Halloween: The Official Movie Novelization

37

Phillips stopped their patrol car right in the lane, facing Hawkins’ car. For safety’s sake, he flipped on their light bar, bathing the night in blue and red flashes of light. Last thing they needed was some lead-footed speed demon to plow into both police cruisers. Both he and Francis strained to see what was happening beyond the glare of the headlights. At least one standing figure, indistinct beyond the light…

Phillips switched on his spotlight, adjusting the handle to turn the beam toward the dark figure. The pale mask and dark coveralls were unmistakable.

“It’s him,” Francis said.

Phillips turned on the unit’s roof-mounted megaphone, brought the mic to his mouth and pressed the talk button. “Hands where I can see ’em! DON’T MOVE!”

The Shape raised his hands, but to shield his eyes, then abruptly dropped to the ground, out of sight.

Steeling his courage, Phillips said, “Let’s go.”

Francis nodded nervously.

They were small-town cops who dealt with vandalism, juvenile delinquents, the occasional stolen car, and maybe even an armed robbery once in a blue moon. They had no experience with mass murderers, serial killers, or raving lunatics.

First time for everything, Phillips told himself. Nobody comes fresh out of the academy with this kind of experience.

He and Francis exited their cruiser, weapons drawn, separating to approach Hawkins’ car from either side. In the military they called it a pincer movement, designed to attack the enemy on both flanks. All Phillips could think about was the distinct possibility of crossfire. If one of them got an itchy trigger finger, he could inadvertently take out his partner.

Phillips circled to the left, checked the side of the cruiser and the back, but found nothing. Francis took the right and paused by the side of the car. Phillips thought he heard Francis gag.

“Oh, Jesus…” he said, back of his hand to his mouth.

“What is it?”

“The doc from Smith’s Grove.”

“Is he dead?” Phillips asked, coming around to the driver’s side.

“Considering most of his brains are outside his skull,” Francis said. “Yeah, I’d say the poor son of a bitch is well and truly dead.”

“Christ,” Phillips said when he saw the splatter of gore covering the road. “How am I supposed to finish my damn sandwich after this?”

“You’ll power through,” Francis said. “Check under the car?”

“Fuck—no!” Phillips exclaimed nervously, abruptly dropping to peer under the cruiser, then cursing when the knee of his uniform trousers pressed into something wet and gooey. “Nothing.”

“He was right here,” Francis said. “Where the hell did he go?”

“And what happened to Hawkins and the girl, Allyson?”

Before the two police officers climb out of their car, The Shape follows the girl’s example, crouching low and scrambling toward the woods. But The Shape does not run away. Stalking past them, hunched over along the embankment, The Shape takes up position behind their own cruiser while they are distracted by their examination of the doctor’s body.

And The Shape watches…

As she had done more times than she could remember, Laurie walked through the rooms of her house, checking and setting her security and defenses. In her bedroom, she walked to the balcony door and secured the multiple locks she’d added to the simple latch lock years ago. Next, she verified that her windows were locked. They were also secured by the same woven wire mesh she’d installed on all the downstairs windows.

Of course, nothing was foolproof, but she made sure there were no soft points of entry into her house and anyone attempting to breach her defenses would make one hell of a racket. No surprise attacks in her own home.

Though Karen had intended to stay in her mother’s underground shelter until Michael Myers was captured or killed, she had become nervous waiting for Allyson’s arrival. As the minutes ticked by, her anxiety had increased to the point where she needed to escape the cramped quarters. Once upstairs, she’d returned to the only room in the entire farmhouse that might offer her some comfort.

Karen sat on the bare mattress of her childhood bedroom and tried to calm herself. Emotions flooded through her, almost overwhelming her with memories she had hoped to forget. To chase away the dark, she turned on both bedside lamps, casting the room in a warm glow. Looking around the sparsely decorated, wood-paneled room—a summer hat with a wide brim hung over the headboard of the bed, a white analog clock and a black-and-white framed photo of her with her mother sat on one end table—she felt little comfort in her return. She had no memories of comfort to draw upon. The only normal childhood memory was sparked by the detailed two-story dollhouse on the floor, complete with its own internal lights. She remembered herself at eight years old playing with the dollhouse, imagining life in a normal home, without the worries and the fear that made her continually gnaw on her fingernails until they bled.

She’d never really understood the phantom danger her mother spoke of, but it crippled her early years emotionally, never allowing room for joy or discovery or a sense of wonder. Danger lurked around every corner. Sleep itself was dangerous. You were vulnerable when you slept. No wonder her childhood slumber was always plagued by vague nightmares, images she could never quite understand even though they haunted her waking hours, filling her with an ever-present sense of dread.

Truthfully, she hadn’t felt any peace until child services removed her from her mother’s care and what she had called the danger house. No matter how safe the house seemed, Laurie feared it wouldn’t be enough. Karen always sensed that worry in her mother. How can a child ever feel safe when her parent goes through her days in a state of perpetual panic?

Laurie walked into Karen’s bedroom and immediately checked the window locks, even though the windows were shielded by steel mesh.

Some things never change, Karen thought bitterly.

Standing at the last window, Laurie peered through the blinds.

“Anything?”

“Not yet,” Laurie said.

Because it was always “just a matter of time.”

“I’m scared,” Karen admitted. “I don’t know how to do this.”

Coming to the bed, Laurie grabbed Karen’s hands and looked her in the eyes.

“You never wanted to listen when I spoke about that night…”

Karen started to protest but Laurie shook her head.

“But this is why,” Laurie said. “We fight to survive. He is a killer. But he will be killed tonight. I’ve been preparing for this for a long time. And whether you know it or not, so have you.”

And suddenly, Karen found herself weeping, but nodded “yes” to her mother, because that’s what her mother wanted to believe, that Karen would be ready. Now Karen had to find a way to convince herself. She could tell by the sympathetic look in her mother’s eyes that she sensed Karen’s self-doubt.

“How do you know he’ll come here?”

Laurie started to reply, then stopped herself. She sat on the bed beside Karen, squeezing her knee as she made eye contact. “Karen… I’m sorry. For everything.”

Laurie’s eyes began to well up with tears, a rare show of weakness for her. Karen’s mother prided herself on her strength and determination, to be ready for every fight, to never back down or surrender. Sensing her mother’s vulnerability as a reflection of her own, Karen leaned into her mother and hugged her. After a startled moment, Laurie hugged her fiercely in return.

Allyson scrambled through the woods as quickly and quietly as she could, circling around to the back of her grandmother’s property. In the dark, she’d twisted her ankle more than once and felt it throbbing with her heartbeat. Bloody, tired, limping and drenched with sweat, she grabbed a tree and held on while she caught her breath. Her hands—and no doubt her face, since she’d swiped at tears and biting insects several times—were smeared with dirt and stippled with blood from several ungraceful falls into clotted underbrush.

She peered through a clearing ahead, lit by the light of the half-moon, and saw ghostly white figures, sitting and standing, utterly motionless before a wall made of interlocked railroad ties. Taking a few steps closer, she stopped when she realized they were mannequins, some missing limbs. Some posed around a tractor tire. Their frozen, bullet-riddled faces made for a disturbing tableau. Even though she knew they weren’t human, their presence gave the clearing an eerie feeling, almost as if it were haunted.

Standing there before their silent ranks, Allyson had the strange feeling that if she joined them in the moonlight she would meet her end, that her cold corpse would remain there, trapped with them forever, paralyzed in death.

As soon as Karen had declared her need to get out of the underground shelter, at least until Allyson arrived, Ray thought it pointless to stay hidden down there alone, so he’d returned to the kitchen, giving his nervous wife space to deal with her nerves, and steering clear of Laurie as she checked the locks and bolts on her doors and windows… again. For now, they were stuck in a waiting game. Ray stood leaning against the kitchen island, examining a yo-yo Karen had brought home from the community center after one of the kids had tangled the string into several knots. He was good at undoing knots, so she’d asked him to “fix it” before she took it back to the center. He’d completely forgotten about it, but the nerves and anxiety he hadn’t been able to shake since the police brought them to Laurie’s house needed an outlet. Untangling the knots gave him something to do with his hands while they waited for the police to bring Allyson to them. After a few minutes, he removed the last knot and coiled up the string to test the yo-yo.

He flipped it down, watched it spin, then gave a slight tug to bring it up to his palm in a flash.

Movement and a flash of light caught his attention—something on one of the security feed monitors. The motion-detecting rooftop spotlights had flashed on. With the yo-yo clutched in his hand, he walked closer to the small black-and-white screen, watching as a police cruiser, bathed in the overhead light, pulled up to the front of the house, absently plowed into a couple of trash cans, knocking them over, then came to a stop.

He frowned. Were they doing shots out there while waiting for Allyson?

It had taken long enough for the cops to get her here, but at least the waiting was finally over. Karen and he could finally relax… well, relax as much as possible with a psychopath on the loose who probably wanted to kill Karen’s mother, if not all of them, before the night was over.

Ray passed through the kitchen archway, into the living room, circled behind the loveseat and stopped at the front door. He peered through one of the vertical panels of decorative obscure glass. Through the distorted glass, the only details he could make out were the cop car and its flashing red and blue lights. Even less detail than what the black-and-white security monitors revealed, especially since, without subsequent movement, the rooftop spotlights had gone dark.

After about thirty seconds spent fiddling with multiple locks and lifting the horizontal drop bar out of its brackets, Ray stepped out onto the weathered floorboards of the front porch, feeling the old wood give slightly under his weight. By now, he would have expected Allyson to have jumped out of the car and run up the porch steps, but the police cruiser just idled there… waiting.

“Any word?” he called, absently tossing the yo-yo down and up again.

No response.

Only metallic clinking from the row of bell-shaped wind chimes hanging from the roof of the porch.

What’s taking so long? She should be here by now.

“Any word on Allyson?” he asked, louder. “You guys need coffee or something?”

Ray leaned forward, straining to see Phillips in the front seat of the cruiser. Ray waved. Still no response. He spread his hands. Anything?

“What the hell?” he muttered and descended the rotting porch stairs, grateful his foot didn’t break through any of the treads. “Too damn lazy to get out of the car?”

The cruiser was too close to the front of the house for his movement to trigger the spotlights, so everything remained relatively dark. He peered through the side window into the car, but glare from what seemed like a flashlight and the fogged window made it difficult to see anything but the general shape of Phillips sitting in the driver’s seat.

Irritated, he rapped on the driver’s side window.

Phillips didn’t budge, so Ray pulled the door open—

—and took a quick step back in shock.

Phillips’ throat had been slit from ear to ear, creating what looked like an apron of blood over his police jacket. A metallic pen with a thin blade jutting from its tip had been rammed into his ear.

Propped on Phillips’ lap was a severed human head.

And it was glowing!

The human head had been carved to resemble a jack-o’-lantern, with triangle eyes cut through his skull, a cutout triangle nose where his actual nose had been, and a jagged smile sliced into and beyond either side of his actual mouth. A flashlight had been shoved into the neck hole to illuminate the gruesome nightmare.

With the facial features mutilated, Ray couldn’t be sure, but the hair looked familiar—it had to be Officer Francis’s head.

Overwhelmed, Ray stumbled backward.

Suddenly, the clinking of the porch wind chimes seemed louder—closer—than they should.

Turning toward the sound, Ray saw a dark shape wearing a pale mask instantly close the distance between them and wrap the chain of the wind chimes around Ray’s neck. Choking and wheezing for air, Ray fought against the strong hands tugging the metal links deep into the soft flesh of his throat. He flailed with his fists, unable to get sufficient leverage for a solid blow. Twisting, bending, staggering left and right, he tried to break free, but The Shape moved with him, never relenting. With each passing second, Ray weakened; his burning muscles, denied oxygen, began to fail him.

A deeper darkness than the night sky encroached on his vision, spreading fast, narrowing his view to pinpoints, as his legs gave out and his arms dropped to his sides, until finally the light winked out.