The first change arrives in the form of wound care. Emily's wrists and ankles, rubbed raw and oozing with pus, are seen to, not with anything like tenderness, but as a pragmatic farmer sees to sick but still profitable livestock. Her wounds are cleaned, antiseptic is applied, clean linen wrapped round the hurting areas. Even her grime streaked body is sponge bathed. Quick and efficient. That tells her everything. The dirt and damage had been growing steadily worse, even resulting in blood dripping down her arm to the elbow, where it formed a dry crust, and Jason had done nothing, but he had seen it. But now there's something about her that will make him go above and beyond providing the absolute bare minimum to keep her alive, at least for the time being. Not only the chaffing of the manacles is corrected, but also her chilblains and frostnip, as well as the nicks and scratches and bruises caused by inordinate 'loving'.
With the slavering demon that is rape actually present at all times, the fear of it is consequently not present, at least not as a conscious thing, because the threat of death supercedes it, but his fingers touching her skin remain an affront, a violation, and a nausea inducer. Her blank face staring at the ceiling reveals little, while her choppy breathing reveals all. She wonders why he assumes her child is his. She could have arrived already pregnant. She knows she didn't, but he doesn't. Maybe he doesn't assume it's his, maybe he has nefarious designs for it that require it to be more fully formed. Who knows. She wouldn't put anything past him.
The second change arrives in the form of clothing. Her old clothes are brought back from the netherworld, now far too large, but what is more, an oversized pink hoody accompanies them, a hoody emblazoned with the words 'Peach Tree'. It's new, and cute, featuring, surprise surprise, a cartoon peach tree. She hates to think how he acquired it. Hopefully he 'only' stole it from a store or something, although imagining him entering a store, even at night, makes her head spin. Probably he stole it from a car, like a baboon. She knows he steals stuff, because some of the things he comes home with are not things happy campers and day hikers carry about, things like farming implements and power tools.
As welcome as they are, and as much as they raise her from beaten animal to beaten subhuman, angst is generated by the clothing. She'd been wearing the sunflower dress when Sarah died, and when he raped her that first time. The fabric takes on a malevolent air, the same malevolent air with which Jason is watching her as she struggles to pull the dress on. He'd removed the wrist manacle for this operation, it dangles from his hand while he waits. Lurking beside the end of the bed, entirely blocking the narrow corridor between the furniture, he stands as still as a bull croc lying in water waiting to ambush some spindly legged herbivore, perfectly patient, yet thrumming with energy. The level of anxiety this causes Emily cannot be described, and is the main cause of her struggles to achieve the incredibly basic goal of clothing herself. She used to watch National Geographic, and the way he bursts out of the ground or bushes can be described as nothing less than reptilian, a monstrous remnant of the ancient world. Even his eyes have that too round, fixed glare of the cold blooded.
The intellectual desire to thank him for the clothes and the care is strong, but the hunk of meat in her mouth refuses to flop around and produce the necessary sounds. It stays where it is, lying prone in its red bed behind her teeth. Clearly her body doesn't think gratitude will add to her survival chances.
The slight protection, the slight barrier provided by the clothing immediately boosts her morale, so much so that she wonders about the possibility of escaping should he ever forget to reattach a restraint…mmm, the chances are not good that he would forget both the wrist and ankle locks, the keys for which he keeps out of her range, and out of her sight. And then there's the dark, the cold, the traps, and Jason himself. Maybe, if by some miracle she managed to make it to a road, then she'd be safe from at least a couple of those threats, but she has no illusions that the machete wielding maniac she lives with would spare her if caught, the bun in the oven is no guarantee of mercy. It was placed there by his implacable violence, it can exit just the same way.
The third change arrives in the form of a heater, fueled by stolen gasoline, and a fire, fueled by bounty from the woods. Immediately one of the many boulders weighing Emily down, is removed. Warmth. As much as she needs. The constant muscle racking shivering ceases. The incessant yelling of her brain for heat, quiets. The itching and aches of chilblains goes away. Such a taken for granted thing, she's never been so glad before, for anything. Adequate warmth doesn't transform her situation, it doesn't transform her captor, but it does give her a little globule of happiness to hold on to. Happiness, she can still feel it, in all its sunny yellow beauty, hibernating, not gone. It provides more warmth than even the heater, and Emily promises herself to always keep it alive, for her own sake, for Sarah, and for all the others who stumbled across the fatal border of Jason's land. All the miserable monsters in the world cannot ever win if they cannot snuff out joy.
Snow piles up outside, but the only chance she gets to see it is when it's brought in on Jason's shoes and clothes, leaving little piles she can look at for a few minutes before they melt. Even when a snowstorm beats at her rickety prison, she manages to avoid it, by being forcibly carried down into the crawl space below the house, and the mines beyond that, Jason manhandling her as if she weighs literally nothing. She wonders why he doesn't keep her down there permanently, since he obviously considers it to be safer.
Christmas with Jason Voorhees is not Christmas, in the usual style anyway. Although nothing indicates the season except the weather, Emily rolls over in bed one morning after he has left for work, to find a battered old Christmas stocking stuck to her when she gets up to relieve herself. It's old and faded by time, like everything in Jason's shack-cabin. How she wishes she had her phone. For escape purposes. And for lore. She didn't do anything but scan that wiki article, glimpsing the barest something about a Pamela Voorhees and her killing spree. Too bad she had been more concerned with finding out how likely it was that she'd encounter a mountain lion, because, you know, serial killers spending decades escaping justice five minutes from civilization is not something that actually happens. No one has ever kept a slave in the basement of their house or under their bed or in their caravan, with absolutely no meaningful interference from law enforcement. You cannot simply run into a bad man in your local woods. You do not dig up foundations or break down walls to find human skeletons. No. Doesn't happen. Never has.
The stocking disappears when Jason leaves again after lunch. Well, it disappears from Emily's sight anyway, stuffed into a cargo pant pocket.
Next, some people equally as complacently naive as she, decide to spend a cosy Christmas weekend in a fancy hunting lodge, expecting to enjoy many, many rounds of eggnog. Unfortunately, this lodge has also had the audacity to be built on Jason's extensive territory. A shiny red bauble appears on the floor of his shack, rolling around whenever he stomps around the rooms, ending up jammed between skirting board and door. Looted bauble and decaying stocking, the sole indicators of a special time of year.
Winter could make little dent on Jason, and neither can the approaching spring. Greenery appears in Emily's meals for the first time, raw carrots and radishes chopped so roughly she could almost imagine he used one of his serrated knives to prepare the vegetables himself, instead of stealing them prediced from some poor bastard's fridge. There's no way The Jason Voorhees took time out from murdering, to crawl around a farmer's fields or old lady's kitchen garden at midnight, ripping plants out of the ground.
At some stage he washes and repairs his clothes, at least that's what Emily infers is going on when one day he appears before her without sweat stains extending from collarbone to navel. She infers as he still hasn't said anything to her, and probably won't. Really, is verbal language even needed when his eyes do more speaking than anyone else she's ever met? A form of synesthesia, or a kind of hallucination develops, whereupon she assigns appropriate words to every little twitch of her captor's eyes, each little roll of the wet and glinting balls, then hears those words spoken, in her own voice. These conversations are very short, barked, and make her heart race despite being uttered in her soft and feminine tones. Mostly they consist of one word commands, or hateful comments about her stupidity, weakness, and female nature. Considering that he murders indiscriminately, she doesn't think he hates women in particular, no, everyone's meat to him, women are simply weaker, and there's nothing a serial killer hates more than weakness, being the ultimate example of weakness themselves, and there's nothing else they target, being snivelling cowards. The fact that children are even weaker than women, does not raise Emily's very grey and overcast hopes for the future. Even entertaining any sort of hope is a risky move, but she promised Sarah and the others, and hope feeds happiness.
Her defiler continues to interact with the consequences of his actions, interacting playfully, if it were possible to use that word to describe anything he does or might do. He likes to touch or gaze, or touch and gaze at her stomach, rubbing it as, again, a farmer rubs the robust flanks of a prize cow, pleased by the impressive development of the flesh below his hand. Flesh which he owns, and can do what he likes with. Even slaughter and consume, if he so chooses. Still, if he wasn't so obviously intelligent and adult minded, she'd think he saw her bump as a toy. The slightly more humane treatment has brought a little more colour to her skin, not that that means anything when you're chained to a bed all day and night.
"Jason." she says, one morning while he's nibbling at the hinge of her jaw, his eyelashes flickering across her cheek, her voice husky and nigh non-existent. Even though the outraging of her person has become less frequent and less brutal after Jason made his discovery, it always feels that at any moment the act will drop and the strangling begin. It doesn't take much to kill a person during strangulation, especially not when the attack comes from a man with hands as large and strong as his. She might not even die immediately, but days later from a blood clot, her arteries partially severed.
The sound of his name makes her enforced lover pause. He seems to wait, still as a fox listening to the scurrying of a vole in the snow. She doesn't dare say anything else. He refuses to say anything at all.
When the days begin to lengthen, sometimes rhythmic, sometimes discordant noises begin to sound underground. Not loud noises, Emily's too far away for them to be loud, but bothersome nonetheless. They break up the quiet, and set her nerves on fire. Any noise sets her nerves on fire, but luckily Jason has prime real estate here, in his self-haunted ghost camp. She doesn't know what it looks like outside his house, only received a few quick glimpses from an awkward angle, but even from that it was clear that for many years no one besides himself has spent any considerable length of time here. The vibes must be bad, if even she experiences profound mental oppression from the sagging building and the scattered remains of an unhappy life once lived, with which Jason decorates it. One would think a creepy house could hold no horror when one is intimately familiar with its infinitely more creepy owner, but the house doesn't showcase only his own evil. Like an overly attached parent making a monument out of a dead child's room, he has made the cabin a monument to his mother, and maybe even to his never known father, twisted, rotten need masquerading as love imbuing the very fibres of the wood around him.
The sounds continue for weeks, but only once does Jason walk by what she once accidentally termed 'their' room, carrying materials obviously meant for building. She makes no inferences from this, as she has seen that he eventually moves the bodies in his bathroom, down undergr-
No more thinking, Emily. No more thinking today, okay?
No more thinking is no longer possible, her fear frozen brain has thawed a little too much, unfortunately, and Jason appears to sense that the easy, halcyon Honeymoon of Terror period is almost over, because he drops a book on her rump one day when the smell of flowers is heavy on a delicate little breeze. Spring light infused with the bright green of fresh, new life, falls across the cover, but she looks up at him from her huddled position before taking hold of it. The man tormenting her doesn't nod, but his more visible eye rolls downwards, pinning first the book with his stare, then her. She hears 'read', so she flutters a trembling hand over it, almost flinging it to the floor. It's a thick novel of the science fiction persuasion, a newish one, but well thumbed by the hand of another, sure to provide a few days worth of entertainment, and more importantly, distraction….Does she need to say thank you? The horrendous dilemma swiftly creates a mental deadlock. The ethics are not clear. Politeness dictates that she show gratitude for the favour, but should any kind of gratitude be shown in this situation? Wouldn't that reward and encourage him? Evil must not be rewarded or encouraged. He's bringing her books so that she stays 'manageable' and 'quiet'. All clever fiends make provision for their captives this way. It's not an act of kindness….But maybe being polite will make him let her go? Or at least be less likely to kill her? By the time she's decided to try a small thank you, Jason has long since left.
The books keep coming after that, but Jason always leaves while she's still parting her cracked and dry lips to thank him.
Around her seventh month of pregnancy (and she has bravely accepted that that is indeed what is going on with her, and even more bravely accepted that no one is coming to save her) a nonfiction book joins the weekly slasher book club. Can you guess what its topic is? Yeah. It's about pregnancy, one of the 'What To Expect' editions that she always enjoyed flipping through at the bookstore because of its weight, shiny cover, and comforting air of having all the answers. Like her, Jason seems to prefer books with above average page counts, as every single book he has brought could probably be used, by him, to kill someone.
It's a bit late for the pregnant bit, but the birthing section holds frighteningly fascinating information. Again and again and again Emily wishes for her phone. She was never subjected during school to watching a video of a woman giving birth, but now she wishes she had been. What happens? What if the baby has the cranial problems of its father? Then she'll die, for sure, since she's small to begin with.
When it talks about caesareans, she freaks out, hyperventilating, as that operation is still entirely possible for her out here in the wild woods, since Jason's utility belts hold many sharp wonders, and, you know, he goes nowhere without what is effectively a sword.
The book talks about midwives for home births, because of course it's going to be a 'home' birth, a chained to the home birth, but the only midwife around is Jason, and his leery best friend. The best friend is always around, like a sponger, sometimes it's even used for its intended purpose, the cutting down of vegetation, which she can hear and sometimes see Jason doing now and then, keeping his weasel ways clean of crap that might impair his hunting of humanoid rabbits. Even this mundane task is gone about with a notable air of fury, Jason slashing and hacking as if he imagines branches to be human limbs. The masterful way he wields his machete is technically beautiful, but as soon as Emily notices herself appreciating the awe inspiring spectacle of prime masculinity doing what it does, she moves away from the window, picking up a book, dropping salty tears onto its yellowing pages.
Big angry man, though, drops his wrath when interacting with her belly. There's never yet been a slip up there. He even applied cream to the straining skin, in a similar but somewhat less detached manner to when he tended Emily's wounds. This sent her into a feverish twenty four fit of what can only be described as an attack of the scruples. Confusion, fear, gratitude, and hatred whirled around together as a bloody tornado, which cut a red swathe through the darkened fields of her mind. She'd stab him in the eye if she could, both eyes, and neck, and heart, and groin, if by so doing she could get away, but now she feels guilty for wishing for the opportunity to succeed at such a task. His thoughtful acts of care are just another kind of torture, and it would have been better to die by his hands, than live only to be put at great risk of turning against herself.