As he felt his sap rising, tingling all the way up his neck to the roots of his hair, he focused on the damaged, ornate wooden cross a friend had salvaged for him from a renovated Catholic church. One of the traditional icons of blood and suffering, it no longer had a place ina modern American house of worship. But James loved it. Now, more than ever, he loved it. The agonized ecstasy on the face of the suffering Christ. The bloody nails through the stigmata on his feet and the palms of his hands. The numerous arrows that pierced different parts of his twisted torso, leading the friend who liberated the artifact to wonder if it wasn't the image of the martyred Saint Sebastian, rather than Jesus.

"Oh God! What, what...” sputtered James. Lisa had known this was working for him, but she didn't want it to happen just now.

"Close your eyes and think of oblivion," she whispered to him. But he couldn't relax anymore.

"Who put that, that, splatter movie on the VCR?”

Oh, what now? Had someone recorded over her tape of The Hunger? Lisa didn't want to slow up the action, for Christ's sake! Grinding over him, again and again, she slowly turned her head toward the source of his gripe.

He was right. She was just as pissed as he was to see, not Deneuve in the shower with a besotted Susan Sarandon, or Bowie attacking some kid on the streets once his vampire years were up and he started to age-but Jason Voorhees.

Lumpish. Misshapen. Ugly. Inarticulate. Sexless. Violent. Jason Voorhees. The mindless nonentity behind that stupid mask. Bloody-pawed and lumbering toward the screen.

“Ignore it. Keep going. Don't stop now..." Lisa turned her back to the screen. But sex and death were about to become more intertwined than she had ever known. Without a word, without a sound, their conjoining in the consciousness of these two young people had invited an intruder into their sanctum. A violent force of nature that had no need of announcing itself. Had no need for doors or portals anymore. Would no longer need to smash its hideous bulk through wooden partitions or glass windows.

Now, one stray thought was enough to summon his unwelcome presence.

"No. No. Oh God, no!” Lisa kept the weight of her rump fastened to her boyfriend. “Don't stop now, James, not now!”

Locked into her sensual dream, she never saw what James saw. With her back turned to all else but this bed of sensual delights, she would never really Know death until she faced it.

The splintered wooden crucifix tore through the rear of her lungs with all the power a once-human being could muster. Measuring three feet by two feet, its mighty ornate scale ripped most of her upper body apart. Its spiked head erupted diagonally through the mid-section of her breasts, tearing one loose from its fatty tissue. It pinned the screaming James to the bed, impaling him through the soft flesh at the top of his breastplate and the bottom of his throat.

By the time Lisa knew what was happening to her, it was too late to act, or to care. She breathed in sobs, but it was with the agony of respiration rather than weeping. James squirmed below her, the blood flowing from his gushing throat down the wooden shaft just an inch or two, before it found its viscous resting place in Lisa's hair.

Jason filled James's vision. A nightmare from the screen become reality. He grunted a mighty breath, the sole triumphant bellow of a mute. He brought his weight, his force, his strength down hard once more, and the lovers were truly conjoined in death. With her face involuntarily kissing his bloody breast, Lisa shivered. Her chill warned her, almost reassured her, that death was coming now. As she died, James's shaking body could control its involuntary spasms no longer, and at last he reached an orgasm that was concealed between her dead thighs. The little death flowed into the big death. Sex and death were as one.

   Friday the 13th: Hell Lake, chapter 7