Halloween

by Curtis Richards

  Sophie lay face down beside the vat, drenched from the waist up. Loomis searched the room for Michael. He stood under a basketball backboard, at least ten steps away, smiling. Loomis looked at the boy's costume and hands: they were completely dry.

  With a nurse Loomis applied artificial respiration, and after a moment the girl brought up a large quantity of water, sputtering and gasping.

  The party was over. Loomis's trap had failed.

  But ultimately, Loomis won. For, on the day he was scheduled to drive up to the county seat to plead his case with Judge Christopher, he received a phone call from the bailiff of the juvenile court.

  The night before, Judge Christopher had had a massive coronary and died on the way to the hospital.

  Judge Christopher's successor was far less sympathetic to Michael Myers. He had only read about the case, and was convinced Michael was the brutal killer that the psychiatrist claimed. Loomis presented the new judge with a forty-five page paper describing Michael's personality and the incidents of the last year, and though there was still not a shred of evidence to support Loomis's contention that Michael was a homicidal psychopath, the new judge accepted Loomis's opinion that it was best to keep the boy behind institutional walls.

  And so it was that fifteen years passed...

  Chapter 5

  On the evening of October 30, 1978, a new Buick station wagon sliced through the blackness of a rainy night on State Highway 116, heading east toward the Smith's Grove state facility.

  On the front door of the sleek car was the institution's emblem. The only other thing that distinguished it from an ordinary car was the chickenwire grating that separated the front and back seats.

  Inside, her face illuminated by the eerie glow of the dashboard and the occasional orange light of her passenger's nervously puffed cigarettes. Marion Treadwell, R.N., peered into the jet night.

  She wore a crisply starched white nurse's uniform and hat, and a navy cape with red piping around her shoulders. Her knuckles on the steering wheel were white. As if she weren't nervous enough about tonight's assignment, the foul weather made her as uptight as a drug addict looking for a score.

  As her passenger smoked and talked, Marion resisted the temptation to look at him. She'd heard so much about Dr. Loomis, both good and bad, and after glimpsing him when she'd picked him up in front of his home she could see why he was spoken of with that mixture of reverence and dread that people reserved for Rasputin. His head was shaved bald , but he wore a gray goatee, giving him a slightly diabolical appearance. He dressed in a limp, wrinkled brown suit and not-very-rain-proof trench coat, and apparently gave no heed whatever to the conventions of good dress. His crystal blue eyes were awesome in their intensity, and you knew at once that mundane matters like proper attire were beneath the interest of a man with such eyes.

  In his lap he held a manila folder whose notes he tried to follow with his index finger in the light emanating from the dashboard. “... Then he gets another physical examination by the state, followed by an appearance before the judge. Bear in mind that this is not the judge of the juvenile court, because the subject is no longer a minor. In any case, the procedure should take four hours if we're lucky. Then we're on our way. As before, he will be heavily sedated.”

  “What did you use before?”

  “Thorazine.”

  The driver frowned. “Why, he'll barely be able to sit up.”

  Loomis smiled grimly. “That's the idea. Here we are.” He gestured toward a large white sign fixed to a low brick wall on the left. It said:

  Smith's Grove

  Warren County Sanitarium

  Through the blackness and the downpour she could make out the shadowy mass of the institution looming up on the hillside surrounded by a sturdy steel fence above which ran three strips of no-nonsense barbed wire.

  “The driveway's up a few hundred yards on your right,” Loomis indicating, gesturing with his cigarette.

  The nurse, an attractive redhead, was slightly disappointed that Loomis hadn't asked her anything about herself. She guided the station wagon around the approach road. Loomis's indication that he intended to keep their charge drugged was typical of the rumors she'd heard about this rugged-jawed, single-minded man. It was said that the patients he treated successfully returned to the world completely adjusted and capable of leading normal lives. It was also said that those he thought incapable of recovery, he sedated until they were no more dangerous than a row of stringbeans. “Are there any special instructions?” she asked.

  For the first time he looked at her directly. “Just try to understand what we're dealing with here. Don't underestimate it.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Don't you think we should refer to 'it' as 'him'?”

  Loomis shrugged. “If you say so,” he said without conviction.

  “Your compassion is overwhelming, Doctor,” she said, reaching for a pack of cigarettes.

  She took one out and slipped it between her full lips. Then she groped for her matches. Loomis reached into his coat for his lighter, but she found her matches first and lit her own cigarette. Now Loomis did look at her for the first time, noting the sheen of her auburn hair, the high cheekbones, the pert nose, as the flare of the match momentarily illuminated her attractive features. She put the matches up on the dashboard, but they slipped off as the car lurched to the right. Loomis picked them up off the carpeted floor. They said, “The Rabbit-in-Red Lounge – Entertainment Nightly.” An odd name, he thought, and wondered whether the young lady frequented the place and what sort of entertainment one might be fortunate enough to see there.

  “Ever done anything like this before?” he asked.

  “Only minimum security.”

  “I see,” he said, failing to keep the pity out of his voice.

  “What does that mean?” she said defensively, picking up his tone.

  “It means...” He gazed at her, assessing her maturity and concluding she didn't have too much of it. “It means I see, that's all.”

  “You don't have to make this any harder than it already is,” she said forthrightly.

  Loomis's smile was devoid of humor. “I couldn't if I tried.”

  “The only thing that bothers me is their gibberish. When they start raving on and on...” She finished the thought with a shiver and a look of disgust.

  “You don't have to worry about that,” said Loomis. “He's scarcely spoken a word in years.”

  Suddenly, in the middle distance, the car's headlights detected a ghostly shape about twenty-five yards away. Loomis leaned forward and peered, eyebrows knit in dismay. “Something is wrong.”

  Marion lifted her foot from the gas pedal and hovered it over the brake, awaiting instructions as she squinted through the windshield into the troubled night. The wraithlike figure had momentarily disappeared. Then five of them appeared. Patients clad in windblown, rainsoaked white gowns, wandering or cavorting around the field outside the fence. Their eyes were hollow and almost zombielike, their faces ravaged by decades of incarceration.

  “Since when do they let them wander around?” Marion asked cynically.

  “They don't,” Loomis replied unnecessarily, gesturing impatiently for her to drive the rest of the way to the gate, where there was a telephone. “Drive, drive!”

  A figure stepped in front of them, a male patient with an insane grin and red-rimmed eyes.

  Marion had to stop the car to avoid running him over. Loomis thrust open his door and jumped out. He trotted over to the bewildered escapee and asked him a question. The man gesticulated with wild, gnarled hands. Loomis's eyes clouded with fear. He rushed back to the car and hopped in, rivulets of rain trickling down his bald head into his face and beard. “Pull up to the entrance!”

  “Shouldn't we pick him up?”

  “Move it!”

  Marion pressed the gas pedal. The rear tires whined on the wet pavement, then grabbed.

  The powerful car almost knocked the hapless inmate down. “What did h
e say?”

  “He asked me if I could help him find his purple lawnmower.”

  “I don't think this is any time to be funny,” Marion declared indignantly. “After all, I'm...”

  “He said something else,” Loomis said ominously. “He said, 'It's all right now. He's gone.

  The evil's gone.'”

  They exchanged a serious look. “What does that mean?”

  “Wait here,” he said, leaping out of the still-rolling car and rushing to the guard booth. He slid the door open and stepped on something soft. He knelt over it. It was the guard. His head was twisted on his neck as if some giant hand had tried to unscrew it. The man's eyes bulged hideously, and his tongue lolled over bloody lips. “My God!” Loomis gasped as he reached for the phone.

  Inside the car, Marion drew nervously on her cigarette as the escaped inmates did their danse macabre around the parking lot. The driving rain drummed on the roof and hood, and Loomis's contorted face in the guard booth as he shouted his message to the main house did not make her feel any easier.

  All at once there was a tremendous thump on the roof, which buckled momentarily before popping back into shape. Marion glimpsed a flutter of white cloth out of the corner of her eye and realized what it was. “Oh, no, one of them is on the roof of the car,” she muttered, rolling th window on the driver's side down to plead with the inmate to get down. The noise on the roof was unimaginable, like someone dancing on it. Marion stuck her head out of the window. “Okay that'll be enough...”

  She did not see the powerful hand extending from the roof, but a moment later it had her by the hair and was attempting to pull her through the window. When the intruder realized he couldn't do that, he attempted to get a grip on her jaw to twist her head off.

  For a moment she shrieked with helpless panic, but Loomis either didn't see what was happening or couldn't help. There was only one solution before this monstrous hand snapped her neck.

  She groped desperately for the knob of the window and found it after what seemed an eternity.

  She gave it a quarter turn with her free hand, but the problem was that her head was out the window and the man's grip was too strong for her to pull back inside the car. Frantically she clawed at the hand. A finger passed over her open, screaming mouth. She clamped her teeth on it with all her might. The thing let out an inhuman howl and momentarily relaxed its grip. She yanked her head back inside and closed the window on his hand. He roared again and pulled his hand out of the window before her last turn on the knob clamped him irrevocably.

  Marion clutched at her throat and gasped for air. She was momentarily safe, but an instant later she had her hands full at the window on the passenger side. The inmate, still on the roof, had struck the window with shattering force, and the window's protective glass had cracked into a thousand geometric splinters that adhered to each other for the moment but would fly into the car next time he struck it. The thing peered upside down into the car, and Marion saw a ghastly rain-soaked creature made even more horrible by the spiderweb pattern of the cracked window.

  Now, in blind panic, she stepped full on the gas pedal. The tires keened on the wet pavement, then took hold and the car lurched forward. Marion tore around sharply from left to right to left again. The car swayed and skidded, but the thing, clinging to the windshield wiper and a door handle, somehow managed to hold on. The rain cascaded down the windshield and she couldn't see a thing; she certainly didn't see the parking lot curb when she struck it at forty miles an hour. The wheel tore out of her hand and her chin struck the rim. The station wagon spun wildly out of control, hurling her across the seat to the passenger side. Then it struck another curb broadside, and from that moment on Marion remembered nothing until she was being helped to her feet by Loomis. She lay on the soaked grass of an embankment, a violent ringing in her ears, the nerves in her scalp throbbed from the pain of her hair having been violently pulled.

  About a dozen paces away the station wagon sat, idling. Loomis examined her and satisfied himself that she'd suffered no serious harm. Then he turned to the car. “Good God, there's someone in there!”

  He could see the ghostly shape on the driver's side, and it seemed to be frantically pounding on the steering wheel as if trying to make the thing go. Loomis dashed for the car, but just as he reached it it vaulted forward, careering crazily from side to side until the driver seemed to gain mastery of the controls and roared down the road and onto the highway.

  Loomis returned to Marion, who was sobbing hysterically and shuddering from the rain and cold. Pulling her cloak closer around her shoulders, he held her tightly. Together they watched the tail lights of the station wagon fade into the blackness of the Illinois night.

  Then he turned to her. “You can calm down now. The evil is gone.”

  Somehow she took no comfort in that at all.

  Chapter 6

  Laurie Strode stepped out of the door of the white frame house on Oak Street and sniffed the air. It was cool and tangy with a faint touch of woodsmoke. Someone had lit a fire in a fireplace somewhere down the street, and for Laurie it had a special significance: It marked, in her own mind, the official start of winter. Of course, winter didn't truly begin until the third week in December, a little less than two months away, and you couldn't ask for a more autumnal event than Halloween, which took place tonight. Nevertheless, Laurie thought about winter, and felt that same mixture of eagerness and dread that most mid-westerners feel about the season.

  She was a pretty girl, slim and angular, with straight, brownish-hair falling without fanfare to her shoulders. Farrah hairstyles were all the rage but Laurie thought it was an affection and a pain in the ass to keep up. Though not exactly a bookworm, she had decided there were simply too many more interesting things to do, like reading, than to spend all that time washing, blow-drying, teasing, and combing, to say nothing of dyeing or frosting your hair if you really wanted to do that trip the right way.

  She dressed in simple school attire, a print skirt, knee socks, sensible shoes, and a boy's shirt under a sweater. Loaded down under two heavy book bags, she appeared to be round-shouldered and flat-chested, but that didn't worry her. She knew that when she set out to dress and make up for a date, she could hold her own with anybody in her high-school class. But today was a school day and there is no way you can look glamorous on a school day short of getting your own private porter of chauffeur to carry you and your books to school. So you do the best you can, and if your friends tease you about your waddle, you grin and bear it.

  She was slightly surprised to note several younger children already dressed in Halloween costumes. Then she realized they were not trick-or-treating at eight in the morning, but merely dressed up for Halloween parties at school. Her cool blue eyes warmed as two little six-year-old girls with eminently solemn faces glided by in satin gowns and rhinestone tiaras, turning occasionally to bark warnings to the gruff little pirates and cowboys who teased them ten paces behind. She wasn't sure if one of the boys was Tommy Doyle, for whom she was to babysit tonight.

  Babysitting, Number one boring job. Boring! Some of her girls friends used babysitting as a means for making out. Perhaps if Laurie were interested in somebody she might do the same thing, but there wasn't anyone in her life right now, so it looked like she would be spending another evening supervising Tommy's addiction to horror movies and satisfying his craving (and, she admitted, her own) for popcorn.

  She thought about what her girl friends did with their dates on babysitting jobs. Some of them had confessed – even boasted – that they went all the way with their boyfriends. Laurie wasn't inexperienced, and she wasn't a prude either, but she knew herself well enough to understand she wouldn't be able to handle that trip at the tender age of seventeen. In fact, she sometimes wondered if there was something wrong with her, if she was a little retarded or something. The smoldering fires of adolescence had never really tortured her body the way it did some of her friends (like Annie, for instance). And althoug
h almost everybody in her class smoked grass, she not only had never gotten high, she couldn't draw the smoke into her lungs without coughing. And she was too smart to be interested in any other kind of drug.

  “Laurie, Laurie,” she said under her breath, shaking her head morosely, “at this rate you'll end up to be as sensible as your mother. What a drag!”

  “What are you dreaming about, sweetheart?” came her father's voice from behind. Chester Strode stood on the front doorstep, fooling with a keyring.

  “Oh, the usual: sex and drugs,” she laughed, knowing he wouldn't take her seriously.

  “Thank goodness,” he said. “I was worried you were O.D.-ing on English lit and political science.”

  “No danger of that,” she retorted. “My parents brought me up to be a straight and decent kid.”

  They walked together to his car, a black sedan with “Strode Real Estate” emblazoned in bold red and white on the door. It never failed to embarrass her, this advertisement glaring at people wherever they drove. Maybe things like this were done in Cleveland or Chicago or St. Louis, but in a small town like Haddonfield most people kept a low profile. Oh well, it brought daddy business, and (as her father was fond of pointing out) business meant food and clothes and a college education. So she couldn't really complain.

  They stood beside the car for a moment until her father managed to slide the proper key off his ring, which had so many keys on it (he called it his occupational affliction) he looked like a jailer. Handing a simple brass key to her, he said, “Now don't forget to drop this off at the Myers place.”

  “I won't,” she said. She decided to keep it in her hand instead of dropping it into her book bag, where it would be “out of sight, out of mind.”

  “They're coming by to see the house at ten-thirty. Be sure you leave it under the mat.”