Pamela bargain

Morgas and Tolleson continued their butchery; breaking, gouging, manipulating the agent's battered form any way they pleased. And with each inventive new act of cruelty, Morgas demanded Jason's secret.

"Tell me!" he raved.

Michelle Kyler was riding an express bound for her destruction; a train with only one broken window left open.

"Oh, I can help you," said Pamela, the only person Kyler could still hear with any clarity. "We still have a deal, remember. We still have to find my boy. But unless we do something, you'll soon be gone."

Kyler didn't understand.

"Give me your body," said Pamela.

No.

"Give me your body and you won't just live, you'll be able to fight back."

Tolleson continued to tighten the noose around her neck, but Nathaniel Morgas stood back and loaded his revolver.

"We can kill them," urged Pamela.

But Kyler knew that fully surrendering her body to Pamela was irreversible; her soul would cease to exist, just as if Tolleson and Morgas had killed her. She also knew that Pamela would already have possessed her had it not been for the presence of her own mother's remains—a power many times greater than the locket.

"Look what they did to your mother," spat Pamela furiously. "Don't you want to make them pay? Look what they did to her! Look what they did to her!"

Kyler recalled that it was Jason who killed her mother. It was Pamela's precious son who was ultimately responsible for the mutilated remains floating in the formaldehyde. Once again Kyler rejected her.

"No!" wailed Pamela. "You don't understand. Jason didn't kill your mother..."

Morgas jammed the barrel of his gun against Kyler's forehead, Tolleson tugged harder on the strangle-cord, and from deep within her nightmare, Kyler found the strength to pull the string that operated her voice.

She coughed, spat blood, and gasped, "Moonlight."

"Ah, the survival instinct is a wonderful thing, Ms Kyler."

Morgas lifted the revolver from her forehead and motioned Tolleson to keep the garrote in place, but not to tighten it any further.

"We've tortured you beyond recognition," he expounded, "you've endured unimaginable pain, and yet all it took to make you talk was a simple gun to the head, along with your recognition of the fact that I would not hesitate to use it. And so you've bought yourself a few extra seconds of that most precious commodity: life."

Tolleson let go of one of the wire handles and pointed at the TV.

"It's starting,” he said, drawing his employer's attention to the opening bars of "Frightdav 13."

"Well, Ms Kyler?” Morgas sneered, tapping her left temple with the muzzle. "What about the moonlight?"

   Friday the 13th: Carnival of Maniacs, chapter 18

Still holding the gun to Kyler's head, Morgas took the open locket with his other hand and dangled it in front of her face; the picture of her mother spun round and round.

"Come now, Ms Kyler, the sooner you tell me everything, the sooner you and your mother will be reunited. Your corpse will make an excellent sidebar to my collection."

Kyler desperately wanted to speak, but the dual sight of her mother—the bloodstained photo in the foreground and the jigsaw body in the background—found a part of her that had almost been buried by the torture; the part that was still an FBI special agent. Tough, resilient and defiant.

Sensing the change, Pamela seized the opportunity to speak to Michelle one last time.

"If you tell them, they'll kill you," she shouted. "And then we'll all become part of this blasphemous freak show. You, me, Jason, your poor mother—we'll be their playthings until the end of time."

Again, Kyler recalled that Jason killed her mother.

"But that's what I'm trying to tell you," gasped Pamela. "Jason didn't kill your mother. It was Francis Grissom. Look!"

Pamela Voorhees opened a funereal gate into the past and, as if in a dream, Kyler relived the night when Francis Grissom found a woman he called "stinky-slut" caught in one of his mantraps. It was dark, she was afraid, and she begged Grissom for help. In return, he beat her about the head and cut her body in half with an axe. He was going to take her home for meat, but some of stinky-slut's friends showed up and he had to "do a leggy." Martha Kyler had been no more than a common victim of humankind's endemic self-hatred.

At long last, Kyler's one unbroken eye flooded with tears. They crawled down her face, fell from her dislocated jaw and splashed upon the locket.

Drip—a lachrymose crown exploded on the surface of her mother's smiling face.

"I'm losing my patience, Ms Kyler," growled Morgas. "Now tell me. What's the secret of the moonlight?"

Kyler could feel the last seconds of her life were approaching

Tolleson kept a firm grip on the garrote, but he was watching Ross Feratu on the TV; the wooden crate had just begun to splinter, the lid would come away at any moment. A bright light was pointed at Ross's head, simulating the moon, and suddenly every answer tumbled into place.

"I've got it!" he shouted.

"What?" Morgas asked impatiently.

Tolleson let go of the wire, the groove in Kyler's neck holding it in place, and rushed over to the lectern. Then he snatched up Pamela's head and ran across to a tiny window high in the wall of the vast chamber: a slender pole of moonlight shone through the aperture.

"Kill the lights!" he called.

But Morgas wasn't in the habit of taking orders from anyone, "What are you talking about, Mr Tolleson?"

"The moonlight needs to fall on Pamela's head," said Tolleson excitedly.

"Heavens!" whispered Morgas.

Kyler's heartbeat stuttered: her next ragged breath would be her last. She saw her mother in the Perspex tank, she felt Pamela begging to be given control of her body, she saw Tolleson about to throw the kill switch, and then there was Morgas—the one who had beaten them all—a monster set against whom Jason was truly a child.

As her pulse crawled to zero, Michelle Kyler spilled one last tear and made her silent deal.

The museum was plunged into darkness and Cory Tolleson held the head aloft, breaking the thin shaft of light that was falling towards the floor...

   Friday the 13th: Carnival of Maniacs, chapter 18