Halloween

by John Passarella

  Aaron stepped into the shower, pulling the curtain behind him to lock in the heat and steam. His hands held her waist, sliding down to the swell of her hips as he brought her close to him.

  With the bathroom door open, Dana heard the murmur of voices coming from the television, which Aaron had left on in the other room. A reporter mentioned something about an empty bus abandoned the previous night on the side of the road. She couldn’t hear any more and, as Aaron pulled her in for a lingering kiss on the lips, the intimate confines of the shower stall held her full attention.

  As she felt him firm against her, she murmured, “Who needs coffee?”

  * * *

  Allyson leaned into her run, a slight forward tilt of momentum that propelled her through her morning miles. A new day. A new start. Her grandmother had talked about a reset. But each reset had a bit of a rewind built into it, a tendency to make the same mistakes all over again. Can’t change the past, Allyson thought, so you might as well look forward to new choices, new experiences.

  Karen couldn’t stop blaming Laurie for her mistakes. And Laurie couldn’t escape the rut of old, destructive behaviors. Allyson wanted them to stop dwelling on the dysfunction, to be better—different—if that was even possible for them. But she was starting to believe neither one of them could change, which broke her heart.

  As Allyson passed the community garden on her morning route, she noticed a shape out of the corner of her eye, someone moving in the shadows. She slowed and turned her head to look back. But she saw nobody, not even the woman in the saree, the apparent caretaker for the garden. Maybe she’d imagined the movement. With a shrug, she picked up her pace and moved on.

  Less than a minute or two later, she noticed a few people congregating near the large tree whose roots had tilted several slabs of sidewalk from below, creating a tripping hazard for walkers and runners alike. She made a habit of running on the shoulder of the road when she approached that tree, rather than faceplant for a second time.

  God, that had been painful! She’d scraped her palms raw and sprained her ankle. Bobby Hall, who had been delivering sandwich orders for a local deli in his dinged-up PT Cruiser, had laughed his ass off. She did her best to ignore the jerk, but felt her face flush, probably beet red. And she couldn’t confirm but wanted to believe smoke curled from her ears to express her silent fury. She’d tried to hobble home but gave up and called her mom for a lift.

  Now she wondered what had caused the commotion at her tree of shame. Everyone there seemed to be looking at something in the tree. Curious, she veered over to the group, slowing to a jog.

  Somebody said, “Who in the hell would do this?”

  Another voice commented, “It’s awful.”

  “Horrible,” a third person agreed. “Somebody should call the cops.”

  Allyson stopped, sidestepping to locate the object of their interest. She gasped. Their attention was focused not on the tree, but on something hanging from a branch. Someone had killed a dog, then hogtied it and hung it upside down. Its swollen tongue, stippled with blood, protruded from its twisted mouth, black lips flecked with spittle. The rope creaked softly as it moved in the breeze. A moment of sympathetic grief over someone’s slaughtered pet transformed into something more personal as Allyson realized she recognized the brown-and-white dog as the one that had lunged at her yesterday, barking and startling her as she passed by its wrought-iron fence.

  She shuddered with a sudden chill, witness to an act of evil that had occurred maybe only a few hours ago, on a street she passed every day. An act of evil removed from her yet connected to her. As one of the onlookers reached up tentatively to touch the dog, to confirm it was dead or to untie it and lower it to the ground, Allyson turned away. She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling her sweat dry, delivering a renewed chill.

  Whatever meditative calm she had achieved on her morning run was effectively shattered now. At the end of the block she saw an unfamiliar car—an old brown-and-tan Bronco—parked at the curb. A driver sat behind the wheel, face cloaked in shadows, unmoving. Indistinguishable, but the shape of a man.

  Behind her, she heard her neighbors lowering the dead dog to the ground.

  * * *

  Laurie awoke to a frightening variety of physical discomforts. Either the pounding in her head or the deep throbbing in her lower back woke her. But the brute force of the morning sun beating down on the windshield of her pickup truck kept her gritty eyes in a squint worthy of Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti western. Hand fumbling overhead, she plucked a pair of sunglasses from a case clipped to her sun visor and slipped them on, grateful for the temporary relief.

  No longer blinded by the early light, she assessed her surroundings. Two old boyfriends shared space on the passenger seat: Jim Beam and Jack Daniels. Both nearly as depleted as she felt. Was it possible for every bone in the human body to ache simultaneously? Or maybe it was just all the muscles attached to those bones that were sore. And her throat couldn’t have felt more swollen and dry if she’d gargled sand all night. Even so, she resisted the urge to wake up Jack or Jim.

  Cast aside on the passenger-side floor mat, a white paper bag with the name and dual-tipped liquor bottles logo of Bucky’s Beverage Barn sparked a memory. Apparently, she’d made a stop after leaving Bellini’s to drown her parental and grandparental shortcomings.

  She recalled the drive back to her house. Both bottles had remained in the bag until she reached home. After that, her memory had a few holes in it. She’d sat outside, drinking, lamenting the years of her life surrendered to the cause, the fight. At some point, she’d had too much to drink to bother leaving the truck. An internal struggle had raged. A desire to blot everything out feuded with her determination not to seek any comfort in her own house, in the warmth of her own bed. In her warped thinking, she thought she’d stay in battle-ready mode if she forced herself to stay upright in the truck.

  After all these years she continued to misjudge her own capacity for reckless indulgence. If there was a line she shouldn’t cross she stumbled blithely over it and forgot to look back to figure out where it was.

  Laurie decided more of her problems were alcohol-related than she wanted to admit to Ray. Or to herself. Easy to keep a secret when everyone refuses to talk to you.

  A glutton for punishment, she twisted the rearview mirror down to look at herself and instantly regretted it. “Oh my…”

  With a groan, she pushed open the door and stumbled down from the pickup, her legs so stiff she almost fell on her face before regaining her balance. After a few deep breaths of the cool autumn air her dizziness passed, and she lumbered toward her front door, keys in hand.

  * * *

  Filling a glass with milk, she added some powder and stirred the mixture to make her strawberry drink. Behind her, an anchor for the local news station prattled on about one misfortune after another. A story about a sinkhole downtown segued into footage of a warehouse fire, arson suspected, and so on… Laurie’s attention wandered as she tried to recall where she’d left the bottle of extra-strength aspirin. Wasn’t in the medicine cabinet, so where…?

  “Police have not determined the cause of the accident,” the news anchor said, after switching to breaking news that apparently trumped her scheduled misery playlist. If it bleeds, it leads. “But we do know there are multiple fatalities.”

  Laurie stopped stirring her drink.

  Her attention locked on the news report.

  “According to sources, the bus was transporting personnel from a local state hospital.”

  At that moment, Laurie felt an electric jolt galvanize her body. Though she’d spent a night wallowing in self-pity and self-recrimination over her life choices, she had made those hard decisions for a reason. Even in hindsight, she wouldn’t change anything. Michael had waited forty years, but his patience had finally paid off. And if Laurie had chosen any other path, she wouldn’t have been ready for this day.

  The stiffness in her muscles and the aches in h
er joints faded away as manic energy flared inside her. First, she switched on the police scanner. Then, she made a circuit of the house, securing the doors with bolts, locks, and bars on the top, middle, and bottom. The first-floor windows might shatter but the steel-mesh barriers would keep any intruder at bay. If, by chance, he brought a hacksaw to work on the thick mesh, she’d have plenty of time to blow his brains out. Even so, she zipped her canvas curtains closed. No need to give away her position within the house.

  With the perimeter of the house secure she needed to check her supplies—and her arsenal. Returning to the kitchen, she approached the island in the middle and leaned into it, twisting it counter-clockwise. The island rotated away on one corner revealing a hidden door underneath, flush with the floor.

  Opening the door, she peered into the darkness of her storm shelter. From where she stood, she could make out the first three steps of the staircase, enough to descend without breaking her neck. Once low enough, her hand reached out in the darkness and flicked on a light. Now that she could see below, she reached up and closed the door behind her.

  13

  Mt. Sinclair Cemetery had seen better days. Or better care. At least, one would hope, Dana thought.

  She and Aaron followed the caretaker, a large black woman, through tall brown grass, navigating the rows of crooked tombstones. After an invigorating morning with a most memorable shower, the day had taken a grim turn. But that was the nature of their chosen profession. And their current story.

  “My cousin works at a graveyard not too far,” the caretaker said.

  Once they told her whose grave they wanted to see, she hadn’t needed to consult the massive map on the wall of her office or check any charts or forms in her filing cabinets. She knew precisely where to take them. With a simple, “Follow me,” she led them across the graveyard.

  “Over there,” she said, “they got war generals, philanthropists, a beatnik poet. They got Muddy Waters and Bernie Mac. People come from all over to pay respects.” She shook her head in professional envy. “But this is Haddonfield. This is our only claim to fame.”

  Aaron asked, “How much farther?”

  “Just ahead,” the woman said, pointing toward a slight rise.

  They walked for a minute at most before the woman stopped and pointed to a tombstone. Dana edged around Aaron for a closer look, dropping to her knees as she read the name: JUDITH MYERS.

  The caretaker folded her arms and said, “Maybe you can explain to me what’s so spectacular about Judith Myers.”

  This is it, Dana thought, fascinated. Where—how—it all began.

  Hard to believe they stood so close to the infamous history of this place, this town, connected to another fateful night, one that had inexplicably forged Michael Myers into the madman he would become.

  She couldn’t let this moment pass without revisiting that history, crucial background for their story. Reaching into her bag, Dana pulled out the recorder and spoke into the mic. “As she sat combing her hair. Unaware. Her six-year-old brother crept in quietly with a kitchen knife.”

  Glancing up, she noticed a look of disgust on the caretaker’s face before the woman looked away and said, “Damn.”

  Dana couldn’t blame her. It was a dark story. And they wanted visceral reactions.

  Aaron motioned for the recorder, so she passed it to him to continue the background information. “He then proceeded to slice the base of her skull, scraping down her spinal cord, here…” He demonstrated the incision on himself, using the recorder in lieu of a kitchen knife. “Then, as she turned and raised her hands in self-defense, he continued stabbing into the arteries and nerves of her palms, like so…” Again, he mimed the cutting motion and paths with the recorder. “Once she collapsed, three more stabs in her sternum, piercing her heart.”

  Judging by her sickened grimace at the lurid re-enactment of Michael Myers’ first murder, the caretaker clearly regretted asking the question and hoped she’d forget it all before it became nightmare fodder. “I don’t know about sternums,” she said with a shudder. “All I know is, we’ve had to replace this stone two times. People come around and put demon pentagrams and voodoo shit on it.” She shook her head. “Every Halloween. Crazy coconuts.”

  Dana looked up at Aaron. “We should use that,” she said excitedly. “As part of the background, and as a postscript to Laurie’s story.”

  “Agreed,” Aaron said. “Reminds me of the ham and eggs fable.”

  “What?”

  “The ham and eggs breakfast fable,” Aaron prompted. Dana shook her head. “What’s the difference between the chicken and the pig? The chicken contributes the eggs. The pig gives up its life. So, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.”

  “How’s this related?”

  “Graffiti and vandalism versus a lifetime commitment.”

  Dana arched an eyebrow. “So, in this scenario, Laurie is the pig?”

  “She gave up a lot,” Aaron said defensively. “Obsession, a lifetime of fear. Lost her child to social services.”

  Frowning, Dana said, “We are definitely not using that fable on the podcast.”

  “Well, it was…”

  “Seriously,” she said firmly. “Not a chance.”

  Aaron raised his hands in surrender.

  Dana stood, brushed off the knees of her black slacks, then reached into her bag and removed a camera to take pictures of the grave and the tombstone from various angles. She planned to use the images in their promotional material, their website, and for any mailers.

  The caretaker stood nearby while they wrapped up.

  Dana wondered if the woman suspected they’d steal the gravestone as a macabre souvenir to take back to the UK.

  * * *

  Across the cemetery, standing inhumanly still under a group of shady trees that have shed their leaves, The Shape watches them. The tall man taunted The Shape with the Mask. And the woman carried the Mask in her bag.

  From the man’s words and taunts, The Shape knew they would come to this town. To this place. And that they still possessed the Mask.

  14

  After leaving Mt. Sinclair Cemetery Aaron drove their Ford rental car onto the lot of the Stallion Service Center for a fill-up. Dana sat in the back of the car, flipping through their storage box of research material, including a laminated binder with photos of the 1978 incident. She spread out selected items, with an emphasis on newspaper clippings, across the other half of the seat, creating a makeshift desktop.

  With Dana engaged in research, Aaron switched off the ignition and got out to fill the gas tank from a self-service pump. He stood and waited while the pump gave him a running count of gallons pumped and dollars sunk. While he waited for the final tally, he thought about the obstacles they’d faced—their inability to get a reaction from Myers at Smith’s Grove and Laurie’s unwillingness to confront her attempted murderer—and what they needed to do next to complete the story. With Myers’ transfer, they’d missed the window for a face-to-face meeting between the two. Of course, they could build the story without that, a complete story, but that confrontation would have been a brilliant highlight.

  Aaron tapped the window, catching Dana’s attention. “Any chance at all Colorado would reconsider?”

  “The ‘less than desirable’ location?” she asked, referring to Sartain’s open disdain for Glass Hill. Aaron nodded. She flipped through some pages in the storage box. “Looked into it some more. Not as bad as Sartain implied. If anything, a bit more modern than Smith’s Grove. But he’s right about one thing. They will put him in a deep hole. No contact. Sorry.”

  “Shame,” Aaron said.

  “Besides, there’s no chance we’d convince Laurie to go.”

  Dead end, he thought with a sigh. But we’ll work around it.

  At the full-service pump opposite the self-service side, a red Ram 350 van refueled. Hand-painted white lettering arced across the side of the extended van advertised The Holy Apostle’s Resurrection
Church in what amounted to a four-wheeled billboard. An older couple sat in the front seats. They looked like grandparents, but the van was large enough to transport a modest church choir. An old woman in the back seemed to stare at Aaron without seeing him. Not wanting to draw attention to himself or incite any attempts at proselytizing, he resisted the urge to wave.

  Dana had already moved on from the Colorado roadblock. She called out to him from the backseat, “If we could get those initial police transcripts from the press conference and post-conviction proceedings we might have a great prologue for our story there.”

  * * *

  After following the man and woman to the gas station, The Shape parks the stolen Bronco across the lot and walks behind the man as he pumps gas. The Shape approaches the service center and its open garage bays.

  An old woman inside a red van watches The Shape without reaction. She sees an old man in a white tunic, white trousers, open shoes. She does not see The Shape because The Shape is incomplete. But soon…

  * * *

  Pushing the storage box out of her way, Dana climbed out of the backseat of the rental car to stretch her legs and make use of the restroom. She approached Aaron to let him know.

  “We have access to Brackett’s personal journal on Michael,” Aaron said, “as well as city records.”

  “What are you waiting for?” she said, smiling.

  She squeezed his upper arm and strode toward the service center’s office to inquire about the restroom. On the way, she passed one of the open garage bays. For some reason, the employees had left a stack of loose tires outside between each bay. She glimpsed a mechanic in a jumpsuit in the first bay, raising the hood of a pickup truck.

  Before ducking into the office, she glanced over at Aaron and saw a woman and her son get into the church van with the elderly couple. The old woman seemed to stare at her impassively. But Dana couldn’t think of anything about herself that would warrant that level of scrutiny. She’d dressed rather conservatively in a gray sweater vest over a striped long-sleeved blouse, black slacks and boots.