Halloween: The Official Movie Novelization

7

Inside the Haddonfield Harmony Community Center, Karen sat at the head of a table in her therapy room, which, due to the gathering of pre-teen children, had the appearance of a classroom. But these kids were at-risk youths, surviving in less than desirable home situations or shuffling between foster homes, some of them victims of abuse. In almost all cases they were dealing with emotional issues that would be troubling for adults, let alone children their age. Some exhibited signs of PTSD.

For the past few sessions, Karen had the children work on homemade puppets. The older kids made boy or girl puppets, now and then adding goofy touches, such as feathers for hair or googly eyes. The younger kids tended to give their puppets costumes, so Karen spotted a pirate, an astronaut, a scarecrow, and a few superheroes, along with a princess with absurdly long hair, and a couple of Halloween-themed ghosts and witches.

The children held their puppets upright on the table, while they bowed their heads, almost as if they were napping or might fall asleep while their puppets discussed their feelings. In this way they were free to project their own fear and emotions through the puppets. But the puppets might or might not be projections of themselves. Sometimes the puppets represented the person who disturbed them, frightened them. One boy, who had made a clown puppet, had since abandoned it and was preoccupied with untangling a yo-yo.

“Who wants to go first?” Karen asked.

“I’m King Bradley,” Tyler said, tilting his royal puppet left and right, “and I get angry at the rain.”

Karen recalled from Tyler’s file that his stepfather’s name was Bradley.

“When my brother comes home from work,” Cody said, jumping in, “I get scared, cuz he brings the guys to fight and throw people through walls.”

Mia placed her girl puppet flat on the table, pressing the rainbow-colored dress with the palm of her left hand, and raised her head. She looked at Karen with heartbreaking vulnerability in her eyes. “If you run away from home then you have no one to hurt you.”

Karen couldn’t decide if the little girl spoke to her own situation, or if she was offering advice to Cody. But she couldn’t endorse pre-teens running away from home. There were better paths to safety. “We need to look at those who love us for protection and comfort,” Karen said. “But listen to your feelings. You have all lived through very difficult situations, and we are confronted with bad people from time to time.”

Mia gave her a slight nod. A few of the other children murmured agreement with her statement. Some were still closed off from expression. But all listened intently.

“But by using our communications, right? By using our voices and telling grown-ups that we trust what is happening in our minds, we can help ourselves overcome our problems and honor our feelings.”

“Like you?” Mia asked.

Karen smiled. “That’s right,” she said. “Like me. But I’m not the only one you can trust.”

Mia nodded, picked up her puppet and lowered her head to the table, ready to begin.

Almost an hour later, Laurie drove her black Nissan pickup truck through a rundown neighborhood, a place where she wouldn’t want to walk alone at night, not without a whistle and a can of mace, not to mention one of her guns. All the houses she passed were in various states of disrepair; the worst had plywood—and in one case a sheet of cardboard—in place over broken windows. Graffiti tags had sprung up on walls, traffic lights, and some of the plywood panels.

Almost all the cars she passed were at least two decades removed from their showroom-floor days. One rested at the curb on cinderblocks. Many were missing hubcaps, with various dings or primer-coated quarter panels. Some of the small front yards were well-maintained but the majority had been overrun by weeds.

Several adults sat on front stoops, some drinking cans or bottles of beer, appearing lost and listless, no job or commitment to set them in motion, left behind by society to fend for themselves with the odds stacked against them.

Laurie checked a street sign, made a left turn, and saw the community center ahead. Middle-aged men played basketball on cement courts, tossing the ball through rings with missing nets—swiped or never supplied. As Laurie swung into a parking space opposite the community center, she noted a group of children, seven to ten years old if she had to guess, file into a white county van. Then she spotted Karen, standing next to who she believed was her daughter’s assistant as they waved goodbye to the kids before returning to the building.

Laurie sat in the pickup truck for several minutes while the cooling engine ticked, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel, then heaved a sigh. She wanted to clear the air between her and her daughter, and not only for Allyson’s sake. But was it fair to confront Karen in her workplace with a personal matter? Would she be receptive? Or defensive? With strong emotions involved, any discussion could go either way.

The last thing Laurie wanted was to sour Karen’s professional relationships, damaging an area of her daughter’s life untainted by Laurie’s obsessions.

Okay, Laurie thought. A discussion for another time then.

After starting the pickup, Laurie drove to a better part of town, to the last place she had enjoyed carefree days.

Allyson sat in the back corner of history class, her attention flagging. After calculus and physics back to back, she lacked sufficient engagement for history, last class of her school day. She’d tried to focus on Ms Dejohn’s smartboard slideshow about the bitter relationship between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton leading up to the famous duel, but after Dejohn refused to take the bait from Matt Evans to discuss the popular musical she’d seen seven times, all the historical details became a blur of political infighting.

Allyson would have preferred the Broadway discussion, but ultimately the lesson plan won out. Ms Dejohn was all business—or history, rather. During class, she had no time for pop culture.

Stifling a yawn, Allyson glanced out the window and saw a lone figure standing beyond the school fence.

A woman with shoulder-length blond hair and wireframe glasses.

Allyson sat up straighter. Grandmother?

From high in the home-team bleachers above the fieldhouse, Laurie watched the Haddonfield Huskers football team, wearing full pads under their blue-and-yellow home uniforms, run through practice drills at the barked instructions of their coach. Grunting linemen pushed blocking sleds. The quarterback practiced taking handoffs, backpedaling and tossing passes to receivers and running backs. And, with robotic precision, the placekicker booted one field goal after another.

Allyson sat beside Laurie, flipping through the stack of cash in the orange envelope Laurie received from the two British journalists. Other than the first few rows of seats, they had the bleachers to themselves.

“This is… I can’t accept this,” Allyson said, holding the envelope out to Laurie.

Laurie ignored the gesture, looking across the field. “Use it for whatever your heart desires.”

Allyson lowered the envelope to her lap and considered. “I’ll use it for—”

“It’s for you to have fun,” Laurie said to Allyson before anything unnecessarily altruistic came out of her mouth. “Enjoy.”

Laurie stood, preparing to leave.

“You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?”

Laurie looked down at her with a confused frown.

As if the implication had been obvious, Allyson said, “Like… kill yourself?”

“Kill myself?”

“That’s what they say in… That you give stuff away… And I know you’re having trouble… And—”

Smiling, Laurie said, “Not today, kiddo. Michael Myers is leaving Smith’s Grove tonight. Forty years from that night. He’s being transferred. Locked away forever. That’s his fate. I want to see him first. To say goodbye.”

“That’s your fate?”

Laurie considered. “Maybe so,” she said, smiling. “To face my fears.”

Allyson chuckled. “You’re Laurie Strode,” she said. “You’re not scared of people. People are scared of you.”

“Ha. Maybe,” Laurie said. But she recognized uncomfortable truths in her own history, traits and behaviors she couldn’t deny but found hard to change. “If you allow your fears to take over… If you allow yourself to become a victim, it attacks you. It attacks you spiritually. Holds you back. Back from realizing your own destiny.” She stared down at the field for a moment, trying to decide on the desired resolution for herself, for her life. And the answer was predictably grim. “If I could… I’d be the one to put him in the ground. ‘Goodbye, Michael,’ I’d say ‘Goodbye.’”

On the field below them, in exhaustive preparation for their upcoming battle, football players in helmets and pads raced and crashed into each other.