Halloween: The Official Movie Novelization

27

While Cameron sat out a few songs, Allyson stayed on the dance floor with several of her girlfriends, none as close as Vicky, but most of them she’d known for years—dating back to grade school—through various shared classes and group projects. As such, they were mainly school friends, not girls she hung out with after school. Yet, with Vicky absent, she thought maybe she needed to expand her list of unconditional friends. Too often Vicky was not just her bestie, but her only real friend.

Robin Barnes had come to the dance as a bloody nun. Rolling with the Exquisite Corpse theme, Emma Wagner had come as a reanimated corpse, reassembled from severed limbs, sporting rough stitches to indicate her head, arms, and hands had been reattached from one or more corpses. Of course, for maximum effect, most of the stitches leaked fake blood. With gruesome facial makeup designed to look as if the flesh had been removed from one side of her jaw, Barbara Decosta had come as a zombie cheerleader, wearing a tattered uniform and bloodstained pompoms. Finally, Kacey Dayton had come as a lady pirate, wearing a tricorn hat with a red feather, an eyepatch, black leather vest with a tattered skirt, and carrying a cutlass made from cardboard and tinfoil, which she kept misplacing throughout the night. She blamed her absentmindedness on lack of depth perception from the eyepatch.

“Okay—what is Oscar doing?” Barb asked.

Allyson followed her gaze to a refreshment table, where Oscar, looking dazed and confused in his red-framed sunglasses, attempted to eat a giant dill pickle while still wearing his plastic vampire fangs. Without much luck, it seemed. The pickle dripped juice on the floor along with chewed bits he hadn’t managed to keep inside his mouth, some of which he’d caught with his free hand.

“Who knows?” Allyson said. “Something lewd, I’m guessing.”

“Gross, you mean,” Robin said. “You came with him?”

“Oh, no,” Allyson said, sounding more defensive than she intended, but feeling embarrassment by association. “I’m with Cameron. Oscar tagged along with us.”

Allyson was surprised Oscar stood alone. Without her monopolizing Cameron’s time, she expected Oscar to glue himself to his friend’s elbow or at least try his luck again with the Haddonfield High cheerleaders.

“Cameron?” Kacey asked. “Would that be the same Cameron over there chatting up Tigress Kim?”

Allyson turned, looking for Cameron in the direction Kacey had indicated. Dressed as Bonnie Parker, Cameron stood out in the crowd, but Kim could have come with her own spotlight and it wouldn’t have made her more prominent. With her black leather bustier flaunting impressive cleavage and a whole lot of exposed, orange-painted, black-striped skin, Kim popped wherever she stood. All eyes seemed to follow her no matter where she went. Compared to her, even the cheerleading squad blended into the background.

At that moment, she stood right next to Cameron, easily recognizable even though his back was to Allyson. She’d been smiling through the dance number and small talk, but as soon as she saw Cameron beside Kim, her smile wilted, overwhelmed by a sudden pang of jealousy.

Wearing the slanted beret and Vicky’s pencil skirt, Cameron couldn’t be accused of sneaking around. He had to have known Allyson would notice the company he kept. Fighting off a panicked sense of embarrassment, she tried to reason that their proximity to each other was totally innocent. Maybe they had a class together and were poking fun at their oddball teacher. Before she could halfway convince herself of such a mitigating scenario, Kim took Cameron’s hand, leaned close to him and kissed his neck.

Jaw hanging as she stood motionless on the dance floor, hardly aware of her friends behind her, Allyson stared as if paralyzed by Cameron’s betrayal. At that moment, she wanted to run out of the gymnasium and straight home. She always tried to live in the moment, but in that moment she thought she might die of embarrassment. She’d grown gradually more comfortable in her skin all evening, but now she felt like an immature fool.

Cameron and Kim turned around. Unlike Allyson, Cameron was smiling. Until he noticed Allyson staring at the two of them. Then he pulled away from Kim and called, “Allyson. Come here!”

Allyson shook her head, a definitive “no.”

Cameron nodded.

Again, Allyson shook her head.

Turning sideways for a moment, he pulled the metal flask from his pocket and took a quick sip before hiding it again. He whispered something to Kim, whereupon Allyson’s imagination ran wild, wondering what he’d said to her. Unflattering possibilities raced through her mind. “Wait here while I ditch Miss Buzzkill.” “Let’s continue this later.” “Meet you behind the fieldhouse.” And so on…

With Cameron crossing the dance floor toward her, Allyson shook off the belittling voice in her head. When he stood close enough that she wouldn’t have to shout and further embarrass herself, she said, “What are you doing? What was that?”

Eyes glazed, he was clearly buzzed. And for some reason, that made her more incensed.

“I just need a kiss from you,” he said.

“Looks like you just got one from Kim,” Allyson said bitterly.

From behind her, with a rustling of pompoms, zombie cheerleader Barb said, “She shoots, she scores.”

Allyson glanced back over her shoulder. “Please,” she said. “This is private.”

“No worries,” Robin said, palms raised as she backed away.

“Be strong,” Kacey said, patting Allyson’s upper arm.

Allyson waited a moment as her friends wandered out of hearing range, then turned back to Cameron, seething.

“That was nothing,” Cameron said, smiling in a lame attempt to defuse her anger. “It was nothing.” He glanced around. “Can we not do this in the middle of the dance floor?”

Allyson looked around, realizing that more than a few of the nearby dancers had started to dance less and stare more. Allyson nodded curtly and followed him toward the refreshment area. Oscar and his big pickle were no longer in the area to attract more unwanted attention.

“You were saying?” Allyson asked, hands on her hips.

“That it—that kiss—was nothing,” he repeated. “Seriously.”

“Really?”

From the frown on his face, she could tell the nonchalant attitude had reached its limit with Cameron. She began to realize it wasn’t in his nature to defend his behavior. Maybe because of his unusual family situation or because of the way he was raised. Whatever it was, he wasn’t comfortable when forced to meet the expectations of others.

“Yeah,” he said flatly. “Every time I turn around you’re buried in your phone. Looking at it, texting with people, talking with people. It sucks. And I didn’t do anything with Kim. She came up to me. Don’t cry about it.”

“Blame me,” Allyson said. “Blame Kim. Everyone but Cameron.”

“Whatever.”

“You’re drunk,” she said angrily. “Oscar got you fucked up.”

“Exactly,” Cameron said, smiling. “See? Not my fault.”

“You’ve been drinking from that flask all night,” she said. “You. Not Oscar.”

Cameron arched his eyebrows. “Who do you think gives me free refills?”

“Not funny.”

“Come ’ere,” he said, voice slurring as he smiled in a mushed-mouth sort of way that irritated her. “Come on. Stop.”

She tried to back away, but he grabbed her arm to pull her close to him.

“Don’t,” Allyson warned.

Her phone vibrated. Distracted, she removed it from her pocket to check the screen display: Mom.

Cameron practically rolled his eyes in disgust. “See!” he bellowed. “This piece of shit.”

He snatched the phone out of her hand before she could answer the call—before she could even decide if she wanted to answer the call—and tossed it toward the serving table, right into the massive plastic bowl filled with nacho cheese.

Allyson thought she might burst a blood vessel in her head as she glared at him in disbelief. “What the fuck?”

Dave ran up the stairs with the kitchen knife in his hand.

Where the hell is Vicky?

He should have seen her by now. As a responsible babysitter she should have been in pursuit of the wild-eyed child the Morriseys had left in her care. And yet he hadn’t heard a peep from her.

Pausing at the top of the stairs, he called out, “Vicky?”

He cocked his head, belatedly alert. Something was off… Slowly, he walked toward the open bedroom door at the end of the hall.

“Vicky, you really need to calm that kid down before he hurts himself,” Dave said. “He ran right out the back door.” Only a few feet from the doorway. “Like a bat out of hell.”

Nothing.

“Really think that kid needs therapy,” Dave added, his voice sounding gradually more nervous to his own ears. “Vicky?”

What if the kid’s right?

Glancing down, Dave stared at the hardwood floor right outside the bedroom, at a thin streak of red, like smeared paint—

Blood!

To his left—a moment’s distraction—he noticed more blood smeared on the bottom of a couple balusters, as if hands had gripped—before—

The screaming he thought he’d heard from the garage—Julian’s panic—

“Vicky! What’s—?”

As his gaze flicked toward the dark doorway, a shape rushed into the light—

Oh, fuck!

A powerful hand clamped around his throat, lifting him off his feet. Dave had only a moment to glimpse the pale, dead face of his attacker, the shock of hair. Only as he tried to swing his knife down toward that face did he see it for what it was—a mask. But the blow was obstructed by the man’s arm as he swung Dave around to slam him into the wall. The jarring impact left Dave’s arm numb, and the knife fell from his senseless fingers.

The man released him while trying to stab Dave with a knife of his own and, had Dave’s legs not crumpled beneath him, the bloodstained knife might have impaled his chest. Instead, the point of the blade scarred the wallpaper, digging a furrow in the drywall underneath. Dave scrambled across the floor, trying to scoop up his own weapon. His numb hand collided with the handle and sent it spinning toward the top of the stairs.

The knife stopped beneath the large wall clock.

When Dave tried to stand, a boot-clad foot shoved him in the small of the back and he fell face first again. Momentum carried him closer to his knife, but his attacker closed the distance between them. Diving, Dave grabbed the knife and climbed to his feet, the staircase at his back. When his attacker came close enough, Dave swung the blade again, another overhand blow. Instantly, he realized his mistake. The man in the deathly white mask snagged Dave’s wrist in his left hand and shoved him.

Unbalanced, Dave fell backward, down the steps, colliding with the railing and the wall, trying to hold onto the knife after each impact, yet worried the blade would end up six inches deep in his abdomen before he hit bottom. At some point, his head struck the wall with enough force to daze him. For a second everything went dark…

When he regained his senses, he found himself on his back, the knife no longer in his possession. Groggy, he tried to rise and felt a spike of pain shoot up from the base of his neck to the center of his skull, his vision blurred. The figure in dark coveralls with the white smear of a face descended the stairs in stereo: two of them, side by side, eerily calm, almost unhurried, as if they knew Dave wouldn’t escape.

By squinting, Dave cured his double vision, but his head pounded more. One murderous attacker was still one too many. On elbows and heels, he pushed himself away from the base of the stairs, unable to take his eyes off the dark shape looming closer with each passing second.

The man had reached the bottom of the stairs.

Dave’s palm brushed the handle of his knife and he gasped with relief, fingers closing around it. No longer defenseless, he scrambled to his feet. The sudden motion triggered a bout of dizziness. He swayed and staggered, fighting to regain his balance.

The stranger’s hand clamped over Dave’s right wrist, twisted his body completely around, and jerked his arm behind him, pulling up so hard Dave thought he’d dislocate his shoulder. He could feel the edge of his own knife pressing against his back. Fearing his attacker wanted to disarm him, Dave clutched the handle, gritting his teeth against the escalating pain in his upper arm and shoulder. But a moment later, his attacker dropped his own knife. Dave fought against the painful grip, shoving his left elbow back, trying to strike an effective blow—but failing miserably.

Dave’s struggles grew feeble as nausea surged and he broke out in a damp sweat. The man’s other hand clamped under the base of Dave’s head and, again, lifted him off his feet.

Only when his attacker slammed him against a wall did Dave notice they had crossed into the living room. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the reflected glow of the TV on the street-facing wall, the broadcast voices too faint to discern any meaning. Then the hand that had such a ferocious grip on his wrist edged toward his palm, prying Dave’s fingers open to seize control of the kitchen knife.

Once he had the knife, the man released Dave’s agonized arm, which sagged, trembling, to his side, but he still held Dave pinned against the wall by the one-handed grip at the base of his skull. Dave’s feet dangled inches off the ground.

He hadn’t heard his knife fall.

For a terrified moment, Dave wondered what—