“I promise.”
`
She started to walk away.
“Haven't you forgotten something?” he called after her. He stood by the car, head tilted, exposing his freshly shaved cheek.
Laurie walked back and put her lips hastily to his cheek, hoping none of her girl friends was watching, then feeling guilty immediately afterward. Why should a girl be embarrassed about kissing her own father, for crying out loud?
She set out down Oak Street, rolling slightly from side to side with the weight of her books
– the famous Laurie Waddle. In her right hand the key to the Myers house seemed to tingle, and suddenly she found herself thinking about the house. It was the one property her father handled that he was ashamed to speak of, and his relief at unloading it for once far outweighed his profit motive. For this was the house in which a seventeen-year-old girl had been brutally slain by her little brother fifteen years ago.
The Myerses had moved away a few months after the tragedy. The grief, shame, and harassment by the press and gawking neighbors and passersby had made their lives in Haddonfield intolerable. From somewhere in Indiana they continued to pay their mortgage loan and taxes, which, as Laurie's father had often said, was a terrible double burden. Not only could they not find a buyer all those years, but they had to bear the emotional burden every time they wrote out a check to support the unsaleable house.
Chester Strode had used every trick in his prodigious salesman's bag to sell The White Turkey, as he'd come to call it. But as soon as prospective buyers heard about the events of October 31, 1963, from neighbors all too eager to tell them, their superstition invariably got the best of them and it was good-bye sale. Mr. Strode couldn't even persuade customers to buy the property for the value of the land. “Buy it and raze the house, if that's the way you feel,” he would tell them. But the property was tainted, and no one went for the bait.
Thank God for the New York couple who thought the house was just what they were looking for, and who were too sophisticated to believe the nonsense the neighbors prattled about. In fact, the New York couple actually thought the idea of a haunted house was charming, something they could boast about. So Mr. Strode gave the New Yorkers something else they could boast about – a price so ridiculous, it was (to use his patented phrase) “lower than a song.”
Laurie wondered what it must have been like that night for the Myers girl, seeing her tiny brother coming at her with that enormous butcher knife. Imagine a blade that long going into her stomach, her breasts, her... even her...! It was unspeakable, unthinkable.
“Hey, Laurie!”
Rarely had she been so relieved to be pulled out of a fantasy. The caller was Tommy Doyle, the boy she was sitting for tonight. The eight-year-old with tousled brown hair and bright eyes trotted up to her, swinging two or three books strapped together with a belt. Laurie, whose own load of books qualified her to join the Stevedore's Union, sighed at this symbol of vanishing youth. “Hi, Tommy.”
He caught up with her and they walked side by side for several paces. “Are you coming over tonight?”
“Same time, same place.”
“Can we make jack-o'-lanterns?”
“Sure.”
“Can we watch monster movies?”
“Sure.”
“Will you read to me? Can we make popcorn?”
“Sure. Sure.”
Her answers came absently and automatically. They were the same questions every time, but this time she was thinking about poor Judith Myers as they turned the corner and walked the hundred paces into Peecher Street where the Myers house was. She couldn't purge her mind of that awful picture of a knife, a long, silvery knife, flashing through the air and plunging into her body. A knife wielded by a...
“How old are you?”
They had stopped abruptly, and Laurie was staring at the boy. “You know how old I am.
I'm eight. Why?”
She hesitated, not wanting to put murderous thoughts into the head of the kid she was sitting for tonight. Yet there was something she had to know. “Have you ever felt like – like killing somebody?”
The boy shrugged. “Sure.”
“You have?”
“Sure. Hasn't everybody?”
“They have?” her eyes bulged.
“Sure. When somebody takes something away from you, or your parents tell you you can't have something, or the teacher gives you too much homework, you feel like killing them. Is that what you mean?”
“Uh, well...”
“Oh, that's what you mean!” Tommy said, eyes rounding and the color draining from his face. They had arrived at the Myers house.
It was a ghost of its former self, weather-beaten and dilapidated. Set back from the street twenty or twenty-five paces, it stood glowering in the cool autumn morning like some mangy, brooding beast. Its former spanking coat of white paint, the symbol of pride of every fine mid-western home, had turned to dingy gray, and much of it had peeled or flaked off, revealing a pitted and rotting facade of shingles. Several windows had been broken by kids or vandals, a few of whom had been bold enough to scrawl graffiti on the front door. A huge elm beat against an upstairs window as the breeze stiffened.
“You're not supposed to go up there,” the kid said, freezing to the spot.
Laurie flourished the key. “Yes, I am.”
“Uh-uh. That's a spook house.”
“Just watch,”she said, walking coolly up to the porch. She lifted the welcome mat as her father had instructed and placed the key under it. She had wanted Tommy to know how unafraid she was, but if she was so unafraid, why was her hand damp with perspiration as she pulled it back from the mat?
For a moment she stood transfixed, contemplating that night fifteen years ago - “My God, fifteen years ago to the very night!” she realized – when the tragic event had taken place. She vaguely heard Tommy on the sidewalk pleading with her to get away from there, but the horror of it attracted her in some perverse way. Was it the fascination of the innocent with wickedness, or just some sort of sick curiosity? Or, was she herself capable of the same gruesome deed?
She shut her eyes and imagined herself picking up a butcher knife and plunging it into the breast of... of whom? Whom did she loathe so much she would want to do that to? To someone in your own family, for God's sake! She couldn't think of a soul.
“Laurie, please, I'm getting scared,” the boy was whining.
“So am I,” she laughed with a shudder, trotting down the porch steps and joining her young companion.
And, as she turned her back on the house, a figure inside it, dark, shadowy, sidled up to the front door and pushed the tattered curtain aside with a knuckle. He watched the slim blonde toss her head and laugh as she raised her hands like a Bogeyman to frighten her young companion.
He breathed heavily, raspingly, as he watched the girl, and a memory entered his mind, the memory of another girl, another blonde, willowy and pretty. He remembered the trapped and frightened look in her eyes, and the futile, pathetic way she had raised her hands to protect herself.
He followed the girl and boy with his gaze until they disappeared from view. Then he walked up the creaky stairs to the second floor and peered into the room where it had all happened...
“I thought you liked to be scared,” Laurie teased Tommy. “God knows, you groove on horror movies enough.”
“Yeah, but those are movies. You can always turn the television off if you get too scared.
You can't turn off real life.”
“That's very wise, Tommy.”
“Lonnie Elam said never to go up there. Lonnie Elam said it's a haunted house. He told me about some real awful stuff that happened there once.”
“Lonnie Elam probably won't get out of third grade.”
“I gotta go. I'll see you tonight,” Tommy said breaking away.
“See you.”
She paused on the corner, feeling odd, as if someone was boring into the back of her skull.
S
he turned and gazed back at the Myers house. She could just make out the gable of the bedroom where Judith Myers had been killed.
Her eyebrows knit. Was she crazy or was there a shape standing in the window staring at her? She rubbed her eyes and looked again. No, there was nothing there after all. Her imagination was working overtime again. She pivoted and continued down the street to school, trying to stride smartly but rolling with a slight waddle that everybody knew belonged uniquely to Laurie Strode.
Chapter 7
Sam Loomis strode down the steps of the institution, gesturing to the sky as if invoking the Almighty to help the fool beside him understand. The other man, gray-haired and ashen-faced, shrank before Loomis's wrath.
“I'm not responsible, Sam,” Dr. Wynn pleaded unconvincingly.
“Of course not.”
“I've given them his profile.”
Loomis stopped in his tracks and stared at the sanitarium's chief administrator. “You gave them the profile of a village idiot, not a homicidal maniac. Two roadblocks and an all-points bulletin wouldn't stop a five-year-old!” He all but ran back to his car, again hurling imprecations to the sky. ”I sometimes wonder who needs shock treatments more, the patients or the staff!”
“He was your patient, Doctor,” Wynn argued halfheartedly as Loomis unlocked his car door. “If the precautions weren't sufficient, you should have notified...”
“I notified everybody. You have a file on that man six inches thick. Either you don't read these things or you can't. Oh, God, save me from these bureaucrats!” He slipped quickly into the car and fumbled for his keys.
“There's nothing I can do,” the hapless Wynn said.
“That's certain. You did nothing before, why should you be able to do anything now? How about getting on the telephone and telling them exactly what got out of here last night? And tell them where he's going.”
“We don't know what got out of here last night. Your six-inch-thick file is full of conjecture. As for where he's going, that's conjecture too.”
“You call that guard's broken neck conjecture? Tell that to his widow! You call the assault on the nurse conjecture? He pulled half the hair out of her scalp, for Christ's sake.”
“The police will catch him.”
“If they look for him in Haddonfield, they might.”
Wynn flashed a patronizing smile that enraged Loomis even more. “Sam, Haddonfield is a hundred and fifty miles from here. How could he get there? He can't drive.”
“He was doing all right last night. Maybe somebody around here gave him lessons. If you read the file you know that he had the run of the place. Inmates and staff alike were scared to death of him and indulged his every wish. Someone could very well have taught him how to drive.”
“That's preposterous. If he had so much freedom, why didn't he walk out of here years ago?”
“Because he had it made here. He had his little empire.”
Wynn shook his head and rolled his eyes heavenward, as exasperated with Loomis as Loomis was with him. “Then why did he take off from here all of a sudden?”
“Because...” Loomis had a strong idea why: for the same reason why he was probably heading for Haddonfield. But if Wynn hadn't bought any of Loomis's explanations up to now, he sure as hell wouldn't accept any now. “I don't know why,” Loomis snapped. “Why won't you announce this to the press?”
“You know why.”
Loomis clapped his hand to his skull. “Yes, it looks bad for the hospital. You're willing to let a butcher roam the countryside so you can save your job. Oh, God, save me from bureaucrats!” he repeated more fervently. He started the car and rolled down the window. “I tell you this, Doctor Wynn, when the bodies start turning up, your job won't be worth and orderly's salary. You'll be lucky they don't send you to prison for gross negligence.” He rolled up the window, jammed the shift into drive, and skittered out of the parking lot like a drag racer.
About three miles down the highway he was flagged down by a state policeman, who peered casually into the back seat and didn't even bother to make Loomis open the trunk. Loomis shook his head sadly and roared away from the roadblock, steering the nose of his car toward Haddonfield.
After an hour he came to a sign announcing “Haddonfield 73 miles,” beside which was a telephone booth. Just beyond it, a red pickup truck was parked. The door of the dilapidated vehicle was open, but Loomis could not see anyone.
Loomis frowned and pulled over to kill several birds with one stone. He had to phone his wife, he had to take a leak, and he wanted to look at the truck with the open door.
In order of least importance, he called his wife.
“No,” he said after a few familiar homilies, “not since Thursday... Yes, I'm all right. Stop worrying. After this I'll sleep for a week, two weeks. But for now, I must stop him. Of course it's possible,” he replied to a conjecture as fatuous as some of Wynn's, “but I know him. And when he gets there, God help us.” He gave her some more time-wasting assurances, drumming his fingers impatiently on the coin box. Then, as he was about to ring off, he said, “Oh, listen, dear. When they come around trick-or-treating tonight, why don't you just not answer the door. I know it's ridiculous, but just this once?”
He hung up and walked to a mound of high grass hidden from the road and relieved his burdened bladder, then went over to the truck to examine it. Perhaps it was merely one abandoned months ago. On the other hand...
On the seat lay a newspaper. Loomis pulled it out and looked at the date: October 30, 1978. Yesterday's.
He was about to return it to the seat when he noticed a crushed cigarette pack and a pack of matches half obscured by the dirt at his feet. He stooped to pick them up and read the message on the matchbook with fear clawing his heart: “The Rabbit-in-Red Lounge – Entertainment Nightly.”
He raced back to the car, jumped in, started it, and roostertailed back onto the highway.
About six paces beyond where he'd urinated, a man lay in the grass. Except for his shorts, he was naked. His eyes started in sightless horror at the clouds that had begun to roll in the sky. His body, however, lay stomach downward.
Chapter 8
“...And the book ends, but what Samuels is really talking about here is fate.”
Mrs. Fredericks shut the book with a thump, then went to the blackboard and with the side of a piece of chalk wrote the word fate in large bold letters. She then wrote the name Rollins in smaller letters about three feet away from fate, and connected the two with four arrows going from Rollins to fate, one of them direct, the other three describing large arcs.
Laurie had not been paying much attention to the morning lessons, for her mind kept drifting to the image of a six-year-old boy with a gleaming butcher knife plunging it again and again into the softness of her body. Her legs were crossed and she squeezed her thighs tightly together to keep the imagined blade from making its most horrifying thrust of all.
She looked down at her notebook and realized the symbolism of the doodles she'd been making absently during the teacher's exposition of the novel: dagger-shaped arrows penetrating a Valentine-like heart. Perhaps that was why she sat up attentively when she noticed the arrows Mrs.
Fredericks had drawn on the blackboard. They all extended from Rollins, and all went in different directions. Yet all ultimately arrived at fate.
“You see,” Mrs. Fredericks amplified, “fate caught up with several lives here. No matter what course of action Rollins took, he was destined to meet his own fate, his own day of reckoning.
The idea is that destiny is a very real, concrete thing that every person has to deal with.” She emphasized this by stabbing at the word fate five times in rapid succession with the chalk until it snapped. Two or three students giggled, but Laurie drew her breath in sharply.
She mused about fate. Suppose it was my fate to die like Judith Myers. No matter which way I ran, no matter what I tried, that blade would be waiting for me. Gosh, that couldn't be my fate.
; I'm too young. I'm too, well, too nice. But Judith Myers was young, and probably no less nice than I. It was just her destiny, that's all. It had been determined by God a million years ago that on October 31, 1963, Judith Myers would be horribly murdered. But why would God do a thing like that to a nice girl?
God wouldn't do anything evil like that, would He? We were taught in Sunday School...
As her mind wandered dreamily over these solemn questions, she noticed a station wagon parked on the street. Behind the wheel, gazing into her classroom, gazing it seemed directly at her, was a man. At least she thought it was a man. He was dressed as far as she could make out in dark kahki mechanics coveralls. His hair was black, but his face seemed preternaturally white, almost powdered.
In fact, the more she looked at the face, with its red lips and sunken purple eyes, she wondered if he weren't wearing a mask. He'd better be, because if that's his own face, that guy is in trouble. Wow, if he's looking at me, then I'm in trouble!
Hoping he would go away, she focused on Mrs. Fredericks, who had picked up her broken chalk and was putting some finishing touches on her rendering of Man against His Fate, underlining and circling fate several more times. As she'd had enough morbid thoughts for one day or for a lifetime, Laurie concentrated on the lesson. “Edwin,” Mrs. Fredericks was asking, “how does Samuels's view of fate differ from that of Costain?”
I'm not going to look at that man, Laurie swore to herself as the boy two rows away muttered an answer. I can see him out of the corner of my eye, but I'm not going to give him the satisfaction of looking at him. Well, maybe just a bit to see if he's still...
She turned her head ever so slightly.
He was.
“Laurie?”
The pronunciation of her name came like a thunderclap, and she jumped as if a bolt had struck her seat. “Ma'am?”
“Perhaps you can answer the question.”
She closed her eyes and brought the question to the forefront of her mind. Then she struggled for a moment to produce an answer.
“Uh... Costain wrote that fate was somehow related only to religion.” The teacher's smile of approbation prompted Laurie to go on and gave her fortitude. “Whereas, Samuels felt that fate was like a natural element, like earth, air, fire and water.”
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