A nail through an eye. The socket demolished. The jelly of the split eyeball spilling onto the cheek. A double puncture with a spear gun. Some fool and his cooze speared through the guts, joining them hip to hip as they screwed. A body cut clean in two. The sucker dangling from the rafters in two halves. His sausage-like guts spilling from his exposed lower half, revealing his vital organs, his kidneys... Sanchez reeled back. His mind was often filled with violence, but these sudden flashes had come to him like a bolt out of nowhere. In this dark place, the bright color of blood illuminated his world. It shocked him out of the despondency he was sinking ever more deeply into. It made him smile.

The silent giant behind the hockey mask regarded him curiously, cocking his head as if he were one of the more highly intelligent mammals, but still not quite human. "That was you-you did that, didn't you, amigo?” Sanchez didn't fully know why, but he felt like laughing and weeping at the same time. Jason was showing him a way out of this place, even if it was just by giving him a full-color peepshow of a different kind of hell. "You're sharin' your memories with me!”

One tear trickled out of the corner of the Devil Boy's eye. Maybe he was imagining things, but he thought he might be seeing moisture in that bovine eye behind the mask too.

Staring Jason unflinchingly in the face, he screwed up his eyes and imagined an incident from his own infamous career. It was the last time he ever invaded a citizen's home, another two-in-one bonanza. He remembered the guy, some moustached spick about whom his attorney asked him if he felt any "ethnic identification," cussing and cursing at him in Spanish. The guy's sudden look of fright as he found himself eye-to-eye with the barrel of a .22. The explosion that made part of his brain hit the wall. The girl's screams, her passing into unconsciousness before Sanchez finished working on her with his jackknife. How he had to make it down the fire escape as nosy neighbors hammered on the apartment door. How he left her with a messily carved pentagram before anything sexual had time to occur...

The behemoth remained silent. But otherwise, it was as if some great beast were coming to life after a long hibernation. He stretched and rocked backwards and forwards, stimulated by the new images filling his fractured mind. It was then that Sanchez knew that Jason could see his own memories of violence, as clearly as he'd picked up those of the man in the mask.

Destiny had led Wayne Sanchez to Jason Voorhees, even if that destiny had meant the extinction of his earthly life. They were two lost souls whose only joy for living came from extreme bloodshed, the destruction of the human form. Locked in damnation together, their thoughts were starting to conjoin on the same wavelength.

   Friday the 13th: Hell Lake, Prologue

"Jason Voorhees. The Crystal Lake Killer. They used to say he was the killer that couldn't be killed."

"Are you..." Charles couldn't stop the mocking grin spreading up from the corners of his mouth, "Are you talking about the malodorous retard in the mask? That thing couldn't take charge of its own senses, let alone any great mass of people!"

Well yeah, that was who Wayne was talking about. Except that he didn't see him that way. He knew the full story of Jason. All the legends and all the facts, down to the last drop of blood to be spilled. All of the murderous career that had eluded law enforcement, and defied the vengeful adolescent brats who had sought to drown, burn, shoot and stab his hero. Jason Voorhees could never be beat. Jason always came back at you. Westenhaus didn't know sht.

"I have to say, Devil Boy, you really had me going for a moment." It was so easy to mock, so facile. All the same, Charles would drain the last drop of humiliation out of Sanchez that he could. Eternity was too long a time not to grab any last vestige of amusement. "I thought we really were going to hear something approaching a master plan. I guess it's a little too much to expect, from someone who spent their time on earth smoking PCP and pretending to be the spawn of Beelzebub, hmm?"

"You had better watch your fcking mouth, man."

In his time on earth, Wayne Sanchez had been treated like a celebrity on death row. True, in county jail, before his sentencing, the gangs had given him sht and tried to punk him out, but that was because he stood as a man alone. Just him and his Lord Satan. He wasn't some whining sissy who fought with every legal trick and every clever word that he knew, to try to prove he didn't kill his old momma! Westenhaus wasn't used to guys like him and Voorhees, to hellspawn, the real deal. One more sideways sneer out of this guy, and Wayne would show him he didn't have the cojones to back it up...

Then the shadow fell over them both. It appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and, to any spider watching from a vantage point on its rock in hell, it would have seemed that both of these men were equally terrified, equally dumbstruck. But the masked behemoth, the malodorous retard that stood over them, only had eyes for Charles Westenhaus.

Charles fell from his rock, the first time Sanchez had seen him dislodged since he arrived. It seemed as if he'd virtually forgotten how to use his legs. As Jason reached down one powerful arm, stinking foully of the rotten fabric that had long since meshed with his skin, he could only cower and look at the giant threat that lumbered over him. Defenseless, with no sarcastic words to hide behind.

Jason placed one huge, rotting, gloved hand under Westenhaus's jaw, and wrenched him up into the air. Almost eye to eye with the one watchful orb that could be seen through the vertical opening of the mask, the Ivy League poisoner could only cringe and fight to conserve breath Holding him effortlessly aloft by his throat, it seemed as if Jason was going to make Charles Westenhaus die all over again.

Sanchez had been gripped by a terrible fear at first. He knew the potential of the Voorhees dude as a force of irrational violence. The two of them may have become like blood brothers, but he didn't see that anyone was beyond Jason's random wrathfulness.

But now he was more impressed than ever. Westenhaus, the smug fuck, was choking on his own terror as much as he was having the life strangled out of him. In the time-maybe hours, maybe days-since Sanchez had left Jason to his own Space and come back to speak with the preppy, he knew the masked killer had not followed him back. He had appeared at random, at will, out of nowhere, because his thoughts and the Devil Boy's were on the same wavelength. Because he knew someone was badmouthing his fearsome name to his blood brother, Wayne Sanchez.

That, Wayne decided, was real power. He wasn't sure how Jason had finally arrived in hell. Given the big guy's reputed ability to fight back against every injury ever inflicted, he felt sure they'd have to burn him alive, and then set fire to his body's ashes, to lay him down this low. But he also felt, with a renewed conviction, that nobody was going to be able to keep him there.

   Friday the 13th: Hell Lake, chapter 2

"Der Untermensch with the hockeystick, jah?" yelled the fat German, hearing the mob's uproar as an affirmation of his own apathy. Talk of the devil, thought Sanchez to himself, and the devil will appear. Or, in His absence, someone equally impressive.

They all saw the massive shadow lumbering over them before they saw its source. Even Sanchez, who now knew that any thoughts of Jason could propel him toward the person harboring those thoughts. Especially the kind of mockery he was picking up on right now.

"Gott im Himmel!" No, man, God in Heaven will not help you, the Devil Boy thought. He's been rather scarce round these parts, hadn't you noticed?

The shadow of the fat little German joined with that of Jason to make a two-headed monster against the rock ceiling of the thirteenth circle, Effortlessly, the mighty creature the little cannibal had berated as "subhuman," just a few moments earlier, held him aloft by his shabby old lapels like a toy.

"No! Wait! Wait!" For what should the big guy wait? Should he mess around for the rest of eternity, like the more defeatist elements of the eternally damned community insisted he should?

Sanchez was almost overjoyed to see Jason pull the solid memory of his most favored weapon from his sleeve. The eighteen-inch long steel machete still glinted in the darkness of hell's lowest level. The Devil Boy had dreamed often of seeing the master of murder in action, but dismissed the likelihood. Until he'd come to hell, he wasn't even sure if his hero had really existed.

"Please! Puh-lleeeeezzzzz!" It was poetry in motion. With one slow, methodical draw of the blade across little Fritz's plump throat, Jason instantly cut away a couple of the flesh flaps that formed his multiple chins, exposing the meat, gristle, and—with another fell slice—the bone beneath. He let the German fall to the ground, but, as he did, held tight to his trachea. As Fritz lay gurgling in his death throes, Jason pulled out the windpipe almost in its entirety, holding the sticky organ aloft. Many of the crowd pushed forward to see his handiwork, ancient green bile from the pits of the German butcher's stomach discharging over their heads.

   Friday the 13th: Hell Lake, Chapter 6