Jason summoning

Shawna and Trey ventured out to search for Gretchen. It was a storm-battered night, and the air was flecked with rain blowing in from the Atlantic. Beyond that, they were submerged in the darkness that swathed their lives. The darkness that protected enemy and friend alike, and protected them from the harsh, unmasking daylight.

"Isn't this what they call sympathetic atmosphere?" Shawna was literally chilled to the bone. "Like, we couldn't have a mild, balmy evening to accompany Gretchen losing her mind?" She almost immediately regretted what she had said. But the essence of her complaint was true. Whenever her friend went wandering off into that damaged little world that she inhabited now, she put them not only at the mercy of whatever was out there in the night, but at the mercy of the elements.

"I think I see her down by the ridge." The outline of a slender female was visible on a jutting rock ledge that overlooked the town below, and the distant lights of the bay. They felt their way down the hillside, grabbing at underbrush and shrub as they lost their footing in the dark. All discomfort was repaid as they saw it was definitely her.

"Hey, enough days and nights in the wilderness. They're missing you back at camp, girl." Gretchen recognized her friends immediately. Since she witnessed the atrocity that destroyed Diane Miranda, she had become possessed of a calm that unnerved all those around her. It was as if she saw their fates, however bleak, as inescapable, and had become reconciled to it.

"He's out there somewhere. He's nearby." Neither Shawna nor Trey knew how to answer her. It made no logical sense. They were hundreds of miles from Crystal Lake and Craven County. Apart from some old shaggy dog story about Jason Voorhees once haunting the Hudson Bay, there were no suggestions that he had ever been seen outside of that several mile perimeter.

But that wasn't how Gretchen saw it. "He lives off the violence in our souls," she had told them. "All our hate and spite and fear. He feels it. He's a product of it. He's not a person anymore, not the way that you or I are, he's all the bad things in our nature. If we think of violence, even if it's just because we live in fear of it, then he's never far away." The way she spoke, it seemed as if her crazy insight had made her more than a little sympathetic to the bastard.

But that night, there was truly something in the air that bore out her madness. "C'mon, Gretchen, we have to get back now," Trey insisted. "At least we can scrounge something to eat and take a piss without having to look over our shoulders." The girl refused to move. The wind howled, a mournful moan on its icy breeze.

"Don't worry, son. There's no one out here who can hurt you any more." Gretchen faced the elements, not a tremble from her slender form as her uncombed hair flew this way and that in the breeze. The strangeness of her words was compounded by an echo in her voice. It was if another, older woman was repeating every word that she said.

"Okay, enough of this sht. We're going back!" Shawna reached out a bullying maternal hand. It shook her to be rebuffed by Gretchen so violently, her usually gentle hand pushing her away almost as hard as if it were a punch.

"There are people on their way to this place who call themselves your enemies, Jason. Stay away if you fear them, son. But they can do you no harm. Truly. Mommy wouldn't lie to you." Gretchen seemed to be trying to summon his presence out of the elements. To Shawna, it was plain insanity. To Trey, it was something more fearful.

Full moonlight shone on the gnarled, rocky ridge of the hillside. It may have been the atmosphere of this place playing tricks on the imagination, but Trey believed the light created faces out of the natural rock formations. Twisted, grotesque faces.

Gretchen walked toward the rocks. "Come back to mommy, Jason. She's waited such a long time." To Shawna, it was proof of her friend's clinical insanity. To Trey, it was something inexplicable. He didn't buy into the idea that Jason Voorhees was just another vicious killer like the rest—albeit mentally retrded, deformed, and possessed of a terrifying strength. That was the way Shawna saw him, through the eyes of a surviving victim who desperately desired revenge. But Gretchen, or whatever insanity was taking over her mind, was right. He was a violent primeval force.

"Mommy won't let them kill you, son. Whoever tries to hurt you is her enemy..." It was no longer Gretchen's voice. No longer her mind. The wild landscape was no longer something natural, born out of its own surroundings. It was now the interior of her mind. And the rocks were developing humanoid features.

"Leblanc, this is insanity in the first degree. Help me take her down, we don't have to injure her but we have to get back to that fcking camp..." He was silent. Frozen. He saw things happening that Shawna couldn't perceive.

"Say, what the fck is it with you? Have you completely lost your guts?” Maybe he had. It was difficult to act without hesitation, without procrastination, anymore. He knew that they were no longer dealing with earthly forces, that it was futile to tussle with anything so far outside the realm of earthly logic.

But then Shawna saw it too. If she had ever seen the images that the moonlight made upon the rocks, it had been dismissed as illusion. But this was hyper-real, all too substantial.

"Oh son, you've come back! Your mother has waited so long to be with you again." That aging, husky voice was not Gretchen's. But it was her form they saw kneeling to kiss the gloved hand of the figure who had not been there only moments before. It was Gretchen who took the hand of Jason and led him toward them.

   Friday the 13th: Hell Lake, chapter 18