“Listen,” Vicky said, and couldn’t help noticing Julian giving her a bit of side-eye when he should’ve been focused on the movie. “I gotta tuck this cute little critter in to bed. Stop being a needy bitch and get over here.”
Allyson laughed. “Sounds good,” she said. “See ya in a bit.”
“Knew there was a party animal inside you waiting to get out.”
“Hey, I’m not—!”
“Better not leave me hanging!”
Before Allyson could change her mind, Vicky hung up.
Julian stared at her.
“What?” Vicky said. “I’m allowed to make personal calls. Besides, I’ve seen this movie before.”
“I heard you telling your friends to come over here and you’re gonna smoke some weed and drinkin’ that stuff. That’s against the rules.” He sat up straight. “I’m telling my mom.”
Little narc, Vicky thought. And after I made him all those snacks—and let him stay up past his bedtime—and watch some questionable movies. Well, two can play the narc game, kiddo.
Vicky crossed to the sofa and sat next to him, the better to look him in the eyes. “They teach you about MAD in school?”
“Getting angry?”
“In a way,” Vicky said. “But this MAD stands for mutually assured destruction. M. A. D. Understand?”
Julian shook his head, confused.
“Well, I’ve seen your browser history, Julian,” Vicky said with a slow, disapproving shake of her head. “Wouldn’t want me telling your folks about that, would you?”
Panicked, Julian shook his head “no” several times.
“That’s what I thought,” Vicky said, adding, “And up late watching scary Alex Cox movies is not what you’re supposed to be doing either.” Actually, she’d catch the heat for that infraction. But he didn’t need to know that.
She patted him on the head and smiled. “Get to bed, you little monster.”
“Now?”
“You bet your little butt now, young man!” she said. “Race you upstairs?”
With a delighted squeal, Julian jumped off the sofa and sprinted for the steps. Urging him on, she pretended to run full tilt, but stayed a few feet back. Of course, in bare feet, he had better traction on the hardwood floors than she did in her socks. But it wouldn’t have mattered. The unwritten rules of babysitting told her to let him end the night with the satisfaction of a clear victory. The faster to bed, she hoped, the faster to sleep. And then she could relax for the rest of the night.
“Okay, you beat me,” Vicky said as she walked through his open bedroom door. “You got some mad skills, little dude. Never saw anyone run up… stairs that fast.”
She looked around his room.
“Julian?” she called. “This was a race. Not hide-and-seek. C’mon, man, it’s already past your bedtime.”
Julian had an enviable corner bedroom for a kid his age, with two windows on either side of his wood-framed youth bed with a matching end table and two more windows on either side of a twenty-gallon fish tank, which glowed white and blue like the world’s biggest night light. His parents had decorated the walls with muted green wallpaper with pale silhouettes of animals—elephants, giraffes, kangaroos, ducks, and roosters in a repeating pattern. Above his bed, fixed to the wall, stuffed, quilted letters in bold patterns spelled out his name in all caps.
She’d seen him enter the bedroom, which limited his hiding options. Julian should have been lying in bed, right beneath the stuffed letters, but had decided to prolong his evening. The bed rested on a large striped throw rug to protect the hardwood floor, with enough clearance under the bed to hide a mischievous nine-year-old. On the far side of the long dresser to her left, a small red rocking chair with a stuffed alligator on the seat occupied that corner of the room. She leaned to the right and peered around the corner of the dresser. No Julian.
“Julian…?” she called. “You need to brush your teeth and use the little boys’ room before you conk out.”
He wouldn’t fit in the closed wooden stand under the fish tank, so no options on that side of the room. To her right stood a youth desk and chair beside a short wooden bookcase with a few sports trophies atop it. Above the desk were twin-framed illustrations, portraits of a polar bear on the left and a panda on the right, with Julian’s own artwork pinned to the wall under these. She leaned over to the right and checked the kneehole of the desk. Again, no Julian. That left the closet and under the bed—unless the kid has a secret passage to Narnia hidden somewhere in here.
“Time’s up, Julian,” she said. “I’m opening the closet.” She stomped her feet for effect, but without her shoes on the soft thumps lacked any intimidation factor. She took two steps around the desk, toward the closet and—
“Boo!” Julian shouted, jumping up from behind the far side of his bed.
Startled despite herself, Vicky swayed back and bumped into the desk chair.
“Did I scare you?”
“Sure did, buddy,” Vicky said. “You got me.”
Julian grabbed the small wooden biplane model from his end table and walked to the left of the aquarium to his craft table, which held wooden train-set pieces and plastic bottles of paint.
No way is he staying up to paint that plane, she thought. Don’t even ask, kid!
Instead, Julian performed loops and dives with the plane in his hand, making engine sounds, and asked a different question. “Would you jump out of a plane?”
“With or without a parachute?”
He laughed.
“It’s an important detail!” she joked. “One is all ‘Ooh—ahh!’ and the other is ‘Ahhhhhhhh—SPLAT!’”
“With, obviously,” he said.
“Might try it someday,” she said. “But you know what I really need to do first?”
“What?”
“Get you to brush your teeth and go to bed.”
“All right,” he said, dragging out the words as he reluctantly set down the plane.
* * *
After Julian finished his nighttime routine, he climbed into bed and pulled up his plaid covers, trying unsuccessfully to stifle a yawn.
“A-ha!” Vicky said, standing at his bedside. “Knew you were tired. Now stop that or you’ll make me yawn.”
“I’m not—” Another yawn. “—tired.”
“No?” She raised her eyebrows. “You’re not even fooling yourself.” She kissed her hand and touched it to his forehead. “Now close your eyes and go… to… sleep.”
Julian nodded.
Vicky switched off the fish tank light and walked to the doorway.
“Will you leave the door open? Just a crack?”
“Okay,” Vicky said, leaving the door open wide enough to let a shaft of light from the hallway spill across the floor of his room. “Before I forget,” she said. “Command, shift, N—next time. Incognito mode.”
25
With Julian tucked in and, she hoped, already asleep after those impressive yawns, Vicky padded down to the kitchen to wash dishes. She rinsed off plates, glasses, and flatware and loaded them in the dishwasher. Letting the hot water run, she hand-washed some pots and pans, making more noise than she intended but hoping not enough to wake Julian. She anticipated a fun and eventful evening ahead, so the last thing she wanted was a tired, cranky child ruining the mood.
Movement outside the window above the sink caught her eye. As she set the last pot on the draining board, she leaned forward to peer outside. She had to press her face close to the window to see past her own reflection to ghostlike shapes fluttering outside. Too late for trick-or-treaters, so—
Two white bed sheets, hanging on the clothesline, rose and fell with the breeze.
She wasn’t superstitious about Halloween, but being alone—relatively alone—in an unfamiliar—relatively unfamiliar—house at night could put anyone’s nerves a little on edge. So, she tried to lose herself in mundane tasks. When she returned the dish detergent to the cabinet under the sink, she noticed the
small trash can was overflowing. Tugging the plastic bag out of the container, she knotted the drawstring closure, put in a fresh plastic bag and took the full one to the back door. For a moment, she considered going back for her tennis shoes, but she wouldn’t need to cross the yard, so she decided to forgo shoes for the sake of expediency.
Outside in the dark toting a load of trash, she shivered, her raglan shirt insufficient against the fall chill in the air.
She walked along the paved walkway around the house toward the large trash bin. Dried leaves skittered across the cement with intermittent scraping sounds. A couple crackled underfoot as she stepped on them. When she lifted the hinged lid on the large trash can, she looked up at the night sky and saw wispy clouds slide across the face of the waning moon. She dropped her bag on top of the other aromatic offerings that had accumulated since the last trash day. Wrinkling her nose, she mumbled, “Ew, that’s ripe!”
She rubbed her arms for warmth, then turned to hurry back inside and—
“Hey, there you are.”
Vicky shrieked. An involuntary impulse before her brain processed Dave’s familiar features. “Jesus, Dave!” she exclaimed, breathless. “You scared the shit out of me.”
He’d come to the Morriseys’ in costume as a farmhand, wearing a frayed-edge straw hat, a red plaid shirt and overalls. Under one arm he carried a child’s stick horse and in the other a jack-o’-lantern with carved hearts for eyes, what looked like an upside-down heart for a nose, and a smiling mouth. Not scary in the least, but he’d showed up out of nowhere in the middle of the night when she was already a bit spooked.
“Sorry,” Dave said. “I’ve been knocking on the front door for, like, five minutes. I didn’t wanna ring the bell and wake the kid.” She’d been washing dishes, but he must have knocked softly for her not to hear.
“Check it out,” he said, holding up the jack-o’-lantern. “Fresh from my patch.”
“Cute,” she said, laughing as her nerves calmed.
“He hearts you,” Dave said, dipping the eyes toward her.
“Well, you know what they say…”
“What’s that?”
“The eyes are the windows to a pumpkin’s gutted interior.”
“That’s awful,” Dave said, hugging the jack-o’-lantern as if it were a frightened child. “Why would they say that? Why?”
“I’m freezing,” Vicky said. “Come inside.”
He followed her through the open back door into the kitchen. “Are we alone?”
“Julian just went to bed,” she replied. “Should be in dreamland by now.”
“So, we have the house to ourselves?”
“Allyson and Cameron are gonna head over in a few.”
Setting his jack-o’-lantern on the kitchen table with the horse stick leaning against a chair, Dave said, “Should we make popcorn? Wanna watch TV?”
He looked up at her and she stared back, trying without much success to suppress an incipient smile. “No.”
When Dave smiled back at her, she leaned in for a light kiss on the lips. But after a moment, Dave pulled away. “Hold on a sec.”
“Okay,” she said, not sure where he was going. If anything, she’d expected impatience, maybe even exuberance, not stalling tactics. “What’s up?”
Instead of replying, he unfastened the top three buttons of his shirt, then tugged down the right side, pulling it under the overall strap to expose his right shoulder. “Check this out,” he said. “I did this for you.”
A fresh tattoo, black ink with specks of dried blood. No picture. Just a date: 10-31-18.
She looked from the tattoo up to his face.
“Because tonight is the night,” he explained. “And this is tonight’s date, which is Halloween.”
Her hesitant smile blossomed, spreading across her face. “Oh fuck yeah, Dave.”
She grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the family room.
* * *
“Restless” did not begin to describe what Laurie Strode felt as she drove through the streets of Haddonfield in her pickup truck, listening to the police scanner as if her life—and the lives of her family—depended on it. Instead, she experienced a gut-wrenching combination of dread and relief.
He had escaped. As she had long predicted he would. No denying it. She had expected and prepared for this night for forty years. Now, finally, the waiting was over. He was out—and he would come for her. She had no delusions about that. But knowing tonight would provide the chance to end him once and for all also gave her a sense of peace. He’d been out of reach for so long, untouchable, and yet a threat to her life so profound she’d been unable to live a normal life. She could never predict the day he would return, only that that day was inevitable. She’d had no choice but to prepare, to be ready when the moment came to reclaim her life—by ending his.
And now that the moment was hours, perhaps minutes away, she sensed the gears of fate turning, all too aware that any slight miscalculation could be fatal, for her and for her family. Since they refused to believe in the threat, chalking up her warnings as the ravings of a paranoid madwoman, the responsibility of ending him rested solely on her. Even though she had tried, unsuccessfully, to prepare Karen to fight the battle with her, deep inside, Laurie always expected the final confrontation to come down to the two of them alone.
She would stand between him and her family. Protect them long enough to kill him. After that, she didn’t care what happened to her. Dr Loomis had deemed Michael the embodiment of evil and wanted him dead from the start. Laurie had never questioned his assessment. Now she planned to carry out that sentence.
“You can’t kill the Boogeyman.”
“Shut up,” she said. “I will kill the bastard. If it’s the last thing I ever do, I’ll kill him.”
Not that she had to wait for him to come to her. Now that he’d had a taste of killing again, nobody in Haddonfield was safe. Eventually his killing spree would lead him to her, but not if she struck first. He wouldn’t expect her to come after him. As soon as she heard a report on the police scanner consistent with his attacks, she would strike preemptively. The element of surprise was her best weapon.
“You don’t know it, Michael,” she whispered intently, “but I’m coming for you.”
She reached over to the passenger seat and patted the cool barrel of her Smith & Wesson revolver.
Continuing to drive at school zone speeds through the neighborhood, she looked left and right, peering into the darkness for any sign of him in his dark coveralls, wearing that pale, lifeless mask. A few last groups of trick-or-treaters roamed the streets, either searching for final candy stops or headed home with their sugary bounty. Most houses had extinguished porch lights, which left the few kids out past curfew with slim pickings. But she had to respect their never-say-die attitude.
“No quitters in the bunch,” she said. Then, “Be careful out there, kids.”
The Boogeyman is back.
* * *
After Vicky dragged a more than willing Dave into the family room, she spun him around, his back to the sofa, grabbed his face between her hands and planted a quick but passionate kiss on his lips. Then she delivered a playful shove to drop him to the sofa. With him sprawled in a half-sitting position, she placed one knee between his spread legs and pushed his shoulders back, following his lips with hers until they were both horizontal, her weight on top of him. Judging by his reaction, he didn’t seem to mind.
Soon their kissing mouths parted, and she felt the light brush of his tongue against hers. Their breathing deepened, finding a rhythm between them. When her long blond hair fell across his face, his caressing hand tucked it behind her ear. Arching her back, she closed her eyes and pressed her pelvis into his hardness. His left hand unbuttoned her jeans and tugged on the zipper, while his right hand slipped under her raglan top, skimmed across her midriff and cupped her left breast over the bra.
Breathing deeply, a pleased smile on her face, she reached back and unfast
ened her bra, felt it loosen enough that his questing hand easily slipped under the left cup and palmed her breast, squeezing her erect nipple between his index and middle fingers.
Her excitement battled her impatience. She wanted to whip off her top and the bra—or have Dave remove them for her, but he was still bundled up in his farmer overalls. They’d waited a long time for this night. She was ready—so ready!
Dave tried to work his left hand inside the top of her jeans, slipping his fingers under her panties, caressing her sensitive skin with his fingertips, but the angle was awkward and even more constricted when she leaned forward to unhook the straps of his overalls. In the middle of their combined effort to get each other naked, Vicky tensed. She’d heard—something.
“What?” Dave asked, freezing. “Did I do something wrong?”
“Shhh… stop,” she whispered. “Dave. What was that?”
If she hadn’t been alarmed, the situation would have been comical. Dave paused to look around, one hand over her bare breast, the other warm and curled up inside the waistband of her underwear. “What?” he asked. “What was it?”
“I don’t know. I heard something.”
Dave listened for a few seconds and shook his head. “It’s nothing,” he said. “It’s Julian taking a dump or somethin’. C’mon…”
His curled hand flattened against her lower abdomen and moved lower.
Upstairs, a door closed.
Vicky grabbed Dave’s left hand and brought it back out in the open. “I’m serious,” she said. “Go see.”
“Go see him take a shit?”
Frustrated, he pulled his other hand out from under her shirt.
Vicky climbed to her feet, standing beside the sofa as she refastened her bra and buttoned her jeans. Unmoving, Dave sat on the sofa, staring at her.
“Don’t just sit there,” she urged. “Go!”
Raising his hands in surrender, he stood and composed himself, hand-brushing his hair as he backed away from her toward the stairs, a look of regret in his eyes, as if to say, “Really?”
Probably wondering if he jumped the gun on that tattoo, she thought. But it wasn’t a missed opportunity, just an opportunity postponed. Halloween wasn’t over.
Halloween Page 15