Halloween
Page 15
She'd be thinking about a festival called Samhain, whose grotesque rituals designed to protect Druid harvests against the depredations of howling demons had been transformed over a millennium or more into the harmless holiday called Halloween.
Halloween. Charming children in cute costumes begging sweets, cardboard cutouts of skeletons and witches on brooms, warmly glowing jack-o'-lanterns, artless parties and entertaining games, spooky movies on TV, innocent pranks, trick-or-treat.
Loomis exited into the cool night air and rounded the side of the house, trailed by Laurie.
Cautiously, he prowled toward the backyard, the moonlight glinting on the blue barrel of his gun.
One more corner to turn. Loomis stuck his head slowly around it and focused his eyes on the place where the body had landed beneath the French windows.
It was gone.
He rushed to the spot, suppressing a sob of frustration. A patch of flattened grass surrounded by twinkling shard of glass. No other sign, not even blood.
Above the thudding of his heart he heard the girl whimper behind him. He turned and put his hand under her arm to support her. Mutely they stared at the patch of grass.
Until this moment he had hoped against hope that the entity he had pursued to this place was a thing of flesh and blood like himself, though deep in his heart he had known it would be otherwise. The evidence pointed not merely to another interpretation but, as he had said to Sheriff Brackett, to another dimension.
He shuddered, wondering what little boy at this very moment was tossing in his sleep, tortured by a dream of tragic love that had occurred far away and long ago, tormented by a voice commanding the dreamer to take revenge.
Laurie's nails dug into his shoulder as she stared like a soldier in shell shock at the empty place on the lawn. “It was the Bogeyman, wasn't it?” she murmured.
“As a matter of fact,” Loomis replied, “it was.”
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15