Halloween

by Curtis Richards

  ...the belly slit from waist to throat...

  ...the intestines spilled out on the bed linens...

  ...the gash across the throat, splashed blood...

  ...the white, bloodless face of Annie, a silent scream on her mouth, the lucid horror of doom in her wide eyes...

  And behind her head, a tombstone.

  The tombstone said:

  Our Beloved Daughter

  Judith Margaret Myers

  There were dates, but Laurie did not read them because things happened too fast from that moment on.

  She heard her own scream and realized in an instant that whatever it was that had slaughtered her best friend must be here, near, waiting for her. It was then that she caught sight of Bob, suspended by the throat from a rope tied around a ceiling fixture. His tongue, purple and bloated, dangled idiotically from swollen lips, and bloody gore spilled from a fist-sized hole in his abdomen.

  Laurie's legs seemed to melt beneath her, and her will to flee flowed out of them as if released by a spigot. The time it took her to turn seemed like a week, but as she did pivot a closet on her right opened, revealing Linda, propped up in a chair, nude. From the neck down, unlike Annie and Bob, her body was unmarred. But her neck and face were livid with broken blood vessels as if some stupendous force had squeezed all her blood up into her head until the pressure had burst every capillary in her skin. Her red eyes all but bulged out of her head on their stalks and her tongue slavered over her lower lip like a mongoloid's.

  If Laurie was screaming now, the pounding fear in her brain made it impossible for her to hear it. For someone whose experience of horror had been limited up to that moment to the sight of small animals run over on the highway, the load on her circuits was tantamount to sending a million volts through a wire designed to carry a hundred. What prevented her from passing out at that instant she did not know, but a voice inside her brain demanded that she take measures to survive, and she concentrated on it despite every instinct to submit to blind panic.

  At the same moment that she came to this conclusion she saw a shadow, dark and dreadful, looming up in the flicker of the jack-o'-lantern. She knew it was the man who'd been dogging her steps that day, and she knew that he expected her to drop backward so that he could catch her off balance. So she did something illogical, and it saved her life

  She ducked.

  She dropped to her haunches as he lunged for her. His hand swiped at her neck as he tripped over her shoulder, grabbing and tearing the arm of her blouse, but he got no more of her than that. But now she had a bigger problem, for he'd sprawled on the landing, blocking her way down the stairs. He grunted and rose to his feet slowly, almost casually; he had her cornered, and it was just a matter of closing the gap. He reached into his belt and drew out a huge knife clotted with blood. Laurie backed away, wondering if she could lure her attacker away from the stairs, but as he advanced on her, he kept his body between her and the landing.

  Like a computer, her brain assessed the possibilities. She could retreat into the bedroom and try to bar the door. Too chancy. She could flee into another room. That was no safer.

  Or she could dive over the stairway railing and take her chances with the drop.

  That's what it had to be. She glanced over the rail and estimated it to be eight or ten feet to the first floor. She braced for the leap just as he was bracing for his. She sprang, placing her hand on the rail as if it were a gymnastic horse, and boosted her legs over it. For a second she clutched the railing. His grip was tremendously strong, but he was in an awkward position. Trying desperately to hold her with his left hand, he swiped at her with the knife in his right, but it grazed her arm and he released her. She tried to make her feet land squarely on the steps below, but her right foot caught one step poorly and a sharp pain shot up her ankle. Her right arm burned where the tip of his knife had caught her. As she clutched it she felt the wetness of blood.

  But she was alive, and now she had to get out of here. She could see him doubled over the railing, but he recovered quickly and made for the landing. Laurie climbed to her feet. The pain in her ankle was excruciating, but she managed to hobble toward the kitchen. She heard him stumping down the stairs.

  As she reached the security of the kitchen, she could see him turning the bend off the stairway, the steel of his knife blade glinting with reflected light from the street lamps. She flung the kitchen door shut and grabbed a steel chair from the dinette table. She propped it under the doorknob a scant second before she felt the thud of his shoulder against the door and heard his muffled grunt of frustration.

  She limped to the outside door and turned the knob. It was locked or jammed, probably intentionally, probably by the same hand that had knocked out the lights. She groped for the button that she knew unlocks some types of storm door, but she couldn't find it.

  All of a sudden the other door exploded as his fist penetrated it, sending wooden shrapnel across the room. The door boards groaned and splayed inward as his arm sank through them to the shoulder. Laurie watched with round-eyed fascination before returning to her task of getting out. She shook the knob in desperation, but did little more than rattle the glass. Behind her she could hear him widening the hole in the door with a second splintering punch.

  Well, she told herself, struggling to keep her wits, if he can smash his door, I can smash mine. She looked around for a blunt instrument or even a towel to cushion her hand from the glass shards, but finding none and hearing the chair propping up the other door sliding to the floor, she balled her fist and struck the pane nearest the knob. It shattered and she felt a dozen glass claws rupturing the flesh of her knuckles, but if there was pain it was overridden by driving fear and desperation. She groped for a lock and found a little butterfly bolt under the knob. She twisted it and turned the inside knob with her other hand, shoving the frame with her shoulder. The door gave and she fell outside just as she heard him kicking the chair out of his way and lumbering across the kitchen floor.

  Still guided by a semblance of reason, she shut the door behind her and twisted the lock to give herself another few seconds of time. As she picked herself up and limped toward the house next door, she heard his grunted frustration upon finding the second door locked. He tried to rattle the door off its frame, and she could hear every pane of glass vibrating.

  She leaned against the doorbell of the Martinson home, which she knew to be occupied by an aged and not particularly friendly couple. It seemed to take an eternity for them to respond, but a light did go on. She pounded on the door shrieking, “Please, help me! Call the police! Please!”

  She saw a hand part a shade and an eye peer out at her. “Please, call the police!” she shouted at the face. The window lifted an inch.

  “No more trick or treat! It's late. Go away! We have no more candy!”

  “Oh, God!” Laurie groaned as the light went out. At that moment she heard a pane of glass smash and her pursuer's hand thumping on the outside of the side door looking for the lock.

  Dragging her bad ankle, she made her way across the street. She looked over her shoulder and saw the side door burst open and the black shape stagger out into the driveway. He looked around, then spotted her. She was almost at the Doyles' front door.

  The key. Where was they key?

  She had clutched a ring of keys in her hand when she entered the Wallace home. Her jeans had been too tight to stuff a keyring into her pocket, so she had carried them into the house. And somewhere in the melee she had dropped them.

  He was coming after her in steady, unhurried steps, knife bared as if daring the world to stop him. Anyone looking out at the scene would see a Halloween mime presented by a couple of clever youngsters. Why, those shrieks of hers were so bloodcurdling, they might be the real thing. And look how cunningly he'd painted that knife blade to look like blood!

  Laurie pounded the door with the flat palm of her hand. “Tommy! Tommy, open the door!

  I'm locked out!” She thumped with her
closed fist. “Tommy, wake up, it's me, Laurie!”

  She looked around her and found a geranium planter beside the door mat. She picked it up, stepped back, and threw it at the bedroom window where Tommy and Lindsey were sleeping. Please, God...

  Smash!

  “Tommy, wake up, it's me Laurie!”

  She stood helplessly waiting for that welcome face to appear in the window. She continued shouting. The shape was halfway across the street now, the features of his face resolving under the street light. Either it was a rubber mask or a real face too hideous to imagine. “Tommy!”

  A sleepy face peered out of the broken glass, “Laurie?”

  “Tommy, hurry down here and open the door. Hurry!”

  The face disappeared and Laurie prayed the kid didn't think he was dreaming and go back to bed. The murderer was on the lawn now and loping toward her, knife poised. Laurie's mind flashed on the sight of Annie with her belly ripped open and her guts hanging out on the bed. “Tommy, hurry!”

  The blessed sound of a bolt being thrown open. She twisted the doorknob and shoved her way inside, knocking Tommy down. She slammed the door and twisted the lock and drove home a second bolt as Tommy picked himself up and rubbed his eyes.

  “Tommy, I want you to go back upstairs...”

  “What is it, Laurie?”

  “Be quiet! Get Lindsey and get back into the bedroom and lock the door.”

  “I'm scared...”

  “Do what I say! Now!”

  He backed away toward the stairs. “Laurie?”

  “What?”

  “It's the Bogeyman, isn't it?”

  “Hurry!”

  Tommy burst into hysterical sobs as he scampered up the stairs. The bedroom door slammed and clicked as Tommy locked it. She could here Tommy and Lindsey making each other crazy with fear, but there was no time to spare to calm them down. She dashed for the phone and picked it up, waiting for a dial tone, finger poised over the dial. No dial tone. The phone was dead. She slammed it down and stood paralyzed, trying to determine her next move.

  A breeze rippled though the air, rustling through her hair. It was coming from the kitchen.

  She took one step toward the kitchen, then stopped and backed away. If the door was already open, it was too late. He was already in the house.

  Now it overwhelmed her. The reality of evil, the horror of reality, penetrated to a brain that since birth had been programmed to perceive horror and evil as something that could be contained within the perimeter of a nineteen-inch television tube. The shock was so violent she thought she would go mad. She buried her face and let out a mournful wail followed by choking sobs. “Please, please stop,” she whimpered, sinking to her knees before the living room couch. “Please?”

  She became aware of another sound in the room.

  Someone was breathing heavily. And advancing on her.

  “Please...?”

  Sam Loomis ran up the street, head tilted like a bloodhound trying to pick up a scent, except this wasn't a smell he was seeking but a feeling, a vibration. “You're getting hot; no, you're getting cold; no, you're getting hot again, hotter; no, colder,” a voice seemed to say to him. His eyes searched house after house hoping to detect something out of kilter, but he was greeted with the disappointing sight of prim house after prim house nestled beneath sheltering trees on pleasantly manicured lawns. If only this were nineteenth-century Transylvania, he said blackly to himself, I'd know where to search, but this is the last quarter of the twentieth century in a lovely suburban town in the Mid-West in modern America. Surely any manifestation of evil would shine like a beacon!

  “Goddamn your soul, show yourself!” he cried at the night sky.

  A pair of headlights pinned him as a police car swerved onto the street. The car pulled to an abrupt halt next to him. “Where the hell were you?” Brackett shouted from his window. Loomis could see his face flushed with rage. “I went back to the Myers house...”

  Loomis impatiently waved him quiet. “I found the hospital station wagon. He's here!”

  “Where's the car?”

  “Three blocks down. Look, you go up this street and back down the next one. I'll go this way and criss-cross you. Honk your horn if you see anything. Fire your gun if it's serious. I'll fire mine.”

  “And if I see him?”

  “Fire your gun... at his heart.”

  Chapter 15

  With death near at hand, a host of crazy thoughts tumbled through Laurie's brain. It was not exactly as they said, your life passing before your eyes. It was more like random snapshots of herself pulled from an unsorted collection: a trip to a Michigan with her father, when their canoe was blown ashore by a violent sudden squall; a two-layer cake baked with her mother, and the discovery they'd made only enough icing for one layer; a baby raccoon she'd kept for a pet until it tore up the den in a fit of rage.

  She wondered what it would have been like to go to bed with a man; she wondered who would come to her funeral; she wondered what grades your teachers gave you if you died mid-term; she wondered what they'd dress her in for the funeral, and whether her face would be mutilated when they opened the coffin; she wondered what would have happened if she'd kept her date with Ben Tramer.

  She wondered what it was like to die, and to be dead.

  She sat at the foot of the couch almost serenely, like a condemned person awaiting execution. Beside her lay Mrs. Doyle's knitting kit. The needles...

  The needles!

  Her bloodstained hand enclosed one of the long needles at the precise moment his forearm encircled her neck. His arm might have been carved out of mahogany, it was solid and muscular, and for the instant before she acted it clamped off her windpipe as effectively as a steel vise. She smelled the vile reek of blood on his arm and the stench of his breath. She knew that if she hesitated even two seconds it would all be over, for even if he did not strangle her to death, the blade in his other hand might even now be describing the arc that would terminate her belly.

  Measuring her next move carefully, knowing it might be her last if she were wrong, she thrust the eight-inch needle over her shoulder in the vicinity of his face. She felt it sink deeply into flesh.

  She heard a grunt, and his forearm relaxed long enough for her to slide out from under it.

  She ran for the stairs, looking behind her for just a heartbeat. He was staggering back from the couch, clawing at a needle buried in his neck. She ascended the staircase three steps at a time despite the agonizing pain in her swollen ankle.

  She pounded on the locked bedroom door. “It's me, Tommy, Lindsey. It's me. Open the door, hurry.”

  Tommy opened the door and peeked out. She rushed into the room, knocking the kid on his behind for the second time. She kicked the door shut and locked it. The children's faces were stained with tears, and their eyes rolled involuntarily. They were perilously close to passing out from shock.

  She embraced them, shushing. “It's all right, kids. Shhh, it's all...”

  She cocked her head. She cold hear movement downstairs. Furniture being shoved around, heavy footsteps staggering toward the stairs.

  “Now,” she said, fighting desperately to contain the fear savaging her chest, “I want you to change your clothes, Tommy. We're going to take a walk outside.”

  “It was the Bogeyman, wasn't it?” the boy said, his little body trembling like a trapped animal's.

  “No,” said Laurie, listening. There was a heavy thud at the foot of the stairs, then silence.

  She brightened. If that noise was what she hoped it was, the threat was over. “No, it wasn't.”

  “I'm so scared,” whimpered Lindsey.

  “There's nothing to be scared of now,” she reassured the little girl. Again she listened. It was quiet.

  “Are you sure?” Tommy pleaded.

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I killed him.”

  “But you can't kill the Bogeyman.”

  “I ca
n, and I did. He's lying at the foot of the...”

  Her sentence was shattered along with her peace of mind by a tremendous blow on the door. It held, but the panel closest to the knob arched inward, showering the floor with paint chips. The next blow would shatter it.

  Though the fight had all but drained out of her, Laurie moved instinctively to save the children, hauling them into the bathroom. They bawled like cattle in a slaughterhouse as she closed the door on them, shouting “Lock it! Lock the door!” She waited ten lifetimes for the click, and wondered what good it did to lock doors when this beast was able to shatter them like rice-paper screens. Already his fist had broken through the weakened panel and was groping for the lock. She would have liked to strike that vulnerable hand with a heavy weapon, but she couldn't leave her post until the kids locked their door. “Tommy...!”

  The bolt clicked on the bathroom door just as the bolt on the bedroom door gave. Laurie backed away, looking around the room for a weapon or someplace to hide, but nothing better than a louvred walk-in clothes closet presented itself. She dashed for it, parting the double doors and slamming them closed behind her.

  She noticed a tie rack just inside the door, and she now grabbed a tie and wrapped it around the little porcelain doorknobs so as to hold the double doors closed. What good this would do she didn't know, and she laughed grimly to think that anyone who could punch through half-inch plywood would be fazed by a door of thin pine slats held closed by a necktie. But perhaps it would buy her three seconds to think, to prepare, to defend herself.

  Or maybe it would merely buy her three more to live.

  She heard the bedroom door burst open and his stumping footsteps enter the room. He growled as he breathed, and again the reek of her friends' blood freshly spilled on his hands permeated the room.

  She moved farther back into the closet and sent some empty hangers jingling to the floor.

  Nice going, Laurie, she said to herself. Why didn't you just shout, “I'm in here, Mr. Murderer!”

  He shuffled toward the closet and rattled it with tornado-like force. Laurie retreated to a corner of the closet and slumped to the floor. So this is where you die, she declared inwardly.