Halloween (7 page)

"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. She 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.

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 an 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 stared in sightless horror at the clouds that had begun to roll in the sky. His body, however, lay stomach downward.

" . . . 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 lesson, 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 Valentinelike 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 khaki 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 into 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."

"That's right," said Mrs. Fredericks. "Samuels definitely personified fate . . ."

He was gone.

She'd decided, even as she spoke to the class, that she was going to whip her head around when she finished and glare at him, whoever he was, until he dropped his eyes in embarrassment.

But he was gone.

He was back.

Several hours later, as school ended with a blaring alarm bell, he sat in the stolen station wagon, watching the children burst out of the doors with a clamor. Many of them were dressed in Halloween costumes and bore black and orange paper cutouts made in school, witches and pumpkins, black cats and devils, skeletons and ghosts. One little girl pretended to be riding a broomstick with a cardboard black cat on it, another wore a jack-o'-lantern on his head like the famous Headless Horseman.

After a while, four boys emerged, one of them bearing a pumpkin so large he swayed from side to side like an overburdened burro. The other three were pushing him back and forth and taunting him. The boy they were bullying was the same one that had been talking to the pretty blond girl this morning.

"Leave me alone," the boy was pleading.

They wiggled their fingers in his face. "He's gonna getcha, he's gonna getcha, he's gonna getcha!"

The boy slapped at the fingers. "Leave me alone."

"The bogeyman is coming."

"No, he's not. Leave me alone."

"He doesn't believe us. Don't you know what happens on Halloween?" said the biggest one, putting his face close to Tommy's.

Tommy shrugged. "Yeah, we get candy," They laughed and danced around him, waving their hands in his face. "Oooooh, the bogeyman, oooooh, the bogeyman, the bogeyman, the bogeyman . . ."

Tommy clutched his pumpkin tightly to his chest and tried to push his way through them, but one of them stuck his foot out and tripped him. He fell on top of the pumpkin, which split open with a glupping sound, emitting a sour odor. Tommy had skinned his knee but there was no other damage done except to his pride. He fought back welling tears.

The sound of the boys' cruel laughter faded as they ran away, leaving Tommy to climb painfully to his feet. His jacket was covered with pumpkin pulp and seeds. Suddenly, as he began pulling these off with his fingers, he felt the sunlight eclipsed by a large shadowy figure. He looked up and there was a man in dark khaki coveralls standing there looking at him.

"Hi," said Tommy.

The man said nothing. Tommy could hear him breathing stertorously but the boy couldn't see his face clearly because it was positioned between himself and the sun. What Tommy could make out, however, left him in no mood to hang around. The man had dark red-stained lips and his eyes were rimmed in purple, like grossly overused eyeshadow. A livid scar zig-zagged down his cheek.

The weird thing was, Tommy couldn't imagine that that was the guy's own face. It looked rubbery and kind of masklike. But if he was wearing a mask, shouldn't he take it off around about now and say "Boo!" and reveal who he was?