Halloween: The Official Movie Novelization

12

October 31st

In addition to a strong cup of coffee, Dana relied on a hot shower to start a new day, otherwise she stumbled through her morning a muddle-headed mess. Unfortunately, the budget motel’s water pressure wasn’t quite up to the task of revivifying lethargic muscles. Or maybe she should blame the generic showerhead. Its default setting—the only setting—could best be described as gentle rain. She’d spent a fair amount of time shampooing her long red hair, and it was taking a godawful amount of time to rinse out the lather. If she didn’t skip the conditioner, she’d probably run out of hot water.

Head bowed directly under the showerhead, she closed her eyes and stood still, letting the water course through her hair. She tried to speed the process by wringing suds and water at the ends with a twist of her hands.

A slight sound—a creak—not of her own making caught her attention.

She raised her head and turned toward the translucent shower curtain, blinking the misty spray from her eyes. Steam billowed up from her shower, spreading through the bathroom beyond. Thinking her imagination had begun to run wild, she almost turned back toward the showerhead but froze. The rectangular shape of the door shifted several inches, opening.

Had she heard the twist of the doorknob? The squeak of a hinge?

A moment later a shape moved through the doorway, a vague silhouette—at first. As it took several steps closer, the indistinct figure resolved into the shape of a man who then stood still, waiting. Something about the silhouette disturbed her on a subconscious level. Something not quite… human.

Incipient fear gnawed at her, stealing her voice, catching her breath.

Abruptly, the figure’s arm rose, hand gripping the edge of the shower curtain and yanking it aside, revealing—

A naked man—save for the pale Michael Myers mask with its shock of brown hair that hid his face—stood before her. Her scream died in her throat, flushed away with a surge of relief. Even with his face hidden, she recognized his tall physique.

“Room for one more?” Aaron asked.

Dana laughed. “Take that hideous thing off.”

Aaron reached around to the back of the mask and tugged it off.

“God, Aaron,” she said. “You scared me half to death. Thought you went out for coffee.”

“That was ages ago,” he said. “You have any idea how long you’ve been in here?”

She smiled. “Ages, I would assume.”

“Sounds about right,” Aaron said, then looked down thoughtfully at the mask. “When I wear this, there is a certain tendency or… inclination that the legacy of the mask seems to inspire.”

“Please don’t murder me.”

Aaron laid the mask on the counter. Then he took her hand and raised it to his lips like a nobleman greeting a lady in a Regency romance novel—except for the little detail of their both being nude, one soaking wet and a bit soapy.

“I would never,” he said. “I need your smile.”

“Get in here already,” she said, laughing. “I’m getting cold.”

Aaron stepped into the shower, pulling the curtain behind him to lock in the heat and steam. His hands held her waist, sliding down to the swell of her hips as he brought her close to him.

With the bathroom door open, Dana heard the murmur of voices coming from the television, which Aaron had left on in the other room. A reporter mentioned something about an empty bus abandoned the previous night on the side of the road. She couldn’t hear any more and, as Aaron pulled her in for a lingering kiss on the lips, the intimate confines of the shower stall held her full attention.

As she felt him firm against her, she murmured, “Who needs coffee?”

Allyson leaned into her run, a slight forward tilt of momentum that propelled her through her morning miles. A new day. A new start. Her grandmother had talked about a reset. But each reset had a bit of a rewind built into it, a tendency to make the same mistakes all over again. Can’t change the past, Allyson thought, so you might as well look forward to new choices, new experiences.

Karen couldn’t stop blaming Laurie for her mistakes. And Laurie couldn’t escape the rut of old, destructive behaviors. Allyson wanted them to stop dwelling on the dysfunction, to be better—different—if that was even possible for them. But she was starting to believe neither one of them could change, which broke her heart.

As Allyson passed the community garden on her morning route, she noticed a shape out of the corner of her eye, someone moving in the shadows. She slowed and turned her head to look back. But she saw nobody, not even the woman in the saree, the apparent caretaker for the garden. Maybe she’d imagined the movement. With a shrug, she picked up her pace and moved on.

Less than a minute or two later, she noticed a few people congregating near the large tree whose roots had tilted several slabs of sidewalk from below, creating a tripping hazard for walkers and runners alike. She made a habit of running on the shoulder of the road when she approached that tree, rather than faceplant for a second time.

God, that had been painful! She’d scraped her palms raw and sprained her ankle. Bobby Hall, who had been delivering sandwich orders for a local deli in his dinged-up PT Cruiser, had laughed his ass off. She did her best to ignore the jerk, but felt her face flush, probably beet red. And she couldn’t confirm but wanted to believe smoke curled from her ears to express her silent fury. She’d tried to hobble home but gave up and called her mom for a lift.

Now she wondered what had caused the commotion at her tree of shame. Everyone there seemed to be looking at something in the tree. Curious, she veered over to the group, slowing to a jog.

Somebody said, “Who in the hell would do this?”

Another voice commented, “It’s awful.”

“Horrible,” a third person agreed. “Somebody should call the cops.”

Allyson stopped, sidestepping to locate the object of their interest. She gasped. Their attention was focused not on the tree, but on something hanging from a branch. Someone had killed a dog, then hogtied it and hung it upside down. Its swollen tongue, stippled with blood, protruded from its twisted mouth, black lips flecked with spittle. The rope creaked softly as it moved in the breeze. A moment of sympathetic grief over someone’s slaughtered pet transformed into something more personal as Allyson realized she recognized the brown-and-white dog as the one that had lunged at her yesterday, barking and startling her as she passed by its wrought-iron fence.

She shuddered with a sudden chill, witness to an act of evil that had occurred maybe only a few hours ago, on a street she passed every day. An act of evil removed from her yet connected to her. As one of the onlookers reached up tentatively to touch the dog, to confirm it was dead or to untie it and lower it to the ground, Allyson turned away. She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling her sweat dry, delivering a renewed chill.

Whatever meditative calm she had achieved on her morning run was effectively shattered now. At the end of the block she saw an unfamiliar car—an old brown-and-tan Bronco—parked at the curb. A driver sat behind the wheel, face cloaked in shadows, unmoving. Indistinguishable, but the shape of a man.

Behind her, she heard her neighbors lowering the dead dog to the ground.

Laurie awoke to a frightening variety of physical discomforts. Either the pounding in her head or the deep throbbing in her lower back woke her. But the brute force of the morning sun beating down on the windshield of her pickup truck kept her gritty eyes in a squint worthy of Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti western. Hand fumbling overhead, she plucked a pair of sunglasses from a case clipped to her sun visor and slipped them on, grateful for the temporary relief.

No longer blinded by the early light, she assessed her surroundings. Two old boyfriends shared space on the passenger seat: Jim Beam and Jack Daniels. Both nearly as depleted as she felt. Was it possible for every bone in the human body to ache simultaneously? Or maybe it was just all the muscles attached to those bones that were sore. And her throat couldn’t have felt more swollen and dry if she’d gargled sand all night. Even so, she resisted the urge to wake up Jack or Jim.

Cast aside on the passenger-side floor mat, a white paper bag with the name and dual-tipped liquor bottles logo of Bucky’s Beverage Barn sparked a memory. Apparently, she’d made a stop after leaving Bellini’s to drown her parental and grandparental shortcomings.

She recalled the drive back to her house. Both bottles had remained in the bag until she reached home. After that, her memory had a few holes in it. She’d sat outside, drinking, lamenting the years of her life surrendered to the cause, the fight. At some point, she’d had too much to drink to bother leaving the truck. An internal struggle had raged. A desire to blot everything out feuded with her determination not to seek any comfort in her own house, in the warmth of her own bed. In her warped thinking, she thought she’d stay in battle-ready mode if she forced herself to stay upright in the truck.

After all these years she continued to misjudge her own capacity for reckless indulgence. If there was a line she shouldn’t cross she stumbled blithely over it and forgot to look back to figure out where it was.

Laurie decided more of her problems were alcohol-related than she wanted to admit to Ray. Or to herself. Easy to keep a secret when everyone refuses to talk to you.

A glutton for punishment, she twisted the rearview mirror down to look at herself and instantly regretted it. “Oh my…”

With a groan, she pushed open the door and stumbled down from the pickup, her legs so stiff she almost fell on her face before regaining her balance. After a few deep breaths of the cool autumn air her dizziness passed, and she lumbered toward her front door, keys in hand.

Filling a glass with milk, she added some powder and stirred the mixture to make her strawberry drink. Behind her, an anchor for the local news station prattled on about one misfortune after another. A story about a sinkhole downtown segued into footage of a warehouse fire, arson suspected, and so on… Laurie’s attention wandered as she tried to recall where she’d left the bottle of extra-strength aspirin. Wasn’t in the medicine cabinet, so where…?

“Police have not determined the cause of the accident,” the news anchor said, after switching to breaking news that apparently trumped her scheduled misery playlist. If it bleeds, it leads. “But we do know there are multiple fatalities.”

Laurie stopped stirring her drink.

Her attention locked on the news report.

“According to sources, the bus was transporting personnel from a local state hospital.”

At that moment, Laurie felt an electric jolt galvanize her body. Though she’d spent a night wallowing in self-pity and self-recrimination over her life choices, she had made those hard decisions for a reason. Even in hindsight, she wouldn’t change anything. Michael had waited forty years, but his patience had finally paid off. And if Laurie had chosen any other path, she wouldn’t have been ready for this day.

The stiffness in her muscles and the aches in her joints faded away as manic energy flared inside her. First, she switched on the police scanner. Then, she made a circuit of the house, securing the doors with bolts, locks, and bars on the top, middle, and bottom. The first-floor windows might shatter but the steel-mesh barriers would keep any intruder at bay. If, by chance, he brought a hacksaw to work on the thick mesh, she’d have plenty of time to blow his brains out. Even so, she zipped her canvas curtains closed. No need to give away her position within the house.

With the perimeter of the house secure she needed to check her supplies—and her arsenal. Returning to the kitchen, she approached the island in the middle and leaned into it, twisting it counter-clockwise. The island rotated away on one corner revealing a hidden door underneath, flush with the floor.

Opening the door, she peered into the darkness of her storm shelter. From where she stood, she could make out the first three steps of the staircase, enough to descend without breaking her neck. Once low enough, her hand reached out in the darkness and flicked on a light. Now that she could see below, she reached up and closed the door behind her.