Circles

It was finished, for the moment. He had done well, and Mommy would be pleased. The urge to rend and tear, to slice and crush began to ease as he surveyed the aftermath of his latest rampage.

There had been three this time, an unholy trinity here to despoil his land with the taint of immoral acts and foul the waters of Crystal Lake with slick, amoral sin. First to go had been the self-important, smug little bastard that had reminded him much of Barry, although thanks to Jason's powerful grip the smarmyness had since departed his crushed features. The Barry-emulator's girl had been a taut, tan thing dressed in the sort of skimpy garb that never failed to raise the rallying cry of WHORE in his aching head and had been next to go. Stranglely her death had forced modesty upon her, the blood spouting from the gash in her neck had flowed over ripe, sunkissed curves, obscuring her sin under a wet, red veil. Last in tonight's line up had been the tanline-less whore's friend, a petite brunette with a propensity for strong drink. While she had no counterpart to partake of fleshy BAD things with that he had observed, she had drank herself into a stupor, and it had been this girl that had proven the easiest kill and yet the most profoundly impacting incident of the evening.

The girl.

While her friends had worn the masks of Barry and Terri, the nude harlot from that bastard Holt's training camp, this third victim, wandering through his woods swinging the bottle of Jack Daniels from slender fingertips, she did not immediately summon anyone from his past. He had watched from the trees as she swayed to an invisible beat, like the leafy branches that moved to the music of a lusty summer breeze. She had somehow made her way to a dock by the lake, where she set the half empty bottle down on sun warped boards. He moved closer then, wondering if she was about to try what he had tried all those decades ago, in this black pit of a lake. Would she swim, or sink down to the inky depths where the cars and old bones waited? He felt on the edge of his proverbial seat, the way he always had been when his mother read him cliff-hanger stories from childhood. The girl was at the edge of the dock now, still slightly swaying.

All you have to do is come up behind and give her a good, hard shove, the voice in the basement of his mind whispered.

She's in no condition to survive. The lake water will fill her cavities the way it did you so long ago.

Jason had two thoughts about this: one was that he didn't intend to force anyone to suffer his fate, and two...he did NOT intend to deprive himself of the kill. Having the lake do what should be his grunt work was not acceptable. Mother's memory demanded more than just a push off a dock.

Jason hung back in the trees, still wondering if the girl would topple in. After a few minutes of supporting herself on a dock post, she sat down, dangling her feet in the water. This was something else he had done when just a small child, and the rest of Camp Crystal Lake was off doing its thing. They may have owned the cabins, the archery range, the game room with the lovely paints and paper, but Jason Voorhees owned those desolate docks, those secluded slices of heaven surrounded by foliage and thickets.

He let himself dwell in the sepia-toned memories awhile, with the blood rage existing on another level. In time, the girl would get up, grab her bottle and go searching for her sinful friends. After a few more minutes of her drunken feet splashing and his inner-child's desperate thrashing, the girl pulled herself to her feet and went for the bottle. But, seeing as she had drained it of more than half its contents, she made an uncoordinated, almost brutish grab for it which sent the thing tumbling off the side of the dock and into the black water below.

She thought about diving in for the bottle, even thought about stripping down and diving in for a swim. The night was a baker's oven, after all, and there was no-one around. What would be the harm? But then she realized that to do so in her condition might not be the best idea, and skinny-dipping was a joy she had oftentimes shared with Steve. Steve, to whom that bottle of Jack belonged. Steve, to whom she had pledged her love, before the bad times. Their fights had been legendary, waking neighbors and summoning the local police. If she was mellow Crystal Lake, the good girl who was still new to getting blasted, then hound dog Steve was the raging torrents of the open ocean, where waves that never met a shore were always threatening to drag down nubile swimmers.

His cheating ways had been too much, and she had smashed his belongings, found hidden inner passion and set some of them ablaze, including the painting of an ocean sunset his mother had given him. That had been too far over the line, and Steve had left for good. Her friends thought that some time in the woods was just what the doctor ordered, and took her up to a place called Crystal Lake. Now, while they were off making love in some secluded cove, she was left to stagger around with Steve's bottle of Jack, unable and unwilling to even enjoy the cool, refreshing midnight water.

Well good, let the bottle drown, let it bleed whiskey into the lake and fill with seaweed, sinking to the bottom where it would rest in the mud to be found in years or decades by other lovers who left clothes in piles and streaked themselves down to the water's edge. She only wished she had poured out the liquor herself, and jammed a note in there about the dangers of falling in love.

After losing sight of the bottle, she made her careful way back along the dock, where the deep, dark woods were waiting. Jason saw the girl coming towards him and knew that the time had finally come. She was grabbing at the trees for support, and bashing into saplings with her hips. Suddenly, already wobbly feet stepping on a pine cone, the girl tumbled to the ground.

Jason stepped out from behind the tree and presented himself to her.

She saw the boots step into her line of sight and looked up at the man standing before her.

"Steve? Is that you?"

The silence was deafening, and her numb tongue grasped for the words that would allow the feeling within her heart to manifest. "Th-the... painting, I know it was... I mean Steve, I'm so... you're all..." She fumbled as Jason gazed down at this drunken wreck of a girl stumbling over nonsensical phrases that meant nothing to him. After all, what did Jason know or care about whomever this Steve she was blathering on about, other than that this Steve would meet a gory end as had all the others should he somehow have escaped Jason's patrol of the woods.

The girl continued her drunken babbling, obviously so far out of it that she did not comprehend any of her situation. For her there was only the spector of Steve, whom she both loved and loathed, when the harsh reality existing beyond her inebriation was that Steve was no doubt out savoring strange favours once again as he always had, and the man looming over her was intent on only one thing, and it was not to provide her with a shoulder to drunkenly weep on.

While the girl sobbed and stuttered on and on about her Steve, he found himself more absorbed in the girl herself than anything she was spouting off.

Perhaps the one thing that set her apart from all of the other BAD girls he relished dispatching was that here he was standing directly over her, and she had yet to take flight, or screech or flail. While he knew whatever had been in that large glass bottle was to blame, it was interesting to be able to stand here and just...observe.

It was a rare thing indeed when a victim this close to him remained where they were, instead of scurrying into the underbrush like the roadside rabbits that had been kept as pets at the general store where he had gotten the clothing that now hung in tatters on his ruined body. He watched her gesturing at him, at the image of Steve, for once a girl articulating her thoughts to him without a weapon in her hands, aiming the blade for his head. It was refreshing, to be honest, and these days the only thing truly refreshing for him was lifting the skull-white mask and allowing the breeze of Crystal Lake to occasionally stroke his nightmare face.

She was so close to him he could literally reach out and touch her if he wished, he could conceivably explore every one of the feminine wiles and secrets that drew in lusty teenage boys by the dozens like lambs to the slaughter. But of course there would be no laying on of hands for him that did not result in carnage tonight or any night that matter, for to even think of the disgusting, sloppy act that these wayward teens were so fond of did nothing but arouse hatred within. And so it was this hatred that blew the lid off the stew pot of misery and rage that fed him every night by the light of the full moon. He thrust his arms out to meet her delicate grasping, their fingertips touching for a fleeting moment as his hands snatched up her wrists and clamped down like the vices in his father's old garage, the ones he sometimes threatened to use on Jason -

"Crush that head of yours down to the proper size" in his words.

He then did what was his trademark, a kill that was sudden, brutal and lightning quick. Her smooth, slender wrists were beating with the boozy pulse of someone lost in the liquor. He swung her by these wrists into the very tree he had been hiding behind while she was playing around on the dock, her head connecting with the thick, hundred year old trunk before either of them knew it. He felt the pulse falter in those dreamy wrists and held tight a moment more, peering down at her glazing eyes as she sank to the forest floor.

Then, like he had with his old life decades ago, like he had with his own MOTHER, he let go.

His blood lust satisfied for now, he turned his back on the crumpled, bloody wreck of girl and was pondering the possibility that this Steve she had been crying for was still lurking somewhere in his woods. Just then the slightest sound caught him by surprise. A thin whimper issued from the dark haired girl who still lay crumpled beneath the tree that had been instrumental in her demise. While the back of her head was a sticky, red mess, somehow thin strains of breath stirred within.

Not dead.

Impulsively he prodded her side with a heavy boot, noting the way the soft skin gave under the slight pressure. Curious, he prodded her again, causing her to roll from her fetal position onto her back. Her head lolled back bonelessly, her wide eyes gazed vacantly to the stars, and up to him.

He had no idea why he was taking in such insignificant details of the broken body lying at his feet. Truthfully, she was really not that much different than the dozens of other girls he'd cut down beneath his dreadfully heavy blade. Her blood was no more crimson or wet than any of them, her eyes no more frightened as she stared upwards in horror in her final moments. She had arrived a lithe, callow thing, and now she was nothing more than a crumpled husk, her dark curls sticky and matted with blood, the heat and vitality rapidly departing her.

Warm...

The girl had been so warm for the brief moment their skin had connected...

Though for the moment rattling, jagged breaths still tore through her throat, the cold embrace of death was rapidly approaching and would soon leech out whatever warmth she still possesed. Not one to be left out, he bent to draw her into his own cold, dirty arms. Again, there was nothing particulary notable about the girl sagging against him, her limbs now a slave to gravity and inertia now that her vital spark had been snuffed. She was no different than any of the legions of bad girls he'd spent decades cutting down, and yet -

She was still warm.

While there was no way that Jason could truly comprehend or appreciate her ripe curves and wide set eyes that were slowly beginning to glaze, he could still enjoy the warmth.

Her breath reeked the way his father's had those nights so long ago, the acrid fumes of whiskey issuing forth with every curse and barb flung at his mother and he. If he inclined his head slightly, he could still discern the sharp, sickly sweet scent trail from her parted lips that had burbled blood and desperatation only moments before. Slowly, she began to stiffen in his arms, and limpness gave way to a final twitching, and then she became still once more.

He set her back down beneath the tree almost gingerly, and she did not stir again. The only evidence that she had ever once lived was the extremely shallow, intermittant breath that was even now fading away as her warmth had. Without the weight of the girl to burden him he'd became nothing more than another silent tree whose branches were the very arms he'd used to swing this girl to her death. Her breath was slowing by now, the boozy vapors being overpowered by the pine scented summer breeze. Her eyes, fixed on the stars above, were beginning to dim, their pseudo-celestial light going out forever.

It was in this moment that Jason understood something. He had finally come full circle, whatever that meant. But the circle had lead him back to where it all began, on that bright, shining day in June.

He hadn't really died alone, he realized now. His small hand had been held by the very thing that killed him, and that thing had also filled his lungs like pitcher-poured lemonade filled the many glasses of a family on a picnic. He was practicing what he had learned, maybe for the very first time. In staying with this girl as she died, Jason Voorhees had finally become the lake. A force of nature whose only barely human appearance masked deep water that could sometimes turn dark, and cold.

Then her eyes were fully dark, and The Lake backed away again.

The woods were teeming with other sounds, mostly crickets, deer brushing against branches and softly sighing leaves, but underneath that were possibly footsteps, and voices. And like the lake beyond that dock, where the bottles and the other trash sank to the bottom, Jason had other shores to seek out, other beaches where lovers and campers were busy with sin. He had to hurry, for there was work to do.

The Lake left the girl then, its waters receding into the night.