l'Enfer C'est les Autres

Chapter I: Some Girls Wander By Mistake

It was as good a place as any she had seen to die, Jayne mused, gazing out through the dingy, bug-bespattered windshield at the dark woods streaking by, overgrown and looming ever closer over the narrow, deeply-pitted dirt road. She felt a momentary stab of pity for her poor old car's abused suspension, and she gently patted the well-worn gearshift knob.

"Don't worry, Rodney," she murmured to the car in a soft, slightly raspy monotone, a habit she had developed over thousands of miles alone driving upon the highways of the eastern United States with nobody for company besides the twice-wrecked '92 Honda Civic hatchback with its leaking windows, the unreliable stereo system she had installed in it herself, and the pain that was so ever-present as to feel like a separate albeit most unwelcome entity. "We're almost there. Just another mile or so ..."

She had tossed the roadmap into the backseat once she reached the turnoff, preferring not to be distracted from the scenery she had come so far to see, so she was not entirely certain about the reassurances she gave the car, but the distance ahead did not matter to her. With a delicate, almost skeletal, twisted and lumpy pale little hand, tinged faintly blue by the visible highway map of veins and speckled with tiny scabs and white and pink scars of various ages, she reached into the cup holder and grabbed the already-uncapped bottle of pills, raising it to her mouth and quickly, expertly dumping two tablets into her mouth, then she dry-swallowed them before slamming it back down beside her knee. Suddenly and wholly unexpectedly, her vision went blurry and her green-flecked amber eyes burned as they filled with tears of helpless frustration, and she heard a quiet, hoarse little bark that she recognised as her bitter, humourless laugh. She hated the pills. She hated the scars dotting the backs of her crooked, subtly misshapen hands and the insides of her elbows left by more i.v.s than she cared to remember. She hated having to schedule her life around the many pills she had to take and regular visits with a half-dozen specialists, but she hated it even more when that familiar, thoroughly-despised monotony was interrupted by the unpredictable hospitalisations that lasted anywhere from a few days to several weeks at a time. One such period, comparatively short at a mere twelve days, had just ended when she decided it was finally time to make this trip.

Jayne eased up on the accelerator, dropping the speed below the cautious fifteen miles per hour she had been travelling down the unfamiliar and long-unmaintained dirt road so that Rodney or a tree would not fall victim to her impaired vision. They had made it this far - and they were almost there. It sounds trite, but she could feel it in her bones, similar to how she could feel approaching storms in her swollen digits and the wrist she had broken in a rock climbing accident the summer before she started college that had never properly healed even years later. Her journey was so close to being complete, finally, so close to the end, and she would finally be able to relax. She was profoundly exhausted, both physically and emotionally, but knowing how close she was to rest was a relief.

Too many years had passed since she had been able to let down her guard and relax. She did not know why it was so, but she often suspected that there was a target affixed to her back that was only visible to the users and abusers of the world who seemingly viewed Jayne with her visibly obvious fragility and shyly gentle mannerisms as an ideal victim for bullying and worse. On top of that, her own body was actively trying to kill her, although it had failed in that endeavour thus far thanks to the intervention of medical professionals and some obnoxious spark within her that just refused to be snuffed out. Jayne hated that spark. She could not think of any better way than that to describe the autoimmune disease that had been ravaging her body, inside and out, since she was a toddler, taking its time, slowly yet progressively damaging and destroying anything and everything she might have become. Now that she was a woman in her mid-twenties, she had been able to arrange her life so that she had only minimal contact with the general public she dreaded facing, at least - down to working as a copy editor from her home in the Deep South for two of the large New York publishing houses as well as occasionally doing contract work for a few others including one overseas and paying the teenage daughter of her downstairs neighbours to bring her the mail from the box every day after school and even to buy groceries for her once a week. The internet made it remarkably easy to live comfortably as a recluse.

In fact, if not for the constant monitoring her health required, Jayne suspected that she probably would never even have to leave her home, getting by with just her phone, email, and Skype - that she would not have to converse with anyone in person. She found herself wishing she could live as a shut-in with only her books and her cat for company, especially every time she had to deal with introducing herself and trying to explain her history to yet another new doctor. It seemed like they inevitably commented upon what a good attitude she had about her condition and her prognosis, how positive and inspiring she was. Sometimes that made her want to laugh. More often, it felt like a punch to the gut from a grown man, a sensation that had become intimately well-known to her ten days before her seventeenth birthday.

She knew what that supposed positivity really was, though - she had simply been raised to be a people-pleaser, and her mother had done such a good job at this indoctrination that by the time she started school, Jayne did not have to be told that nobody wanted to hear her complaints or about her true feelings, and that even if someone asked, she should say something positive. She knew better than to talk about the excruciating pain burning day and night in her inflamed, arthritic joints, or the primal terror she felt when the inflammation would strike her lungs, stealing her breath, smothering her. What good would it even do to describe to them or anyone else how it feels to have your immune system, that marvellous biological machine meant to protect you from harm, turn against you, torture you, and try to kill you, she had wondered countless times. And what about how the medications prescribed to treat the actual underlying condition - not just the symptoms like inflammation, nausea, rashes, supraventricular tachycardia, skin lesions, perpetually dilated pupils, photosensitivity, and pain ... so damned much pain … but the autoimmune disease itself - work by suppressing your sadistic, murderous immune system, leaving you vulnerable, defenceless against any and every imaginable infection, which inevitably would spread? Who besides those who lived with it themselves even could relate to that?

Her experiences certainly isolated her; even more, though, Jayne found herself envious of others. Sometimes, merely watching people do the things that she had loved to do, engaging in activities like dancing, roller skating, playing guitar, rock climbing, and so many other small pleasures that were now difficult if not impossible for her, was just as painful as the arthritis and colitis. Sometimes, she even hated everyone else. However, as she had always been told that envy, much less burning hatred, is a sin, that jealousy and hatred simply increased her misery, isolation, and self-loathing, even though she had long abandoned the faith in which her well-meaning parents had raised her.

No benevolent god would have created her much less allowed her existence to go on for so long.

If her own body wanted her dead, how awful must she be?

The psoriasis that was diagnosed before her fourth birthday did not affect her much. It was easy enough for Jayne to wear long-sleeved tops to hide the scaly patches upon her elbows, and tights were sufficient to mask the ugly plaques upon her thighs from curious eyes, even in ballet class. She endured some teasing for wearing long-sleeved tops and jeans or leggings underneath her skirts and dresses even at the height of summer in the sweltering, humid oven that is the area just above the mouth of the Mississippi River, but it was no worse than the teasing for her short stature, boyish figure, breaking the grade curve, or her preference for the company of books over that of her peers.

That knowledge of how to hide marred flesh also served Jayne well in middle school when she needed to hide the designs she had begun to carve into her tummy and chest with an x-acto knife in vain attempts to drain out some of the misery and self-loathing that was building up and threatening to explode from within her but that she could not allow herself to express. The two smallest toes of her left foot swelled up like a near-completely immobile pair of tiny pink sausages shortly before her tenth birthday, and the occasional tummy aches that haunt all children became more instead of less frequent with time. She stopped gaining weight, no matter how much she ate, and her naturally slender frame started to look outright emaciated as she slowly continued to grow taller and increasingly pale as her skin became more and more sensitive to sunlight and she learnt to avoid spending time exposed thereto with any skin exposed. A few months later, she had her breath stolen from her by inflammation-induced bronchial spasms for the first time. She did not know it then, but looking back, Jayne viewed that terrifying day as the beginning of the end - and as the last time she had felt welcome in her own body. By the time she was twelve years old, the arthritis had begun to spread, engulfing and warping her lower extremity from all five toes upon er left foot up into her ankle and even touching her knee, and she was scratching a series of shallow lines into the skin along the prominent lines of her rib cage with her x-acto knife on an almost daily basis.

Jealousy of the other children her age and the constant dull aching progressing up the left side of her body envenomed her mind, poisoning even the most pleasant of her thoughts, and her only escapes were into dancing, hiking, and the fantastic novels that she read constantly. She even resorted to hiding her book underneath her desk so that she could read during classes and carrying it with her into the lavatory. While dancing and hiking became increasingly onerous with each year's passing, reading remained a great pleasure as well as a distraction. Jayne often wished she could be left alone completely with her books and music. Even conversations about subjects that fascinated her with the few classmates who seemed to want her company and invited her over to hang out, watch movies, or for sleepovers, were draining for her. She did not trust them and always feared they were just trying to get her to let her guard down, leaving her open to teasing, tricks, and cruel pranks, despite that fact that her classmates' outright, overt cruelty had dissipated by junior high when less calmly resigned and therefore more amusing victims emerged to capture the interest of the bullies.

By middle school, depression's hand had firmly and seemingly irrevocably taken hold of the tiller of her life, guiding her ever-deeper into misery. She knew that she was worthless and bad, that she was no good and of no use to anyone and had nothing positive to offer - why else would her body be so hellbent upon torturing her, ensuring that her pain was so constant that she could not even remember how it felt to have a single day without stomach-churning pain, and hastening her onward at breakneck speed toward an early death from one or more of the unpleasant effects of her condition or the treatments therefor? She simply had been born wrong, cursed by genetics, and for that she needed to be erased from this existence. However, before her stain vanished from the mortal coil, whatever malign forces that guide the universe apparently commanded that she had to suffer ... she suspected that she probably even deserved it for whatever reason that might be - Jayne could not fathom what it was, but nevertheless she accepted it as valid. The only reason she could come up with which might render her deserving thereof besides merely having been born wrong was her bitterness and jealousy. Otherwise, she was either paying for the (doubtless vile, repugnant, and profoundly awful) sins of another, or she was some sort of experiment, a marionette dangling from strings made of pain, a toy to amuse some sadistic being of power incomprehensible to the human mind that others might call "god" and worship. Neither dish was particularly palatable.

Jayne did not mean to wallow in her misery or indulge in self-pity. Truly, she did not feel particularly sorry for herself and her rather bleak, brief future, any sympathy directed toward her made her horribly uncomfortable, and she disdained most expressions of empathy she encountered outside of a select few patients she had gotten to know in the clinics and hospitals where she spent too much of her time. She did not pity herself.

She hated herself.

But she had been trained so well - to make eye contact and smile prettily when approached, to look for and compliment something unique about anyone who engaged her in conversation, to laugh quietly or feign a moué of sympathy where appropriate, and most of all, NEVER to let on that she was in pain, distracted, disgusted, or bored. Thus, nobody ever knew what was really going on inside of her behind the gracious mask of old southern civility. Her classmates and later her coworkers thought the skinny, pallid little girl with big hazel eyes and too much thick, wavy, dark blonde hair which glittered bright with copper in certain lights - so much hair that it overwhelmed her slight figure - was extremely shy and perhaps a little peculiar, a little too quiet, but so patient, considerate, polite, and helpful that they happily looked past her eccentricities. Mothers even encouraged their sons to date her, but she inevitably turned down the small number of those who acquiesced and asked her out, albeit doing it so gently that it was hard to hold a grudge against her - despite her suspicion that nobody with good intentions would ever stoop so low as to settle for wanting to be with her. The nurses and doctors thought she was impressively stoic just because she smiled and thanked them when they drew her blood, tested her ever-decreasing range of motion, set up the i.v. for her monthly infusion, or told her that the infection that had already spread from her bladder to both kidneys over the three previous weeks was not responding at all to any of the antibiotics they tried, did she have anyone they should call to come visit her, and did she have an advance directive, DNR, and will?

It had felt like being kicked in the stomach while her lungs screamed to reclaim the breath torn from them, but she even thanked the orthopaedist when he told her that she needed to have both of her hips and both of her knees replaced, but that he would not perform the surgery until she was at least 40 years old because the replacements wear out more quickly the younger and more active the patient is ... and that was only assuming she could pass the cardiac function tests required to go under general anaesthesia by then.

She hid her hopelessness, desolation, and guilt almost as well as she hid her scars and the plaques of thick, angry, flaking skin that showed up at random anywhere on her body - although at least it seemed as if the worse her arthritis became, the clearer her skin somehow became, as if the inner and outward manifestations of her condition were inversely proportional, and by the time the inflammation had worked its way up the right side of her body, the plaques were not even a monthly thing anymore. When she tried to analyse her situation with emotionless logic, she knew that fourteen years should be enough time for her to get her heart in better shape, and that in that amount of time there could be a breakthrough in the treatments for autoimmune disorders like hers - possibly a cure might even be discovered. The bare facts were not enough to overcome her dread or the pessimism born from all her experiences that taught her that hope always leads to the disappointment that had birthed it, though. What she saw was was not hope and positive possibilities; instead, she saw fourteen more years of monthly intravenous infusions costing her thousands of dollars each time even with health insurance, the devil knows how many infections and hospitalisations, seventeen pills a day on good days and the complete inability to walk even from the bed to the sink to brush her teeth on the bad days - and the bad days were significantly more prevalent in her experience, and only becoming more so with the passage of time. Fourteen more years of agony to wait ... but the offered anticipation was not fourteen more years until she would be cured; it would be another fourteen years just until they could perform further surgeries on her that might reduce her pain and might increase her mobility ... if they did not make them worse.

If she actually even lived that long.

That thought - living fourteen more years trapped in her body as it viciously attempted to destroy itself - was almost more than Jayne could bear. That thought was the impetus for her giving her beloved cat to the sweet, helpful family living downstairs, hoping that their kindness to her despite her eccentricities meant that they would treat him at least as well as she did, and it was responsible for her finally loading a few weeks' worth of supplies and old camping gear left over from trips into the swamps of southern Louisiana and to the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina with her late father into the beaten up but reliable Rodney (named thusly as a prayer of sorts that the elderly Civic "not throw a rod...ney" by the tattered remnants of her sense of humour) then setting out for a beautiful but deserted summer camp up north in New Jersey that she had heard about a decade earlier and that had burrowed into her imagination and set up residence therein. That thought was what put her upon the narrow, deeply rutted road slowly being reclaimed by the thick autumn foliage surrounding it that day.

While she swiped at the tears dripping down her cheeks and the stubborn ones clinging to her eyelashes in irritation, her heart suddenly soared when she saw the dilapidated and badly weathered wooden sign arching over the road announcing that she had finally made it to her long-awaited destination.

CAMP CRYSTAL LAKE

With a crooked little half-smile, she told the car, "We made it, Rodney. Now, I just need to find somewhere to put you and set up camp so I don't have to spend another damned night in this seat."

Silently, she added, "Somewhere someone will find you and give you a new home."

But even though she thought it, she was not brave enough to express that sentiment aloud, even though her only audience was her vehicle and the other inanimate objects piled up inside it.

The masked killer was surprised to see someone sitting at the end of the rickety old dock. Moving quickly in wraith-like silence despite his remarkably tall and thickly muscular, bulky frame, he approached to examine this unexpected and unwanted intruder into his realm, the machete he loosely gripped in a large, gloved hand hanging at his side. Upon the shoreline at the foot of the dock, he stood perfectly still, observing the figure intently. It was a child, he decided, judging by her small stature and the pale, skinny wrists standing out in sharp contrast against the gaping black void of the long sleeves of the T-shirt out of which they jutted. The presence of children in their innocence did not bother him, they did not trigger his need to eradicate trespassers, but children never came to Crystal Lake unaccompanied. The teenagers and adults who were foolish enough to bring children there, on the other hand, they were not welcome. In fact, among all of those he had killed or attempted to kill, only one or maybe two were children, and he had never gone out intending to kill a child; however, anyone who got between him and his target inevitably wound up dead, and he felt no shame or remorse for the very few innocents who had made the fatal mistake of getting in his way and who thereby came to harm. Maintaining his perfect silence, Jason Voorhees abandoned his disinterested assessment of the little girl sitting upon the dock and went off in search of whatever fools had brought a child to Camp Blood.

They deserved their fate for such recklessness alone.

A few minutes later, Jason found the car in which they must have come parked in a natural clearing about half a mile past the camp entrance. Despite having little interest in such things, even he could tell that the dusty, dirt-encrusted little green two-door hatchback with its mismatched panels riddled with rust and held together with patches of bondo, cluttered backseat, and a faint stink of mildew emanating from the half-opened windows, had one tyre in the junkyard. As he strode to the other side of the small clearing, he noted that a tarp had been strung up between three trees as a simple yet effective a-line shelter against the elements, and a second tarp had been set down beneath it to form a floor. A small pile of faded old blankets sat on the tarp alongside a lantern, a stack of four thick, dogeared books, and a single pillow. He noted that the camper had already dug a fire pit at a safe distance from the tarp but close enough to provide some defence against the autumn chill and cleared away the fallen leaves surrounding it, leaving the sharp shovel on the ground beside it, and he or she had gathered some kindling and a few larger branches into a pile beside the pit, though none of these was as long as his arm or much thicker than one of his fingers.

However, none of these details mattered to the masked killer and the simple efficiency of the neat little campsite that had sprung up like a fungus after a rainstorm in his domain failed to impress him, although he grabbed the sharp-bladed shovel for himself, thinking it might prove useful at some future point.

The camp was simply perplexing to him. There was only space for one person to sit in the cluttered, fully-packed little old hatchback, and there was only one pillow and one pile of faded blankets laid out beneath the tarp. Children do not drive - he was sure of this. No matter how much things had changed since he had been alive and a little boy himself, that would not have changed. So, what did these discoveries mean? Jason's was a simple world of cause and effect in which mysteries had no place. Irritation at what he now viewed as a trick burning in his dead but undying gut, he began walking back toward the lake in which he had drowned so many years ago.

He paused at the edge of the tree line and fixed his lopsided hunter's gaze upon the diminutive figure still sitting at the edge of the dock. The setting sun gilded the curls dangling down the girl's narrow back in copper and gold that matched the autumn foliage as it floated around her on fingers of breeze, but the beauty of the scene was lost upon him. What that reddish blonde hair did instead was trigger a flash of memory, although it was far longer and wavier than hers had been … that horrible, unforgettable girl named Alice who had killed Mommy and who, in turn, had been the first person he hunted, who had been his first kill. Jason's stomach lurched and his hands clenched into fists so tightly that he could feel his jagged fingernails digging into his palms through the thick, once-yellow leather of his irrevocably bloodstained gloves. But Alice was long dead, and aside from the similar colour of the girl upon the dock's hair, he saw no actual resemblance to his mother's murderer. The entirety of Jason's intense focus was fixed upon studying this interloper who was trying to trick him. His vision was almost as exceptional as his hearing despite the fact that one of his eyes was set significantly lower in his uneven, asymmetrical face than the other and he was nearly blind in that lower eye, so the distance from which he observed her from behind made little difference.

The little girl or woman or whatever she might be was sitting up very straight with one skinny leg clad in clinging black leggings folded to the side almost as if she were sitting Indian style, and it appeared that she had rolled the other leg of her leggings up to her knee with the limb below that dangling off the edge of the dock into the clear, cool water. Sitting upon the warped, grey boards beside her were a water bottle, a spiral-bound pad of paper, a smallish green backpack, an intricately carved and well-oiled walking stick, and a pair of black and green jungle boots that looked laughably small to him even knowing the distance between where he stood and the end of the dock.

Then, he could feel the breeze coming in off the lake picking up, and when the girl reached up with both hands to pull her wild curls back and off of her face, the back of her T-shirt was lifted up, too, revealing almost half an inch of remarkably pale skin and the familiar bulge of a handgun in a holster resting upon her hip. The killer frowned behind his scuffed hockey mask at that unwelcome sight. He knew very well by then that being shot would not kill him or even do him much harm, but it remained one of the more unpleasantly painful experiences for him. However, he learned one more important thing from this - the positioning of her weapon indicated that she likely was left-handed.

The sight of the gun further altered his impression of the intruder, so he decided to move forward toward her or a closer inspection - plus, that way, if she should prove to be a threat (although, oddly, he still had not yet heard the echo of Mommy's voice speaking to him in his mind, commanding him to kill), he could end her life quickly. Despite his weight, the rotting old wood of the dock failed to squeal or groan its protest when he stepped out onto the span, and the girl did not even turn around when he stopped and stood glaring down at her from barely four feet behind her back. Standing so close, he could see the skulls and runes that meant nothing to him carved into the top and midway down the shaft of the walking stick, but it was the matte black hilt of a long hunting knife in a scuffed, worn, black leather sheath tied to her bent left thigh, camouflaged though visible from that close against the clinging black fabric, that caught his attention. He tilted his head to the side, wondering if she possessed any skill with either weapon he saw upon her. Although he had underestimated his prey a few times in the past to his own detriment, she was so short and skinny that he could not prevent the doubt that filled his mind as he assessed the level of threat she might pose to him and whether she would require killing - without Mommy hissing at him that he must, he remained uncertain. It was harder to judge when she was sitting practically at his feet and had half her body hidden beneath a loose shirt at least two or three sizes too large, but he doubted she stood even a hair over five feet tall or weighed as much as 90 pounds ... even if standing in those ridiculously small boots.

Despite the weapons she appeared so comfortable wearing, he dismissed the oblivious ... girl, woman, child, whatever she might be ... sitting before him as not a being a threat - at least not to him. By the time the sun disappeared below the treetops but before its light had abandoned the lake, he had decided to wait before killing her. His mother's voice was silent in his head, neither encouraging him to kill her nor to let her live. The girl was just sitting there, exceptionally still and quiet the whole time the hunter studied and analysed her, apparently lost within her own thoughts as she gazed out over the clear water, wholly unlike the behaviour of the bad teenagers who came to defile his home with their irresponsible drunken antics and almost unbearable noise - and Jason was nothing if not patient. He could wait to see if she was anything other than what he now judged her to be. Hoping that she would pack up her little campsite into her rickety little car and leave tonight or the next day at the very latest, he turned and left as silently as he had approached her.

He had wasted enough time upon her for now. The very last bit of hunting and camping season was almost over in this part of the New Jersey, and he had heard the arrival of another vehicle intruding into his domain while he was observing the skinny little girl - probably some irresponsible teenagers coming to Crystal Lake to do the bad things they always did, drinking alcohol, doing drugs, hunting for sport rather than sustenance, and fornicating - despoiling the peaceful autumn wilderness, the sacred land where he and his mother had died because of people like them, with their wickedness. He did not smile behind his mask in anticipation of eradicating the new arrivals, because killing was not a pleasure to him. It was simply his duty, the right thing to do to make his mother proud and what he must do to protect the land and other innocents like he had been when the bad teenage counsellors were too busy doing those bad things to save him from drowning - and like everything Jason did, he tried to do it well. The only pleasure he took in ending the lives of so many people who trespassed upon this land he considered his own was the simple satisfaction of a job well done. They had to pay for their desecration with their blood, with their lives; they deserved to die, and it was up to Jason to make sure that they did.