Halloween (6 page)

Now, in blind panic, she stepped full on the gas pedal. The tires keened on the wet pavement, then took hold and the car lurched forward. Marion tore around the parking lot, hauling the wheel sharply from left to right to left again. The car swayed and skidded, but the thing, clinging to the windshield wiper and a door handle, somehow managed to hold on. The rain cascaded down the windshield and she couldn't see a thing; she certainly didn't see the parking lot curb when she struck it at forty miles an hour. The wheel tore out of her hand and her chin struck the rim. The station wagon spun wildly out of control, hurling her across the seat to the passenger side. Then it struck another curb broadside, and from that moment on Marion remembered nothing until she was being helped to her feet by Loomis. She lay on the soaked grass of an embankment, a violent ringing in her ears, the nerves in her scalp throbbed from the pain of her hair having been violently pulled.

About a dozen paces away the station wagon sat, idling. Loomis examined her and satisfied himself that she'd suffered no serious harm. Then he turned to the car. "Good God, there's someone in there!"

He could see the ghostly shape on the driver's side, and it seemed to be frantically pounding on the steering wheel as if trying to make the thing go. Loomis dashed for the car, but just as he reached it it vaulted forward, careering crazily from side to side until the driver seemed to gain mastery of the controls and roared down the road and onto the highway.

Loomis returned to Marion, who was sobbing hysterically and shuddering from the rain and cold. Pulling her cloak closer around her shoulders, he held her tightly. Together they watched the tail lights of the station wagon fade into the blackness of the Illinois night.

Then he turned to her. "You can calm down now. The evil is gone."

Somehow she took no comfort in that at all.

Laurie Strode stepped out of the door of the white frame house on Oak Street and sniffed the air. It was cool and tangy with a faint touch of woodsmoke. Someone had lit a fire in a fireplace somewhere down the street, and for Laurie it had a special significance: It marked, in her own mind, the official start of winter. Of course, winter didn't truly begin until the third week in December, a little less than two months away, and you couldn't ask for a more autumnal event than Halloween, which took place tonight. Nevertheless, Laurie thought about winter, and felt that same mixture of eagerness and dread that most midwesterners feel about the season.

She was a pretty girl, slim and angular, with straight, brownish-blond hair falling without fanfare to her shoulders. Farrah hairstyles were all the rage but Laurie thought it was an affectation and a pain in the ass to keep up. Though not exactly a bookworm, she had decided there were simply too many more interesting things to do, like reading, than to spend all that time washing, blow-drying, teasing, and combing, to say nothing of dyeing or frosting your hair if you really wanted to do that trip the right way.

She dressed in simple school attire, a print skirt, knee socks, sensible shoes, and a boy's shirt under a sweater. Loaded down under two heavy book bags, she appeared to be round-shouldered and flat-chested, but that didn't worry her. She knew that when she set out to dress and make up for a date, she could hold her own with anybody in her high-school class. But today was a school day and there is no way you can look glamorous on a school day short of getting your own private porter or chauffeur to carry you and your books to school. So you do the best you can, and if your friends tease you about your waddle, you grin and bear it.

She was slightly surprised to note several younger children already dressed in Halloween costumes. Then she realized they were not trick-or-treating at eight in the morning, but merely dressed up for Halloween parties at school. Her cool blue eyes warmed as two little six-year-old girls with eminently solemn faces glided by in satin gowns and rhinestone tiaras, turning occasionally to bark warnings to the gruff little pirates and cowboys who teased them ten paces behind. She wasn't sure if one of the boys was Tommy Doyle, for whom she was to babysit tonight.

Babysitting. Number one boring job.
Boring!
Some of her girl friends used babysitting as a means for making out. Perhaps if Laurie were interested in somebody she might do the same thing, but there wasn't anyone in her life right now, so it looked like she would be spending another evening supervising Tommy's addiction to horror movies and satisfying his craving (and, she admitted, her own) for popcorn.

She thought about what her girl friends did with their dates on babysitting jobs. Some of them had confessed—even boasted—that they went all the way with their boyfriends. Laurie wasn't inexperienced, and she wasn't a prude either, but she knew herself well enough to understand she wouldn't be able to handle that trip at the tender age of seventeen. In fact, she sometimes wondered if there was something wrong with her, if she was a little retarded or something. The smoldering fires of adolescence had never really tortured her body the way it did some of her friends (like Annie, for instance). And although almost everybody in her class smoked grass, she not only had never gotten high, she couldn't draw the smoke into her lungs without coughing. And she was too smart to be interested in any other kind of drug.

"Laurie, Laurie," she said under her breath, shaking her head morosely, "at this rate you'll end up to be as sensible as your mother. What a drag!"

"What are you dreaming about, sweetheart?" came her father's voice from behind. Chester Strode stood on the front doorstep, fooling with a keyring.

"Oh, the usual: sex and drugs," she laughed, knowing he wouldn't take her seriously.

"Thank goodness," he said. "I was worried you were O.D.-ing on English lit and political science.''

"No danger of that," she retorted. "My parents brought me up to be a straight and decent kid."

They walked together to his car, a black sedan with "Strode Real Estate" emblazoned in bold red and white on the door. It never failed to embarrass her, this advertisement glaring at people wherever they drove. Maybe things like this were done in Cleveland or Chicago or St. Louis, but in a small town like Haddonfield most people kept a low profile. Oh well, it brought daddy business, and (as her father was fond of pointing out) business meant food and clothes and a college education. So she couldn't really complain.

They stood beside the car for a moment until her father managed to slide the proper key off his ring, which had so many keys on it (he called it his occupational affliction) he looked like a jailer. Handing a simple brass key to her, he said, "Now don't forget to drop this off at the Myers place."

"I won't," she said. She decided to keep it in her hand instead of dropping it into her book bag, where it would be "out of sight, out of mind."

"They're coming by to see the house at ten-thirty. Be sure you leave it under the mat."

"I promise."

She started to walk away.

"Haven't you forgotten something?" he called after her. He stood by the car, head tilted, exposing his freshly shaved cheek.

Laurie walked back and put her lips hastily to his cheek, hoping none of her girl friends was watching, then feeling guilty immediately afterward. Why should a girl be embarrassed about kissing her own father, for crying out loud?

She sat out down Oak Street, rolling slightly from side to side with the weight of her books—the famous Laurie Waddle. In her right hand the key to the Myers house seemed to tingle, and suddenly she found herself thinking about the house. It was the one property her father handled that he was ashamed to speak of, and his relief at unloading it for once far outweighed his profit motive. For this was the house in which a seventeen-year-old girl had been brutally slain by her little brother fifteen years ago.

The Myerses had moved away a few months after the tragedy. The grief, shame, and harassment by the press and gawking neighbors and passersby had made their lives in Haddonfield intolerable. From somewhere in Indiana they continued to pay their mortgage loan and taxes, which, as Laurie's father had often said, was a terrible double burden. Not only could they not find a buyer all those years, but they had to bear the emotional burden every time they wrote out a check to support the unsaleable house.

Chester Strode had used every trick in his prodigious salesman's bag to sell The White Turkey, as he'd come to call it. But as soon as prospective buyers heard about the events of October 31, 1963, from neighbors all too eager to tell them, their superstition invariably got the best of them and it was good-bye sale. Mr. Strode couldn't even persuade customers to buy the property for the value of the land. "Buy it and raze the house, if that's the way you feel," he would tell them. But the property was tainted, and no one went for the bait.

Thank God for the New York couple who thought the house was just what they were looking for, and who were too sophisticated to believe the nonsense the neighbors prattled about. In fact, the New York couple actually thought the idea of a haunted house was charming, something they could boast about. So Mr. Strode gave the New Yorkers something else they could boast about—a price so ridiculous, it was (to use his patented phrase) "lower than a song."

Laurie wondered what it must have been like that night for the Myers girl, seeing her tiny brother coming at her with that enormous butcher knife. Imagine a blade that long going into her stomach, her breasts, her . . . even her . . . ! It was unspeakable, unthinkable.

"Hey. Laurie!"

Rarely had she been so relieved to be pulled out of a fantasy. The caller was Tommy Doyle, the boy she was sitting for tonight. The eight-year-old with tousled brown hair and bright eyes trotted up to her, swinging two or three books strapped together with a belt. Laurie, whose own load of books qualified her to join the Stevedore's Union, sighed at this symbol of vanishing youth. "Hi, Tommy."

He caught up with her and they walked side by side for several paces. "Are you coming over tonight?"

"Same time, same place."

"Can we make jack-o'-lanterns?"

"Sure."

"Can we watch monster movies?"

"Sure."

"Will you read to me? Can we make popcorn?"

"Sure. Sure."

Her answers came absently and automatically. They were the same questions every time, but this time she was thinking about poor Judith Myers as they turned the corner and walked the hundred paces into Peecher Street where the Myers house was. She couldn't purge her mind of that awful picture of a knife, a long, silvery knife, flashing through the air and plunging into her body. A knife wielded by a . . .

"How old are you?"

They had stopped abruptly, and Laurie was staring at the boy. "You know how old I am. I'm eight. Why?"

She hesitated, not wanting to put murderous thoughts into the head of the kid she was sitting for tonight. Yet there was something she had to know. "Have you ever felt like—like killing somebody?"

The boy shrugged. "Sure."

"You
have?
"

"Sure. Hasn't everybody?"

"They
have?
" Her eyes bulged.

"Sure. When somebody takes something away from you, or your parents tell you you can't have something, or the teacher gives you too much homework, you feel like killing them. Is that what you mean?"

"Uh, well . . ."

"Oh,
that's
what you mean!" Tommy said, eyes rounding and the color draining from his face. They had arrived at the Myers house.

It was a ghost of its former self, weather-beaten and dilapidated. Set back from the street twenty or twenty-five paces, it stood glowering in the cool autumn morning like some mangy, brooding beast. Its former spanking coat of white paint, the symbol of pride of every fine midwestern home, had turned to dingy gray, and much of it had peeled or flaked off, revealing a pitted and rotting facade of shingles. Several windows had been broken by kids or vandals, a few of whom had been bold enough to scrawl graffiti on the front door. A huge elm beat against an upstairs window as the breeze stiffened.

"You're not supposed to go up there," the kid said, freezing to the spot.

Laurie flourished the key. "Yes, I am."

"Uh-uh. That's a spook house."

"Just watch," she said, walking coolly up to the porch. She lifted the welcome mat as her father had instructed and placed the key under it. She had wanted Tommy to know how unafraid she was, but if she was so unafraid, why was her hand damp with perspiration as she pulled it back from the mat?

For a moment she stood transfixed, contemplating that night fifteen years ago—"My God, fifteen years ago to the very night!" she realized—when the tragic event had taken place. She vaguely heard Tommy on the sidewalk pleading with her to get away from there, but the horror of it attracted her in some perverse way. Was it the fascination of the innocent with wickedness, or just some sort of sick curiosity? Or was she herself capable of the same gruesome deed?

She shut her eyes and imagined herself picklng up a butcher knife and plunging it into the breast of . . . of whom? Whom did she loathe so much she would want to do that to? To someone in your own family, for God's sake! She couldn't think of a soul.

"Laurie, please, I'm getting scared," the boy was whining.

"So am I," she laughed with a shudder, trotting down the porch steps and joining her young companion.

And, as she turned her back on the house, a figure inside it, dark, shadowy, sidled up to the front door and pushed the tattered curtain aside with a knuckle. He watched the slim blonde toss her head and laugh as she raised her hands like a bogeyman to frighten her young companion.

He breathed heavily, raspingly, as he watched the girl, and a memory entered his mind, the memory of another girl, another blonde, willowy and pretty. He remembered the trapped and frightened look in her eyes, and the futile, pathetic way she had raised her hands to protect herself.

He followed the girl and boy with his gaze until they disappeared from view. Then he walked up the creaky stairs to the second floor and peered into the room where it had all happened . . .