l'Enfer C'est les Autres
Chapter VIII - By All That I Have Done Wrong
As the sun began its slow descent toward the treetops, gilding the green, scarlet, yellow, and brown leaves adorning them with its golden-red luminance, the infamous Camp Blood Killer finished properly utilising the newest pair of corpses, incorporating each body into a part of the extensive alarm system he had designed and constructed to alert him to the presence of interlopers along with their locations. Much of the system was comprised of tripwires attached to lines of rope or wire that led to the bank of dangling clusters of bells in his cabin that rang when triggered, and the rest of the system might be considered "jump scares" - bodies positioned to elicit maximum shock and terror in the trespassers who encountered them, inciting them to panic, encouraging them to run in another direction - preferably directly into a trap that would hold them until his arrival - and eliciting screams by which they could be located with more precision than the bells allowed. Done with integrating the brothers' bodies into that intricate yet oddly simple system, he finally was able to return to his ramshackle little cabin deep in the woods, but before he made it even halfway back, the state of his clothes reminded him that he needed to stop by the lake to clean up the blood that was already starting to stink. His yellow leather gloves and faded workman's clothing fairly dripped with the gore of his latest pair of messy kills, but the sensation of blood drying and flaking off his skin in large patches, stiffening the ragged fabric he wore, and reeking of an outhouse and death did not themselves bother him. The only reason why he felt so compelled to wash it off quickly was the odour, as his prey might be able to detect his presence thereby too soon for his liking.
Despite his hurry to be rid of the stench of blood and opened bowels that was enough to send the woodland animals scurrying away from him, his progress through the forest was slow and halting because he stopped to inspect the traps he passed along the way, resetting those that had been triggered by the wildlife he had built them not to catch and checking the ropes and wires, pulleys, and triggers that controlled them to ensure that they remained functional. When he encountered a great fallen tree lying across the faint trace of a trail long unmaintained which he was following, Jason grew pleased to have chosen to walk that particular path to the lake even though it was a rather circuitous route. Climbing over the massive trunk with ease, he examined it carefully, hoping that whatever creature had triggered the deadfall - a massive version of the simple crushing trap that he had erected after coming upon the elderly rock elm tree with the entirety of its spreading canopy broken off neatly just over halfway up its close to hundred foot height after a particularly intense winter storm two years earlier - had managed to escape the horrible death by crushing, already knowing it had not been a person that triggered the trap by the lack of the particular, cloying odour of decomposing human flesh along with the lack of evidence around the trap of either a hiker's passage or the presence of furless limbs sticking out from beneath the trunk.
Given the great weight of the almost forty foot long section of tree, Jason knew it was entirely possible that any one of the supports had simply given way beneath it without being triggered by anything - after all, this was the largest deadfall he had ever engineered, and experience had taught him long ago that simply doubling all of the measurements in a system like a trap to account for when one element was twice the standard size he was accustomed to using was rarely correct, so he had been required to calculate the necessary adjustments to the upright supports, the main support, and even the triggering mechanism … all without the aid of any knowledge whatsoever of the applicable mathematics and physics equations, a calculator, a ruler, a scale, a protractor, or even a pencil and paper upon which to sketch out his design. The fact that he always attempted to build his traps so that it was easy for humans to trigger them but unlikely if not impossible for an unwitting animal to do so only made designing and building them more complex. Not knowing how or why the trap had collapsed, he was concerned that it might have accidentally crushed some poor woodland creature; and further, he wanted to reset it - and properly this time. Therefore, he crouched down near the top end where a precisely pruned section of the bare crown remained intact and wormed his hands into the depression beneath the fallen tree, gauging that the impact made the concavity some six inches deep despite the dry, hard-packed earth onto which it fell. Upon seeing that tangible reminder of just how heavy the section of tree was, he planted his feet firmly upon the ground, bracing himself, and lifted up one end of the tree trunk as he stood, his muscles straining against the weight while his buckshot- and broken bone-filled (but already healing after only somewhat less than an hour and a half had passed since the boy had shot him) right shoulder howled protests that raced shrieking down the nerves in his right arm and across his back which he stoically tried to ignore.
Much to his relief, once he had manoeuvred the tree trunk into an upright position and leaned it against the large pin oak shading that section of the trail, he did not see anything lying crushed and dead in the depression left in the ground by the heavy section of old tree crashing down hard upon it. Relieved not to have found a dead animal crushed beneath the tree, he quickly began reassembling the upright supports. Unsurprised to find one cracked completely in half and another permanently and irreversibly bowed due to the immense weight that had put too much pressure upon it for almost a year, he reinforced the upright supports that had survived the trap's collapse and replaced the two that had failed, altering several of the angles in an attempt to prevent accidental triggering or another such collapse.
All of his traps were constructed solely via trial and error, but as the years passed and his experience grew, his knowledge grew, as well, and the number of such errors steadily declined. While deadfalls were among the simplest of the traps he set, rigging up one so large that it would instantly kill the person who triggered it upon collapsing was far from simple, especially when he was trying to design it in a manner whereby innocent animals would not be caught by it. Jason knew nothing of the mathematics or physics employed in the construction of any of his traps, and he absolutely would not have recognised any of the equations used to calculate force, trajectories, and angles, seeing such as mere scribblings devoid of meaning, and yet his untaught, unknowing mind performed them quickly in his head - and with a remarkable degree of accuracy.
Once he felt confident in the strength of the upright supports and had determined their proper placement, he began reconstructing the trap proper. Disguising the deadfall, making it look like the large, mushroom and lichen-adorned trunk leaning across and over the path, was due to events that had occurred naturally when the great rock elm fell as opposed to human intervention - not that Jason had considered himself human in many, many years - was actually more difficult for him than calculating its assembly. However, after a few small adjustments, he was confident that the fools coming to Crystal Lake would feel comfortable passing beneath it and therefore would be caught unawares by the large section of tree rushing down to crush them and thereby saving him both the hassle and risk of injury involved in killing them himself.
Finally done repairing and then reassembling the deadfall, Jason tested it once, triggering the trap even though the persistent, nagging ache of his wounded right shoulder made the thought of having to reset it once again distasteful. Still, he preferred to be thorough whenever he had the time to do so; therefore, he focused upon the functional operation of the trap, mostly for the sake of the trap itself, but also to tamp down his awareness of the broken bones grinding together as he muscled the massive remains of the tree back into position, held in place by the uprights and the main support high above the narrow, overgrown path. He took a bit more time to hide the deep depression left when the deadfall collapsed, wanting nothing to put the doomed trespassers walking the path on guard, then stepped back to inspect the trap, satisfied. His task thus completed, he at last was able to go down to the lake where he could rinse off the stinking blood and gore that saturated his clothing, stiffening his gloves and the ragged old fabric uncomfortably as it had dried and was flaking off his discoloured skin with his every movement.
After emptying his pockets of the bits of twine, rope, and wire he always carried and laying his axe and machete at the edge of the lake, along with his belt, the leather holster that strapped thereto and wrapped around his thigh, and the loops from which he hung various tools, he waded in until submerged up to his chin, the cool water gently lapping at the bottom edge of the mask that concealed his despised horror of a face. While sluicing the effluvia that had soaked into his clothing off the aged fabric, he noticed that the sun-warmed water was significantly less chilly than it had been the previous night when he ventured into the lake to kill the naïvely giggling defilers of that sacred place as they cavorted in the water where he had died for the first time, seemingly oblivious both to the significance of the lake and the doom bearing down upon them. Although he was not negatively affected by temperature extremes, he found the subtle movement of the less-than-frigid water surrounding him relaxing, so he took his time in digging the pellets of buckshot out of his healing shoulder with his ragged fingernails and pushing pieces of broken bone back into their proper positions within the wound.
All in all, the latter part of the afternoon had been quite satisfying, despite the shotgun blast he had taken from mere feet away and his mild disappointment at having found the deadfall apparently collapsed beneath its own weight, probably due to a miscalculation on his part. However, the issue of the undefinable girl with her peculiar response to seeing him, whose presence upon the land he defended inexplicably failed to drive his mother to urge him to kill, still remained, and with time to think while cleansing himself and his clothing, that conundrum returned to the forefront of his thoughts. He was unsure what in particular might have reminded him of her and brought the situation to mind, but his thoughts were troubled as he strode dripping from the lake in which he had drowned as a child and from which he had been reborn as a deadly, virtually indestructible spirit of vengeance. At least only one critical task remained for the day - to clear the five dead teenagers' campsite of all evidence that they ever had polluted his land with their unwelcome presence - then he could return home and focus upon how to rid himself and the camp of the unwelcome little intruder.
His body and clothes clean and stripped of the stench of death that might have given away his presence to his prey, and his shoulder beginning to heal in earnest now that the metal pellets were removed from the wound and the broken bones within had been realigned, Jason set off for the abandoned, beer can and other trash-littered campsite. Thanks to the irresponsible fools who continued to come to Camp Crystal Lake despite his violent, bloody efforts to discourage visitors, it often felt like his work never would be done.
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—
As always, guilt and remorse returned to Jayne along with her self-loathing shortly after the buzz she felt whenever she etched her body in blood wore off, bringing reinforcements that swarmed over her with utter revulsion to increase her misery. In their disgust at what she was and what she had done to herself, they reminded her that she was worthless and vile, a barely-living font of corruption, of refuse, of putrefaction and filth - hideous with her bony frame, pallid skin, untameable hair, ruined body, and scars … so many scars, inside and out, scars both physical and emotional; a walking horror show, disgusting, awful, unworthy of the title of woman or human; unworthy of everything, even death. Just bad. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.
She might have curled up on herself upon the blanket beneath the artificial blue sky of the tarp and wept, but she had long since run out of tears, having cried herself hollow upon the dock when the masked man had turned and walked away. All that remained of her was a vast emptiness encased within a fragile shell like a cicada's shed husk, so light, floating upon the breeze that would toss her about wherever it pleased. She had no recollection of putting away all of the accoutrements of her ritual, but the scalpel, candle, and bottle of rubbing alcohol were nowhere in sight and she found the blanket upon which she had lain to gaze up at the sky neatly folded upon the stack of its fellows beneath her pillow. As the sun sank lower in the sky, a chilling Fall wind began to blow, which she assumed to be what had prompted her to pull on her black longsleeve T-shirt although she had no memory of dressing, and her small feet were again encased in her jungle boots. The lost time failed to alarm her.
She was still too mentally absent to be alarmed by much of anything, and she was long accustomed to the daze that inevitably followed performing the ritual.
Not knowing what prompted her to move, she picked up her walking stick and began listlessly meandering along the lake trail, ignoring the high, prickly underbrush clawing at her bare calves exposed above the protection of her boots, passing by the turn to the dock and continuing to follow the overgrown path. The wind tugged at her plaited pigtails and nipped at her exposed nose, but she ignored that, too. As she was nothing, nothing mattered.
Eventually, she reached a broad clearing where a trio of neon green tents seemed to have sprouted from the surrounding ground that was littered with crushed beer cans and other trash. Assuming that the campers were either down at the lake or dead by the infamous and, as she had so recently discovered, very real killer's hand ("They would be worthy of death's cold embrace," that cruel voice of her self-hatred that festered within her whispered conspiratorially. "Unlike you."), she sighed in disgust. Why must people be so careless and rude?
"Fucking kids, so disrespectful …" she muttered under her breath when she thoughtlessly began gathering the litter they had left behind into a tidy pile, assuming based upon the sheer number of cans that the campers were either high school or university students.
Her body moved simply because it needed to do so, some compulsion to do driving her, albeit absent any real intent on her part. As she bent and crouched to pick up the empty cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon and crumpled bags of crisps, her knees singing their protest anthem of pops and crunching, grinding crepitus, Jayne shivered at the sensation of her shirt brushing against the fresh scabs decorating her chest. For a brief instant, she regretted her failure to put on a brassiere to prevent that exact sensation; even though it actually felt oddly pleasant - almost too pleasant, really - it also served as an unavoidable reminder of the horrible thing she had just done to herself yet again, one she found impossible to ignore. However, she doubted that she had been thinking about anything at all while she dressed after the ritualistic spilling of blood, given her complete lack of memory of having chosen a shirt and pulling it down over her head, though as evening approached and the temperature continued to drop, she was glad that she had chosen in her mental fog to pull on a longsleeve. Additionally, although the brush of soft, thin fabric against sensitised, blade-scored flesh was distracting, serving both to remind her of how weak and awful she was and as a strangely pleasing stimulation, she hated trying to wash blood stains out of her bras. At least the blood seeping through would not show upon the black fabric of the T-shirt when one or more of the scabs inevitably cracked open and bled as she moved and stretched.
Fortunately for her precarious composure, the corpses of the two victims Jason had slaughtered at that site the previous evening along with the bear trap that had captured the boy's ankle were long since removed, and Jayne's perceptions were still muted by the distracting extremity of her emotions, so she failed to notice the copious amount of rusty stains splashed upon the dry leaves and pine needles in front of one of the tents. Neither did she explore the campsite, fearing that the absent campers might return at any moment, doubting that they would mind seeing her cleaning up the mess they left around their campfire but knowing that it would look suspicious if they caught her poking around their tents and gear, which prevented her from finding the long, bloodstained tear slashed through the back of one of the tents. Had her senses not been somewhat dulled, she would have seen the blood staining the fallen leaves, and she would have known that the campers were dead, that they had died violently, and that knowledge, coupled with her encounter with the unspeaking man out upon the dock, would have tipped her sideways to plummet off the precipice of anguished hopelessness, dizzyingly spiralling into the black caverns of despondency. She might not have had any tears left within her to cry by that point, but the physical manifestation of her devastation at what she would have viewed as concrete proof of the killer's rejection - irrefutable proof that she was irrelevant, insignificant, inconsequential, worthless, and everything else her self-loathing constantly insisted that she was - would have been profoundly awful. Ravaging. Ruinous. Crippling. Replicating all of the most agonising pain of her pain-riddled existence jumbled together, blended and fused with her self-hatred, resentment, disappointment, and anger into a bitter infusion that would be pumped forcefully into her burnt-out veins.
But Jayne was insulated from the cataclysmic tempest of emotions that cognisance of the campers' fates would have aroused in her by the obscuring fingers of mist left behind following cutting and by her focus upon her task. As she gathered up the trash, she began singing quietly, her thin soprano lower than usual, textured with the faint rasp left behind by her extended crying jag.
"Broken doll baby and she says that life's a waste … "
Preferring not to be caught by the campers, not because she believed that she was doing anything wrong by cleaning up the mess they had left behind when they went off to wherever they were or because she thought she looked particularly suspicious, but rather because she dreaded being engaged in conversation on her best day - which this emphatically was not - due to her much-hated compulsion to be warm and polite even to strangers, she tried to hurry. Just because of the possibility that she might be dragged into a conversation with people she already despised without having met them just because of the lack of care they showed in setting up and maintaining their campsite, their apparent disregard for safety or the forest they had chosen to invade, her hands grew damp, and she could feel a line of cold sweat trail down her spine, goading her to work even faster. However, her body refused to obey, trapping her into a slow and methodical process of picking up each discarded can or bag individually and carrying them over to the pile she was making beside the ashes of their abandoned bonfire. When she paused to examine the large pile of ashes, blackened wood, and broken glass, she halted her soft, low singing to cluck her tongue in distaste at how incautiously the fire had been constructed. Dead leaves and pine straw encroached upon it, and she considered it a minor miracle that they had not accidentally set their too-close tents or the surrounding woods ablaze.
As she limped toward the trees surrounding the clearing to find a leafy branch she could use to sweep the desiccated fallen leaves away from the fire for when they returned (if they returned - she knew too well that it was quite possible if not probable that they were dead, given where they had chosen to go camping) so that they would not put the forest at risk when they rebuilt their bonfire that evening, she resumed her quiet singing.
"She doesn't try / I watch her spirit die / But giving up the ghost would feel so good …"
Finding a suitable branch was easy, and she returned with it to the centre of the clearing, continuing the song as she swept the area surrounding the fire clear of combustible material.
Is that broken glass in the fire?! Why do kids have to be so damnably irresponsible?
Growing increasingly frustrated with the absent campers, she squatted down and picked the shards of glass out of the ashes that clung to her slightly damp fingertips one by one, recognising them as once having been a bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey. She rolled her eyes, although there was a part of her, deep down and unacknowledged, that was envious of their ability to drink. The medications she had to take made alcohol far too dangerous for her to drink, and although she hated losing control of herself too much to ever have had fun being drunk anyway, there was a part of her that still wished it was at least an option.
Once she felt that the fire was as safe as she could make it, although she did not trust the campers not to do something to screw it up when they returned, she resumed picking up litter, still slowly singing.
Seeing the tidy pile which she had made of the trash that had been spread across half the clearing, Jayne smiled faintly, pleased to have accomplished something positive in an otherwise dreadful day. Of course, she had not thought to bring a trash bag with her when she wandered aimlessly away from her campsite - she had not been thinking of anything at all, and she was somewhat surprised she had even put on her boots before leaving. Oh well, she had a half-full box of trash bags in Rodney, so she decided to go back to her own neat little campsite and get one then return. The fogged daze in which she had left her campsite had faded while she cleaned up after the absent campers, but her depressed mood and the awful memories that triggered it had not returned in their worst form to torment her - keeping busy was good.
With a goal in mind to act as a distraction from her memories of the assault and torture she had endured exactly ten years before and her bitterness at the Camp Blood Killer's inexplicable and to her mind cruel decision not to kill her, she headed back along the barely visible trail back to her own campsite to grab a trash bag to bring back so she could finish her self-appointed task.
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—
Intending to dispose of the trash and camping gear left in the clearing by the prior night's kills, Jason hiked down the trail along which the running girl had fled, expecting to spend the remainder of the late afternoon engaged in that simple, mind-numbing task which he had performed uncountable times before. Cleaning up after trespassers was just another one of his many duties to the land where both he and his mother had been killed so long before. He doubted that he would find much if anything there for which he could find a use, but it was always worth checking. He had been pleasantly surprised before by what he found scavenging through the belongings of the dead, though - shears, axes, good hunting knives, lengths of wire, parachute cord, blowguns, darts, climbing rope, various tools that came in handy, especially because he could not obtain such things on his own, and even a few portable generators. Anything he found for which he had no immediate use, even junk he knew he would never use, he stored down below the ground in the old mining tunnels that crisscrossed the land. His mind engaged in contemplation of his mental list of the items he needed and hoped to find as he came to the clearing where the five dead teenagers had made their camp, he was startled to hear what sounded like a human voice. He stopped in his tracks and stood, listening.
Someone was there.
Singing.
Had friends come to join the dead?
Upon silent feet he approached the clearing, leaving behind the damp impressions of his large boots. He halted just within the tree line to observe, expecting to see more teenagers who had come out to join their friends to party or possibly another group of hunters who had happened upon the site. Instead, he saw a familiar, slight figure with long, copper-blonde braids hanging down her back walking around the ashes of the prior night's bonfire. Closing his eyes in exasperation, he exhaled a quiet sigh and fingered the handle of the axe hanging at his waist. Why had she not fled Camp Crystal Lake after their bizarre encounter upon the dock? Would she continue to haunt him like some irritating ghost, showing up unexpectedly wherever he went?
Again, his mother was strangely silent in his mind, not encouraging him to kill the girl, and again he wondered why - he was reasonably certain that the girl was not the child he first had believed her to be, which made her an unwelcome intruder, a trespasser, which in turn ought to incite Mommy to scream in his head for her blood. It perplexed him, which made him intensely uncomfortable. He was unaccustomed to being confused by what he encountered within his realm, and the last time he had felt this confused was when he had tried to kill little blonde Tina Shepard and had found himself confronted with a terrible power beyond his comprehension that flung objects at him without a hand to pick them up, hanged him, brought the roof down upon his head, and set him on fire. That had been a singularly awful experience, and one he hoped never to repeat. Even then, though, his mother had not fallen silent until his body came to rest in chains at the bottom of Crystal Lake once more.
What was so different about this girl? She looked perfectly ordinary - normal if somewhat unhealthy and scrawny - aside from how difficult he found it to ascertain her age. Her behaviour, on the other hand, was outright peculiar, particularly the smile lighting her pale face when she had gazed up at him, and her expressed hope that he was indeed Jason Voorhees. That experience had disturbed him to the core. Nobody was happy to see him, especially not those who knew who he was. The brothers he killed earlier that very day had spoken of a desire to find him so that they could kill him - as insane a desire as any he could imagine, and yet they had greeted his appearance with screams and terror. The girl, on the other hand, had smiled.
It made no sense to him, and therefore it bothered him.
Standing still as a statue concealed in the camouflaging shadows of the forest, Jason decided to stay to watch her in the hope that further observation might allow him to unravel the tangled mystery that he viewed her to be. She was walking around slowly as she sang very softly, apparently singing just to herself, squatting down to pick up something then going to lay it down upon a pile beside the remains of last night's bonfire before repeating the process … and then he realised what she was doing. The odd little girl was picking up the cans and other trash littering the clearing - she was doing part of his job for him. If he were not so confused and irked by her continuing unwanted presence where the living did not belong, he might have been amused by the situation or even glad not to have to pick up the reeking beer cans himself, but it was difficult for him to feel anything but frustration then.
At least her singing was quiet - ever since the lake returned him from the depths in which he had drowned, his hearing had been almost painfully acute, and he found certain noises particularly alarming and unpleasant. The music blaring from the vehicles and radios that trespassers brought with them cracked into his skull like a blade - a terrible sensation with which he had sufficient familiarity to know just how apt a comparison that was - and their screams pierced his ears horribly. If the girl raised her voice even slightly, he probably would have walked away in anger, but as it was, he was content to stay and watch her until she finished performing part of his task for him, simply hoping that she would finish quickly and leave.
He assumed that she finally was leaving when she walked to the edge of the clearing no more than ten yards from where he stood, still unseen; but instead, he saw her pick up a branch then return to the dead fire. Initially, this further confused him, but his frustration took on an edge of amusement when he observed her using the branch to rake the dead leaves away from the fire, as if she expected the dead campers to return and relight it. He might even have appreciated the effort to ensure the safety of the forest, wasted though it was, if not for his already sour mood. As it was, he instead experienced a sense of relief when she finally stopped picking up trash and sweeping aside leaves, looked around the clearing, then set off upon the trail back to her campsite, leaving the trash in a neat pile that would be easy for him to bag up and dispose of properly. As soon as her retreating figure vanished into the woods, unsure if she would return to pick up the pile of garbage and not wanting to see her again if she did, he hurried to the clearing and began disassembling the tents to clear the site. He had wasted enough of the quickly fading light watching her, although his vision was not impeded much at all by darkness, and he just wanted to be done with the day. It had been far too unsettling.
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—
Upon returning to her tidy little campsite, Jayne went straight to Rodney to dig out the box of trash bags which she had brought with her so that she would not leave the old, abandoned camp littered with trash as the other campers whose site she had just cleaned up seemed depressingly likely to do. Although she had intended to return immediately to the other campsite to finish her cleanup, hopefully before the campers returned - assuming that they were still alive, of course - instead, she paused to drink some water. Then, she remembered the camp shower which she had spent so much time assembling and filling, so she dipped a finger into the reservoir to test the temperature, smiling when she found the water to be warmer than she expected. She regretted that it had gotten so late, as it meant that she would have to postpone her shower until the next afternoon and she was feeling outright grimy, but she hated going to bed with wet hair. Not only did it turn her hair into a bird's nest liable to develop dreadlocks that would take her hours to untangle, it also tended to give her the sniffles, which she imagined would be even more likely in the chilly Fall air so far to the north of where she had lived all her life.
She did not know why she was dawdling, but there was an unrecognised and unacknowledged part of her that was trying to draw out the task as if it knew that she would be inundated by memories that would hack at her like knives as soon as she no longer had the activity to distract her - and it was reasonably successful in that endeavour. However, the crescent moon was rising, so Jayne knew that she had to get back to the campsite if she wanted to avoid running into the people staying there. That practical part of her knew that they would not be returning, but she refused to acknowledge it as she cautiously limped back toward the clearing which she had tried to make tidy.
When she finally made it back to the campsite, she was surprised to see that not only had the pile of trash she had made been removed, but the trio of tents had been taken down and removed, as well, along with whatever had been inside of them. Whoever had disassembled the campsite in the time she was gone had even raked dirt over the ashes and swept forest litter over the burnt patch where it had been, thoroughly erasing the signs of recent inhabitation. For a moment, she wondered if she had gotten lost somehow and come to the wrong clearing, but even in the starlit darkness she recognised the trees, so she was certain that she was in the right place. It just seemed so strange to her that people who had kept such a messy campsite would have taken such care in clearing away all evidence of their presence - and that they would have done so as quickly as they had. She did not think that she had been away longer than forty-five minutes.
Perhaps seeing the effort that she had put into picking up their litter and making their campfire safe had inspired or shamed them, she supposed.
Or else someone else entirely had come behind her to clear the site.
A shiver ran down her spine at the thought of who might have done that, followed by a crashing wave of bitterness. If it had been Jason who had cleared the campsite, then surely that meant that he had killed the campers.
If they were worthy of death, why wasn't I?
Jayne felt her eyes burning with tears that dripped off the tip of her nose and chin as she slowly trudged back to her campsite. When she made it back, her shins itching from the weeds that obscured much of the trail scratching at them, she could not dredge up enough energy to eat anything for supper, to reignite her campfire, or even to read. Pulling off her boots, she arranged her blankets into a comfortable nest and curled up, hoping that sleep would come quickly to end the awful day.
Perhaps tomorrow would be better.
She highly doubted it.
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Note: The song which Jayne is singing is "It's Alright, It's Okay" by Leah Andreone, and the chapter title is from "Bird on a Wire" by Leonard Cohen