Chapter 11
Follow Me Down
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Day 27
"And then they use maggots to eat away the dead flesh so the surrounding tissue doesn't become necrotic too, because maggots only eat the dead stuff. Gross, right?"
They were sitting in the grass, shaded by the thick branches of a great fir. Half an hour ago Jason had been listening to her read while he mass constructed new snare loops to have ready for later use. Normally when her voice got tired, she took a nap, especially mid-afternoon when the day was at its hottest, often requesting to go back to the relatively cooler shelter of the tunnels. But today had been different. She had set the book down, stretched, watched him for a moment or two, then took up wire and cutters and proceeded to help.
At some point – via some progression he couldn't fully recall – they'd gone from making snares to him teaching her how to tie increasingly more complicated knots. The legitimacy of said knots was somewhat questionable, as he had learned most of them via a combination of spending hours experimenting with rope and sheer necessity. She had the benefit of small hands, which made the complex weaving and looping patterns easier to manage, but lacked the experience that made it genuinely easy. Still, she managed well enough to fill the time she wasn't concentrating too hard with idle talk about what she termed nasty medical stuff.
She didn't appear very put off by the one-sided nature of the conversation, for which he was grateful. He liked hearing her talk, and it was a relief that his lack of reciprocation didn't make her think he wanted silence. Far from it. While the nuances of what she described sometimes escaped him, he could follow about as well as she could follow his wordless knot-tying demonstration: with some skips and stalls along the way.
He smiled, heartily amused. Gross or no, Whitney's tone was all delighted fascination. There was no disgust to be heard, and for all that her nose had wrinkled as if she smelled something as rotten as the subject matter, her eyes glittered with more of the same. The subjects of her stories didn't bother him at all – even the ones which featured large needles being stuck in distinctly unpleasant places. He was familiar enough with death to be more than a little desensitized even to the idea of quite a lot of things. Death itself was dirty and foul, and smelled of far worse than just blood or bile.
In spite of her somewhat deliciously horrified tones, she didn't seem overly disturbed either, with the singular exception of something called a sucking chest wound, at the mention of which she actually dry-heaved before choking on her own snort of laughter – evidently amused by her own visceral revulsion. Clearly there was a part of her that enjoyed being a little bit disgusted. It was not something he would have imagined of her in the beginning. Now, though, it seemed right.
"So...wait."
Whitney undid the loop she had just made, staring down at the length of twine held between her hands as though willing it to submit. There was a deep furrow between her dark brows – a crease which Jason felt the unusual urge to smooth out with the pad of a finger.
"Around and under," she muttered under her breath, glancing between the half-tied knot Jason held cupped in an open palm as he waited for her to catch up.
After a moment he took pity on her and undid the last tuck he'd done to show her a second time, slowly, and a screechy "aha!" burst from her mouth. She copied the tuck and pulled the loose end, cinching the knot tight. It was, perhaps, a little too tight, but for this particular knot too tight was better than too loose, and she was beaming as though she'd just accomplished a borderline herculean task.
She had been in an extraordinarily good mood all day; something which he relegated to the new, and likely far cooler, clothes she had changed into that morning.
As he'd suspected, most of the food liberated from the would-be campers had been, while edible, not entirely food, per-say, and while she had kept a few things most had been rejected. The clothes, however, had been a definite win. She had been incredibly pleased by the odd wire-and-elastic contraption, her half-relieved glee instilling the reflective happiness in himself that he had decided to cease questioning, and she had become increasingly more enthusiastic as she'd rifled through the duffle's contents to choose a replacement for the long-sleeved flannel.
The new shirt – if that was still the right name – had no sleeves beyond the straps that cut white lines across her bare shoulders. It had been oddly distracting at first to see so much skin. Odd since there was nothing inherently interesting about skin specifically; he'd seen plenty of it, and had plenty of his own. He had seen far more than a few female bodies far less covered in the past and hadn't so much as blinked. Yet he had repeatedly found his attention wandering to these newly visible places, studying the graceful transition from neck to shoulder where her hair fell, the collarbones arching below the hollow of her throat, the expanse of upper back, the soft shadow which halved her chest.
And it wasn't only the skin. The denim pants she'd donned were not unlike the ones she had worn in the beginning, but they were tighter, thinner, and clung. The curving slopes and contours of the shape previously hidden away by the folds of baggy clothes were no longer so, and while before he hadn't taken much notice beyond her tangible existence he was infinitely more aware now of the way the liberated clothes fit her.
Not for anything could he put together why, only that he felt like the refrigerator magnets he'd once played with – drawn by some unavoidable cosmic force that yanked his eyes to her. And every time he caught himself doing so he would feel a strange sense of unease prickling at the back of his consciousness that didn't match the compulsion he had to look again. If he were honest with himself, it was more than a little disturbing.
Not that he was, in fact, honest with himself.
Shifting the knotted twine to one hand, she held up the other, arm bent at the elbow in a ninety-degree angle with her palm flat and facing him. Her eyes were bright with the little victory, shining green-gold in the flecks of afternoon light that filtered through the shade.
She was looking at him expectantly. Suddenly he understood there was a significance to the raised hand that he was intended to understand and respond to. There was a small spark of recognition: a memory buried deep in his brain that he couldn't quite access. Tentatively he raised his hand to mimic hers and paused, not fully remembering what to do with it.
Whitney nodded encouragement. "Yup, and now we slap one another's palms—like this."
She lightly tapped the flat of her hand against his and the memory unearthed itself in entirety. Yes, he remembered the gesture, remembered seeing it done, but never having done it himself, and there was a small, childish part of him that felt as though he were finally completing a rite of passage of sorts.
He felt the smile pull at his skewed mouth as she retracted her hand and said, "Now again, together this time," and he mimicked her movement, gently touching palms with her. It wasn't quite a slap, as she'd deemed it, but it seemed to suit her need to celebrate her victory over the knot, for she shot him a grin that seared like pure sunlight before dropping her hand to her lap.
Unbidden his thoughts spiraled back to that morning during her exploration of the clothes and the rat that had been settled there at her lap, curled up in a be-tailed ball. It had frequently interrupted her breakfast with insistent begging for snacks. Begging Whitney had staved off with bits of the oat cereal discovered amid the bag of food. She'd snapped good-naturedly at it every time, dubbing it a pest and herself a "crazy cat lady," although he had no idea what that meant. He only really maintained the rough idea of what a cat looked like, recollected from an old picture book when he'd been learning – or failing to learn – how to read. He remembered they said meow and not much else. A rat was definitely not the same thing, of that he was certain.
Still, in spite of her grousing she had fed it more than she needed to and didn't so much as bat an eye when it curled up there for a nap. Seeing her interact thusly with the little creatures did something unusual to his insides: they seemed to soften within the confines of flesh and bone like butter left out on a summer day, warm and malleable in ways no longer entirely alien, but still bizarre.
He had thought often about her question of loneliness over the past few days, turning it over in his mind like a stone, testing the edges, the smooth surfaces, the nicks and divots. He could recall having been lonely before, the yawning hollowness that he'd thought might swallow him from the inside out, but after...after there had been only pain. Only anger. Only an unending cycle of exhaustion.
He had thought about it so much that he had dreamed last night. Of his first kill: the girl from the lakeside. The survivor.
It had been the first and only time he'd left the grounds and the area immediately surrounding them, and then only to silence the compulsive need to see the thing finished. The pull had been too strong to fight; the demand for justice – for balance – clamoring so raucously inside his head that eventually he could no longer think for the noise in his ears.
He didn't know how he'd managed to find her. He shouldn't have been able to, he had no knowledge how tracking was done without physical tracks to follow – of which there had been none. It had been over a year, she had left by car, lived more than several cities away. It had been a force beyond his own making. His feet had simply carried him to where she was, guiding him like the weight of his mother's hand on his shoulder pressing him on. The pitch of his rage spiraling higher and louder until the very second he had taken hold of the girl's skull and shoved the ice pick through the thin layer of bone at the temple to bury it deep within her brain. Only then had the constant wailing in his head gone quiet.
It had occurred to him when leaving that he might have been seen, that something bad might have come from the perhaps ill-advised quest for vengeance. But some things were worth the price of the consequences.
After that point, he didn't remember feeling anything quite like the gnawing, hungry solitude of his childhood. Oh, he missed his mother, but he was no longer sure what he missed wasn't simply the presence of someone who knew what to do, someone to give him direction, a purpose beside the one of killing.
Sometimes it was when he missed her the most that he was also at his weariest. Sometimes to the point that he felt scraped empty and hollow, clinging to the last shreds of her he could find amid the cycle of violence and simultaneously wishing that he could just...stop. Normally he refused to tolerate these moments for long. Such a wish felt like disloyalty of a kind that discomforted him, because without the killing it would mean she was truly gone, and without even that poor, pitiful link to her, what point was there in existing?
Jason didn't have the schooling to understand the premise of existentialist thought, but he steered away from it instinctively nonetheless; knowing that the road of those particular thoughts led to places he couldn't go, if not the specific reasons why. For one, he had no way to know if he could die anymore, that if he were to stab or slice or cleave himself apart if he wouldn't simply mend as he always seemed to. He had no way to know if were to hurl himself back into the lake from which he'd been reborn if he could still drown, and that, of all possibilities, he flatly would not try. And if he could not end, then...he supposed he must go on doing as he always had, carrying on the cycle of vengeance for the rest of eternity.
Yet just now, sitting in the grass at the base of the tree with the remembered imprint of her hand small and slender against his as vivid as though it rested there still, he had the sense of some old, scabbed-over wrong made inexplicably right.
He had never had a pet growing up, nor siblings, or anything else that required caretaking. Whitney was neither, of course, but with her had come the purpose of keeping something alive and well, and if he were honest with himself – which in this case he was – the purpose in maintaining life and fostering contentment was a far more engaging one than the opposite. Not to mention pleasant. He hadn't really considered before, but maybe a part of him hadn't thought he deserved to find pleasant things within existence any more, or at least that pleasant things no longer had a place within said existence – as though, since he was no longer truly alive, his state of being no longer revolved around joy or peace. Whether or not that had been true or just belated analysis, it no longer felt true.
Whitney bent slightly at the hips, undoing the knots in the piece of twine before she returned it to the pile of supplies. It brought her ever slightly closer to him and he caught the scent of her: citrus and soap, the salt of sweat, and beneath that something like the earth after it rained. Indescribable, but soft and singularly nice.
"I wish you could tell me about your life," she lamented as she straightened, shoving loose waves of hair back from her face. "I have so many questions. Maybe not about the murder, though."
Her lips curved faintly, a tiny, almost-smile, and warmth curled beneath his skin. He didn't know what it was, but when she did that it made something swoop in his chest like a diving bird, deep down beneath the ribs. He might have thought he was ill, though it would have been the first time since his waking on the shore of the lake, evidently not drowned.
He had never seen anything quite the same shade of pink as Whitney's mouth, no flower or fruit or anything in nature. He liked that the color was a thing uniquely hers. He rather liked her mouth, come to think of it. It seemed a strange thing to like, after all a mouth was a mouth, wasn't it? It had a function – several functions for those with voice – and that was all. But perhaps that was an over-simplification, after all he could tell by the set of a trespasser's mouth whether they had fully realized their circumstances or if they still thought they were the subject of a prank. Whitney's mouth was no less a tool with which to gauge expression and he utilized it as such: studying the set of it, the soft lines which bracketed it which she smiled, the precise curve of her lower lip and the subtle indentation at its center.
It took him a full second to realize there had been no censure in her voice, but rather humor. Dry, yes, but humor all the same. He blinked, wondering at what point the subject of murder had ceased to be one to avoid at all cost.
At some point she had picked up the jar of water she had taken to toting around whenever they went on outdoor excursions, unscrewing the metal lid and cradling it between her hands while she studied him.
She looked at him that way now sometimes, with a peculiar sense of anticipation, as though she expected him, or wanted him, to do something. He didn't know what it was, and she was never forthcoming about explaining, both of which made his stomach pitch with equal parts agitation and unease – fretting, perhaps unnecessarily, that he was doing something wrong. He was starting to wonder whether it wasn't his own ignorance that upset him more than what might or might not be wrong. Whatever it was, he had the sneaking suspicion that it was so completely outside his realm of comprehension that he didn't know if he would have asked even if he could. Though he did rather desperately want to know.
Lifting the jar to her lips, Whitney averted her gaze and the odd expression smoothed away just as it always did, though his anxiousness lingered.
"Mm—" She made a noise around her mouthful of water, her throat bobbing rapidly with her swallow. "You know, you might not be able to answer complicated questions, but I could ask closed ones. Yes or no questions. Right?"
Jason blinked, completely sidelined. What had she been talking about? His life. She wanted to ask him about his...life? What on earth for? He nodded somewhat automatically, still feeling a little slow to comprehend as though the space between his brain and skull had become stuffed full of cotton fluff.
"You don't have to answer anything you don't want you. Or you can completely ignore me, that's fine too."
He exhaled sharply through his nose, mocking offense at her suggestion that he ignore her, and caught the flash of her smile as she returned the lid to her water jar.
"Ok, then."
Leaning back on her elbows, Whitney stretched her legs out in front of her so that her toes just breached the line of shade.
Almost the instant they had settled there she had removed her shoes and socks. The temperature just seemed to keep climbing with each passing day, and this was by far the hottest yet. Perspiration had added a soft, allover gleam to her skin and darkened the fabric at the small of her back, gathered at her hairline. He was feeling rather warm again too, now that he considered it – not quite stifling, and not sweating, but mildly uncomfortable. Though not enough to act on.
"Did you always live here?"
He blinked again, feeling his brow lift with his surprise. Of all the things he'd expected her to ask, that hadn't been one of them...not that he really knew what he should have expected. He had no what to know what things might or might not peak her interest.
"The house was yours, right?" she added when he didn't answer right away, "you lived there with your mom?"
He was halfway through a nod when he lifted a hand to belay it. Holding up a finger, he indicated: first question. Then he shook his head.
"No, you didn't always live here," she guessed, and he nodded, holding up two fingers.
Second question. Another nod, this time with conviction behind it.
"Got it. Were you little when you moved? Do you remember it?"
For a moment, he considered, casting his thoughts back in time to when they had come to the camp. He hadn't been little, not the way she meant. Calculating, he held up his hand again, showing her four fingers.
"You were four years old? Or, you were here for four years before...before."
She let the question drift, sensitive to the subject of the deaths that had turned the once active camp into a ghost town. Which he appreciated. Neither of them needed it any more defined than that.
He indicated the second answer: four years. Four summers spent in the little corner of hell while the counselors and other children alike made it brutally clear that he was not like them and not welcome. Not that that had stopped him from trying anyway. He had always been persistent that way, or maybe overly optimistic was the better description – for he had maintained a chokehold on the hope that maybe tomorrow he might convince someone that he would make a good friend. Just one someone. It would have been more than enough. The optimism had not managed to overcome what had happened, though. Even the hardiest of plants could only take so much abuse before they simply withered.
Whitney's chin dipped slightly with her nod, seeming to read the negative slant to the answer. He realized the muscles in his shoulders had coiled reflexively and he rolled them back, coaxing them to relax.
"Was it weird living at a summer camp?" she asked then, only to amend, "I guess it's hard to know if something's weird when it's your normal. Let's change that question to: did you like living at a summer camp?"
His immediate response came almost without his will to drive it, his head jerking sharply from side to side. Then he stilled. It hadn't been all bad. Certainly the summers had been exercises in emotional endurance, but there had been good things too. He could just recall what it had been like to live in a neighborhood: all the cement and chain link fencing, the tiny cramped yard with grass that never seemed to be any less than seventy percent brown at any given time. After the move he'd had the run of the woods with all the trees he could possibly climb and not a square foot of cement in sight aside from the camp structures.
He amended the vehement negative answer by creating a so-so motion with his hand, and Whitney gave a small smile. "I think all kids feel that way about where they live. The grass is always greener, and all that."
Puzzled, he felt his head tilt slightly to one side, which Whitney mirrored a split second later, tilting her own head the same way. Another little crease formed between her brows. Once again he felt the compulsion to smooth it away.
"You don't know that phrase? The grass is always greener on the other side? It means we always tend to want what we don't have."
Well that, as he could attest, was absolutely true.
Whitney stifled a yawn behind a hand and shook her head rapidly as if to clear it. "Sorry. I'm not bored," she quickly explained, "The heat makes me sleepy."
He blinked, somewhat bewildered. Did yawning happen with boredom as well as being tired? Fascinating.
"What did you...no, sorry. Did you go to school?"
He answered with a shrug, only somewhat paying attention. Her feet were moving, toes flexing and curling gently as if on absentminded habit as if she didn't even realize she was doing it. Such tiny toes. Again, he had seen plenty of feet before – people seemed almost instinctively inclined to shuck their shoes like a snake its skin upon arriving to the lake grounds in the summer.
His eyes followed the fine bones along the arch of her ankles to where muscle curved at the back of each calf. She had very long legs, he noticed. Long and sleek. He'd seen her run, and even when hindered by bound hands and heavy chain she had been a strong runner. He kept likening her to a deer in his mind, or a bird, all russet and white, swift and light and graceful.
The feeling of being smothered in his coat increased, and he had the creeping feeling that he was doing something he should not. He averted his gaze to the grass in front of him, the knotted mess of twine that lay there, brow creasing with his frown.
He didn't like this feeling, this tangle of confusion and heat that made his chest feel tight and foreign. It felt like...like he was changing.
Well, of course he was changing, that had been unavoidable from the start. The problem wasn't that there was change, but that the change didn't stop – it just kept building on itself, reminding him of what Whitney had said before.
"I don't recognize parts of myself right now."
He felt her eyes on him, and knew without seeing it that she was looking it him in that wistful, almost-sad way that made his stomach turn over like a car engine in a spluttering attempt to start. It was as if she was staring right through his clothing, through skin and flesh and bones into the places that were no longer hollow as he had come to believe they were. His fingers curled into the grass, combating the sudden clawing, urgent need to get away from her – away from her pale, pretty face and green-flecked eyes that saw far too much. The urge to run, to flee from something dangerous.
There was something very wrong with him. He was not prey, and she was not a threat. But he didn't fully believe it, because there was a part of him - a small, whisper-thin part way, deep down – that was very much afraid of this small slip of a girl. It was as if she was a force that was pulling him in...although in to what, exactly?
"How about...did you do things for fun?" Whitney's voice broke through the cloud of confusion in his head. "Like sports? For instance, I was on my high school's track team."
His eyes flicked to her face, the frown in them redirecting. It was better, easier, to direct the confusion into her statement than whatever was going on in his head.
"Competitive running," she explained, which really did explain some things. "Well, sort of, but not really—I wasn't that good." She propped her chin on her shoulder as she clarified, "did you do anything like that?"
It took Jason about ten seconds to decide how to answer, more than half of which had been devoted purely to awe over the unexpected similarity they now shared.
Gathering up the twine and other materials, he shoved them back into his pockets, gesturing as he did for her to get up. Her expression turned to one of mild puzzlement, but she shoved her feet back into her shoes and followed anyway.
He couldn't tell her, but he could show her.
~/~
The interior of the house was even shoddier than she remembered.
The door they used opened into the kitchen, where the paint upon the walls peeled up in strips like bark from a birch tree and the cheap linoleum bubbled and curled at the corners where moisture had seeped underneath. Water stains created patterns on the ceiling. Tree limbs had burst right through one wall, the foundation underneath likely suffering damage from roots. Every flat surface was covered in clutter. Dishes and opened, empty cans, spilled food too old now to even have any smell beyond the general odor of uncleanliness, unopened mail, bits of foliage dry and one poke away from becoming dust.
It was old mess, untouched, no doubt since it had been left by the previous owner's descent into grief-fueled madness.
"What if some homeless person lives here?"
They had been the first words out of her mouth upon setting foot through the bent screen and finding herself inside the room that had looked like the ghost-story copy of a cute 1960s kitchen. She had said it mainly as an attempt to convince Mike to leave well enough alone, not because she legitimately thought it might be true. Or, so she'd thought at the time. Maybe a part of her had known someone was there with them – some deep-buried instinct that people no longer tended to pay attention to now that they had molded themselves around the arrogant assumption that they were the top of the food chain. Though that possibility was a little pointless now. The fact that she'd said it at all, regardless of reason, sat like bad food in her stomach sometimes, now that she knew more of what had happened between the rotting walls.
She hadn't paid much attention to the house itself after that first night, when she'd been an unwelcome – and unknowingly rude – intruder. At first the reason had been terror, and when the terror had passed through resignation and acceptance she simply hadn't had much reason to look when it served only as the means of passage from outside to the tunnels. Except for the bathroom. The trapdoor was located directly outside the bathroom door, and she hadn't been able to look too closely inside for fear of seeing the hole in the floor and remembering what had caused it.
The difference between then and now was almost profound.
As she followed Jason through the kitchen and into the dark hall, she realized the creepy abandoned house out in the dark woods had stopped feeling like a monster. It was run down and falling apart, tracked with dirt and spots of mildew, being slowly, steadfastly reclaimed by nature; but it was no longer the scary place spawned from her horror movie nightmares. It was just a neglected house. No more, no less.
The carpet under her feet was threadbare almost the point of nonexistence, and every so often she thought she caught the smell of something burnt when she walked on it as though it had been scorched. They passed the living room to the left, and she remembered the little upright piano inside it, leaning to one side and half its keys broken. She had found the whistles in there – a group of them so out of place that their presence alone had felt freaky and wrong. She wondered now if they hadn't belonged to that first group of counselors, if Mrs. Voorhees hadn't returned to the house with each kill to hang up her trophies. Or if Jason had found them on her body and done it for her.
It was also the room where they had found the jewelry box.
Her hand rose at the memory of the faded pink satin, fingers curling beneath the locket suddenly heavy at her throat.
"Jason-"
He stopped, turning to her with that subtle air of question he had a knack for producing, and she felt her conviction momentarily fail her.
"Do you…do you want this back?"
She indicated the jewelry cupped in her palm. It had begun to feel at home there around her neck, but she could never really forget why it was there, or where it had come from.
She knew she had already apologized for taking it, and for the part she had played in desecrating the mausoleum his childhood home had become, but an apology didn't feel like enough. Even if to his eyes she had paid her debt, or even if she never could, surely he would want the necklace returned to its rightful place.
Yet as she watched, frown lines formed around his eyes. Even in the dark it was evident. He looked...puzzled, as though he couldn't understand why she would ask him such a thing. When he shook his head he did so slowly, as though he wasn't sure he was answering the question he thought he was.
"Are you sure? It was your mother's, wasn't it?"
He nodded, the gesture surer than its predecessor.
"But-"
Before she could fully form her rebuttal, he had cut her off, laying the tips of his fingers across her mouth in a very clear request for her to shush. She could feel the callus lining them, rough, but not unpleasant, and the heat of her own breath reflected back at her, and promptly shut up.
His hand dropped to the locket, fingers brushing hers as he pressed them closed around the oval pendant, and while she could understand the command of keep it, especially where the repentant nature of the locket's being there in the first place was concerned, the neutral softness in what she could make out of his expression didn't seem to match. It was like he was refusing her attempts to give back a gift, not insisting she keep the symbol of her wrongs in place.
Before she could attempt pressing again he'd turned back, ducking his head to pass through the open doorway of one of the rooms. Forced to follow or be left in the hall, Whitney stepped across the threshold, her eyes lifting to peer inside.
Her entire body rattled with the force of the hitch in her pulse.
It was the bedroom; the one that had so obviously belonged to a child. The one, she understood now, had once been his.
The windows were still open, gauzy white curtains wafting gently with each faint whisper of air, yet this was the only thing that felt unchanged. One of the dresser drawers had been left askew, offering a peek at the clothes folded in neat layers within, and a pair of sneakers had been left at the end of the twin bed, the white toes scuffed and dirt-smeared, the fire-engine red canvas dulled by dust. Toys, old long before they had come to live there, chipped and well-loved and a little bedraggled. Her eyes traveled over the room, over little details that had seemed so sinister before, and she felt none of the menace, none of the thick, oppressive anger. She just felt overwhelmingly sad.
Jason had taken an immediate left, crossing to the corner where a squat little bookshelf stood. Picture books and light chapter books littered the shelves, interspersed by tiny toy cars and animal figurines, as though the scene of some epic saga of play had been interrupted before its finale. But this wasn't what she was meant see.
At the forefront of the topmost shelf stood the trophies; a neat little row of them, dust-choked and festooned with cobwebs, and all – every single one of them – for archery.
"Oh, how cool," she murmured, bending down to get a closer look and blowing gently to dislodge some of the grime coating the name plates. They were just cheap summer camp awards, listing the date and not much else, but there were at least ten of them, indicating he must have won at least two competitions every year.
She had formulated the question based on what she knew of him, assuming he had been more outdoorsy as a kid than others might have been. Learning difficulties aside, he simply didn't strike her as having been the kind to while away inside if he had another option. Archery actually made a lot of sense. It was a solitary sport, something he could practice and excel at alone, and would explain at least some of how he had come to be such an efficient killer. He would have perfected his sense of aim long before he would have had to rely on it.
She straightened, remarking: "These are all for first place." He shrugged, as if to say it was no big deal, which she refused to let stand. "You must be really good."
Another shrug, but she thought there might be something bashful in the way his eyes dropped to the floor, and she felt a warm rush of fondness.
Something at the corner of her periphery caught her attention; a dark spot perched atop the bed's lumpy old pillow. Inexplicably she felt her feet begin to move, carrying her toward it. As soon as she drew near enough to distinguish the shape of the teddy bear she experienced a sudden jolt of deja vu.
She remembered the bear, ragged from love, remembered that when she had last looked in this room it had been sitting on the bed itself, propped against the headboard, not on the pillow. Did Jason still sleep here? The bed itself was in a state of wrinkled order, as though someone had tried to make it up without quite knowing how, yet it alone was absent the healthy layer of dust which coated the rest of the room, which suggested that he might.
The seam along one side of the bear's body had pulled loose, bleeding stuffing gone yellow with age, and one button eye was missing. It had the look of something handled often, and she was left wondering whether he still held it throughout the night, whether for comfort or out of habit. The thought made her heart squeeze.
Whitney reached almost without thinking before snatching back her hand as if in reaction to being bitten by a rattlesnake. She had touched enough of his things without asking already and did not need to do so again. When she looked up it was to find Jason observing her from where he stood at the end of the little bed. For a moment she worried she had crossed a line of some kind, but he appeared more curious than bothered, his posture was loose and relaxed.
"May I?" she asked, pointing to the bear.
He made an odd motion, half nodding while hunching his shoulders as if an accompanying shrug had stalled halfway through, and she took careful note of it. He didn't feel protective enough to tell her no, but she should tread gently.
Gingerly she scooped up the plush animal, cupping a hand over the gash in its side to keep the stuffing from spilling out. Overall, it was in remarkably good shape. The fabric was a bit matted and a bit dirty, but it was neither patchy nor worn thin, and the rest of the seams were holding strong. The tear appeared to have been the result of snagging on something rather than the stitches themselves giving way.
Cradling the bear in her hands, she moved around the bed to where he waited, watching closely as she fingered the edges of the torn seam.
"I could probably fix this," she said, before hesitating.
Maybe he wouldn't want her to. Maybe it was enough just having her touch it, let alone mauling it with a needle. Yet while she had almost expected refusal, he seemed to straighten as if perking up at the sight or smell of something good.
"If you want?"
His eyes lit up like stars. He had to be beaming behind his mask, for he was radiating hope and elation brilliant enough to be near blinding. The heart that had squeezed moments ago now ached, so full of emotion that it felt as though her rib cage might be too narrow to contain it.
It took a little while to find the right tools with which to perform said mending job, but in the end Whitney sat under the light in her corner with what had to be the world's smallest and most practical sewing kit housed in an old cookie tin.
The thread was the heavy-duty kind made for serious business patch-jobs, which made sense considering the original owner had been the mother of a young boy who had likely been quite active and quite prone to torn clothing, and was more than adequate for fixing up a wounded teddy bear. She used a neat, tidy overhand stitch to pinch and hold the two raw edges together, routinely poking stuffing back inside. Jason hovered the entire time, crouched closer than usual and following every pass of the needle as though it were piercing through actual flesh in a show of concern that was utterly involuntary, and absolutely one of the most adorable things she'd ever seen. It seemed a shame that no one else ever would. No one else would ever know that the big bad wolf of Crystal Lake was such a puppy at heart.
"There we go," she proclaimed once finished, and snipped off the leftover thread with the tiny pair of scissors from the tin. It no longer looked quite so sad now that its insides weren't in constant peril of leaving its body, but there was still something missing.
Reaching into the duffle of clothes, she rifled about for a moment before extracting the oversized men's plaid shirt that she'd managed to wash (sort of) in the bathroom sink. With a deft flash of scissors, she freed one of the buttons and affixed it to the empty space left by the bear's missing eye. The buttons didn't match, but not matching was a far cry from being completely lopsided, wasn't it?
She offered the bear with a quiet "here," and there was a weight to Jason's silence as he reached to take it, an almost tentative care. Then he was cradling the toy in his great hands, a little less ragged than it had been, staring down at it with something that was disbelief and wonder and yet neither and both all at once, as if she had just returned a piece of his childhood to him – one that had been stolen away far before its time.
His eyes rose to hers, liquid and a bit over bright, and he didn't need words. She read the gratitude there as clear as if written ink to paper or carved in stone. It had been such a small thing, a small act, but she had been alive long enough – had spent enough time looking through the lens of adulthood – to know that more often than not it was the smallest of things that tended to hold the most weight. Little kindnesses were indicators of thoughtfulness far greater than the actions themselves. While it was nowhere near exact, she knew what it was to feel like one's childhood had gone too soon, and she knew what it was to feel the simple joy of it again just for a moment.
Smiling, Whitney put the sewing things back in the tin, her eyes lingering on the scissors. They were tiny but they were sharp as only the very best sewing scissors were, and it did not escape her in that moment that at one point she would have tried to keep them, to slip them away out of sight somewhere to use later – whether to pick a lock or gouge a hand or an eye. Nor did it escape her that that point had not been all that long ago. Her eyes lingered, but her fingers did not.
After a moment, she popped the lid firmly into place and added the kit to the steadily growing piles on and around her crate.
Funny how quickly things could change.
Her eyes flicked to the wall where her tallies stood in crooked rows. She was still dutifully adding one with every sunrise, but the act had become more routine than a method of maintaining sanity. There were so many of them now. But when one remembered that each mark counted for a single day, there weren't that many at all. Not quite a month. Not that much time, in the grand scheme of things, yet it felt as though she had been here for far longer. Maybe that was how time had felt in less advanced times, when the hours and what they ruled were less important than the seasons, when time wasn't spent and used like so much cold currency. Or maybe not.
There was something grounding about time lived this way. For maybe the first time since she had been little she no longer felt as though she was constantly chasing after the time she was losing as quickly as she caught it. How much of that, she wondered, was because – just like when she'd been little – she had been removed from responsibilities?
It was weird...she knew what she should want: to be back home with Mom, with Mike (ignoring the fact that Mike no longer existed to be with). With her textbooks and her looming exams and all the terrifying possibilities of a future that looked more like a shapeless void of uncertainty and fear than anything else when she tried looking into it. Still, it was her life, whatever its troubles. Yet sometimes the thought of returning to it brought her within a hair's breadth of breaking out in a cold sweat.
She didn't know what she wanted anymore. Because if she could just stay in this slice of reality where time slowed down she could pretend that in some other part of the state the woman that had raised her and loved her wasn't slowly withering away.
She knew that wasn't how time, or life, worked, just as she knew that pretending was a way of exerting control over something she had never had control over. Regardless of what the outcome might be, she could still ask to go. She could explain to Jason that she wanted to go home to her dying mother – not counting how icky and even manipulative that piece of truth might have felt coming out of her mouth. She could promise to come back, and even mean it. But it was easier to remain in a state of perceived powerlessness than it was to make another choice when all roads at the end of that choice led to watching her mom die.
Jason was still staring down at the stuffed bear in his hands, running a fingertip over the rounded crest of an ear that looked as though it had been chewed on the regular. Which was weirdly and completely endearing.
Whitney knew that the idea of repentance wasn't something that should be weighing on her. For all the missteps she may have made, at the time she hadn't known she had been trespassing, hadn't known that she was doing any more than treading ground that had seen more than its share of suffering. Whatever wrong she had done, it hadn't been done with intent or with malice. And whatever wrong she had done, he had paid her back in punishment far beyond what had been earned. Still, she was pleased that she had been able to do something – even just this small something – for a person that had seen so much of the darker parts of life.
Where once she had merely wondered, now she knew. Kindness was the way to fixing whatever was broken in this little sliver of the world, not violence, not a show of power.
Just simple kindness, and maybe a light dash of hope.
~/~
Day 31
He hadn't been doing anything out of the ordinary; just sitting at the workbench cleaning the blade of the machete with mineral oil. Yet for some reason, everything about it was just…
She'd had to stop reading. They were currently about a third of the way into a murder mystery set on a train in the 1920s, very a 'la Murder on the Orient Express although with vastly different characters and – or so she suspected – a vastly different ending. It was an engaging book, and they were at a good part, but her eyes had kept straying from the page, lingering on the way his hands moved as he polished the metal using long, smooth strokes with the cloth. After several minutes spent tripping over her tongue she just gave up, because there was just no point. She had had to cover up the signs of her idiocy by downing half a jug of water when he'd looked up from his work, evidently wondering what was wrong.
She'd blamed a scratchy throat. Or allergies. She didn't actually remember now. Just like she didn't remember what had happened in the last couple pages she had been attempting to get through.
Ugh.
Jason had gone back to his task, holding the blade close to his face and looking down the length of it, turning it this way and that as if looking for nicks or scratches that needed tending.
It was his hands, she thought. She'd always had a bit of a thing for nice hands, and Jason's were, even if they were also gigantic. And it was how he used them, the care and the focus with which he treated the weapon that was almost as much a part of him as his mask was – the same care and focus with which he did pretty much everything.
Whitney was a firm believer that every teen went through a phase where they were simply too mature for all the nonsense in the world. Sometimes it lasted years, and sometimes only a couple months, but every person went through it: the time where dirty jokes were nothing but crass and gauche, and why did everything have to be about sex. God. And then once that phase ran its course, every single person reverted to the maturity level of a twelve-year-old boy. Where they then stayed.
As far as her experience with people went, this was the way of it. She was no exception.
Everything was about sex. How the hell else would babies happen as often as they did? Because better sense would always be subject to the rule of the tyrant Biology. Capitol B.
That said, it was not rocket science to understand why her brain made the leap to someone who treated inanimate objects with such meticulous attention treating a bed partner just as attentively. Not that that was what she wanted.
Oh, who was she kidding? When her daydreams kept playing host to the near-rabid curiosity as to what her one-time captor might look like without all those layers of clothes it was a little pointless to pretend, wasn't it?
Yeah.
Well, she was in it now. Might as well get whatever joy she could out of it.
She grabbed an open package of cookies to have something to do with her hands and chewed at the corner of one. They were the cheap, generic brand sandwich kind with the chemical-sweet frosting – which said that either the people he'd relieved of them were either young or had specific tastes – but so far she'd had no problem getting through half of them. It was a pretty pathetic cover, and there was nothing surreptitious about the way she was eyeballing him over the food, but it was still better than just sitting there staring at him with her mouth open like a fish. Because she probably would have, given the chance. It wouldn't have been the first time.
She kept thinking back to what it had felt like to be pressed up against him, his hand against her side and his back against her cheek. Did so almost to the point of it becoming obsessive. She kept remembering how the muscle had bunched beneath his coat, proving that whatever bulk he had was his and not the result of padded clothing.
The remembering made her somewhat giddy, which in turn made her feel absurd, and simultaneously unsure whether she should be ashamed of herself or just fucking laugh. Especially when she repeatedly caught herself studying his booted feet and wondering with a tangled mix of curiosity and concern whether it was true what people said about the correlation between foot size and the size of…other extremities.
Oh, yes. She was in it now.
So many of the stories painted him as some vengeful, bloody patron saint pitted against the demons of premarital sex, or just sex in general. Whitney didn't think that was the case. His mother had been the one to pin that crime on the counselors that had let him drown, condemning them as having been too busy screwing one another to properly watch the children in their charge. The girl that had survived the incident those years ago had reported that Pamela had even said as much – loudly and somewhat erratically through her tears. The poor woman.
It was just a theory – though one she would have put serious money on – but she didn't think Jason knew enough about sex to care whether the kids he slaughtered were boning or not. He killed them because they came onto his land, not because they drank or smoked or fucked, or anything else. They were there. That was offense enough. Of course she had no real evidence to support it, after all just because a man didn't make a pass at her didn't by default make him ignorant, or gay. But she just...she had a feeling. He looked at her sometimes when she knew the expression on her own silly face would have been enough of a hint for most guys to realize she was thinking about what they looked like with their shirt off, but the connection just wasn't there. He didn't see it, and it wasn't because he was slow.
Just like he didn't have the social context to make him an overly-macho asshole afraid of his own emotions, he didn't have the context to understand human mating behavior – which she termed thus only because she couldn't necessarily assume he didn't understand it where animals were concerned. It was possible that if she'd been a bear or a finch he'd be able to tell. But she was a person, and people were stupid, stupid complicated, and never more so (or weirdly less so) then where relationships were concerned. And so much of that came down to things that were socially constructed and had very little to do with the actual act and the possible result of children. Especially for women.
Whether her theory was right or not, she was grateful beyond all reason that he didn't seem to notice her being her creep self. She could wallow in her own overactive hormones in peace without the indignity of him knowing.
Chewing her cookie, she followed the path of his hand as he made another pass with the cloth. She would have sworn there was something almost loving in the way he touched it, meticulous and gentle. His fingertips followed the subtle curve of the blade with the same devotion she had once shown once Mike's biceps. Not to mention other things.
It was that easy. Her brain took the image and ran with it like a crazed cheetah on crack.
He was lying on his back atop her too-small striped mattress, coat and shirt gone – sacrificed to some other plain of existence – and she was straddling his hips, running her fingers over the naked plains of his stomach. He wouldn't be cut like a gym rat, but like an athlete, like a farmer, like a man who used his body the way it had been made by nature to be used. She would lower her mouth to follow the path her hands made with her lips until all that muscle flexed and strained, until those lovely steely eyes of his became dark with the same desperate fever she felt coiling deep in her belly. Not that he would ever let her do such a thing. Not unless she utilized those manacles, maybe.
Oh, fucking hell.
She felt the tell-tale liquid rush between her thighs, and it was completely her own fault but damn if she didn't all but throw the package of cookies as if they'd bitten her.
Stupid cookies.
Stupid goddamn human brain and its stupid susceptibility to such ridiculous fucking fantasies.
Decisively she got to her feet, determined to shake it off.
There was no jangle of chain when she stepped from the mattress onto the dirt. He had taken to keeping her unbound pretty much whenever he was within the same vicinity, which was most of the time now, and which made it possible for her to get up and walk around the space when she wanted to so long as she stuck to the main big room. He had only needed to shoo her away from one of the branching tunnels once for her to get the message, but she got the impression it was more a matter of safety than one of control, since he had also taken to letting her wander almost completely out of sight when out in the woods now. She had kept her word not to try another solo sprinting expedition, and he trusted her to come back.
It was dangerous, that trust. It had the unfortunate side-effect of making her weirdly hopeful, which was all kinds of dumb. She had no business hoping. There was no hope of anything with this man. What was there to hope for with someone who had no concept of relationships? She could be his friend, although even that was debatable when her ovaries kept screeching like they were – the wanton hussies. But what could come of that, really? At some point this would have to end, wouldn't it? And then what?
At the sound of movement Jason looked up from the machete in his lap, cocking his head in a way that somehow managed to convey concern in addition to curiosity.
She hadn't really noticed before, but in that exact moment she became aware just how extremely attuned they were to one another. He could tell just from the way she stood up that she was agitated, and she could tell just from the way he moved his head that he had sensed it. In other people she might have called that chemistry.
Her laugh caught her by surprise. It left her in a wheezing bark which she quickly masked with a cough.
"Just needed to get up for a minute," she said, waving an airy hand as she lifted her arms above her head and stretched.
He regarded her steadily, and for the space of an instant she was positive he was fully aware that she was full of shit. Part of her hoped he'd call her on it, somehow. Put down the machete, stand up, and do…something. She didn't know what. The only things she could think of him doing were things he would in no way ever do, which wasn't helping her bullshit face at all.
Finally he gave her an infinitesimal nod and lowered his gaze back to the blade, allowing her to let out a breath and try to will her pulse into calming down.
She continued to stretch, channeling the energy into activity as best she could, all while mulling over the tiny revelation she'd just had.
Whitney had thought she knew what chemistry was. Books and movies all touted it as this electric, burning force between people, and she'd determined this was the natural exaggeration of fiction. Other women tended to spout this same story, talking of a spark or some bright, tingling connection. But when she had been drawn to boys before it had been due to what she supposed were the usual kinds of things; a nice smile, interesting conversation, humor, height, and so on. Mike had had all of these things and more, which was why she'd gotten involved with him to begin with. Things with him had been easy, comfortable, more so than with any other guy she'd dated – a comfort that had seemed unearned, but that had been so darn nice that she had leaned all the way into it. What was that if not chemistry?
Mike had been average in a number of ways, she had come to realize: average height, average built, average – if pleasant – looks, average smarts, average goals. Her kind of average, she'd thought, because that was all she had wanted. She didn't need something electric and exciting, just something stable, something real. It had never occurred to her that average might not suit her the way she thought it would, or that normal might chafe when hard times came knocking.
Mike had been average down to the blood in his veins, down to the core. It was that very comfortable normalcy that had kept him in the state of just post-college stagnation while she was spending her days inside a crucible being reshaped right next to him. It hadn't been his fault, or hers. It had just happened, the way life did.
She was not the same girl she had been two years ago. Hell, she wasn't the same girl she had been a month ago, and even discounting the trauma and strangeness of it all there was no way she would have been able to stay with Mike for much longer. Whether his kind of average had been her kind once, it hadn't been any more. And it sure as shit wasn't now. As it turned out, her kind of average wasn't average at all.
Her eyes slid almost reflexively to Jason, and her heart skipped a half frantic beat when she found him looking at her – his gaze glittering out at her from the dual layers of dark provided by the corner shadows and those from the mask. Her very skin seemed to wake up and pay attention, as though just the look had power she had only ever associated with touch.
And he wasn't even looking at her like that. He was just looking at her, probably because she was acting weird.
Yet she still felt her insides tremble as though all the little butterflies that lived there were rip-roaring drunk and all kinds of eager to throw themselves at the nearest available behemoth of a man.
She hereby swallowed all of the trash she had ever talked about those books and movies in the past. Turns out they weren't just selling false expectations after all. Who knew? Too bad none of them had had any advice on what to do when one sparked with a serial killer.
Actually, she was pretty sure there were a couple that did, but they were nothing she wanted anything to do with. Because she was nothing like those women that fawned over evil people, who wrote them fan letters and married them while they were serving out life sentences in jail. She'd take her serial killer over those garbage humans, thank you very much.
God, listen to her: her serial killer.
Jason had gone back to work on the machete, apparently accepting that she was just in a strange mood (which shouldn't have been endearing but kind of was), flipping the blade over and administering more of the mineral oil to the other side of the metal. It was obscene, though it really wasn't, and she had to bite into the inside of her cheek to keep from snorting.
Bending to scoop up a passing rat, Whitney cuddled the little beast to her face.
"Help," she whispered into its fur.
A tiny paw pressed against her nose, a whiskered nose sniffing gently at her closed eyelid. She laughed, partly because it tickled, but also at the sheer hilarity of the situation. She just needed a minute or two. All too soon she'd be right back where she was, objectifying the man that had almost murdered her like the happy nutball she was.
Oh well. There were, in fact, far worse things.
NOTES:
FINALLY - we've reached the month mark. Jesus christ I wasn't sure I was going to make it.
I can fairly confidently say I will not be filling up the film canon timeline of six weeks. I don't know the specifics, but I know we're not far off from the latter three quarters of the film events.
I just want to take a minute to share a bit of amusement at myself: usually dialogue is very difficult for me to write, which is why I thought this story - with Jason's particular proclivity toward not talking (whatever the reason) - would be easier than others I've written. HAH. Think again. I cannot tell you how difficult it is to write one-sided dialogue that does anything. I feel very much like Whitney probably does...like, how do formulate questions that can be non-verbally answered in a way that makes sense and that gets us anywhere? So it feels weird and stunted, but it kind of should? For as difficult as I find it sometimes, I didn't realize how heavily I lean on it most of the time, especially where building relationships are concerned. Think about it, we humans rely a lot on talking to figure shit out. I think a lot of why this character dynamic works is because of Jason's being something of a social blank-slate. Maybe I'm wrong.
On that note, what are your theories as to why Jason doesn't talk? Do you think it's a choice? Or that it's psychosomatic? Personally I think he's physically incapable of it, but what do you think?
It's also really hard to write this kind of naivety in a character. I don't mean it's hard writing a dude being the innocent one, I mean literal, hardcore ignorance of certain behaviors. Whitney's theory is bascially my own. If we considering where and when she grew up, it's likely Pamela was pretty conservative, and if she was a single mother and carried the stigma of that that still existed pretty heavily in the 70s and 80s, and add to that having a kid that's a little off...I don't imagine she got around to the birds and the bees talk. If she ever would have. Anyway. I know the whole "Jason hates sex" is a thing, but I don't really subscribe to it, personally. He never seems more or less apathetic or pissed about people that are screwing versus people that aren't. He treats everybody pretty much the same. It's one of the reasons I like him so much.
And as Whitney says: we're in it now, folks!
Thank you all so much for the love. I got several really lovely comments from some awesome people last chapter, and it really made my life a bit brighter. So, truly, thank you!
Until next time!