THE SHERIFF
Steven stared at the charred, broken remains of the farmhouse and wondered what the hell he was doing here.
The truth of it was, he didn't know. Something had drawn him back, despite the snowstorm that had blown through a few days ago, covering everything in a fresh layer of powdery white hell.
Logically, he knew that the danger of discovery had passed; the TV crews had packed up and gone chasing after the newest disaster over a week ago. And the girl, Dasvidanya – fucking weird name - had left town several days ago. Steven was in the clear. He, like his father before him, had done a very good job of covering his tracks. Journalists and investigators had gone digging for information, as they are wont to do, and they had found nothing. No one had linked Steven to the drowning that had happened at Camp Crystal Lake over twenty years ago.
So what the hell was he doing here?
Why was he sitting in his cruiser outside of Jason Voorhees's house at nine o'clock in the morning on a Saturday?
And why did he feel like he was being watched?
He looked around, scanning the woods as the fine hairs on the back of his neck stood up.
Bullshit. There was no fucking way anyone else was out here. It was still snowing lightly, and really fucking freezing, and he would have seen evidence of another person nearby. Car tracks. Muddied snow. Footprints, at the very least.
No one else was around.
Which meant that no one else would be able to see Sheriff Price sneaking down into the mine beneath the old Voorhees house at nine o'clock in the morning on a Saturday.
Steven sighed, set down his thermos, grabbed his hat, and stepped out of the car. The wind immediately sucked away his body heat, seeping down through his winter coat and infecting him with the bitter cold. He cursed under his breath as he made his way quickly to the house, to where the entrance to the mine had been cordoned off with police tape.
They had explored it as far as they could. Which was not very far, to be honest. They'd had to work for over an hour, digging out the collapsed passageway beneath the house, in order to get to the girl. And, after they'd rescued her, they'd found that the other three tunnels leading from the main area, further down into the mine, had also collapsed.
At the time, Steven hadn't thought much of that.
Now, however, as he stepped around the caution tape and eased himself down into the darkness, he marveled at the coincidence of it. Coalmines were built to last, built to hold up against time and the elements and even the occasional earthquake or explosion. The fact that the remaining tunnels had collapsed in on themselves during the blast just seemed awfully… convenient.
He turned on his flashlight as he went, sidestepping piles of rock and debris, and made his way slowly down the passage until it opened up into the main cavern, where he could stand up straight. The old mine lamps were dead. The area would have been dark, but the mine windows let in a faint haze of gray light. Enough to see by, but not enough to investigate by.
Steven stepped around an overturned workbench, using his flashlight to guide him across the gritty cement floor. Other than the upended table, the area was remarkably clean and well organized. Tools and equipment were lined up neatly on the remaining bench, along with a hotplate and several crates of canned food. A small collection of unwashed silverware still sat in the utility sink.
He followed the beam of his flashlight across the room, over to the big, cast iron stove that sat at the foot of the little bed, in the far corner. He huffed in grim amusement; at least that bastard had been decent enough to try and keep the girl from freezing to death.
Her screams echoed in his memory, and he stopped at the little bed and stared down at the old, worn mattress.
Oh, Christ.
Jesus fucking Christ.
The guilt hit him all at once, slammed into him like an avalanche, crashing and tumbling and pulling him under. He nearly fell to his knees as the weight of it dropped on his shoulders.
God help him.
Tracey was right.
He had let this happen.
How many people had suffered? How many people had died because Steven couldn't face his past?
He reached out, half-blind with grief and shame, and sat down on the small bed, holding his head in his hands as he fought back the tears. It was as if he'd been storing it all deep inside him, and the seal had finally cracked, the dam had finally broken, and now he was here, in the home of a serial killer that he had helped create, and all the souls of his victims had come screaming forth to drag him down to Hell.
He could feel them, like a physical presence closing in on him, silent and predatory and utterly merciless.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.
That wasn't a ghost.
He lifted his head.
Jason Voorhees stood before him, battered and burned and covered in blood and ash. His hockey mask was cracked and stained and chipped along one edge. His eyes were blue as the heart of a fire.
And, dear God, they burned.
Steven opened his mouth to speak, but before he could get a word out, Voorhees had him by the throat. He lifted Steven off the ground as if he weighed nothing, and then he tossed him. Like a ragdoll.
Steven went flying. He landed on the opposite side of the room, catching himself on a crate full of old rope and twine, and then tumbling with it. He started to stand, to turn and run, and in a flash, Voorhees was in front of him, those blazing eyes boring into hi, with seething, immeasurable fury.
Again, Jason clamped his hands around Steven's neck and lifted him off the ground, but this time, instead of throwing him, Jason just slammed him back against a wall of rough-hewn stone.
Pain exploded in the back of his head, and then spread like napalm, burning through his body and down into his lungs. He tried to break the chokehold, the way he'd been taught at the academy, but his strength had abandoned him. He couldn't fight this, not with a lifetime of guilt weighing down his soul and sucking the life out of him.
Jason Voorhees was fury incarnate. He was judgment. He was a force of nature.
He was Death itself, come back from the grave to take Steven's soul.
And Steven couldn't fight that.
He didn't deserve to live.
The pain began to fade, and Steven knew instinctively what that meant.
It meant that he was dying.
In a way, it made a twisted sort of sense. He would die at the hands of a man he thought he had killed a long time ago. The boy he had tormented, taunted, and reviled. The boy he'd seen thrashing helplessly in the dark water of the lake until the fight had gone out of him, and he'd stopped struggling, and his pale form had slipped beneath the glassy, rippling surface.
Now it was time for Steven to stop struggling. His hands stilled, no longer clawing at Jason's arms. His legs gave out, no longer supporting him. He stopped moving entirely, and he waited for the end.
The pressure around his neck disappeared.
Instinct took over, his lungs sucking in a heaving gasp of bitter cold air. He collapsed to the floor, coughing so violently he thought he would be ill.
When he could finally see straight again, he looked up and found Jason standing just out of arm's reach, watching him, utterly still.
"You…" his voice cracked, and another fit of coughing seized him. "It was you."
Jason didn't move, he didn't even blink.
Steven struggled to stand, using the wall to support him as he eased his body weight back onto his legs.
When he was upright again, he paused for just long enough to catch his breath.
Then he went for his gun. It wasn't there.
He looked up to find Voorhees holding the pistol in his left hand, pointed at the ground.
"What… what do you want?" Steven rasped, frantically searching the room for something to use as a weapon.
A soft growl stilled him, drawing his gaze back to the hulking shadow before him. He squinted in the dim light, and realized that Jason was holding something in his right hand.
A… rag? A bloodstained scrap of cloth, coated in a layer of ash. Voorhees held it up for Steven.
"I don't understand," he said.
Another low growl. The pistol in Jason's left hand wasn't aimed at him, but Steven felt the threat of it growing with every passing second.
"Look, I'm…" he hesitated. Apologizing? Now? After everything that had happened? After what Steven had done?
He couldn't do it. Words weren't enough.
"Just tell me what you want, and I'll give it to you." He'd already given up his will to live; what else could Jason possibly want?
Voorhees extended his right hand and shook the rag a bit.
"I... I'm sorry, I don't know what that is."
Blue eyes narrowed dangerously. Without once moving his gaze from Steven, Jason dropped the rag and backed up a few steps, reached over and grabbed a small lantern from a crate on the floor and switched it on.
Steven might have thought that more light would lessen the aura of otherworldly dread that surrounded Jason.
He was wrong.
If anything, Jason became more terrifying. More real. More visceral.
Voorhees set the lantern on the ground between them, next to the rag, and then he opened the grate on the cast iron stove and pulled out a small piece of charred wood.
He lifted the gun and pointed it directly at Steven's heart. The warning was implicit. Move and he would die.
And then Jason knelt on the ground and wrote three words in big, angry black letters.
WHERE IS SHE
There was absolutely no question of whom he meant.
The only question was what Steven was willing to do to settle his debt to Jason and atone for the wrongs he had done. He'd been damned once, already; this might damn him all over again. Would he tell Jason where Dasvidanya was?
The fact that he hesitated damned him all the more.
"I don't know," he said.
Steven's heart froze at the look Jason gave him at that moment.
"She… she's gone," Steven whispered. God help him. "Back to her hometown, somewhere... somewhere in Georgia."
WHEN
"Three… ah, three or four days ago? She… one of the doctors drove her to the airport."
Jason went very still. It was like seeing a mushroom cloud in the distance, even though you hadn't yet heard the explosion. It as like the quiet before the storm.
Steven braced himself, closing his eyes and lowering his head as he waited for the crest to break over him.
Silence.
Stillness.
Darkness.
When he finally gathered enough courage to open his eyes, Jason was gone.