Halloween (19 page)

She rolled away as he mounted the stairs. The dying man staggered into the bedroom toward the French windows that opened on the Doyles' sun deck. The bald man reached the landing and stepped into the bedroom, leveling his gun at the retreating figure.

The explosions were ear-splitting. Laurie was deafened by the first and felt rather than heard the subsequent ones. She saw the assailant lurch back with each gunshot as if struck with a bat. He crashed backward through the French windows and tumbled from the sun deck into the backyard below. The moon and street light caught the blood-gloss of at least three bullet holes in his chest.

She did not ask at first who her rescuer was. She simply fell into his arms and burst into wracking sobs. His embrace was so comforting she could have fallen asleep in it. Maybe, if she did, she would wake up to find the world as it had been this morning. This morning? Was it a mere sixteen or seventeen hours since she had stood on her doorstep bantering with her father? It seemed as if she'd lived three lifetimes in that scant time.

Suddenly she was in pain. The adrenaline that seemed to act as an anaesthetic started to wear off. Her ankle throbbed where she'd twisted it dropping over the stairs at Lindsey's house. Her wrist ached and had begun to swell where he'd cracked the bone. Her slashed arm tingled agonizingly. Her scalp felt as if someone had taken a tomahawk to it. No, these were not the symptoms of a dream. This was the nightmare of reality. It would take her years to absorb this truth, and a lifetime to ponder it.

The man released her, and she looked up at him. "Thank you. Are you a policeman?"

He smiled. "No, just a friend."

"A friend with a gun, thank God."

"Thank God." Loomis was trembling. He hyperventilated several times to slow down his racing heart. Then he walked to the shattered windows and peered down.

It lay on its back amid a thousand shards of broken glass that twinkled in the moonlight like hoarfrost. The front of the uniform stolen from the truck driver glistened blackly with blood that seeped out of the tremendous rents in his flesh caused by Loomis's magnum. One of its eyes gazed stupidly up to the sky; where the other had been was a black hole caked with clotted blood and jellied aqueous humor. Loomis stared at the corpse a long time, watching for a sign of life. Detecting none, he turned back into the bedroom and reached into his trench coat pocket.

"What are you doing?" the girl asked.

"Reloading," he said, pushing the long heavy cartridges into the chamber of his gun.

"Why?"

Loomis shrugged. "It heightens my sense of security," he said with an irony that was lost on her. He started down the steps.

"Where are you going?"

"To examine the body. I would like you to go across the street and wait for the police."

"No," said Laurie. "I think I'd like to come with you."

Loomis looked at her quizzically. "You haven't had enough for one night?"

"I want to make sure it's all over."

"Suit yourself. I assure you it is."

Which is why you're reloading your gun, Loomis said to himself, heading downstairs. From the way the girl clutched his arm he knew she was thinking the same thing. Poor child. If she knew what he knew, she'd be thinking darker thoughts than that even.

She'd be thinking about the dream that little Michael, angelic choirboy face turned to the ceiling as if in prayer, had told him some fifteen years ago, a dream about his vengeance on a Druid girl who had not returned his love, and on her lover who had mocked him, a dream about a ceremony on an accursed gravesite, where his head and heart were left exposed to the elements to rot while some shaman recited an awful curse dooming him to roam the earth forever lusting for blood.

She'd be thinking about Michael's great-grandfather, who had been tortured by that identical dream, a dream that had inflamed both of them to commit deeds of wanton horror.

She'd be thinking about the voices that spoke both to Michael and to his great-grandfather, urging them to take revenge against someone who had lived over a thousand years ago.

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 shards 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."