Halloween: The Official Movie Novelization

14

After leaving Mt. Sinclair Cemetery Aaron drove their Ford rental car onto the lot of the Stallion Service Center for a fill-up. Dana sat in the back of the car, flipping through their storage box of research material, including a laminated binder with photos of the 1978 incident. She spread out selected items, with an emphasis on newspaper clippings, across the other half of the seat, creating a makeshift desktop.

With Dana engaged in research, Aaron switched off the ignition and got out to fill the gas tank from a self-service pump. He stood and waited while the pump gave him a running count of gallons pumped and dollars sunk. While he waited for the final tally, he thought about the obstacles they’d faced—their inability to get a reaction from Myers at Smith’s Grove and Laurie’s unwillingness to confront her attempted murderer—and what they needed to do next to complete the story. With Myers’ transfer, they’d missed the window for a face-to-face meeting between the two. Of course, they could build the story without that, a complete story, but that confrontation would have been a brilliant highlight.

Aaron tapped the window, catching Dana’s attention. “Any chance at all Colorado would reconsider?”

“The ‘less than desirable’ location?” she asked, referring to Sartain’s open disdain for Glass Hill. Aaron nodded. She flipped through some pages in the storage box. “Looked into it some more. Not as bad as Sartain implied. If anything, a bit more modern than Smith’s Grove. But he’s right about one thing. They will put him in a deep hole. No contact. Sorry.”

“Shame,” Aaron said.

“Besides, there’s no chance we’d convince Laurie to go.”

Dead end, he thought with a sigh. But we’ll work around it.

At the full-service pump opposite the self-service side, a red Ram 350 van refueled. Hand-painted white lettering arced across the side of the extended van advertised The Holy Apostle’s Resurrection Church in what amounted to a four-wheeled billboard. An older couple sat in the front seats. They looked like grandparents, but the van was large enough to transport a modest church choir. An old woman in the back seemed to stare at Aaron without seeing him. Not wanting to draw attention to himself or incite any attempts at proselytizing, he resisted the urge to wave.

Dana had already moved on from the Colorado roadblock. She called out to him from the backseat, “If we could get those initial police transcripts from the press conference and post-conviction proceedings we might have a great prologue for our story there.”

After following the man and woman to the gas station, The Shape parks the stolen Bronco across the lot and walks behind the man as he pumps gas. The Shape approaches the service center and its open garage bays.

An old woman inside a red van watches The Shape without reaction. She sees an old man in a white tunic, white trousers, open shoes. She does not see The Shape because The Shape is incomplete. But soon…

Pushing the storage box out of her way, Dana climbed out of the backseat of the rental car to stretch her legs and make use of the restroom. She approached Aaron to let him know.

“We have access to Brackett’s personal journal on Michael,” Aaron said, “as well as city records.”

“What are you waiting for?” she said, smiling.

She squeezed his upper arm and strode toward the service center’s office to inquire about the restroom. On the way, she passed one of the open garage bays. For some reason, the employees had left a stack of loose tires outside between each bay. She glimpsed a mechanic in a jumpsuit in the first bay, raising the hood of a pickup truck.

Before ducking into the office, she glanced over at Aaron and saw a woman and her son get into the church van with the elderly couple. The old woman seemed to stare at her impassively. But Dana couldn’t think of anything about herself that would warrant that level of scrutiny. She’d dressed rather conservatively in a gray sweater vest over a striped long-sleeved blouse, black slacks and boots.

Not that it mattered. With everyone back onboard, the church van drove off the lot as Dana stepped into the office. Behind the counter, next to an electronic cash register and a transistor radio tuned to a classic rock station, a man wearing the same style dark coveralls as the mechanic aimlessly flipped through the pages of a tabloid-sized newspaper. At the sound of an overhead door chime, the clerk looked up at her expectantly.

“Bathroom?” she inquired.

Hooking his thumb around in an arc behind his shoulder, the clerk said, “Back out around the side.”

Nodding, Dana stepped back outside and walked around the corner, past an ice machine and another stack of tires, these painted in alternating red and white layers. She supposed it was meant to be festive, but they still came across as sloppy. The phrase “lipstick on a pig” came to mind, which made her think of Aaron’s horrendous ham and egg fable, and she chuckled. The man was gorgeous, with a sense of style, but sometimes displayed a jarring lack of common sense.

Between a brick wall painted white and a partial privacy fence she found the door to the ambitiously signed “Ladies’ Lounge.” Because she was at a gas station, not a nightclub, she kept her expectations suitably low. Clean and functional would suffice.

Prepared for the worst, she stepped inside the restroom.

Reasonably clean, she thought, but the odor leaves something to be desired.

Pulling a paper towel from the dispenser, she approached the row of three stalls. Using the paper rather than her bare hands, she pushed open the first door and grimaced. Second stall… not much better. Figurative fingers crossed, she opened the last stall door. It was… acceptable.

She ducked inside, closed and locked the door, set down her bag and took a seat.

Absently, Aaron watched the Holy Apostle Church van drive away. Then he caught himself staring off into space, much as the old woman had been. Maybe she hadn’t been looking at him after all. With a mechanical thump, the gas pump handle shut off, signaling a full tank. Aaron wondered if one full tank would get them through the rest of their field research.

Aaron noticed a piece of paper shoved into the credit-card slot of the fuel pump: PLEASE PAY INSIDE.

Aaron looked around the empty lot.

Dana still hadn’t returned.

He called her name.

Sitting on the only acceptable toilet seat in the so-called Ladies’ Lounge, Dana amused herself by reading the graffiti scrawled on the walls and door of the stall. One to her left read, “Amazing Grace come sit on my face. Don’t make me cry, I need your… pie.”

Dana wondered if this “Grace” person was real and, if so, what about her made her so amazing. From her bag, Dana withdrew a permanent marker and crossed out the word “pie.” Right above it she wrote “smile.” Thinking of Aaron this morning, she chuckled to herself.

As the bathroom door opened, she fell silent, self-conscious.

She heard measured footfalls on the tiled floor. Not the click-click of high heels or the squeak of rubber-soled trainers. Heavier…

The first stall door thumped open, rebounding with force.

Dana flinched at the noise.

In the ensuing pause, she heard breathing. Steady breathing, but, again, a heavy sound.

She sat still, afraid to move a muscle, her own breathing shallow.

The footfalls moved closer, stopping at the second stall.

Even though she braced herself, the abrupt bang as the second door slammed open and shook the partition between stalls made her jump.

Aaron walked to the service station’s small office and opened the door to pay the clerk for his gas. A chime sounded as he walked through the doorway—and froze.

The clerk’s lifeless body sat slumped over the counter, one arm flung over a transistor radio and a blood-flecked cash register, his neck twisted at an extreme angle to reveal his broken and bloody jaw, all but ripped out of his face. Most of his teeth had been smashed out. The pool of blood spreading around his head glued his face to the pages of a newspaper.

“Dana!” Aaron called.

A plate-glass door to his left led into the garage, a pickup truck in the first bay, its hood propped open for service. Aaron surveyed the room through the glass but saw no sign of the mechanic. Slipping through the doorway into the garage, he called out, “Hello! I need help! Have you seen—?”

Again, Aaron froze.

First, he saw blood splattered over the engine block, some dripping to the floor below. Then he saw the man’s body, clad only in a dingy white t-shirt and briefs, lying face down in a larger pool of blood near a wooden-handled mini sledgehammer. The back of the man’s head looked like raw meat—wet clumps of brain matter mixed with bone splinters. Someone had crept up behind him while he worked on the truck and caved his head in with the hammer, then taken the dark coveralls from his lifeless body.

Frantic, Aaron yelled, “DANA?”

Other than the dead mechanic, the cluttered garage seemed unoccupied.

Casting about for anything useful, Aaron spotted a crowbar on a workbench and grabbed it.