Saturday the 14th

based on characters created by Sean S Cunningham and Victor Miller in Friday the 13th      
        
"Camp is what the boy looks forward to in Scouting." - Lord Robert Baden-Powell, founder of Scouting        
       
In the movie that girl chops my head off, but obviously that's bullshit, since you don't survive that. The movie had a lot of bullshit in it, right down to casting that old bitch Betsy Palmer as me. Did they really think that a pampered little actress like that would be strong enough to push an arrow through both a mattress and a young guy's throat? I doubt they cared, of course. The movies were just for idiot teenagers. Apparently, there was a remake a few years ago. My grandniece told me. She asked if she should watch it and I just laughed, which was a bit mean, in retrospect. She's seventeen, she doesn't know. She doesn't know how Hollywood takes your story for its market potential and then does what it wants with it, that there's no such thing as "realism" or "sensitivity", even when they pretend that there is.        
       
I started writing to Aileen Wuornos, the Florida prostitute who killed johns, about a year before she was executed. Well, she started writing to me. Some nonsense about the end of the world and how we as incarcerated women would inherit the earth. I should have ignored her letter, I suppose, but what have I got to lose? Besides, the turnkeys read everything anyway. Don't act like they don't. I know because I once wrote a letter to my niece claiming that an officer had hit me with a nightstick (he hadn't) and of course she didn't bring it up in her letter back. They censor stuff like that, to make sure us convicts don't have a deleterious influence on the outside world. As if anyone's going to listen to an old hag who killed ten kids back when the peanut farmer was president.        
       
I talk about convicts and screws, but of course I'm supposed to see them as patients and orderlies. Fact remains I can't leave, and they lock you in at night, though I guess I shouldn't gripe. We get a television room and time spent in a garden rather than a concrete exercise yard with walls higher than Jericho's. It's more comfortable than Camp Crystal Lake's ratty old cabins.        
       
Yet in a strange way I'd still rather be there than here. It was my own fault. When I think about the camp I think about a full moon, hanging fat in the sky like a bone-coloured bauble, like what people in the underworld would hang on their Christmas trees. I'm not a poet by nature, but I've had a lot of time to reflect, to romanticise.        
       
I was twenty-eight back in 1958, when everyone liked Ike and the Kennedy assassination hadn't yet knocked everything askew. The camp was a paradise to me, and I hadn't thought myself deserving of paradise for a long time. It had been twelve years since my father threw me out after my mother made him aware that my belts were no longer fitting me, and that she suspected that I was in trouble.        
       
If they happened today, I wouldn't have gotten away with my first two murders. I didn't wear gloves, didn't move or operate with the stealth of an assassin, probably left all kinds of DNA all over the place. I wore his hockey mask. That wasn't in the first couple of movies, someone somewhere having decided that its inclusion would be bad taste. Of course, by the third movie they didn't give a shit.        
       
Does it bother me that they've immortalised my son as a remorseless zombie? No, not really. I don't give a fuck about the films. Why would I? Jason lives in my head, forever eleven years old, trapped in the year 1957, but not sad because it's always one of those gorgeous New Jersey summers. When the woods and the lakes are as golden and humid as any Deep South boondocks. In my head he plays in the woods, dives off the peer and into the lake, and never gets lost or gets a splinter. Never drowns.        
       
On the night of the '58 murders I'd been taking my customary walk through the woods. I still lived in my old cabin, which I’d been given on getting my job as camp cook, and would right up until 1980. People like to picture me as a foul-smelling wise woman, who spent twenty-three years living in filth and squalor, but I had food, a bed, a TV, and a job at a nearby factory. It was the closest thing to normality I could have ever hoped for, especially after what I did in '58.        
       
I can't explain it in a way that'll be satisfying to anyone, just that I heard noises from one of the equipment cabins. I'd known for a while that the camp would be opening again and made peace with it. I didn't expect the world to care about some fallen slut and her dead, retarded kid. But when I heard those brats, making love... No, not making love. Fucking. When I heard them fucking in the attic of the equipment cabin, a cold sea of rage swept over me. There were javelins and hockey equipment in a corner of the cabin, and the moon through the window lit up the javelins like ancient spears. Kill them, mommy...        
       
And I did. I put on a hockey mask, and I killed them. First, the boy, whom I speared as he flopped about on top of that girl. Some academic wrote me in the '90s to ask about that, whether I skewered him out of some sort of penis envy. You have to laugh. People come up with all kinds of nonsense ideas about hate and violence, trying to explain it. Sexualise it, more often than not. That whole thing about final girls, for example, and how they have to be virgins to survive. In the movies, maybe, but let me tell you, my final girl wasn't no Virgin Mary. She was just like the rest of them, just like me when I was sixteen and stupid enough to believe what boys say when they're turned on.        
       
The truth is, I chose the javelin because it was sharp, and I stabbed him through the back while he was screwing his girlfriend because I wasn't exactly going to tap on his shoulder and ask him to make himself decent before I stick him like a pig. The girl ran, and I gave chase. Something that really does happen in real life, and not just horror films: sometimes, the girl really is dumb enough to run upstairs rather than down and through the front door. The cabin had three floors, the third a poky attic space filled with trunks. I don't even really feel responsible for this second death. The silly bitch ran into a precarious pile of the chests and then one, which happened to have a medicine ball inside, fell from the top and caved in her head.        
       
The attic had no windows, but I could see the moon outside, waxing brightly in its clouds of witness to what I'd done there that night. Jason capered about in my head, waving his little arms, his malformed face broken out in happy and innocent laughter. Children don't understand the consequences of violence. They don't understand that dead is dead. And Jason wasn't even an ordinary child. He was special, as is said today. Back when he was born the terms were much uglier. Retard, mutant, moron, mongoloid. "Mental defective", if you felt like being nice and professional.        
       
There was nothing defective about Jason. He was better than anyone I'd ever met, adult or child. Instinctively kind and unassuming, without ego or any sense of entitlement. That's why he had to die. That's why the world had to kill him. I'm seventy-five now, and in the last ten or so years I've been thinking that maybe it was a good thing he died. Maybe those teenage counsellors who were too busy fucking to look out for a little defective boy, to make sure (as they promised they would) that he didn't fool around near the lake, did him a mercy without even realising it.        
       
I'd still kill them if I could, though. I regret killing all those kids, but if there's anything that'd give me a measure of peace before dying, it'd be giving those brats who were actually responsible for Jason’s death the punishment they deserved. It's not like the state cared enough to prosecute them back in ‘57. I doubt that they even felt bad. I can be more honest now. I wouldn't have said this ten years ago, back when I was in that halfway house. If I'd stuck it out, I could have had an apartment and a shitty job slinging patties in a roadside diner, like that Arizona transvestite who killed those girls in his motel.        
       
I couldn’t have stuck it out, though. Because I had to go back. I had to go back to Camp Crystal Lake because that’s where I felt closest to Jason. Walking in the woods, I could hear his laughter again, the laughter that will always be eleven years old, and sunlit, and echoing in a way so beautiful that it makes me think for a second that maybe I’m not hell-bound after all. Only a second, though, since I’ll always remember the blood, and the screaming, and the young girl’s head split in two with an axe, how I marvelled at my own strength, standing over her body as her bare thighs got splinters from the floor. The childish music of Jason’s laughter keeps me sane, and I’d hear it more strongly if I could be where he was happiest. The cops caught up with me just as I was making my way down the road where I’d driven fifteen years before, with that girl whose throat I slit. She said she hitched a lift with me because I’m a woman. More fool her.        
       
A lot of motives have been ascribed to what I did, all crap. Like the idea that I was trying to deter developers from re-opening the camp, or that I was punishing teenage sexuality. Feminists have written to me asking if I was ever raped or subjected to male violence, if my dreams were crushed by the patriarchy and that’s why I kill, and I have to disappoint them and say that I’d happily kill every other female on this vile earth, if it meant one more minute with Jason, stroking his head, holding his weak little hand. I killed those kids because I hated the world, hated it for hating Jason, and because Jason was too loving and pure to have taken revenge for himself.        
       
He wasn’t like other boys. He was better than them. He’d have never grown into a man who let his wife slave away after him without even a thank you in return, who’d cast out his own teenage daughter for making a mistake, because girls don’t get to make mistakes. He wouldn’t have told a girl that he loved her just so she’d give it up without a fight, then leave her with a kid to raise and no income.        
       
In one of the sequels there’s a shack in the woods with my head in it, on a crude altar which Movie Jason presumably worships at. I suppose that that was based on my altar, on which I’d put his hockey mask between a couple of candles, and at which I was found when the final girl got to the police. I was kneeling and covered in blood. (Now there’s an image for a horror film, but I guess In a slasher, the slasher needs to die.) I wasn’t thinking anything, except that I’d probably never see Camp Crystal Lake again. And I didn’t.