FRIDAY THE 13th Part 4

The final chapter

A novelization by Landon Turner

Based on the screenplay by Barney Cohen

Prologue

It was the summer of 1984 in the town of Crystal Lake.

Crystal Lake was the sort of town where you could walk alone down the streets in the late hours of the night and not be afraid; the sort of town where you could leave your doors unlocked and never fear the sort of things that happened in the bigger cities; the sort of town where you could turn on the ten o' clock news and cringe at all of the terrifying stories and then sigh with relief as you realized that what you were hearing about had happened over a thousand miles away.

It was just that sort of small, sleepy town that everyone dreamed about. Sure, you had the few ambitious folks who had their hearts set on the toils of a big city like Manhattan or Chicago, but deep down in their hearts, they always longed to eventually settle down in a picturesque frame house on a quiet, tree-lined, residential street somewhere in a North American suburb.

Crystal Lake was that sort of town.

Until, the summer of 1984 came.

What happened that summer rocked the small town and everyone living in it. Nobody wanted to believe it. They wanted to put it aside and erase it from the town's history; they wanted to pretend that it never even happened.

And, unfortunately, it wasn't the first time that the small town had endured such a tragedy.

Some twenty years ago in the same, sleepy town of Crystal Lake, at a local campground, a boy drowned in the lake.

The Voorhees boy.

Jason Voorhees.

It was a name that the residents of Crystal Lake had come to know; some were afraid to utter out loud.

The drowning almost got Camp Crystal Lake shut down, but no one cared enough about the Voorhees boy to go to such drastic measures.

But, someone did.

Someone cared about Jason a little too much.

That 'someone' was his own mother, Pamela Voorhees.

Some say that she went 'mad', others say that she was just a mother doing what she thought was best for her son.

Every day, Pamela thought about her son's lifeless corpse, rotting away at the bottom of that lake.

He would call out to her, and his puny, helpless voice would reach her through the wind, and she'd stand at the edge of Crystal Lake and call back out to him.

His voice was telling her to seek vengeance for him. To kill them all.

She didn't want to listen at first, but the more that she heard her son's awful cries; the more she began to succumb to its wishes.

So, when Camp Crystal Lake went into business next summer, so did Pamela.

She waited for the darkest night to come. The darkest, quietest night.

And she took a knife from the shed.

And she watched two camp counselors fondling each other on the second floor of an old barn.

It was the same two counselors who should have been watching Jason when he drowned.

With each kiss that they gave each other, and each caress, and each passionate moan, Pamela grew hotter with rage.

She felt it well up inside her, and finally, she couldn't handle it anymore.

She hacked away at their bodies until their screams stopped, and as soon as their agonizing cries ceased, so did the rage inside of her; a temporary alleviation to the madness and the suffering she had been through ever since her sweet Jason was left to die.

Pamela disappeared into the night, leaving a grisly scene for the rest of the camp to discover.

After the murders of the two camp counselors, the camp was officially shut down, and the locals deemed the place "Camp Blood".

The campgrounds were opened again in the early sixties, but someone burned down the cabins, and later, poisoned the lake.

Mrs. Voorhees wouldn't stop until it was closed down for good.

She almost got her wish, because for the next twenty years, the camp lay dormant. Rotting away until it was only a shell of what it once was.

But, a man by the name of Steve Christy made the fatal mistake in opening the camp again in the summer of 1979.

He signed a few papers, hired a few counselors, and after some negotiating and patience and a little luck, the camp was his.

It had only been open a month.

The kids were arriving in only two short weeks.

Disaster struck again at Camp Crystal Lake.

The group of counselors that Steve had hired for the summer were brutally slaughtered one night.

All at the hands of a vengeful mother.

Pamela Voorhees was back.

Ol' man Christy didn't survive her bloody rampage either. The officials found him strung from a tree, the blade of a hunting knife driven through his heart.

One girl survived that night. 19-year old Alice Hardy fought Pamela to the death, finally gaining the upper hand and decapitating her with her own machete.

Alice was severely traumatized, and who could blame her? She had seen all of her new friends butchered in one night, and had seen Pamela Voorhees coming at her with a machete, swinging at her, calling out her son's name…

Alice saw something else that night.

Something in the water.

She swore that she saw him in the water.

Jason Voorhees.

She had screamed hysterically at the police officers, tried to make them listen, tried to make them understand, but their tiny minds couldn't wrap around the idea that Jason Voorhees was alive.

They couldn't comprehend that a boy who drowned twenty years prior could actually be alive.

But Alice saw him.

She saw him rise up from the murky depths of the lake and grab him, his skin so cold and grimy, his eyes bugging from his skull, the putrid smell of decaying flesh pervading her nostrils.

Nobody believed her.

They scoured the lake, and never found any sign of a boy.

After all, it was absurd.

Jason Voorhees was dead.

He drowned twenty years ago.

There was no way he could have been alive.

It wasn't until a few months later that the police force in Crystal Lake would realize how wrong they were.

Alice went missing that fall.

The fall after that awful summer.

They never found her body.

All they found was an empty one-bedroom apartment; blood was all over the walls, the floor, and the bedsheets, everywhere…almost like some kind of sign. A warning.

A preview of years to come.

Could it have been Jason?

Back from the dead.

To finish what he started.

The locals seem to think so.

Everyone in town knew that it was Jason. They said that Jason never truly drowned in the lake.

He survived, and sought shelter in the wilderness, feeding off of the land.

They say that he became some sort of monster. Some sort of demented creature that could barely be thought of as 'human.'

The locals also said that Jason saw his mother beheaded that night.

By that poor girl, Alice.

He saw his mother being murdered.

True, it was in self-defense.

But Jason didn't know. He didn't understand.

After all, Pamela was killing for him. All for her son.

Jason didn't have a sense of right or wrong.

All he had now was an unstoppable lust to annihilate the girl who killed his mother.

The locals say Jason killed Alice.

They say that he waited a few months, growing stronger, the rage pent up inside of him ready to burst…waiting patiently until the time was right…and he tracked Alice down to the tiny apartment that she had rented in Crystal Lake…and he murdered her.

What he did with the body varied with whoever you talked to in town.

Some say he brought her back to the old abandoned Camp Crystal Lake and hid her inside one of the cabins…Some say that he ate her remains like a wild animal.

Whatever way the story ended, the locals all believed in the same legend.

The terrifying legend of Jason Voorhees, avenging his mother's death, patrolling Camp Crystal Lake, ready to slaughter any helpless victim who crossed his path.

Was he still out there?

Was there any truth to the legend?

Could Jason really be alive?

Could he have survived his drowning back in 1957, and could he have witnessed his own mother's death twenty years later?

Five years had passed since Alice went missing.

No more bodies, no more bloodshed.

The town of Crystal Lake had returned to its peaceful self.

The terror and the paranoia that plagued the town for twenty years was over.

Mrs. Voorhees was dead.

No more murders.

But, there were still very important questions to be answered.

Was Jason alive?

Did he survive his drowning?

Was the legend real?

One girl knew the answer to that question.

Chris Higgins knew all too well that the legend of Jason was too real. Too horrifying to even comprehend the reality of it all.

Jason was alive.

And he had gone on a two day killing spree across Crystal Lake, and his last stop had been Higgins Haven, where Chris and her friends mistakenly decided to spend their summer vacation.

Chris had watched the property on Crystal Lake where she had spent the majority of her childhood turned into the scene of a massacre.

Now, she was staring headlong at the masked killer as he cornered her in her family's barn.

She scrabbled backwards across the hay-covered floor, shaking her head, screaming hysterically.

His eyes bored into hers through the eyeholes of the hockey mask he had taken from the dead body of one of her slaughtered friends.

She saw the gleaming machete in his hand.

"No!" she shrieked, grasping around her for a weapon, searching for an escape, but she was cornered.

He advanced towards her, his imposing figure towering over her, blood caked around the wound where Chris had stabbed him earlier that night.

She had tried stabbing him, hitting him, even hanging him from the barn loft, but nothing could stop this killing machine.

She was going to die.

When it seemed that all hope was lost, a figure lunged out of one of the stalls, throwing his shoulder into the crazed killer's midsection.

Jason staggered backwards, hardly fazed by the blow.

It was a young black man, not one of Chris's friends, but she assumed it was an earlier victim who had survived Jason's attacks.

The young man threw himself at Jason again, but Jason took him down with one swing of his machete, and the man's arm was lopped off at the elbow.

Blood spurted from the bloody stump; Chris screamed.

The man let out an agonizing scream, incredulous at the blood spewing from the stump where his arm had been.

Jason took another swing with his machete, slashing the young man across his midsection and bringing him down to the ground.

Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

Jason hacked at him mercilessly with the machete until his pained groans ceased, and just as he turned around to finish Chris off, an axe was swung into the middle of his forehead.

He let out a growl of agony as the steel blade sliced into his skull and he reeled backwards from the force of the blow.

Chris released her grip on the axe handle, shocked at what she had done.

She was relieved, however, that he was soon going to die, but somehow, she was astounded that she had actually been the one to kill him.

But her relief was short-lived, for he wasn't dead.

Jason came at her again, his arms outstretched, his gnarled, bony fingers grabbing at her in a blind, desperate attempt to end her life as he felt his body going numb.

"No! No!" Chris shrieked, stumbling backwards into the clutter at the back of the barn.

He couldn't be alive.

There was no way in Hell that this man could be alive after an axe was sent hurtling into his brain. Could he?

She let out another sigh as Jason finally collapsed onto the floor of the barn.

The night of terror was over.

But the Crystal Lake massacre had just begun.