The stop motion effect of lightning captures a young mother leaping across a huge, nearly empty bedroom with a child in her arms, towards a window, and then back, towards a cot, her movement staccato, frenzied. Electric death strikes again, in the same lonely spot, smashing thin and creepy humanoid silhouettes against wealthy white walls, dredging up hell for a split second. Thunder follows, rolling angrily down the mountainside, crashing into each house in turn. Steel fences shoot from the thirsty, naked earth like prison bars, laughably short, easily vaulted by a tall man with a stepladder.
Grabbing up her youngest from his contented sleep, Emily sprints into a walk-in wardrobe, barely a quarter full, crouching in a corner under the dresses she brought from her former, pre-abduction life, dresses that carefully exclude the two she had with her in Crystal Lake, crouching at the closest point to the door so if someone walks in, she has a chance to duck behind them and away. Scrambling around with her free hand amongst empty shoe boxes, her small size making it very difficult to hold both boys in one noodle arm, she locates a special box, stashed here for just this purpose. It's baby pink, because after three years of dirt brown, she needs colour. Inside the box is a black gun, given her by an older cousin who, while he didn't provide a listening ear, did provide her with this protection. Or at least, he tried, somewhat, because he gave her the gun, but no in-depth lessons. Never mind, load it like so, point and shoot, bang bang dead, that's what he said. She has to put the boys down to load it, from another box kept in the pocket of a coat hidden between the dresses. Maybe bear spray would be better? Or a taser? Multiple bad man shotguns couldn't do what she hopes a dinky little pistol will.
The window, she didn't see anything, but her son does not go around calling all and sundry by that word, or by his other favourite descriptor for his mythicallegendary father. It's only the very tall and very wide, only the hulking outliers she hates for him to glimpse on TV, that are mistaken by him for Jason, only the fast and faceless ones with obscuring contraptions on their heads, and only those of them who show exceptional aggression. Also, most embarrassingly, certain veterans. Still, the cacti that dot the garden and landscape beyond, must look evocative to a child.
Listening reveals nothing but the incessant wet slaps and spattering of rain, and the growl of thunder, stark white light silently making the wardrobe into a comic art strip. Kevin breathes calmly, eyes focusing on each new flash. He's scared, but has learnt to pull the shutters down on his own reactions far quicker than he should have, while his infant brother, Julian, has had his milky supper and is not going to let a bit of rain or his mommy interfere with his siesta. He falls asleep as soon as Emily replaces her boys in her arms.
Noise comes to her attention, annoying noise, carried along under the storm. Not a stealthy click of a door or careful footsteps, not soft breathing or the zhing of metal, but the yelps and hoots of teenagers, her cousins, faffing about in the middle of mortal danger. Of everyone who knows about her recent 'troubles', they have shown the least understanding or compassion, which is natural, but still shit. They're in danger not only from what her son may have seen, but from the weather, which they are filming for social media. TikTok told them that the only way to die was by saying something cringe in public, so there they are, laughing at lightning.
Having her phone attached to her at all times, and not for social media reasons, she doesn't use social media anymore, Emily dithers on whether to call them, or call the cops. She didn't see anything, but surely a suspicion is enough?...no it's not, Em. They don't care that on the other side of the country you went through something that is still threatening to break your mind. Three years? Should've made it ten, then we'll take you seriously, maybe. A guy has to be caught with his knife in your jugular in order for him to be arrested, and even then he can say it was an accident, or he was provoked, or drunk. Some friend of his will crawl out of a dumpster and testify that you lead him on. Some psychiatrist you've never met will say you have BPD. Shouldn't have bared your neck, girl. Shouldn't have said anything.
Outside a teen receives a call, laughing into a phone while booming follows a flash half a second later.
"You're going to die. Go inside!"
"What?"
"Go inside, Logan!"
"Who's that?" asks the other maniac busy getting soaked to her bones.
"Em. She's saying we're going to die. Another homeless man must've strolled past her window."
"What's new. Em's a head case. Mom says she needs to be admitted." Jessica, the older of the pair, continues to film as lightning strikes become more and more frequent, thunder arriving almost simultaneously. Rain lashes at the paradise blue water of the pool, bright lights keeping it attractive even while being battered. The cacti remain unmoved as the black clouds of the storm centres itself overhead, glaring, prickly old survivors who care even less about human opinions than trees do.
Emily heard her cousin's words over the racket. They hit like painful things do when there's more important business going on, carving out a chunk of flesh, filed away for later. "Logan, the storm is right on top of us. If the lightning strikes you, you'll probably die….do you see anything out there?"
"I see viral views incomi- Woah! Something just blew up in the Park. Did you get that, Jess?"
"Yup!"
It's pointless to beat sense into such impossible immaturity, so Emily puts the phone down. Her cousin is right, she's overreacting, has overreacted in the past. Toddler's can't even see that well, and there's a young cactus facing her window.
Taking the gun to bed and placing it on her bedside table, Emily stays awake all night, purposely leaving the blind up as she usually does, so she can see a corner of the main house. Her cousins remain alive, their large and glossy free-range bodies traipsing past after half an hour of cloudy clout chasing. They're barely wearing anything, gliding around in short shorts, flip flops, and crop or vest tops, a look Emily wished she had the blasé courage for when she was younger, but again, that's for cool people, and she'll never be cool now, with her babies, her vulnerability, and her extreme fear.
Some lights of the main house turn off another hour, but are never totally absent except in the day, something Emily is very grateful for. Wilderness surrounds the house, extending into the South Mountain Park, the place she intends to go for that eventual desolating walk. There's no attempt at a garden, and her line of sight is not interrupted once it squeezes through the bars of the fences. There's nothing out there but cacti and animals, animals who go about on all fours. Animals like that don't scare her.
The next morning she shuffles across the property for breakfast, looking like a wraith, the shadow of 'chained-to-the-bed-Emily' looking out of hollow eyes. A thousand yards? More like a million, her gaze unnerving. So much time spent trying to heal, as fast as possible, and one misplaced word knocks all that work off the table. As soon as she came to terms with her first pregnancy, she promised herself she'd never resent her son for anything, and she's not resentful now. Over time, one accepts that the journey of one's particular life includes more rapids than smooth sailing, and everyday will bring a little bump. Her family and friend's lacking the empathy and patience they should possess also doesn't provoke resentment. Sadness, yes, but resentment, no. Like envy, resentment only damages the feeler, and she can't afford to be damaged any further.
Her aunt and uncle are better at saving her feelings than her cousins, saving them via their words that is, but Emily has become exceptionally good at reading body language, and via that they speak pages and pages worth of words, far more than Jason ever did. By acting like a beast, he developed the mindset of a beast, focused entirely on sustenance, safety, sex, locking his more human, and therefore more frightening needs and desires under a trapdoor labelled 'Mother', which he only really began to lift near the end of her time with him, unleashing more complicated behaviour and body language, fraught with the instability of a conflicted person. She did alright decoding that under extreme pressure, so discerning that her family thinks she's raving mad and possibly dangerous, is easy. At least Jason never thought she was crazy, only weak and contemptible, like everyone else. Mostly weak and contemptible.
"How are you today, Em? How are…" her uncle, quite an affable guy considering his job as big boss of some transportation company, raises his thick eyebrows at his pale, rough hewn nephews, before his eyes skitter away to land on his niece's delicate nose. Very strange. He's not sure what to believe about all this. His brother is adamant that Emily went loopy after the original Kevin's death and has made up increasingly lavish stories ever since, while his wife thinks the 'troubles' Emily had before she went missing were real but that her resulting issues weren't properly treated, but he's done a bit of research. It seems like a huge and very weird leap to cover one's mental break by latching onto some old urban legend. Sure, crazy people do come up with crazy things…but truth can also sound like madness to people who don't want to hear it. And what happened to the girl Emily was with? The one she brings up too naturally for her to be fake. He found her LinkedIn profile. It hasn't been active in three years. He tracked down the girl's parents, but they put the phone down on him, something that has apparently happened to Emily too.
"I'm alright, they're alright. The storm kept me up. How about you guys?" Emily watches them shrug the shrug of people who have never once considered that a psychopath might be outside, loitering in their pool.
Aunt raises her voice, intending to make it airy, but making it shrill instead. Her chocolate sausage dog comes waddling in from the lounge, flopping down in the middle of a sun heated tile. "Logan said you thought he was in danger?"
"From lightning."
"Is that all? He said you sounded very concerned."
"Lightning kills people. Every day. All day. Last week a funeral party blew up."
"Darling, we're very safe here. You don't need to worry yourself sick. Little, um, Kevin and his brother will pick up on it and develop anxiety issues."
Emily wants to say that Kevin saw his father butcher his little sister with his own hands, and that he's been present for rape after rape and beating after beating of his mother, while living within a corpse cluttered home environment, but doesn't say, as that would be unnecessary and cruel. Have to be very careful not to turn cruel, and start taking revenge willy-nilly. Like with her boy's origin, there'll be no more shame and no hiding, but there's no gain in speaking about it too often either, people only turn away from you if you shake their perfect little worlds.
"He's not dead." She says, too low to hear.
"Sorry?"
"I said, he's not dead." Emily's heart pounds so hard that it's painful. She wanted Jason to be thinking of her so he could suffer the agonies of a lacerated conscience, that's all. So he could sit and think about his actions, and mourn and cry like she has mourned and cried, not so that he could stalk her. She may feel tender towards him, likely unreasonably tender, but even supposing he didn't immediately gut her for running, she doesn't want to see him again, otherwise she wouldn't have moved away from New Jersey, leaving her daughter behind, and she wouldn't sit up all night shivering. Has no one around her understood that you can forgive evil done to oneself but never want to interact with an evil person ever again? That you can love a wicked person but refuse to tolerate their wicked behaviour? People don't get it, they think she mentions him to be perverse, they think she's a masochist wanting to relieve the worst things that have ever happened to her. Maybe, instead, she wants to vomit them up.
Familial glances are exchanged, before Uncle, otherwise named John, clears his throat. "You escaped, honey. It's over."
The tip of a little pink tongue convulsively darts out to lick chapped lips. "He doesn't like people escaping him once they step foot onto his land. Especially not escaping with his propert-"
"John, isn't it time to go?" Aunt Susan stands up so quickly that her fancy white chair falls onto its back. That's great actually, it means that what Emily was alluding to can be erased that much morel swiftly.
The short trip back to the guest house takes a route past the slinky little pool, which is placid and crystal blue, permanently setting a holiday mood, perfect for lounging beside with cocktails and friends while the sun goes down as a flaming red yo-yo. Wow, reaching a point where she can relax without being on constant edge, reaching a point where she can trust people not to abandon her at the first hint of trouble, is a goal Emily doesn't ever think she'll attain. Maybe she can chill with her sons one day like that, but she's wary of becoming their whole world, or vice versa, seeing where that goes when taken to the extreme. If only Uncle John or her father didn't look at her boys like they're cursed. They need father figures. Looks like she'll have to hope they're good at sports or something.
Back in her room she plays with them for a bit, then puts Julian down for his after-brekkie nap, leaving Kevin to play with blocks on her bedroom floor while she works on a personal project before work-work. It's an online remembrance wall for victims or suspected victims of Crystal Lake, hopefully to be a physical wall one day. She expects there'll be trouble, in general, but also specifically with the name, but most people outside the area, if they have even heard of him in the first place, believe Jason Voorhees was a one-time thing, a single spree, revenge for the other famous spree so 'tragically' cut short, or lopped off, as the case may be. Every subsequent death is always listed as a missing person, not entirely a lie considering Jason's habit of cleanliness, no doubt inculcated by his mom. But she's seen the bodies, been there if not directly witnessed him thrust his machete through her only friend, beginning to shake and tremble and turn livid upon even thinking about someone denying to her face that no one has died there since whenever ago. She's seen bodies, but there were no names, Jason keeps trophies until he gets bored of them and changes them out for fresh ones, but he's so disdainful of other people that any individuality would be an affront to his own. A lump forms in her throat. Maybe that's why he refuses to name his children. Maybe that's the only reason he asked her name, so he could track her. There's only one person in the world, and his name is Jason.
Screw Jason though. The name Sarah was the second to go up, with the date she was last seen, a little pink heart marker placed in Emily's estimate of the right location, followed by the other missing persons she could find listed, placed on a map of Jason's kingdom. From her knowledge it has wider borders than she would have thought from reading the wiki article, extending like a sinister star, pointed, jagged, and leggy. The town and surrounding farmland fit into it and not the other way round. From a bird's eye view it looks like a stylized gunshot wound, with a blue heart. After much agonising debate with herself, Emily adds a second Pamela, supposing that in some ways the woman who began all this was indeed a victim of the lake, as well as of herself.
To try and forestall insomnia that night, Emily takes her boys over to the seventy year old cactus opposite her bedroom, hoping and praying that Kevin points at it, as she hopes and prays that was what he did the previous night. He doesn't point and name a plant his father, having previously been taught by his mother that it's a mean, stiletto wielding type of plant that doesn't like little boys hugging it. Up close it doesn't look particularly man-shaped either.
Nightmare. Jason. Chasing her through dark, unformed woods wreathed with smoke that swirls like mist. There's no sun here, no warmth, never has been. There's no escaping him once he's set eyes on you, especially not in dreams. When has a dream ever been on the side of the dreamer? Laughing a deep laugh incongruous with his cold personality, Jason catches her easily, pushing her down onto soggy earth that turns hard as rock beneath her back, dropping a forearm onto her throat, simultaneously wearing his mask, and not. It's worse when he doesn't wear his mask, and not because he's ugly.
What follows is what always follows when he climbs on top of her like that, the worst thing about going to sleep with that kind of trauma in the forefront of your mind. You repeat it during the day while you're awake, you repeat it at night while you're asleep. Emily tries to throw off the all too real incubus before he can complete his defiling, failing, sitting upright in the terror she never felt while the terrifying object was present, enduring her body shuddering for an entirely different reason. Another aspect no one speaks about. Sex dreams and soft feelings. Where in the self-help books are they mentioned? God, to be dead. Why couldn't Jason have murdered her along with Sarah. What about her made him want to inflict a lifetime of torture. No, no, Emily, don't go down this road.
Memories of her dream return, acting like memories from reality, leaking away till she only has snapshots. Flesh. Hateful traitor! No…unconscious animal. It can't be blamed for reacting the way it's built to, as much as that screws with her head. She opens her eyes on the dark, without killing anything in the process, a massive weight slowly slipping off her as her dream evaporates. What made Jason attack their daughter. Is he that keyed up at all times? Or was it an excuse? She doesn't know. Maybe he wasn't asleep, maybe she only wants to believe so, to try and pointlessly wipe away a bit of that ocean of red. Her poor little baby wasn't even crying.
Thinking about the difference between a victim's nightmares and a perpetrator's, smash her fragile composure into heaving sobs, a flashback hurtling her back into a dingy bunker, the bed under her reforming into concrete, wet cracking sounds she can't get out of her head, breaking, tearing, stomping on her heart.