FRIDAY THE 13th Part 4

The final chapter

A novelization by Landon Turner

Based on the screenplay by Barney Cohen and the film by Joseph Zito.

It was 1984 in the town of Crystal Lake, New Jersey, a small, bucolic New England-style town just on the edge of Pinehurst County.

Crystal Lake was the sort of town where you could walk alone down the streets in the late hours of the night and not be afraid; the sort of town where you could leave your doors unlocked and never fear the sort of things that happened in the bigger cities; the sort of town where you could turn on the ten o' clock news and cringe at all of the terrifying stories and then sigh with relief as you realized that what you were hearing about had happened over a thousand miles away.

It was just that sort of small, sleepy town that everyone dreamed about. Sure, you had the few ambitious folks who had their hearts set on the toils of a big city like Manhattan or Chicago, but deep down in their hearts, some of them would long to eventually settle down in a picturesque frame house on a quiet, tree-lined, residential street somewhere in a North American suburb.

Crystal Lake was that sort of town.

Until the summer of 1984 came.

What happened that summer rocked the small town and everyone living in it. Nobody wanted to believe it. They wanted to put it aside and erase it from the town's history; they wanted to pretend that it never even happened. Unfortunately, it wasn't the first time that tragedy befell the small town.

The horror started in 1957 at a local summer camp for kids, Camp Crystal Lake.

Camp Crystal Lake was an idyllic summer getaway for parents to get their kids out of their hair for cheap. It was owned by the Christy family, and on a shoestring budget and staff. All you had to do was hire a few teenagers to arrive early, get the place in shape, and have a relaxing weekend in the woods for a few bucks an hour.

Picture a few cozy log cabins on the shore of a serene lake surrounded by pine trees in the Northeastern wilderness...a whitewashed dock sticking out into the water beside a row of canoes...It was just off the highway down a winding dirt road on the outskirts of town.

The peace of solitude, and freedom from their youngsters, attracted the adults, the mischievous summer hijinks attracted the teenage counselors, and the thrilling outdoor experience attracted mostly inner city children.

The serenity of the campgrounds would be shattered that summer when one of the campers drowned in the lake.

The Voorhees boy. Jason Voorhees.

It was a name that the residents of Crystal Lake had come to know; some were afraid to utter it out loud.

Jason was an odd child, very quiet, and he never played with the other children. Depending on who you talked to in town, he had been mentally impaired and somewhat deformed from a birth defect. The drowning almost got Camp Crystal Lake shut down; no one cared enough about the Voorhees boy to go to such drastic measures.

But, someone did.

Someone cared about Jason a little too much.

That 'someone' was his own mother, Pamela Voorhees, who worked as a cook at the camp.

Some said that she went 'mad', others said that she was just a mother doing what she thought was best for her son. Some locals said she had watched her son screaming for help from the mess hall, his tiny body thrashing around in the murky water of the lake helplessly, and no one had even tried to help him...None of the counselors had heard his cries and the counselors who were supposed to have been watching Jason had been off fooling around. It was business as usual the rest of the summer, and the usual variation of the story was that every single day, Pamela thought about her son's lifeless corpse, rotting away at the bottom of that lake. The more she made meals for all the little children, the more she began to miss Jason.

In some variations of the legend from the locals in town, Pamela's mind had started to lose its grips with reality. She would hear Jason calling out to her from the lake, and his puny, helpless voice would reach her through the wind, and she'd stand at the edge of Crystal Lake and call back out to him. His voice was telling her to seek vengeance for him. To kill them all. She hadn't wanted to listen at first, but the more that she heard her son's helpless cries; the more she began to succumb to his wishes. So, when Camp Crystal Lake went into business next summer, so did Pamela. She waited for the darkest night to come. The darkest, quietest night.

On Friday the 13th, her son's birthday.

And she took a knife from the kitchen.

And she watched two camp counselors fondling each other on the second floor of an old barn, the same two counselors who should have been watching Jason when he drowned.

With each kiss that they gave each other, and each caress, and each passionate moan, Pamela grew hotter with rage.

She had felt it well up inside her until it was unbearable, and finally, she couldn't handle it anymore.

She hacked away at their bodies until their screams stopped, and as soon as their agonizing cries ceased, so did the rage inside of her; a temporary alleviation to the madness and the suffering she had been through ever since her sweet Jason was left to die.

Pamela disappeared into the night, leaving a grisly scene for the rest of the camp to discover.

After the murders of the two camp counselors in the summer of 58, the camp was officially shut down, and the locals deemed the place "Camp Blood".

The campgrounds were opened again in the early sixties, but someone burned down the cabins, and later, poisoned the lake. Mrs. Voorhees wouldn't stop until it was closed down for good. She almost got her wish, because for the next twenty or so years, the camp lay dormant, rotting away until it was only a shell of what it once was. A man by the name of Steve Christy made the fatal mistake in opening the camp again in the summer of 1979.

He signed a few papers, hired a few counselors, and after some negotiating and patience and a little luck, the campgrounds that had once belonged to his father belonged to him. It had only been open a month. The kids were arriving in two short weeks.

Disaster would strike again at Camp Crystal Lake.

The group of counselors that Steve had hired for the summer were brutally slaughtered in one night. Pamela also left her calling card. It was Friday the 13th.

Ol' man Christy didn't survive her bloody rampage either. The officials found him hanging upside-down from a tree, like an animal in a slaughterhouse, the blade of a hunting knife driven through his heart. Only one of his counselors survived that night. 19-year old Alice Hardy fought Pamela to the death, finally gaining the upper hand and decapitating her with her own machete.

Alice was severely traumatized, and who could blame her? She had seen all of her new friends butchered in one night, and had seen Pamela Voorhees coming at her with a machete, swinging at her, calling out her son's name…

Alice saw something else that night.

Something in the water.

She swore that she saw him in the water.

Jason Voorhees.

She had screamed hysterically at the police officers when they arrived, tried to make them listen, tried to make them understand, but their tiny minds couldn't wrap around the idea that Jason Voorhees was alive. They couldn't comprehend that a boy who drowned twenty years prior could actually be alive.

But Alice swore she saw him.

She saw him rise up from the murky depths of the lake and grab her, his skin so cold and grimy, his eyes bugging from his skull, the putrid smell of decaying flesh pervading her nostrils.

Nobody believed her, and when a team of divers scoured the lake, they didn't find any sign of a boy.

After all, it was absurd.

Jason Voorhees was dead.

He drowned twenty years ago. There was no way he could have been alive. If Jason were alive, he would have been full grown. It seemed to the police that there really was no Jason and the Crystal Lake slayings had come to an end. It wasn't until a few months later that the police force in Crystal Lake would realize how wrong they were.

Alice went missing that fall. The fall after that awful summer at Camp Blood as it came to be called.

They never found her body. All they found was an empty one-bedroom apartment; blood was all over the walls, the floor, and the bedsheets, everywhere…almost like some kind of sign. A warning. A preview of years to come.

Could it have been Jason? Back from the dead? To finish what he started? The locals seemed to think so. Everyone in town knew that it was Jason. They said that Jason never truly drowned in the lake. He survived, and sought shelter in the wilderness, feeding off of the land, they would say. They say that he became some sort of monster. Some sort of demented creature that could barely be thought of as 'human.' The locals also said that Jason saw his mother beheaded that night.

He saw his mother being murdered. True, it was in self-defense. But Jason didn't know. His mind had already become unhinged. All he had now in his mind was an unstoppable lust to annihilate the girl who killed his mother. The locals say Jason killed Alice.

They say that he waited a few months, growing stronger, the rage pent up inside of him ready to burst…waiting patiently until the time was right…and he tracked Alice down to the tiny apartment that she had rented in Crystal Lake…and he murdered her. What he did with the body also varied with whoever you talked to in town. Some say he brought her back to the old abandoned Camp Crystal Lake and hid her inside one of the cabins…Some say that he ate her remains like a wild animal. Whatever way the story ended, the locals all believed in the same legend.

The terrifying legend of Jason Voorhees, avenging his mother's death, patrolling Camp Crystal Lake, ready to slaughter any helpless victim who crossed his path.

Was he still out there?

Was there any truth to the legend?

Could Jason really be alive?

Could he have survived his drowning back in 1957, and could he have witnessed his own mother's death twenty years later?

Five years had passed since Alice went missing. No more bodies, no more bloodshed. The town of Crystal Lake had returned to its peaceful self. The terror and the paranoia that plagued the town for twenty years was over. Mrs. Voorhees was dead. No more murders.

But, there were still very important questions to be answered.

Was Jason alive?

Did he survive his drowning?

Was the legend real?

One girl knew the answer to that question.

Nineteen year old Chris Higgins knew all too well that the legend of Jason was too horrifyingly real.

Jason was alive.

He had gone on a two day killing spree across Crystal Lake, first at a local counselor training center on the shore of the same lake he had allegedly died in.

His next stop had been Higgins Haven, where Chris and her friends mistakenly decided to spend their summer vacation.

Chris had watched the property on Crystal Lake where she had spent the majority of her childhood turn into the scene of a massacre. Her friends had also all been savagely murdered; Debbie, a knife through her throat, and Rick, his head crushed by the monster's bare hands and his body thrown through the living room window at her, covered in blood.

Now, she was staring headlong at the masked killer as he cornered her in her family's barn.

She scrabbled backwards across the hay-covered floor, shaking her head, screaming hysterically and hyperventilating. His demented eyes bored into hers through the eye-holes of the hockey mask he had taken from the body of one of her slaughtered friends. She saw the gleaming machete, streaked with crimson, streaked with her friend's blood, in his hand.

"No!" she shrieked, grasping around her for a weapon, searching for an escape, but she was cornered and helpless. Her parent's barn had now become a cage, trapping her with a mad killer.

He advanced towards Chris, his imposing figure towering over her, dried blood caked around the wound where Chris had stabbed him earlier that night.

She had tried stabbing him, hitting him, even hanging him from the barn loft, but nothing could stop this killing machine. She was going to die in her family's barn for the police to find along with all of her friends...poor Andy...and Debbie...dear God…he had killed them all. And now, he was going to kill her.

When it seemed that all hope was lost, a figure suddenly lunged out of one of the stalls, throwing his shoulder into the crazed killer's midsection.

Jason staggered backwards, hardly fazed by the blow.

It was a young black man, dazed and bloody from an oozing gash on his forehead. He wasn't even anyone that Chris even recognized, just another one of his victims that Jason had neglected to finish off.

The young man threw himself at Jason again, but Jason took him down with one swing of his machete, and the man's arm was lopped off at the elbow.

Blood spurted from the bloody stump as Chris screamed in sheer horror.

The man let out an agonizing scream, incredulous at the blood spewing from the stump where his arm had been.

Jason took another swing with his machete, slashing the young man across his midsection and bringing him down to the ground.

Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

Jason hacked at him mercilessly with the machete until his pained groans finally ceased, and just as he turned around to finish Chris off, an axe was swung at his forehead.

He let out an animalistic growl of agony as the steel blade cut through the hard plastic of the hockey mask and sliced into his skull

Chris released her grip on the axe handle, shocked at what she had done.

She was relieved, however, that he was soon going to die, but somehow, she was astounded that she had actually been the one to kill him.

But her relief was short-lived, because he wasn't dead.

Jason came at her again, his arms outstretched, his gnarled, bony fingers grabbing at her in a blind, desperate attempt to end her life as he felt his body going numb.

"No! No!" Chris shrieked, stumbling backwards into the clutter at the back of the barn.

He couldn't be alive. He just couldn't be alive.

There was no way in Hell that this monster could be alive after an axe was sent hurtling into his skull. Could he?

Chris's hyperventilating slowly began to slow down as Jason finally staggered and collapsed onto the floor of the barn like a fallen tree.

Chris Higgin's night of terror was over.

But the Crystal Lake massacre had just begun.