Jason's journey from the 13th circle of Hell

It had to be seen to be believed. There are any number of things one has to get used to in an afterlife of psychological torment. But for sheer pathos there was nothing, to Charles Westenhaus's mind, that could beat the faith that the Devil Boy put in that pitiful, subhuman creature.

They had pushed and kicked their way through their fellow prisoners of the thirteenth circle. When that was too subtle an approach, they knifed and gouged. For all the animosity they created towards themselves, for all the hateful rage and screams of resentment, they were also attracting a following. It was quite something to see, as comical as it was futile. All the crazy people, the mental cases, those who had committed the least motivated, most senseless crimes, or who had lost their minds during the infinite, unmarked hours in this place—these were the lost souls who followed Wayne Sanchez and Jason Voorhees on their exodus across the overpopulated mass of barren ground.

Then there was Charles himself, of course. But that was strictly for amusement, at a distance from the murderous hoi polloi. Once they had beaten back the rest of the flotsam and jetsam, his curiosity wouldn't allow him to rest. These were the creatures that were going to overturn the regime of damnation? A system that, for all he knew, had been operative for time immemorial, ever since the first caveman bashed in his neighbor's skull, or Cain slew Abel with a rock —whichever was one's preference. Amusement was so damnably hard to come by, and if it took the form of lowbrows and blowhards beating the brains out of each other, then so be it.

In earthly times, it might have taken days. It might have taken eons. What was the measure of time when each step was weary, when each thought was doubly as tortuous as that which came before? But, for the chance to see that deluded spick and his mongoloid mentor defeated and humiliated, Charles was willing to follow the throng. To shuffle along for time without measure. To step over groaning bodies and avoid the hostility of those who still lurked in the shadows. Until they reached the end of— well, what?

All that they found at the furthest reaches of the thirteenth circle was another cavernous wall—with one narrow opening that led sharply, up an uneven incline, into total darkness. It was completely inhospitable to the human form, with no torchlight showing the way, nothing to grip, and a height that necessitated any figure much above five feet tall having to scramble up on his hands and knees.

But this was the portal. This was the way to a world above their own, even if it meant only exchanging one plateau of torment for another. Sanchez knew for sure when he listened hard at the bottom of the tunnel and heard the screams and cries of rage from above. This sounded like a whole different scene—like they had some dudes up there who were trapped forever in their death agonies, or subjected to some sort of torture for their life's sins.

"Hear that, big guy?" As with anything, it was met by Jason with silence. But his cocked head, his attentiveness, his very presence after sweeping this far across the thirteenth circle, guaranteed his interest. "It's like they gotta punish them hard for what they did, but with us it's punishment enough just to be down here with each other. Are we the f(u)ckin’ underclass or what?"

They stood at the very bottom of a howling tunnel that only led to another level of eternal suffering, and after that another, and another. Behind them was a veritable legion of the damned. The unloved and the unlovely. Killers of women and firebugs. Slaughterers of entire families, betrayers of their own flesh and blood. Faces that grimaced with an almost innocent expectation, a sense of wonder that they might get out of this place—even if it was only to a higher plateau of hell. If Jason and the Devil Boy were to take the lead, they had an army of followers. If they stalled at this point, they might find hundreds of hands rending their flesh from their bones, till all that remained were some discarded organs and scraps of skin around a red raw skeleton. And once they returned to hell, there would still be enough hate in the hearts of the mob for the whole brutal process to start all over again.

"Looks like you an’ me are carrying the expectations of these losers." Sanchez glanced up at his subhuman/superhuman hero."Whad'ya say, killer? We need our best man to be the first thing those f(u)cks up there see when we get outta here. Someone to make ‘em scared of losing their lives all over again."

Someone to fight their way through the displaced bodies and souls that blocked their path. Someone to lead them on their insane flight from the deepest, darkest circle in hell. With hardly a hope in hell.

Jason wouldn't move. After coming so far, he seemed paralyzed. Sanchez felt his guts tie up in a knot. The guy that was so feral that he'd lost almost all human characteristics, who made the average serial killer look like a pus(sy)whipped schoolteacher, seemed scared.

"Hey, c'mon man! What you got to lose? There ain't no one fiercer than you in that f(u)ckin’ world or this one!" Sanchez was feeling waves of fear coming from Jason, waves that originated from the dark tunnel up ahead. Not of violence. Not of defeat. Just raw, shapeless fear.

The Devil Boy felt his own fear too. Behind them, the ugliest mob that ever there was, or ever there will be, was making its displeasure felt. "What is this bullsh(i)t? What kinda fools are they takin' us for?" The guttural words dripped with malice, the sound of a man used to manipulating other people into committing his dirty deeds for him. "No more of this sh(i)t! F(u)ck 'em up!" That was one of the more articulate complaints. Others roared, raged and bellowed, in unrecognizable foreign languages or the deranged argot of beings who had long since forgotten how to communicate.

Sanchez stared sharply behind him, at the foremost members of the mob. Most of them looked older than him, ruthless, experienced in every kind of low enterprise. But maybe that was because even he had an image of himself as the Devil Boy; the murderous youth for whom time had stopped, when he was arrested for multiple murder aged twenty-two, back in the early 1990s.

One of them had a completely bald head and dark shadows under his eyes. He looked like a fagg(o)t who liked to blow teenage boys and then cut them up to be collected in garbage bags. The other dude had teeth like rotten tombstones, and the rank aura of someone who might follow student nurses home in the night and try to make them heal his tormented soul—before he rap(ed) them and cut them up good. Since coming to hell from the row, he had an uncanny instinct for detecting the nature of his fellow predators. He knew him and Jason could take them, make them eat their own sh(i)t, but then you had to multiply their kind by a couple hundred...

The big guy snorted. It was a high-pitched whine that started in his belly and blew out of his distorted, bestial nose. A noise like nothing human can make. He tilted his head and looked up above at the winding passage of darkness. Sanchez didn't know what had held him back, but he could feel a fire in his own gut that he believed they shared.

Then, with a speed that belied his graceless form, Jason Voorhees hurtled upwards. Up the narrow, echoing tunnel with a grasp on the rocky surface that almost defied their hellbound gravity. Never was there such a corpulent but agile corruption of a human being. Though he had the sluggish shape of an overgrown ret(ar)ded man, Jason moved with an electrified sense of purpose that no man could keep pace with.

Though many tried. Sanchez was the first, breathlessly moving up the rear, while the very dregs of humanity panted at his shoulder. He had to move, had to maintain his closeness to Jason. This was his idea, his campaign. His war. No scumbag was going to position himself in Sanchez's place. He was not the Crystal Lake Killer's first lieutenant, he was his f(u)cking general.

The further they climbed, the more alive the tunnel became. Not simply because of the echoing voices from above becoming louder, there were human figures that inhabited this rock fissure. They were the maggots in this diseased bowel of a place.

"Aaaah!" One man's body rolled toward Sanchez, a bearded dude in a lumberjack shirt and denim. He sobbed, holding his eyes as blood ran from the sockets through his fingers. The Devil Boy recognized the handiwork of his hero, the huge dark shape that clambered way up higher in the tunnel. Sanchez climbed frantically, finding that though he was tired, once he reached a peak of exhaustion, his fatigue stayed at the same level. It struck him that he was no more exhausted than he'd been ever since the day he entered hell. Fatigue, discontent and irritation unto madness were the natural states of mind here. They could literally get no worse.

Twilight was entering the tunnel, dull gray and obscuring, but still a relief after the pitch darkness. Somewhere up above, still unseen, was an exit. Below that was Jason Voorhees, though he remained out of sight. Another scream came from above, and Sanchez found himself scrambling over a body that came rolling down the tunnel. It was a guy about his age, but dressed a little faggy, like from the bad old days when everyone had to wear topcoats. Except that his elegance had come all undone, as he clutched at the opening in his frilled shirt and the deep machete wound in his back, where it looked like his kidneys might be about to fall out.

Bodies were rolling all the way down the tunnel, Jason's bloodlust having been awakened long before it was needed. Sanchez could not give a damn. Most of those who had stayed the course so far, who were scrambling up behind him, screamed and hurled obscenities. But not at him. Not at Jason. The distant scent of freedom, however faint, was in their nostrils. Some of them had been trapped down in the thirteenth circle for what might pass for a couple years up in the outer world, others were there for longer than they or anyone else could remember. All of them felt a refreshing, revitalizing burst of pure hate.

An elegantly dressed lady from another time, who might have been a poisoner from the court of King Louis in her fine white dress and pomaded hair, made an obstacle for Sanchez to clamber over. She was deader than a doornail, her gushing neck broken by the man who everyone feared, even before he took his blade to it. It warmed the Devil Boy's heart. He grabbed her by the hair and cast her corpse behind him, raising his bloodied hands to those who followed. "We are killers! So let's f(u)cking kill!"

And so they did. Any tormented soul, or any instruments of torment—the gallows, the gibbet, the solitary windows from which could be seen the accusing gaze of those who had died on their betrayer's account—were removed from their path, reduced to bone and matchwood splinters. But the important thing now was not their bloodlust, but their path—to where? They had no way of discerning how, or whether, they would rise from the ultimate levels of the pit. But their maniacal forms were already alight with triumph. They had already burst out of their own confines, from which few believed they would ever pass. Their march of murder was becoming a celebration.

Crossing the plateau of traitors was so much easier than on their own level of hell. Those who suffered there were locked into their own inert torment. Few moved, fewer still resisted, as the howling mass trampled them underfoot or tore them asunder. What had seemed to take earthly days to traverse down below was much more rapid on this level. None would feel the burden of their fatigue, their bruised bodies or broken bones anymore.

"Lemme up! Lemme outta here! I got things to do! I got people to kill!" It was the voice of the irredeemably degenerate, and it could have sounded from any one of them. As they found the tunnel that led upward from the twelfth level, the fact that it was stuffed to the brim with suffocating, suffering humanity was a challenge, a test of their ruthless spirit, rather than an obstacle. Men cried out and women sobbed. Any who could not take shelter from the rebelling horde were reduced to a bleeding mass of torn, hacked flesh. None were permitted to stand in their way.

By the time they burst screaming onto the next level, Jason hacked frenziedly with his machete. Sanchez was driven into a foul bloodlust. They all knew that they were not subject to the same laws of imprisonment that had held some of them bound for decades, even centuries. There was no guarantee that they would ever be truly free again, but while they knew these small freedoms they would demonstrate their power.

In the vale of the thieves and the gangsters, the dealers and the professional assassins, Jason's legions fell upon the first sharpdressed man they saw. He wore an expensive suit, so they stripped it from him. He sported a trimmed, oiled moustache, so they ripped it clean from his face, the bloody follicles torn out by the roots. He instinctively regarded himself as a higher class of criminal, someone who used his brain, rather than simply responding to every perverted urge. So they clawed through to his skull, clogging their fingernails with his blood and body fat as he tried to plead with them. "Look. Please! You crazy-asses, I'll give you anything you want, anything!"

But there was nothing he could offer them. Earthly rewards exist only in an earthly context. So they stuck his fat, seeping head on the end of a bayonet, as a symbol of their power and their undeclared crusade. On this level, many fought back. Sometimes the madmen and the psychopaths were outwitted, or outgunned. In a hellish environment where a killer could summon his earthly weapon by force of memory, and where everybody else's weapons were inescapably trained on him or her in return, many of the professional killers gunned down the scum who invaded their space. But they were always outnumbered. Their ammunition was always exhausted, or their weapons taken from them.

Their expensive clothes were always ripped away by maniacs who tore the living flesh from their bodies. Or dragged them along the ground in opposing directions until the body split in two, one arm and one leg heading in one direction, the remaining ones in another. "Please. Please PLEASE," became the only verbal currency of exchange, worthless except for how it added to the cacophony of screams that now permanently filled the air. Nobody could reason with a twisted mind that correctly perceived it had been damned to rot away forever. That irrationally blamed every other existing soul for its predicament, apart from those that ran in its feral pack.

This was now hell as imagined in the triptychs of fifteenth century churches. Any fool or thug brave enough to resist found himself seized upon by more rabid degenerates than he had imagined existed. They fell upon him out of the darkness, from out of the shadows of the rocks, out of nowhere. He would barely have time to ask, "Look, why, why are you, why...?” before they would tear the flesh from his bones. Gouge the eyes from his head and cut the tongue from his mouth. Or impale him upon broken branches, stakes, or long blades. Through his mouth. Through his navel. Or through his ass.

It was the hell of torments painted by Hieronymous Bosch in The Last Judgment. Only here there was no need of devils to inflict grotesque punishments and tortures. Here devils were redundant. In hell, as the lunatics ran riot throughout the asylum, men and women were their own tormenters and torturers.

One level of hell after another fell. In our earthly terms, it may have taken weeks. Indeed, it may have taken years. All sense of time was an irrelevance, something that belonged to the past they were trying to reclaim. All that motivated was the desire for freedom and revenge, the lust to kill, and the will to survive. Beside that, all earthly things, particularly time, could no longer be said to exist.

Each time Jason's legions of hellions came screaming out of another tunnel, they left many wounded and dead behind, including many of their own number. Not all of the insurrectionists in hell would know freedom again. But despite the casualties, their ranks were swelled. There were a greater number of them on each level than there had been before. Volunteers were gradually being recruited from the ranks of some of the more rational, professional killers in the mid-circles of hell.

By the time they ascended to the upper levels, the cowardly everyday adulterers and business cheats had had much time to listen to the coming mortal deluge, to the chaos that came ever closer. These were not violent criminals. It went against their instincts to offer resistance to the demonic lowlife. Where possible they tried to cringe away, to attach themselves to rocks or gaps in the ground, and let the madmen pass. They suffered all the worse for it. Any of these common sinners who could not make themselves invisible, make themselves evaporate, were clawed and hacked till the rocky ground beneath them ran red.

Women, far more common here on the higher levels, were descended upon and ra(pe)d by the sex criminals from the lower. "Please. Please stop. Somebody help me!" came the seemingly helpless cry from one society hostess, as she was dragged to the ground by the weight of a thousand maniacs. It seemed too great a price to pay for an average life of two-faced duplicity. As she was submerged beneath the human tide, a moment of relief allowed her to breathe again. Their foul breath, rough faces and groping hands fell away. As she blinked into the twilight, she saw it was a huge, shapeless, deformed man in a mask who was her rescuer. Who had hacked at her violators till they gave way and fled. Trembling, she hesitantly accepted his hand as he raised her to her feet again. Weeping and suffocating, she choked on a mouthful of her own blood as his machete cleaved her torso in two. His disgust at the beauty of women, of anything that stank of hated life, was as great as the disgust he felt for sexual activity.

And hell followed with him. Jason was now a great centurion, assisted by a legion of murderers from all the lower levels of hell. All those who were canny and ruthless enough to realize that they were best served in joining the murderous throng rather than trying to resist or flee from it. All the killers—rational or insane, professional assassin or marginal deviant—carried the tools of their trade. To call them an army was almost to understate the power of this vast homicidal mob. Their legions were headed by the Devil Boy and his man-mountain mentor, who had taken on the mantle of the devil himself. As they approached the final tunnel, at the very top of the upper circle, the plateau was crammed with bodies. The everyday miscreants outnumbered the murderers by at least a hundred to one. And still they fell before them.

And in the wake of Jason's army came the cautious ones. The survivors, those who had shrunk to the ground and stayed unnoticed, as the killers ecstatically covered themselves from head to foot in blood. The world-weary career criminals, those whose few errors of judgment had brought them here, who had no wish to make any further fatal errors before considering the consequences. The lone wolves, those killers whose isolated nature left them wary of joining up with anyone—especially a howling mob led by psychopaths and psychotics.

Then there were those few cunning survivors who wanted to assess the situation, to know if there was anything in it for themselves before committing. At the rear of the great line of devastation, Charles Westenhaus exchanged courteous glances with some of his fellow stragglers, those he recognized as having led criminal careers of some prestige. He had followed the Devil Boy's shambling hordes all the way from the lowest reaches of hell. But cautiously, at a distance—trailing in the wake of the madness and the pointless bloodshed he surveyed. Even Charles had to admit he had felt a sense of freedom, of exhilaration, of having come so far, of traveling each bloody mile. But now what? Had they wreaked so much bloody chaos just to remain prisoners several hundred feet above where they were previously interned?

At the head of the shock troops, he saw a wide-eyed Sanchez and his monstrous, unspeaking mentor walking alone. Ascending above the twitching, febrile masses that writhed below them, that they had crushed and trampled underfoot. Clinging to a rock ledge that led apparently nowhere, tilted upward on a sharp gradient.

"So here we are, mah man. There ain't nowhere further we can go. Nowhere more we can climb." At the very top pinnacle of the almost bottomless construction they had christened hell, they could see all the way back down to the bottom. To the pits of the thirteenth circle from which they had arisen. It was such a long way back down, almost too far for the human mind to assimilate. Maybe further than the drop from the highest, snow-capped mountain peak to those dark, mysterious places at the bottom of the ocean.

And now, above them, there was only a small dark hole that led into a void. Pure nothingness. There were no sounds of life that promised any existence outside of this place, such as they had encountered at every level on their way up. "Check it out, dude," Sanchez whispered to his friend and soul mate, solemnly. "All this way and all I can hear is the whistling of the wind. Leastways, that's what I think it is."

Jason listened intently. In his madman's mind, even more so than in the deluded dimension where Sanchez dwelled, he received only fragmented impressions. Nothing was what it was, only what it suggested to him. But here, in the least logical and most chaotic of places, it was his only asset.

Jason stretched out a mighty helping hand in friendship. It was a gesture he had never made before, to anyone. It steadied Sanchez as he felt his way up to the very top of the ledge, and looked out of the gap in the rocks. Blackness. Nothingness, Silence. At that moment, it seemed as if even the ominous whistling of the void had been nothing but his imagination. A vain hope that there was something there.

"I can't hear anything but death," Sanchez decided. "Sh(it), I wouldn't tell anyone but you this, but I'm scared, man. It's like I'm back where I was when they offed me. Like I'm getting ready to die all over again."

Jason heard. The howling silence suggested death to him, too. But then, to Jason, everything spoke of death. Death was all he knew. Death was all he wished for, for others and, finally, for himself. Death was what he wished to bestow on every living being. It was so inextricably bound up with every aspect of his existence that he had none of Sanchez's fear. He listened hard to the beckoning void and felt that to die again might be the same, to him, as being born again.

The small portal in the rocks promised nothing but nothingness. Its dimensions were too small for the vast bulk of Jason to enter through. All seemed hopeless. Then he pushed his powerfully destructive hands to either side of the basalt rock enclosure that surrounded the void. And pushed. Tensed. Directed every inch of leverage in his great, malformed body outward, till he shook with the tension.

"Is that what you think, man?" queried the Devil Boy. "That we can break our way right out of here?" Thinking hardly entered the equation. The only mode of communication between Sanchez and Jason was those stray, silent images that passed between the empathic consciousnesses of the two killers. All Wayne Sanchez could pick up from Jason Voorhees was a similar misgiving that he himself had felt. That to step outside the confines of hell would merely be to return him to the moment of his death.

Then the coral-like rock on either side of the small hole in the cavern wall started to crack and crumble. With each surge of strength from the mute behemoth's body another piece fell away. Until what had been a less-than-man-sized hole broke open to make a stark entrance into the black, unending void.

Without thought and without hesitation, Jason hurtled his corpulent mass out into the unknown. He fell into nothingness, no air currents or surfaces below him to counter the ruthless pull of gravity into the void. He fell into pure, silent darkness, heading further and further down into nothing. Until his dry form suddenly cracked through a dark sheen of moisture.

For a moment, he believed he might be re-entering the protection of his dear mother's womb. But then the impact of his body against the fluids created a sound. The moist crack of water being hit by a weight many times its own mass and force from above. He could see now, but it was the obscured vision of someone plunged into dark water. His lungs filled, and he recognized the claustrophobia that he had felt before. So many years before, when he, as an eleven year-old child, had drowned in Crystal Lake.

He had come back to the scene of his worldly death, his watery grave. So intimidated by the memory that he splashed and kicked, hoping to propel himself to the surface of the water before his lungs burst. He had returned to the scene of his earthly resurrection, when the distress of Pamela Voorhees had returned life to the twisted, pathetic young body that had been left to molder at the bottom of the lake for twenty-two years.

As his frantic, spastic movements took him upward from the mossy bed of the lake, further impacts made him aware that he had re-entered the physical world. Splashes of large objects against water sounded all around him, their impact felt as much as heard. After a moment's reorientation, Jason realized he had passed through the void and re-entered the physical world. But he was not alone. Other humanoid forms were hitting the water, falling below the surface and kicking and splashing their way upward when their efforts were not so halfhearted as to sink them right down to the bottom again.

They had followed him here. With not even a full moment's hesitation, the first of those desperate lost souls of the underworld had plunged in after Jason. Had followed him back into his world. He propelled himself upward against some of those who kicked and faltered. Feeling no personal loyalty to any but one of them, he used their floundering bodies as ballast to balance him as he made his way back to the surface. The others were hitting the water at rate of one every two seconds. The vicious, the crazed, and the ugly, all kicking wildly, ecstatic to break out of the confines of hell, or panicked to find that they were drowning.

As Jason's masked visage just broke the surface of the water, he saw that his old killing ground was darkened beneath the stars of a fall evening. He was back in the world. The air hummed with a thousand sounds, and the area surrounding the Jake veritably buzzed with the essence of life. Damnable, hated life. Everywhere. The sounds of youthful excitement, of happiness. Of confidence, joy and well-being. All those states of mind that he had never known, and had wanted to destroy wherever he found them.

The surface of the water exploded next to him. "We made it!" Wayne Sanchez spluttered to the surface, joyfully spitting out the water that filled his nose and mouth. "Hey, Jason." The young Hispanic stayed afloat by treading water. "We made it home, man!" He sensed the unease that tempered the decaying giant's relief. The sense that he had escaped only to re-enter the world that he hated. The world of smug, smiling faces and facile happiness. The world that was both alien and hostile to him. "We made it to your home, man," Sanchez recognized the significance of where Jason Voorhees had brought them. "And this is our world. We're gonna make those motherf(uc)kers see. Shake up their stupid, f)u)cking worthless lives like we never have done before."

His senses filled with the sounds of the night, of the lake and of the surrounding verdant forest, the self-styled Devil Boy was intoxicated by their potency, and of the dark possibilities of what could yet be done. Staying mostly below the dark sheen of the water's surface, he floated his body toward the edge of the lake and indicated for Jason to do likewise. He raised his left arm enough to see that the Mickey Mouse watch he'd worn at his execution, en route to what he believed would be the Disneyland of hell, was functioning in the water. In hell, it had been a redundant prop, its time frozen at the moment of his death. But now he could read the time and date and see that it was close to the end of the day, nearly midnight, on Friday the 13th of January 2006.

   Friday the 13th: Hell Lake, chapter 8