Author's Notes:
If it's unclear, this story takes place several years after the events of Friday the 13th Part VII - The New Blood. I dismiss Part VIII as a nightmare that Renny had as opposed to something that actually happened, and Part IX is simply nonsense that ought not exist. How Jason managed to return from the lake after Tina Shepard's father dragged him down at the denouement of Part VII and how he got back his mask will all be explained in due time. I've done the best I could putting together the timeline from the original 7 films and tried to explain the occasional disparities among them. Most of all, I am trying to keep this true to the marvellous Jason Voorhees and his legend.
Jayne is based upon a young woman I know very well, and what brought the character to Camp Crystal Lake all really happened to one person. Her life story is used with her full and enthusiastic permission.
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l'Enfer C'est les Autres
Chapter IV: Evensong
Almost three miles away from where five reckless teenagers had just paid the ultimate price for their unwise choice of hunting locations and irresponsible behaviour, at the opposite end of the wooded, lakefront property that once was a children's summer camp, Jayne could feel the exhaustion of her several days of driving and sleeping in the cramped front seat of the tiny hatchback tugging upon her, trying to pull her under. Not having realised at any point since her arrival at Crystal Lake that she was not the only person there, she remained blissfully unaware of the absolute carnage so near to her neat little campsite or that she had already been spotted by the architect of those gruesome deaths.
"I'll just finish the chapter, then it's bedtime," she reassured her mutinous eyelids that kept trying to fall closed as she continued reading.
It only took her a few more minutes of fighting her still-insubordinate eyelids to reach the end of the chapter, and even though she would have preferred to continue reading, she was true to her promise to them - truly, they forced her to keep her promise by being all but impossible to keep open. Closing the book with a quiet thump, she balanced it upon the armrest behind her elbow and gripped the armrests tightly to push her stiff body up out of the chair. To her alarm, the momentum sent her staggering forward a pace, but through a rapid series of minuscule muscle movements and adjustments, Jayne managed to catch her balance before falling face-first into the dying fire.
Bemoaning the clumsiness her arthritis coupled with stiff, aching muscles caused while staring wide-eyed into the campfire into which she just came so close to stumbling and falling, she breathlessly gasped "Oh, hellfuck!" in absolute shock.
That was too damned close for comfort.
Was there nothing she could do right?
And what else was going to go wrong before whatever forces control existence finally tired of their weary plaything, finally decided they were bored of toying with her, finally had their fill of her misery upon which they supped voraciously as if her agony, both of the emotional and physical sort, were a delicacy - and she feared that their appetite for her suffering might never be sated - before they finally cast her aside and allowed her to tumble into the blessed, black oblivion and nothingness that awaits after life is extinguished?
At least she hoped only blackness and oblivion came after death. Reincarnation terrified her, because the thought of having to endure yet another lifetime where she could be forced to pay for her mistakes in this one was outright nauseating. Jayne had no hope that another life would be anything but being forced to re-enter the ring, flung to the mat and compelled to go another round with the awful twins, agony and despair, made to fight even though she would not … indeed, could not win. The concept of an afterlife was not any more comforting, even if she were destined to some unearthly paradise constructed along the lines of what Christians call "Heaven" (which seemed extremely unlikely to Jayne - if there were a supreme deity out there, it appeared to take pleasure in the tortures she endured; if it did not enjoy her suffering, it would not force so much upon her, right? So, obviously, it would not send someone it delighted in tormenting to Paradise, she reasoned), if she retained anything of herself once there, if she had any memories from this current existence, then Heaven would be Hell. And, if those "places" truly exist, she must be bound for the latter; nothing else made sense. So she hoped that any religions with an afterlife were wrong.
To be trapped with the memories of everything that had happened to her, everything that had been done to her, and all the pain she had endured, for all eternity? Her fear of that was the only thing that had prevented her from taking her life before now. But Jayne knew that the end was rushing ever closer, that her body could not sustain life much longer, not even with all of the medications meant to keep her organs functioning and tame her immune system's drive to destroy, and she dreaded the very likely possibility of her dying turning into one last drawn-out period of prolonged agonies. All she wanted was for her suffering to end.
Jayne's mind drifted to the main subject of the tales that had brought her to Camp Crystal Lake - the protagonist, if that were the proper term for such a figure, for a serial killer, a revenant, a creature that was once a deformed little boy who died by drowning on his eleventh birthday but came back, only to die again and again, over and over, and yet somehow to be forever denied the peace and finality that is supposed to go along with death. A shudder of horror wracked her skinny frame.
Were there many fates much worse than Jason Voorhees', were those tales true?
She did not want to try to imagine any such thing. In a way, she felt relieved that nothing she had seen in the abandoned camp implied that there was any truth to the story that Jason had ever been resurrected after he drowned as a child - such was not a fate she would wish upon anyone - even though she had made the long, strenuous and uncomfortable drive to New Jersey in hope of finding that the stories of the masked murderer who haunted the forest were true so that she could be his next victim. To be unable to die and stay dead forever was the worst thing her fertile imagination could conceive.
Just as she had sat too still and for too long at the end of the dock, she knew she had sat too still and for too long in the folding camp chair before the fire while reading, and she heaved a weary sigh of frustrated resignation before turning to pick up the book and bring it back under the tarp to rejoin its siblings in their stack. Spending a couple hours sitting by a campfire reading should not be a dangerous activity, and that she had come so close to injury thereby was a slap in the face, more than merely disappointing, proof that there was something wrong with her - and the something that so undeniably was wrong with her was not just her physical ailments. They were a symptom, not the underlying cause, of that she felt absolutely certain. All Jayne really wanted to do was to curl up in her blankets and sleep, but she knew she should get changed and that she had to take her medications. Honestly, she was aware that she should eat something, as well, but her previously nonexistent appetite had diminished even further thanks to her little stumble. Even though her vehicle was only a few yards away from the tarp, she picked up her walking stick to use in aiding her balance as she limped over to Rodney.
She sighed again when she opened the hatchback and realised that her bag of clothes was buried at the very bottom of the pile of camping gear and the bits of potentially useful detritus she retained from the life she had abandoned.
"Fuck it, I'll just sleep in my clothes tonight," she muttered under her breath, her irritation mounting.
Maybe she would find her missing shovel while rummaging around in there in the morning, she thought, searching for something positive upon which she could focus just as her therapists always encouraged her to do, although she did not have much hope of it showing up. She could swear that she had stabbed the shovel into the dirt beside the fire pit after she finished constructing it and left it there before she left her campsite in search of the infamous, supposedly cursed lake.
Although she had given up on digging out her bag of clothes, she decided to grab the camping shower she had picked up on a whim for just in case her trip's purpose took longer than she anticipated to effect, along with her sneakers. The terrain here was easier, flatter than she had been expecting ("You really ought to've checked a topographical map before heading out, Jaynie-bug," she could almost hear her father chiding her. "It's important to prepare oneself as thoroughly as possible for everything one intends to do - and I know you hate hearing it, but you know that goes double for you, fragile li'l bug that you are."), so her old tennies should suffice, and they were much more comfortable than the jungle boots. Tying the frayed ends of the laces together in a loop that would be easy to unknot even with her frustratingly stiff and shaky fingers, she hung the pair of black converse lo-tops over her shoulder, freeing one hand to grip the walking stick. She did not particularly want to, but she resigned herself to having to make a second trip to the car to grab one of her water jugs.
Once she had brought everything she needed back to the tarp and locked up the car (she doubted anyone was around to steal from it, but her shovel did seem to be missing, so she felt the need to be cautious), Jayne plopped down beside her pile of blankets and pulled the lockbox where she kept her pill bottles out from beneath them. She only had to take out five of the bottles at night as opposed to eight in the morning, so twisting off the caps and replacing them was slightly less of a chore, at least.
Finally finished with her nightly routine, she went to bank the fire in its pit, not wanting to be responsible for a disaster should any of the dead leaves picked up by the night breeze float through the flames and carry them into the dry underbrush that grew so thickly around the old camp, then she retreated back to the tarp. Spreading out the blankets then wrapping them around herself, she curled up in a ball and sleep claimed her almost immediately.
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At the same time, while Jayne was pulling the largest of the partially burnt limbs out of the fire and spreading a layer of ashes over the glowing coals, Jason was sitting upon a thick branch of a gnarled old red oak about eight feet above the ground with the body of the first boy he had killed that night, wrapping a thick metal cord around its intact ankle that attached to a pulley system triggered by a series of three lines crossing the path below. If anything weighing more than the majority of the area's wildlife stepped upon or into any of the lines, the corpse would swing down from the branch by its ankle, its face hanging exactly 5'5" off the ground. Although he had no measuring stick, the killer knew that his calculations were accurate. And if the startled trespasser should step back to either side in their shock at being confronted by the mutilated body rushing at them from above, they would likely find a foot caught in the steel jaws of one of the pair of bear traps he had positioned and disguised there - just as the dead boy had when he stepped out of his tent. Once he was certain that the cord would hold, he dropped from the branch, landing lightly on his feet despite the height of the branch and his weight, and then he intentionally triggered the mechanism. He was not surprised when the corpse swung down from the branch exactly as he had intended when he rigged up the system, having used similar setups for many years now.
Rather than grabbing it, Jason patiently waited until the body stopped swinging on its own, then he reached up to grasp the branch overhead and easily pulled himself up onto it again, expertly balancing himself as he crouched upon the twisted limb then using the cord to pull the corpse back up, replacing it in the exact same position as before. He inspected the cord and the ankle around which it was wrapped, nodding in grim satisfaction at their condition before leaping down with the grace of a wild panther and landing perfectly silently upon the dry leaves carpeting the ground.
Having finally completed his task, making good use of the last of the night's bodies, the killer felt the satisfaction of a job well done flow through him, feeling a sense distantly akin to peace though it did nothing to warm his cold, mostly-dead body. He knew that there were no other trespassers about as his mother's insistent whispers to kill - a sound to which he had grown so accustomed over the years that it mingled with the sounds of his heartbeat and his breathing, just another part of him and barely noticeable unless he disobeyed - had fallen silent the moment he pierced the running blonde girl's brain pan with the broken oar she had tried and failed to use to defend herself against him. Although another had survived, only one girl had ever truly defended herself against him after the Jarvis boy dragged him out of the quiet calm of his grave. Jason shook his head, trying to clear his mind of the unpleasant memories of the little blonde girl who had dredged him out of the lake where Tommy Jarvis had chained him, then proceeded to use some awful, invisible force to beat him, hang him, stab him with nearly a dozen nails, set him on fire, then try to blow him up before having him dragged back into the lake again to wait until some other fool had ignored the curse upon the land and brought him back. He had never faced anything like that wretched blonde girl before, and he hoped he never would again. Tina Shepard might have been no more than a little slip of a girl, but she was a monster, too.
Unlike Tina and Tommy, though, at least it had been easy to kill the third person who resurrected him - and the full force of the land's curse that he enforced - from the depths. Jason chose to focus upon the memory of killing the bearded old man in black and green robes instead, how he had ripped the man's arm from its socket and beaten him to death with it even as he bled out the moment he waded out from the water, much preferring that to his memories of tangling with the Shepard girl. Unbidden, another strange girl came to mind even as he was remembering the strange, unintelligible words the bearded man had been chanting in some language that sounded inhuman to Jason's unstudied but sensitive hearing before he began blubbering and pleading for his life in plain English - the skinny little child-woman he had found sitting on the edge of the dock.
Almost without thinking, he found himself walking upon the trail that led to the campsite he assumed was hers, wanting to see if he could possibly learn anything more about the new intruder from observing her at her camp. Though he walked at what he considered a leisurely pace, it took him little time to cross almost the entire camp property he haunted before reaching the tidy little campsite he assumed that the girl had set up for herself. He stopped at the edge of the clearing, just another of the many silent shadows surrounding it, and looked around intently. The first thing to catch his eye was the properly-banked fire and the folding camp chair placed at a safe distance from the fire pit. Then a hint of movement from beneath the tarp drew his gaze, and he saw two neat piles of gear and the stack of books off to one side and a lumpy pile of blankets in the middle beneath the peak of the tarp. He wondered where the girl was, though.
Even though it was the pile of blankets that had moved, coaxing his attention toward what lay beneath the bright blue plastic canopy, it took him a moment to realise that the girl was buried beneath them or curled up amongst them, somehow making herself improbably small as she slept. He studied the pile of blankets for several minutes, mostly pondering what to do about her, but enough of his attention was focused upon her to notice that the blankets moved at irregular intervals, and it did not appear to him that the movement was caused by her body shifting positions beneath them, but rather it looked more as if she were experiencing spasms in her sleep. It was a notable detail, but he doubted that it had any real significance. He decided that the most likely cause was just dreams causing her body to twitch as she slept, so he dismissed it from the forefront of his thoughts, although it was filed away somewhere deep within the recesses of his mind along with all of the likely-useless information he collected about his victims just by observing them prior to killing them. No two trespassers ever had behaved exactly the same and none of them had ever responded to him in exactly the manner he predicted, although he was exceptionally skilled at reading their bodies' micro-movements and anticipating with a high albeit not perfect degree of accuracy how they might react.
Much more significant to him was the fact that his mother still remained silent, not telling him what to do about the girl's presence where he knew she did not belong.
Well, despite how incredibly unwise, reckless, and indeed irresponsible it seemed to him that she had chosen to go camping at Crystal Lake given his presence and the curse within and over the land itself that he personified, he could find no fault in the obvious care she had demonstrated via how she set up the site - or indeed in any of her behaviour he had observed thus far. He had seen no evidence of bottles or cans of alcohol when he had looked into her car earlier and, unlike the five teenagers whose blood still literally stained his gloved hands, there were no empty containers of alcohol strewn across her campsite. Furthermore, as far as he could tell, she was quiet, and the entire setup of her campsite was designed to be minimally impactful upon the land. Perhaps that was why his mother's voice that always urged him to kill just about anyone and everyone reckless enough set foot upon the former camp property was quiet in his head despite the girl's very unwelcome presence. It made little sense to him, but he decided he could ignore her for the night. As long as she packed up and left tomorrow. She might not appear to be the typical irresponsible thrill-seeker who visited Camp Crystal Lake, but that was even more reason she absolutely did not belong here.
As he turned away from where the girl slept and melted back into the forest, he decided that if she had not packed her gear into her rickety little car and gone on her way to anywhere else by the next afternoon, then he would have to make sure that she left. It would be much easier on her if she just left on her own.