l'Enfer C'est les Autres

Chapter IX - And Who By Fire, Who By Water

The next morning dawned cold and wan, overcast, with a biting wind that ripped through the trees and tore the fragile leaves from the branches, the autumn sun barely visible through thick, grey clouds that threatened a bitter downpour. Prying fingers of chilling wind tore through the tarp beneath which Jayne slept, creeping into the blankets so that they could slide under her shirt through the loose cuffs of the sleeves and through the gaping neckline and sneak up her thighs beneath the legs of the cargo shorts she had been too exhaustedly miserable to remove before curling up in her nest of blankets the night before. That cold touch raised goose prickles along her flesh, driving her to curl up into an even tighter little ball than the one in which she usually slept and to shiver violently, which quickly awakened her. With a low groan, she wrapped herself more tightly in her cocoon of blankets, her movements stiff and jerky as if she were hacking her way through an inundation of thick, clinging swamp-sludge rather than merely pulling a couple blankets around herself, trying to banish the chill even as she blinked away the sleep clouding her vision.

Peering out from beneath the shade of the tarp, she felt a stab of disappointment at the sight of the dark storm clouds angrily rolling across the sky even though normally she loved gloomy days, far preferring them to the bright sunshine that burned her fair skin which completely bypassed the tan phase in favour of turning her a furious crimson that ached with fever and broke out in blisters before sprinkling her nose and cheeks with the freckles she despised because they made her look even younger than she already did.

So much for a nice morning shower, she thought disgruntledly.

At least her skin was not actually outright itching yet, so she felt that she could put it off for one more day; and, between the cold and the imminent probability of rain, she doubted that the shower she had been anticipating so greedily would happen at all that day.

Well, even if she did not want to waste the sun-warmed water of the camp shower on such a cloudy day - plus, the water in the reservoir probably had cooled off during the night, and she thought it highly unlikely that it would get any warmer when the sun was hidden behind roiling thunderheads, anyway - there always was the lake. The water was incredibly clear, wholly unlike any of the swampy bodies of water that dotted southeastern Louisiana, and she recalled how nice it had felt around her lower leg when she had let it dangle off the dock her first afternoon at the camp. Reluctant to leave the warmth of her nest, she pulled the blankets around herself and scooted to the edge of the tarp so that she could inspect the sky. Judging by the movement of the clouds and the throbbing ache of her formerly broken (actually shattered, according to the surgeon who had compared her x-rays to looking at terrazzo floors upon several occasions) and twice surgically-reconstructed forearm that never had properly healed, the rain would not come for about an hour.

That should be just enough time for me to scoot down to the lake, scrub up quickly, then hurry back to the campsite and secure it before it starts pouring.

She knew that it would be uncomfortably cold, but that would be just further incentive to get it done and over with as quickly as she could.

Sighing, she shed her quilt-cocoon and clambered clumsily to her feet, sleep-stiff joints cracking in protest, then picked up her stack of books and carried them over to Rodney. The passenger side door had leaked where the seal was damaged in one of the two wrecks which the old hatchback's former owner had gotten in since the day Jayne had bought it, and she never had felt like spending the money to get it repaired properly, but it still offered more protection from driving rain than the tarp would, so she put her books and then all but one of the blankets inside for safekeeping - on the driver's side. She had stored the water- and fireproof lockbox containing her medications behind the driver's seat, as well, so she quickly downed her morning pills. Upon digging through the back of the car, she found her poncho, a towel, and a bar of fragrance-free hypoallergenic soap, then she dressed in a plain, army green tank top and faded grey soffee shorts despite the chill in the air, having neglected to bring a bathing suit with her up to New Jersey, and pinned her sleep-mussed plaits atop her head so that they would not get wet. Finally, she adjusted the ropes supporting the tarp and staked down the edges so that her shelter would be as watertight as she could make it; then, picking up her walking stick, she hiked as quickly as she could down to the lake.

By the time she reached her destination, already shivering, the sky had grown significantly darker and the wind tearing at her hair threatened to pull her braids loose from the clip. Before venturing out into the lake, she looked around, scanning the surrounding woods for any sign of witnesses. The thought of being watched as she bathed made her skin crawl, especially given what she had done to it the previous day. Seeing nobody, satisfied that she was alone and would not be seen, she limped out onto the creaking, weathered boards. At the end of the rickety old dock, she slid out of her shorts and slipped off her converse then wrapped them and her towel in the poncho, just in case the rain came sooner than she predicted. Biting her bottom lip in trepidation, she gazed down into the clear, green water, darker than before due to the reflection of the thick, grey thunderclouds massing above. It even looked cold. Did she really want to do this? A glance down at the itchy, red scratches that marred the pale skin of her childishly skinny, paper-white calves, and she decided that yes, she did.

Clad in just the loose-fitting tank top and panties, she sat down upon the edge of the dock, bracing herself for the chill, and let her lower legs slowly sink into the water.

Shit, that's cold!

Deciding that it would probably be less tortuous to just submerge herself quickly, she gripped the edge of the dock and allowed gravity to pull her body down, unable to suppress a squeal when the frigid water lapped at her ribs as she lowered herself into the lake. Even there, just off the end of the dock, so close to the shore, she noticed that the lake was too deep for her to feel the bottom with her toes. Using her stronger left hand to cling to the dock so that she would not sink and to allow her some leverage because she had never gotten the knack of floating even though she could swim just barely well enough not to drown, she slid the bar of soap over her skin as quickly as possible, pulling the hem of her tank top over her scab-adorned breasts up to her armpits and squirming her underwear down her thighs so that she could reach every bit of her body before tossing it back onto the dock and hurriedly scrubbing herself with her shaking hands. She knew that it was not much of a bath, and that neither was it the best thing for the lake, even though it was about as non-caustic a soap as there was, but it was better than nothing and should not do any real environmental harm to the ecosystem.

The mineral-rich water stung as it softened the scabs and flowed into the day-old cuts decorating her chest, and when the soap suds slithered their way into the long, shallow wounds, it burned, dragging a sharp gasp from her throat. However, this failed to prevent Jayne from scrubbing the perforated skin, although she did so with significantly more care and delicacy than she applied to the rest of her body. The water sliding over the scratches upon her shins stung, as well, and even though she rubbed the soap vigorously over her legs and arms, the sensation was negligible in comparison to how her cut breasts felt.

Not even five minutes after lowering herself into the water, she decided that she was finished - not so much because she felt thoroughly clean, as that would have required her to have shampooed, conditioned, and rinsed her overly-long and overly-thick hair, but rather that she simply could not stand to be submerged up to her neck in frigidly cold water any longer - so she rearranged the meagre clothing that she had worn into the lake then pulled herself back up onto the dock. Much to her chagrin, because of the strong wind coming in over the water, it actually felt colder outside of the water than it had felt while she was neck-deep in it, and she began shivering violently even before she managed to stagger to her feet. Teeth chattering loudly, she towelled herself dry as rapidly as she could before pulling on her shorts and wrapping herself in the damp towel, then she slid her feet into her shoes. Last, even though the rain had not yet begun to fall, she slipped the poncho over her head, hoping that it would work as a barrier against the cutting wind. A glance up at the sky told her that the rain was likely to arrive sooner than she originally had anticipated, possibly while she still was out upon the trail if she did not start walking now, so she grabbed her walking stick and scurried off the dock, hurrying back to her campsite and its meagre shelter.

Barely a minute after she grabbed some warm clothes and a book from the car and situated herself beneath the lowered tarp, a brilliant flash of lightning speared across the sky followed barely more than a single breath later by an earth-shaking peal of thunder that rumbled ominously for the span of several heartbeats, and the clouds opened, pouring their heavy liquid burden down upon the earth. The rain was loud as it pounded upon the tarp, falling so heavily that it formed a cacophonous, crackling plastic din without any break in the wall of sound that completely surrounded Jayne. It was no warmer beneath the tarp than it had been outside, either, so she pulled off the poncho and let the wet towel fall to the blue plastic "floor", then slipped out of her sodden clothing. Even though her dry change of clothes was about the same temperature as the cool ambient air, the leggings and oversized blue plaid flannel shirt felt blissfully warm against her chilled, damp skin.

As she settled into her less-than-snug shelter, finally feeling clean and not so uncomfortably cold, she wondered how long the storm would last, and she momentarily regretted her decision not to bring any devices that could access the internet with her that might have allowed her to check the local radar. However, that moment was exceedingly brief, and she shattered it with a wry chuckle. As if there would be cellular service much less WiFi at Camp Crystal Lake, a place that's been abandoned some thirty years. Putting an eye to one of the brass rings along the edge of the overhead tarp, she examined what little she could see of the sky through the downpour, trying to see if there was a visible edge to the cloud cover where blue sky showed through. While the visibility was too poor to allow her any degree of certainty, she saw nothing to indicate that the storm would be over any time soon, so she wrapped herself up in the one blanket that she had not carried over to the car with the others earlier and lay down upon her belly to read, as she had lowered the highest point of the tarp to such an extent that the top of her head brushed against it when she sat up straight in her effort to waterproof her shelter to the best of her ability. If only she could have afforded a new, state of the art tent like the three she had seen the previous afternoon … but her health insurance alone ate up several hundred dollars of her monthly paycheque, and her monthly medical expenses that were not covered by insurance ate up another seven thousand on average. She considered herself fortunate to earn enough to be able to afford her treatments, but she resented having to spend nearly everything she made just to keep herself alive, leaving next to nothing that she could spend to improve the quality of that life.

Not that her finances were a concern anymore.

She could foresee no need or use for money during her stay at Camp Crystal Lake, a stay which she anticipated would be very brief. And after that, she would have no need or use for anything at all.

—

—

Decades had passed since Jason's body had required sleep, which allowed him to patrol the grounds of the long-closed Camp Crystal Lake at all hours, day or night. Further, he did not need to eat or drink, and neither bitterest cold nor blistering heat impacted his ability to fulfill his obligation to the cursed land. Even though his body did not need it, though, there were times when he was not required to be elsewhere, so he could rest for a while in the little cabin he had shared with his mother before he drowned and where she had continued to live up until one of the intended victims of her burning need to avenge his death - one of the string of irresponsible teenagers who kept coming to the old camp - had hacked off her head with a single, awful swing of a machete while he looked on in absolute horror from only a short distance away, held back from intervening, perhaps by the same terrible force that had kept him apart from her - cruelly separating him from the only person who had ever loved him or even shown him any kindness in his brief life - during the years after his resurrection, which he had estimated to be close to twenty based upon his recollection of the changing of the seasons and the cycles of the moon. Back then, the passage of time had meant something to him - back then, Jason had still had the hope that he and Mommy would be reunited somehow, someday. But years had passed, he had never been able to comprehend the nature or purpose of the impenetrable, invisible veil that had seemed to exist just to keep him separate from others during those early years, and neither could he understand why it had been torn aside that horrible, horrible night, just in time for him to have to see Mommy die … to watch the warm arms that had held him with such love when he cried in loneliness fall and lie still in the dirt … to see the soft eyes that had never seen him as a monster glazed and fixed in fear and madness … to see the mouth that had murmured comforting assurances to assuage his insecurities and dropped light, soothing kisses upon his forehead every night before he fell asleep gaping wide in a silent scream …

Jason had never determined what force had held him back from killing Alice Hardy that night, whether it was something inexplicable like whatever had kept him apart from his mother for all those bleak years, or if he simply had been frozen by the dread of the moment, unable to run to her and rooted to the spot by the shock and the pain and the absolute horror and the rage that had boiled away the blood in his veins and turned the air in his lungs to choking dust. He had never felt so helpless before or since, not even while he drowned.

At least he knew that he never would experience that sort of pain ever again. Time spent in solitude had whittled his emotions down until little more than anger and frustration remained to him, and he did not mind this, for no other feelings were suited to his strange, joyless existence. As he cared about nothing but his duty, he could not be hurt by cruel words or by loss.

And he still heard Mommy's voice, urging him to kill the inevitable trespassers just as he had seen one of them kill her.

He just wished that sometimes she would tell him something else - something not full of anger and bitterness, something more like what she used to say to him back when they were both alive and together and as happy as their circumstances had allowed.

Those thoughts, too, had grown less frequent as the decades passed him by, though, his body nearly untouched by the passage of time that slowly was reducing the abandoned, decaying structures that remained of the camp to nothing. If he ever allowed himself to contemplate such things, he might have wondered how long he would go on "living," duty-bound to kill the irresponsible fools who chose to enter the domain he guarded. But he embraced his bleak existence, developed his routine and kept himself busy tending to his weapons, the land, and his terrifying, bloody defence thereof; and, even at rest, his mind was always occupied with designing traps and alarms, thoughts of how to be more effective in his rôle of defender and executioner.

The morning after his bizarre encounter with the undefinable girl began as nearly every other - he started making his rounds beneath a leaden sky thick with clouds through which the sun's light barely penetrated. His feet carried him along the old trails with little conscious thought upon his part, the routine ingrained as much in his muscles as in his mind. There was a comfort of sorts in the familiarity of it that eased a bit of his lingering discomfort after the unfamiliar events of the past couple days. He knew every tree in the forest through which he strode, and he recognised the calls of each species of bird and insect, even though he did not know what most properly were called. Not having to speak or communicate with anyone made such gaps in his knowledge irrelevant, anyway. These woods were his home, even more so than the little cabin where he kept his shrine to his beloved mother and his workshop, and he was no less a part of them than were the earth and the streams that crossed it, the trees and bushes, the wildlife, and the lake.

He paused for a moment to watch a pair of deer drinking from the shallow stream he was about to cross, standing less than two metres from them, close enough to see the faint remnants of white spots dappling the coat of the smaller and thinner of the pair, but they were undisturbed by his proximity, as if they could tell that he would not harm them. He smelled like the forest, only the leather of his gloves, boots, and belt and the faint tang of the sharp steel he always carried setting him apart from the other wildlife, and those slight odours were not enough to mark him as something to be feared and avoided. His large figure weaving between the trees was familiar to all the forest's denizens, nothing to induce alarm.

He belonged.

He belonged in that forest as he had never belonged in the society of people, when he had been young and different, deformed, reviled. The forest accepted him. It always had, even when his mother first had been offered the job as camp cook and moved them into the tiny cabin at the edge of the camp proper. The camp owners had allowed them to live there rent-free in return for Pamela working at the camp during the summer months, and the rest of the year she worked double shifts at the diner in the nearby town, over forty miles away, also owned by the owners of Camp Crystal Lake, along with whatever odd jobs she could find to bring in extra income. Jason had known even as a small child that she did it all for him. The medical treatments that had been required to keep him alive and healthy must have been ruinously expensive for a single mother with no family to help her, way out there in rural New Jersey, he had realised later on in his childhood, shortly before its abrupt, terrible end, and he was eternally, undyingly grateful to Mommy for all the sacrifices that she had made for him. Still, her jobs had not allowed her much time to spend with him, and although he was grateful to her for everything that she did for him, that gratitude had done nothing to assuage his loneliness.

None of the local children would play with him. Some avoided him just because they thought he was stupid and a freak, while others were not allowed near him by their parents, and one early afternoon when Mommy had acquiesced to his begging and let him come along with her to work, he had overheard two ladies sitting in a booth chatting about him from where he had hidden himself away beneath one of the two long tables between the windowed wall lined with booths and the mint-green, Formica-topped lunch counter that faced the grille and deep fryers. Of course he had crept closer, stopping at the edge of the table, his presence masked by the long, green-checkered tablecloth, childish curiosity compelling him to hear what they might have to say about him, a small hope blooming in his chest that they might want to encourage their children to include him in their games.

Over fifty years later, he could still remember every detail of that early afternoon - "Unchained Melody" by Al Hibbler was playing upon the jukebox, followed by "Too Young" by Nat King Cole, then "Blue Moon" by Frank Sinatra, and Mommy was working at the grille behind the lunch counter, swaying slightly in time with the music as she flipped the sizzling eggs and strips of steak for the man in a red trucker's hat and dark blue denim overalls over a red flannel shirt who sat at the counter nursing a cup of coffee while waiting for his lunch. A teenage boy with greasy, slicked-back, dark hair wearing jeans with rolled cuffs and a black leather motorcycle jacket over nothing but an undershirt sprawled in the booth closest to the door across from a giggly, freckle-faced girl with her red hair pulled up in a high ponytail who wore a baby pink sweater and a calf-length white skirt, sharing a chocolate malt with only one straw. The heavyset, brunette waitress dressed in a mint green uniform just like Mommy's, Florence (although everyone called her Florrie), who never said anything unkind to him but who would not make eye contact with him or come within a yard of him, was writing down the order of the stooped old man sitting alone in the booth in the back corner … and Jason still remembered every single word that the ladies had said.

"Oh no, I'd never let my Lottie play with that nasty little Voorhees boy - the Lord only knows what's wrong with him, and what if it's catching!" the one with thick, straight, black hair cut into a bob that framed her plump face, emphasising its roundness, who wore a navy blue dress with a line of red buttons down the front and tiny red polka dots speckling the fabric, a red Peter Pan collar, and puffed sleeves cinched tight around her arms midway between her shoulders and her elbows with wide, red cuffs, exclaimed to her friend after glancing around nervously as if seeking to assure herself that Pamela was not within hearing range.

Her friend nodded, perfectly coiffed ash blonde curls bouncing upon the padded shoulders of her similar dress, only hers was a soft, bluish green with a long line of large, white buttons down the front, and the collar and long, fitted sleeves were trimmed in white lace that looked rather like a doily to the little boy beneath the nearby table.

"I know!" she replied then leaned across the table, adding conspiratorially, "Have you seen his hair? I think the boy has mange! Goodness, I can't imagine what I'd do if Genevieve came home looking like that - all those beautiful golden curls, gone!"

Self-consciously, Jason's hand had reached up to feel the sparse, slightly-reddish, light blonde hair trailing in wisps over the back of his misshapen skull that hung down to brush against his collar. Even at a very young age, he knew that he was different and ugly, despite what Mommy always told him - he had a mirror, didn't he, and he had to see his face every morning and every night when he brushed his teeth, so he knew - but he wasn't contagious, and he certainly didn't have mange!

The dark-haired lady shuddered daintily.

"I won't let my Jonathan anywhere near him, either, you know - and not just from fear what he's got is catching. He's retarded or something, and you know those people are dangerous."

Nodding, the lady in green murmured, "I'm sure - have you heard him trying to talk? I've never heard a stutter like that in all my life! I'm so glad Pamela hasn't put him in school. Can you even imagine?"

"Oh Lord, that'd be just awful! Good children shouldn't be exposed to things like that - monsters shouldn't even be sent home from the hospital. Some kind nurse ought to've smothered him at birth," Lottie's mother declared, her voice barely above a whisper, but Jason could hear her, clear and loud as a church bell. "Who could ever love anything like that? It'd really be a blessing if he'd die soon, even if his mother doesn't see it now. Haven't you noticed how sad she always looks? After a while, I'm sure she'll be relieved when he's gone and she can move on to a happier life."

Although he had already been taunted with almost every cruel name imaginable - dunce, jerk, blockhead, sissy, retard, momma's boy, dolt, elephant boy (one Jason did not understand as he had never heard of Joseph Merrick, but he recognised it as an insult nonetheless), idiot, cockroach, dummy, ugly, stupid, freak of nature, numbskull, moron, gross, lamebrain, dimwit … also tattletale and rat fink that one time when he told Mommy about the teasing and pushing, and she went to their parents to ask that their children stop only to be told she should keep her son inside if she did not want him to be teased … and so, so many others - by the children who he had shyly approached in the hope of kindling friendship, that was the first time Jason had heard anyone call him a monster. For some reason, that was even worse than the others. It felt as if the lady's voice were a blade sharpened upon her cruelty, and she had cut him over and over, slashing at him with her words, before she named the blade "monster" then stabbed it between his ribs, plunging it straight into his heart.

After darting another nervous glance across the room at Pamela's back to ensure that she would not overhear, the blonde remarked, "Poor Pamela. It's really so sad. She's such a sweet lady - she really doesn't deserve to be burdened with that. I heard that boy's why her husband left her, too, and as terrible as it sounds, God as my witness, I can't say as I blame him. Shucks, I think Artie'd do the same to me. At least she's still young and nice-looking, though, so she's got a chance at a better life once that boy's finally gone to be with God."

"Amen to that!"

Right after the dark-haired lady's emphatic agreement, upon noticing that Pamela had turned around to serve the man at the counter his steak, cheese, and bell pepper omelette, the ladies fell silent.

Hot tears had burned in Jason's mismatched eyes, scalding his cheeks in their descent, and he sniffled quietly. He wasn't dangerous or a monster! He knew that he was far from the smartest child, but it wasn't his fault that he had a hard time speaking clearly, and he didn't think he was that stupid. His crooked jaw and twisted lips just made it difficult to form the words he wanted to say, and his shyness made it almost impossible to get them out, worsening his stutter. But that didn't mean that he should die, did it? And that last part … would Mommy really be happier if he were dead? He knew that she loved him and that everything she did, all the long, tiring hours that she worked, it all was for him. He was old enough to know that his treatments were expensive, and without him she would have enough money to go to see the moving picture shows at the small theatre in town and maybe buy a pretty dress like the ones the ladies were wearing - and she would look much prettier in it than they did, he thought. Mommy was the prettiest lady he knew. Maybe she could make friends and go out dancing with them on Saturday nights. Maybe Daddy would even come back if he were gone, and then they could have a new baby. One who wasn't ugly and deformed and stupid and expensive.

Then a horrible thought crept up on him. What if Mommy actually resented having to do all that for him? What if she resented him? What if she was fibbing when she told him that she loved him and that she didn't mind working so hard and coming home with blistered burns on her hands and wrists and aching feet that he'd sit on the floor rubbing for her while she read to him at night - saying she didn't mind it because there was nothing at all that she wouldn't do for him?

Jason wiped at his eyes and nose with his sleeve then buried his face in his hands to muffle the sobs he could feel welling up through the tightness burning inside his chest.

The ladies were probably right - Mommy would have a better life without him.

Whatever else the ladies might have said thereafter, Jason did not hear it over the blood pounding in his malformed head and his own muffled whimpers. He was not merely sad - he ached with despair. It felt like they had broken something inside of him irrevocably that had shifted him off balance and washed out the ground beneath the foundation of his Self, allowing it to tilt and crumble, taking him down with it as it collapsed.

Unable to bring himself to crawl out from beneath the table, not wanting to be seen or caught spying which he knew was a bad thing to do, he had waited for the ladies to leave, quietly crying into his sleeves until the tears soaked through the cloth to wet his wrists. When they were gone and he finally emerged, his crooked, green-hazel eyes red and swollen almost shut in a bloodless face that glistened wetly beneath the artificial light, Mommy had come running out from behind the counter to sweep him up into a tight embrace. Her rushing questions about what was wrong caused his stomach to clench violently with both his new uncertainty of her sincerity and the guilt he felt for upsetting and worrying her so much, and he stiffened in her arms, close to retching and unable to reply. However, her soft reassurances while she mopped up his wet face with her starched white apron and her gentle hand stroking his baby-fine hair were soothing, and his body finally relaxed again, crumpling against her. But the feeling of being held supported within the warmth of her embrace when his legs were too wobbly to hold him upright just brought on another torrent of tears. Even though he really was too big for her to pick up, she did so anyway, carrying him over to the nearest booth - the one so recently vacated by the ladies who said that both he and Mommy would be better off if he were dead - where she sat down, cradling him upon her lap while the deep sobs torn from the depths of his soul wracked his body. Stroking his hair and his back to soothe him, she told him that whatever it was that had upset him would be okay and that she loved her special, special boy, and that she would be there for him always, no matter what.

Jason had wanted to believe her, had wanted to trust her quiet assurances that she loved him forever, more than he had wanted anything in his life, even more than he wanted to have a normal face and to be a normal boy with a normal life, but the ladies had planted a seed of doubt within his heart and watered it with the cruel reality of his situation. He could not deny their assertions that Mommy would be better off without him, because he recognised that he was an unbearable burden and that she had done nothing to deserve to carry that.

He had been eight years old. Less than two and a half years later, he would be dead, and his mother's frenzied grief would prove just how wrong those ladies had been even before it was transformed into embittered, murderous rage, but Jason was not there to see that confirmation of her undying love for him.

But he knew it. Even after the crop of doubt sewn in his fragile young heart had ripened within him, everything that Pamela Voorhees did proved her devotion to her precious little boy, and by the time of his first death, his worries and distrust had faded away in the face of her pure, selfless love.

Jason had never belonged out there among people who were too blinded by their own shallow pettiness to recognise the depth and sincerity of his mother's love for him.

It was different, though, in the forest. The trees and animals did not care that his face was deformed or that he found it difficult to speak clearly - any more than they cared that he did not speak at all after his resurrection. They did not judge him for being poor and wearing ill-fitting, thrift store clothes that Mommy mended for him without complaint whenever he tore them, and they did not look down on him for being taught at home in his mother's scant spare time instead of attending school like the other children. There was nobody there to taunt him or push him down face-first into mud puddles. He could run around, climb trees, build himself (ineffective) fishing rods using branches, string, and safety pins as hooks, just be a normal, active little boy - all without being tormented.

But he had been lonely.

Although he never gave up and accepted that he would never have any friends with whom to play, Jason was forced by circumstances to play alone, always; therefore, he came to excel at solitary activities. Because he was something of a perfectionist and possessed remarkable patience for a child so young, he focused intently upon everything he did and put forth effort into every goal he set for himself, practicing by himself until he had achieved his goal. Even though his uneven, lopsided eyes rendered his depth perception unreliable (and made reading difficult albeit not impossible for him), he went outside almost every day with the bow and arrows that Mommy had given him for his eighth birthday, practicing doggedly until he became so adept at shooting that he never missed the centre of where he aimed at any target, and he taught himself to make and fletch his own arrows. He developed equal accuracy with darts and even practiced throwing knives, figuring out the proper grip and technique on his own, without any guidance. He also enjoyed building things, working with wood and wire, carving himself toys to play with out of fallen branches and even constructing himself a treehouse that had a pulley system for carrying heavy items up into the fort that he erected in the great scarlet oak behind the house using scavenged wood and other materials that he had found lying around abandoned at the camp. Despite how unprofessional it looked, his mother had lavished him with praise as if he had built one of the incredible stone castles illustrated in some of the storybooks she read to him at night.

Those skills developed during a solitary childhood had come to serve him well in the rôle he was to play after his death, although he took no pride in his abilities, seeing them as mere necessities to fulfilling his obligation to his mother's memory and to the land where they both had died.

He tried never to think about his childhood, preferring to keep his mind empty of everything but his duty, as even the best memories of when he and his mother were alone together and content induced pain - agonising pain that manifested itself both emotionally and physically - that was near-crippling in its intensity, reminding him of his loss and what might have been had Fate been kinder to the Voorhees family. Alongside all of his emotions apart from his ubiquitous anger and frustration, the pervasive loneliness that had characterised his childhood had long since faded away into nothingness.

He liked it better that way.

Shortly after Jason found himself back upon the lake trail that would bring him to the turnoff leading back to his home, a blinding flash of white light forked across the night-dark sky, followed within a heartbeat's span by a roaring crack of thunder that growled like some great beast as it rolled on and on, seeming to shake the earth in its ferocity, and then the rain pelted him, instantly becoming a heavy deluge that threatened hail. Neither rain nor hail actually affected him, although both could do a number upon his traps, so he knew that he would be busy once the storm passed through and he could go inspect the damage it wrought. Thunderstorms struck the camp less frequently during the Fall than during the Spring and Summer months, but the Fall storms made up for that comparative infrequency with their destructive intensity. The ropes supporting and within his traps tended to stretch when soaked through, and although the brightly colourful modern climbing rope that he acquired from the dead was significantly more resistant to that, it was far more difficult for him to disguise and hide it from wary intruders than old-fashioned rope that came in pale shades of beige and white which he easily could stain with grass and dirt until it was barely visible to the human eye, so he still utilised ordinary rope in most of his traps. That meant that he had to check each one after every storm, but he did not mind the time spent thereupon. Further, when the rain fell heavily for an extended period, for several hours or even days straight, the ground upon which several of the traps sat could wash out, rendering them ineffective or even carrying them away from the trails where they were most likely to catch an intruder. It was a rarity for Jason to have any time when he was not busy, and again, he did not mind this. He had his routine, and he was quite comfortable existing within it.

Rather than making the turn toward the cabin, an impulse directed him to remain upon the path that eventually led to the main entrance to the camp - but that was not the destination he had in mind. Despite the blinding downpour that had saturated his clothes almost instantly and was transforming the ground into thick mud that sucked at his heavy, once-black work boots with every purposeful, long-legged stride, it did not take him long to reach the clearing where the blue tarp had been strung up between three trees at a safe distance from the fire pit, hoping to find it empty - the tarp and the aluminum and canvas-webbing folding chair removed and packed up into the rust-pocked little teal hatchback, the strange contraption of hoses and a water container hung from a tree limb taken down and absent, and the evidence of the fire pit erased from the ground. It surprised him to realise that he expected that the girl would be so thorough in disassembling her campsite - even though he did not give trespassers the chance to clean up after themselves, inevitably killing them before they were ready to pack up their belongings and leave, his gut told him that they would have left obvious evidence of their presence and a mess for him to clean, regardless. Responsible, careful people simply did not venture to Camp Crystal Lake.

Which was a great part of the conundrum the peculiar girl's presence represented.

A presence that apparently was going to continue a while longer.

Jason felt a stab of disappointment when he reached the clearing and saw that the tiny hatchback and the blue tarp were still there, that the threat of the storm had not been any more sufficient to drive her away than being confronted by him in the flesh the day before had been. The girl had lowered the tarp that formed the roof of her shelter by several feet and staked down the edges that now reached the ground in an effort to block out the wind-driven rain. Although he knew that definitely offered her more protection from the elements than it would have as she initially had erected it, he did not doubt that water was managing to seep in between the two tarps that were not sealed together. She would be cold and wet, the conditions only getting worse the longer the storm persisted.

Good.

While he did not wish any actual harm upon her, he hoped that her experience in the storm would be unpleasant enough to drive her to leave.

His curiosity satisfied, Jason turned and followed the boobytrapped path leading back to his cabin to wait out the storm. While the weather had no effect upon him, there was little for him to do until the rain passed and he could go out again to assess and address whatever damage it might have caused. In the meantime, there were several tasks that he could address back home - he had blades to sharpen and oil, some three dozen arrows which he had fashioned that still needed to be fletched, and he intended to create another bank of bells so that he could extend his makeshift alarm system over a larger portion of the four-square-mile territory that he protected. He did not want to be surprised again by the sight of an intruder sitting upon the dock like how he first had found the girl two days earlier.

—

—

Reading "The Dunwich Horror" in her well-loved, dog-eared, and personally hand-annotated copy of the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft while lying flat upon her belly with her knees bent so that her calves almost met her thighs, beneath the low ceiling of the tarp, a ceiling only made lower and lower as the saturated ropes suspending it between the trees stretched beneath the weight, Jayne listened to the storm. The wind howled frantically as it whipped through creaking branches and the rain fell so heavily that she could not distinguish the sounds of any individual drops falling upon the blue plastic as they all merged together into a steady, ceaseless roar. Rivulets of water were creeping in through the gaps between the two tarps that formed her shelter, but there really was nothing she could do about it except try to brush the water away with her hands before it could soak into the blanket in which she was cocooning herself for warmth. At this time of year, it was still in the high-70s to mid-80s back home, whereas she supposed that the temperature at Crystal Lake must have dropped into the low-40s with the thunderstorm, and she wondered if it might even sleet if it grew any colder.

Although she adored snow, as it was rare enough in southeastern Louisiana to be a novelty and the ground temperature never got cold enough for it to stick and create truly hazardous conditions, she was not fond of sleet, and she hoped that this storm did not herald the coming of a bitterly cold winter. However … she recalled having read somewhere that succumbing to hypothermia was supposed to be a remarkably peaceful way to die - that the cold was absolutely piercing for a while, but then the victim would stop shivering, warmth and a sense of peace flooding through them in the last minutes before they slipped into a sleep from which there was no awakening. Really, aside from the extended period of shivering misery, it sounded quite pleasant as far as deaths went to Jayne, and she decided that once the rain stopped she would go to her car and read the list of cautions the pharmacist always stapled to the bags containing her monthly supply of pills (which she only threw out once she picked up her refills, even though she had read them all more than once and her prescriptions rarely changed, so keeping them around had no real purpose aside from her taking comfort in the fact that they would be there to check should an issue arise) to see if any of her medications would make her more susceptible to the cold.

It was always good to have options, as her late father so often used to tell her.