After a few minutes, he tossed the knife aside and started scrambling in the dirt with his bare hands. Soon his fingers touched something—something smooth and wet and gray.

When he cleared more dirt aside, he realized what he had found. It was an old cardboard box, about twelve by twelve inches from the looks of it. He dug down deeper until he was able to lift the entire box from the ground. It was surprisingly heavy. Gently, the hunter lifted the box's soggy cardboard lid. And then he looked inside.

His heart seemed to stop.

His jaw dropped and his eyes bulged.

He looked inside the box for only a second. Then his legs started moving as if by themselves, carrying him backward so fast that he fell, landing hard on his back.

It was almost a minute before he was able to stop screaming.

   Friday the 13th: Mother's day, Prologue

The voice. The voice told him what to do. There was nothing he could do about it. He had to obey.

First, he took the cardboard box back to his cabin. He set the box on his little white Formica table. Then he sat stiffly in his one rickety wooden chair, waiting for darkness.

That night the sky turned cloudy—no stars, no moon. By eight, the woods were pitch dark. There would be rain tonight, the hunter could feel it.

It was time to follow his first set of instructions. Putting on a pair of yellow work gloves, he hoisted a shovel over his shoulder, put the cardboard box under his arm, and set off into the darkness.

Rick Perkins was having some construction work done a few miles down the road. He was digging a foundation so he could build himself a larger house, the greedy geezer. The hunter knew he could find what he needed there.

He went on foot, staying by the side of the road the whole way, ready to move into the woods at the sound of any approaching car.

As it turned out, this was an unnecessary precaution. He saw and heard no one. Except the animals, that is. Amazing how noisy the woods were at night. Crickets chirping, frogs making that rivet-rivet sound, owls hooting. And his own black boots, trampling along the hard-packed dirt.

It took about an hour to reach the construction site. There stood the huge yellow backhoe, it's dirty metal shovel hanging down like a giant arm.

The supervisor's shed was padlocked. But the hunter was prepared for this little problem. He'd brought along a screwdriver and a flashlight. With these tools it was easy enough to unscrew the rusty metal hasp and remove the padlock from the door.

Inside the shed, he found the key for the backhoe hanging on a pegboard, it's little whit tag neatly marked, as if for the hunter's convenience. When he turned the key in the backhoe's ignition, the powerful diesel engine roared and rumbled like an airplane. The hunter didn't care. The walk here had convinced him that there was no one around for miles. No one to see, no one to hear. He was able to drive all the way to the site on back-country roads. The cardboard box sat on the seat beside him, jouncing up and down on the black leather seat. The hunter felt powerful sitting behind the wheel of the huge machine. The engine throbbed. The heat baked his legs. The metal flap on the exhaust pipe flipped up and down as the smoke poured out. All the while, the voice guided him, telling him which way to turn.

He drove until he came to an old abandoned house not far from Crystal Lake. It was a gray two-story building set way back from the road across a large field. The hunter guided the giant yellow machine across the lawn. The backhoe's wide wheels made deep tracks in the overgrown grass. About a hundred yards from the house, several small headstones jutted up from the grass in what seemed to be a small family cemetery. Just beyond the small cemetery the voice told him—ordered him—to stop. He braked at once.

Then the voice told him to dig.

It took him a few minutes to master the levers—four large ones and three small ones—that controlled the machine's hydraulic arm. Finally he got the hang of it and lowered the metal arm until the shovel's four metal teeth raked hard into the ground.

It was a mild night, but digging was hard work—even with the help of a machine. The hunter was soon bathed in sweat. The mound of black dirt dug out by the backhoe kept growing, growing.

The voice gave him no relief. There was no stopping, no pausing to rest. He had to dig deeper and deeper.

Around midnight, the threatening skies finally broke. Streaks of lightening briefly lit up the lawn, revealing the eerie scene. The hunter and his machine digging, digging.

The voice issued a new order. The hunter parked the backhoe by the edge of what was now a very deep hole. He retrieved his shovel from the cab floor, and in the frenzy of the rainstorm, started climbing down into the pit. The rain was rapidly turning his hole into a muddy gorge. He slipped and slid most of his way down.

When he reached the bottom of the pit, he began to dig hard. Though he was tired, he kept up a steady rhythm, the black smelly dirt flying over his shoulder again and again. The rain made each shovel-load twice as heavy, but he didn't show down. He didn't stop.

His clothes were soon drenched, his camouflage shirt was plastered to his skin. Rain drummed on the cardboard visor of his cap. He had no idea how deep he had dug. The night was so dark that when he looked up into the rainstorm he couldn't tell where the hole ended and the sky began. Maybe he was burying himself alive. Maybe he would drown.

It didn't matter. He had no choice. He had to follow orders. As he dug down even deeper, he began to hear the strangest sounds.

At first, the sounds were faint. But they soon grew louder. He couldn't quite make them out. They sounded like distant screams.

Then the air turned foul. It smelled like rotten eggs, except with a sting to it that burned the cartilage of his nose---and beyond.

There seemed to be a vapor rising up around his heavy black boots, a thick yellowish mist that wound itself around his legs like a living thing. And then there was the snake. It oozed through the muddy water around his feet. He felt it sliding up his pant leg, felt its leathery skin rubbing against his own. He must be seeing things, he told himself. He kept digging.

The shovel slipped out of his grasp. And when he bent to pick it up, he saw that the wet ground was moving. He looked closer. There were worms in the hole. Thousands of them, worms so white they must never have seen the sun, worms with thick, bulging bellies.

He shouted in disgust and fear. But only for a moment. The terror passed, and he forced himself to pickup his shovel and keep digging.

Almost immediately, the shovel struck something hard. He lifted the blade of the shovel so that the driving rain could wash off the mud and he could see what he had found.

It was thin and white and pitted with tiny black holes. On his own, in the darkness the hunter would never have known what it was or what to do with it. But the voice had told him he would find this object here.

It was the mask. The hockey mask Jason Voorhees had worn to hide his rotted face.

Several thick white worms were sliding out of the mask's eyeholes. The hunter banged the mask against his leg to knock off the worms. Then he tossed off his camouflage cap. With two yellow-gloved hands, the hunter carefully placed the wet mask over his face.

As he did so, he felt a strange power surge through his body, making him shake and quiver both with pleasure and pain. It was as if he had been given a whole new supply of blood, stronger and more potent, but blood with bits of glass in it. His mouth twisted in a silent scream.

Just then, another bolt of lightening streak down through the sky. If there had been anyone around to see (which there wasn't), the flash of lightening would have provided just enough light to glimpse the hunter deep in the pit. His arms were lifted toward the sky. His masked face was tilted up into the driving rain. Behind the mask's small round eyeholes, the hunter's dark eyes gleamed hatefully.

The fun was about to begin.

   Friday the 13th: Mother's day, chapter 2

She jerked her hand away in terror.

But it was just a box, a gray cardboard box nestled in the hollow of the tree.

She removed the box, which was surprisingly heavy, and set it on the ground. Then she lifted the lid.

She started to scream.

So did the severed head inside the box.

Carly dropped the box. Inside the box the head kept screaming. The voice was incredibly loud, high pitched and harsh, like grinding gears. The box was jiggling from side to side as the head moved inside it.

"She's here! She's here! She's here!"

From where she was standing, Carly could barely see into the box, could only see the tight curls of iron-gray hair on top of the woman's head. She had already gotten a close up look at the rotted old flesh, the dark eyes burning with anger. Somehow, though, seeing that little bit of hair was even worse.

   Friday the 13th: Mother's Day, chapters 20-21