Jason's handiwork

Behind his black welding mask, he regarded Trey with an eye that was no longer there, an obliterated orb that should have left him blinded. Jason did not attack because he wanted them see his handiwork.

In the middle of the room lay Diane Miranda. Injured, traumatized, but still alive. She lay horizontal, her partly naked body dividing the room almost perfectly in half. From their vantage point, her torn dress, one bared breast and buttock could be seen, her body quivering violently in profile. Trey's attention darted from the distressed woman to her victimizer, then back again. The last time they had come into contact, Jason had been driven into a rage of hideous violence at the sight of nudity. Now, it seemed the obscene freak had purposely disrobed this suffering woman.

Shawna took Gretchen's hand and edged toward the door. Diane tried to speak but could only clatter her jaw up and down, cracking her teeth. Her shaking was as violent as any epileptic convulsion. Trey moved toward her. Diane had never deserted him or his friends. She may have been the only person in the adult world to whom any of them could have turned.

He kept part of his attention fixed on Jason, but it was clear the freak wasn't going to attack yet. He wanted Trey to see. As the young man bestrode the center of the room, his hands fixed on his gun, he suddenly understood why.

Diane had fought valiantly, but hopelessly, for her life, and for that of Gretchen. For that, she was rewarded with a punishment that was almost indescribable. Trey looked down on her from above, and saw that her healthy, toned, feminine body had been bisected. The clucking face that met his own had suffered the torture of a machete blade dividing it vertically in two, from the hairline down, splitting the nose gristle, the lips, the lower jaw and the throat. The bloody injury was continued in the middle of her body, and followed all the way down in a symmetrical line. Seen in profile from either side, Diane Miranda was still a beautiful woman, albeit with rivulets of blood trickling down her body. When viewed from the front, she had been almost exactly cut in half.

The cut line ran down through the center of her breasts, which parted now to either side as if responding to separate fields of gravity. It ran down the center of her ribcage and through her abdomen. As her killer's hands had found more pliable expanses of flesh to cut and tear, so there was a greater abundance of her internal body to reveal. Diane had been a beautiful woman and remained so, even in these dying moments.

But Trey's mind reeled to wonder at the perfection of the still working body that was laid open to him. At the pulsing intestines and spasmodic liver, their terminal workings revealed by the hand that had prized her flesh apart from the central wound. At the lower half and trunk of her body that been split down the middle, breaking her almost entirely in two at her hindquarters. For one brief, obscene moment, he thought of an exhibition that had caused scandal at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where the British artist Damien Hirst had displayed two sides of a pig cut perfectly down the middle. Jason had not performed so delicately, but instead of rendering a dull brute into an artistic curiosity he had made an obscenity out of beauty.

Diane felt the chill of approaching death, and the cold air that invaded her internal organs, now stripped of their protection. Her teeth chattered violently as death approached. But it did not come quickly enough. Her wide, staring eyes implored to Trey to take her out of this hell of pain, in any way that he could.

Jason tilted his head, watching the boy closely for his reaction. This was his personal masterpiece. Without the power of words or rational thought, he relied solely on instinct and flashes of random intuition. He had smelled the scent of an enemy around this woman, that of the slimy mother-murderer whose presence he had been forced to endure in hell. For that alone, she had to pay a hundredfold. Jason watched Trey closely, searching for intimations of how Westenhaus might react if he saw what had been done to his lover. Jason was too estranged from human nature to know that people often shut down in the face of unthinkable horror. That Trey was showing no response simply because his mind and body could not produce anything appropriate.

Shots rang out from outside the door. Jason groaned and reeled back. The animal rage inside him welled up into a voiceless bellow. Trey backed out towards the door. "Save your bullets!" Trey was hysterical, almost weeping. "It does no good with him!" His arm outstretched, he pushed all three of them back out of the door.

   Friday the 13th: Hell Lake, chapter 16