l'Enfer C'est les Autres

Chapter X - Cursed and Damned

The storm assaulting Crystal Lake showed no sign of abating until several hours after the sun had descended beneath the horizon, as if the great star itself had given up on its light touching the cursed surroundings of that fathomless lake of clear water and impenetrable, dark secrets. Well before the viciously roaring gusts of wind and torrents of rain had subsided to a light sprinkle, all of Jayne's attempts to stay dry and warm had failed. At least two centimetres of standing water sat upon the tarp that formed the floor of her shelter, slowly crawling up fabric to saturate the bottom third of her blanket along with her woollen socks, halfway up the shins of her leggings, and even her underwear, leaving her cold and uncomfortable where she huddled in a tight little ball in an ineffective attempt to conserve her body heat. Even sitting upon her poncho had proved ineffective to keep her dry. Very little of what she had believed to be her well thought out and carefully considered trip to the long-abandoned summer camp seemed to be turning out as she had anticipated when planning her journey up to New Jersey, despite how perfectly everything had appeared to fall into place, at least initially. Even the most improbable of the aspects that had motivated her to choose Camp Crystal Lake as her destination (which was her main motivation for coming here, however unlikely it was in reality) had proved to be true - by some black twist of Fate's inscrutable threat, these woods were indeed haunted by an alarmingly large, intimidating man wielding a machete who hid his face behind an old, once-white hockey mask with scarlet markings.

Miraculously, it had turned out that the drowned boy who would not stay dead, Jason Voorhees, actually was real, and for a few moments out there upon the dock over that lovely, deadly body of water, Jayne had given in to temptation, had felt the sort of hope that her life long had taught her to fight against or ignore flood through her. Her pain, no doubt, would flare brighter than she ever before had experienced, but then it would have been over, it all would have been over, and she would have learnt the answer to the great mystery: whether it is the peace and relief and unending dark nothingness that she craved with ravenous desperation that comes after life has ended … or something else. She was ready to learn that answer, prepared to face the endless oblivion of nonexistence or whatever else there was. But Jason had not done what every source she had found in her research declared that he would do. The blade had not pierced her body. Instead, he had turned his back upon her and strode away, denying her the salvation she sought from him, silently damning her by his refusal to free her from the strangling noose that the mortal coil had become, leaving her hanging there, helpless and choking.

She should have known better.

Why would this have been any different from everything else she had ever attempted in her search for an end to the suffering and relentlessly unceasing pain that defined her life, after all?

The countless medical specialists who she had seen did not save her. The treatments and the medications that they prescribed kept her alive and reduced some of the worst symptoms to a point where she was able to "function" and even to work, albeit only from home and upon her own schedule, but she did not consider her existence to be the same thing as "living."

Why would a merciless dealer of death have granted her the mercy she sought from him?

And now, instead of being the infamous Camp Blood Killer's latest victim as she had intended by making the journey to this haunted place where the wise feared to set foot, she was sitting in damp clothing, huddled up within the loveless embrace of a cold, wet blanket upon a cold, wet tarp in the middle of a cursed forest as a storm that doubtless heralded a cold front's arrival finally began to subside.

At least she could look forward to building a fire, boiling herself another mug of tea, and getting warm again.

At that thought, the edges of Jayne's lips began to turn up into the beginnings of a smile, right up until the awful realisation that she had failed to protect any of her supply of wood and kindling from the rain crept up from behind her and wrapped its chilled, clammy fingers around her neck, throttling her with the knowledge her stupid, thoughtless error. There would be no warming campfire for her before which she could sit and read tonight. A seasoned camper like she was never should have made such a rookie mistake … but of course she had. Nothing was allowed to go right in her life, and nearly all of it was due to her own errors, her own poor choices, her own misjudgments, perhaps the very wrongness of her existing at all - or so it seemed to her. With the exception of the autoimmune disease that was taking its time in destroying her from the inside out - her own defences from sickness that had turned against her by corrupting one body system or organ at a time, torturing her while it inexorably crippled her, that was slowly, oh! so slowly and torturously dragging her along behind it upon a floor jagged with splinters and embedded with sharp nails and razor blades that caught in her skin and ripped through her scarred flesh, down that long, bleak, sightless corridor that only leads to a longed-for death that remained hovering just beyond her reach, tauntingly far away - her exhaustion-and-pain-warped mind was able to twist each cause of her various agonies until it convinced her that they all were her fault. Of course, her therapists insisted that this was irrational thinking, but that logic had little effect upon what she actually believed. At her lowest points, Jayne occasionally even managed to convince herself that the lupus itself was her fault, that even at the moment she was conceived, the great forces of the universe had known that the blob of cells soon to grow within her mother's womb into a girl was going to be awful, too awful, an abomination of profound wrongness undeserving of personhood, so they had played with the genetic material from which she was composed, manipulated it so as to ensure that her body would punish her ceaselessly, every single day, for how wrong she would be once born, because all that she deserved was suffering.

If she had not believed that entirely during the pathetic semblance of a life that she had left behind, her experiences at Camp Crystal Lake were enough to convince her of its truth.

Otherwise, wouldn't she be dead now by that large, gloved hand?

She knew that she should be a corpse now, just wet meat and fragile bone disposed of however the undying murderer saw fit; and yet, horribly, she still was alive, shivering beneath a tarp stretched out across land where the living are not welcome and listening to the slowing patter of raindrops echoing against blue plastic, hollow with bitter disappointment.

How could one person have been through as much shit in so short a life without being cursed and damned?

It really did strike her as ridiculous, the sheer number of terrible things that had happened in her life, the outright absurd volume of hell that she had endured. The thought that if she were a character in a novel or movie, people would have begun laughing after a point, probably only a little less than a decade before this particular low point, at just how many things had gone wrong in her life, came to her again - really, it was patently unbelievable. Even the dramatic Lifetime movies her mother used to watch, as over-the-top and over-dramatised and therefore silly as they tended to be, probably would not go as far into disaster after disaster as her real life had done, like some Escher-inspired rollercoaster with soaring drops into seemingly eternally-spiralling loops and no end to the track. Hellfuck, she sometimes laughed about it herself - wildly, lunaticly, until tears streaked her sunken cheeks and stained her collar, but there was no humour in her laughter. It was the mirthless sound of internalised bitterness given voice, harsh and mocking, tearing at her vocal cords with barbed hooks.

How many profoundly horrible experiences could one person really have in their life?

As far as Jayne could tell, there really only was one explanation for it all, although it was sufficiently far-fetched that the logical side of her mind rebelled against accepting it. But logic and reality are not the conjoined twins that most seem to believe them to be. Indubitably, they are related, but more in the sense of fourth cousins twice removed who sit in the same room but not at the same table and who might exchange a cordially polite yet unfelt, shallow greeting during family reunions. Logic is a human invention, nothing more, an attempt to give rules to something truly wild that might appear to submit to humanity's dominion, but that adherence to the laws humans invented to define and control is no more than a façade, a mask, a trick. And whenever humanity grows complacent in its supposed governance and false comprehension, reality will defy that ephemerally thin logic, turning around and biting those who place all their belief and trust therein.

It might be illogical or even irrational, but Jayne knew that she saw hints of the truth beneath reality's biddable, apparently constrained and governable façade.

Cursed and damned. That's what she was.

The nuns at the all-girls Roman Catholic kindergarten where her parents had sent her were the ones who put that particular idea into her mind, and there it had festered, a sort of soul-rotting, cancerous infection metastasising until the putrescent, pulsating tumours grew far too large for her to ignore. Jayne was a left-handed redhead, the only such in her smallish preschool class, and therefore she stood out amongst her peers in the eyes of the older nuns. That she was inquisitive and imaginative although never outright confrontational had not helped her, either. Elderly Mother Superior had made certain that Jayne knew that the left is the mark of the Devil, thus those who are dominant to the left are marked by damnation, and as Judas Iscariot who betrayed "Our Lord Jesus Christ" had red hair according to doctrine (as unlikely as Jayne later determined that to be based upon the geographical location and ethnicity of those biblical figures) all redheads ever after were born cursed in the eyes of the Christian God. Although Jayne did not believe in either God or Satan, and it was very possible that she never had, the old woman's searing words never had left her.

That deeply-ingrained Catholic guilt seemed impossible for her to shake. As extreme and almost ludicrous as the amount of terrible things that had happened to her might have been, Jayne knew that there were people whose lives were punctuated with experiences far more terrible than hers, and whenever she thought of that, her guilt leapt forth like a wolf, pouncing upon her and worrying her sense of Self in its slavering jaws, chewing and gnawing until she submitted to it once more. If the reports which she had read about the Camp Blood Killer were true, as she was coming to believe they must be after seeing and even speaking to the solid apparition, then Jason Voorhees was someone who had suffered more and worse than she had in his too-short life and his long existence thereafter - born with disfiguring deformities at a time when medical treatments for such conditions were barbaric at worst and at best were far more limited than now, and the assumptions people made about the afflicted during that time were cruel, extreme, and often wrong; raised by a teenage single mother whose husband had abandoned them when the boy likely was too young to remember anything about his father, growing up in a rural area with few if any resources for a struggling family, not to mention that this was in an era when that was far more difficult (not that it ever has been an easy thing to raise a child alone, but at least it no longer was judged so harshly or viewed as a personal and moral failure); not allowed to attend school which undoubtedly was meant for his safety but which still served to isolate the child even further; and then he was allowed to drown at summer camp upon his 11th birthday due to the negligence of the counsellors who had been charged with watching him, possibly after being pushed off the end of the dock by his fellow campers … but the poor child had been denied peace even in death, as twenty-two years later to the day, his grief-maddened mother had been beheaded by the last of her intended victims when the son of the original owners of Camp Crystal Lake foolishly attempted to re-open the cursed place to children despite the tragedies and deaths that haunted it, and if the stories were true, Jason had borne witness to her violent, gory death, and then apparently he had taken up her cause, killing those who dared to disturb the quiet of the land where he and Pamela had died, and in turn being attacked and allegedly even killed by several of his victims over the years.

She might not have known the exact reasons why Jason killed or why he kept coming back from death, but somehow Jayne felt oddly certain that existing in that state brought him no joy. If he took pleasure in killing, she doubted that he would have turned and walked away from her when he found her out there upon the dock … unless he was such a sadist that somehow - perhaps through whatever mystical force kept him however alive he was after his deaths - he had known what she so desperately desired from him, and therefore, in a monster's ineffable cruelty, he had decided to deny it to her. That thought sent a shiver racing down her spine which had nothing to do with the chill air nipping at her through her damp clothes. While she had found no reports alleging that he tortured his victims prior to killing them, there were no living eyewitnesses to the vast majority of his murders, either, so it was possible, even though what little of the survivors' accounts she had managed to find in her research implied that Jason simply tried to kill his victims as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Although Jayne could not imagine what forces imbued the murderer with "life" or how they accomplished that impossible feat, and even if he somehow had survived drowning then grew into a man in total isolation from humanity in the woods surrounding the then-abandoned camp, she knew that Jason had died at the very least twice - once at the end of the massacre at Higgins Haven when the EMTs brought his body to the morgue after one of his victims buried a hatchet in his skull and a doctor declared him dead, mere hours before he slaughtered several people in the hospital before breaking out and going on yet another spree of murder, and again the very next evening after he had slaughtered that nearly a dozen more people when a machete was driven through his eye socket and deep into his brain by a twelve-year-old boy, after which he again was pronounced dead by medical professionals and even was buried in a local cemetery where he spent at least five years in the grave, until something or someone brought him back. The lack of mysterious disappearances or mass slaughters during that period appeared to confirm that he had been dead and buried. Had Jayne not grown up so close to New Orleans, that beautiful, haunted, deeply-flawed gem of a city at the mouth of the Mississippi River known for its wrought iron-adorned architecture, incredible food, music, wild revelries, and the old cemeteries where the dead rested above-ground inside their family crypts that encircled the oldest neighbourhoods like silent charnel cities of corpses, Jayne might have been less inclined to believe that a dead boy could grow up to become a dead man who murdered anyone who trespassed upon the ground he stalked. However, even if she could not begin to comprehend how he still haunted the long-abandoned site of the old summer camp, she had no difficulty accepting the reality of Jason and what he was. While his face had been hidden by the battered old hockey mask and his body was mostly concealed by his tattered clothing, he had not moved like a man who was over sixty years old, which lent further credence to the stories that he was something not entirely mortal, something not fully human.

Trying (and failing) to get comfortable despite the pitiable conditions beneath the tarp, she shifted around, only to be startled by a sneeze.

"Oh, hellfuck," she grumbled.

Of course she would get sick.

—

—

Despite the damage he knew it likely was inflicting upon his traps and snares, Jason was pleased by the thunderstorm's ferocity and longevity. Not even the reckless, irresponsible sort of people who were drawn to visit his domain tended to show up when the weather was so severe, which allowed him to focus the entirety of his attention upon the many tasks that he could and indeed should perform around his cabin without much of him having to remain alert for any sign of intruders. Even though he had nothing but time, he never seemed to have enough of it to accomplish everything that required his attention upon the four square miles that he considered to be his land. However, despite knowing what tasks he ought to be performing, all that he seemed capable of doing right now was pacing back and forth across the length of the front room.

Before he died the second time, at the young hand of Tommy Jarvis, he had not fully comprehended his condition - that his body no longer was a slave to the needs and drives of the living such as food, sleep, and shelter - and during the long years in which he was kept separate and completely alone by that cruel, invisible yet impenetrable barrier, kept away from his mother and from anyone else, his existence had been reduced to little more than desperate scrabbling to meet those supposed needs. He had subsisted upon whatever meagre scraps the forest provided, fruits and berries in their seasons, the meat of whatever animals he could trap or shoot, little more than grass and leaves at times, and even dirt when he found nothing else to fill his stomach, eating merely out of habit and Mommy's remembered words telling him that he needed to eat three meals a day if he wanted to grow up to be big and strong rather than true hunger; and, during the long, cold, dark winter months when nothing grew and the animals were in hiding or hibernation, he had been driven to leave the forest and trudge through thick snow for miles to the town where he scavenged through trash cans and dumpsters in search of sustenance. Had he not already been dead, he never would have survived that first winter. No sickly, delicate eleven-year-old boy who always had been protected and kept close by his mother could have, no matter how determined or skilled. Jason knew that, now.

Still, the skills he was forced to develop over those two decades of complete, abject solitude and reliance upon nobody but himself came to serve him well after the veil that separated him from the realm of the living was torn asunder that awful night when Alice Hardy murdered Mommy, when Pamela Voorhees' need for vengeance was passed on to him - that inheritance of revenge and death which she gave to him. The snares and traps which he had taught himself to build and set in order to provide himself with the meat he had believed his growing body needed easily were converted into forms that would catch his human prey. His youthful passions for archery and knife-throwing allowed him to kill even when his victims managed to evade the reach of any hand-held weapon or his immensely powerful hands themselves. Even the process of building his ramshackle little cabin deep in the woods from whatever scraps of metal, lumber, glass, and plastic sheeting he could find taught him the art of improvisation, how best to make use of whatever he found. Anything could become a deadly weapon in his hands.

Because of the desperate, precarious nature of his (unnecessary, as it turned out) struggle to survive those first two decades after he drowned, Jason had little time to attend to such things as organisation during that period. The cabin he constructed in those early years to protect himself from the elements had been a foul, putrid, perpetually-leaking little hellhole inundated with mildew and rot almost from the beginning, but it was more comfortable than being exposed to the cutting winds of icy winter or the blinding heat of the summer sun day and night should have been, and he had been too preoccupied with trying to keep himself fed, with keeping himself alive so that one beautiful day he could be reunited with Mommy, to allow the deplorable condition of his home to bother him. There was no trash service so deep in the forest, so the garbage of his "life" built up until he could muster the courage to bag it all up and carry it to the closest dumpster he could find at the edges of town, generally whenever he had been unable to find anything that even remotely resembled food for over a week and thought that he needed to go there to scrounge up something edible anyway, dreading encountering another person the entire time he was away from protective isolation of the abandoned camp. He did not want to be seen. The taunting laughter of those who had watched him drown still rang in his ears, and even adults had not reacted with much more kindness than children to the sight of him and his disfigurement - which was what drove him to hide his face beneath a burlap sack. Not that he ever had been seen until after the awful night when that monstrous girl killed Mommy. The veil was too thick, and although he occasionally saw others, somehow they never had seemed to see him.

His squalid, hardscrabble existence during that time had been nightmarish at best, and he could not count the number of nights that he had fallen into a restless, shallow sleep upon a filthy pile of clothes salvaged from the trash sobbing for his mother during the earliest years, but it had hardened him, moulded his once-frail body into a relentless, unyielding tower of murderous strength. It was a crucible in which that scared, lonely, helpless little boy who was hounded by the taunts and jeers of his fellow children even into death had been forged into the force of Nature, the not-quite-living and yet not-quite-dead embodiment of Vengeance and Death Incarnate, that he was today. Jason was not glad to have endured those formative experiences - in truth, he doubted if he could remember how it was to feel truly glad of anything - but he acknowledged the purpose that they had served in making him into the brutally effective, efficient creature that he had become.

In the first five years after his mother's death, his "life" was no easier than it was before his ability to interact with others was restored. It took him over two moons to track down his mother's killer in the boarding house to which the wicked, red-haired girl had retreated after the bloody events which Mommy had orchestrated upon what would have been his 33rd birthday had he not drowned, and to this day he still did not know exactly how he had managed to find where Alice tried to hide herself away from her unforgivable sin. However, far too many of the events that characterised his strange existence seemingly were impossible, often defying even the very laws of Nature herself - there were too many impossible, inexplicable happenings for him to waste much time upon pondering the "hows" of what he was and what he did, even if his perpetually-active mind were given to such analysis, which it was not. After Alice's death and her body's removal to join his beloved mother's severed head in the shrine that he built to Mommy's memory within his squalid little cabin, only a few people had dared to visit the site of the abandoned camp, mostly vagrants he had surmised, judging by their appearances which were nearly as ragged and marked by desperation as his own. These few souls were dispatched with ease, and nobody ever had come searching for them.

Then, only a few years after he tracked down and killed Alice, brown-haired, giggly Chris Higgins had come to Crystal Lake with her family to stay in their summer home right at the border of his territory. Seeing the girl's confident smiles and hearing her thoughtless, uncaring laughter so close to where he had died, so close to where his mother had been murdered by a similarly blithe and oblivious girl, had incited a searing bonfire of rage within him, flames that could be quenched only in a shower of blood. Her blood. And Mommy had encouraged his fury, whispering through his mind that the brunette teenager had to die, that he must kill her from the moment she crossed the unmarked but not unfelt line separating the Higgins property from his own. Late one night, Chris had fled into the forest and she fell asleep beneath the spreading boughs of an oak tree, and Jason had believed that this was his chance to obey his mother and the burning need within him, his chance to kill the girl, to punish her for the disrespect she showed by her giggling and flirting in so sacred a place. Once she awakened, he had pounced, but while she fought like a wildcat against his attempts to kill her and even had managed to disarm him by kicking his knife from his hand, he accidentally had knocked her unconscious or perhaps her terror had overwhelmed her and dragged her into unconsciousness; unable to end her life when she was unaware of the punishment her sacrilege demanded, he had begun to drag her toward his home, to sacrifice her before his mother's holy shrine, hoping that if he performed the act there, he might be able to feel Mommy's pride that he had done what she commanded him to do. Much to his frustration, just as Chris was coming back to reality, finally, so close to his run-down shack, before he could drag her the rest of the way there then wrap his hands around her slender throat and squeeze until the whites of her eyes turned crimson with blood and her face turned dark, until the delicate hands that inevitably would beat at his unshrouded face and chest as harmlessly as butterfly wings fell still, until the frantic pulse he would have felt beating against his squeezing fingers ceased, he had heard the sound of someone approaching. Never having attempted to kill two people at once before, especially not while unarmed, Jason had fled, knowing deep within himself that he would have another opportunity to punish the girl for her unspeakable sins. Mommy had been disappointed in his failure, he knew, but he thought that she understood.

Following his thwarted attempt to kill the Higgins girl, the area surrounding Crystal Lake returned to the quiet peace that had settled over the derelict property for many more moons, but despite the rarity of disturbances by trespassers during that period, Jason's existence then was far from peaceful - it, too, reverted to the desperation of trying to survive on his own deep in the forest. And then a whole group of young people, trespassers, violators, arrived to stay at Packanack Lodge at the edge of the property he guarded, despite the large section of a fallen tree that he had dragged for nearly a mile in order to block the road leading to his land. At first, he had considered simply leaving them be, but then a pair of them intruded upon the grounds of the camp itself, followed almost immediately by another, a police officer who actually had dared to enter his home, the site of Pamela Voorhees' sacred shrine, the home of the holiest of his relics of his sainted mother who had been able to love him when nobody else ever could, and that was something Jason could not allow. The majority of the teens were easily eliminated, and with each death his confidence grew - and he had felt deeply satisfied by his discovery that the snares he had set for game indeed worked equally well for human prey, just as he had hoped that they might. But then, the fair-haired, freckle-faced girl called Ginny found his cabin, found his mother's shrine, and damned, demoniac thing that she was, she stole Mommy's sweater, tainted it by touching it, by putting it onto her impure slut's body, and then she had tried to trick him by pretending to be Mommy. The thought, the desperate hope, that his mother somehow actually had returned to him from death after so many cold years of aching with longing to be held in the warmth of her arms again, to hear her sweet voice telling him that he was more than a deformed monster, to feel cared for and loved again, had blinded him to the truth, nearly allowing the girl to kill him then, and shortly after that cruelty, she had stabbed him with his own machete, with the sacred blade that had spilt the saint's lifeblood into the ravenous sand upon the shore of his first grave, in what he assumed to be a failed attempt to behead him just as Alice had done to his mother.

The pain of the realisation that Mommy still was gone, still was dead, and that any hope of feeling loved or accepted was just as dead, had been far more painful than the deep wound in his shoulder that had cracked bone and shredded muscle. For that callous desecration of his most sacred relics, for the sin of having dared to place her profane hands upon all that he had left of his beloved mother, Jason had felt a rage so hot that he feared it might consume him, that it would reduce him to a pile of ashes as grey and empty as he had felt inside since the moment he saw Mommy's head drop to the blood-hungry sand at the shore of the lake that had swallowed him whole then spat him out into the bleak, grey Hell in which he still was trapped. That fiery rage burned the girl's name and face indelibly into his soul, and the hatred for her that welled up from within the hollowness inside his desolate heart was overwhelming. He had been able to taste it, bitter and caustic upon his unspeaking tongue, with every breath he took, and the need for vengeance drove him as it never before had, to the point where he had found himself able to ignore the agony of his bloodied left shoulder in order to track her back to the Lodge and make another attempt to bring deadly justice to her. And yet, despite his resolve and determination, much like the Higgins girl, Ginny, too, had escaped the retribution her unspeakably foul, blasphemous acts had earned her, the death she so richly deserved.

And it was in that bitter conflagration that Jason's ability to hope ever again to feel Mommy's love was consumed, destroyed. That flaming destruction touched upon all of his emotions with fingers of fire, all of his remaining feelings and hopes and desires except for his hatred and his need for revenge, reducing them to charred, brittle, hollow lumps that time eventually could wear away to nothing.

Although time still had not obliterated them completely, it would. Eventually. For such is the nature of time. And perhaps then, if nobody else ever trespassed upon his land, Jason might know peace.

Severely wounded and fearing that the safety of his cabin had been compromised by its discovery by Ginny who he had been unable to kill due to the severity of the injuries that indescribably cruel witch inflicted upon him, he had hidden Mommy's head away in a safe place and hidden himself away in the large barn upon the Higgins property, not expecting anyone to go there as the family had not returned in the seasons since his attack upon Chris. It was peaceful and calm in the shadowy building, and he even found some clothing that almost fit his large frame to replace his bloodstained, torn old flannel and overalls - a shirt and pants of a heavy, thick material that probably had been left behind by a workman at some point. As comfortable as he could be outside of the boundary of his forest and so far away from the solidifying, soothing presence of his mother's sacred remains, he settled in and focused upon recovering from the injuries he had suffered while eradicating the filth that came to Packanack Lodge and intruded upon his solitude. The only thing missing had been food, and he was forced to venture to the little market at the close edge of town to attend to that need. Fearing that the couple there whose home was attached to their business had seen him while he stood outside surveying the property, he killed them prior to scavenging through their inventory for what he believed he needed to survive then swiftly returned to his sanctuary in the barn. Much to his amazement, the wound that probably should have been fatal, from which he had expected it to take weeks for him fully to recover, healed completely in a matter of days, although it left his shoulder deeply scarred - a scar that served as a permanent reminder that he never would feel love or compassion or anything good again as long as he "lived," a scar the sight of which forever would force him to face and simultaneously allow him to accept that lack, a scar that killed any hope or even desire that he might have had of having such things and buried it in a grave so deep it never could be exhumed and recovered. That was when Jason finally had been forced to consider that he might not be an entirely-normal man any longer, although he had not yet understood just how far removed from humanity he truly was. His brief time alone in the barn also had allowed him the opportunity to observe the structure in depth, noting that it obviously was far more solid than the little cabin he had built out of scraps and trash, and Jason carefully studied its construction and geometry during his stay, learning from it what he could.

However, the peace which he had found at Higgins Haven was almost pitifully short-lived, and he offered a prayer of gratitude to whatever power allowed him to heal almost completely from his debilitating wounds so impossibly, inhumanly quickly when yet another group of disgusting, irresponsible young people showed up at the property a matter of mere days later.

A group that included the girl who had gotten away some two years before, Chris Higgins herself, amongst its number.

When he saw her exiting the van through a small crack in the barn door, the anticipation of finally finishing what he had started that night beneath the gnarled old oak tree had surged over him with all the force of a hurricane-driven tidal wave. Killing her companions, giving their blood in offering to the cursed land and fulfilling the unwritten, unspoken mandate that drove him, proved to be noticeably easier than when he had sought to eliminate the trespassers from Packanack Lodge, to free their rotting souls from their dissolute young bodies. Perhaps the most satisfying part of the massacre, though, had been finding the hockey mask that the curly-haired, heavyset boy whose throat he slit had brought that proved to be an ideal replacement for the sack he previously had worn to hide his disfigured face which wicked Ginny had taken from him. Over the span of the too-few days he had spent blessedly alone in the barn, he not only had healed: he discovered that he had grown stronger, faster, more impervious to pain. These changes served him well when the Higgins girl fought his unrelenting attacks with even more ferocity than she had demonstrated in the forest that night when he found her asleep beneath the oak - stabbing a knife deep into the muscle of his thigh, knocking him senseless then pushing him out of the hayloft with a rope twisted around his neck to hang him - a fall that should have been fatal, that snapped his neck when the slack ran out, leaving him dangling with his feet half a metre off the ground - and finally burying a hatchet in his skull. It was that final, (briefly) fatal wound that had allowed her to escape paying the blood-price of her carefree violation of the sacred land her frivolity profaned with her every stolen breath yet again.

Awakening in a freezer drawer in the hospital morgue upon recovering from the axe wound that had split his head open remained one of the most disturbing, alarming experiences of his existence - even now, decades later.

As he made his way back to the abandoned summer camp, Jason had observed several teenagers in and around the lake, and he tracked them down, killing all but two for their trespassing that same night - finding that his strength had increased yet again. He had not even wanted to kill the boy - he was too young, too close to innocent although he was teetering at the razor's edge of losing that trait, for his presence to violate the sanctity of the land - but Tommy Jarvis had gotten between him and his prey time after time, thwarting his every attempt to exact the blood-payment due from his sister. Tommy's tenacity and cleverness were sufficient to allow the boy to kill him, truly kill him, by thrusting a machete through his eye into his brain and then stabbing him countless times.

Jason never had learnt how long he spent in his grave after that, and neither did he care to find out as that knowledge was irrelevant and useless to him, but when his body was exhumed and some force resurrected him again, the same Tommy Jarvis had been standing there over the open grave, a man grown, telling Jason that several years had passed. The necessity of his presence to enforce the cursed land's law that the living were unwelcome upon the site of the old camp where he and his mother died was proven beyond any doubt when he returned to his home only to find that it was being reopened by the exact same sort of drunken, drugged, fornicating, irresponsible people who had allowed him to drown so many years before. Just to see children there hovering upon the precipice of the eternal black void, at the edge of the bottomless lake that had taken his life, had made Jason's soul ache, sickening him to his core. Unable to allow the desecration or the risk to fragile, innocent children like he had been when he fell victim to the selfsame careless negligence, he slaughtered every one of them as well as the police officers who came trying to save them from the consequences of their sins - except for one blonde girl and Tommy Jarvis. Again, the latter had stood in the way of Jason fulfilling his duty, eventually succeeding in chaining him to a rock that sank to the bottom of the lake, stopping him only one night after his resurrection.

Many years passed while Jason floated there, suspended in the water, trapped by the chain and the stone, unmoving and undying, so close to the peace Fate seemed so determined to deny him, but eventually a little blonde slip of a girl named Tina Shepard who wielded a truly terrible power somehow utilised it to awaken him from the hibernation-like state in which he had existed and break the chain tethering him to the stone - although he did not know how this happened or possess any curiosity regarding that - thereby freeing him to resume exterminating the human vermin who trespassed where they could not be allowed to walk. However, despite the girl's seeming fragility, the invisible force that she possessed turned anything into a weapon that she did not shy away from using against him, rendering her the most formidable person he had ever encountered. At the end of the evening of his first day of freedom, she had dredged another long-dead body from the lake that had bound his burnt and battered form in chains again and dragged him back down into the depths of Crystal Lake to wait. But again, as always, he had been dragged back to fulfill his duty.

Thus, the time between his startling discovery of his inhumanity - that he was no ordinary, mortal man and that therefore his body was not a slave to the needs of Man - while healing in the Higgins' barn and his final return from the water in which Tina had entombed him had been only a matter of days. It had not been nearly enough time for him to utilise his newfound freedom from the time-devouring necessity of tending to the requirements of sustaining and maintaining a living body in harsh conditions. However, since last he was dredged forth from Crystal Lake by the peculiar bearded man in strange robes, however many years that was after the Shepard girl had condemned him once again to the depths, he had at last had ample time for such tasks as designing and building ever-improving traps, amassing and tending to a growing hoard of weapons, creating his system of alarms to alert him to the presence of intruders, and maintaining the little cottage in which he and Mommy had lived together prior to Fate's cruel intervention into their lives.

Jason preferred order, organisation. Not neatness, per se - Nature is not neat by any means, and it was She that he tried to emulate - but there was a part of his unconscious mind that recognised the patterns within Chaos, the strange ways in which even disparate things came together, the order of its very disorder, the illogical logic underlying it all. Out in the wild, everything followed these patterns. The seasons changed, one blending into the next, the new, pale green leaves of spring unfurling upon branches denuded by Winter inevitably darkened, grew broad and heavy during Summer before changing to clothe the forest in all the shades of a great blazing bonfire at the touch of Autumn as if they had stored all of Summer's heat within their delicate lacework of veins until the conflagration no longer could be contained and it exploded outward in a rush of multicoloured flame that burned them, crisping and curling their edges in anticipation of Winter, when the last of them finally would turn brown and fall dead to the earth to be consumed by the soil. The migratory beasts came and went, all in their time.

The only beasts that failed to fall within the patterns Nature set forth were the humans. Yes, they obeyed the seasons to some extent, predictably coming to the lake to explore and laugh and desecrate that sacred place in Summer, venturing out to hunt game in Spring and Fall, but there was no real order to it or to them that Jason could perceive. Instead, they attempted to impose a sort of order of their own upon it, one that was unnatural and wrong.

Everything in Jason's existence followed a sort of order, an inherent logic where purpose was all and form was irrelevant except for use as a disguise - and perhaps his disdain for form and his favouring of functionality above all was born from his loathing of the appearance of his own form, most particularly of his face, a visage that had cursed his small, insular family to misery and premature death, but that comparison never crossed his mind. Even the state of his home matched his sense of order. The exterior of the cottage where he once had lived in relative peace with his mother implied long years of abandonment, mildew staining what little remained of the peeling paint, vines growing thic and wild between the warped slats of cheap, decaying wooden siding, and a roof that sagged with exhaustion like a weary old derelict at the end of a hot summer day, but the walls beneath it were solid, and whenever a new leak appeared in the roof, Jason repaired it before the house's bones could be compromised, replacing the rotting shingles with what he could find, filling in whatever holes he encountered. The interior of the cottage looked no better than the exterior - he left the windows open to allow the wind to blow dirt and falling leaves inside to cover the unpolished, scuffed floor, the long-unused kitchen appliances (which had been far from new even when Pamela Voorhees purchased them in 1952) were slowly being eaten by rust, the particleboard beneath the chipped and peeling linoleum of the cabinets and countertop warped more and more with the changing of the seasons, and very little furniture remained in the main rooms. However, the condition of the house was fully intentional upon Jason's part. It was not that he wanted to live in such a dreary ruin - rather, it was part of his disguise. Nobody who saw the decaying structure that appeared to be slowly being consumed by the surrounding forest would believe it could be inhabited, and even if some foolishly curious explorer dared to enter his sanctuary, they would not be disabused of that belief by what they found inside. It was one more layer of protection against intrusion.

However, despite the apparent chaos and decay, Jason's home was organised in a manner that worked for him. The piles of seemingly random, broken junk hid many of the objects he used to maintain the property, including salvaged parts for the generators that ran the lights for the camp and lining the old mining tunnels that he had discovered ran belowground and which he painstakingly had expanded using nothing but handheld tools and his immense strength, spools of cord, rope, and wire of various gauges and metals, as well as scraps that he used for building traps, and an immense collection of tools that he had stolen or found among the possessions of the dead over the decades. Far more similar items were stored in the mines beneath the camp, including a vast quantity of camping and hunting gear as well as the weapons he amassed. The tunnels closest to the cottage resembled a pack-rat's lair, but Jason knew what lay in each pile. In a sense, he was a hoarder, but he possessed both the skills and the motivation necessary to make use of what he found and kept - and if it seemed to be comprised of enough materials for more projects than a man ever possibly could complete in a lifetime? Experience would have convinced him that his existence was likely to continue long past any human's lifespan, had he given the matter any thought.

His disorganised system of organisation and the automatic, almost thoughtless precision through which he created a sort of order amidst the disorder of his environment - order not imposed or coerced upon but rather learnt from Nature - also was reflected in how his mind itself worked. Jason automatically placed all that he encountered into the categories by which he defined things - natural or unnatural, possibly-dangerous or likely-harmless, interesting or not, adult or child, useful, potentially useful, or useless … and trespasser/prey. The fluent ease with which he was able to do so and the regularity of the patterns his existence followed allowed him to function without requiring him to engage in much deep thought; and, more importantly, without having to rely upon conscious memory. Only infrequently did he come across anything which did not fit neatly into any single one or two of these "boxes" by which he categorised things, but upon those exceedingly rare occasions when he did, his frustration tended to grow into something akin to its own entity, existing within him yet separate, and threatening to take control of him entirely. Or, he would find himself being pulled down into and subsumed by the chthonic whirlpool of his darkest memories. Neither was a comfortable position.

The way he viewed things, the automatic categorisation of objects and experiences, formed a part of his formidable defences against feeling as he had felt prior to his first death and right after his mother was killed. Time and repetition whittled away his ability to feel, both emotionally and physically, and knowing that fear, pain, and even the pervasive loneliness that had defined his childhood no longer possessed the ability to harm him, gave him strength. Even the cruel words which others had wielded against him like weapons had lost their power to stab into his heart long ago. If not for the acidic rage bubbling up inside of him at the discovery that people had dared to reopen the camp, that they had brought innocent children to the place where he had died due to the selfishness and irresponsibility of those to whom his safety had been entrusted and that those charged with supervising the young campers were no different from the counsellors who had allowed him to drown some thirty years prior, Jason probably would not have responded at all to the Jarvis boy's taunts of "asshole" and "maggot-head." Despite the fact that he understood their meaning, the words themselves had meant nothing to Jason, and neither had Tommy's jeering tone, even though there had been a time when hearing them would have reduced Jason to tears - that time was long in the past, though, and all that had mattered to him by the time he arose from the grave was avenging the trespasses, giving the sin-tainted blood of those who intruded upon his property back to the land their presence soiled. The only emotions Jason had experienced then, as now, were anger and frustration, and that anger was not even upon his own behalf.

The simple, repetitive physical tasks with which he occupied his time had a similar effect upon what remained of his emotions. However, given the frustration born from his confusion about the girl-woman-child who he was unable to categorise and his inability to deal with that frustration using any of the skills which he had developed over his existence, his ordinary relative calm had shattered and he felt as if he were a tree infested with termites that swarmed beneath its bark but which it lacked any ability to shake out of itself. At least the rain and his long walk back from the cemetery to where the waters of his first grave - his true grave - lapped at the shore of his home had been sufficient for his body to shed the maggots and worms that had burrowed into his corpse while he lay dead and rotting in his coffin, so that odd, almost ticklish sensation had not lasted for too long. But as physical as his confusion and frustration felt to him, how close to actually being jittery it brought him, pacing back and forth across the worn floorboards of Mommy's cabin was providing him no relief. But Jason was, in his way, a logical and even rational creature; therefore, as pacing did not help, he gathered up his blade-cleaning supplies and sat down cross-legged upon the floor with his spine flat against the wall. The familiar metallic rasp of the whetstone down the edge of the machete sang in his ears, his hands moving from muscle memory alone, angling the stone and the tool with unthinking expertise.

This was not the machete that had taken his mother's life - he had lost that particular blade to some victim who fought back, far too long ago for him to remember the details of how it had been taken from him - and several had passed through his hands in the years that followed. Even so, he treated the blade with the same reverence as if it were that sacred instrument that was one of the very last objects Mommy touched with her soft, living, loving hands. Each machete was The Machete to Jason, despite his knowledge that they were not the one whose handle had felt the warmth of the same hands that had granted him the only affection he ever had known, that they were not the one upon whose blade Mommy's blood had poured. It was the shape of it that held meaning to him, what it represented, as opposed to an individual's blade's provenance.

Perhaps this merely was yet another of Jason's defences against the consuming anguish that he had felt, this imbuing of whatever machete he currently possessed with all of the significance and power of the first he ever held. The last his mother ever held. He could gaze down the blade and see her holding it, see Mommy standing upright and alive in her warm sweater, so beautiful there upon the beach as she swung it at that horrible, horrible girl. She was an angel there, a protector of innocence against the immorality of those who came to Camp Crystal Lake, against the irresponsibility that had cost him his life far too soon and which inevitably would have ended in other mothers having to share her pain, in other children dying before their purposes could be known much less fulfilled, swinging it at Alice in the name of vengeance, with the power of her love for him.

After a few minutes, he tested the machete's edge against the pad of his thumb, barely touching it to his dead flesh, and sharp steel parted greyed skin to release a thin, sluggish trail of dark blood that trickled down toward his wrist at the slight pressure he exerted.

Good. But not perfect.

By the time he set the stone to the blade again, the wound had closed, leaving the faintest trace of a pale scar upon his the callus of his fingertip, one of hundreds or perhaps even thousands such marks upon that thumb and therefore unnoticeable. Jason worked methodically, slowly and carefully sharpening the blade, holding it up to his masked face and looking down its edge or testing it upon his own flesh every few minutes, seeking perfection. And then, when he finally felt satisfied with his work with the whetstone, he poured a bit of oil stolen from a home near the edge of the property that was his by right of blood into a rag and cleaned it thoroughly before setting it aside to dry.

The next blade he picked up was a hunter's gutting knife, relatively recently acquired and as yet unused by its new owner, although it was far from new, the wood of the handle stained and worn smooth by hands other than Jason's. While he had possessed a similar blade during the long ago time when he still had thought of himself as a person who therefore had the same needs as all other living people, and he was familiar with the use of the curved hook at the tip of the blade, he never had used one upon his human prey. Not yet. But the evisceration of the boy hanging by one ankle from a snare had reminded him of this particular knife, and it inspired him to add it to the number he carried upon his body. However, before he could trust it, he had to test it, and therefore it received the same careful treatment as the machete.

Indeed, Jason treated all of his blades with the same degree of care, although none but the machete had any meaning to him beyond their utility. That last night, his mother had worn a large Bowie knife upon her belt, as well, but somehow, these did not hold the same significance to him. He had not ever wasted his time wondering why this might be, likely because such thoughts would have had to come back around to the fact that it had been her machete, wielded by that demon-girl, that killed his mother. And even though killing with the same instrument that had ripped everything good in his existence from his pathetically reaching, helpless hands was, in a way, a reclamation of power, Jason's mind did not contain the philosophical bent necessary for him to draw such conclusions. Thus, to think too deeply thereupon would cause him to feel the aching sorrow and loss that he tried to the best of his ability to avoid.

His blades served his purpose, just as he served the land's and his mother's, and he tried to be like them. Strong. Sharp. Durable and unbreakable. Deadly.

But there was a difference between himself and them, one which he felt acutely at times - they were unthinking, unfeeling things. Mere objects with no purpose of their own. Jason did not know what he was, but he could not become as like his tools as he aspired to be. He thought. He felt. And no matter how he wished, no matter how much time passed or how vast the chasm between him and the mortal human boy he once had been grew, that remained unchanging.

By the time the storm's rage began to calm and the pounding of the rain subsided to a whispering patter upon the shingles, nearly a dozen blades of varying sizes and shapes sat upon the floor beside Jason's bent knee, gleaming with oil and all sharp enough to rend flesh and split bone with ease. Their owner's frayed sleeves were stained with droplets of his own blood, split to make sure of this, but his scarred fingers did not ache, either from the painstaking work he had spent hours performing or from the nigh upon a dozen new slim cuts that adorned them, every one already healed. The slight sense of accomplishment that he now felt was as nothing compared with what he felt when he finished fulfilling his duty by ending the life of a trespasser and his mother's insistent commands to kill fell silent inside his head once more, but even so, it was a soothing balm upon his tattered nerves.

Standing once more, his muscles moving to raise his bulk with perfect fluidity despite the hours spent seated hunched over his tools upon the floor, he stooped to retrieve his machete and slid it into the leather straps wrapped around his thigh then picked up the bottle of oil which he returned to its proper place in the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink, leaving the rest of the collection of weapons to dry upon the floor. Raising his wrists to his masked face, he inhaled deeply, and the trace of copper that wafted into his open nasal cavities was too faint to concern him, so washing his hands and cuffs was unnecessary. Long ago, Jason had noticed that the scent of his own blood was not as strong as that of his victims - just another of the many peculiarities of his being that he was aware existed but upon which he wasted no consideration, merely accepting it, like all of them, as fact. Understanding the changes that his body had undergone served no purpose. Knowing why or how or even what would not make him more efficient, more effective in fulfilling the duty that drove him.

It was not his duty that drove him to leave the cabin, though. The bells had not rung, the clamorous sounds of unwelcome intruders had not reached his ears, and the strange sense that was not truly a sense at all, at least not one of the five which all men possess, had not informed him that anything upon the land that he guarded and served was amiss. And yet, now that the rain had all but stopped, Jason abandoned the candlelit house for the night-black forest. It was not the call of potentially rain-ravaged traps that he followed, leading him to stride, wraith-like, beneath the dripping trees. Neither was it curiosity, nor anything else for which he had a name. The cold wind left behind in the storm's wake crept into the multitude of holes and tears in his ripped clothing to slither over the dead flesh beneath, dipping in between pale, bare bones exposed within the gaps, but while he could feel its touch, he did not shiver at Autumn's chilling caress. Truly, he was not even thinking about a destination, merely allowing his boots to follow the traces of the unmarked trail, until the forest opened up before him like a locket unclasped.

That clearing.

There he stopped, just before the edge of the clearing where the shadows of the trees were thick enough to conceal him from any watchers. But tonight, there was no odd little girl-woman-child sitting beside the little campfire that lit her red-gold hair, transforming it into a halo of flames. Indeed, there was no fire at all beside which she could have sat, and even from several metres away he could see the reflection of pallid stars off the dark water that had puddled in the very heart of the fire pit. One glance at the pile of sticks she had gathered confirmed that they had been left out uncovered during the storm.

There would be no fire to warm her, not tonight.

Still, even though he did not see her, he knew that she was there, no doubt huddled amongst her blankets beneath the sagging tarp that he well knew would have been insufficient protection against the driving rain, cold and wet and miserable. Even though the sight of him had not been enough to drive her away, perhaps a night spent damp and shivering would drive her to untie the stretched ropes supporting her bright blue shelter and pack all of her gear and herself into the tiny, rust-pocked car and leave. He hoped that it was. Standing perfectly still as stray droplets dripped from the flame-coloured leaves above onto his shoulders and head, a few even daring to trickle beneath his mask to touch his despised face, his single, greenish-hazel eye unblinking, he watched, and he listened.

As the quiet patter of errant raindrops falling from the trees grew more and more irregular, the songs of night insects replaced them, and the sound of great wings beating the air above drew his gaze upward, but only momentarily. His head turned sharply back toward the tarp when he heard the distinctive crinkling of plasticised fabric followed by a very odd, high-pitched little squeak then a despondent mutter of "oh, hellfuck." It took him over thirty heartbeats to realise what that sound was - he had just heard her sneeze. Behind the mask, what remained of his lips curled up into a satisfied smile. There was no actual cruelty in his thought once he recognised the sound, no true malice despite how cold a thought it was. There was only relief.

The girl-woman-child … whatever she is … she won't stay here past the morning, not if she spends the night in misery, and especially not if she falls ill as a result.

Jason remained where he stood, just another part of the forest, unmoving as the trees in whose shadow his large form was concealed except for the steady, slow rise and fall of his chest, silent as the stones surrounding the flooded fire pit except for the barely audible whisper of his breath through the holes in the hockey mask that concealed his face, a neither truly living nor truly dead sculpture, a monument to the true power Nature holds over Man carved of the decayed flesh of a lost but never forgotten child all grown up. Until an hour before the first blush of sunrise warmed the tree-obscured horizon, he simply listened to the rustling of the tarp beneath her restless, shivering body, and then he turned away. He had left the tools and other supplies that he might require to repair any of his traps that had been damaged by the earlier deluge back at the cabin, and he had to retrieve them if he wished to begin attending to that task at dawn. As he walked away, he did not bother to glance behind toward the clearing with its desolate little occupant.

By the time he made it back there after circling his property and repairing any damage wrought by the storm, she would be gone, and everything would be simple to place into the proper boxes for categorisation once more.