Halloween (16 page)

The ghost began to advance. Linda could see him coming out of the corner of her eye. While she waited for Laurie to pick up the phone, she said, "Well, I finally got you to make your move. I knew it. As soon as I hide my ass, you want to pull my pants down. You men are all ali—
arrggghh
. . ."

He clamped one hand over her mouth and with the other wrapped the phone cord around her throat. She reacted with the ferocity of a victim in full panic, dawing at his knuckles with sharp nails and tearing strips of flesh off the back of his hands. He gripped her more tightly despite the searing pain. On the other end of the phone line he could hear someone saying, "Hello? Hello?''

He gripped the wire tighter. The girl danced madly in his clutches, biting, kicking, wriggling, scratching, pounding, pulling, striking. She fought harder than any of them, fought with amazing pluck, but it was all for nought. All for nought. Her movements began to slow down and become more jerky and frenetic. Her face was turning blue, and her tongue flopped around her lips as if it had no organic connection with the rest of her body. Her eyes bulged like a frog's, the red blood vessels in the whites bursting with the overload.

With one last frantic effort she aimed ten fingernails at his eyes, but he buried his face in the back of her neck so that she had no good target. Her nails tangled in the bedsheet. When her hands went limp at last, they dragged the sheet with them, revealing her assassin.

He wore a grotesque mask.

"Hello? Hello?" Laurie tapped her fingernails impatiently on the phone. "All right, Annie! I've heard your famous chewing, now I get your famous squeals?"

The gurgles and sputters continued. "Annie? Annie, are you all right?" Now she heard a heavy, throaty breathing. "Annie, are you fooling around again? Annie, I'll kill you if this is a joke. Oh, God, I can't wait for this day to end," she said, slamming the phone down.

She went to the window and looked across the street. Bob's van was still parked there, but except for an orange glow from an upstairs window, all the lights in the Wallace house were out. Laurie decided to phone there one more time; if nobody answered, she'd have to run across the street.

She dialed the Wallace number and waited. The phone rang four, five, six, seven times. With each ring, Laurie prayed harder that the joke would be over, that Linda or Bob or Annie or Paul would pick it up and, with their inimitable laughter, tell her it was all a big put-on. Eight rings, nine, ten.

Eleven, twelve, thirteen.

Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen . . .

Laurie put the phone down heavily and stood beside it, pondering her options. It was not so much that she didn't know what she must do; it was that she didn't want to do what she knew she must.

She tiptoed upstairs. Tommy and Lindsey were sprawled on Tommy's bed like a couple of rag dolls dropped from ten feet, hands and feet dangling over the sides and an assortment of dolls, game pieces, cars, trucks, fire engines, and Erector set components covered the bed and floor as if all had been packed into the muzzle of a mortar and fired indiscriminately into the room. Tommy was in his pajamas, but Lindsey, who had not been expected to stay so late, was still in her clothes.

Laurie felt safe in leaving them; she knew from countless babysitting assignments with them that their deepest slumber was immediately after falling asleep. They would not wake up and, not finding her in the house, push the panic button.

She went back downstairs and opened her purse. She had a ring with four or five keys belonging to the people she regularly sat for, and she selected the one to the Wallace house. She opened the front door of the Doyle house, stepped outside, and looking ruefully across the street, closed it behind her. She crossed the street and stood before the Wallace house, studying its hulking vastness for a sign of life. Except for the mellow flicker of a candle upstairs, there was none. She glanced in Bob's van, but nobody was in it either.

Her feet felt as if they'd been fitted with leaden shoes as she walked the last few yards and mounted the steps to the verandah encircling the house. She tested the knob of the front door. There was no need for her key. The door swung open.

She peered inside, listening. She thought she heard a floorboard groan, but perhaps not. She stepped inside and stood in the arched entrance to the living room. "Annie? Bob? Linda?"

The total silence that greeted her sent a shudder down her spine. She reached for the wall switch and flipped it.

The room remained dark. Cursing, she retreated to the entry hall and tried the switch to the big chandelier there.

No response.

"You guys have
really
been blowing some fuses," she said with a nervous laugh.

She stayed in the hall a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness. Then she ventured into the living room. It was devoid of life, but an examination of the rumpled pillows on the couch indicated that some heavy petting had gone on. They were probably upstairs.

All of them? she wondered. "Oh Lord, just what I need—walking in on an orgy," she said aloud.

She jumped when she heard something heavy, like furniture, being moved upstairs, followed by a crash. She rushed to the foot of the stairs and stared up. The bedroom door was closed, but an eerie orange light radiated from under it.

She managed a smile, shaking her head. "All right, meatheads. The joke is over." She took one tentative step up the stairs and paused to listen. "Come on, Annie, enough."

A new sound greeted her, the sound of something being dragged across the floor. The sound stopped abruptly, followed by a closet door shutting in the upstairs bedroom.

Laurie took three more steps. "This has definitely stopped being funny, guys. Now cut it out!"

Now a scraping sound.

Her heart began to thunder and she thought of fleeing, but she knew what kind of laughing-stock she'd be at school if she did, when Annie and Paul and Linda and Bob told everybody how they'd scared Laurie Strode out of her shoes on Halloween.

"You'll be sorry!" she shouted as she made her way up the stairs with determination.

Sam Loomis was cold, and getting colder.

Had he known he'd be staked out in a hedge in the middle of a cold October night, he'd have dressed for the occasion. But he had worn his trench coat over a summer business suit, and he was cold.

Aside from the three kids he'd chased off, there'd been no activity at the Myers house, and as the evening wore into night Loomis began to wonder why he had expected that there would be. Yes, the fellow had returned to the scene of the crime in the best tradition of criminals, but that was much earlier. To what end would he hang around the house? Wouldn't he seek elsewhere for victims?

Because he was cold, and because he'd begun to realize he was barking up the wrong tree, Loomis started to pace. He paced up the block and down, glancing over his shoulder often so as not to take his attention totally off the Myers house. He paced in an ever-lengthening pattern, and the more he did, the more certain he became that his quarry was near. His conclusion was based on reason and emotion. Intellectually, he reasoned that with the strange affection of a hunter for his prey, his maniac had indeed come home today, and he'd seek victims in the immediate neighborhood.

But it wasn't just intellectual deduction; it was a feeling, a hunch. Loomis's spine quivered like a divining rod near water. Evil was afoot, and it was nearby. If only he could get some definite sign . . .

Loomis's pacing swept him farther and farther away from the Myers house, and soon he was turning his back on it with impunity, for he was now convinced his maniac was not there. Back and forth like a pendulum Loomis swung, attuning himself to the vibrations of evil in the air and trying to get a fix on them like a pilot seeking radio guidance on a Stormy night.

He debated with himself as to whether he should continue going straight up and down the block, or turn corners and form a kind of search grid with his pacing. At a certain corner he felt strongly drawn and decided to let the force carry him even if he lost sight of the Myers house entirely. It was as if he were the planchette on a ouija board and someone had asked him,
Is a murderer near at hand?
The force of the vibrations was sending him . . . where? Down this oak-lined street and toward that car. Why that car?

But it was not a car, it was a station wagon. A station wagon! Could it be the one? His pace quickened. It was hard to tell the color of the vehicle because of the yellow arc-light of the street lamps overhead, but it seemed to be that livid purplish brown of the state hospital's station wagon. One glance at the side of the vehicle would tell him. He strained his eyes seeking the emblem on the door, his legs churning at a pace they hadn't done for a decade. And inside his head, the vibrations of evil grew immeasurably stronger with each yard he covered . . .

She stood on the landing, paralyzed with uncertainty. At the foot of the stairs she'd been certain this was a big put-on by her friends. But with each step she mounted, her doubts had mounted too. If this were a practical joke, it was, well, too good, too professional. Where were the whispering and the giggling, the shushing and the tittering? There was too much silence. Entirely too much silence.

She peered at the crack under the door, a mellow orange line that shimmered seductively like a neon sign advertising some forbidden delight. She clenched her teeth. If this was a setup, they were doing a terrific job special effects and everything! How could she not go in?

She stepped forward two paces and encircled the doorknob with her hand. The muscles of her legs were tensed like those of a runner at the start of a race, prepared to spring back and down the stairs at the first sign of trouble.

She pushed the door open a crack. She could see a pair of feet on the bed, but whose she couldn't yet identify. Just out of the range of her vision, a candle or jack-o'-lantern cast an orange light on the legs.

Laurie opened the door two inches farther and stuck her head into the bedroom. She took in more and more of the figure on the bed. The feet, the knees, the thighs, the pubic hair, the pelvis, the . . .

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

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

. . . The gash across the throat, splashed with crimson 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:

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 the 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 to cushion the drop. She felt his hand close around hers as she released her grip on 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.