Bedded down in his two-man dorm that night, Ricky Garcia felt like it was the first time in days his body would willingly surrender to sleep. He'd been called to the dean's office that afternoon, but the old guy had softened up a little when he recounted all the horrors he'd encountered over the last few days.

Ricky wasn't sure that the dean believed he'd struck out at Christos because his "dangerous philosophy" gave up the cheer for serial killers. It was as if the top guy at the college couldn't believe that a pupil who consistently earned good grades could be a sicko. But whatever, he'd threatened Ricky with expulsion if he showed a similar lack of control again—even if the next incident was a nonviolent one.

It irked him a little, to be praised as a fair-to-middling student on one hand, and attacked as a violent thug on the other. But what the hell. He'd retained his student status despite an admission of violence on his part. How many other kids, during any other semester, were able to claim "provocation" as a cause for beating up on someone, as he had?

It was this kind of benign complacency that would allow him to slip off to sleep that night. Almost. His roomie, David, was already making like a buzzsaw in a timber mill, and his friend, Shane, had crawled into his sleeping bag on the floor with the resolution of an animal bedding for hibernation. The way he understood it, Shane had wrangled permission to sleep there from David, for a hundred and one different reasons: the college dorms were all booked, he was facing a cash crisis until he could find somewhere affordable, whatever.

But Ricky believed he was there because he was scared. It was no big deal, and there were dozens of other dudes in the kid's position, but no one could come clean about it. Fear, or extreme caution, always had to be dressed up as something else.

As the only major witness to the crimes, he pondered whether he was being driven by his emotions too. He dismissed it. Anger, yes. Depression, yes. But to be constantly afraid was to use up too much precious energy. Besides, as his snoring roommates had shown, the minimum of natural caution should be no guard against sleep.

His last conscious action, as his eyelids started to weigh heavy, was to check the glowing face of his alarm clock. 1:32am. That was okay, no need to get in a vicious insomniac circle worrying about whether he was going to get enough sleep. At last, his rational mind took the subconscious path into all kinds of random, dissociated words and images He was being carried off to sleep, consciously aware of only the rhythmic snoring of his roomies, and the thin beam of light that shone through the glass panel on top of the door.

That light. He couldn't help noticing it even with his eyes closed. It didn't blend with the yellow beams of the dormitory corridor. It was a focused red beam, and, even now, as he tried to dismiss its intrusion while his conscious mind strove to identify it, it danced upon his closed eyelids.

Danced in a way that mocked and challenged him, making him only too aware of the red shadows at the back of his eyes. Irritated, he snapped back to consciousness. Sure enough, it was like a red pencil beam, shone purposefully through their skylight. He rolled over and sorted through the pile of possessions in his bedside drawer. Wallet, ID, photo of his mom and dad and his sisters, photo of his girlfriend Janita, army-style penknife, all present and correct. Among the myriad other items that he'd picked up on his path through life, he couldn't find his novelty laser pen. Exactly the type of tool to create the images he saw before him. The less sophisticated cousin of the kind of laser instrument they were using to repair detached retinas. It was exactly what some fool was using to bait him right now.

"Hey Christos! That you?" He regretted the words almost as soon as they hissed from his mouth. His regular roomie and their guest stirred a little, rolling over and murmuring as if another call from him would bring them back to wakefulness.

But, just as he found it difficult to believe that the geek was goading him, at the same time he questioned Christos's stupidity. Did he really think he could f(uck with him so blatantly and get away with it? There was only one thing to do, and if it woke his buddies, too bad.

He sprang up from his mattress and grabbed his sweatshirt in one arced movement. Purposely avoiding any further noise to wake his roomies, he took the handle of the closed door in one hand and gently opened it, stepping out of the gap and pulling it closed behind him in one more single movement.

He saw him straight away.

The unknowable face that breathed hard through that expressionless, inhuman mask. The shapeless form of someone whose physiology had not known when to stop growing.

"Christos, is that you fucking around?"

Though his eyes had been closed long enough to make him squint in the light, he Knew the falsehood of his remark. Petulance could make little men grow spiteful. Courage could even make them momentarily strong. But nothing could make someone of Christos's stature grow temporarily huge.

"What the fuck you doing with that?"

It was the last coherent statement he would ever make, cut off in mid-flow. The giant gloved hand grabbed the ponytail that bound together Ricky's long hair. It snapped back his head and tightened the skin of his face, pulling his eyes back open as if in a poor man's imitation of plastic surgery.

"Fuck you. No you can't..."

He didn't have enough strength to fight off the powerful shape. Ricky, like most of his friends, had never really considered the various forms that death might take, aside from the odd sick joke about road accidents. He had never believed it might come for him like this. That it would be this humanoid. That it would be this merciless, or smell so bad.

He hollered, as much in a cry for help as in pain. Unable to shut his eyes, he felt the searing heat as his right pupil shrank in defense against the thin laser beam shining directly into it. As it came suddenly closer, and his eyelids could afford him no protection, his manic stare reversed the process. The pupils of his eyes grew until they almost obliterated the irises, like black voids of fear.

His right pupil maintained itself at more than twice its normal size. Dark and terror-stricken, Ricky's eye would have accommodated someone's thumbprint across its center just then.

But instead, it defenselessly welcomed the glowing red end of a laser pen. The hot end that quickly turned its lubricating tears into a hot vapor. The burning point that pushed quickly through the huge black pupil, then upwards through the eye, through the organic jelly of the cornea.

Ricky Garcia screamed hopelessly, helplessly, though he knew his cries would bring rescuers too late. He screamed because it would have intolerable to stay silent, as the laser pen was driven in its entirety through the cornea of his eye and upwards, to imbed in the right side of his brain.

   Friday the 13th: Hell Lake, chapter 4