by Jack Martin
"It's—" all right now, he started to say. The shape sat up.
It got to its feet. As if it had not been shot at all.
He took point-blank aim and squeezed off two more rounds. The explosions were so loud they might have been a single shot.
The moment was slowed-down, dreamlike. Loomis saw the slugs slam into the chest. Each shot knocked the shape back farther on the landing, holding it at bay. But only temporarily each time, as it regained its footing and kept coming.
Loomis braced his back against the wall and pumped off three more shots, rapid-fire, straight into the chest, until the gun clicked in his hands.
As each shot hit, the shape was driven back toward the second story balcony, freezing the scene in stages like flashes of lightning. The empty chambers clicked and clicked. As the shape jerked backwards and over the balcony railing, Loomis clicked the trigger again. Through smoke from the muzzle he saw the shape fall backwards through space and into the darkness outside. A long second later, he heard the thud of the body hitting the ground.
Then there was only the sound of the girl whimpering against the wall.
Loomis lowered his trembling arms. His lips curled back over his teeth.
It was over.
The adrenalin pounded in his body. His knees unlocked and he went to her, bending over her, his kidneys throbbing with pain.
She was flecked with blood—her own. The sleeve was torn away from her blouse, revealing a long, clotted gash like lips in her white skin. Her face.., she was young, no more than sixteen or seventeen. She might have been much younger; the way her face was distorted she could almost have been a child in grade school. She was not crying. She was sobbing, broken. The effect was pathetic. Loomis felt his heart wrench. He started to reach out to comfort her, thought better of it.
He sat down next to her.
At the end of the landing, droplets of dark blood reflected moonlight.
Loomis massaged his arm. It felt sprained, nearly crippled from the recoil of the revolver. The gun metal was hot in his hand. He set it down. He felt no satisfaction in the moment. Only a numb relief.
The girl's sobbing continued. Go ahead, he thought. Just be sure you're weeping for yourself and not for him. Spill the tears he never shed; spill it like his black blood.
Half-formed words were struggling in her throat.
Don't, he almost said. Words mean nothing now. They never have. All my words were not enough, down the days and years of therapy. A game, that's all they were, a poor way to try to deal with the reality of his presence in our midst. Words fail me even now. They were not enough when it counted and they will never be enough again.
"Was it . . . the bogy man?" managed the girl in a pitiful child's voice.
He had to watch her mouth and listen closely. The echo of the gunshots still clogged his ears.
Loomis took a long time answering. Trying to find the right words. Words that would mean anything at all. Finally they came to him with great effort, as if he were being reeducated to their use.
"As a matter of fact," he said, "it was."
The girl went on sobbing. His words neither frightened nor comforted her. She was past that. She had seen the face of Evil up close, and she would never be the same.
A shot of morphine, he thought. That's what she needs. Obliteration, total and complete, for as long as she needs it, until forgetfulness can do its merciful work and allow her to heal. If it's not already too late for her.
He forced himself up and went to the balcony.
He cupped his palms over the sides of his head and popped his ears. The wind swelled the trees but he could not hear it. If a police siren or ambulance was on its way he could not hear that, either. Someone will have heard, he thought. The shots were like cannonfire. Unless the good neighbors on this block have been sleeping the sleep of the dead.
His eyes took in the grass below.
Let me hold this last picture of him in my mind forever, he thought, for the longest day that I live. Whenever I am afraid, whenever anyone is afraid, I will be able to dredge it up from memory and be assured that he and the evil he represents are no more.
The balcony. The flower trellis. The grass below, where he had fallen.
The lawn.
Which was empty.
He slapped the wall with his hand.
Turned. Grabbed the gun and staggered down the stairs. Out the door. Into the yard. He dropped to his knees there.
A patch of flattened, wet grass which still held the outline of a body. It looked as if it had been burned into the ground.
He reached out, feeling the compressed blades of grass against his skin. The grass was smooth when you rubbed it in one direction, rough the other. It was wetter in the center. Very wet.
Wet with blood.
Loomis drew away from it and stood, staring wildly around the yard. The waving branches. The smudges that were garden tools around the periphery. The sky, and the night. Nothing else.
A porch light winked on at the house next door.
A man in nightclothes leaned into the darkness, shading his eyes, peering out between two grinning pumpkins on his porch.
"Just what is going on out there?"
"Call the police," said Loomis reflexively.
"Tell the Sheriff I've shot him."
"Who?"
Loomis' throat cleared and he found the full strength of his voice. "Tell him that he's still loose!"
The man clutched his pajamas and swayed uncertainly. "Is this some kind of joke? I've been trick-or-treated to death tonight."
Loomis held to the gun, the empty gun.
This is it, he thought. I should have guessed.
Halloween is over. The games. The roles. The cheap thrills.
Now it really begins.
"You don't know what death is," he said.
He was on his way out of the yard.
THE SHAPE (Dick Warlock), bleeding from gunshot wounds, steals a butcher knife from MRS. ELROND'S (Lucille Benson) kitchen.
A Holiday Burning
A dentist (Jeffrey Kramer) and DR. SAM LOOMIS (Donald Pleasance) examine the charred remains of the masked figure.
Chapter Three
A Haddonfield blue-and-white screeched to a halt in the middle of the block, as a group of late trick-or-treaters ducked into an alley. They were four: a witch, a ghost, a ghoul, and a pint-sized version of the Devil. They giggled and hid in the shadows, watching.
Loomis ran to the car. His coattails flapped behind his like wings.
"I shot him six times!"
"Wh-a-at?" groaned Brackett skeptically as he climbed out. But he had his shotgun cradled in the crook of his arm just in case.
"I said, I shot him six times," repeated Loomis. His hands jerked in the air, trying to describe what had happened.
It was absurd, he knew that. But so was the universe. Logic was a tool for dealing with only a small part of reality. Still the question remained: how to persuade a nickel-and-dime constable while there was time, with anything less than a cram course in metaphysics? He was at a loss. He felt like a child again, trying to convince his father that there was good reason to be afraid of the dark.
He heard his own voice ringing in his ears, the hollow tone of it, and came close to giving up. Let me have the shotgun, he thought. And the car. I'll find him. It will take too long to explain.
But all he could say was, "I—I shot him in the heart and—"
"He can't have gotten very far. Come on."
"I shot him six—" Face it, Dad, he thought. Or have you never heard of quantum physics, the Heisenberg principle, the porridge bird that lays its egg in the air? No, of course not. There are more things in Heaven and Earth . . . do you think your ignorance prevents them from being true? Do you even think? What will you understand? "Brackett, he's not human!"
Brackett's face screwed up as though someone had told him that his underage daughter had just eloped with the town hebephrenic. What would happen next wo
uld be one silly-assed piece of business for a grown man to put up with, he was surely thinking. But, shit, it has to be done. It's the law.
The law, thought Loomis. That's what I'll hit him with. It's his religion. He's hung up on it the way an addict depends on his heroin. I'll—
Brackett saw the smoking gun still clenched tightly in Loomis' hand.
That did it.
A moment later the car doors slammed and they were burning rubber.
The four trick-or-treaters waited until the flashing red lights of the police car were gone. Then they continued cautiously along the alley.
They made their way past a rotting picket fence, bent trash cans, bundles of cut branches tied like the ends of witches' brooms. One of them stepped down too hard, spitting gravel under his shoe like BB shot against one of the cans.
"Shh!"
"Carefull"
"Are you sure this is the short-cut . . . ?"
A dog barked suddenly and gnashed the air, straining its chain.
"This ain't the way! Come on. . . ."
They turned and dashed off in another direction.
The dog relaxed and gave out a last growl as the alley was silent again.
Almost silent.
Its ears pricked up and swept the alley like radar.
A tall, very tall trick-or-treater emerged from the shadows.
The dog barked furiously.
The tall shape sidestepped into a yard and did not move again until the barking dog lost interest.
The yard was overgrown and uneven, mined with mounds of garden-variety refuse and discards. An old refrigerator tilted there like a white tombstone, a rusting lawn mower propped against a shed, sections of garden hose coiled and rotting in the spiked grass, beneath stiff flags of laundry left out and forgotten on the line.
A house. A warm, orange light in the kitchen window.
The tall shape moved toward it.
"Harold, you want mayonnaise on your sandwich?"
The voice projected clearly through the window, around a fat pumpkin perched on the sill.
It was Mrs. Elrod, she of the sugar cookies and pale eyes.
The shape came closer.
There was no response to Mrs. Elrod's question. She did not look up but finished carving a thick slab of ham on the drainboard. The pumpkin reflected in the carton of Coke bottles on her counter, six orange circles burning in the glass necks, transforming each into a flickering, tapered candle. She put down her Ginsu knife and reached for another jar. "How about mustard?" Still no response.
The shape waited, blocked from her view by the jack-o'-lantern. The flame burned lower, the carved, slitted eyes squeezing closed to the yard and the night outside, the top of the pumpkin and its length of withered umbilical vine sinking and beginning to char like a blackened fuse.
"Harold?"
She tsked and dragged her slippered feet across the kitchen floor.
The living room was dark except for a strobing blue television screen. She put a tired hand to the door frame and steadied herself as her eyes adjusted.
There was Mr. Elrod, slumped in his lowboy chair before the TV. His head and shoulders were outlined against the screen, where just now the image of an American flag fluttered in grainy black-and-white. There were words superimposed over the flag, the last of the titles for this latest movie in Dr. Dementia's Six Hour Horror Movie Marathon. She squinted. DIRECTED BY . . . somebody. The lettering threatened to break up into snow on the small screen. G-E-O-R-G-E R-O-M-E-R-O. Whoever that was.
She made out the image of her husband much more clearly now. The mussed hair, the wrinkled roll of his pajama collar under his bathrobe.
"Harold, are you asleep again?" She started toward him. The screen went blank.
She stopped. She reached out for the back of the chair.
The screen brightened.
Now the face of a local news reporter lit up the room. Beside him at his news desk, a pumpkin grinned broadly.
"THIS IS A WWAR NEWSBREAK. HERE IS ROBERT MUNDY, REPORTING LIVE FROM THE SCENE . . ."
Mrs. Elrod folded her robe closed around her throat, as if feeling a sudden draft in the house.
The scene switched to remote coverage. "MOMENTS AGO POLICE INFORMED US THAT MICHAEL MYERS, WHO FLED LAST NIGHT FROM THE SMITH'S GROVE-WARREN COUNTY SANITARIUM, IS UNFORTUNATELY TIED IN WITH AN ATTACK ON A YOUNG WOMAN . . ."
"Oh, Lord," whispered Mrs. Elrod. "It's that Myers boy again, I knew it!"
Around her the house settled, heavy leaves fell on the roof, the refrigerator creaked like the opening and closing of a screen door.
"REPEATING FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO JUST TUNED IN. THE STATE POLICE HAVE ISSUED AN ALL POINTS BULLETIN FOR MICHAEL MYERS, A MENTAL PATIENT WHO ESCAPED LAST NIGHT FROM THE SMITH'S GROVE-WARREN COUNTY SANITARIUM. HE IS NOW BELIEVED TO BE AT LARGE IN HADDONFIELD."
She shrank back into the kitchen, where things were bright and clear. Mr. Elrod had slept through the announcement.
"THIS IS ROBERT MUNDY, RETURNING YOU TO . . ."
The reporter's voice and face broke up into static.
She felt around her for balance within familiar surroundings. She continued to stare dumbly into the living room as the horror movie, now in progress, flicked back up on the screen. Her pale eyes became watery. She could not have seen the television image: a parched graveyard, the stones tilted, the ragged, wiry figure of a man in black closing the distance across bleak graves with spastic, sleep-walking movements. She crossed herself.
". . . Hey, I mean, praying for church, huh?"
The voice on the TV was speaking in a sarcastic tone. Then cheap music droned, muffling the dialogue.
Mrs. Elrod reached for the unfinished ham sandwich. She would get back to her job and forget what she had just heard. Try to forget it.
Her plump fingers found the bread, the meat. At last she forced herself to turn away from the receding image of the living room, her husband sleeping safely there. She hoped he had not heard any of it.
Now there was work to be done.
Her hand slid off the cutting board.
She looked down.
There was a spill on the board. It might have been strawberry jam, except that it was too runny. She held her fingertips to her face. Some kind of syrup or—
It was peculiar. The way it was on the ham, too.
She made an effort to concentrate on what was in front of her. It was not mustard. It was not mayonnaise. It was not anything she used for sandwiches. It was the wrong color. Darker, even, than her robe. Much darker. It was gluey and red and . . .
Mrs. Elrod screamed. She reached blindly for the knife she had been using.
Which was no longer there.
Next door to the Elrods', a telephone rang.
The dog was barking.
In fact all the dogs on the block were barking. It spread like a contagion, gaining in volume, a warning signal that quickly became a chorus of mad, guttural barks.
It was Halloween, of course.
And yet there had been no firecrackers, no rattling trash cans, no giggling children to start the barking this time.
Was that a siren that passed quickly and faded in the distance?
A young woman came out onto her porch.
"Mr. Elrod?"
That only made the dogs bark louder. She couldn't hear. It had been a siren or—
"Mrs. Elrod?" She stopped halfway down the wooden steps to the back yard. "Are you okay?"
The dogs quieted, as if uninterested in the sound of her voice. Whatever had alerted them had passed by.
The blankets left to air out on the Elrods' clothesline flapped in the breeze. She rubbed her arms and shuddered. Unseen crickets took up their singing again in the bushes, sounding the uncertain boundaries of the yard.
She went back inside, the whites of her eyes showing.
She picked up the phone in the dining room. "Hi."
"What's wrong?"
"There was someone screaming next door."
>
"What?"
"Yeah. Mr. and Mrs. Elrod's. It's his wife's always picking on him. He probably got angry and decided to start beating her." She said it cooly, as if describing an everyday occurrence, but gooseflesh rose on her arms.
"God, I hate nights like this." The voice was hollow in the phone lines. It was coming from only a few blocks away, but in that short distance it gained a false electronic vibrato. "You know it's the full moon?"
"No kiddin'?"
"No. Your folks home?"
"They," she announced, a self-indulgent smile curling her lips, "are gone." She straightened her white blouse in the dining room mirror, tried tucking it into her jeans. "My dad had to take my Aunt Ruby to Hardin County and my mother decided to go along." Idly she picked up a carving knife left from dinner and examined it without really seeing
it. Almost fondling it.
"Did you hear?"
"Hear about what?"
"This girl got killed in Haddonfield. It was on the radio."
"Hold on." She set down the knife, turned on the radio.
". . . THERE HAVE BEEN REPORTS OF AT LEAST ONE VIOLENT ATTACK TONIGHT BY THE ESCAPED MENTAL PATIENT. A TEENAGE GIRL WAS FOUND MINUTES AGO IN THE UPSTAIRS OF A HADDONFIELD RESIDENCE . . ."
"I can't believe it," said the girl.
She glanced warily at the windows, but they were black as the night except for the detached reflection of a Halloween pumpkin's mordant grin, floating suspended in the shiny darkness.
"I know," came the voice on the telephone.
"You know, we prob'ly knew her?"
"Where did it happen?"
"Down on Orange Grove."
"That's right down the street!"
"I know!"
"Sally, I can hear the sirens coming. Do they know who it was?"
"No . . . "
The boards in the front room floor creaked.
She jerked around nervously. The sirens, the dogs barking, howling like wolves . . .
The glass panes in the window over the sink shivered, trembling like membranes. The reflection of a pumpkin appeared to swell unrecognizably, then dissembled into twin circles that resembled animal eyes, watching her. She blinked and rubbed her face. The glass subsided into flat panes. Her own breathing came back to her magnified in the mouthpiece. She tapped the receiver with her nails. She yanked her shirttails out of her jeans again, watching the mirror image of herself posing in the glass.
