Just for clarity's sake, jason is remake jason.
For the most part, I thought they did a great job with the remake (I've been watching it and obsessing over Derek Mears' hands) and there was only one real complaint I had. Kind of superficial, but whatever. When Jason is about to kiss the blades of the wood-chipper and Whitney stabs him, after six weeks of being held captive mind you, in any twisted revenge fantasy she may or may not have had the best line she can come up with is "say hi to mommy... in hell". Seriously. I hope she dies in the sequel just for that. I liked her up until those words came out of her mouth. It's really the writers fault, but still, that's just unacceptable. And that is my rant for the day.
Thanks to Kyuubi123 for the review. The only review, i might add. I know theres more than one of you so come out of the interpipes and let me love you.
Felix Laband – Miss Teardrop
It happened entirely by accident. Jason had been checking his traps in vain; the camp was quiet these days, with the summer rush over. He had heard an engine roar one last time before dying out with a grumble. The engine belonged to a chipped green truck on the other end of the lake. There were a few other houses built near the lake and even though they were all spaced out around the huge lake, this one was about as close to Jason's territory as he could feel comfortable with. It had never bothered him before because the house was usually inactive and quiet, even when it was being built several years prior it had never given Jason any cause to worry.
He observed the truck and the figure inside the cabin with minimal interest, simply watching for lack of anything else to do. The door swung open with a rusty creak and a foot dropped down to the gravel. The figure, upon careful inspection, was the injured woman from the week before. It was definitely the same woman, Jason decided, when he saw her struggle to make the transition from sitting to standing on crutches.
She hobbled up the stairs to the patio where she sat down in a Muskoka chair for almost an hour just dozing before she even went inside. When she finally woke up she seemed groggy but refreshed. She went inside briefly, but spent most of the afternoon on the patio reading and napping alternately.
Jason watched her for months.
Some days he would walk to the far end of the lake where he could see her cottage on the other side. The stained pine stilts holding the patio above the slope of the hill and the water; the dock and the orange kayak tied to it; the broad window through which he could see her kitchen quite clearly when the lights were on. He would watch the still house for hours and if he saw her milling about he would watch hours more, fascinated by her tantric solitude. She would drive into town every week, usually Tuesdays, for supplies, but she never once brought people home with her. Most nights, she would play music that wasn't obnoxious or offensive to sensitive palates: jazz or folk or something slow and experimental. The jazz songs were always accompanied by a crackle, a sonic imperfection that textured the music like a well-trod dirt road, an effect which Jason found to be oddly soothing. He liked the way the sounds carried over the lake so he could hear it as clearly as if he were standing right there in the room.
She still had a limp, but it grew less pronounced every time he saw her. One morning in October, she was practising a slow-paced series of movements and stretches (she did this every morning when the sun rose) and must have stepped on her ankle the wrong way because Jason heard her cry of unexpected pain from the other side of the lake. She then hopped to the railing and attempted to stretch out her leg to relieve the pain. He edged closer to the water, as close as he dared go, and caught a glimpse of the winces shooting over her face as she massaged her ankle. Soon she gave up and limped inside where she stayed for the rest of the day, much to Jason's disappointment. He got close and watched her through the kitchen window that day.
He found that she spent most of her time absorbed in a book on the patio. Jason would lament her reading inside when the weather got colder. He liked to watch the flick of her delicate wrists when she turned a page and (when he was close enough) the shadows of emotion that would pass over her face when she would read something to induce them. Every few days or at most a week, she would have a new book and would dive straight into it with the vigour of a child on Christmas morning. Sometimes she would even talk to herself. Little, nonsensical phrases, and she would laugh out loud at her own jokes.
She would commit herself entirely to housework too, and do many difficult and labour-intensive tasks. One day in November, she was up on the roof with a hammer tucked in her belt loops and several nails held in her teeth, looking like a roughneck.
She cut down a tree one day, a tall cedar about two feet thick, with a chainsaw. She cut it into sections and then chopped up the sections into firewood with an axe. There is more strength in her than her body would suggest. Jason watched the wing-like movement of her shoulders as she lifted the axe above her head and swung downwards, repeating the motion a thousand times before she got tired. Then she went in the house for lunch. She came back outside in a different shirt and repeated the chopping process until the entire tree was in workable slices, all of which she then piled in the crawl space under the patio and covering the wood with a giant blue tarp to protect it from rain.
In December the lake began to freeze over in a thin plastic-like film. The first snow had come late this year and it had all but melted away now, leaving a brownish tint of decay in the cold vegetation. The trees drooped and sagged under the snow burdens that had partially melted into icy stones still clinging to their branches.
Jason was never bothered by the snow soaking his boots and the hem of his pants; his body temperature was never warm but it never seemed to drop below a certain point.
This was a great opportunity to clear away the traps for the winter; he didn't want them rusting in the snow. In the early afternoon when the sun was winking through the treetops in the most delightful way, Jason had four bear traps slung over his shoulder. He had made his way to Charlotte's end of the lake and decided to drop them off in the mines before getting the remaining two. But Charlotte suddenly burst from her door and bolted to the dock. Jason was baffled, naturally stopping to stare.
Her leg was long since healed but she still possessed a shadow of a limp. Jason guessed it was permanent now. He wondered how it happened in the first place; she had a makeshift bandage around the wound in the forest where he found her. He didn't even know if it was a bite or a cut. It could have been self inflicted for all he knew, though he doubted that very much. She led a peculiarly healthy lifestyle, like she had her own brand of hermit sustenance. The only unhealthy thing she did was smoke, which Jason deplored. The only consolation was that she didn't do it often. He had only seen her with a cigarette twice in nearly four months.
The weather couldn't have been far from freezing but she was dressed only in a shiny blue bathing suit, sprinting down the dock. She dropped a towel carelessly in her path and dove into the icy water. Panic and confusion gripped him in an inescapable vice when she didn't immediately surface. The water had to be colder than death; he could just imagine its merciless tendrils trapping her and the thought made him queasy. Instinctively, he gripped the handle of his machete.
But when she propelled herself half out of the water with a gleeful shriek she didn't seem to be in any danger. It was silly to think she was when she jumped into the lake quite on purpose, though why she would do this in the middle of December, Jason didn't know, but he did know that she was safe so he felt safe by association... how strange that felt.
She continued to giggle and shriek and even though Jason could hear the chill in her voice she refused to leave the water. Instead she played in it, splashing about and diving under and spitting out fountains of the icy liquid when she surfaced.
Although she was behaving like one she was no child; if Jason had to guess he would say she was older than twenty and younger than forty. Before he could properly acknowledge thoughts for her safety he realized he had no idea why he was thinking about her safety at all. He didn't know her. Was it because he saved her life with minimal effort that day? The act of taking her to a road in itself might not constitute saving her life, but sparing it certainly was. He didn't have to let her live, he didn't have to kill her, he didn't even have to acknowledge her existence.
If he had just ignored her and let her wander through the forest in search of civilization she would have succumbed to infection. She would have starved, or been killed by an animal or died from exhaustion or the elements. She could have gotten sick. But it was too late for any hypotheticals to matter, because Jason hadn't let any of those fates become her simply by guiding her to the road and doing very little else.
He spent so long trying to make sense of his concerns that he barely noticed when she finally left the water. The towel she wrapped tightly around herself couldn't have been very warming and she ran straight back inside before she got sick. Jason was almost relieved to see her race back inside to get warm. He stood on the edge of the lake for a long time before readjusting the traps on his shoulder and collecting the final two.
Jason was in the mines, speeding up the rotation of the grindstone. His weapon must be sharp. It must be silent as it cuts through air as well as flesh as well as bone.
His mother's whispers of encouragement and inspiration came less and less frequently until they finally stopped. Jason hadn't heard his mother's guiding voice in years, but he kept his promise to keep Crystal Lake free of filth. He unleashed his vengeance on all who entered the camp – his camp – as retribution for his suffering so much cruelty in the very same place. His mother didn't need to tell him that. He knew this for himself, ever since the day he drowned. Sometimes he would hear faint whispers when everything else was silent, but they were incomprehensible to him.
He wondered if he had done something wrong. If he had displeased his mother in some way, though he didn't know how. His behaviour hadn't changed in decades, and the things he did then, and still did, used to earn him praise and encouragement in abundance. Now he was left to the cold wind and the silence.
Next chapter will be up in roughly two weeks. But every review knocks a day off the wait. Live or die. Make your choice. * tv static *