by Jack Martin
The blood from Mrs. Alves' wrist continued to drain drop by thickening drop, feeding the pool that flowed under the table, across the floor, rising. Jimmy's blood now joined that unstemmable tide, running thin and hot from his mouth and ears and the crack in his skull.
Blood was everywhere and spreading, enough of it to flow out into the streets and gutters of the world and soak the earth, drip by horrible drip.
When would it stop?
THE SHAPE (Dick Warlock) collapses to the ground. . . .
The Lord of the Dead
LAURIE STRODE (Jamie Lee Curtis) cowers from THE SHAPE (Dick Warlock).
Chapter Twelve
Laurie saw that the corridor was empty.
How many more were there? It was a maze. And she was lost in it, bumping from wall to wall, trying to find a way out.
The floor was burnished with the circular brushings of a floor polisher; as she stooped low, she was nauseous at the reek of germicidal.
She focused her eyes as best she could. The drugs were wearing off, but a leaden residue remained in her bloodstream, enough to cloud her vision unpredictably, as if she had cataracts.
Now the focus sharpened. She saw an eye watching her from high in the corner.
It was the bug-eyed security camera mounted at the ceiling. It reflected a tiny reduction of herself, a homunculus trapped
within its convex surface. As she faltered there, picking a direction, the lens revealed her bowed body rippling up from the floor like a solitary undersea plant. She elevated a hand to block it out, spreading her fingers like the rays in a child's drawing of the sun. She saw the spokes of her fingers radiating like a mandala around the miniature representation of her head.
The watchbird is watching me watch it watch me, she thought.
Why waste the time? she wondered. Turn your attention somewhere else, somewhere where it might do some good. Am I supposed to believe somebody's actually watching this?
The uselessness of it all was too much to bear.
The wound in her shoulder was reopened fully now. Watery blood soaked through her nightgown, crushed rose petals beneath the flowered print. It ached and throbbed with each heartbeat.
She leaned into the wall, slid along the corridor.
The inset windows of each room were glassy eyes observing her route. If this building put all its circuitry together, she thought, its remote-controlled monitors and alarms, maybe it could come up with an answer before it's too late. Because there is no one left here who can do it. For sure not me.
Jimmy, she thought, take care of yourself, wherever you are. This isn't your problem. No one can help me now. But do a good job with your own life. There's only one of you.
Maybe after this is over . . .
But there was no point in dreaming anymore.
The real test lay before her.
At the junction, she finally spotted the emergency entrance.
There was no one at the desk.
She teetered forward, regained her balance and went toward it.
The reception area was dim as an after-hours bar. Charts and pencils were strewn over the counter. Off to the side she identified the examination room where she had been brought a few hours ago. A supply cupboard hung open, exposing rolls of gauze dressing and a box of Tucks. A clump of thermometers leaned upright in a jar of tincture of green soap like swizzle sticks in crème de menthe.
It was like the end of the world in a movie she had seen once. The movie was called Is Anybody There? She had watched it one night while babysitting the Doyle kids. Its premise was that one night everyone in the world suddenly disappeared except for an actress named Susan Penhaligon. Laurie did not know why she thought of such a thing at a time like this, unless it was a nervous reaction to keep herself awake. Well, she told herself, if that's what it takes . . .
She slogged ahead.
I'm not a famous actress, but why do I have the feeling that they're not really gone? How can they be gone? They can't leave their patients, can they?
But, somehow, they had. They sure didn't stick around for my sake; why should they? Nobody ever has.
If they had all gone off-duty, wouldn't they at least tidy up for the late shift? Apparently not. And yet . . .
She had the strong impression that someone was still here, hiding, perhaps up ahead.
She could not think of his name or what he looked like. But she was sure she knew him.
I can almost remember. Not quite.
In fact, she realized, I can't even remember what I'm doing in this place. What was it, an accident?
Maybe I'm suffering from some kind of defensive amnesia.
She tested herself. What's your name? She knew that one. I'm Laurie Strode. I've always been Laurie Strode. My parents are Mr. and Mrs. Strode. I have no brothers or sisters. We have always lived at—
Outside the glass doors, someone approached through the mist.
Instinctively Laurie recoiled.
Drifts of mist billowed on the other side of the glass, collecting to form a head and hands. Nothing else.
Then the door was opening, and Laurie saw that it was a young woman. She was wearing a white uniform which blended with the whiteness outside.
Her name started with a J. Jill, that was it. She was good. She was with me when I hurt the most. Yes. It was all right to remember her.
Laurie showed herself.
Jill's eyes grew large. "Laurie!" she said, speaking to someone who had returned from the dead. Her eyes were so wide that Laurie peeked over her shoulder to be sure the nurse was talking to her.
Where were you? Laurie wished to say. Where is everybody? Is anybody—?
The nurse's lips stammered at another question. She was trying to convey too much in too few words.
"Laurie, wait!" was all she could say. "Wait, I've been—"
Laurie allowed the nurse to advance on her. She tilted her head and studied Jill's lips in an attempt to read her meaning. The nurse's gestures were desperate. Laurie wondered if she had been lost outside in the mist and had become hysterical while searching for the way in, just as Laurie had been exhausting every possibility to find a way out.
You don't want to come in here, Laurie thought, but no sounds would come from her throat. I tell you there's something dreadful in
this place. I—I can't remember what it is. It must be too awful to put into words. But you should turn around right now and get out. It's—
A tall shape like shadows made real lumbered out of the examination room.
Laurie's eyes bugged out of her head. Her arms and legs began to quake uncontrollably. She opened her mouth to scream a warning. But the darkness that was where the shape's eyes should have been flowed out, an invisible force to freeze her where she stood.
Darkness extruded from the end of the shape's sleeve and collared Jill. It was real. Jill saw it now, too. She felt it. Her eyes rolled up and her tongue grew thick in her mouth as her body arched in a last intake of breath.
The darkness at the end of the shape's other sleeve glinted with a light of its own. It was solid, knife-edged.
A blade.
Jill's eyes shut as the scalpel disappeared behind her back. Then there was the most awful sound Laurie had ever heard as Jill's last breath caught in an astonished gasp and then wheezed out slowly, escaping like wind through reeds.
The shape released her throat, locking her to him by the hand at her back.
The nurse rose an inch, two inches, a foot into the air, impaled like a puppet by the blade at her spine. It was impossible. But it was happening. The shape was lifting her by one hand. By the scalpel.
The shoes slipped off her feet and thumped to the floor. The soles of her feet curled inward in a death contraction. She swayed there, the only sound the stream of her blood pattering onto the tiles.
Then the deadweight gouged free of its skewer and fell down into steaming blood.
Laurie had already half-run, half-fallen backwards most of the length
of the corridor.
She let the scene blur out. She flung herself blindly over a stainless steel supply cart. Medicine and pills scattered like rain in a tunnel. She shoved both arms out and sent the cart hurtling behind her. By the time she was at the end and around the juncture, she heard the cart smash into a wall. Then there was only the measured cadence of horribly weighted footfalls coming and coming.
She ran on. She slammed off one wall, another. Soon the ferocity of her own breathing was all there was for her.
She caromed into a steel bar, knocking the breath from her body. She fell on it and could not pass. Her feet skidded in place. Then the bar gave way, the fire door clanged open on a blast of cool air, and she was careening down stone steps.
A landing. Another door, another bar. She hurled her weight on it. Its latch gave.
Footsteps approaching the stairwell above.
She lunged forward.
A blast of hot air gagged her. She raised her head. The air was oppressive with orange light, like the inside of a pumpkin. Deeper, more vivid lights on the other side of the room warned her to stop.
Past the monstrous iron of the hospital's generator, pipes coiled like the constrictions of a blood-red snake, and then green lights that meant safety. She fell across the room toward these lights, dodging valves.
A single clear light beckoned her. She splayed her arms and tripped headlong, embracing it.
Clear light blasted her forehead. She saw the red veination of her own eyelids. She raised her face to it.
The light swung. Back and forth, back and forth. She took in the features of its surface. It was—
One of the security guards, hanged from the pipes in the corner, strung up by the cord of a utility light.
Laurie screamed. Again no sound came out.
The pumping rhythm of the generator, resounding in concrete through the bowels of the earth.
And the sound of the bar on the door across the room, disengaging.
The shape was in the room.
Darkness flowed toward her on heavy feet, covering the distance between the pipes.
She turned, turned again.
But the security guard could not help her. The shape was all but upon her.
Cornered, she scrambled up the pipes next to the body. The connections rose in a nonsensical pattern.
A foot went up, her good foot. Her other followed, wrenching as if breaking. She clung, drowning, her stitched shoulder ripping open to the bone.
A face in the fire window above her. A girl's face.
Her own.
It gave way. At the first thrust of her hands it flapped open. Impossibly she elevated her body up, up—
Below, the footsteps stopped.
A waxy hand closed on her ankle.
She kicked up and in.
She was through the window.
While below, a no-longer-bright scalpel sabered the red air.
Her legs kicked until there was nothing left to kick, and she fell.
More darkness. Boxes toppled around her. She was in the storage room.
Below the red window, a hulking shape pounded the wall on the other side.
Pure adrenalin directed her through this terminal maze.
Green safelights on white bricks. Chained cages.
Footsteps on the other side of the walls, in the walls. She did not know where to turn.
A dark rectangle the size of an upright coffin. It was marked FIRE DOOR—KEEP CLOSED AT ALL TIMES.
It unbolted. A dark hand reached through. She dodged, ran.
Beyond the chain links, a dot of red light on the wall.
An elevator.
She slapped its door, which would not open.
2.
1.
G.
B.
The light was at 2. She beat at the black button.
The light moved down to 1.
The shape swung toward her, knocking jars of chemicals from shelves. Glass crunched and ground to sand under its shoes.
The light descended to G.
The shape lurched wildly, swinging steel.
The door layered open. Laurie plummetted into the elevator and hammered every button.
The door pumped, grinding to shut. But the blade—the rubber door guard was thumping and thumping closed on the blade.
She backstepped, and the elevator's outside loading door slid open behind her on misty darkness.
She collapsed into the parking lot.
The outside elevator door bumped closed.
Run, she thought, run! Before it gets out. . . . Don't think! One hand, one leg, up, out—
Through the mist to a yellow '57 Chevy. She slumped into its wet steel sides. The passenger door handle chilled her hand.
She managed to get it open and scrabbled inside. She locked the door and assumed a defensive position on the front floor. Time passed without meaning.
Was he coming?
She was sure he must be able to hear her breathing.
She climbed up to eye-level at the dashboard.
The obscured lot. Cars placed far apart like chess pieces in an endgame. A Volvo by the EMERGENCY door.
Nothing moved next to the building.
Then a dark shape passed outside the car like a ship in fog.
She hadn't locked that side! The button—
The driver's door popped open.
A man in dark clothes sank onto the seat.
Jimmy!
She could not say his name.
She tapped his leg.
His head lolled. His mouth fell open, and red drool ran through his teeth.
Finally his eyes found her.
His hands fumbled for the gearshift.
"It's all right," he slurred drunkenly. "We're gon—we're gonna get outa here . . ."
He aimed his key.
He lost concentration.
"I think," he said almost unintelligibly, "I think he . . . killed us all. . . . "
The key slipped from his fingers and he dropped headfirst onto the steering wheel, as if his strings had been cut.The horn blared.
She sprawled across him, wedging him away from the wheel.
The horn stopped.
Without thinking she sandwiched herself between him and the controls and raked the ignition, feeling for the key.
It was gone.
Her nails skittered the floorboard. She found it! Gripped it with both hands to steady it toward the slot—
And turned it.
The car clicked. And clicked. And clicked. It was dead.
She gave it up. No time. She got the door open and tumbled out onto the pavement. Her shoulder seared with pain, her leg, her ankle
She dragged her bad leg behind her, standing, falling back. It was no use. She could not run. She could not walk another step. She could not even stand.
From nowhere, powerful lights cut past her through the fog.
Headlights. She waved deliriously.
The car passed. It did not see her.
Racing to a stop at the EMERGENCY sign. A woman and two men slammed out and charged the doors.
Laurie crawled after them.
Stop! It's me! I'm out here! It's—
They were halfway inside. One was the man in the trenchcoat, the man who had saved her once.
She writhed on her belly until her hands and feet were torn to shreds. But they would not hear. They would not turn. They would not see.
The glass doors shut.
She hauled her body up the fender of a parked car. The Volvo. The aerial snapped off in her fist.
As around the side of the building, washed in red by the EMERGENCY sign, came the shape.
Behind its inhuman mask, it observed her.
Chapter Thirteen
Loomis thought he heard a car horn blaring like a lighthouse warning as they entered the hospital parking lot. There was no sign of life.
It was a poetic image, but there was no time for any of that now.
The mar
shal allowed the barrel of Loomis' gun to point him to the EMERGENCY entrance.
"I ought to handcuff you to the wheel," said Loomis, "but I have a feeling I'm going to need you in there. Can I trust you?"
"What have I got to lose, except my job?"
"All right. Let's go."
He led them through the mist to the glass doors. He went in first.
Loomis had the feeling they were entering a tomb.
For all I know, it may already be too late.
"Check the rooms down there." He motioned the marshal into the main hallway. It was surprisingly dark there, the perspective shaded and forced.
The marshal cocked his head.
"Move!"
"Dr. Loomis . . . ?" Marion said.
"Stay with me and shut up!"
A rattling.
Three heads turned to the entrance.
A distorted face and hands red as a surgeon's gloves smeared the door.
It was the Strode girl, no longer catatonic but wriggling in the clutches of unreasoning terror, flattened to the glass by the pressure of uncontrolled panic. Her lips contorted into a soundless scream.
Loomis bounded to the door. He attempted to catch her, but she arched and made a grotesque effort to run. Her eyes, thought Loomis, her eyes!
He set the bolt on the door, then went after her.
"Dr. Loomis, look!"
A dark juggernaut appeared outside.
"It's him!" screamed Marion.
The marshal reached for his empty holster.
Marion took the Strode girl into the hallway.
Loomis stood his ground, solid as a rock.
The shape's cadaverous white mask jutted forward, and then its arms went up.
It walked to the door. The closed door.
Loomis could not tell whether his shot hit the door first, but there was a shattering crash as the glass broke in a hail of bright nuggets.
The shape walked through the door.
Loomis took steady aim.
Another shot.
The shape was hit dead on. Loomis saw the hole burn into the chest, throwing blood as the body took the impact.