One Good Woman

Disclaimer: Jason does not belong to me.


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A sound.
Jesse’s eyes flew open. She raised her head quizzically.
There it was again.
Jesse leaped up, her heart pounding hard.
There was someone poking around just outside the cabin door.
And it wasn’t Jason.
The door was smashed open, and Jesse was blinded by the glare of several flashlights. Voices assaulted her from more than one direction.
Dazed, she tried to back away from the offending lights and sounds.
Hands grabbed her.
Jesse began to scream.

()()()()()()()()()()()

Director Bradley stood outside his cabin feeling uneasy, but determined not to show it in the face of these young officers.
“I tell you, it’s late, and Counselor Jesse is traumatized enough. I refuse to allow you to take her off to some unfamiliar station where she’ll just freak out more.”
A wide-eyed officer spoke up. “But Deputy Sage suggested…”
“Ah Deputy Sage, not Sheriff is he? What does the sheriff say about this?” Bradley asked.
The young officer cast his eyes downward.
Feeling smug over the small victory, Bradley walked past him and into his cabin. The sheriff had been benefiting from “contributions” from Director Bradley of late.
The smugness vanished quickly.
A she-demon had taken over his bedroom.
Kevin had damn near pissed himself as he heard the inhuman yells coming from that room as he nailed the door shut from the outside.
He stood outside the door looking at it in shock almost forgetting the hand-drill he’d just drilled a peep-hole with.
Director Bradley grabbed the drill just as it was slipping from Kevin’s hand.
“That…..isn’t Jesse.” Kevin whispered.
“I’m sure Beth would love to hear you say that.” Bradley replied.
Keeping a safe distance from the door, he looked in on Jesse.

()()()()()()()()()

Jesse was furious. She was trapped in this reeking hole that dripped with the stink of that foul man’s scheming dishonesty.
Her sensitive nose found Bradley’s cologne bottles intolerable. They’d gone out the broken window.
She wanted escape, but the Director’s cabin was up on stilts. The bedroom window was too far from the ground for Jesse to jump safely.
So she had started expressing her opinion of Bradley’s crappy décor.
The bed sheets, the clothes, and everything that stunk directly of the man had been chucked out the window. She’d even ripped the pillow top off the bed mattress with a chunk of glass after breaking the bathroom mirror.
When she felt she could breathe better, she took a shower to rid her flesh of the stink he’d left as he and Kevin had forced her from the officer’s car, up the stairs, into the cabin, and into the bedroom.
As she walked fresh from the shower into the mangled bedroom, her nose wrinkled in distaste. That smell! It was worse than corpses! At least they had reason to reek honestly!
She paced restlessly. Trapped. Trapped by the man who was truly responsible for Tommy’s death. The boy had been unforgivably fragile. She’d watched the camp from afar with Jason a couple of times. Seeing the camp from the outside had given her more perspective on the matter.
Tommy had never had any business here. The idea of “integrating” seriously retarded children with normal ignorant kids was a politician’s vision. In real life, it didn’t work. Not that normal kids were evil, or insensitive by nature. They were perfectly normal children. Loud, boisterous, and reckless.
All things you could not be around a child like Tommy. She shook her head in frustration. To think, not so long ago, she was the one spending all her time with Tommy, and never really paying attention to how normal kids really worked. She had been too close. Willing, as an adult to make concessions for a child, that the young children at the camp were not capable of even considering. And her frustration with the normal children, that they weren’t making adult considerations for Tommy…..it was unfair all around.
She had not been responsible for Tommy’s presence. Director Bradley had. A man who had not bothered to spend ten minutes with the kid.
Tommy’s death flashed through her mind. The child had been missing a piece of skull and Director Bradley had encouraged his presence at a camp full of boisterous children! The boy’s life was too fragile to be here to begin with!
These realizations were not new. They had come to her during those times when Jason brought her to view the camp from afar. After she’d made the realization that Tommy’s death was well on another’s shoulders, she’d stopped watching the camp with Jason. She had to. Jesse did not have the control Jason did. She wanted to race right into the Director’s office and strangle him with his own belt!
Jason had seemed to understand….in his own way.
Where was he now? She had little doubt that he would be fully aware of what had happened. And she knew the state of Jason’s cabin would make it pretty obvious she had not left him willingly.
“J-Jesse?”
Jesse’s head snapped toward the door, she noted the small hole bored in the door, and the anxious looking brown eye peering through it.
In another time, such observation would have sent her racing to cover her nakedness. Being with Jason had given her a feral self possession that made such an action unnecessary. She was fully at home in her nude body.
“Kevin.” Jesse acknowledged.
“D-do you need anything?” He asked.
Jesse stopped pacing and turned to face the door. Water droplets from her wet hair had run shining tracks down her tanned breasts. The small patch of hair between her legs sparkled with a few clinging drops. She stared at Kevin’s widening eye.
“Do I LOOK like I need anything?” She challenged sweetly, placing a hand on her hip.
It sounded like Kevin was choking. His eye suddenly disappeared from the hole. She listened as he left the cabin hastily.
“Pathetic.” She whispered.

()()()()()()()()()()()()

Jason was not happy. He’d seen the police make off with his yowling mistress. His heart had started its irregular beating at that. Watching her fight them. She’d torn one guy’s cheek open, and bit another one pretty damn good. But they had numbers. She’d made them use every one though as they hog-tied her and put her in the back of a cruiser.
He’d almost despaired as the car drove away with his prize. How was he to reach her if she was at the police station in the middle of town?
He was just preparing to race into the night to beat the car at a short-cut he knew, when the remaining officer’s radios crackled to life. The voice of that bad Camp director filled the air. Jason stopped and listened. The officers around his home looked confused and angry.
Jason felt elation. Not only was he going to get her back, the night of reckoning had come. First Camp Crystal Lake would scream. Then it would be claimed by the silence it was owed.
Again.

()()()()()()()()()()()()()

Kevin’s heart hammered as he stood in the cabin that was once Jesse’s. Her stuff was gone. And it looked as though someone had erected a mini-shrine to her in her closet. Old candle stubs surrounded her driver’s license. A small bouquet of dry wildflowers lay before it.
“Too creepy.” Kevin whispered.
Director Bradley seemed intent on putting the blame for the disappearances, including Tommy’s, squarely on Jesse. Kevin had been doubtful about that, after all, Jesse had vanished as well, but the Director called the shots.
The hair was prickling on the back of Kevin’s neck as he backed toward the door. Something else was responsible for all this. And it was still out there somewhere….
Hands grabbed him. Kevin shrieked.
“Gotcha!” Beth giggled. “You scream like a little girl baby.”
Kevin faced Beth. “They found Jesse.”
She looked curiously at his ashen face. “And? What? Is she dead or something? You look completely freaked.”
“No she’s…..alive. We got her locked up in Director Bradley’s room.”
Beth laughed. “Locked up? What for?”
“She’s not….like she was before she disappeared.” Kevin replied.
“Pffft. If she’s deranged or something they should have taken her to a psycho ward. What are you doing in here?”
“I was looking for her clothes, but they’re gone. And look.” He said pointing at the little shrine. “I think whoever took her left that.”
Beth looked at the little candles and laughed. “Kevin! We’re at a camp full of stupid pre-teens! Use your head. Some of them probably got in here and left that as a joke! Her clothes are probably in a ditch somewhere.”
“Hmm. You may have a point. Can we give her something of yours to wear? She wasn’t wearing anything when they brought her in.”
“Why can’t she wear something of Bradley’s?”
Kevin pointed out the window at the ground under the Camp Director’s stilted cabin.
“I don’t think she likes him, or his stuff very much.”
“Mousy little Jesse did all that? You’ve got to be kidding.”
“She did it.” Kevin stared at the rubbish for a moment. “So how about those clothes?”
Beth shrugged. “Sure, but I wanna see her.”

()()()()()()()()()()()()

Jesse heard Beth giggling in the next room. She rose from the shredded mattress and waited. Sure enough, a heavily made up female eye appeared at the peephole. The giggles faded.
“Hey Jesse. Um….you doing okay?” Jesse nodded. “I brought you some clothes. It’s just yoga pants and a tank top.”
Beth’s eye disappeared as she obviously bent to stuff the clothes under the door. When she stood and peered through the hole, she leapt back, startled.
Jesse had crossed the room soundlessly and now stood inches from the door looking out at Beth.
Seeing that Jesse wasn’t holding a wire hanger or anything else that could be stabbed through the hole, Beth carefully eased back to the peephole. Jesse’s eyes just seemed to stare through her.
“Leave the camp.” Jesse said.
“What?”
“Leave the camp. Take that weak boy with you, and leave the camp.”
Beth glanced across the room at Kevin. How had Jesse known he was there?
“I can smell him Beth. He smells of fear, and…….lust. Have you been pleasuring him Beth? No. I don’t smell his poor fluids on you. Anyway, leave the camp. Take him with you if you must, but you’ll get away faster without having to drag his useless hide.”
Beth leaned close to the door. “Get away from what Jesse? What are we supposed to be getting away from?”
“He’s coming.” Jesse replied as she moved to the open window. Pale moonlight spilled across her nude body, contesting with the artificial light in the thrashed bedroom.
Beth stared in fascination as Jesse brazenly braced her arms against the top of the window and writhed in front of it.
“He’s watched you fuck that boy when you were supposed to be watching the children. He’s seen you, and the other counselors smoking weed when you were supposed to be making nightly rounds. He knows you’ve been bad Beth.” Jesse whispered as her eyes closed. She continued to dance in front of the window.
Beth’s mouth went dry. She couldn’t believe this was Jesse, but it was.
“Did you get hit in the head girl?” Beth asked.
It was as though Jesse couldn’t hear her. She just continued her slow teasing dance in front of the window.
“A kid might see you there.” Beth said.
Jesse stopped and began to laugh. The hair rose on the back of Beth’s neck at the sound. Her nerve almost broke, at that moment she wanted to get far far away from Jesse.
“This window looks over the lake Beth. The only one who might see me is the one you don’t want to meet.”
Jesse walked back to the door and looked out at Beth.
“When he comes, everyone who has been bad will die Beth. He’s like Santa Claus you know. He’s made a list, he’s checked it twice……” Jesse scooped up the clothes Beth brought and walked away from the door, humming the rest of the Christmas tune.
Beth stepped away from the door and looked at Kevin.
“She’s gone totally over the rainbow Kev.”

()()()()()()()()()()()()()

Across the lake, a figure moved closer to the camp. He’d seen the slow dance of his female in the window. She was waiting for him.

She would not have to wait long.