Jason's aura

Jason Voorhees lumbered slowly, purposefully, through the damp woods, keeping up a steady, inexorable pace. He had not slept. Jason Voorhees never slept now. For a while, as his body had moldered in the grave, there had been rest, unconsciousness, sweet oblivion devoid of feelings or awareness. But deep within him somewhere was a thing that never died—a power shaped by raw emotions and a hunger for revenge, a primordial animating force that wouldn’t let him rest, that kept him forever moving. He was like a shark swimming in deep and ancient waters, driven only by a deep-seated instinct to devour. He had dim memories and fragmentary visions of a life before he had become the driven creature feared by all. Memories of what was, in some respects, a normal childhood.

It was normal in the sense that he had once eaten and slept and performed all the normal functions of a human child. He had once had normal feelings. He had a mother and a father, parents who loved him, albeit in a strange and twisted way. There had been nothing terribly remarkable about his birth, save that it occurred at the stroke of midnight on Friday the 13th. He had been premature and Pamela Voorhees expelled him quickly, a short labor and an easy birth, as if her uterus was anxious to surrender him. The doctor barely arrived in time. They never made it to a hospital. Jason had been born in his mother’s bedroom and when the doctor held the infant up and slapped him, Jason hadn’t made a single sound. Other than that, it was a normal birth.

He had been a very quiet child. Even while he was inside his crib, he never woke his mother in the middle of the night and there had been no need for her to get up at four A.M. to soothe her crying baby. Sometimes, Pamela Vorhees had been concerned about her child’s silence. She would occasionally wake up for no reason, in the middle of the night, hearing nothing from her baby’s room. She would leave her bed and tiptoe silently to Jason’s crib, feeling a need to check on him, to make sure he was all right. And she would find her baby quietly on its back, its eyes wide open in the dark, staring coldly up at her. Even as a child, Jason Voorhees never smiled.

He did not cry when his first teeth came in. He did not cry when he fell down and skinned his knees. He did not even cry when the yellow jacket had landed on his palm and stung him while he was lying in the sun in their backyard. He merely closed his little fist and crushed the life out of the offending insect.

For a while, everyone had thought he was mute, but medical examinations proved that there was nothing physically wrong with him. Jason could speak; he simply didn’t want to. He made all his teachers feel uneasy, though they could never say just why. In school, he did all the things he was supposed to and he seemed very quick to learn, but he would never answer out loud when he was called upon in class. Instead, he would carefully write his answers down upon a piece of paper and hand them to his teachers silently. One teacher, a young and eager woman who taught him in the third grade, had gone out of her way to try and make him speak, and finally driven to frustration, she took him by the shoulders, shaking him, demanding that he answer her. Jason said nothing. He simply stared at her, not blinking, his young eyes boring into hers like the twin turrets of an anti-aircraft gun locking on a target. She let him go, backing away from him, feeling her skin crawl and shivers running up and down her spine. The next day, she gave her notice without any explanation, packed her things, and moved out of town.

Autism, said the school psychologist. Precursor of schizophrenia. But autistic children simply did not respond. They did not write messages. They did not listen carefully when they were spoken to. They did not respond at all to outside stimuli. The muteness had to be hysterical, the baffled school psychologist suggested, seeking some logical explanation. It had to be some strange form of withdrawal, brought on by some early trauma, perhaps even at birth. Yet there had been no traumatic experiences in the young boy’s life and the birth had been an easy one. But there had to have been some sort of trauma, the psychologist persisted in saying. The boy refused to talk. There had to be a reason. In exasperation, after spending hours trying to get Jason to respond, the psychologist finally turned on Jason, screaming at him, "I know you can talk, you little freak! You can, can’t you?"

And in a firm and very quiet voice, Jason had said, "Yes."

The psychologist became tremendously excited, convinced that he had made a breakthrough, but Jason never said another word. And for years thereafter, the psychologist had nightmares for which he had no explanation, dreams in which everyone around him opened their mouths to speak to him, but no sound at all came forth. Hysterical deafness, his colleagues said when they examined him, while the psychologist stared at them wildly, putting his hand to his ear and shouting, "What? What?" repeatedly, screaming at the top of his lungs. They shook their heads sadly and gave him a quiet room to scream in.

The other children shunned Jason and complained about his "creepy eyes." There was actually nothing at all unusual about his eyes, except that he never seemed to blink. The bravest and the biggest of the bullies in the school had tried to pick a fight with him once, feeling his prestige at stake. Jason was much smaller than the bully was and the bully had been confident of his superior size and strength. He goaded Jason, teasing him unmercifully, and when the verbal abuse did not provoke any reaction, the bully struck Jason hard, hitting him in the face with his closed fist.

The blow seemed to have no effect at all. It did not even make Jason blink. He simply stood there, staring at the bully, who swallowed hard and backed away, retreating from the smaller boy’s unblinking stare with dread, and two days later, an ambulance came to the bully’s home and took him to the hospital. He had taken his right hand, the same hand he had struck Jason with, and jammed it down into the kitchen drain. Then he turned on the garbage disposal. Neighbors a block away heard the boy’s agonized screams. Yet no one could ever get the bully to say why he had done it.

   Friday the 13th: Jason Lives (novelization), chapter 3