx].
Joan ends up dressing up as Bozo the Clown and three days later, Tony’s task appears in the classified – he has to come last in today’s races against a rival school. If Tony loses, the school loses, so it’s not really an option for him [So selfless, I’m in love ♥]. After warming up, he briefly talks to Neil and apologises for not telling him about his date with Alison, which Joan had rudely told everyone about at the meeting, but Neil doesn’t want to stand in the way, which makes Tony feel even worse because Neil isn’t even angry about it.
After downing a carton of his favourite lemonade, Tony manages to win his first race, but his body feels all weird and he’s struggling a bit. He drinks another lemonade to boost his energy, but by the next race he’s super exhausted, way more than he should be, and he ends up coming last before collapsing. We later find out something he ate or drank had been spiked with codeine [Caretaker Neil spiked the lemonade!], but he recovers nicely after a good old stomach pumping.
It’s Friday night now, the opening night of the school play, and Alison’s deed is to stuff up her lines. Despite her nerves about the whole Caretaker situation, she’s so serious about acting that she’s not planning on going through with it, but I guess the Caretaker was prepared for disobedience [I’m assuming he’s responsible] because as she leans against the prop wall in one scene, careful not to put too much pressure on it, it falls back and she goes down with it. A set light snaps from above and comes crashing down towards her face, but she covers her head with her hands, which are cut up and slightly electrocuted from the exposed wires [Why did the Caretaker punish both Tony and Alison during the events they were supposed to sabotage? Surely he didn’t know for sure they wouldn’t fulfil their tasks? Why has his M.O. changed now?].
On Monday, Fran receives a new letter from the Caretaker, this time with their names listed in Column II in the same order. The letter explains that because the new tasks will be more complex, they’ll appear in the classifieds in a secret code, and if any of the seven defy the orders this time, the punishment will be much worse. The Caretaker also clarifies that he’s not one of the seven of them [Which is exactly what the Caretaker would say if he was one of them].
Fran’s new task is to streak naked at lunch [Hahahahahaha I hope she does it] but she can’t bring herself to do it, so Alison suggests she go visit her sick relative for a week or so and not tell anyone where she’s going, promising to keep it a secret herself, even from Tony. Fran’s all like ‘”You’re in love with him, aren’t you?”‘ [Surely not, they’ve only been seeing each other for a few weeks at this point lol] and something about her tone makes Alison realise Fran wants to go the police [That’s some good sleuthing]. Fran protests that Neil thinks they should turn Tony in, but Alison warns that turning him in won’t absolve the rest of them from their involvement in the crime, and Fran eventually decides to take Alison’s advice and leave town for a while.
Sometime later, the gang calls another meeting at a park, but before the others arrive, Alison and Tony are pashing in his car [Sxc]. With Fran gone without completing her task, Kipp’s received a letter from the Caretaker, identical to hers but with her name missing. His task is to announce that he cheated on the aptitude test for college, something he refuses to do because it would ruin his academic career [Again, his seems so hard compared to Fran’s?].
Tony points out that the Caretaker broke his pattern, drugging him before he even tried to win the races and sabotaging the play’s set before Alison really had a chance to flub her lines [I’m glad they’re realising this too!], like he knew they wouldn’t obey their tasks, which makes him suspect the Caretaker is someone from the group. Although the Caretaker states in his new letter he isn’t one of the seven, Tony suggests he he wasn’t being quite so literal, and if he’s as complicated as he seems, it could mean more than one thing [Neil seems to have the biggest conscience, so it makes sense to me that he doesn’t feel like one of them]. This prompts Tony and Alison to outline why each of their friends could potentially be the Caretaker:
Kipp – Has a ‘”kinky sense of humour”‘ that reminds Tony of the Caretaker; was wearing a seat belt when he crashed into the wall despite never wearing one before; was seen going through the ice chest where Tony’s lemonade was with Joan before the races; and right from the start was opposed to the Caretaker being one of them.
Fran – Didn’t seem too bothered by having to paint over the mascot; created the set that fell down with Alison; has always been the odd one out; Alison’s been putting her down recently without realising it.
Neil – Was at the ice chest right before Tony drank the first lemonade [Tony is super defensive over Neil though – he always takes care of the drinks at the track meets, and he did offer to taste the lemonade first before Tony drank any. That’s still suss to me though because that’s exactly what you’d do to throw off any suspicion, ya know?].
Brenda – Enjoyed berating the play’s director; hasn’t been getting along with Kipp lately; Alison thought she heard her laugh when she fell in the play; she refused a lift from Kipp just before his crash; was also wandering around the field at the track meet.
Joan – Could have been lying about the window and cockroaches, since she claims to have repaired it herself before anyone could verify it; is a huge bitch; said something to Alison that reminded her of the Caretaker, but Alison can’t remember what it was just yet; was basically responsible for Tony hitting the guy last summer so might be trying to incriminate everyone else further in case the truth comes out one day.
[These are all very valid points, but by Point Horror standards, Neil is the one they think is the least suspicious and has the least motive so he’s surely the bad guy].
It’s time for the meeting now, and Joan suggests Kipp just admit he cheated, something she believes anyway due to his perfect score [It’s been mentioned several times how smart he is, but surely no-ones smart enough for a 100% score]. Brenda and Neil accidentally reveal that they know Fran’s location, horrifying Alison. Brenda claims she heard it from Fran’s parents, and Tony hands Alison some change so she can use the nearby payphone to call Fran at her grandmother’s. Apparently Fran was gone when her grandmother woke up this morning, so Alison calls Fran’s house too, but she’s not there either [Uh oh! What did you do with her, Neil?!].
That night, Alison is brought out of a recurring nightmare to a phone call from Tony, who informs her that something’s happened to Kipp, but doesn’t say what, so she rushes over to Kipp’s place where Tony and Neil fill her in on what happened.
“The police believe he could still be alive,” Tony said quickly. “We just don’t know. Somehow, without a lot of noise, he was overcome and dragged out his bedroom window. The trail of blood leads from the backyard to the street. His mother woke up when she heard what sounded like a truck starting up out front. She was the one who found the soaked mattress.”
After their meeting earlier, Tony and Neil decided to keep an eye on Kipp, so they all hung out back at his place. At one point, Brenda came over with some beer for everyone but didn’t stay long are having some bevs. Eventually, Kipp asked the boys to leave too so he could get some sleep. Sometime later, a detective called Tony and Neil for questioning since they were the last to see Kipp. The one detail Tony didn’t mention to the cops is the letter he found in his car seat from the Caretaker, reading ‘If you are not certain they are dead, do what you know you shouldn’t, and be certain.’ [OK so they’re alive…for now].
A week later, Alison’s crossed Brenda off her list of suspects because ‘no one could fake the anguish she was going through’ after Kipp’s disappearance. Much like her boyfriend before her, Brenda received a letter from the Caretaker without one of the others sending it, and her new task is to tell every teacher in school to go to hell [Hahaha the Caretaker really wants to ruin Brenda’s life]. Alison escorts her around the school for moral support, and Brenda decides to start with art teacher Mrs. Frankin because ‘”That bitch gave me a D on a pretty giraffe I made in my freshman year.”‘ [Swearing, alcohol and drugs! You won’t find that on Fear Street].
Also on Brenda’s hit list is Miss Fogleson, a ‘grossly overweight’ woman in her 30s with ‘elephant legs’, who Brenda tells to ‘”roll your fat ass down to the administration building this minute and hand in your resignation”‘ [Oof, even Stine isn’t this cruel with his fat shaming! This teacher’s a real ass though, so I’m fine with it here xx]. After telling the football coach where to go next, Brenda’s marched straight to the principal and promptly expelled. And just before graduation too [Poor Brenda :(]!
Neil’s up next and his task is to burn down the school [Good luck with that one, Neil]. He’s not planning on doing it and seems resigned to his fate, refusing to let Tony complete the task for him. Alarmingly, he seems to have deteriorated even more in the weeks since the first letter. He asks Tony if he ever thinks about the man they killed – did he have a wife and kids, what music did he like, etc, but shamefully, Tony’s never had those thoughts like Neil has [Another reason for Neil to be the Caretaker – he’s the only one that seems to even care that they killed someone for non-selfish reasons]. With no other way to help his friend, Tony gives Neil one of his dad’s guns for protection and Neil heads home, wanting to be alone [Bad idea if you’re not the Caretaker, which again makes me believe Neil is our bad guy].
Two days later, Alison and Tony are at Neil’s funeral with his mother. While she was out of town, Neil had perished in a house fire while he was sleeping. Arson is ruled out, and it appears the fire started in the kitchen from faulty wiring and spread fast, so Neil wouldn’t even have woken up. One body was found in the debris – ‘the charred and scattered pieces of a skeleton of an individual approximately five-and-a-half feet tall who had worn an emerald ring on his left hand’ [I guess it matches Neil’s description, but I’m not buying it. I reckon it was the man they killed’s dug up remains!].
After the funeral, Neil’s mother drops a complete bomb after she declares the fire a blessing in disguise – Neil didn’t have diabetes or cartilage damage in his leg, he had cancer:
‘It started in his leg. Those weeks when he was out of school, that’s when he was receiving chemotherapy. That’s why he lost so much weight. The doctors tried, but it just spread everywhere. The last X-rays they took showed tumours in his brain.’
As we know, Neil was a proud man, and didn’t want sympathy or anyone to worry about him [Poor guy. Still makes sense with my ‘Neil is the Caretaker’ theory! He wants everyone else to suffer like him]. Before he died, Neil had asked Tony to do two things for him if the Caretaker should get him – first, make sure Alison receives that beautiful emerald ring he was always wearing. The band is slightly warped from the fire, but otherwise it’s unscathed. Alison doesn’t feel worthy of the ring, but Tony explains Neil’s feelings for her, and she agrees to look after it, but thinking it’s a family heirloom, she wants to make sure it’s OK with Neil’s mother that she keep it. She’s perfectly fine with it though. In fact, Tony doesn’t even think she was aware of the ring in the first place. Then Tony seems to have a sudden realisation, but doesn’t elaborate [Did the ring belong to their murder victim?!]. We also don’t find out what the second thing Neil asked of Tony is yet because ‘”It’s a long story”‘ and Tony hasn’t been able to do it [Read: Pike wants to keep us in suspense a little longer].
Joan’s next to receive a task and she has to tel everyone she’s gay. She refuses to do it though, because I guess death seems like the better option to her [It’s definitely the easiest Column II task so far, by today’s standards at least, but back in the ’80s it would have been a lot harder, so I can’t really hold it against her. Still, if I wasn’t gay and was in per position, I would spread the rumour for sure…]. Joan’s nailed the shutters on her bedroom window shut and now sleeps with a police-trained German shepherd [I wonder if these will help or hinder her] to prevent anything from happening to her.
A week later, Alison’s parents head to New York for a business trip/20th anniversary celebration/second honeymoon. Joan’s managed to pass her deadline without completing the task unscathed, and Alison invites her and Brenda over for the night [I think we are gearing up for the big climax!]. Alison’s house hasn’t been relevant until now, although we found out much earlier in the book where she lives, so here it is:
Her father had recently changed jobs and they’d had to move. Because graduation was so near, she hadn’t wanted to transfer to another school. It was thirty-five miles of highway to her house, out in the boonies of the San Bernardino Valley. Their house was brand-new, part of a recently developed tract, an oasis of civilisation in a desert of dried shrubs. To make the isolation complete, they were the only family to have moved into the track.
[That would be creepy af, especially when home alone at night! But at the same time, I love this concept. It’s like living in a ghost town!]. Alison pops in a video while she waits for Brenda and Joan to arrive, and a lengthy encounter with the Caretaker soon begins [Even though Alison is last in line on the chain letter?].
While a fierce storm rages outside, the power goes off two separate times. Alarmed, Alison’s fetching her father’s shotgun from the garage when there’s a knock at the door. She calls out, assuming it’s Brenda and Joan, but there’s no answer. She turns on the porch light and peeks through the opaque window next to it, but sees no-one on her doorstep. And then there’s a knock at the back door [This is ooky spooky!]. She heads back to the garage to find shells for the shotgun, but she hears knocking again and ‘what was left of her courage ran out the bottom of her feet, collecting in a sticky puddle on the floor, preventing her from budging an inch’ [So…she pissed herself, right?? or is this a fancy way of saying she was glued to the spot, too scared to move?]. She then realises it’s just the shutters outside the den window banging against the house.
The phone rings, but it’s just someone breathing on the other end [Classic]. They quickly hang up and Alison decides to call the police, but before she can give them any information, the line is cut. She realises that the only way the Caretaker could have phoned her and cut the lines minutes later was if he’s in the tract [This is getting intense!].
She then hears loud knocking, and this time it really is on the back door [Tbh I’m unsure if all the other knocks before this were the den windows or not]. As the Caretaker attempts to break down the door with an axe, Alison tries to escape through the front, but the lock has been jammed from the outside and she’s unable to open it. She shoots a jagged hole in one of the windows beside the door and reaches outside to unblock the lock, and just as she realises there’s no more noise coming from the back door, someone grabs her arm [!!!]. A tug of war ensues, continuously slicing Alison’s arm on the broken glass, but she manages to break free when the blood prevents the Caretaker from maintaining his grip.
Alison crawls up to her bedroom as the Caretaker enters the house with his trusty axe. She props herself up across from the door and prepares to shoot when a sudden memory stops her. Remember a little while ago how Joan had said something that reminded her of the Caretaker, but she couldn’t remember what? Joan had earlier said ‘”Remember, you have been told”‘, the same line that Alison later read in Fran’s second letter from the Caretaker! So Joan must be the Caretaker [Nice try, Pike, but we’ve still got 40 pages so there’s no way that’s true!].
She fires a shot at the door, but when she goes to inspect it there’s no body on the floor, so Alison begins to suspect Joan isn’t the Caretaker after all. Then the phone rings and the Caretaker, in a voice that’s well disguised, neither masculine or feminine, tells her to come to him for her task [But it’s Tony’s turn! Or has he already been tasked with something and we just weren’t privy to it? And what’s the Caretaker done with Joan anyway?!].
Alison escapes to her car, but quickly realises the Caretaker’s tampered with it to prevent it from starting, and then she hears music playing. She looks down the street and sees a house with lights on and bolts over to it, stopping at the front door when she realises it could be a crafty trap. But dozens of human voices coming from inside convince her she’s found refuge at last [Couldn’t she peek through the windows?? If you can see that the lights are on from down the street, surely there’s no closed curtains?].
Entering the house, she finds it completely void of life. The music and voices were simply a recording which abruptly stop right before the Caretaker puts her in a chokehold. Alison breaks free and manages to get the shotgun she’d left on the porch, but just as she shoots, the Caretaker shuts the front door, knocking the gun and wasting the final bullet [Lol rippppp]. As she turns to flee, Alison ‘simply slipped and fell, and hit her head on the brick planter wall and was knocked out.’ [This is like the longest final showdown ever and she can’t catch a break hahaha. It’s definitely keeping my interest though!].
We jump to Tony now, who’s at the burial site of the guy they killed. He needs to prove what he already knows – that the man isn’t there anymore [That pesky Neil!]. Tony’s realised it was the already dead man’s body that was found after the fire, not Neil’s. After Alison mentioned thinking the ring was a family heirloom, Tony remembered that a few weeks earlier, Neil had actually told them it was a family ring. Since Neil had felt some sort of attachment to the dead man, identified with him in some way, Tony realises Neil must consider him family in some deranged way. The ring had belonged to the man, and since Neil was the last to touch his body on the night of the burial, he must have snatched the ring [So many revelations!].
Remember how I mentioned the tasks for Column II were all in a secret code? Well, I didn’t explain that starting with the first letter, every third letter would help spell out the message. Tony had studied the ad with Fran’s task and realised that working backwards, starting with the last letter and every third letter there on, was another message:
‘Go To Police Please Tony
Or I Will Die Yours Neil Hurly’
[Once again, I was right about the bad guy! I hope one of these days I’m completely wrong though]. Back to Alison, who’s just awoken upstairs in the house she fell over at to find all her friends alongside her, restrained with cuffs just like she is. Fran and Kipp are alive and well, living off apples that Neil brings them apparently, and Fran reveals Neil’s plan is to take them all to the scene of their shared crime and run them over. We learn that Neil had shown up at Fran’s grandmother’s place and asked Fran to go for a walk, and she was so flattered she jumped at the chance, unwittingly downing the codeine-spiked drink he’d given her. Similarly, Kipp believes Neil drugged his beer the night he went missing [I guess he’d have access to strong meds like that because of his cancer, right?]. Strangely, Kipp doesn’t believe it was his blood left behind, since he has no injuries, but it had been confirmed to be human according to Alison, so where did it come from? [Wouldn’t they have tested to see if it matched his blood type?]. Anyway, Neil had also flagged Joan and Brenda down on their way to Alison’s earlier tonight before pulling a gun on them, so Tony’s the only one missing. Neil appears in the doorway and informs them all that Tony’s dead, but Alison’s too busy gawking at Neil’s appearance to process the information:
To say that Neil did not look well would have been the same as addressing such a remark to a week-old corpse. His yellowish flesh hung from his face like a faded and wrinkled oversized wrapper. His back was hunched, and it was obvious that his right leg was painful. The once irresistible green of his eyes was a pitiful blur, and the left shoulder of his dirty leather jacket was torn and bloodied.
Alison realises he must have jumped back from the bedroom door when she shot at him earlier, but the bullet managed to graze his shoulder [Wow, this guy’s got some strength lol]. She briefly mourns over Tony, but there’s not much time because Neil’s limping into the room with a needle and a medicine bottle filled with a colourless solution [!!!]. As he prepares to sedate Alison, she stalls for time, quizzing him about Tony’s death. Apparently he’d killed himself [Surely not]. Alison tries to reach the old Neil, her friend, but he’s too far gone and believes the dead man is the only one that cared about him. Neil wants them all to be with the man, so he won’t be lonely, which is why he plans to take them back to the scene of the accident.
Alison stalls him long enough to snatch the revolver from his belt and points it between his eyes, demanding he get the key to her cuffs. But Neil’s not afraid of the gun and continues to prepare Alison’s arm for the needle. Unable to bring herself to shoot him, she offers him the gun if it’ll prove that she really does care about him. He agrees and takes it from her, then stabs the needle into her leg anyway [What have you done, Alison?!].
We cut back to Tony [Who didn’t kill himself after all] who’s figured out that Neil would be hiding out near Alison’s place after he faked his death because he once referred to her as heaven, and where do you go when you die? [Clever, Tony!]. With Alison’s place empty but full of signs of the struggle that took place there, Tony realises the house down the street with the lights on must be Neil’s headquarters and heads over there [Better be quick, Tony!].
He sneaks in, grabs a set of keys on the floor next to a makeshift bed and listens at the door upstairs to Neil and Alison’s conversation. Like I did ages ago, Tony figures out that Neil must have seen his cancer as karma and wants to punish the rest of them before he dies on behalf of the man they killed [I’m way ahead of you, pal].
We get a repeat of the scene where Alison’s stalling Neil from sedating her, this time from Tony’s perspective who realises the gun probably isn’t loaded after remembering a conversation he’d had with Neil about the Caretaker probably not being scared of a gun if he knew it wasn’t loaded [Tony’s doing a lot of convenient remembering tonight!]. Tony eventually bursts into the room just as Neil stabs Alison’s leg. The surprise halts him from administering the whole contents of the syringe, but he’s able to yank Alison up and back into the corner with her, a switchblade pressed to her throat. [Uh oh].
Pulling the set of keys from his pocket, Tony leans down, unlocks Fran’s cuffs, and asks her to get Alison. Fran, the only one who apparently never took advantage or manipulated Neil, knows he won’t hurt her, and offers herself in Alison’s place. This act of love seems to bring back the old Neil, who releases both girls and seems determined to commit suicide. He mentions not being able to take the voice that appeared in his head after his diagnosis, the voice that told him to do all this [Poor Neil :(]. Alison and Tony convince him not to take his own life and Neil collapses into Tony’s arms, who exits the room with his friend.
A week later, Tony reappears and visits Alison who explains how everyone covered for Neil – Fran told the police she was kidnapped by a ‘”deaf and dumb old man”‘ that ‘”forced her to draw obscene pictures of him all day long”‘, managing to escape when he wasn’t paying attention, while Kipp lied that he was kidnapped by three beautiful woman who basically nonstop molested him for the two weeks he was missing. Neither of them remember any more details than that [And the police bought both stories lol… OK].
Then Tony reveals how he rented a cabin up in the mountains where he and Neil just hung out and talked about old memories and stuff, completely disregarding the Caretaker business [I don’t know if I could have looked past that like Tony can]. Neil eventually succumbed to his illness yesterday, and we find out what the second thing he made Tony promise to do should the Caretaker get him – bury him next to the man in the desert. Before he’d died for real, Neil brought up the subject again, only this time he wanted to be buried in the man’s grave. That way, Tony can’t go to the police because the man’s body had already been disposed of and turning himself in would only have drawn out the whole thing for longer than it needed to be [Very clever, Neil!], especially since everyone believed Neil died in the house fire already.
Then the book ends with Alison and Tony being super loved up [Gross!].
Final thoughts
Once again, Pike didn’t disappoint! This was a real page turner, especially towards the end with all that suspense. I didn’t really believe Alison would die, but at the same time it wasn’t totally unbelievable that she might have. I thought the characters were all fleshed out well and I liked them all, especially Tony hehe. It was like a mash-up of ‘Pretty Little Liars’ and ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’, so if you enjoy those franchises, I’m sure you’d enjoy this book. I liked it so much that I’m not even bothered by no-one getting murdered [Excluding the guy last summer, of course!], or that we never found out where all the blood in Kipp’s room came from!
As usual, I guessed the twist pretty early, but that also didn’t bother me much because I was so absorbed into the world Pike had created. It was a bit lengthy, and a lot of it could have been edited down, but I think that’s my only criticism, and it’s a small one at that.
There’s a sequel which I’ll cover next week because I’m super keen to see what else Pike has in store for this group of friends. There’s still Column III on the chain letter to get through, so maybe it’ll pick up from there, and maybe some of them will even die!
100 sticky puddles of courage collecting at Alison’s feet out of 120!
