Chapter Text
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On one damp Friday morning, you find yourself crunching brittle leaves beneath your boot soles, carrying a dog-eared list of mushrooms to forage for the local farmers’ market in Blairstown. It’s something to fill the hours, a temporary occupation after the government pulled funding on the program you and your colleagues had built around the 'Practical Benefits of Low-Dose Psilocybin in the Treatment of Major Stress Disorders,' but the money-hungry lobbyists for major pharmaceutical companies didn't like the idea when it meant potential revenue loss; your studies competing with established treatments that often created unwanted side effects which could, in-turn, be treated by more and more expensive medications.
The whole endeavor had been meant to revive holistic methodology in a field where mental health was more often treated by guesswork, practically beanboozling patients with SSRIs until something worked. Meaning that patients were often treated over the course of months and years, when relief could be found in weeks with more natural remedies... given proper study, of course. But, like so many other attempts at further research, it was shut down and now... so too came the return of your own mental health struggles.
So here you are, your degree in psychopharmacology adapted into combing through the New Jersey underbrush for adorable hen-of-the-woods, morels, and whatever edible plants or herbs you happen across. All the while, depression, apathy, and listlessness follow you like old friends.
You step carefully through these woods, but only out of habit. The rain that fell last night still lingers, clinging in beads to moss and pooling in dark root hollows where tadpoles ripple; it means the air is heavy with petrichor and you're less likely to run into anyone. More importantly, fresh rain means pleurotus ostreatus, commonly known as oyster mushrooms, which garner a high price at the local markets. What with your student loans, the thought makes you half-fizzy, not exactly excited but eager all the same... perhaps that's why you venture past the old drop point where you've been leaving offerings for the boogeyman over the last few months—or maybe that's the apathy, leaving you reckless despite the danger.
There's no way he'll be out here after such heavy rain... Maybe tomorrow, after giving the local fauna enough time to stumble into his traps?
Your reasoning feels sound, so you continue onward between dew-sopping tree trunks that transition into the sagging rooftops of old cabins. The yellow, welcome sign of Camp Crystal Lake swinging in the breeze barely raises the hairs on the back of your neck, though it certainly should.
You tread cautiously through the camp, passing a long dock and the main cabin and onward until you're standing before a rundown two-story home with a caved-in morning room and a sunken porch leading to a warped front door with peeling paint. Makeshift powerlines lead from the derelict porch light to a much later-installed flood light to—
A branch snaps behind you, muffled by the humidity, but close enough to startle you in a half-circle, where you're faced with an empty forest and a dead-leaf-cluttered path that leads back to the house, something you must have missed earlier. Your eyes follow it, back to the house where it stands, looming and judging your attendance. Your gut comes alive as a pang of apprehension—of knowing exactly whose home you’ve stumbled upon and the ramifications of being caught here, on this soil, on his property.
You turn as though glass has replaced the hard-packed earth, catching a flash of steel as the hard butt of a machete snaps off the side of your temple, throwing you stumbling into the Land of Nod.
A flare of white pain eats up your skull as greenery swirls into a speedy blur. The last half-formed thought that flickers through your mind, before a large, man-shaped shadow blocks out what little sky you can see, is… why? Why so utterly careless?
You've been such a well-behaved guest in these haunted woods, where so many unsuspecting people have lost their lives. Never passing beyond the perimeter you’d mapped out based on the murder reports. Always left a careful bounty of herbs and edible plants by the drop point that must’ve been used to drop off supplies from Blairstown before Crystal Lake had established its own grocery store in the mid-seventies... You suppose it was silly to think a handful of mushrooms and edible flora would have protected you from what every single visitor before you eventually faced…
Spare me, you think weakly. Not really ready to die, even though you blame depression for leading you all the way out here; suicidal ideation becoming wishful action.
The monstrous silhouette of Jason Voorhees, hovering above you, doesn't reply to your dazed thoughts. He's silent as you swing in and out of consciousness, the day turning to night as chirrups of birds give way to the steady throng of cricket song. A door slams somewhere as floorboards creak and bow, and when you’re thrown down on something with a stale bounce, you succumb to the darkness with a snap.
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Days pass like flickers from a faulty bulb. Water is dribbled in your mouth, and something from a spoon is fed between your teeth. You feel like a child on bed rest, sleeping and resting between fever-dreams as cicadas undulate with the time of day.
When you finally claw your way up from the darkness, it’s on an afternoon. Your body aches from days gone by, lying still in one position other than the few others you can recall: being stabilized on a toilet, held aloft in someone’s arms, taken outside once—maybe for fresh air? But now the sun’s a molten smear on some nameless day as you turn your stiff neck against the pillow, looking out a shattered window surrounded in gingham curtains and creeping charlie, their green runners crawling inside, causing the plaster around the white window frame to crack.
You try to move onto your side, take pressure off your back, but hiss a weak ‘fuck’ when your hair snags, and your T12 pinches. Nothing else wants to comply.
“Oww...” you lament, throat hoarse from disuse. What happened? Where are you? Who are you?
It hurts to keep your eyes open, so you blink them closed, using the darkness to recall the events leading up until now. But the light from outside is too bright and serrated; it penetrates your eyelids, burning away every brittle thought. Just thinking is giving you a headache, so you reach up to rub it away, but… can’t… why can’t you?
For a second, panic washes over you, afraid you’re paralyzed, perhaps. The thought is so real that you strain to look down at yourself, and when you find a crisscross of ropes anchoring you to the bed, it's almost a relief. But then you start wiggling around in the slack, find nearly no leeway, and a bucket of adrenaline deposits into your bloodstream.
“Oh, shit," you gasp, "Oh shit-oh shit-ohshitohshit—“
Your eyes cut across the room frantically, searching for objects to label—something to ground you back to a parasympathetic state.
Golden light illuminates everything, fracturing off a cracked mirror on the side wall by an open door, and in that light, you parse remnants of a child’s long-forgotten bedroom: time-rotten posters of Smokey the Bear and Star Wars, several photos tacked to the walls, plastic bins of toys, piles of folded clothes and handmade quilts, Folgers tins, and more. Everything is covered in mildewed dust… even the hand-painted sign on the front of the door that reads ‘Jason’s Room,’ as if painted by a loving hand.
"Calm down—just breathe," and you breathe and feel your heart beat soften as you continue cataloging objects: orange ham radio, plastic animal figures on a leaning shelf, wooden crucifix above a six-drawer dresser, twine-wrapped bundles of animal bones, school books, and tarnished trophies. It’s a boy’s room, but decorated by one Pamela Voorhees, no doubt.
Your memories are coming back slowly, and the question of where you are becomes clear. It appears to be untouched for at least two decades, possibly longer, but the narrow bed beneath you once belonged to the Camp Crystal Lake boogeyman, one Jason Voorhees.
Why and how, though? Trespassing, right?
It's still blurry, but you remember that Friday morning drive to the woods and the grocery list for the Blairstown market that following Saturday. So you walked too deep into the wilderness as Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks, and all the other splendid stupid women in those fables, and now you'll be eaten... maybe, or worse. Yet that brings you back to the question of: What are you still doing alive?
Jason knocked you out, kidnapped you, and took you to his childhood bedroom. He tied you up, fed you medicine—maybe soup, maybe other things—and the sheets are dry, so he must’ve taken you to use the restroom too, just like you dreamt. It’s all very terrifying, albeit fascinating to wonder... to have this be the way you die will at least be interesting for your old college acquaintances, the ones that branched off into criminology... the ones who read obituaries each morning.
As you lie there, the noon wind blowing through the window, you imagine Jason as a child, curled up in this very bed with a fever as Pamela dotes on him. But the grown man, while reenacting what his mother may have done for him in the past, is far detached from that innocent child. Which means whatever he’s keeping you alive for is far from innocent. Either mere torture, self-regulating childhood trauma by taking care of someone, maybe loneliness... but then... a four-letter word passes through your thoughts—rape—and you sit on it, chew it over, then spit it out like rancid gum and start screaming.
You scream until your voice breaks and nothing but an ugly croak comes out—you cry too, eventually sagging against the lumpy mattress to weep your tear ducts raw. Eventually, afternoon turns to evening, and the high noon yellows melt with orange, to red, to nothing but blue-tinted darkness.
Sounds of night come alive as you stare at the popcorn ceiling, shapes coming and going as you blink away stale tears and wait. You wait, and wait, and wait… long into the evening.
You wait until your bladder aches—until it finally empties of its own accord. Heat soaks the mattress, shame pours over you in waves while the frogs begin their mating chorus outside. You wait as the wet spot cools beneath you, crying again until the edges of your vision go soft and sleep takes you under once more.
Then a floorboard creaks both in a dream and outside of it. Your head snaps toward the sound, body still tender.
In the doorway stands a giant silhouette of someone. No. You know who, of course. Even hunched to appear smaller, his shape far exceeds the frame beyond anyone you’ve seen in your wildest dreams.
“I… holy shit. I’m s-sorry.” Your meek apology is two-fold, both for trespassing and wetting the bed, but he left you here… all alone, and what were you supposed to do? If he didn't want you pissing the bed, he should have come sooner.
In the silence, in the indigo of the night, your voice comes out cracked and small-sounding, “I-I couldn’t hold it any longer.” You rationalize it, "I n-needed to pee and you weren't here and Jesus Christ I'm so sorry. I couldn't—"
Whatever reaction you expected, it isn’t one where Jason Voorhees quickly shoulders into his old bedroom to cumbrously kneel beside the bed. Where the first thing that hits you is panic, and then the second thing is the smell: lake water, sour sweat, unwashed clothes heavy with musk and heat-rotted blood. Your mouth quickly hangs open, forcing acrid air down your throat to avoid the full brunt of it, trying not to gag... to remain polite as he leans in closer and closer... a single eye gleaming inside the torn grain sack wrapped around his head.
You brace for something—for whatever is about to commence—when you feel a soft tug near your hip. It's hard to see in the dark, but your lashes flutter against it, blinking away old tears and the night to watch his thick, dirty fingers work loose a knot at the edge of the bed. You lie there, limp with perplexed fear, heart pounding. The ropes loosen as you wonder whether to make a break for it as soon as possible or bide your time. The first thought probably leads to certain death, while the latter feels... less certain...
When the final rope is tossed over the bed and you can shift onto an elbow, you begin to ask, “Are you gonna—“ when Jason's fingers squeeze the question down, sharply tugging you to a seat, hauling you out of bed over wobbly knees as you scramble to breathe, to claw away his grip, to do something other than dangle on your toes like a broken doll, but then... then you're set gently down on your feet...
His grasp softens, even though it tugs, leading you on weak legs outside, down a leaf-dusted pathway to a small dock.
Against the moonlight, you can see the camp across the lake, its still waters like panes of chilled glass. Beneath you, the dock boards whine, not under your weight, but his. The smell of mud, algae, and murk hovers beneath the crisp aroma of the water, yet you can still smell him... the revolting heat of him...
... and you're still trying to gag out questions around his fingers when he yanks you to a halt at the end of the dock, unceremoniously fisting your upper thigh in his other hand and lifting you—screaming your lungs out—over his head. Then he throws you into Crystal Lake, where your ugly shrieking turns to cloudy bubbles under the freezing bite of the water.