Gretchen connection

He looked almost tenderly down on the girl. Her calm served to pacify him. For her to be so willing in the face of death was like a gift, a peace offering from someone accepting of her fate. That she could stare so deeply into the twisted face of death, with those kindly, benign eyes. She took Jason back into the mists of his past. Into that which he only half-remembered. Her strong, fair features and her pale blue eyes reminded him of the only woman able to gaze on his ugliness with affection. Jason, in his turn, was becoming transfixed by Gretchen.

Then Jason's mutilated eye exploded. This time the orb was blasted out of existence in spray of blood and dark, fatty jelly. It left nothing but a red, empty socket as the gigantic killer lurched, almost knocked off of his feet.

"When I said move, girl, I meant right now!" Shawna yanked her brutally along the floor, dismayed at having to risk her own life further. She passed Gretchen's handgun, from which she had fired the last shot, back to the men of Forest Green whose clambering hands were waiting for them to climb through the front of the van.

Trey stood close to them, his Chinese spear aloft in his hand, as if it might counter the human monster if it went on the offensive. But Jason, for now, had to cope with the pain, and his partially obliterated sight.

Shawna's open hand smacked hard across Gretchen's face. It brought her back to consciousness just enough. She followed her friends as they climbed, crouched and clambered over the broken glass of the windshield.

Outside, everyone was being pulled into the vehicles that remained in a driveable state, to make good their escape. In the back of Gerry Nielsen's pick-up, they watched as the deformed behemoth came staggering, half-blind, through the burnt hole in the camper van. Gretchen responded to her friend's perplexed glare with surprising indignation. "I looked, but I didn't see evil there," she spoke as if awakening from a dream. "I only saw damage. And sadness. Deep, dark sadness."

   Friday the 13th: Hell Lake, chapter 11

"This isn't going to hurt, is it?” Gretchen's voice sounded fragile and neurotic. Since being taken under the wing of Diane and her boyfriend, Ed, she had lost some of the self-confidence she had been starting to build. Dependence upon other people always left a person feeling diminished, weakened, and she was no exception. Suddenly her assuredness seemed artificial, just a one-off reaction to freak circumstances.

"No, this shouldn't hurt one bit. Not if you like injections anyway," Ed North teased. He plunged the hypo home, and the chemical solution coursed into the girl's bared arm. She winced at the pinprick, but then her senses began to swim. It was no chemical high but its effects were immediate.

"Now Gretchen, this chemical is a hypnotic. It's been used in medical science to retrieve lost memories from patients with brain damage." More accurately, he might have added that sodium pentathol was best known to the intelligence services, the CIA and the NSA, as a "truth drug." Its record in obtaining suppressed facts from semi-conscious subjects was variable, but it had a high success rate when the subject was at least mildly compliant. Its use was much in vogue, when law enforcement wanted to circumvent time spent interrogating anti-socials, and easy to come by.

Gretchen's eyes grew heavy and she wanted to sleep. Only Ed's droning voice kept her from drifting away. Its insistence, its singlemindedness. "Gretchen... Gretchen, can you hear me?" She moaned in the affirmative. "I need you to tell me about the big monster. About the creature that frightened you. About what you saw in his face, what you remember about him. You can do that for me, can't you Gretchen?"

"Yes I can." Her voice was ethereal, otherworldly. North looked down at her in the black negligee Diane had lent her. It lent her slim, pale, virginal figure quite an allure. He had promised he would help Gretchen through the therapeutic stage of her post-traumatic stress. The only condition was, they had to do it while Diane wasn't around. She would object to the tried and trusted pharmaceuticals, he told Gretchen. Diane was all about aromatherapy and health-store nerve tonics. But if she subjected herself to his methods, he promised her an easy ride. She was in safe hands.

As he looked down on her reclining form, he wasn't so sure. It had been a long time, but, back when respectable Ed North was carefree Charlie Westenhaus, he'd developed quite a penchant for administering sedatives to young women. Not always with their prior knowledge and permission, it had to be said. But he'd enjoyed some wild nights of abandon, whether his partner was conscious or not. Hypnotics like Rohypnol had been a fashionable accessory among rich and idle young men, and Charles had been among the vanguard. He looked at Gretchen's pert breasts and defenseless body and wondered why it had to be so different now.

"He scares me but he's so sad. He's like child. He's so terribly, terribly ugly. But the ugliness isn't his fault. All the ugly things that ever happened in this world are manifest in Jason's flesh. When he showed me his face it was like a child revealing to me his unhappy soul."

No, he had to leave her alone, she was almost conscious. If that crazy babble she was coming out with could be called "conscious." But it was partly what he wanted to hear. Since the girl had been complaining endlessly to Diane about her nightmares of Jason, North had become obsessed with knowing what she saw. With knowing whether that misbegotten freak was still as horribly powerful as he remembered. Whether it was still in his power to inflict pain and destruction upon him.

As Edward North, he now had a completely different life. But the Westenhaus element of his psyche, the part that remembered that purgatorial existence in the other world, was still afraid. And still filled with hate.

"Jason suffers for the circumstances of his birth. He suffers for the deeds of others. When he commits atrocities, he only bares out what Mary Shelley's father said: 'Treat a person ill and he will become wicked.""

This was becoming more than a little nauseating. "Tell me what you saw Jason do, Gretchen. Tell me about his power, his strength."

"Jason did what he's been taught to do. Jason would never have hurt a soul if it wasn't for the unkindness he's been shown. Jason kills because this world killed him first!"

Whoa, that was enough. The girl was freaking out. She wasn't even speaking in her own light, measured tones anymore. This was the much huskier voice of a woman of about fifty. He decided to try to bring her round with a dose of soluble caffeine, before this got any further out of control.

"My boy is a good boy at heart!" North started mouthing a wide range of profanities. She was hallucinating that she was the freak's mother. "He is a child. Just a little child. Who would hurt a child? Who would persecute a babe in arms for striking out against those he hated and feared?"

Shit, this had to stop. This had to stop now. He took a further step toward the girl to make her drink the caffeine solution. She rose suddenly from the couch, as if in an electrified reflex action. Her eyes opened wide and stared him in the face. Even her facial features seemed to have altered. There were wrinkles around the girl's previously unblemished eyes, and small lines around her mouth, the telltale signs of early middle age.

"People like you, Charles Westenhaus! Sneering no-goods like you have persecuted my boy all his life!" Now he really did feel nauseous. He drew back, searching to find where he had laid the hypodermic needle.

"Go to hell," he snarled. "Whoever or whatever you are, just go to hell!"

"If I go back to hell, I'm taking you with me, you evil, mother-murdering bastard!" Her face, manic and aged, howled at him. She had that one wrong, and he was about to show her just how wrong. If Jason Voorhees's crazy old bat mother was really inhabiting Gretchen Andrews's mind, then he was going to drive her out of there. She was the one who was going back to hell, even if it meant Gretchen had to depart this vale of tears too.

The girl's waving arms were manic, but not strong enough to fight him. When he got a tight hold of her right wrist, he was able to plunge the second syringe full of the truth drug straight into her arm. Almost immediately, the girl's mania left her. The intensity and natural disfigurement of age left her eyes, and she began to lose balance. To black out. North had no idea whether the two shots amounted to a potentially fatal overdose, but he would weather that storm if it came. He had played a fatally administered injection as if it was an accident before, and he would do it again. But this time, his knowledge of the law wouldn't let him down.

As he laid Gretchen's supine body on the couch, headlamps shone through the window of the office as the automatic gate of the garage raised into the air. No time for any further evasive tactics now, not even if she died. He just had to tough it out.

   Friday the 13th: Hell Lake, chapter 15