He gently eased her down and covered her with a blanket. She stared up at him, eyes wide, lips trembling slightly. Whatever was going on, he thought, it had long since passed the joke stage. It wasn't funny anymore. Alice was genuinely frightened, but he remained convinced that the others were behind this. The generator might have run out of gas or they might have turned it off, just playing games.

Maybe Ned put them up to this, he thought, it was just the sort of juvenile prank he would pull and Brenda would have probably gone along with it. But Jack and Marcie seemed to have a lot more sense than to pull something this stupid. They had probably all gone off and smoked somewhere, got silly, and decided to play a practical joke. Hide and seek. Ghosts and monsters in the dark. Kids' stuff. But the laughter stopped when someone got as scared as Alice did, especially the bit with the bloody axe in Brenda's bed. It was probably red paint. He hadn't stopped to check. It had actually scared him a little too. Sick, he thought, really sick. He had half a mind to deck Neddie when he found them and Steve wouldn't be amused by this at all.

Unlike Alice, he knew why the people in the town called the place "Camp Blood." When he had first arrived, he had stopped in for breakfast at the general store in Crystal Lake and struck up a conversation with one of the locals who had told him all about the drowning in 1957, the murders in 1958, and everything that had happened since- every time the Christies had tried to reopen the camp.

At first, Bill hadn't really believed him. He had worked as a camp counselor every summer for the last five years and he heard every single summer camp ghost story there was to hear. Most of them were variations of the same thing. A tired classic told around the campfire late at night.

The story of the hook.

There was a homicidal maniac who had killed a lot of people and been locked up in an asylum for the criminally insane. This asylum always just happened to be somewhere not far from the camp. The killer, so the story went, had lost his hand and in its place, he had a steel hook. The hand was never found. The killer had lost it somewhere nearby in the woods and he was obsessed with finding it.