 
Strictly Not For Sale:

This release is not for profit, fan fiction, to be sold under no circumstances

Table of Contents

Introduction

Ben Tramer's Not Going to Homecoming

Halloween 3: The Monster's Mask

THE LAST STRAW: The Reincarnation of Michael Myers

The Halloween Hunt

The Haddonfield Companion

Showing Scary

Inspiration

Helloween

Halloween Returns

Halloween: Remains

One Night in Haddonfield

Halloween Returns

Halloween Returns

Halloween: Return to Haddonfield

Halloween: Day of the Dead

Haint Night

Behind the Mask

7 Facts About the Personification of Evil

You May Think They Scare Me (You're Probably Right)

# Introduction

By Matt Molgaard

I was just a boy the first time I nearly defecated in my pants while watching John Carpenter's ground breaking slasher film, Halloween.

It left an undeniable scar on my psyche. And despite being absolutely terrified by the film, I found a mystifying degree of magnetism in that sensation. See, as a boy I fed on fear. Even as a naïve youngster, that impression of dread reminded me that I was alive. And the nightmares... well, they were shocking and satisfying – already understanding that what we see on film is a creation and not a reality – instilled a feeling inside of my core that I yearned to cling to at every chance.

Needless to say I would go on to hunt down every Halloween picture to see release. Needless to say, the Halloween franchise sits perched upon the top branch of my horror preferences.

John Carpenter changed my life.

John Carpenter made me want to create.

Ultimately, John Carpenter is the one man who led me to pursue a career in the horror field. The man made me want to tell terrifying tales. He made me want to write. He made me want to make films (something I've yet to do), and he made me grasp the fact that my lone desire was to pursue horror, at all costs.

Carpenter's original film eclipses every slasher film ever made. And that's not because Halloween was one of the first slasher pictures I'd taken in, it's because the story, the aesthetic quality of the flick, and the most terrifying villain in the history of celluloid, left an indelible mark on one young boy's life.

Yes, I will reiterate, John Carpenter's Halloween certainly changed who I am as a person. And it is for that reason alone that I've called upon the readers and writers of HorrorNovelReviews.com to honor the man.

Halloween Returns: A Fan Fiction Anthology is a collection of 19 amazing stories inspired and directly related to one of history's greatest impacting films, and we're confident that you're going to love every last story!

  * Matt Molgaard

# BEN TRAMER'S NOT GOING TO HOMECOMING

By Kevin Wetmore

r

Haddonfield, Illinois, Friday, October 31, 1978, 6:45 pm

"Bennett Samuel Tramer! This is the third and final time I ask you to take out the trash!" His mother's voice flooded up the stairs like a raging river, the sharp rasp from her years of smoking making it grate on his ears, cutting through the sounds of E.L.O.'s "Turn to Stone" on the headphones of his turntable. "If you don't take it out now you will be grounded for the rest of the weekend, mister!"

Pulling the headphones off, he stared at the ceiling. "All right, already!" he called back down. "Jeez, give a guy a chance to do it."

It's not like it mattered if he was grounded. All of his friends had dates for the homecoming dance and he did not. "Ben Tramer's not going to homecoming. Again," he thought. You know what made it worse? He just hated it when she used his middle name, which was happening more and more lately. Everything just sucked right now. His mom was riding him about chores, school, how much time he spent at work. He was making good money at Brennan's Garage, and learning practical stuff, unlike school. But every night it was, "Did you finish your homework?"

Then back in August the sheriff had busted Mike, Paul and him for drinking. He got driven home in a cop car. So what? Nobody got hurt, but because the neighbors saw it she gave him holy hell about it. So he had a few beers. So what? All the kids do it. But now she rode him all the time. He was getting sick of hearing his middle name.

Ben dragged himself off the bed, put on his glasses, hit the off button on his stereo and saw the turntable slow, the needle still on it, as he slapped his hand against the poster of Farrah Fawcett in her red bathing suit, smiling just for him as her curls dropped down over her shoulder, head rolling back with a look that said, "Hey, Ben, why don't you come over here and lay down next to me." He always hit it for luck with girls on the way out of his room. He bounded out his bedroom door and down the stairs grumbling to himself, running his hand through his shaggy brown hair.

Coming up the other way was Missy, his kid sister. The only thing worse in the house than his mother.

"Ben's in trouble" she sang at him. He allowed himself to time his steps on the stairs so he bumped into her on the way down. "Moooommm," she cried out. "Ben just tried to push me down the stairs."

"Just get ready for trick or treating, Missy. Leave your brother alone," his mother's rasp followed up the stairs. She stuck her tongue out at him and said, "I hate you!" Ben smiled.

He found the full trash bag out of the can and waiting by the backdoor, the remains of dinner already starting to smell. He grabbed it one handed, swung the door open a bit too hard (he'd hear about that on the way back in) and took it out to the larger metal can in the breezeway between the house and garage. He lifted the top, threw the bag in the already full can, and dragged it down to the street, holding the lid with one hand and dragging the can with the other.

As he moved down the driveway, coming down the street was a real squaremobile, a station wagon with wood paneling. Some kind of logo on the side - a white circle and he could just make out the words "For Official Use Only" under the logo as the car sped past him, passing within inches of the garbage can as he set it down in front of the curb. Ben gave the driver the finger and called him an asshole.

The car slammed on its brakes, the red lights angry and the reflection of that light pulsing in the wood paneling of the back gate. The car idled there, twenty feet away, the small plumes of exhaust coming from the tailpipe.

"What's this guy's problem?" Ben wondered. "I mean he almost hit me."

The car just sat there, the driver invisible in the dusk.

Ben wondered if the guy was going to get out of the car and threaten to kick his ass. Or maybe back up and try to hit him or the garbage can. He knew some kids who would do stuff like that.

The car sat there, the brake lights hypnotically staring at him for a long lingering second, and then it moved on.

"Jeez," Ben said to himself before realizing how much his heart was pounding. Kids lived on Market Street, this guy should be more careful.

"What did I say about slamming the door?" He was not even back in the house and his mother was again on his case. "Bennet Samuel Tramer, I swear it all goes in one ear and out the other."

"Be-en! Pho-one!" Missy made all one syllable words into multiple syllable words when she wanted to annoy him.

"Sorry, mom - phone," he said by way of both apology and escape and ran to the upstairs extension where Missy stood holding the phone in her princess costume.

"It's a girl!" she squealed with delight.

"Thanks, squirt, now get lost," he said, taking the receiver from her and pulling off her tiara and throwing it down the hall. "MOOOOM! Ben threw my crown!"

Ben rolled his eyes and put the phone to his ear. "Hello?"

"Ben? This is Annie Brackett. Hey, are you already going to Homecoming by any chance?"

Oh my God oh my God oh my God oh my God.

His heart was pounding more than it was with the freak in the station wagon. He was going to Homecoming. He lay on his bed listening to Warren Zevon's "Excitable Boy" going over the conversation with Annie in his head again and again and again. He had a crush on Marie Krish since ninth grade when she came back from summer break and suddenly made him feel stupid all the time with how hot she was. But she didn't have the time of day for him.

Annie said Laurie Strode liked him. Laurie Strode. I mean she was smart, but she was pretty and even though she dressed kind of preppie underneath all those layers he bet she had a killer bod. Plus, she hung out with Annie, who had been going with Paul for over a year and Paul said she was a freak in bed, and Sue Snell, who had been dating Bob Simms, and Bob had said she was a real easy lay. So if her friends were like that, Ben had to assume he was going to get laid tomorrow night.

"Sorry, Farrah," he told the poster. "Looks like Laurie Strode is going to get the pleasure of doing the deed with Ben Tramer first."

Smiling, he let his eyes drift to the clock. 7:30. Holy shit! He was going to be late to meet Mike. He and Mike Godfrey had said they were going to hang out and drink tonight. On top of everything else, the state of Illinois sucked. The drinking age for beer was 19, but Ben was only 17. Mike, however, had just turned 19, having stayed back a year in elementary school. Ben had given him five bucks so they could split a twelve pack of Schlitz. They were going to meet at 8:00 at Mike's house and get the party going.

OK, it was a last minute plan, just like Homecoming with Laurie Strode. That's kind of how Ben's life worked, he realized. At the last minute things just happened to him. He had good luck. When Mike said they should drink tonight and then raise some hell before Homecoming, Ben gave him the five and then after school went to Nichols Hardware just before they closed and bought a generic "Fright Mask" (that's what the label said) - a white, expressionless face with eyeholes cut out. It also had blonde hair combed back. Ben combed it up into a punk hairstyle to make it extra freaky.

He didn't know what else to wear and looked around his room.

His coveralls! He worked weekends and two afternoons a week at Brennan's Garage, changing oil, changing tires, helping repair engines, just everyday stuff around the garage. He wore black coveralls over his clothes to keep them clean. (That was another reason to be annoyed with his mother - she did not understand why he took AP classes and wrote for the school paper but still wanted to work in a garage. "It's so common," she complained, again concerned about what her friends would think. Ben didn't give a shit what her friends thought. He liked music, books, girls and cars. You can be a braniac and still work with your hands. (God, she could be so superficial!) The coveralls were stained with oil which Ben figured would look like bloodstains under the streetlights. He pulled them on over his clothes and grabbed the mask and his wallet. He was gonna scare the crap out of little kids trick or treating tonight.

Hitting Farrah on the way out of the room (gonna need that luck tomorrow night, Benny-Boy!), he rode a tidal wave down the stairs, shouting "ByeMomandDadI'mgoingovertoMike's."

"Be home by midnight and you better not be drunk," his mother's voice followed him out to the curb where his car sat parked. No sign of that creep station wagon from earlier.

Ben got in, turned the key, the engine turned, and off he went.

"Laurie Strode, huh?" Mike took a long pull from the can, draining it and then crushing it and then throwing it towards the plastic garbage can in the corner of the basement rec room. He missed, and it joined two others on the floor nearby. He opened another and continued to flip absentmindedly through a Playboy. His costume was a KISS concert t-shirt and a half-assed attempt at KISS makeup.

"Yup. Annie swears up and down she is into me. I am totally getting laid tomorrow night." Ben lifted up his can of Schlitz (his third for the night), toasting the prospect, and drained it.

"Cocksucker, you're going to be a virgin until you're thirty," Mike razzed, opening up another can.

The two of them sat there drinking, the television in the background showed a black and white picture of a group of men standing in a circle in the show, outlining something that lay beneath. To be honest, it was just on for background noise.

"What makes you think Laurie the Librarian would ever give it up for you? She's as straight-laced as they come. You think she's going to bang anything other than a book?" Mike belched to show his contempt. "'sides, I thought you were all about Marie Krish. You kept talking about how you were going to bang her like a screen door in a tornado. What happened?"

"Love the one you're with," Ben sang, raising his beer again. "Krish doesn't know what she is missing, and Laurie is warm for my form. So she gets the prize."

"Yeah, the booby prize," Mike laughed.

"Fuck you," said Ben with nothing behind it. "You're just jealous that it's me she's lusting after." He took another swig. Then another. "I hope it's the Booby prize," he leered. "I bet she has nice tits."

"You'll never know because Laurie the Librarian hides them behind sweaters and books and you're never going to see or touch them. And while you're pulling your pud and crying tomorrow night, here's who I'm going to bang at Homecoming," and he flipped the magazine open in one deft movement, so that the centerfold opened up across the table, Marcy Hanson smiling up at Ben in a manner that would even make Farrah blush. Her yellow sweater may have been tied around her shoulder, but all Ben could focus on was the clear plastic miniskirt that left nothing to the imagination. "Miss October, meet Mike, Jr." he proudly announced.

Ben was fascinated but also kind of scared. He had never gone further than second base and that was last year with Becky Buntner in a closet during "Seven Minutes in Heaven" at a party at Sue Snell's house. Becky never talked to him again after that, not that she talked to him before that either. Their names had just been pulled out of the hat together.

He knew the girls and other kids thought of him as quiet. He knew a lot of the girls didn't notice him because he wasn't all flashy. Still, if he could be like them the way he was around Mike and Paul and they guys, they'd see he was funny and cool. He wondered what it would be like to be with Laurie. Would she look like Miss October with all her clothes off? Would she have that come hither look on her face? God, where were they going to do it? The back of his Dodge Duster? No way. He had better find a party they could go to afterwards. He'd also have to get some condoms. Maybe later he'd ask Mike if he could borrow one. He found himself growing drunkenly aroused thinking about it.

"Fuck it, man, let's go to a bar," he said to Mike, standing up a bit too fast.

"What's your problem?"

"We're sitting in your basement, drinking cheap beer, wearing shitty costumes watching a stupid movie on TV while you get hard looking at a woman you're never gonna meet in some shitty magazine. It's Halloween. Let's go out."

Mike considered then nodded. Ben had a point. "What about the rest of the beer?" he asked.

Ben went over to the couch, picked up a pillow, pulled off the case and threw the rest of the beers in it. "Trick or treat?" he asked Mike with a drunken grin.

"Dude, you're a fucking genius."

"Mulligan's?"

"Mulligans."

As they walked through the spaces in between houses taking a shortcut to the bar, Ben looked over and saw a man standing on the sidewalk, staring at a house. Somewhere in his drunken brain, Ben had a thought.

"Holy shit," he said to Mike, grabbing his arm, "That asshole has the same costume that I do!"

It was true. The tall man wore the same (or very similar) "Fright Mask" and dark coveralls. He stood, unmoving, staring at the well-lit house on the block, his arms hanging by his side. He could have been a statue. Kids were walking past on the other sidewalk, but he paid no attention to any of the passersby. Just the house. He stood, staring.

Suddenly and paradoxically slowly, his head turned deliberately towards them and cocked to one side as the man stared at Ben and Mike.

"Happy Halloween, asshole!" Mike yelled at him.

"Knock it off, man," Ben said, swinging the bag of cans at him. "Weird guy gives me the creeps. He's older than us, man - why is he out trick or treating?"

"Are you scared?" Mike teased. "It's probably just some guy waiting for his kids to come back down from the house. He put on the same lame, cheapo costume you did so as to be 'scary dad' for Halloween. Now do you wanna get to the bar or should we outfit you for a training bra, you girl?"

Ben looked back. The man was gone. Ben looked up and down the street. The man didn't walk away. He was just gone.

"Whoa," he drunkenly slurred. He simultaneously realized how tipsy he was and that Mike was right. Just some guy in a costume. He had other things to think about, like how he was going to score with Laurie Strode tomorrow night. I mean Annie said she was interested in him, right? That meant she wanted him.

They emerged out of the neighborhood onto the main drag. Mulligan's was two blocks down and they could already hear the Halloween party going on inside.

"Shit, what time is it?" Ben asked Mike.

"Time to go drinking. Why?"

"Because I have to be home by midnight, man."

"You gonna turn into a pumpkin if you're not home then? Don't let that happen tonight. Some guy with a knife will turn you into a jack-o-lantern," Mike giggled.

"No, man, my old lady has been giving me a lot of grief. She's going to ground me if I'm late or really drunk or both I guess. So I should really only have one beer here."

Mike turned and looked him in the eye. "When did you become such a pussy? You get one date with a librarian and it's like you became a chick, man. C'mon."

They entered into Mulligan's and it seemed like half of the high school senior class was there. Marie Krish was in a corner and Ben did not even notice her. Mike pushed his way through the crowd, past a pirate, a pussy cat, a ghost, two gypsies, a vampire, and the kicker from the football team wearing a t-shirt that read, "This is my costume," in order to get to the bar and get two beers. Ben hung back on account of being under age and not wanting to get sucked into the party and staying too late. Mike pushed back through the crowd and met him near the payphone.

"This place is out of control," said Ben.

"You're the one who wanted to come, dipshit," Mike countered.

"True," said Ben, and they clinked their bottles together and drank.

"God, there are so many hot chicks in here." Mike's head was on a swivel, taking it all in. "There's something about tail in costume that just makes them hotter, you know?"

"Yeah," replied Ben absentmindedly. "What do you think she's doing right now?"

"Who?"

"Laurie?"

"Jeez, let it go, Ben. Besides, you told me Annie said she was babysitting tonight."

"Oh, shit. Yeah." Ben laughed.

The jukebox closed out on the final notes of The Cars' "Just What I Needed" before the opening guitar licks of Van Halen's "Running with the Devil" sent the crowd into a frenzy. Ben and Mike made eye contact, smiled, and started screaming along with David Lee Roth along with the rest of the crowd.

Ben had lost track of time, but knew it had to be late. He told Mike he had to go. Mike told him to head out by his lonesome, because he had "an eye thing" going with one of the gypsies, the brunette to be precise, and he wanted to see if she really could see the future, or would the size of his manhood be a surprise to her. Ben laughed, rolled his eyes and stumbled out into the street.

He was still clutching the pillowcase with the leftover beers in it. He knew it was around ten. He knew he was very drunk. And he knew if he walked home now, he could sober up enough to get past his mother just before midnight and rescue Laurie Strode from a life of a librarian tomorrow night. It was a good plan. Ben was lucky.

Hell, he could even trick or treat on the way home, get some candy. He pulled on the Fright Mask outside the bar. His head was already spinning and the eyeholes in the mask made it even more challenging to walk straight, but who cares. It's Halloween, he was going to Homecoming the next day, and he had had a great night. It was his right to celebrate with his friend and some beers. His mother could sit on an egg. The image made him giggle under the mask.

A handful of kids were still out trick or treating as he left the main drag and walked back into the residential streets. A few who heard him giggle and turned and saw him in his mask and coveralls walked a little more quickly away from him.

"Wow, this really is a fright mask!" Ben thought. "Cool." He let himself walk even more menacingly than his intoxication was already allowing. It was Halloween. Why not give the kids a good fright, right?

He was swaying towards a group of kids in costumes standing in front of a fence. "I'm like a cool Frankenstein," he thought. Beyond them he suddenly noticed the flashing lights of a cop car at the stop sign.

Two men jumped out of the car and were looking right at him.

"Is that him?" yelled one. Somewhere in the haze Ben realized it was Sherriff Brackett. Shit - the sheriff had busted him for drinking two months ago. He didn't want to get arrested again. Not for public drunkenness. Not when he had a date with Laurie Strode. He could not get grounded right now.

He did not recognize the other one, who was smaller, in a trench coat, and who cried out, "I don't know" in an accent that some part of his brain told Ben was British.

Another part of his brain told Ben to turn and run. Or turn and walk away because running was not an option right now. Ben turned and began to walk away just as the two men broke into a run towards him.

Ben turned to go across the street, but kept his eye on the two men for signs they were catching up. Was that a gun?

He heard the car before he saw it. As he turned towards the noise, time slowed down even more so, impossibly more so. He saw the light bar, flashing blue and red on top of the police car as it bore down on him at great speed from five feet away. He saw four headlights, two over, two under shining bright in his eyes. He saw the grill, not at all looking like a grin, but rather a grim metal cage about to make contact with him.

Then he was flying. He felt no pain or at least the pain did not register, but he realized at some point he was being pushed by the car grill backwards through the air, his head hitting and bouncing off the hood of the car. Then he was thrown back against something hard, his arms spread wide and the back of his head impacting hard against the wall or whatever it was.

"I look like a crucifix," he thought and giggled in his mind. Then, "Hey, I'm still holding on to my beer. Cool!" He didn't fall; he was pinned in between the car that hit him and whatever was behind him.

Then he was warm, no - impossibly hot. He didn't feel any pain. But he couldn't see anything either. The mask was already melting to his face.

Through the flames he heard a voice yell, "Is it him? Is it HIM? IS IT HIM OR NOT?"

"Yes," thought Ben as he began to fade. "It's me. I'm going to Homecoming with Laurie Strode and I'm going to get laid."

# HALLOWEEN 3: THE MONSTER'S MASK

By A.P. Sessler

A scarred hand raised a cup of scalding coffee to scarred lips. Dr. Sam Loomis blew into the cup several times before taking a sip. He sat at the kitchen table of Charles and Sheila Atkins when the living room TV flashed to a commercial featuring three rubber Halloween masks dancing to music.

Sheila rolled her eyes. "Oh, cut that off already," she said.

"No, wait," said Sam.

Charles and Sheila eyed one another in surprise.

"I've seen this before," said Sam.

"I should think so," said Charles. "They've showed it all month."

Tommy walked into the kitchen, about to greet Sam when the jingle stole his attention.

"Silver Shamrock! Uncle Sam, did you know I won my own Silver Shamrock?"

"What's that, boy?"

"I won one through the TV contest."

"We held a contest to give away the masks. Tommy wanted one so badly I might have rigged one of the entries," said Sheila.

"Why on earth would you do that?" Sam asked.

"Family members aren't allowed to enter the contest. I let him enter under his birth father's name, and used sticky paper so I knew which one to draw."

"Wanna see it?" Tommy asked, his body already facing the stairs.

Sheila touched Tommy's arm. "Uncle Sam isn't exactly fond of--"

"I would very much like to," said Sam.

Tommy smiled even wider and ran up the stairs.

Sam watched him disappear. "Surely you both are Trick or Treating with him?"

"Unfortunately, we'll be working," said Sheila. "He's going with some boys from the neighborhood."

"Not to worry. Everyone will be home by 9 for Silver Shamrock's giveaway," said Charles.

"What's the big surprise?" Sam asked.

Charles and Sheila shrugged.

"We're hosting the show with Dr. Vibes," said Sheila.

"The radio DJ with the foul mouth?" asked Sam.

"And horror host. That's the one."

"He's giving the producers a real headache having to censor him," said Charles.

Tommy came blazing down the stairs with a green and black mask in hand.

"I wanted the skull, but the witch is still cool," he said.

"May I?" Sam asked.

Tommy handed him the mask.

Sam held it up, letting it unfold. "Ah, yes. The season of the witch they call it."

He rotated the mask when he discovered the reflective, silver disc mounted to its rear.

"Silver Shamrock," he said, tracing the outline of the green and silver logo with an untrimmed fingernail.

Tommy held his peace as the scratching sound grated on the disc and his nerves.

Sam looked up, lost in momentary reflection. "Yes, now I recall. They used to be in the novelty business."

"The what?" Tommy asked.

"Rubber vomit and electric hand-buzzers—the same sort of thing I imagine they sell in the back of your comic books these days."

"Oh yeah," Sam nodded. "X-ray glasses and all."

"Very interesting," Sam said and handed the mask back.

#

Sam stepped inside his office, finding his secretary on the multi-line phone.

"Just a moment," she interrupted the caller and pressed HOLD. "Dr. Loomis, the prank calls have already begun."

"I expected as much, Mrs. Hill. Would you please pull the Myers file? I would very much like to review something."

"Yes, Doctor."

#

"Here, Sheriff," Sam said, a sketch pad in his hand.

Sheriff Brackett took the pad and sifted through its horrific drawings from behind his desk. "It's a bunch of monsters."

Sam stopped him and flipped a few pages back. "Look closer."

Sheriff Brackett stared at the image. "It's a witch, a skeleton and jack-o-lantern."

In his other hand Sam held a newspaper advertisement for a local department store. He placed it on the desk.

"Notice the order, the colors, the details."

"It's similar."

"Not similar. Exact. You see, Sheriff, Michael has a connection with not only the date October 31, but Halloween itself. You could lock him away for a lifetime and he could give account for every strange occurrence that will ever fall on that evil night, for he is the evil that all men do on Halloween."

Sheriff Brackett handed the pad back. "You're saying Myers was a prophet or something? What does it matter? He's dead."

"We've made that mistake before."

"His body is on ice at the Livingston Morgue."

"Even if he is dead, evil lives. These masks must be part of evil's plan. We must remove them from the stores now."

"Neither you or I have that authority. It'd take the kind of court order that only comes with a lengthy legal battle. Besides, every kid in Haddonfield already has one of these things."

Sam hung his head in despair, clutching the pad until his knuckles turned white.

Sheriff Brackett placed his hand on Sam's shoulder. "Go home. Shut your porch light off. Watch the game. Have a drink. Do anything but anything Halloween. Trust me, Doctor," he said, glancing at the photo of his daughter on his desk.

#

Darkness gave way to light as the door to the cold chamber opened. The marble slab supporting the corpse was pulled out. The room was sparsely furnished: two swivel stools; a cabinet-counter covered in tools, clipboards and a transistor radio announcing the live play-by-play of a college basketball game.

Norman gazed at the naked corpse. Massive scar tissue testified to the man's death by fire. The tag on his toe read in brief 10/31...Michael Aubrey Myers.

A door closed. Norman turned to find Brad, a cup of hot coffee and glazed donut in hand.

"What's the score?" Brad asked.

Norman took a clipboard and pen from the counter. "21 to 38."

Brad approached the open cold cell. "Why's he out?"

"He just got elected most popular to be dissected for biology class at one of the universities."

Brad took a sip of coffee. "Man, that's hot. Whew!"

He placed the cup on the cold slab by Michael's foot. "That'll cool it off."

He eyed the corpse from top to bottom. "What a mess. Sure he wasn't voted least capable of operating a propane grill?"

Norman laughed as he filled out a form on his clipboard. "The cops said he was built like a Timex."

Brad took another bite and placed his ear close to Michael's chest, careful not to touch the repulsive flesh.

"We'll be right back after this message from our sponsors," the basketball announcer's voice came through the radio speaker.

A lively synthetic march followed, soon accompanied by the melody of London Bridges to very different lyrics. "Happy, happy Halloween, Halloween..."

"Tick tock tick tock," said Brad.

"Cut it out," Norman said, forcing a frown.

Michael's little finger twitched.

"...Silver Shamrock," the munchkin-like voice sang.

"Tick tock tick tock," said Brad.

"...Happy, happy Halloween..." the radio repeated.

Michael's foot twitched, knocking the cup of coffee off the slab.

Brad stood straight. "Oh damn," he said as the black puddle spread across the floor.

Norman placed his clipboard on the counter. "Look what you did."

"It wasn't me."

"...Silver Shamrock..." the munchkins sang.

Norman pointed to Michael. "I suppose it was him?"

"You said he was built like a Timex."

A smile rose on both their faces.

"I knew you appreciated my humor," said Brad.

"Just clean it up."

"Will do, just after I give this thing one more listen," Brad said and leaned over Michael's chest again. "Ah. Mechanical perfection and Swiss ingenuity. Tick tock tick--"

Michael's hand shot forth and took hold of Brad's throat. The icy, disfigured hand squeezed, crushing Brad's windpipe in an instant. Blood spurted from his mouth and he fell to his knees.

His eyes rolled toward Norman, who could only scream.

Michael swung his legs over the side of the slab and slid off to his feet.

Norman glanced at the door, stuck between fight and flight. Michael pushed Brad's lifeless body to the floor. Norman's legs burst into action. He rushed Michael and took hold of the killer's arms.

Michael swiveled about, reversing he and Norman's positions. They wrestled around the slab until Norman wound up on it back first. Michael released him and took hold of its handles. Norman flipped over, belly up on the slab.

He swung at Michael, who gave the slab a sharp shove.

"No!" Norman shouted as he slid backward into the cold cell.

When his head met the ceiling there was a crack and he went unconscious. Michael closed the door, leaving Norman in the freezing, dark confines of the crypt.

Michael gazed down at his naked body, then at the uniformed Brad who lay dead.

#

Mrs. Curtis knelt in her backyard garden, half-humming, half-singing an operatic tune as she broke a patch of soil with a metal hand tiller. Atop her head a floppy, straw hat shielded her face from the noon sun. A half-empty bag of manure sat by her side.

From behind the linen bed sheets hung upon her clothesline a silhouetted figure stood. The unshakable sensation of being watched forced her to turn her head, but when she did she only saw the waving sheets blow in the gentle, Autumn breeze.

She turned back to her garden to find a pair of black shoes standing before her. With a gasp she gazed up at the blue pants and lab coat. Before she could see his face, one scarred hand pulled her hat off and another took her by the hair. Her face was thrust into the manured soil.

She tried in vain to remove his hand to free herself, her legs kicking violently, then barely twitching, then completely limp.

Michael left the garden, Mrs. Curtis' hand-tiller, bag of manure, straw hat, and linen sheet now missing.

#

Tommy, Dave and William rode their bikes down the street, their Silver Shamrock masks glowing green, white and orange against the night. The boys stopped beneath a canopy of trees.

"Whose house should we get first?" Tommy asked.

Dave smiled when he saw the carton of eggs and roll of toilet paper peeking out from beneath the velcro flap of Tommy's backpack.

"What about the Boogieman's place?" he said.

"No way!" said Tommy.

"Not me," said William.

From behind the trees two figures watched the boys.

"What about that one?" Malek whispered, pointing at Tommy.

Ricky nodded.

The seniors stepped from behind the trees.

"Nice mask," said Ricky.

"Yeah," Malek agreed.

Dave and William eyed one another as the senior approached Tommy.

"Can I try it on?" said Ricky.

"No way," said Tommy.

"I'll give it right back."

"Get lost," Tommy said and raised a leg to pedal away.

Ricky took hold of Tommy's handlebars. "I don't think you heard me."

"Hey!" Tommy yelled, fighting in vain to wriggle the handlebars free from Ricky's grip.

"Let him go," said Dave.

"Or what?" Malek said and swiped at Dave with an open hand.

Dave ducked and pedaled off in a panic. William followed suit.

Tommy looked back. "Hey, guys!" he yelled, but they were gone.

"Aw, your friends left you," Ricky said as he took one hand from the handlebars and pulled the witch mask straight up off Tommy's head.

When Tommy released his handlebars to take the mask back, Ricky placed his foot on the frame's head tube and gave a strong shove.

The front wheel turned sideways and the bike went back and down on top of Tommy, leaving both flat on the cold asphalt. Ricky pulled the latex mask over his face while the boy cried and cursed.

"Uhh! This thing stinks," said Ricky.

"Not as bad as you!" Tommy cried.

"Shut up, little punk."

Tommy flinched when Ricky feigned a punch. Ricky kicked his front tire and left with Malek.

"Looks good on you," Malek said.

"Thanks," said Ricky.

When the two turned a corner they found a figure standing in the middle of the street. It wore a linen sheet, holes torn out for eyes. Atop its head sat a large straw hat.

"Aren't you a little old for Halloween?" Ricky asked.

"Yeah, what you supposed to be? A scarecrow?" said Malek.

Michael opened the bag and held it forward.

"You want some candy?" said Ricky.

"I think he wants to give us some," said Malek, approaching Michael.

Though Malek could barely make out the bag's contents in the dim light, the sweet, earthy smell of manure was strong enough.

"Hey. This bag is full of--"

Michael took a handful of Malek's cropped black hair and forced his face into the bag. Michael pulled his right hand from the bag and with a twirl of his left wrist, wrapped the opening of the bag around Malek's throat.

Malek clutched at the bag, threw right and left hooks into Michael's trunk, but they were soft as the flowing sheet draped over the living specter.

"Let him go!" Ricky yelled as he charged.

Michael retrieved the metal hand tiller from his pocket and with a sidestep to avoid being tackled, lashed at Ricky's face, leaving three deep, bleeding gashes in his cheek. Ricky wiped the blood from his face and turned back for a second attack.

Michael gripped a bit of bag beneath the tiller in his right hand and with a quick jerk a sharp snap sounded. Malek's limbs went limp and his body slumped down against Michael's legs.

"No!" Ricky yelled and tackled Michael.

The two rolled about the asphalt in a struggle when the sound of chain running through gears crescendoed from around the corner. Tommy sped into the center of the four-way intersection and slammed his brakes, fishtailing the rear tire of his bike 180 degrees counterclockwise.

The men paused their deadly battle long enough to sit up and assess their audience.

"Take this, douchebags!" Tommy shouted and reached into an open carton of eggs.

His first egg caught Michael in the face, the second his straw hat. Tommy emptied the carton upon the young men until they were covered in running yolk and shell.

When Tommy seemed to have their attention, he pedaled off behind the trees on the opposite street corner.

Michael pulled the vandalized straw hat from his head and threw it aside, the sheet likewise. He took Ricky by the collar and raised him to his knees. Ricky opened his eyes to find dark, souless eyes staring back.

Tommy pedaled past several streets when the blinding flash of high beams and screeching brakes led him to stamp his own brakes and shield himself with an arm. The car stopped within inches.

A window roll down and a head emerged.

"What are you doing, Tommy?" the man yelled.

"Uncle Sam!" Tommy shouted.

"Get in!"

Tommy wheeled to the back passenger side and opened the door. He tried to squeeze his bike into the back seat but it wouldn't fit.

"Leave it," said Sam.

Tommy rushed to the sidewalk and laid his bike down before climbing in the back seat of the car and pulling the door shut.

Sam adjusted his mirror to see Tommy's face. "Why are you alone? Where are your friends?"

"Ricky Warlock scared them away. The wimps let him take my mask, but I didn't run."

"Good, boy. You're not afraid. You'll need to be very brave tonight."

The car sped down the road toward the city skyline, the competing skyscrapers a tartan of darkness and light.

#

Sam and Tommy stood at the security guard's desk inside Station WALS.

"Hey, Tommy. Here to see your parents?" the guard asked, seated behind his console.

"Yes, George," said Tommy.

"They're busy filming, but I'll get word to them," George said and reached for a phone. He pressed a button. "Hey, Patti . . . Tommy's here. Can you send someone up? . . . Thanks."

In a moment, she greeted Sam and Tommy and led them to the studio door. She placed a finger over her lips, pulled the door open and let them inside.

A wide smile rose on Tommy's face. The set looked like a mad scientist's dungeon, complete with cotton cobwebs, plastic spiders and a faux stone wall backdrop. Seated in the audience were two children wearing Silver Shamrock masks: a jack-o-lantern and skull.

Standing on set was Dr. Vibes, plunking away on his one-and-a-half-octave synthesizer, intoning the introductory riff of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor in a cheesy transistor organ preset. A quarter-inch monophonic cable ran from the keyboard to the back of his neck, where it disappeared beneath the butterfly collar of his lace button-up shirt.

Patti motioned for her guests to follow. They went through another door, where Tommy's parents sat behind a console and set of television monitors showing Dr. Vibes, one in real-time, the other an echo.

Sheila was surprised to see them, but held her peace as she listened to Dr. Vibes through her combination microphone-headphones. She stood and waved a silent thank you to Patti, who exited.

Dr. Vibes smiled from the monitor. "That was a little ditty I call Bach You and Fugue Your Mother in D minor."

"Close enough," said Sheila. "Bleep him."

Charles mashed a button.

"That was a little ditty [BLEEEEEEEP] in D minor," Mr. Vibes' voice sounded on the broadcast monitor.

Sheila rubbed Charles' shoulder. "Nice job. And switch to movie in 3...2...1..."

Charles manipulated the controls, bringing a black-and-white creature feature up on the broadcast monitor. He spun in his swivel chair to face his visitors.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

"Ricky Warlock stole my mask," answered Tommy.

"I'm sorry," said his mother.

"Then I ran into Uncle Sam," said Tommy.

"Thank you for bringing him," she said to Sam.

"I'm afraid it's more serious than theft," he said and opened the sketch pad to the illustrated masks.

"What's this?" Charles asked, standing up to take the pad.

"This belonged to Michael Myers when he was in my care. Every Halloween he would draw images just like this."

While the adults spoke, Tommy scanned the control room. On the far side an illuminated EXIT sign stood above the studio's back door. A small window revealed the night sky.

Charles flipped a page—an illustration of the station's call sign. "So, he grew up in the city. Everyone watches W-A-L-S."

"Look at the next," said Sam.

An illustration of Dr. Vibes.

"And everyone knows Dr. Vibes. He's a legend," said Charles.

"And the next."

Sheila and Charles gasped. There on the page lay he, his wife, their throats torn out, and little Tommy, his face a bloody mess surrounded by snakes, spiders, roaches.

Charles faced Sam with wide eyes. "He's been spying on my family."

Sam shook his head. "These were drawn nearly 10 years ago, before you two met and Tommy was just a baby."

"What are you saying? We're all going to die tonight?"

"Quiet," said Sheila. "You're going to scare Tommy."

Tommy turned around. "Huh? Is it 9 o'clock yet?"

"No, dear. We'll let you know."

"I wish I still had my mask."

"Here, Tommy," she said, pointing to the swivel chair. "Have a seat and watch the movie."

He sat in front of the broadcast monitor. Sheila moved toward the entrance and motioned for the men to approach.

"You think he's coming here?" she asked Sam.

"I am certain he's on his way even now."

"I'm calling Security," she said and picked up the phone.

Tommy watched the rubber-suited monster sneak up on an unsuspecting victim and strangle her from behind.

"Oh, damn," said Charles as he hurried to the console. "Excuse me, Tommy. We have to switch back to Dr. Vibes."

Tommy returned the chair. In a moment the monitors revealed the set once more, now occupied by Dr. Vibes and the two masked children previously in his audience.

"Alright kids, it's time for the big giveaway," said Dr. Vibes. "Johnny and Sandy and everyone here in our dungeon are going to gather around our magic, crystal ball and watch the Silver Shamrock Giveaway with all you at home. We'll be back after the giveaway to announce our own giveaway—a season pass for two to all your favorite horror movies at the Lost River Drive-In."

"And rolling video ... now," said Charles.

The studio monitor showed the three dancing masks.

"This stinks!" said Johnny beneath his skull mask. "We don't even get to see the giveaway?"

"Yeah," Sandy wined.

"Shut your trap, ungrateful brats," said Dr. Vibes. "You won your masks and get to be on TV."

"It's time. It's time. Time for the big giveaway ..." said the pre-recorded announcer.

"I wish I had my mask," said Tommy.

In his silent tantrum he refused to watch the footage, again gazing around the studio. His eyes settled once more on the back door and its black rectangle of stars.

A face appeared at the window, wearing a glowing witch mask.

"Charles! It's Ricky!" Tommy said and ran for the door. "My stepdad's gonna kick your butt!"

"No, Tommy!" Charles yelled, seeing the masked figure.

The face was replaced by a hand wielding the metal tiller. It struck the window. Tommy shielded his face from the shower of glass.

Sheila screamed.

The hand reached through the broken window and turned the knob.

"... Watch the magic pumpkin. Watch!" said the announcer as the image began to flash on and off.

The door opened.

Sam retrieved a pistol from his pocket.

The pulsating music pounded in the studio speakers.

Michael took Tommy by the collar and raised the hand tiller to strike.

Sam fired. Michael's right shoulder jerked back upon impact.

Charles shoved Sam into the console. "What are you doing?"

"He's a killer!" Sam shouted and raised the pistol again.

Charles jumped in the way. "You'll hit Tommy!"

The music was deafening.

Michael dropped Tommy and the tiller and grasped his ears. Tommy rushed to his father, who handed him to Sheila. She and Tommy fled into the studio.

In the dim room a spark flashed behind Michael's head. His arms trembled and back bowed. The music became a ringing. Michael collapsed on the floor. In a moment the green mask became like putty, falling from his face, as a horde of unclean things crawled from another place--spiders, snakes, roaches, insect and arachnid breeds unfamiliar to the men watching in horror.

Sam glanced at the masked children in the studio and the vanquished corpse in the control room. "Stop the broadcast!" he yelled.

Charles stepped through the writhing things, onto the chair and out of their reach. He killed the Silver Shamrock video feed with a second to spare. He reached for the fire extinguisher and emptied its freezing contents onto the moving floor.

When it all ceased to move he stepped from the chair.

"I only hope the children are safe. The poor children," Sam whimpered.

"Thank God for censorship," Charles quipped, wiping tears from his eyes.

"I don't understand."

"The seven-second delay, courtesy of W-A-L-S and Dr. Vibes."

Sam smiled, but was quickly sobered when he gazed upon Michael Myer's body. He stepped through the dead things on the floor and with his foot pushed aside what remained of the deteriorated mask. A mess of flesh, brain and bone sat on the floor by the stump of neck.

"It was the masks," said Sam. "Only Michael didn't understand."

# THE LAST STRAW: THE REINCARNATION OF MICHAEL MYERS

By Lou Rera

"Go on Billy. Touch it. I dare ya."

"No way man. Halloween 5 'member?"

"It's a freakin' movie dipshit. Go on, ya wuss!"

Billy and Gary look at each other, then at me. Billy whispers something into Gary's ear, they laugh. Billy takes it out, and with the pissing strength of a fourteen year old, does his best to power-arc a stream on my leg. He misses. They burst out laughing, then Billy turns toward Gary and catches the edge of his Nike's.

"Hey Asshole! What the fuck?"

"Chill dude, it's a friggin' joke ya dickweed!"

Billy zips himself up, and does a weird thing with his tongue--protrudes his lower lip like it's packed with snuff. He looks left then right, and says, "Hey, member what that old bitch-witch said in the Wizard of Oz movie?"

In a high-pitched squeaky voice Billy says, 'how about a little FIRE scarecrow?'

That's how my day began. Those little fuckers burned off my face.

I had been presumed dead many times. My recollection before the last dark period was a woman stabbing me repeatedly in the face and chest--everyone thought I was dead. I don't think I can die anymore than the Frankenstein monster. Black-ness followed. There was a difference in the darkness that time. Sucking sounds of something moving in and out of grease or mud. There were screams and gunfire--then nothing except a high-pitched ringing sound.

When the new day began, a warm blue light formed at the edge of the horizon. I understood what I had become. I had seen my image, Christ-like, hanging on a cross, reflected in a puddle of rainwater. My reincarnation as a scarecrow was dif-ficult to comprehend. I went from years of murder and mayhem, to a man made of old clothes and straw.

First, there was the strength issue. When I was slaughtering people in Haddonfield, I could pick up an eight-een-year old football player by the neck with one hand, ram a butcher's knife through his sternum, and impale him to the wall in a flash. Piece of cake. Plus, back then, I was extremely comfortable wearing a mask 24/7. I couldn't remember a time when my hot breath wasn't heating up my cheeks and viewing the world through eyeholes was like peeking out from be-hind a curtain--a security blanket of obfuscation, which I had always considered good stuff. I never had spoken before--now it's different.

Billy and Gary have had a good laugh at the expense of my face. They burned away most of it. My temporary blind-ness forced me to crawl. My button eyes and my cork nose are gone. I'll replace my scarecrow features, but it's my recollection of my former life that incites my rage.

I'm consumed by the idea of not being myself. I no longer inhabit the multiple incarnations of Michael Myers, but I still ache with the same murderous thoughts. I dream of gut-ting some bastard from ear-to-ear.

Reborn as a scarecrow, I spend my days in the corn-fields near Haddonfield. My existence amounts to being tethered to a laundry pole. My purpose is to frighten birds. I swear to God, as he has most assuredly has condemned my rancid soul to hell, I will make my way back to Haddonfield by next Halloween. I will rip that town a new one but before I do, I must pull myself together and kill someone. A trial run.

I pat the ground in search for the everyday throwa-ways to rebuild my face. A few large black buttons and some other odds and ends make me whole again.

I've discovered something about my new existence. One: On the surface, I am a collapsed body in an armature of straw that goes far beyond the likes of Stephen Hawking. Odd-ly, I have motion and stealth. Two: I am a scarecrow from Ozymandias, aware of the inevitability of my own destruction.

In the cornfields, an unknown force rides the cross breezes over the plains and brings with it, a kind of peace. A gust of wind wiggles my hat. I twitch my thumb and forefinger, and a crow hops away from his festering road kill. His beak empty.

Caw caw.

I laugh. I did my job. I frightened the crow and it lost its savage grip on the stingy remains of snapping tendons and collapsed veins. Flecks of straw and mouse shit-pellets rain from my coat. I am in a state of suspended decay, a desiccated effigy of a man from the great Dust Bowl. As a scare-crow, I will adopt the essence of what drives all men: deception.

It's October, so it's not out of the ordinary to see costumes. I've learned townsfolk are the same everywhere. It is I that is unique. I will be the intruder in a store, cradling cans of soup on top of scraggly arms, losing bits of my-self here and there. I'll carry food I'll never eat. Food I can't possibly eat.

Today, the groceries will be a prop in a play where I'll star as the leading flimflam man in the destruction of other people's lives. I have cash from pockets I've ransacked. My simple looks with button eyes and a cross-stitched mouth will allay their fears, and instill false trust in the hope that this scarecrow clown will break into a little Fred Astaire, dos-à-dos. I am the funny waif. The jester easing their tension, dancing my way into the warmth of their hearts.

I picked this spot because it's remote. My new ground zero. A random sample of small town America--near Haddonfield. A place called Enfield. A nowhere place with Ford F-150s rusting near the Double Gin Inn, where two of the town's miners, T. Rice and Crim fortify their day with rotgut whiskey. They slug it back next to the grease pit and rusted barrels behind the bar. T. Rice wipes his bearded mouth on his filthy sleeve, a crow swoops down from a utility pole, and whisks away some discarded jerky. Crim nods in my direction, like we're old friends, and shrugs. Crim and the rest of the town won't remember seeing me. I am an apparition of mistaken identity.

I take a place next to a life-size wooden Indian at Miller's Country Store. With one hand, the painted warrior shields his eyes, as he scouts an invisible enemy. The other hand holds a sign, "Cigars Sold Here." The Indian and I are effigies. If I am discovered, I'll be sent back to the corn-fields to dole out fear.

The day is October crisp, and I'm at home with the chill in the air. Fresh produce is outside, left and right of the entrance, stacked high on the weathered wooden racks. A jar half filled with coins, a single dollar bill, and a few papers that plainly read, IOU, sits atop of an old milking stool. I can smell the sweetness of the apples, and everything is available for half the price of the Piggly Wiggly Market, six miles south of Cronenburg.

I walk through the double screen doors. The hundred year-old oak plank floor groans with every step I take, but it's the simple jing-a-ling of the entry bell that announces I am here. Walking from the storeroom, a mixture of fear and un-certainty washes over the cashier's face. She looks over her shoulder. Are there more like him? Everyone knows everyone in this town. The currency of the familiar is the price for peace of mind.

My cloth patched hobo sack hangs from my shoulder on a strap made of rope. It's worn and the contents smell acrid from nights of sleeping in the mud and rain. But the odor is no worse than the subtle stink of this small town fear.

The obese cashier shambles up to the register. She places her greasy half-eaten pizza on a piece of ripped brown paper, then for no apparent reason, straightens her nametag. Dottie. Of course her name is Dottie.

Her nose ring is dwarfed by the size of her upper arm tramp stamp, a poorly rendered blue ink heart encasing the name, Ron--probably a long departed fuck-friend. Dottie's hair is matted in clumps as she rests her flabby arm on the plastic bag carousel. Skin oozes through the grate, waffling like Sil-ly Putty, as she rams gossip into the ear of a customer--a leather-faced woman buying a carton of Kools. A butt smolders from the customer's lips. The sting of cigarette smoke scrunches her right eye, as a curl of ash crumbles onto the counter. She glances over her shoulder. Dottie swipes her EBT card, gets the cash, and buys the cigarettes. The smoker wheezes as she trundles through the double-screened doors.

I can sense that Dottie doesn't like strangers injecting doubt into the cracks of her life. I am the unknown. I am a manifestation of her fear. She will learn a valuable les-son today: That all is not as it seems. Love thy neighbor, but never trust him. When I am finished here, all hell will break loose, and I will bath in the fire that will ignite her demise.

"Got a party to go to?" she asks.

I remain silent.

"Do ya?"

"Nope. What you see is me."

Her perplexed look borders on confusion.

"Are you for real?" Then she catches her own attempt at a joke and in a moment of cockiness, chuckles to herself. She cranes her neck in search for a patch of human skin any-where on what she thinks is my costume.

"Well Halloween ain't fer a few weeks yet mister. So what cha doing?"

"Well DOTTIE, you could say I'm rehearsing. Sort of a practice run at being human. Like my ol' self Michael. Re-member Michael Myers, Dottie?"

"How's that mister?" she asks, with a trace of nervousness in her voice. "I don't g--"

"Are you really that fucking clueless Dottie? Is it really any of your fat-ass fucking business why I do what I do? I can call you DOTTIE now, right? After all, tonight you'll get to know me like no one else you've ever met."

This throws her. I hear the wheels "a turning'" in that brain of hers, she is searching her memory for some prankster from her past. Someone who would joke with her like this.

"Rory is that you behind all that stuff?" she asks. "Golly, you had me going for a minute. So what gives Rory, what's with the scarecrow getup? Got any weed?"

"It would be nice if I were Rory wouldn't it? But I'm not. Think hard Dottie. Put that fucked-up little brain of yours into overdrive. You don't know me--do you? And that's what frightens the fuckin' shit out of you. Am I right?"

Her eyes flick back and forth like one of those cat clocks from the 1950s, with the tick-tock of the seconds, her fear heightens, then bubbles into pure panic. Unconsciously, she twists her hair, and bites her lip. She marches in place like a five year old needing to pee.

For Dottie, those seconds must feel painfully long. I imagined she thinks, "Mind your language mister. Believe in the Lord and Jesus will save you. Oh GOD please help me Jesus! Aw Fuck'n hell. He's going to rob the place or worse!"

The cashier is a victim of the butterfly effect. I'd explain that concept to her, but I'm just not in the mood to rattle off all of the possible things that needed to happen to bring both of us to this juncture.

I sense her apprehension. Her deodorant has failed her in a moment of budding tension, and I take a deep breath of her steamy rank. Her lip curls as she tries to wipe the beads of sweat with her apron. Worry is like a piece of meat caught in her throat. I've always wondered how panic manifests itself as a lion clamps down on the throat of a gazelle. Does instinct convert to pure resignation? Is there such a thing as the Kübler-Ross five stages of dying in the quick moments during a violent death?

"Just wondrin' if I knew you is all," she says. "Just being friendly."

"Well if you must know DOTTIE, you don't know me. But here's the kicker. You will--in a BIG way. And when we're done here, maybe I'll stick around for a while to see the rest of the town. Kick up my feet a little and see the shit storm hit the fan."

"I'm closin' soon mister. Um, I don't know what you had in mind, but I'm kind of busy," she says.

I see the wheels turning quickly in that thick skull of hers.

"Clyde Fretwell is in fact--" Dottie looks at her watch, "--on his way right now," she continues. "Well, not many folks stay fer long, the town bein' so small 'en all. Heck, there ain't nothin' going after seven, unless listenin' to that drunk 'ol fool, Red Stillwell, hoot and howl like a dog in the streets, does it for ya'."

She's obviously nervous. Her tension thrills and ex-cites me. I feel alive. Exuberant. I feel the power of adrena-line for the first time. My journey from a token mascot in a cornfield, to a threatening stranger in Miller's Country Store, has been a long one. I have yet to raise a hand to this woman. Her mounting terror is based solely on our discussion. I have said things to fuck with Dottie's head.

Dottie needs to understand and appreciate the value of every breath she takes. I am not in this for violence as a product unto itself. True, I have pent up frustration and rage. I loathe apathy. I love cruelty. I can, and will, mete out justice for people living wasted lives. I am, and always have been, the essence of evil. The idea that pure evil was created by God to offset the concept of good is utter nonsense to me. Evil is a by-product of who I am.

I watch Dottie squirm as she looks at the mud on my jacket and the smirk stretched across my burlap face. The jag-ged stitching for my mouth separates, revealing to Dottie a cavernous indefinable blackness of the interior of my scare-crow's mouth. My stuffing has been augmented with mice urine and pellets of feces. Ticks burrow into the mice that are sickened in my brain. Unable to move, they steep in the horror of my thoughts.

I can see the trance of uncertainty well in her eyes. I am the stone in her shoe and the gnat buzz in her ear. Right now, I am her worst fucking nightmare delivered into her humdrum life.

"Mister, will that be all?" she asks as she looks at my groceries. I detect the quaver within a stern tone in her voice. She still has a modicum of control, or at the very least, the perception of control. She's nervous and this makes me grin. No one else is here with us. She does not look up. The chain-smoking customer has long departed--I know she realizes she's alone.

"Eat your pizza Dottie," I say. I let my arms fall, groceries tumble everywhere. Two cans of creamed corn roll in opposite directions. They sound like low rumble thunder on the hollow oak floor.

She doesn't speak. Dottie looks toward the door, and must realize it's too far to run. Before she can take a step back, I am on her. I grab her fat neck and press my gloved thumb deep into what should be the indentation above her collarbone. I push so hard, I can feel her spine. I know I have just crushed her trachea. Her tongue juts out like a frog flicking flies. With my free hand, I ram the half-eaten slice of pizza into her face, breaking the bridge of her nose. I slam her head into the edge of the cash register with such force, that her head cleaves like a melon. She's dead before she hits the floor.

I tilt my head with the quizzical look of a dog trying to make sense of an unfathomable scene. I stroll, back and forth in front of the counter, and for the first time I notice the paint spattered CD player spewing a Zeppelin song near the microwave and donuts. Even I, without any real worldly experience get the sarcasm of "Stairway to Heaven's," final chorus. What I see before me is an art installation conceived by a madman. It could be a scene from a Wes Craven film, without the demons waiting in the wings to rip my soul to some well-crafted vision of hell. The steady drip, drip, drip of her blood is in its slow motion journey to the already clotting pool on the floor.

Headlights flash on, then off as a truck lumbers in-to the parking lot zig-zagging around the potholes. I walk to the end of aisle two, I transform into a mannequin for the Halloween season. Little Debbies on the left side, and canned beef and Spam on the right. Behind me, there are rows and rows of candy and chips. A hand scrawled sign is taped to a shop-ping cart. It reads: "10 bags of chips for 10 bucks!"

A dude with a John Deere cap and grease up to his elbows walks through the door. He gasps, but doesn't scream. The guy bolts, then pauses at the door. He pokes his head up like a meerkat, jerking his head around. John Deere man walks swiftly around me, down the aisle to the cooler and grabs two cases of Bud. He exits in a flash. Even as I savor my after-noon of ultra-violence, I am not surprised by the beer thief's callousness. These people deserve me.

I consider this experience my scarecrow clan's version of Rumspringa. My Bar Mitzvah in hell. My confirmation into the church of Satan. I have consecrated my soul upon the bloodied earth of damnation. Not in a grandiose Biblical way, but simpler, like the life of Dottie. I released her from her from her piggy ways. "Hey Rory, got any weed?"

Yet, all the energy expended makes me wonder if her destruction worth the effort? I think back to my rebirth--a time of swirling winds and the sounds of rustling leaves in acre after acre of cornstalks. That kind of solitude requires only a flick of the wrist or a nod of my head.

In the hours that followed, the town was abuzz with the horror of Dottie's murder. In small town quickie-marts across the freedom plains, robberies, muggings, and scattered murders are as common as a sixty-four ounce orange Slurpee. The news has given the town a collective brain-freeze, but as it must, life will go on. Mice fuck, eat and piss, then shuttle on with their day.

Officer William "Bud" Hammister, of the two-man police force, called in the State Police. This was too big for the locals. The State boys found few clues. Hammister told his partner, "The perps wanted to throw us off. Those bits of straw and dirt came from a cornfield. Dottie was decoratin' for Halloween was all."

But in the dozens of crime scene photos on Hammister desk, two photos should have caught Hammister's attention. In one photo, taken shortly after the murder, there was a scare-crow propped up at the front of aisle two. The photo from the next morning, numbered EN4509, shows the scarecrow missing.

# THE HALLOWEEN HUNT

By Joseph Rubas

On the blustery morning of October 28, Jimmy "The Shark" Russo drove his shiny Pontiac across the gray-washed city of Chicago and parked across the street from Razzle's, a high-end strip club owned by Petey "The Pirate" Vicenti. The windows were dark and shuddered. A CLOSED sign was tacked to a sheet of plywood covering the door.

Jimmy thought he knew why he'd been called to meet the boss. Not Petey, no, the big boss, the man who ran the Outfit itself. And his stomach twisted.

Please, God, just let 'em whack me.

Like a man in a dream, Jimmy got out of the car and into the chilly Chicago morning. He shut the door and crossed the street, shaking, but not from the air.

An alley running along the side of the building provided access to the back. Between a pile of trash bags and a stack of broken down cardboard boxes, a metal door loomed large, like the grinning face of death itself. Jimmy knocked, and a panel slide instantly back. A set of hard eyes met him.

"Jimmy?"

"Do I look like I'm anyone else?" Jimmy snapped.

The door opened and a large goon whose name Jimmy couldn't remember filled the threshold. He was wearing a gray suit with a black tie. His face was hard and mashed and covered with scars.

"The boss is waiting."

The goon led Jimmy down a shadowy hallway that terminated at a closed door. The goon opened it. A large sitting room. A fire burned in the stone heath. The boss was sitting in an overstuffed armchair before the fire. There were other guys there too, sitting on couches and in chairs of their own.

"Jimmy's here," the goon said.

The fire popped.

"Good," the boss said.

"Sit," the goon commanded.

Jimmy found a chair and parked his ass.

When the goon was gone, the boss said, without turning, his face still hidden, "I have a special job for you boys. Some of you have done this before, some of you haven't. For the newcomers, I have a story."

The boss fell silent for a moment. The fire popped again, the sound startling Jimmy.

"Twenty-two years ago, my daughter, Rosa, was murdered."

Jimmy sagged.

He knew the story.

And he knew where he was going.

Haddonfield, Illinois.

#

They left later in the morning, twelve guys in three cars. Jimmy drove the last in the fleet, his hands tight on the wheel.

Some guy, the boss said, Michael Myers. He rammed a fucking rolling pin through her heart.

Jimmy knew the rest, though he'd only heard whispers from some of the other guys. The boss's daughter was going to college and renting a room in Haddonfield. On Halloween 1989, a guy named Michael Myers killed a bunch of people in town, strolling from one house to another in a search for blood. This was the same Michael Myers who came to Haddonfield in 1978 and killed a bunch of people. They said he died in an explosion at the town hospital.

His psychiatrist got him, Benny "Bongo" Castellone told him once. Blew 'em both to shit. Only this Michael guy survived.

After '89 he disappeared, only to come back in '91, '95, '01, and '06. Each time he killed a dozen people and fled into the night. The cops were baffled. The papers said he was a demon or something. Every Halloween the Illinois National Guard set up camp in Haddonfield. Their standing orders were to shoot the bastard with a rocket launcher or a fifty cal. No small shit.

He's a fucking curse, the boss said. A goddamn demon. Too bad so am I.

Now, as cold rain began to drizzle from the sky, Jimmy followed Johnny "Butcher" Simone and Jake "Knife" Carmine onto I-57 and tried to lose himself in the radio. No one spoke. A sense of doom hung over the car.

"We'll be fine," Robbie Porter, an associate who hung around with Jake, said. "I've been twice and nothing happened."

"Yeah? What happened in '06?" Steve Amuso asked. He was sitting in the back, wedged between Pauly Saccaco and Simon "The Dentist" Rosenberg.

Robbie didn't reply.

The boss started the Halloween Hunt in 1998. In '01 the guys missed Myers by a long shot. In '06, however, they were patrolling the streets when he came out of the shadows.

He was just fuckin' walkin', Frank Fonzi told Jimmy, like he was on a stroll or somethin'. We stopped, piled out, and someone called to him. He stopped, turned around, and fuckin started walkin' at us.

Frank swore up and down that they put a hundred bullets in the bastard, but he kept coming.

Ripped us to shreds.

Out of ten people, only Frank survived, and only then because he started running when Myers didn't die after two headshots.

In January 2009, Frank disappeared. Jimmy thought the boss whacked him for pussing out.

Haddonfield sits in the rural southwest corner of the state. They arrived shortly before three in the afternoon. Jimmy thought it looked like a normal place. Old houses. Shaded sidewalks. A business section lined with restaurants, shops, and government buildings. The only thing off was the military encampment on the town square, watched over by the stately courthouse.

"There's a curfew," Robbie said. "Dusk to dawn."

Jimmy followed the other cars to a big clapboard house on a quiet side street. They parked in the driveway, he parked at the curb.

"HQ," Robbie said.

They were here.

#

Twilight fell silently over Haddonfield. Jimmy was stationed by one of the upstairs windows overlooking the street. He had a walkie-talkie in his lap and an Uzi within reach. Outside, a cold gust of wind pushed dead leaves up the street.

The lack of activity outside surprised him. No one moved. No cars passed. But what really got him was the blackness. Though it was early in the evening, all of the houses along the street were dark. Johnny Simone said people went into siege mode on Halloween, boarding up their doors and windows and hiding in their basements. "Sometimes we make extra sellin 'em guns," Jake said.

The walkie-talkie squawked, startling Jimmy. "Chestnut Street clear," a staticky voice said. "Moving onto Providence."

"Military patrol coming at you," someone replied. "Stay outta sight."

Jimmy turned the volume down and sat the radio aside. He picked up the Uzi and made sure the safety was off. He knew it was, he'd checked at least fifty times already, but you could never be too safe.

The street stood empty.

Jimmy sighed. Jake told him to stay where he was and keep from being seen. He even put a pot in the room to piss in, so he wouldn't have to go to the bathroom. Jimmy checked his phone. 8:01.

Next to him, the police scanner Johnny brought came to life with military jargon he didn't understand.

Outside, a police cruiser passed in the street, moving slowly. A bright white search light blinked on, and the pig inside shined it along the front lawns opposite Jimmy's position.

See something, say something, Jake said.

Jimmy picked up the walkie-talkie, depressed the TALK button, and said, "Police car on Pine Street. Spotlight."

The squad car moved on, its red taillight gradually disappearing into the night.

Jimmy sighed.

It was going to be a long twelve hours.

#

The sound of the walkie-talkie woke Jimmy from a thin and fitful doze. Someone was screaming.

"...fuckers! Tommy's down! Tommy's down!"

Another voice came back. "Get the fuck outta there! That ain't why we're here."

The first voice responded. In the background, Jimmy heard the telltale pop of gunfire. "Fuck them!"

Jimmy eventually got the whole story. A team of guys were patrolling a street that runs behind a row of houses when they met a group of civilians on the same mission, hayseeds with rifles and shotguns playing Platoon. The civvies were jumpy, and opened fire without so much as a "Who the fuck's there?" Tommy Ghio was hit in the head, and Jake took a round to the leg. Being wiseguys, they fired back. Jake said they got two of them before retreating into someone's backyard. The cops and guardsmen were all over the place within minutes.

"We couldn't get Tommy," Jake said. "He was dead anyway."

That was bad. The pigs would find out Tommy was with the Outfit.

At midnight, Johnny radioed in. "Jimmy, see anything?"

"No."

"Alright. We're..."

The connection broke.

Jimmy waited a few minutes before hitting him back. "You there?"

No reply.

He tried again.

Nothing.

Shit.

"Jake, you copy?"

"Yeah. Go ahead."

"I was talking to Johnny but he went quiet."

Jake didn't respond for a minute. "Okay. I know where he was. I'll go check on him."

The street stood silent.

Jimmy licked his lips and picked up the Uzi, drawing comfort from it. A few minutes later, Jake came back. "Fucking Christ! They're dead!"

The words sank into Jimmy like a thousand pounds of lead. "Dead?"

"Jesus Christ, it's a bloodbath! I...the fuck?"

The line went dead.

Jimmy's heart seized. "What? What's going on?"

In the distance, Jimmy heard machine gun fire.

His stomach turned.

"Jake?"

Nothing.

More gunfire in the night.

Tat-tat-tat. Blam! Blam! Boom!

Silence.

Jimmy was panicking now. "Jake! Jake, come back!"

The lined opened up.

Only instead of hearing Jake's voice, all Jimmy heard was the sound of heavy breathing.

Michael Myers.

Jimmy dropped the walkie-talkie and jumped up. The breathing continued. Ragged. Obscene.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Leaving the radio but taking the Uzi, Jimmy left the room and went downstairs. A few guys sat around the living room, bathed satanic in the glow of a fire. A CB rig sat in the center of the coffee table. They'd heard too, and their faces, slack and pale, showed it.

"We gotta get the fuck outta here," Jimmy said.

No one spoke. They were in shock.

The first one to speak was Robbie. "We ain't goin' nowhere except to find that bastard."

He stood.

"Robbie," Jimmy said, "We can't fuckin fight this guy. He's not human."

"He's human alright," Robbie said. He grabbed an assault rifle from the table and slung it over his shoulder. "Come on! Let's move!"

A few guys got up. The others didn't. They looked scared. Doubtful. Jimmy knew how they felt.

"Robbie..."

"Move."

Robbie and his minions brushed past and went out the door. Robbie came back. "Jimmy, get back to the window and spot. You guys, cover the doors."

With that, he was gone.

#

Jimmy was back at the window. It was almost three and he hadn't heard from Robbie in nearly an hour. On the scanner, cops talked about the bodies. Locals. Out of towners. Michael Myers was moving in the shadows and they couldn't catch him. At 3:05, an explosion rocked the night. Jimmy didn't see anything, but the cops on the scanner said something about shooting by the BP on Main Street.

Jimmy patted the Uzi.

He called Robbie but got nothing.

If I don't hear from him by four, I'm gone.

Then he thought of Frank Fonzi.

Whacked for running away.

At 3:58, Jimmy checked his phone.

When he looked back up, someone was standing in the middle of the street.

Jimmy's heart jumped.

The figure, lost in shadows, was tall, solidly built, and broad. He was wearing what looked like a white mask.

He was looking directly at Jimmy.

Fuck.

Jimmy tried to move, to raise the Uzi, but he was frozen.

The figure moved, walking slowly and deliberately.

He was coming toward the house.

Jimmy moved then.

He moved a lot.

Downstairs, a guy Jimmy didn't know very well was backing away from the door, an M4 raised at stomach level. "He's coming!" the guy shouted, his voice breaking.

Just then the door exploded into a thousand pieces, as if someone had left a dynamite bomb on the WELCOME mat. Screaming, Jimmy fell back, landing on the bottom step.

In the swirling dust, Michael Myers stood tall and statue-like.

The other guys were screaming then. Four of them, Jimmy thought, or was it five?

Then the gunfire started.

Myers twitched and jerked and moved, but he didn't fall. Jesus Christ, he didn't fall.

The guy with the M4 ran out of led first. Seizing the moment, Myers sprang forward and snatched the gun from his hands. While Jimmy watched, madness closing on the edges of his mind, Myers swung the rifle like a baseball bat. Like a baseball, the guy's head flew outta the park, landing in the fire, sending a vortex of sparks into the living room.

The sofa caught.

Myers turned to him then.

Jimmy screamed and scrambled up the stairs. Behind him, more gunfire rattled. Someone else screamed.

He had to get out of here. Find someone. A cop. A car. Whatever. Whoever. Jesus Christ. Fuck.

In a moment of lucidity, he remembered there was a set of back stairs that led to a side door behind the kitchen.

Down hall, down the steps, falling, sliding, and yelling. At the bottom there were two doors. One leading to the kitchen, one leading outside. Jimmy grabbed the handle to the one leading outside and pulled. He didn't hear anymore gunfire. But his heart was pounding so loud in his ears he wouldn't have heard an A-bomb going off.

The door popped open and swung out.

Jimmy screamed.

Hanging from a wire, Jake's severed head, grinning and eyeless, greeted him like a maître d in hell. Jimmy fell back, hit the wall, and nearly went down.

A noise on the stairs.

He looked up. Michael Myers was standing on the landing, his head cocked to one side, a butcher knife hanging limply from one hand.

Jimmy wailed, knocked the head aside, and ran out into the night.

In the street, his screams echoing loudly, he stopped and turned.

Myers was there.

Through someone's front yard he ran. Scrambled over a wooden fence. Dropped into a back alley.

"Help me!"

He staggered south, casting terrified glances over his shoulder.

When he reached the end of the alley, he turned west...

...and right into Michael Myers's arms.

#

The house on Pine Street burned long into the night. Cops, firefighter, and soldiers scoured the town.

The only thing they found was the body of Jimmy "The Shark" Russo.

He died of fright, the coroner later said.

As for Michael Myers...

...he got away.

#  THE HADDONFIELD COMPANION

By Michael Ayoob

I never heard him walk into my house or come up the stairs. He just appeared in my bedroom doorway while I was putting my costume on. I was so scared I couldn't scream, like in a bad dream. Then I thought he was Daddy home early and playing a trick, or maybe Judy's boyfriend Steve. But he grabbed me by my arm, picked me up, and carried me downstairs.

Outside I screamed, "Stop! Put me down! This ain't funny! You're gonna rip my costume! Mommy's gonna be mad!" But he didn't listen, and he didn't stop.

There was nobody on my street even though it was morning. I don't know how nobody saw us – him looking like he did and carrying me screaming and fighting in my costume – but nobody said or did anything if they did see. He threw me in a car that had words on the door that I couldn't read. And he started the car and drove, and I didn't know what to do.

I watched him while he drove. He was tall and skinny and wore a navy blue uniform like a window washer. And he wore a white rubber mask that didn't look like any mask at Woolworth's. It was a ghost face with hair. I could see his eyes and hear him breathing, but he wouldn't look at me.

I saw more weird things, like how his window was busted out and its glass pieces were on the floor. And on the back seat there was a big stone with chunks of dirt on it, like something he dug up from somewhere.

I knew he wasn't Daddy or Steve and this wasn't a trick. I asked if he was gonna hurt me, and he didn't answer. I asked why he took me and where he was going, and then I shut up because the way he didn't answer – the way he just kept breathing and looking straight ahead – made me afraid even more.

He drove around the neighborhood. If he wanted to kidnap me, he'd leave the neighborhood, I thought, go way far away. But instead he kept circling around the same few streets like he was looking for someone else, too. Finally he stopped across from the high school, got out, and looked at a window like he saw somebody he knew. Then he got back in and drove some more.

He was a better driver than Daddy or Mommy or Judy or Steve. That was one good thing about him. He never speeded or jerked the car around or got mad at other drivers. I was safe from accidents, and I told him that to be nice, hoping he'd let me go. He didn't answer.

He parked by another school and waited like he was looking for somebody again. A boy came walking out holding a pumpkin, and a couple other boys were teasing him. One mean boy tripped the boy with the pumpkin and made him fall on the pumpkin and smoosh it. Ghost Face got out the car then and grabbed the mean boy. Didn't do anything to him, just held on to him for a second, and that scared the mean boy, who ran away.

Then Ghost Face got back in the car, and we followed the boy who had the pumpkin for a while. It was nice of Ghost Face to stick up for him, and I told him so, too. Ghost Face didn't answer, but I thought he might be a good guy who goes around stopping bullies.

Soon after that, he started driving by three girls Judy's age. One had curly black hair, one had light brown hair, and one was blonde. One yelled at him, and that made him stop real fast. I got jerked, and my seatbelt scratched my neck, and I didn't know how good his driving was anymore. He parked and pulled me out of the car with him.

He walked real fast. I had to run to keep up. He knew where he was going and cut through people's yards to a bunch of big bushes. He stepped out past the bushes and onto the sidewalk for a second, then he ducked back and ran and dragged me along. We hid behind the closest house, and I heard a girl talking at the spot on the sidewalk where he'd been. It sounded like the girl who yelled at him.

Then he cut through more backyards. All this time, nobody saw us, just like in the morning. He snuck to a yard where there was laundry hanging and stood near a sheet, looking into a window like he did at the high school. I saw a girl in the window, the one with light brown hair. She saw him and got scared and jumped away from the window, but she didn't look at me even though I was right there with him.

That's when I knew he was playing a game like hide-and-seek, but I didn't know the rules. He hid from the girls but he sought them, too. I think he was it, but he didn't chase them to tag them. I knew he wouldn't answer if I asked him what the rules were. The running and hiding and sneaking was fun, but I was still afraid of him and I wanted to go home.

So I tried. After that girl jumped away from her window, I took off for home. I ran out onto Oxley Street, and I screamed my head off. "Help! Help! A man took me from home! Help!" There were boys and girls trick-or-treating, and none of them paid attention, like another bad dream. There were three trick-or-treaters with masks – jack-o'-lantern, witch, and skull – and I screamed, "Help me! Can't you see me?! Can't you hear me?! A bad man's chasing me!"

I touched the witch, and I'm not lying but a spider crawled out of her mouth. A snake came out of the jack-o'-lantern's mouth. And all the other people, the grown-ups, were acting like nothing was happening. Other trick-or-treaters walked right past us. People drove by on Oxley Street. I was standing there, too scared to move, watching the spider and snake and waiting for the skull to start leaking bugs or snakes, too.

He grabbed me from behind then, picked up me up, and carried me away. I must've fainted because I don't remember what happened right after that.

#

It was dark when I woke up, and I was in the car again. He was driving again, still wearing his mask and not talking. We were still in the neighborhood, which was good news. Even better, we were on my street and getting close to my house. I thought he might be a good guy again because he rescued me from those scary trick-or-treaters and was taking me home.

But there were already two men standing in front of my house. One was a policeman, and one was a old bald man in a long coat. Ghost Face parked and just watched them from a few houses away. They went inside. I knew what they were there for. They were looking for me. They were talking to Mommy and Daddy and Judy, trying to find out where I was all day.

I could've asked him to let me go, but I knew he wouldn't. I had to run for it, and I knew this was my best chance. But he read my mind and grabbed me before I even moved. As scared as I was, I got mad, too, and I screamed, "Let me go! LET ME GO!"

He wrestled me back so I couldn't reach the handle. Like always, he didn't say anything. He just breathed and grunted through his mask. He didn't hurt me, but he wouldn't let me go, neither. He put his hand over my eyes and made the world go black.

I begged him, saying, "Please. Everybody's looking for me. Why won't you let me go? What do you want?" He covered my mouth with his other hand, and I cried until I fainted again.

#

It was still nighttime when I woke, and I was still with him. We were standing just outside of a house, and he was looking in a window. I knew I was trapped in a bad dream that kept turning into more bad dreams. Running from him wouldn't work, and he would never talk. The only thing I could do was wait until this newest bad dream ended.

I asked what he was looking at, and he picked me up like Daddy would do at the zoo. It was one of those girls from before, the one with curly black hair. He was playing his own hide-and-seek game again, but a dog came around the house and gave him away. A big barking German Shepherd. The game was over, and Ghost Face you lost, I thought. But then he put me down and lifted up the dog, as big as it was.

And that's when I found out how mean Ghost Face could be.

#

Even after he choked the dog, I didn't think he'd hurt the girl with the curly black hair. I thought he meant to scare her. He kept me with him when he snuck into the back seat of her car and waited for her. I thought maybe the dog scared him and he didn't mean to kill it. Maybe it was a accident that went too far.

But the girl was planned. We waited for her, and waited, and when she sat in the front seat, Ghost Face jumped up and gave her a big gotcha. But he squeezed her neck just like he squeezed the dog's, and he meant what he did. I didn't know he had a knife until then. While he was holding the girl's neck with one hand, he picked up a knife hid in his pocket, and I closed my eyes and screamed.

When I opened my eyes, we were sneaking around in a dining room, hiding from two more people. The blonde girl he followed before and her boyfriend, whose glasses were huge. They were kissing on a sofa, and we were watching them. I wanted to warn them, scream out, "Go away! Call the police!" But I was afraid of what he'd do to me if I did.

We stayed hiding while they went upstairs, and then he dragged me into a closet connected to the kitchen. We waited there for a while, and the boyfriend came back down to the kitchen. I stayed in the closet when Ghost Face jumped out on him, and I didn't look at what happened next. I heard them pushing each other around, and I knew who was stronger and would win. Then everything went quiet.

I think I fell asleep in that dark closet because the next thing I remember was a girl screaming. Then a thumpity-thump-thump like she fell down the steps, then more screaming and glass breaking. He reached in, grabbed me, and yanked me out to join him. Outside we went, chasing after that screaming girl, who I recognized. She was the one with light brown hair, the same girl he spied on from that yard with the laundry.

The street was all dark and nobody was around. The girl ran crooked like her leg hurt and screamed loud for somebody to help, but nobody woke up. I knew they wouldn't. I could've told her they wouldn't.

She got into a house, and we followed but didn't go in right away. Her screaming didn't hurry Ghost Face up or make him afraid of getting caught. He went around to the side, found a wire stuck to the house, and cut it with his knife. Then he pulled me with him to a open window, and we snuck inside together. We came into a living room, and the girl was trying to hide by the sofa in front of us. She was crying and really scared.

He creeped up behind the sofa, held up his knife, and stabbed it down, but he missed. The girl stabbed him with something in his neck, and he fell. I knew he wasn't dead because he grabbed me on his way down and kept holding me. The girl didn't see me, but I was standing right there in front of her, saying, "Run out the front door!"

He sat up, and I think he was mad I told her to run. He pulled me along pretty rough and followed her up the stairs. I think he was mad, too, because this girl was making him do more chasing, maybe beating him at his own hide-and-seek game. At the top of the steps we found her and and a boy and a girl my size. The boy was the same one Ghost Face followed earlier, the one with the smashed pumpkin. They screamed and ran to a different room.

I said, "Don't hurt them. Please don't hurt them," and maybe he listened because he didn't care about them at all. He only went after the older girl, who tried to hide in a closet. I stood back while he smashed through that closet, throwing pieces of wood everywhere, trying to get to her. I couldn't see everything happening, but I could see him yanking the cord of the closet light, making it go off and on, while the girl was on the floor screaming.

Then something happened to him. I think she jabbed him with something, maybe a sharp piece of wood from the closet, but he fell again like he was hurt. He laid on the floor and faked like he was dead. I know he was faking because when I went near him he took hold of my foot. He wanted me to stay, I think, to show me how to win the game.

And the girl was fooled. She sent that little boy and girl out of the house running and screaming, and I wanted to go with them. I tried, too. I took one step, but he held on tight and wasn't letting me go anywhere. The girl was sitting there crying, looking away from him as he sat up one more time.

I said, "Turn around. Why don't you turn around? Why don't you run?" while he pulled me closer to her. She didn't hear me, like always, and maybe he was mad that I tried to talk to her again because he let me go and choked her with both hands. I screamed, "Don't! Stop it!" and you know that didn't work. I even kicked his leg to get him to stop, but he didn't feel it.

The girl pulled off his ghost face, and that made him stop for a second. The weird thing was he didn't look scary at all without the mask. He looked a lot like Daddy but younger. I wanted to tell him this, to ask him how we were family because I knew we had to be. But then something even crazier happened as he put his mask back on. That old bald man in the long coat, the one we saw by my house, he came into the room aiming a gun!

BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!

And Ghost Face went flying out the window and landed on the ground hard. The girl was crying. I said to the old bald man, "Take me home! Take me with you!" but like everybody else, he didn't hear me or see me, and I didn't want to touch him, because what happened with those trick-or-treaters.

So I ran out of that house, and I ran all the way home myself. The policeman wasn't there anymore, and Mommy and Daddy's car wasn't in the driveway. But the downstairs lights were on and the TV was on, so I knew Judy and probably Steve were there. And our jack-o'-lantern was lit, too. I ran past it, and my costume was sweaty and dirty and maybe bloody from everything that happened.

I opened the door and called out for Judy, but she wasn't in the living room. Maybe she was upstairs with Steve, something they do sometimes. I called out to them again and started to go up.

I never heard him come in the house behind me, only felt his hand on my shoulder. It made me jump and scream and turn around, and there was Ghost Face again. Now he was bleeding and moving slower than before. Bleeding badly, too, with bullet holes in his body. I was scared he would do something to Judy, but he didn't try to go upstairs. He sat on the steps and just breathed through his mask and watched himself bleed.

"Is the game over?" I said, and he didn't answer.

"Will you let me go upstairs?" I said, and he didn't answer that, too.

I got the feeling he wouldn't stop me if I tried, so I moved past him and went up the steps. I found my Bozo mask on the floor up there and picked it up by its big red nose. Judy left her door open, and I went in to tell her I was home and warn her about Ghost Face.

She wasn't there. Her bed was unmade, and her clothes were on the floor, but I swear she wasn't there. I don't know where she went, but I had a sick feeling in my stomach she wasn't coming back anytime soon.

Ghost Face was still sitting on the stairs when I came back down, breathing like he was catching his breath after running. I watched his blood drip onto the steps and tried to understand what was happening. I didn't and still don't.

I don't know who or what he is. I don't know why he hurts dogs and people, or how he can be stabbed and shot, fall out a window, and still walk around. Or why he doesn't speak and is so good at being sneaky.

All I know is that today is Halloween, this is my house, and nobody's here but us. I'm stuck in a bad dream, and Ghost Face is the only one who sees and hears me, the only one I can touch, the only one who treats me like I'm here. He is scary and a bad guy, but he's who I'm with until I wake up. And I will wake up, I know it. Mommy will say, "Time to wake up, Michael," and I'll be here at home again, and everything will be okay like it was before.

# SHOWING SCARY

By Chad Lutzke

Haddonfield, Illinois

Halloween, 1963

7:30 a.m.

"Judith, don't forget. Tonight is your father's work party. We'll be gone before you get home from school so I need you to watch Michael. Oh, and take him trick or treating." Mrs. Meyers said as she picked out that evening's attire. Two dresses lay spread out on the bed. She stood over them wearing only a towel, surveying each gown.

"Mom, no! I wanted to go to this costume party tonight. Sarah saw my costume and thinks I have a good chance at winning this year." Judith whined from across the hall.

"I'm sorry, honey. But this really means a lot to your father and there's no one else to watch your brother."

"No, there are plenty of people to watch him. You just won't ask them because you know everyone thinks he's weird."

Mrs. Meyers peeked from around the doorway and into Judith's room. "You shush your mouth. Michael will hear you."

"He's downstairs, he can't hear me."

"You're going to watch him and that's final. We'll be home around 9:00 or 9:30." Mrs. Myers went back to electing a dress for the night.

"This sucks! I can't wait to move out. Then he'll be somebody else's problem."

Mrs. Myers poked her head around again. "I said you shush. And another thing. No boys here tonight while we're gone."

"I know, Mother."

"I can't even imagine what the neighbors would think—like we're running some kind of whorehouse here. "

Judith rolled her eyes, grabbed her books, and headed downstairs.

"Wait for Michael." Mrs. Myers called after her daughter.

"He knows the way." Judith shut the front door and made her way to school.

Mrs. Myers, dropped the towel and stepped through one of the dresses. "Michael, honey," she yelled.

"Yes?" Michael stood in the doorway of the bedroom.

Startled, Mrs. Myers quickly pulled at her dress, covering herself. "Oh, sweetie, I didn't know you were right there."

Michael gave a blank stare.

"I think your sister was in a hurry. I'll drop you off at school, okay?"

"Yeah." Michael turned and headed downstairs.

#

2:45 p.m.

Judith stood outside Haddonfield Elementary School, speaking to a teenage boy while waiting for Michael.

"So there's no way out of it at all?" asked Danny. "You could stick him in front of the television, maybe put a creature feature on for him. Boys love those." The horny teen had just spent the last 10 minutes trying to convince Judith to meet him at the costume party. Judith had a deep crush on the boy, but not enough to risk a lengthy grounding.

"I wish I could, Danny. Listen, why don't you skip the party and come over to my house. My parents won't be home until late."

"What about your brother?"

"He won't say anything. I'll make sure of it. I'll call you when it's okay to come over."

"Speak of the devil." Danny announced Michael's approach. "Hey, squirt. Whatchya gonna be for Halloween this year?"

"A clown."

Both Judith and Danny erupted in laughter. Michael was caught off guard.

"You idiot. Halloween is for scary stuff, Michael. Not sissy crap like clowns," Judith declared.

"Clowns can be scary. I've got the whole getup. The mask and a full suit." Michael said proudly.

"Nobody's gonna be scared of a little twerp like you. Leave the mask off and then maybe you'll have a chance." Judith made herself chuckle, but Michael looked down, his spirit broken from the joke.

"I'll see you later, Danny." There was a twinkle in Judith's eye when she said it. She fingered Danny's jacket collar, smiled and turned away, walking toward home. "Come on, sissy. Let's get you home." She looked down at Michael and pulled at this sleeve.

Danny stood and watched the exaggerated sway of her hips as she walked away like a cat in heat.

Not a word was said by either Judith or Michael until they were nearly home. "You're gonna look stupid." Judith held a smirk when she said it."

Michael continued walking and made no effort to argue with his sister. It was the usual routine. When they were alone she would belittle him, reminding him that every little thing he did was stupid, every accomplishment too small to be praised for, and that until he was in high school he would never understand anything about real life. She had talked down to him once in front of a friend and was promptly put in her place. It was a humiliating experience to be spoken to like that in front of her little brother. And by her own friend even. These talks were reserved for the two of them only.

"I'm not taking you, ya know," Judith said.

"I know."

"So you know what I'm talking about?"

"Trick or treating?"

"Yup." Judith stuck a piece of gum into her mouth she'd found in her purse. "High schoolers are much too old to be running around collecting candy, and I'm not your mother. Besides, I have tons of homework to do. I won't be doing anything tonight except hitting the books. We'll find you a group to follow. Just make sure you're back before Mom and Dad get home."

Michael kicked at a mound of dead leaves piled on the sidewalk.

#

Judith spent the rest of the afternoon talking on the phone, chewing gum, and teasing Michael for wearing his clown costume hours before he would even leave the house. He sat uncomfortably on the living room floor mesmerized by back-to-back episodes of Scooby Doo, doing his best to ignore his sister's insults.

When evening rolled around, Judith became anxious. No familiar group of kids had come to the door that she could send Michael off with, and if she was to have Danny over at all it would have to be soon or not at all.

At 8:00 Danny parked his car down the street and waited for Judith's signal that all was clear. Nearly forty-five minutes later, Judith came into the living room where Michael still sat, fully suited in his satin clown suit, his neck red from scratching where the ruffled collar tickled him. She scooped him off the floor and hurried him to the front door

"Come on, Michael. The Miller boys are at the door. You can go with them. Hurry up."

"I don't have my mask."

"Well, where is it?"

"I don't know. Maybe behind the couch."

"Michael, you've got the stupid suit on. That's enough. You're not scary anyway. It looks stupid. The whole thing looks ridiculous. Now get. They're waiting for you."

"What about my pumpkin?"

"Your what?"

"The pumpkin to hold my candy in."

Judith looked around the room, ran to the kitchen and back again in a matter of seconds. She handed Michael a large, black garbage bag. "Here, that's plenty big."

Michael held it up as though it were road kill and then struggled to find the opening.

"Michael, go!"

Michael opened the front door and joined the small group of children outside. Just as he'd thought, conversations began with questions about his mask, the whereabouts, and what it looked like.

He began to feel like the idiot his sister had deemed him.

#

A half an hour passed before Michael could take it no more. With no mask, Halloween wasn't the same. After the group circled around the block, Michael split from them and headed home. Soon after, he was met by a teenager who quickly grabbed his bag and ran off with it. An insult to all the injury his sister had dished out.

Once home, Michael could see Judith through the window. She was with the boy he'd seen earlier at school—Danny. They were kissing on the couch and the boy had Michael's mask, teasing Judith with it.

She's a liar.

Judith and Danny left the couch and headed upstairs. Michael went inside through the back door and into the kitchen.

I can be scary.

He opened up the kitchen drawer and retrieved a large butcher knife. As his head filled with thoughts of Judith's ceaseless taunts, he walked from one room to the next, looking briefly for his mask near the couch where Danny had wore it. It wasn't there. He walked to the next room and stopped when he heard Danny's voice.

"Look, Judy. It's really late. I gotta go."

"Will you call me tomorrow?" Judith asked.

The boy stopped halfway down the stairs and pulled his shirt down over his head. "Yeah, sure."

"Promise?"

"Yeah." The boy hesitated.

Michael waited until the boy was gone and then headed up the stairs.

She'll be really scared.

Once at the top of the stairs, Michael turned toward Judith's room. The mask was there on the floor. He picked it up.

Clowns can be scary.

He entered Judith's room where she sat naked in front of her vanity, brushing her high school hair.

"Michael!"

It would be the last time Judith Myers ever yelled at her brother.

# INSPIRATION

By Matthew J. Barbour

Oh my, there you are just standing there. Haddonfield's finest in the flesh. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. It is after all Halloween. This is your time to shine. Your one big day a year. Better not screw it up, huh?

I've just got to come out and say it. You're every bit as tall and menacing as your movies make you appear. What are you 6'9" or 6'10"? Shit.

I'm not sure I get the Captain Kirk mask, but then again William Shatner is one ugly dude. I suppose that would strike fear in the heart of most warm-blooded Americans. Still, it looks kind of goofy. It is dated too. These days I'm not sure most young people know who William Shatner is.

I take that back, he does those commercials with that girl who loves nerds. She's hot. I get a boner just thinking about her. Fuck, if I knew nerds had pussy like that hanging around them I would've studied harder in school. You know what I mean?

I won't lie. You were kind of my inspiration. Back in the day, you were the bomb. The way you hacked up those teenagers, it was masterful. I'm not just saying that either. You were kind of like a harbinger of things to come. But, hey, don't let it go to your head. We're way past that now.

I see you still got that butcher knife too. Good for you. You know some people have analyzed slasher movies and say the knife is a phallic symbol. They say you have penis envy. They say you have a little prick. I say fuck that. It's just a knife. If you want to kill someone with a knife, you fucking do it. If you want to kill someone with your penis, you kill someone with your fucking penis.

Reminds me of a toddler I worked over the other day. Man did he scream when I packed his fudge. Something must have ruptured when I was doing it too. Little shit bled all over me. He died. Well, he died eventually, but man was it fun while it lasted.

Did you just fucking stab me? Hold on hombre. I am not like you. I can't take twenty bullets, fall down, and then get up. I don't just walk around like nothing happened ten minutes later. I'm not invincible. The age of the superhuman slasher is long gone. I fucking bleed.

Also, I'll just come out and say it. The way you use the knife is pretty vanilla. You don't have to just stab someone. You can draw it out. Tie them down. Cut off their toes. Feed it to them. You don't want to be vanilla. You want to be rocky road!

For example, last time I used a knife, I cut a hole in some girl's belly. Then I took a piss and shit in there. Sewed it up before strangling her with razor wire and dumping her in a trash bin. I wonder if they ever found that girl. If so, I wonder what the coroner thought when he removed my feces from her abdomen. Do you think he chalked that up to penis envy?

You stabbed me again! Are you trying to fucking kill me? Well go ahead you big pussy. It won't change anything. You're still old. You're still obsolete. It isn't enough to just kill people anymore.

Shit with all the stuff Ryan Harding, Monica O'Rourke, and Wrath James White are writing, the public expects a bit of flair. You got to eat babies or rape the elderly while their grandchildren watch. Put a gerbil up someone's ass and then we'll talk.

That masked psychopath look isn't doing you any favors either. They can spot crazy on you from a mile away. You're not someone their going to trust. You don't have a pretty face or smile. Serial killers today are priests or doctors. Hell, I'm a school teacher. You're just some fucked up monster of a man that spent too much time in a mental institution.

So you go ahead and fucking stab me. I'm not invincible. I'll die. Maybe by killing me you'll even spare a few kids from a fate worse than death, at least until the next sick fuck comes along.

Fingers crossed. Perhaps you'll even get lucky and people will start feeling sorry for you. It could be your big chance to play the antihero. Find your way into their hearts and minds like every other silver screen has-been.

Or maybe not? You don't have to go the way of that blood sucking douchebag in a cape. Maybe we can teach an old dog new tricks. Look, I just got done reading the latest Edward Lee novel. The man's a fucking genius and I've been taking notes. Going to need a quadriplegic, a hockey stick, and the gills of a North Atlantic Sturgeon. You in?

# HELLOWEEN

By Nathan Cabaniss

Hell's a real place.

It's not a place in that it's a location that can be pointed out on a map, or that can be given directions to, as long as you take a left at Purgatory and keep going for a few eternities (and if you see an endless black void, well, then you've gone too far). But Hell is real all the same. All you have to do is look in the cracks and the crevices, the shadows in the drapes, the offset panels of a wooden floor where the roaches and the rats make their passage... or perhaps even a pair of lifeless black eyes, hidden beneath a mask of ghostly white. That's the thing about Hell: you can find it anywhere, as long as you know where to look.

There's one soul in particular who knows Hell all too well. He's a familiar face round these parts, one whose shape has silhouetted the thorned gates that surround the endless inferno more times than a person can count. It happens like clockwork every Halloween. He dies and comes to me, and I send him right back. But not without a price, of course... I can see him now, in fact, stumbling forward awkwardly through the crevices known only to a few. All the way from Haddonfield, IL to Hell.

"Michael, Michael, Michael," I tell him, and he turns his head curiously, like the little boy he still is on the inside. "What happened this time? Stabbed? Shot? Set on fire and thrown from a great height?"

Michael doesn't respond. He's not one for banter.

"Well, whatever it is, you know the drill from here. If you want to go back, you're going to have to earn it..."

This gets a response. Michael lifts the knife in his hand, the fire around us dancing on the face of the blade.

"Oh, no. That's far too easy. This time, you're going to have to play by a different set of rules..."

I flick my fingers and the knife disappears--the brute looks down at his empty hands for far longer than any normal soul should.

"Pay attention, Michael," I tell him, and he finally looks up again. I form a pathway before him, a fresh crop of victims lined up in a perfect row. A woman showering, a couple in heat, a young man hiding just behind a thick bush... souls I've plucked from the fire who don't know they've already died.

Michael looks at them eagerly, and then turns back to me. With a smile I wave my hand before him, providing him with his arsenal this go-round: a mouse-trap and a cement trowel.

"You've got thirty seconds."

In a blink he's grabbed the tools and already stumbling along the path, and shortly thereafter the first scream pierces the air. It's all a game, really; I could just let him go back with no huss and no fuss. He does send me plenty of business, after all...

But he'll be back before you know it. By my count, he dies at least a half-dozen times every Halloween. And besides, this way's more fun.

# HALLOWEEN RETURNS

By S@yr (Cathal Gunning)

Dedicated to the memory of Wes Craven

"Everyone has a Michael Myers, I think. He's a scary story to tell your kids, but one who, as an adult, you still believe in, in secret. He's the bogeyman under the bed, the man in the mask who's hiding in your closet. He's the reason you're afraid of the dark. The hand that grabs the foot from under the covers, the reason no one wants to close their eyes in the shower. We know there's supposed to be nothing to fear but fear itself, sure, but that's who Michael is. It's who he was, and it's who, I think, he'll always be, if he's still out there"

\- Don Castle, during a press interview for "All Hallow's Eve", 1988.

All Hallow's Eve Returns.

All Hallow's Eve, Returned.

All Hallow's Eve Returns, Again.

All Hallow's Eve: The Law of Diminishing Returns.

Don Castle sat slumped at the typewriter, a six pack of cheap, warming beer close at hand. 2:08 A.M. It was going to be one of those nights, he thought to himself. He bit his lip to wake himself up, and almost drew blood.

Outside, little blue lanterns in cast iron cases spread pale, thin light across the lawn. Their glow was weak, fed by the starving October sun, and the stretch of suburban garden was almost all darkness. Dewy grass and uneven paving stones, and beyond that, splintering tree houses and empty, leaf-strewn swimming pools. Chipped tiles and fallen roof slates. And beyond that...

Something flinched in the trees. Something moved. A shadow in the corner of his eye. An almost shape flickering across a light somewhere, too quick to be human. Nothing. There's never anything out there.

Unless "out there" is Haddonfield on Halloween night, that is.

Don flinched, something he had found himself doing a lot of in recent nights. Haddonfield was creepy, the slow burn creepiness of a town where something awful had happened and the air itself could have told you as much. Don thought about the expensive conmen who worked as therapists back home in LA. "Talking through our feelings about what has happened" was the last thing Haddonfield wanted to do.

So Don Castle was here to do it for them, he thought to himself. Don Castle, the script surgeon who saved "that summer camp slasher movie" from being a laughing stock, the man who turned a screenplay entitled "Dreamkiller" into a halfway tolerable movie, here to save the day once again. Don shook his head.

He pictured the studio heads sweating in the sunshine, desperate to see if a few weeks in haunted Haddonfield could save the first draft of "All Hallow's Eve". At the very least, the re-write could change the script into something less tasteless than a movie of the week about the so-called "babysitter murders".

The incident had shook the town, supposedly, but Don would not have known on arrival. Streets were kept clean, hedgerows were even, and everyone had the same Stepford Wives almost-smile. A sad smile, the sort people wear when they comfort each other. Don was not a fan of the town.

There was a noise outside.

Scratching of a gnarled tree limb against something, Don thought. Mangy cat claws cutting through garbage bags. Some big dumb retriever, barking at the darkness, sitting in a suburban garden, scared by nothing. Footsteps on gravel...

There are always noises outside, Don thought. It was always nothing. Almost always. It only had to be something once, though. One more noise and Don was running for the bathroom with a baseball bat in hand, the way characters in his movies never did. Don looked back at his beer.

One of those nights. Every night in the last fortnight had been one of those nights, ever since Don had moved down to Haddonfield and into the "dark, old house" where it had happened. The house which was not as dark, or as old, truth be told, as Don had been expecting. It was strangely modern, fitted with televisions and everything. Then again, the murders were only ten years earlier.

Fuck Halloween, Danielle thought as she climbed from the window.

He was ten paces behind her, his steps as slow as death. Danielle had not seen his face, and had no intention of doing so. If you ever see Michael's face, you know you're already too late, Danielle thought. She could hear him breathing.

_Why run upstairs?_ She thought. Well, why go out on Halloween in Haddonfield? Why leave the house at all? Michael Myers was meant to be an urban myth, the life-size clown statue or the alligators in the sewers. He was not supposed to be the hulking thing which had been standing in her kitchen before she knew it. The dark shape who had followed her screaming up the stairs at a snail's pace, the faceless thing which somehow knew which room to follow her into.

Her legs slid against the rain-slick roof tiles, one ankle dangling from the edge of the roof. Twelve foot drop? Ten feet. Danielle tugged off her high heels, looking over her shoulder at the empty window as she did. Two more seconds and he would be there, following her out into the night. He never gave up, never got tired, never stopped following until it was over.

Danielle wished she had worn a more comfortable costume. She shifted to her knees, unsteady on her bare feet, and tried to straighten herself up.

"No, the nurse outfit would look brilliant. Seriously, you'll look totally adorable, just wait until Sean sees you"

Danielle winced as she looked down to the unforgiving rose bushes and the less forgiving ground. Flat suburban lawns, no cushion from the hard surface of the soil. She wondered whether Laurie Strode knew what to wear when it was her turn to play "Escape the Shape". Danielle turned back to the house, seeing a figure start to appear in the dark room behind the open window.

She closed her eyes and jumped off the roof.

The bedroom upstairs was never fixed up. The closet door was shattered, still just about hanging on by its hinges, the rest of the room a picture of chaos. Clothes torn and strewn across the floor, bed tossed aside, and furniture shattered. The would-be murder scene of Laurie Strode, the sole survivor.

The last treatment had ended with some real strokes of genius. From what he could recall, the babysitter had fought off the invincible and supposedly supernatural Michael Myers with- a clothes hanger? Something ridiculous.

Don still had no intention of re-visiting the room upstairs in order to re-write the closing scenes, though. No one's fee was worth that visit. Don heard a creak and knew something was walking down the stairs behind him.

Don exhaled, taking a long drink from his beer, ignoring his shaky hand. If he was half as good at scaring everyone else as he was at scaring himself, he would have been a millionaire, Don thought. He shifted in his seat again. Nowhere in this house was comfortable. He looked to his notes. Thus far, Don's contribution to saving the "All Hallow's Eve" script consisted of a pile of newspaper articles, unread, a list of names not yet interviewed, and a single note, scrawled across an otherwise empty sheet.

"Cast chesty girl for Babysitter- Blonde? Brunette acceptable, if chesty blondes unavailable".

The magic of Hollywood.

The cold night air snaked itself around Don's neck. Every breath was a small victory against the suffocation of the cold, dry night. Don's chest felt tight. The start of a panic attack, he thought. He pushed the idea to the back of his mind.

Not scared, not worried, just getting bored of small towns. Small towns like Haddonfield on Halloween night. Maybe a little scared.

Rattling. A tapping on the upstairs window. Don tensed, his shoulders a knot of frozen muscle. The air in the kitchen was impossibly cold.

Something banged on the door. Clattering, a shock of impossibly loud noise shooting up Don's spine. Do not answer the door. Don's heart skipped a beat. It's the ghost of Michael Myers. No, it's the cops, here to warn you about the copycat killer who is sneaking through your garden as they wait for you to answer the door.

Another bang on the door. A quick, angry noise, a crack, the only thing louder and faster than Don's rushing heartbeat. Don stood up, tensed, and grabbed the baseball bat. He remembered how crazy he had thought he was to pack it.

Before he left the kitchen, Don emptied his beer. He tapped the six pack, a promise to return. Superstitions.

Don stalked through the empty hall as quick as he could manage. The twenty feet may have taken a few hours. Every heartbeat was louder than the last. In the little plate glass window at the top of the door, nothing was visible. Nothing but the empty Haddonfield night. Cold, quiet.

The banging on the door started again. Don clenched the handle of the bat, his fingernails digging into his palm. He watched the doorway of the living room as he passed it. He stared upstairs, into the empty, darkened landing.

The phone rang. Don swung, a reflex, pure instinct. The bat went straight through a thin vase of wilting flowers and into the drywall. Fuck the phone, Don thought. Calls are always coming from inside the house anyway.

The ringing persisted, sounding louder with every passing second, closer. Don continued toward the door. The banging had subsided for a few seconds again. The window was still empty. No way was he opening the door without seeing who was out there. A face appeared, and Don's heart jumped.

Danielle hammered on the door again, her heart hammering in her chest. Somewhere in back of her adrenaline flooded head, she thought of how ironic it was to go to the haunted house to get a way from Michael Myers.

It would be a while before Danielle saw the humour in this.

She paused for a second, looking around the small porch in every direction. He was nowhere to be seen, but that did not mean anything. He just appeared without warning, always close by, never seen but always watching. The night was silent. No rowdy teenager parties, no kids staying up late watching scary movies. Dead town.

Danielle banged on the door again, desperate. He would be closer by now, somehow. He would have followed her next door, to the only house with its lights left on. The end of the street, lit only by the thin yellow wash of a single streetlight.

Danielle heard a phone ring inside. She thought she heard a crash. Michael was in there already, Danielle thought, he had somehow beaten her back to his old stomping ground. She turned to run into the freezing cold night.

Danielle saw Michael Myers walking towards the house.

His stride was implacable, an inhuman calmness carrying him, as if he was a ghost, weightless. He was impossibly tall, a huge beast of a man, a blue boiler suit stained red all over. His face was a white mask, nothing human underneath, no trace of movement, no emotion. A ghost's face turned inside out. In his hand was a butcher's knife, dripping with still-wet red, coated to its handle by someone's still-hot blood. The shape drew the knife up, the dark claret which soaked its blade shining in the moonlight.

Danielle turned to the door and screamed, her eyes wide.

It swung open.

Don thought he had lost his mind.

Danielle sprinted inside as Don slammed the door shut.

The deadbolt clicked as he shoved a coat-stand in front of the thin wooden barrier between them and death. Don turned to the girl standing in his hallway, his mouth halfway open. She was no longer screaming, now watching the door as she grasped a set of scissors she had grabbed. She was maybe a college freshman, barely out of her teens, dressed in a barely-there nurse outfit, barefoot, and holding the oversized scissors in a small clenched fist. One of Don's characters would have known what to say.

"Welcome to Haddonfield", Danielle said.

The knife smacked into the door, its blade splitting through a board beneath the little plate glass window.

"Was that-"

"Yeah"

"How can he be-"

"No one knows. Hey, any chance you have a car or a gun?"

"I- What?"

"Car, gun, do you have one?"

The conversation continued as the girl ran into the kitchen, apparently abandoning any attempts to barricade the door. Don thought of protesting, then imagined trying to keep the front door safe as Michael Myers crept in through the patio and jammed a knife in his back for his troubles. Smart girl.

She was rifling through kitchen drawers, grabbing a pair of small knives as she did. She stuck them in between her fingers, the grey steel of the blades poking out between her soft knuckles. Don tightened his grip on the bat.

"I've a car", Don said, "There's a Beretta in the glove-box"

"Seriously?"

"I'm from LA"

Danielle frowned as she looked Don up and down. Shaky, but well built. He had a hard grip around the bat's handle, but his eyes were about three beers deep in a six pack. He was no Sam Loomis, but he had a car and a gun. Beggars can't be choosers, Danielle thought.

There was a loud crack from the end of the hall as Michael's massive arm tore through what was left of the flimsy wooden door. Don and Danielle looked at each other. Danielle tightened her grasp on her handfuls of knives and scissors.

"Upstairs? We could get onto the roof, and then-"

"We really couldn't," Danielle said, "trust me"

She walked to the back door and grabbed the handle. Of course it was locked. The key clicked in the lock, stuck by the frost of the night air. Across the room, Don shoved the small dinner table in front of the kitchen door. The doorknob shook.

Danielle kicked the door handle, immediately regretting the decision as a spark of pain shot up her foot. She shouldered the handle, then gripped it as tight as possible.

Don held the table in place, hearing the repetitive, deliberate smack of knife on wood as he pushed his back into the edge. Danielle twisted the handle, yanking in every direction, shaking the glass door as hard as she could manage.

She wrenched the door open, finally flooding the kitchen with the frozen air of the nearly-winter night. Danielle turned to Don. He paused, looked at the door behind him, and got to his feet.

To their shock, the kitchen door remained shut, the house silent once again. Danielle and Don looked at each other, then out at the dark, quiet garden.

It was only ten paces until the fence, and another twenty to the end of the dead end street where the car was parked. The piece of shit 1981 Ford which would have to make it out of town. It would have been lucky to make it to the end of the street, Don thought. Still, at least there was no way Michael Myers knew how to drive.

One step at a time. The garden stood still in the dark.

Silent and empty. For now. Only ten paces.

There was nothing in the garden. No cats prowling through dewy grass, no little paws skittering over stones. No sound at all. The dark, silent night was cold and sprawling, open outside the door in front of Don and Danielle.

Don took a slow step into the lawn, Danielle still standing by the frost-coated door. His pulse pounded in his throat, his eyes flicking through the dark. Don took another step, out in the open, exposed. Stuck out in the dark with-

Nothing.

There was nothing out here. Don nodded, and Danielle ran past him. She went straight for the fence. Seeing that no one was following them, Don followed her lead.

Danielle stumbled.

Over a rock, over her bare and by now probably bloody feet, over something or other. She stumbled and fell, sprawled onto the lawn.

Over her shoulder, a few feet from where she lay, was Michael. He was in the garden, right behind them, somehow knowing, always waiting. Michael walked on, each step taking an infinity. Don swerved, looked back, and clenched his fist.

It was too late.

Don's stomach knotted over itself. His heart stopped for a second, and he choked on a shallow breath, unable to look away. He took a step back towards her.

Danielle lay flat on her back. Michael stood above her, an immoveable colossus, his long walk finally at its end. His huge shape bore down her, blacking out the sparse light of the moon. The blade of his knife was the last thing she saw before closing her eyes, still shining in the moonlight.

Danielle felt skin split open underneath the blade. Then the screaming came.

The noise was unlike anything Don had heard before, an animalistic howl. Raw pain peeling through the silent suburban night. Don had not thought Michael Myers could feel pain.

Danielle twisted the knife into his thick wrist, knots of untenable muscle opening up under thin skin. She punched the knife edge in further, then yanked it free, kicking herself back onto her feet as the mighty Michael Myers recoiled, his hand spewing red lifeblood into the cold night.

He doubled over, breathed a deep, shaky breath, then the noise was over. In a second he was back on his feet, following again. Silent, slow, unstoppable. Don had waited for her, or maybe he had just been frozen in place.

Danielle grabbed his arm, waking him from his daze. Together they sprinted through the inky depths of the neighbourhood, only ever a few corners ahead of him.

Don had never been so happy to see his piece of shit car.

He tugged open the door, shoving himself into the front seat as Danielle climbed over him, kicking the gas pedal before he even closed the door.

The engine would not turn over.

Michael was a few feet from the car's bumper, still walking at a glacier's pace. Still catching up on them. Never stopping, never rushing. Always following, until it was all over. Danielle pulled open the glove-box, the Beretta's chamber blue under the cold glare of the moon.

Danielle shoved bullets into the chamber backwards, fumbling with cold metal cartridges. Don switched, taking the gun from her and shoving her in front of the wheel. Fuck, the cartridges were slippery. Shaky hands did not help. If I make it out of this alive, Don thought, I'm finishing that six pack.

The looming darkness of his figure filled the rear windshield, one arm raised high, its bloodied hand holding his huge knife.

The bang echoed through the car, deafening Danielle and Don. Missed. Five shots left. The rear windshield was shattered, shards of glass filling the backseat. Michael continued forward, his arm reaching through the empty space toward them.

Another bang, this bullet slamming into his shoulder. Michael stumbled back, pulling his arm from the window, as Danielle kicked the pedal once more, the engine finally roaring, a pained wheeze turning to a low growl, rumbling into life.

The Ford tore forward, a too-smooth jolt which almost slammed them into a telephone pole. Danielle grabbed the steering wheel, swerving back onto the gravel-strewn surface of the street, and Don took aim.

The sound echoed through the dead silent suburbs, the shot ringing through the heads of Haddonfield. The bullet planted itself in Michael's chest, but that meant nothing. As the car tore on, towards the road to town, towards safety and freedom, the shape got back to his feet, walking on after them, an impossible monster. Don took aim once more, bullets barely slowing down the terror which followed them.

"Michael Myers survives a drive by, killer ending"

"What's a drive by?" Danielle asked.

"Seriously? Jesus, Michael Myers is out killing kids every decade, and this is still the safe side of Illinois", Don said.

The piece of shit Ford struggled onto the road and into the night, streetlights passing in streaks of blurry orange. Don took a deep, shaky breath as Danielle struggled to recall her few weeks of driver's ed. The turn in towards the street faded into darkness, neither of the car's inhabitants wanting to look out onto the darkness left behind them. The darkness which filled every edge of the town, its alleys and old houses, torn-down buildings and emptied institutions.

Danielle was not sure where they were heading.

Don was the first to speak.

"It'll make a hell of a movie, at least"

In a small dead end street on the edge of Haddonfield, Illinois, a shape moved in the dark. Blood dripped onto the dirt and gravel of the ground, a steady trickle seeping across the dark floor of the earth. Moonlight shone on the windows of the suburbs, and sound was a stranger to the silence that suffocated the town.

As a car roared somewhere far off in the distance, a child peeked out of his window on the second story. He looked out onto the silent, unmoving streets, the quiet gardens and their empty pools. A shape dragged itself through the dark, leaving a trail of red behind. When he grew up, he would learn it was only the power of suggestion, a trick of the light. He must have convinced himself he saw it after hearing what went on that night. Just a good scare. It was Halloween, after all.

Still, in the years that followed, he never was quite sure it was only his imagination. In the dark of Haddonfield that Halloween night, that little boy could have sworn he saw the bogeyman.

# HALLOWEEN: REMAINS

By Jacob Asher

A chilled wind swept through the rain-slicked street outside. The sun had retreated over the horizon over a couple hours ago and only street lights were left to guide the crowds of costumed children and impatient parents through the night. Tonight was once again the annual reminder.

October 31st, 1984.

Halloween.

Gary Hunt sat in his recliner chair, feet up, beer in hand. His nightly ritual in front of the television. He clicked the blocky remote control through the same few channels, over and over, expecting to find something different on each time.

Most of it was just horror films tonight. Hunt had already seen enough horror in his life that if he ever wanted a scare, he only had to look to the shadows in his memories. Tonight was a stark reminder of the biggest of those horrors. Halloween had forever become a symbol of death and pain in his mind.

Ever since that night.

Six years ago, back in '78, a mental patient by the name of Michael Myers escaped from the sanitarium over in Warren County. The monster had been after his little sister and meant to kill her when he found her.

At the end of quite probably the longest, most stressful night this town of Haddonfield, Illinois had seen in decades, Myers had left a blood-soaked trail of fourteen victims in his wake before being burned alive by his own psychiatrist.

The girl, Laurie Strode, had managed to make it out alive in the end. Hunt could only imagine the trauma she experienced that night and how difficult it must be, even now, to deal with it all.

Hunt had heard that the doctor, Loomis, had somehow survived that explosion at the clinic. Be it luck, or sheer will, the old quack had performed a miracle. But, the most, bewildering and outright infuriating thing about that though is that not only did Loomis survive, but so did he.

Michael Myers is not human. Loomis had told him that and after all was done, Hunt had been certain of that fact as well. He'd read the physician's report of Myers' condition when he was taken into intensive care after the blast. The man had been shot thirteen goddamn times and set ablaze; left to burn for over half an hour before he was put out by first responders.

Yet, still his heart beats.

Hunt called down to the Ridgemont facility at least once a year to check up on Myers. He hadn't gotten around to it this year yet, but last he'd heard the devil incarnate was still strapped to a bed in a deep coma. He could only pray that Michael would stay that way and never wake up again. The world was ugly enough without that kind of evil lurking in it.

Hunt wished that one day he would get the call that Myers had finally died, but he wasn't sure it'd ever come.

He knew that Leigh Brackett would be absolutely giddy if he heard that news though. Leigh was hit probably the hardest besides poor Laurie that night. The masked son of a bitch killed his only daughter Annie in his pursuit of Strode. Choked her before cutting her throat.

Gary remembered the moment he got the call. The neighbors next door to the Doyle house called about gunshots and the responders found an injured Laurie in the upstairs bedroom and she informed them of the horrendous scene soon to be discovered across the street at the Wallace house.

Hunt had felt physically ill when he heard the initial reports. Things like that just didn't happen in this town. Murder was old hat in the big cities like Chicago, but in a place where everyone knew everyone, a murder was a punch to the gut of the community. Let alone three at once.

And then it got worse.

Deputy Ramsey slammed into a drunk Ben Tramer on his way home from a Halloween party and killed him instantly after the van he pinned him against blew up and incinerated him.

The second gut punch of the evening. Things seemed to be descending down into chaos like some sort of domino effect. Michael Myers had come to town to kill and had unraveled the fabric of the entire town in the process. Then he had to tell Leigh about his daughter.

To this day, Leigh Brackett blames Dr. Loomis for the death of Annie. He accused him of letting Myers out in the first place. Hunt felt for his friend, but he could never quite justify blaming the Doctor for what happened.

The conviction that was apparent in that man about stopping that psycho and the fact that he shot Myers eleven of the thirteen times that night made it clear to Hunt that would have done anything to stop him. Hell, he almost gave his own life trying to. That said too much to ignore.

Couple years later in '81, Brackett retired from the force and moved on down to St. Petersburg, Florida with his wife, Joanne. Hunt thought that might help them find a bit of peace; get away from constant reminders of the pain. It didn't though. He got a phone call from Leigh just a year ago saying that Joanne left him. Saw his daughter's face every time she looked at him and couldn't take it any more.

No one who survived that night actually ever escaped it. Leigh fell apart, Dr. Loomis became a haunted recluse, and Laurie practically lived in therapy.

Hunt had taken over the Haddonfield Police Department as the new sheriff when Brackett retired and he tried to act like he didn't think about that night at least a couple times a week and have to catch his breath after.

Watching body after body get wheeled out in black bags one by one from the clinic had really sunk deep into him. It felt like ten deaths that he could have prevented had he tried a little harder and not been so quick to dismiss what Loomis had to say. But, he always tried to stuff those feelings down deep and carry on with a head held high. Be the fixture of stability that his town needed him to be.

Some nights were harder than others and these nights were the hardest to get through. Hunt spent the dreaded anniversaries the same way each year: sitting in front of the television, getting shit-faced and trying not to dwell on it all. Never a successful part of the plan, but the effort was always put in.

He glanced over at the clock on the fireplace mantle. It read about nine-thirty. Hunt was only slightly on his way to his drinking goal for the evening, so he'd have to dip into the heavy hitters if he wanted to be face-down, passed out on his bed by eleven.

With a curling of his legs he put down the rest on his chair and stood. When he stood he could see a couple crowds of teenagers wandering around in the street outside his window. Three guys and two girls; laughing and screaming. All of them in some sort of costume or another. It was a picture of what this night should mean. A time for people to have fun and be together, not a time for dark remembrance.

Hunt wondered if he'd ever be able feel that way about it again.

He stepped over to his makeshift bar he'd set up on an empty shelf beside the fireplace. Hunt grabbed a clean glass from it along with a half empty bottle of bourbon. It was time to drown out the noise in his head and just go ahead and put the night behind him. The amber liquid he poured himself would hopefully do the trick.

Hunt only got a sip or two down when he noticed the lights dim before flickering and completely dying.

Now he stood in total darkness, the only light he could see came from outside.

He moved to the window and looked out. All of the other houses still had power and the street lights were all still working, it was just him that seemed to be in the dark. He might have just blown a fuse or something.

Hunt sighed and felt around for a place to set his drink; settling on the now dead television as a temporary table. The breakers were all the way down in the basement and he was not terribly excited about having to fumble his way through the dark to get to them. He knew the flashlight in the kitchen had dead batteries and no replacements yet, so a dark fumbling was all that was really in the cards.

He began inching his way through the living room, bare feet shuffling across the shag carpet. The lights outside were only close enough to light up a small portion of the room; mostly right in front of the window. So, he had to mentally draw up a layout of the room from memory and hopefully accurately recall all of the obstacles that would end up in his way.

He was just one stubbed toe away from being really and truly pissed off right now.

Hunt made it out of the living room unscathed and found himself in the total darkness of the main hall. He hugged the wall and made slow progress across the cold hardwoods towards the front door. The basement was located to the left of the door and down a rickety old staircase that he'd meant to fix up for years that he was sure would probably give out on him now just out of spite.

The door came up sooner than expected and Hunt stumbled slightly into his coat rack. He pulled himself straight by the arms his Sheriff's jacket hanging in front of him and was suddenly struck by an idea.

He felt around and grabbed the zipper track on the coat and pulled it open; groping the soft inside material for his breast pocket. His target was swiftly found and out of it he pulled a lighter. This was one of those nights where he was thankful for still having bad habits.

Hunt gave a quiet exclamation of relief and wasted no time in flipping open the cover and bringing the flame to life. Its little orange flicker danced on its pedestal and casting shadows over the now dimly lit walls. The expedition to the basement would now be a far sight easier than the travesty it might have been before.

He rounded the corner and held the light out in front of him as he gripped the railing with the other hand; slowly descending down the splintered and groaning steps.

Hunt reached the bottom of the staircase and noticed how cold it was down here tonight. A draft blew through and chilled him. He took a few steps and entered the laundry room; immediately his eye was drawn to the basement window that was slightly ajar.

The latch on the window had always been flimsy and loose, another item on the list to fix eventually, so he assumed it must have been blown open during the storm earlier. He crossed the distance of the room and sealed the window shut once more; doing his best to secure it with only one free hand.

The light from the street outside reminded him of his goal and he turned around to look for the fuse box. He saw the gray panel mounted on the unfinished wall across from him and he made a straight line for it. What he saw when he opened the cover made his stomach flip.

The cables running from the breakers had all been cut.

Hunt slowly turned back to the window and then looked to where he'd come from. The storm hadn't blown the window open, someone opened it. That same someone was most certainly still around somewhere, and he intended to make them regret it.

In all probability he was being robbed at the current moment. Some kid who thinks he's hot shit for coming up with a plan of distraction and then speeding through the house, grabbing what valuables they can in time. He'd heard of a few instances of it a couple counties over, and Hunt had no intention of letting it go on in his town.

This kid picked the wrong house, and the wrong night to do this.

Caution was thrown to the wind like a flag of ill omen being flown over the horizon of whomever was rooting around in Sheriff Hunt's home currently. He made tracks straight for the stairs and wasted no time in bounding up them.

In a moment he was back up at the top and staring at his open front door directly in his path. There was definitely someone in the building and Hunt's adrenaline began to surge. He quietly approached the door and softly closed it again, locking the deadbolt as he did so.

Couldn't have his guest leaving on their own terms.

Hunt wished he had his gun at the moment, but it was all the way upstairs in his office. That would at least keep his inflated confidence up at its peak and keep the creeping fear at bay. But, he'd have to manage without it for now.

Once again he shuffled through the long, dark main hall to the living room. Paying near superhuman attention to any sounds that didn't come from him; of which none were coming to him. All he could hear was his own shallow breathing and the creak of the floor beneath his weight.

After a moment he was back in the living room and his eyes scanned the darkness, waving the lighter about, exposing the deeply shadowed corners. Nothing seemed to be out of place or moved in any way since he'd last been through. In his mind, that was a little bit more worrying than had he found the room a wreck. At least then he'd be right.

Right now it was still up in the air as to what this was.

Hunt turned his attention to the kitchen; the dark doorway looming at the other end of the room. It was hard to make out anything inside as the light in his hand made the doorway an ominous barrier of black that promised nothing but uncertainty beyond its threshold.

He inched his way towards it, feeling threads of nervous sweat running down his face. He placed a cautious hand on the door frame and called out to the shadows.

"Whoever is in here, come out now! This is Sheriff Gary Hunt of the Haddonfield Police and I am putting you under arrest! Come out peacefully and I may just go easy on you. Otherwise, we do this hard way." he shouted into the kitchen, but making sure the rest of the house could hear it.

Only silence replied to him for what felt like a lifetime. Then he heard it.

One thing that could be counted on with old houses was that the wood had probably seen better days, and therefore might make some noise when walked on. Hunt heard the faint, familiar, creak from the master bedroom upstairs and at the end of the hall.

He hit that floorboard every morning when he got up, so he knew its sounds very well. Whomever was in his home was standing by his bedside. He did not like them there one bit.

Hunt waited a few moments to see if the sound was this person walking on down to give up or not. Wishful thinking he knew, but he had to say he gave them the opportunity. He clicked the lighter closed and was once again swallowed in darkness.

If this was about to get ugly, Hunt wanted the two of them to be on the same level of visual impairment. He didn't want a big glowing beacon to tell this guy where he was at all times.

He turned to the stairs and gripped the railing after pocketing the lighter. Hunt took a couple long deep breathes before starting to ascend.

What he was doing was reckless and he was incredibly aware of it. The right thing to do would have been to leave the house, go next door to the Rogers' and call for backup. But, tonight, Hunt wasn't interested in doing what was right.

Some punk had broken into his house on the worst possible night he could have, and he wouldn't stand for it. The memory of this night's anniversary was more terrifying to him than whoever this guy was. Hunt had survived the terror of Michael Myers, he wasn't about to go running from some thief looking to score a couple bucks.

Hunt ascended the staircase quickly, but quietly. Scanning the long hall ahead of him. He couldn't see much, but he didn't see a person yet. He reached the top and was about to make for the bedroom at the end of the stretch, but was hit by another practical idea.

He sidled up to the open doorway to his office and peaked inside. The window across the room let streetlight directly in so it was easy to make out all the features of his cluttered office. Hunt looked back at the still empty hall and slid inside the room.

No restraint was made and he quick-stepped to his desk, opening the top drawer on the left as soon as he got there. He pulled his holstered weapon out from its contents and immediately drew the revolver from its sheath. He checked to make sure it was loaded and spun on his heel.

In a moment he was back in the hall and was about to progress further down with his weapon raised when he heard the sound of a glass hitting the floor and shattering in the kitchen back down the stairs. Hunt shot back around and stood at the top of the stairs.

"This is your last chance to come out with your hands raised and surrender! You're going to be in some serious shit if you don't!" he called out down the stairs.

The only response he got again was pure silence. At first.

After a few moments of excruciating quiet came a terrifying sound. Another creak of the boards. From behind.

Hunt spun back around with his gun aimed and now saw the shape of a man in the darkness, not ten feet from him now.

"Stop! Freeze! Hands where I can see them!" he shouted, spit flying from his teeth.

The silhouette just kept its slow, steady walk towards him, not paying attention to his warnings.

"I mean it! Stop where you are and get on your knees! If you do not comply, I will open fire!"

But still, this did not phase the man. And, then hunt saw why.

The Man came to be in front of Hunt's office, the light from the window spilling out into the hall and briefly illuminating him. The dark coveralls, the pale white mask with its messy dark hair and its wide, black eyes. It was him.

It was fucking him.

Hunt froze and forgot how to control his body. The gun hung limply in his grip as Michael Myers walked straight for him, just a few short feet away. He must have escaped again and no one told him. Back in town to continue the spree he started all those years ago and mopping up the victims he missed the first time around.

Whatever the situation, he snapped back into reality and realized his death, and many others was at hand. He wasn't about to have a repeat of that night.

Hunt straightened his grip on the gun and was about to fire when he took a step back to get more distance and was reminded he'd been standing on the edge of the staircase. Hunt cried out in surprise and tumbled backwards; falling end-over-end down the hard, unforgiving staircase and hitting his head on the bannister before he hit the bottom.

The world was spinning and a searing pain soared through his temple as he lie in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the stairs. He tried to quickly sit up, but his body threw him straight back down from the disorientation. Instead he pushed himself a few feet back from the stairs and propped up on his elbows; watching the now dark staircase.

He could hear the heavy footfalls coming down the stairs slowly for him, but he couldn't see a thing. Hunt shot to his pocket and pulled out the lighter once more; cracking open the lid and striking the flame to life. The room instantly lit up around him and he was terrified to see that blank, emotionless face staring straight back through him from directly in front of him

And then another of him appeared from both sides to make three.

Hunt didn't even know what to do right now. The blow to the head must have scrambled his mind a bit and he was hallucinating. He lifted the revolver once more and took aim with his free hand at The Shape in the middle and shouted as he came to stand over him.

"Go back to hell!"

Three loud cracks filled the small room and Myers fell back against the staircase with a painful sounding thud. To Hunt's surprise and confusion, the other two Myers' he saw took off running for the front door and shouting to each other.

"Oh fuck he shot Lonnie! Let's get the fuck outta here!" the front one yelled.

"I didn't know he had a gun man!" the other called back.

Hunt let the revolver slip out of his hand and onto the floor as he sat himself up. Slowly as he crawled over to the masked man he gunned down, the pieces began to fall into place.

He reluctantly pulled the latex mask off of the body and found himself staring into the vacant, dead eyes of young Lonnie Elamb. Hunt sat himself down on the step and put his back against the wall.

"Jesus Christ..." he muttered to himself and rubbed at the swollen knot on the top of his head.

Lonnie was just a seventeen year old local kid. He was no inhuman killer.

The other two had most assuredly been Richie Castle and Keith Stevens. The three had been in trouble with law a good handful of times in recent history and each time it was for something worse than the last. This time, they'd outdone themselves.

Richie was the leader of the pack and probably came up with the scheme to prey on the aging sheriff's dark history for a scare and a laugh later; while poor Lonnie was the follower of the group. He was a decent enough kid, he was just talked into doing bad things too easily for his own good. Tonight, that quality had just gotten him killed.

Hunt checked for a pulse to make sure and then just sat with his head in his hands for a while after. He no longer understood the youth today. What made them want to do such disgusting and stupid things to good people. He could never imagine coming up with something like that. Not in a million years.

Furthermore, he now knew that no matter what he did, there was truly no way of escaping that night back in '78. In one way or another, it was always come back and kicked him down when he least expected.

Michael Myers had killed a lot of people, but he also killed the peace of mind of those that survived. His evil would never leave their lives for good. Hunt closed the kid's eyes and clicked the lighter closed.

He sat quietly in the dark until the sirens came.

# ONE NIGHT IN HADDONFIELD

By Neil Hudson

Tully's car finally gave up the ghost a few minutes' walk shy of the town. He pulled over and looked under the hood, hoping beyond hope that some sort of inspiration regarding car maintenance would occur to him. It didn't, and the car remained staunchly reticent at his attempts towards getting her going again.

'Fuck it.' Tully muttered. He freed his worn rucksack from the useless carcass, tossed it over his shoulder and made off down the road. The car was a piece of shit, anyhow, and the night was pleasant enough so a stroll would be no burden to him at all.

It only took five minutes of hiking before he came across the sign: Welcome to Haddonfield, it said, in letters of embossed cream. Seems like a fine place, he thought, continuing past the welcome board. All he needed was a phone and the number for a local mechanic, then he'd find somewhere to bed down for the night. He was in no hurry; his wristwatch stated confidently that it had only recently turned nine.

The first street he came across was a picturesque little enclave, lined with trees; their branches shedding golden leaves to the sidewalk whenever the wind gusted.

It was as quiet as a sepulcher.

Nothing moved on it. No cars. No people. Surely, Tully mused, a town like this loved Halloween night. Where were the kids running the streets? Dressed as whatever monster was terrorising the big screen these days. At 22 years old, Tully had little time for horror films, or any films come to think of it. He was a drifter, and didn't see the sense in handing over good money to witness the fevered imagination of some Hollywood shithead. Still, it was unusual to come across a street like this - especially in a town like this - that didn't love Halloween with a crazy, almost religious, fervour.

Tully walked up to the driveway of the nearest house, intent on getting a mechanic's number. The fresh whitewash on it gleamed in the moonlight. No lights lit the interior, making the house seem like a gigantic dead tooth poking up. He tried the bell any way. No answer. Tully gave it a few moments before trying again. There was a sedan on the drive; whoever was in would probably be upstairs, he thought. Tully took a stick of gum from his back pocket and began to chew it meditatively.

Where the fuck was everyone?

He hopped onto the lawn and walked up to the window, cupping his hands against the pane, his breath fogging the glass, and peered through. It took a couple of seconds for Tully's eyes to adjust to the darkness inside. When they did, his breath caught raggedly in his throat.

Three sets of eyes stared back at him.

Lined on the couch was a family. A father, mother and daughter sat looking out on him silently from the darkness of their front room. They were sitting there, unblinking. No expression moved across their pallid faces. Tully found that he had to will himself to draw breath. For one brief, horrific, moment he thought they were dead.

He worked up a weak, little smile and waved at the occupants, mimed driving a car and shrugged, hoping this would intone his predicament. The father looked at him coldly and shook his head. Tully noticed that propped on the wall next to the man was a double-barrelled shotgun. The father wrapped his fist around the barrel and pulled it across his lap like a pet, never taking his eyes off Tully. Tully took this as an indication that his appearance was not entirely welcome and vacated the property at speed.

He walked the rest of the road hurriedly, looking in on the houses as he passed them.

Not one house had its lights on.

Eventually, Tully came across the pissy little stretch of road that constituted Main Street. A feeling of unease had wormed its way into his gut, and Tully's initial assessment of the town as somewhere nice, wasn't sitting well with him at all. He'd still not seen one person walking the streets. The only car he'd witnessed had belonged to the Haddonfield police department, prowling around slowly like it was searching for something. It had pulled alongside him and the officer had practically blinded him whilst looking him over with his flashlight. The cop had driven off without a word.

Tully spotted at the end of the street a lone neon sign flickering. A bar, he thought, it must be. He walked up to the entrance. Tully glanced around the street one last time, and, seeing no one, stepped inside.

The bartender looked up sharply at the sound of the door swinging open. His hand snaked under the counter in a panic, grasping for something. Tully saw the bartender's face go tight, as though the man had expected someone to walk in who was going to be a considerable amount more trouble than Tully. The bartender looked over Tully's slight frame and clearly decided on the spot he'd not walked in for anything more sinister than a tall, cold one. The errant hand, which had moved so quickly underneath the bar, came up holding a washrag, and proceeded to wipe diligently at the scarred surface of the counter.

'Help you?' The bartender said; his eyes downcast, continuing in the futile attempt of cleaning the beer rings from the surface of the wood, despite their ancient, ingrained appearance. Tully ruminated, watching the man go about the cleaning, that maybe a good blowtorch would get rid of the stains. Or, short of that, a wrecking ball. The whole dive had the look of something barely used. An outpost.

'I hope so. Can I grab a beer, and, if you have one, the number for a decent mechanic.'

'I can get you the first, last one's gonna be a problem.' The bartender's face looked about forty, forty-five at a push, but his posture and the vague stare in his eyes suggested Tully would be better off guessing closer to sixty.

'Shit. My car died on me just outside of town.'

'Wish I could help.' The bartender said, placing Tully's beer on a napkin in front of him.

'You got any motels nearby? Anything like that?'

'No. Not open now.'

Tully took a long pull on his beer. There was something up with this bartender that Tully couldn't wrap his head around on. It was like being served draft by Lurch of the family Addams.

'Name's Tully.' Tully stuck his hand over the bar. For a moment the bartender just observed Tully's hand as though it were a dead sturgeon and let it hang there. After what seemed like the runtime of a typical sitcom, the man took Tully's hand in his own and shook it briefly.

'Craig. Craig Doyle.'

'Pleased to meet you.' Tully said, taking a swig from his beer. Craig nodded once solemnly, and continued at his fool's errand of trying to get the marks from the bar.

'Quiet town you got here.' Tully offered. Craig grunted noncommittally by way of reply.

Tully sat himself on a barstool, nursing his beer. He looked at the rim of his glass and noticed the faint tattoo of lipstick there. He thought about asking for a fresh beer for a moment, decided against it, and swigged from the opposite side of the glass.

'You got any advice about where I can get a bed for the night?' Tully said.

'Won't be anywhere for you out there tonight. Best I can offer is that you stay here. We're open all night and I'll call Tim, he's the mechanic, in the morning.'

'You gonna stay open all night?'

'Yeah. I do every Halloween.'

'Any reason for that?'

'Not one you probably want to hear. Look, I got a deck of cards out back. You play Rummy?'

'I do.' Tully nodded.

'I'll go get the cards. You're welcome to sit with me and play a few hands till dawn comes. '

'A few? Man, you better break out the coffee instead of the beer; dawn's quite a while away yet.'

'Uh-uh. Best offer I can give you. It'll be the best offer in town you'll get tonight too; might as well take it.'

'Don't suppose I have much choice.' Said Tully.

'Not by the sounds of it.'

'Fair enough. Bring on the coffee, in that case.'

'I'll get some brewed now.' With that Craig turned and went out back.

Tully drained the rest of his beer and set his empty glass to one side. The beer had a pitiless aftertaste like gone over eggs, that Tully knew meant signaled the beer lines hadn't been cleaned in an age. He wondered when the last time a health inspector had paid a visit. Craig returned after a few minutes with a deck of cards in one hand and a pot of steaming coffee in the other.

'Take a booth?' Craig said, nodding to the one furthest from the door.

'Sure.' Tully said, sliding into the seat facing the entrance.

'You mind switching?' Said Craig. Tully shrugged and changed places. Craig put the deck and the coffee on the table and came back with some mugs. The older man went back to the bar, leaned over and rummaged underneath it, eventually finding what he was looking for after a few seconds of rooting. He came up with a nickel-plated revolver. The neon signs that festooned the place gleamed merrily off its barrel.

'Hey...' Tully said, backing up in his seat, arms outstretched. Without acknowledging the panic in his customer's face, Craig sat down opposite him and placed the gun on the table next to the coffee.

'You want a cup?' Craig asked.

'What's that for?' Tully said carefully, looking across the table at the gun.

'Same thing any gun should be for. Protection.'

'I'm not going to try and rob you, mister.'

'No offense kid, but you look about as threatening as my niece.' Craig's eyes went to the door. It was something Tully had noticed him do a couple of times now.

'Who's it for then?'

'The Myers kid.' Craig said, flatly.

Tully stared at the man sat across from him, finally rubbing his chin.

'Go on.' Tully said.

Craig slid a cup across the table in front of Tully and poured the dark, aromatic blend into it and then his own. Tully thought it smelled strong and good, although the scent of it seemed disjointed here. Out of place.

Craig closed his eyes, ran a hand over them and sighed.

'Started more than thirty years ago. One night – Halloween – Michael Myers strolled into Haddonfield and started to kill. He's never really stopped. Killed his own sister when he was a kid, and the authorities tossed him down the booby hatch; thought he'd rot there I suppose. He didn't. Took him a while to work his way back to us, but eventually he did. That night he took a bunch of kids from us.' Craig's eyes glistened.

'He went through them like a scythe through corn.' The older man said, pulling out a pack of Chesterfield's from the front of his apron and lighting up.

'Every so often we'll get a report saying he's been killed and then, like as not, he'll turn up here again. Not every Halloween, just some. No pattern to it. It's like he comes back when he's bored and's got nothing better to be doing.'

Tully had heard a tale or two on the road, but this particular brand of crazy was new even to him.

'How come the police don't deal with him? He's crazy as you say, I imagine he'd be a pretty high priority in a quiet burg like this.' Tully asked,

At that Craig let out a stunted, yelp of laughter.

'Oh, we take him plenty serious around here. Why is it you think you didn't see anyone out there?'

Tully shrugged.

'He can't be stopped. Can't be killed even.'

Tully frowned and motioned to the pack of cigarettes lying on the table. Craig nodded and Tully shook one out for himself.

'That's why I wait here every year. For people like you.'

'Like me?' Tully said, eyebrow arching.

'Yeah. Sometimes out of towners wander through. Someone's gotta make sure they're okay. Kept out of his way.' Craig leant across the table and lit Tully's smoke for him.

'So is he a ghost then?' Tully hid his sneer behind the cigarette.

'Loomis said he was the Boogeyman. That's what I heard he told Laurie Strode. I think he might have been onto something.'

'I'm pretty sure he's just some nut that the cops haven't managed to scoop up. You guys really go all out for Halloween, don't you?' Tully said.

'What?' Craig said, frowning.

'Trying to spook me. This has got to be some kinda bullshit prank. I bet that creepy family I saw coming into town are a part of this too.'

'It's not like that.' Craig looked at Tully, concern furrowing his brow.

'Sure it is.' Tully said, smiling serenely. 'I bet you guys love having a laugh at the expense of people driving through. Well, it's been fun up till now, but I'm gonna grab a bed at that motel you're so sure is going to turn away good business.' Tully said, standing up. Craig put a hand on his arm.

'Wait. Just stay.' Craig's eyes had a watery, rheumy sheen. He was almost pleading.

'If you have to stay anywhere, I have a room upstairs I can put you up in.'

Tully shrugged the hand off and slung his bag back over his shoulder.

'Thanks for the coffee. Maybe try that malarkey on someone a little more wet behind the ears next Halloween. Good luck with this whole thing,' Tully waved his arms in the air obliquely 'and keep on keeping on. See ya.' Tully walked out through the door and turned left, continuing on the path he'd been on before seeing the bar's neon.

Craig watched him from the doorway for a moment. He shook his head, checked the safety on his pistol, and shuffled back inside.

Tully walked as quickly as he could. It was coming up on midnight and at this point all he wanted was a room with a bed in it. He turned off Main Street and onto the road adjacent to the one he'd been on before he'd got there, reasoning that if he kept going he'd come across something. Christ, let it be soon though, he thought. Regardless of the lunatics that inhabited it, it was a nice town. All the streets were lined with trees and the houses were well kept. Ahead of him, on his right, Tully could see a quaint little park. There was a slide, a swing set and one of those rocking things made to look like a dinosaur. Tully had no idea what you called that.

A figure stood next to the swing set.

A shape.

Tully stopped and looked into the darkness, tried to see through it. The man stood, almost hidden by the shadows. On his face he wore a mask; it gleamed white in the moonlight. Tully's feet froze in place and he stared at the figure hidden amongst the children's things. The shape stared back. After a moment it angled its neck slightly to the right, like a bird assessing a kill. Tully's feet came unstuck and he started to walk backwards, keeping his line of sight on the man.

'Can't be.' Tully whispered. 'Can't be true. It's just a guy in a suit.'

The figure began to move towards him. It moved with purpose, like a shark that had scented blood. It came straight for him, a butcher knife held rigid at its side.

'Fuck you, man!' Tully shouted at it. 'You aren't him! There is no him, it's bullshit!'

But Michael kept coming.

Tully looked at the knife. It glinted, full of the light from the streetlamps above. There was nothing fake in it at all; Tully could see that now.

Tully turned and ran.

# HALLOWEEN RETURNS

By S.T. King

Michael's here.

He's on the pew the count of colors of the candy he hates, all he had when he was home the Halloween of 1963. His grandmother prays for his good tidings, as the clouds had burned to soot and snuff out the sun. And all the monastery had been swollen with the empty night.

Two days before Halloween, Sister Mary Margaret Myers rolls out of bed at 3:47am.

She walks by the church: the same as she'd walked by her husband of fifteen years who came by greyhound to retrieve her. Now she's in the sitting room. And she sleepily kicks an empty bottle of Merlot that skitters off and then turns slowly in place. One of the full bottles had fell, because she'd too many of them on the short end-table. She suddenly leaves and shuts the door behind her and locks it, makes her rounds through the Monastery.

When she returns she looks at the shattered bottle and weeps. She couldn't remember the last time she'd prayed.

But she hadn't had it in her to pray anymore. And where she finds herself in the next hour -- as the first fingers of morning stream through the stained glass and break apart– is sitting and talking aloud to herself. Kneeling was too bad on her knees.

Her writing desk is covered in mini-cassette tapes and packs of wafers that she'd half eaten and lost, with the dozens of other bundles of papers and tapes – stray staples and paperclips – so that she opened other packs she didn't finish. And some of them wound up on the floor and kicked around as she listened to the tapes, one after the other.

This is how Sister Carrietta finds her. And she prays quietly to herself, and picks up her sister and carries her out of the sitting room and closes the great, heavy, oak door. She comes back after she's sat with Mary, runs her a bath and leaves her to soak. She takes the bottles of wine that remain and hides them. Then she sits down to smoke.

She doesn't finish the cigarette. But as she puts it out in a glass of water, she half-heartedly imagines the sitting room is swallowed in thick, black smoke and fire. She looks at the picture of little Michael Myers, a picture she'd taken herself on his first birthday. That'd been the first warm Spring day after his christening.

He's held by his sister, Judith. And the both of them are in the arms of their parents, the hastily married Donald and Edith Eleanor Myers, the latter of which was Sister Mary's eldest daughter, who wore the same red cardigan she always wore, the one with the gray stitching and the little buttons that'd been like burnt black melon-seeds.

Carrietta pads through the great passageways in silence, carrying her slippers in her hands. It'd been so sunny and cheerful in the bath that ran her own and took it. She wears a towel. And the halls were chilled as if they'd been open – nude to the surrounding moisture, the lingering marshes, the cold mud. She crept through the now long-empty dormitories, and found the quiet steely and unsettling

But these rooms had been empty for months. It was only her and Sister Mary. And the cottage was worse for wear, the commitment to charity, their living arrangement. She went to her quarters and drew the curtains – and the sun had been cut in lattice patterns which broke through the wooden gates outside like the golden crusts of apple or cherry pie.

In Carrietta's wardrobe are her blacks and whites, her cotton cowls and tunics. She takes these out and folds them, and then leaves them on her mattress. In an old wooden breadbox behind her wardrobe is a medium-length, onyx, peplum dress. It has a flare of silk in the hip to cancel out the broad, roundness of her shoulders. She drops the towel and puts it on, unsure as to why she's so driven – the nervous energy in her arms, one she recognizes from her youth, that same fervor that undid zippers and belt buckles and her own bra-straps, and that harried them back on at the sudden return of her parents. She laughs and shakes her head. Was she too old to be homesick? Too far gone to miss the cool rigidity of her father? The fruity-splash of the perfume her mother always wore on Sundays? She sits on a footstool, takes her hand-mirror from the dresser, puts on blush and powder, and tops it off with red lipstick.

She feels good, ready even. But a sudden dread wraps its fingers around her, the pit of her stomach, and she gets up and ambles towards the panes. Then she's reaching along the glass, a passing sensation of worry or guilt. She sees shadows of her own gray irises, floating. When she'd been upstairs with Sister Mary, the sun had bursts through and liquefied the clouds, turning them to off-white molasses that'd been spread across the heavens. But that had changed in the passing minutes. The sun had been different: a smudge of orange that'd been smothered behind gray and blackening billows of smoke. The shadows had flew and stuck to the trees, like monstrous birds covered in crude oil.

Sister Mary checked the weather report, the first thing she did before coffee and morning prayer. But they hadn't exchanged words in months – a time that dragged its bottom from one side of the monastery to the other. It had been a time of silence and worry, a time where the air they'd shared for so long had grown thick and hot and radiated through the pipes.

And it had been this way ever since --

ever since Sister Mary Margaret Myers's decision: a fluke of words that almost seemed to sweep by on so many brooms and flying pigs. This had been a few days after Halloween – when the Sisterhood of St Johns Monastery had been charged with spiritual intervention and charity. This had been after the Haddonfield Massacre of 1978.

And many of the sisterhood had been so appalled that they packed what little they could carry and left, making calls to children, siblings and parents, before sundown. Those who'd been touched the deepest by the atrocities had broken the oath of sisterly silence as they crowded the phones. They'd told their loved ones about Sister Mary's plans – to hold a funeral for her only grandson, Michael Audrey Myers.

Currently, Sister Mary, riding the same nervous energy, works quickly, pacing to and fro from the wheel-barrow --to the altar and each of the pews. And in the wheel-barrow are wreaths and sprays. She takes them, two at once and places them. And they burst with white roses and lilies, waving carnations and snapdragons, and leaves with smooth, blade-like edges. One of tapes had been playing then, the haggard, if not aloof voice of Dr. Samuel Loomis. He'd been a voice that Carrietta knew well – one she'd been able to recognize through the seemingly insubstantial wood-works. Regrettably, she wasn't the only sister that could.

#

Forty-Five Lampkin Lane -- Halloween had return to Haddonfield with a chilled rain that lightly flooded the narrow streets and driveways -- the autumn leaves that coated the pavement. And at the foot of the low shrubs runs rivers of black water that emptied out into the main thoroughfare. Because it'd been the hour of preparation, final applications of colorful makeup, fake blood, awkward talks about the bogeyman -- basins of water filled with apples and bowls of caramel with more of the same \-- the streets were desolate. The rain beat on to its own drum.

A figure of a woman is standing at the Myers house. She hums a tune that's written dryly on her tongue. She's so caked with mud that the rain does little to make her likeness legible. She's still. And every so often packs of raw, black earth shake loose from their crevice, and make slopping sounds on the pavement.

The night is painted over with swathes of floating silver.

She moves, but when she does it's like she's learning to walk for the first time. The sky is screaming, the great bands of clouds that'd been beaten purple and sobbing. Like chipped and rusted hinges, the ball and joints in the knees, scraping toes. The marionette jerks forward on drunkenly pulled strings.

#

Giddy, Carrietta jumps straight down from the top step, nana's porch. She doesn't want the bogey-man to grab her feet. She knows he hides in the shadows; that he's probably watching for her through the gaps between the dirt-worn wooden steps. And that there's rats. She hates rats.

Her father comes behind her, carrying her wagon the way he'd carried his own baby girl from the hospital. He puts it down and oils the wheels. She hops in. And then he's crouching and making motor sounds with his mouth, and asking her if she's ready in his official racing announcer's voice. He gives it a kick from the steel toe of his work boot.

Then they're laughing together – Friday morning. It's humid. She doesn't like the way she smells, or maybe that's the oil daddy had put on the wagon's wheels --

now he's yelling at her, calling her name "Carrie, honey".

He's far away. "Carrie?" lesser now.

But now she can't move

then she sees herself standing, the wind pushing at the yellow daisies on her dress, her shortly cropped, brown hair, and the white frills on her socks. Daddy sounds scared. Carrietta is scared to look behind her. The lady driving the post-truck she's approaching, she looks scared too.

Then the faraway ringing, at least it started that way in her dreaming mind. But it wasn't ringing at all. It was a full throated scream, on and on. She whimpers – forces her eyes open and touches her face through the covers. The covers had been damp. She'd been sweating through them and shaking.

All these years – and the scars are still so deep and ugly to touch. She covers her face with her pillow and cries, pushes down so it's hard to breathe. She holds her breath until it hurts her lungs. Then she's laughing. She's a little girl and she peeks over at the door, then she's hiding under the covers.

But it hadn't been her voice, the screaming voice. That had been outside: with the din of smashed windows, from a throat that'd been overflowing with blood. It'd been from the Myer's house across the street. And Carrietta staggers and wipes at her eyes. She's making her way to the front door frantically. It's already open when she gets there.

#

Laurie Strode, who's birth name had been Cynthia Evelyn Myers, was among those persons found dead in Haddonfield Memorial Hospital. Her severed head was recovered in the lobby, one of the places that went miraculously unburned. Her other remains...

Mary stops the tape.

She strikes a line through it in red and takes it anxiously from the player. She gnaws on her pencil – takes the next tape and plays it.

The boy, little Michael – (Dr. Loomis coughs into something, maybe his sleeve. It sounds far away from the recorder) I've seen the devil in his eyes – all these days – and it pisses me off, frankly, that he's moved in so easily.

(A commotion, other's talking – a popping sound, noise) Yes, you. (The doctor has called on someone) You talk so much of this "devil", Dr. Loomis – maybe you've considered exorcism, or is that just (The woman's voice trails off. The quiet after it is covered in noise like falling grains of uncooked rice)

She stops the tape. For a while she holds the marker like she's going to use it. She caps it and puts it down, puts the recorder aside her face. Her fingers are small; and so she's wrapping all of them around the recorder, all except the thumb. She squeezes the button slowly – play.

#

It took Mary longer than she'd anticipated, to be swallowed by Haddonfield's city limits. It'd been drizzling all the day so that the firmament was gray and hazy. The maple, those trees that'd been the shade of both her brothers and sisters, her friends, those who'd wandered through their little town from one side to the other, from when she were a little girl – they were so much bigger now. And they reached over Davison Street and University and thickened into a mossed mass of what looked like red-green fur.

Mary cracks her window. And some of the rain had crawled over the glass and made its way in. But it always got so hot in the Lincoln. And she'd been driving for so long she didn't care.

Halloween -- and with her is a tote bag of wafers and chicken salad, a copy of the old King James bible that she'd been given by the previous abbess. She saunters under the trees, so it was like the rain had abated altogether. And the avenue had been so dead and black it seemed like a pocket of outer space.

But she doesn't know where she is. And she hits what feels like the crushing armpit of a waterfall, the way the rain had come down again on the Lincoln. She shrieks and lets off the gas and lets her coast -- holds the clicker in place for her high-beams, since the mechanism itself is broken, and Carrietta never got around to fixing it.

She starts praying for two reasons: because it's all she's ever had -- two, because the Lincoln's motor starts to miss and sputter. The rain is freezing cold. And she knows this because it's made its way into the cabin and it sloshes around her feet and the pedals. Further, the left side of her habit and coat is soaked and sticking to her skin, the cold works its way across her hips and shoulders. All she can see is water, the sea as it empties onto her and beats on the roof and doors, knocking. And its voice is deafening and crying.

The Lincoln coughs and dies.

Sister Mary remembers the old Chevelle that'd belonged to Buck Johnson. She makes the turn on Lampkin, drives through the roaring silver diamonds, the peeking slivers of night. And all at once, the rain is swept away behind her like the snapping covers of bed-sheets. The air is hot in its pot and melts. The other side of it, it's quiet and dank and the trees had thinned out and took to their own streets – the simple brick bungalows and their flat colored skins.

It's too much for her to see the boys and girls in their costumes. She throws the shifter in park and holds it, rests her head on the cold, thin steering wheel. She couldn't say how long that'd been, how long she sniveled, soaked and cold, parked in middle of the boulevard along the side of Buck's R.V. – but it felt good and soothing and her tears were warming on her face and neck. And at first, it seemed like the boy would walk on by. But he stops and says "excuse me" a few times and comes closer. Though Mary is far from stopping herself, she does when she sees him.

It's because he looks too much like Michael: the same dirty blonde hair, the same pudgy, cream-soaked features – too much like Michael, indeed. But there was no way it could be Michael. The boy was too young, and alive. Her little Michael was dead. He died a man, and without God.

That's what she had said then, by the empty brass urn as she prays.

Everyone was dead.

"Everyone," she says.

The boy opens her car door and she's so stricken and swallowed by fear she slaps at his hands and kicks. And she can only hear her own screaming. She works her way over the partition, to the passenger seat and flings open the door. She's out and running. The other children have stopped and watched her.

She tries not to see them but she does, each flat and passing face. Were they Michael too? She shields the sides of her eyes with her hands.

Then she stops.

She stops because she can't run anymore – nor can she see anything around her. It'd been like she ran off the edge of the earth. A single street lamp burns ahead. And the boy is waiting for her there, Michael, her grandson. He was waiting, the whole time.

#

Michael takes her hand, and they go. The old brass door is shaky and dull. They go inside. A woman is at the kitchen counter washing dishes. She wears a badly stained apron and a red cardigan. Her face is painted in white and blue, a big, red spongy nose. She cries like she's cried for years and it's much too frightening to stop. The kitchen floor is flooded with water and the faucet whines with such a noise that makes Mary's stomach turn. Michael leads Mary through the kitchen and by the woman. But the woman takes no heed. They step through the water, one after the other; and rising from it is the coppery, sour odor of blood.

Sister Carrietta taught her that song, the tune that Judith hums in the vanity: every stroke of the comb, and the great clumps of long and broken hair – thin, golden-blonde locks that'd come off and covered her naked breasts and shoulders: gathered at her lap, taken to the floor and collected in dry, wiry heaps. It takes her another look but Mary does: see's the mirror is not really a mirror, but a finely cut hole that'd been ringed with bulbs that burned bleakly in the room. Judith wears a mask too: but Mary knows her Judith's voice. Mary makes a hurtful convulsing sound. Michael pulls her.

On they go.

From this side of vanity had been nothing, but a hole so solid and black it seemed to mark the end of things: the universe as god had seen it – the beginning of things before the first fruits, the first skies and salt-water oceans, the first sun, all that she hadn't seen in so long -- the things that felt more like distant memories. And the next room had been filled with children, stacked on top of each other and plastered against the door-frame. Michael opens the door and they're pressed against it like clumsily affixed wooden planks, nooses around their throats. One of the girls, she looks like Cynthia.

There are tears in Cynthia's eyes. And suddenly she falls loose and tumbles through the other children – crashes to the floor at Mary's feet. Then she looks at Michael and runs. The withered rope lengthens behind her. She doesn't make it far before it goes taut, then retracts. By the time she's sucked back her face is blue and she's not moving. The rope pulls her through the other children until she's gone.

Mary sees this.

Michael lets go of Mary's hand and looks around him. The harmless, boyish way in which it tousles, he almost seems normal. She can't get her mouth to move, hands and feet that hadn't belonged to her anymore. Mary watches him as he watches her. Then he lifts and presses his foot on a freckled boy's head who'd been face down against the floor. A terrible pop from the freckled boy's face, and a thick bead of blood pushes from under it. She can hear as he struggles to breathe against his own blood and the weight of the other children on top of him. Michael climbs up and through and disappears.

Mary feels everything as she prays. She can close her eyes, so she prays.

Forgive him.

It hurts to think, hurts to see.

Forgive him.

There'd been another door, the farthest down the hall that opens and falls loose on its hinges. A man comes through it, a tall man wearing overalls that he filled in broadly in the neck and arms. Dr. Loomis clings to giant's leg like a young boy trying to stop his father from going to work. The man lumbers forward, nevertheless.

Most odd about him though is the mask: the pallid, blank face and the rough texture, like it'd been dragged through mud and sharp rocks and rusted, red fish-hooks. The eyes had been cut out wide so that the wrinkles of skin show underneath. His eyes had been deep and black, a gaze that searched through rather than at.

One step and then the next. Mary turns and looks at the children. And for the first time since she'd been in the house she feels afraid. And like they'd felt this they whine and jerk, trying to free themselves as the man looms closer. They grab at their necks and legs until the ropes nip at them and draw blood. One of the girls, one with frazzled red hair and a sharp beak-like nose bites a unidentified rosy leg to get it to move. There'd been a muffled sound from the mound of little bodies, some of them saying "help me" and "he's gonna get us" but very little progress, their faces flushed like cherries and soaked with tears.

It finally hits her as he's this close. She fancies she can still smell the baby on him, beneath the rotten and sour outdoorsy odor: she can taste him on her lips, the way she'd kissed him after his christening. Then she hands him over to Carrietta, his god-mother. And she rocks him and smiles. She'd been so happy that day, the both of them actually. She doesn't know why but she weeps in her heart for Carrietta.

"Oh Carrie" she says. It's first a sob and she chokes it back. "Oh my dear, dear Carrie." She's losing herself.

"Oh God," she chokes. And she wails into her hands and shakes. The rosary bites into her breast and she stops. She looks at him.

"Michael" she says.

The man watches her. And as he does she looks for the slightest sign of movement in his black eyes -- but there's none.

"Michael, baby?" she says again.

She takes a step back, water -- a thin finger of it had worked its way from the front kitchen.

Dr. Loomis's eyes are closed. But a streak of black comes from the corners and down his cheeks like tar. He holds on to Michael but he says nothing. Michael turns and to the children. He raises his knife and the blood from a girl with a slightly yellow and squared face, it bursts from her cheek and onto Mary. It's heavy as it hits her, the weight of bricks. It works its way through her habit, and then onto her own skin. And the knife is up and down and Michael is stabbing them and taking them in his hands and throwing them to the side. The blood forms its own body and dances with the water.

It goes on like this for a while. And the blood spurts across the door and on the far wall and falls down to the baseboards and crawls over the molding and collects. When it gets heavy enough it jumps the baseboard and makes a dense film on the floor. Then she sees nothing else, all the light is sucked away, as if through a straw. Then, there is nothing else. She can barely hear her own breathing. The darkness is so thick she can't tell the difference whether her eyes are opened are closed.

"Michael," she says.

Then a smaller hand, the little boy's.

"Shhhhhh," he whispers, "Cynthia's trying to sleep.

He squeezes her hand. "Welcome home," he says.

# HALLOWEEN RETURNS

By William Spencook

It was the Haddonfield Police that were notified by Dispatch first. Thomas Muldowney and Seth Goldfarb were the two Police Officers closest to the school when they heard a call for help come over their police radio at 8:38 a.m.

The school day was officially starting in a few minutes.

October 31:

"Somebody is outside one of the doors, shooting through the door ... we do have at least one male that has been shot at this time," the Dispatcher reported. When the officers arrived, they knew the High School shooter was in one of the classrooms. They also knew was he armed with a gun and maybe some other weapons. And they knew the whole High School was probably in a panic.

But both men are veterans on the force and in the field. They've both done multiple deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan. So when they arrived, they were also prepared. They had just done an Active Shooter drill with Homeland Security the other day. It was Halloween, so both were wearing bullet-proof vests.

They parked in front of the main entrance to the School at 9:44 a.m. with no lights or siren going. They heard several shots as they approached. The Active Shooter was firing at random through the windows from inside one of the classrooms. The Officers used their police car and other cars in front of the entrance to the school as cover. They started to fire at the front of the school building randomly, and started moving toward the sound of the shots inside. They had taken only a few steps inside the school when they saw the Active Shooter standing right in the hallway.

"We're exchanging shots with him"," was the last report Muldowney had radioed into Dispatch at 9:46 a.m.

The two officers shot wildly from their .44-caliber handguns at Myers, striking him once in his right side. They were about 15 yards away. They were doing exactly as they had been instructed by Homeland Security. You do not negotiate with an Active Shooter.

Both Officers saw the muzzle on the Active Shooter's 9 mm handgun flash. They opened fire- hitting their target countless times. Yet the Active Shooter stood his ground. Now his arm slowly holding the rifle rose up and he returned fire. In the last moments of Officer Muldowney's life he will never forget the shock of recognition. The Active Shooter, this man they had just blasted away with lead, but who still stood. Well, he looked just like Michael Myers. Haddonfield's most famous.

Officer Goldfarb recognized the Active Shooter as well. "My eyes must deceive me", was one of his last thoughts. This can't be Michael Myers. He's locked up In Supermax out in Colorado. This is someone playing a sick prank. Dressing up as Michael Myers for Halloween and coming to school as part of an Active Shooter performance.

The Active Shooter retreated into the nearest classroom.

More Officers entered the school, guns drawn and spread out throughout the hallways of learning. One of the Officers was State Police Sgt. Bertha Davis. She ran down the hallway to wear the bodies of the two now very dead cops lay on the floor. She had glimpsed what she thought was the Active Shooter skirting into the nearby classroom.

"Suspect has an assault rifle and a dark-colored flak jacket, lined with steel plates and packed with magazines of ammunition. I also see a holster around his waist, Davis told dispatch at 9:48 a.m.

She was overwhelmed with loud thoughts. What? "I have come to exterminate you", she heard the thought inside her head. "I've come home to exterminate you", it continued. These words were ughts broadcast into her mind. Suddenly and invasively.

The Active Student is a student, she realized. This is a troubled newcomer. This is someone who had come to the school armed, physically and psychologically, for a killing spree.

Sgt. Davis held her ground, standing motionless. Looking around, she could tell the school was already in lockdown mode. Homeland Security had told her that Haddonfield High School was handpicked to be armed with the latest new in security technology. It networked the school with local law enforcement agencies and the local Department of Homeland Security Fusion Center. It was called Virtual Command Technology and she was assured it was to be a game-changer for Active Shooter events

Homeland Security had told her that it usually takes an average two to four minutes after an Active Shooter event has begun before someone first gets through to a 911 Emergency First Response Dispatch Center. And someone at the school here, as soon as they heard the first gunshots did that. Most likely it was one of the teachers. They would just press the button on the Key on their necklace. This activates the school's built-in security system and notified the Police.

Sgt. Davis realized that something had gone wrong. The Virtual Command technology was supposed to shut all classroom doors, which will automatically lock. Looking at the open doors of the classrooms down the hallway she could tell they did not. She remembered hearing that the entirety of Haddonfield High School was outfitted with a special type of "hardened exterior glass" designed to deflect both bullets and Improvised Explosive Devices (IED). The events of this day were also to be captured by a multitude of cameras equipped with "shooter detection technology". All created for the military to allow them to more quickly locate Active Shooters such as the one that stood a few feet away from her.

Her eyes begun to sting. She couldn't take a breath. After backing away a few steps, she realized that she was breathing in the vapor from the smoke canisters in the hallways. Someone from the Fusion Center had detonated them remotely in a quick effort to take down the Active Shooter. Although she was wearing a bullet-proof vest, she didn't have her facial shield helmet. She took more stops backward. The gas released from the canisters was supposed to neutralize any threat left in the hallways. But this time the doors to the classrooms did not close and lock.

Once inside the classroom, the Active Shooter faced the Teacher. He looked at the rows of empty desks and realized the students were hiding beneath them. Haddonfield's students were long trained to "duck and cover" from the many Active Shooter drills they were forced to participate in.

After shooting and killing the Teacher at point blank range, the Active Shooter who resembled Michael Myers then turned on the students. He grabbed the pistol from his holster and reloaded it. He ordered the students to get up from beneath their desks. He then ordered them to the center of the room and then pointed to them one-by-one and began shooting.

Celine LeMeiux loved My Little Pony and was also a devoted Seventh-Day Adventist.

Clinton Corneilus was on the School's track team and was expecting to be inducted into the Honor Society.

Charles Kirkpatrick, left behind two brothers and a sister.

Sandra Amache was a "beautiful spirit" and relative of U.S. Sen. Neil Applebaum.

As Sgt. Bertha Davis ran back down the hallway to the entrance of the school, she knew that heavily armed reinforcements would soon be on the way, if they weren't outside already. Sgt. Davis didn't notice two other armed men dressed as Michael Myers entering the High School building from the southeast portion of the High School parking lot.

As Davis exited the building she heard loud explosions, coming from the parking lot. It reminded her of the time she was deployed to Afghanistan. She shook. She broke out into a cold sweat.

In front of the school were now five or six police cars and one ambulance. A student named Becky Howe came up to Sgt. Davis and frantically explained that she was warned by two masked men to leave the area. Howe said one of the men was unloading duffel bags from his car. Were these the IED's she heard going off all around her she thought to herself.

She was soon surrounded by more students who had run out of the school. Seeing a uniformed officer, they instinctively stopped and told her about a number of men coming into the school wearing long, red coats and face masks. They were carrying shotguns, and grenades and pipe bombs. Davis felt a pit in her belly, like she did once in Afghanistan when the Taliban were attacking. She vomited and fell to the ground.

Some of the 1,500 students fled the school from all direction. The ones that ran out the front entrance stepped around the body of Sgt. Davis who lay face down, passed out on the concrete. Some tripped over her. One stepped on her arm, and that made her come to. She stood up and heard the sond of gunshots and explosives went off, coming from all directions. I am back in Afghanistan, she wondered.

Davis knew from past Active Shooter events that there would be a few students too scared to run, and were hiding in Classrooms. She remembered the Homeland Security Drill from yesterday. That's what they told us. Many of the kids would be too afraid to come out. They would hide inside the classrooms for hours. In previous Active Shooting events, the assailants would first stalk the halls, blasting away at innocent people.

Another student ran up to her. This one a young girl, who pleaded with her to understand that "one student was killed on a sidewalk near the back entrance to the cafeteria". Others were trapped in the large library on the second floor. Bertha Davis nodded her understanding.

Her police radio blared at her "Shots reported in the library...Reports of four-five pipe bombs in the classroom." None of this was making any sense to her.

Davis could also hear the police radio booming in unison from the squad cars in the parking lot. "Male student reports bombs being thrown down from top of the school...Suspect grenade or IED", the dispatcher was now reporting. "Now receiving reports of multiple shooters inside the school." Multiple shooters? What in God's name was going on here, she thought to herself. And then silence. No sound. Yes, this was a warzone. This was Afghanistan. The enemy was all around them. An enemy that cannot be defeated, that goes on fighting forever. Smoke everywhere, people running. Young children crying. Burned and bloodied bodies lie now on the ground. Were there Helicopters now overhead? Was she dreaming?

She could hear sound again now. A wind had come up from the south-south west. Was this paralysis? Her mind felt blank, all she could do was stand her ground as the carnage flipped ripped all around her. This can't really be happening, can it?

"I am Pazuzu", she thought to herself. "Daughter of the King of the Wind, I ascend a mighty mountain that quakes. The winds I create are heading west. One by One I will break their wings."

And that's when everything went black.

When she woke, she found herself in a hospital bed. The sun was shining through a window across from her bed. In a few minutes, she realized where she was now. I'm in a hospital now, she realized. She vaguely remembered the scene at Haddonfield High School. She looked up from her bed and noticed a TV set. She reached beside her and found the remote. She clicked it on.

The sound coming from the TV: "One of the students earlier today told me he was coming down the stairs and saw three bodies there, people he thought had been killed.

...as I was trying to get out through the library, I heard around 10 or 11 rounds shot from an automatic weapon at that time...I like to consider myself lucky, I got out in one of the safer areas; however, the plate glass window in the front of the classroom was broken out, I do not know what that was from." Such a pretty girl on the TV, Davis thought to herself. I wonder what had happened to her?

There was some more talking head on the TV by some young people. They spoke of three individuals, two wearing masks and one in a red T-shirt...the Authorities have said all along that they knew there were at least two..."

Sgt. Bertha Davis She felt groggy.

A new talking head appeared on the TV. "We have with us, Dr. Samuel Loomis. He was the Doctor in charge of the most notorious serial Killer in America- Michael Myers. Dr. Loomis, many people have made the accusation that the Active Shooter yesterday was none other than your infamous patient. Can you confirm to us that Michael Myers is still incarcerated in a maximum security prison in Colorado?"

"Yes, I can. I'd also like to assure the public, that Michael Myers has never left his facility, the Supermax Prison in Florence, Colorado. Yesterday's tragic massacre at Haddonfield High School was surely the work of an imitator. There are 320 million Americans. Paranoid Schizophrenia affects just under 1 percent of the population. That's about 3 million people. Only a tiny fraction of these are ever violent. However, the dangerous ones are the loner who is socially isolated, often immersed in a fantasy world of violent video games. There are myriad such young men out there, but with different ages of onset, in different stages of psychotic derangement. What to do? As a society, we need to forcibly apprehend them, medicate them and put them into a type of pre-crime perpetual preventive parole. We need more aggressive psychiatric interventions. These massacres are almost invariably perpetrated by severely disturbed, isolated, often delusional young men. They believe in Conspiracies. We need laws passed that require the forcible medication of these individuals.

Sgt. Bertha Davis drifted back into sleep.

She started to dream. She is at a party. Her father is there. They are in her garage, in the home where she grew up. A man walks in. She has seen him before. Somewhere. He looks like he was in a horrible accident. His face is mangled. He has something in his hands. The man starts to spray something. There is liquid now on my face. I now need to solve a puzzle. Once I do I can then go outside. Now I am walking down the street where I live. Suddenly the man with the scary face looks out the window of a car as it passes me. He is shooting things at certain houses as he drives by. They are sticking to the sides of the houses like a target. Can he see me? No. Does he feel me? Yes. I feel naughty.

"...reported by officials. 25 dead. That total turned out to be 15. Now back to CBN News Headquarters. Thank you Jake.....President Santiago appeared at a White House Press conference earlier today expressing his condolences and calling for stricter gun control measures......"

Bertha opened her eyes. Still in the Hospital bed. The TV is still on. Terrible, terrible shooting. Surprised that there were any survivors. Like something out of Afghanistan.

The door to her Hospital room opens. There's her Doctor, smiling as he comes in to greet her. And how are we doing today, Sgt. Davis, he is asking.....

Flashback to the time when she found that couple on the side of the road. Both had been beaten on the side of their face and then stabbed in the right eye. In each of their hands lay a clump of hair. Their bodies had been completely drained of blood, most likely with a veterinarian's syringe. That was blamed on Michael Myers.

Was that who she saw at the school? Michael Myers? Did he escape from prison? She told the Doctor she was feeling fine. She told him that Michael Myers had returned, but this time there was more than one of him. He had multiplied himself. Somehow. We've got to do something, Doctor.

"Now, I'm going to give you something that will let you sleep. You need some rest. Everything is being taken care of". He was smiling at her now. The Doctor reminded her of someone from long ago. Wasn't he her Guidance Counselor back in Junior High School?

She drifted back to sleep and awakened a few hours later. She was glad to have the hospital room all to herself. It would help her to think. About the bloodless corpses she found on the side of highway. Did this have anything to do with yesterday's Active Shooter at Haddonfield High School?

The drained bodies had clasped knots of black hair in their hands. And both had strange but identical mutilations. How could Michael Myers have returned? She was very groggy and realized it was the meds that the Doctor had given her.

When she woke up again it was daylight. Sgt. Bertha Davis turned on the TV.

"QASI is the most advanced humanoid robot in the world. It can walk, carry objects, and even break into a short sprint. It is the new prototype robot for disaster response. And so he won't scare the injured as they are carried to safety, QASI can be painted and outfitted to look like a real human. QASI is a robot that's able to negotiate obstacles and even climb ladders. First Responders around the country can't wait when robots like QASI are available to assist in Emergency Response. Paul Thomas, FBN News."

Robots.....Robots? Is that what I saw at Haddonfield yesterday? Have they made a robot of Michael Myers? Is that why people saw multiple Michael Myers walking around shooting people and throwing bombs off the roof of the High School? "Experimental humanoid robot?", is that what I saw.

Days later Sgt. Bertha Davis was finally allowed to leave the hospital and go home. The doctors told her to take some extended time off of work. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders, they said can be worsened by events such as the incident at Haddonfield. They are best treated by meds, rest and relaxation they told her. During her stay at the hospital, Sgt. Davis thought about telling the doctors about the robots she saw. The robots that were made to resemble Michael Myers. But she decided not to.

It was when after she had gone through the mail that had piled up. That's when she saw the headline on the latest issue of the fashion magazine she subscribed to. It said on the cover: "Candidate Susan Mulligan: I'm Really Not Even a Human Being. She loved Susan Mulligan. She was going to be the first Woman President! Quickly she flipped through to the article. It was an interview with Susan Mulligan.

"I was constructed in a garage in Palo Alto a very long time ago. People think that, you know, Microsoft and Honda, they created me. But really, a man whose name shall remain nameless created me in his garage."

Q: Are there more of you?

SUSAN MULLIGAN: "I thought he threw away the plans, at least that's what he told me when he programmed me — that there would be no more. However, I've seen more like me, and I think they are part of the new race that he created: the robot race.

Q: So there's a Cyborg Army- is what you're saying?

SUSAN MULLIGAN: I don't want anybody to know this. This has been a secret until now.

Yes! Sgt. Bertha Davis smiled. I was right all along. Michael Myers had indeed returned that Halloween.

# HALLOWEEN: RETURN TO HADDONFIELD

By Mark Allan Gunnells

Crisp autumn leaves scuttled like chattering rats around John Tate's feet. Next to him, his wife Molly took his hand. "Are you sure you want to do this?"

He smiled at her and nodded, and the two stepped off the curb and started across the street to the rundown house with the crowd gathered out front.

"We could just go back to the hotel and watch Hocus Pocus on cable," she said, the chill air lifting her blonde curls and making them dance about her face.

John shook his head. "No, I have to do this. Not just for myself, but for my mother. She lost so much."

"She's not the only one," Molly murmured.

Squeezing his wife's hand, John silently chastised himself for not being more sensitive. Molly was right; they'd both lost friends the autumn of 1998 when John's uncle, Michael Myers, had paid an unexpected visit to Hillcrest Academy on Halloween night. He would likely have killed John and Molly as well if John's mother hadn't saved them. She'd risked her life to fight off Michael, ultimately beheading the maniac.

And yet she'd died herself less than a year later from a stroke. John had no doubt it was because of the lifetime of stress she'd endured. So in the end, even though he was already dead, Michael Myers still managed to kill his younger sister.

They made it to the opposite sidewalk and stopped, staring at the Myers house. This was the first time John had ever laid eyes on it, the first time he'd ever been to his mother's hometown of Haddonfield in fact, but his mother had described the place in such detail that he felt a stab of recognition seeing the peeling white paint, the sagging porch overhang, the two sets of double windows on the second floor. He'd never been here, but it felt like a homecoming nonetheless. Something inevitable that his life had been leading toward since his birth.

"I still can't believe they're doing this," Molly said, watching as people went up the steps and handed cash to a young man who stood by the front door.

John laughed. "When I got the email from Ronny saying he'd found out about this on the 'net, I thought he was joking. I don't know why we should be surprised though. People love a freak show; they get off on dissecting the tragedies of others."

"Ghouls if you ask me. What kind of person pays money to spend Halloween night in a house just because it was the home of a notorious serial killer?"

"Well, we are," John said, holding up the two folded twenties in his right hand.

"I'm only here because you dragged me along. I'm still not entirely clear on why you're here. Your mother's life was wrecked because of the trauma of what her brother did to her. I don't want to see the same thing happen to you."

"I don't want that either, and that's why I had to come. I can't explain it, but I feel like I can get some kind of closure by being here. Finally put all this behind me and move on from the nightmare."

Though Molly didn't say anything, she gave him that look of hers that said she knew he was holding something back from her.

Perceptive woman. John had studied the website that had been created for tonight's event, and the organizers had hired a medium that planned to hold a séance, reaching out to Michael's victims from the massacres in 78 and 98. A heartless tacky ploy to possibly bring in family members of those who'd lost their lives.

A ploy that had worked for John. He wasn't sure he believed in that kind of spiritual mumbo-jumbo (though after everything his family had been through with his uncle, he didn't rule anything out), but he couldn't shake the thought that he could possibly talk to his mother one more time. He'd lost her so suddenly, he hadn't even been able to say goodbye.

They took their place at the back of a line moving down the walkway to the front steps. The walkway was lined on either side with crudely carved jack-o'-lanterns, their crooked grins revealing teeth of flame.

"I'm surprised Ronny didn't want to come," Molly said. "I mean, this would have been great research for those grisly horror books he writes."

"I know, and I think he'd be here except his wife wouldn't let him."

"Smart lady. Maybe I should have gotten her to talk some sense into you."

"We won't stay long, I just want to check things out."

The line had progressed quickly so that they were now on the porch, the boards bowing under their feet. John handed over the payment to the teenaged boy in the Creed T-shirt and then they were through the door into a small foyer with a narrow staircase directly in front of them. A sign at the foot of the stairs read "Judith Myers' Bedroom This Way" and had an arrow pointing up. That seemed to be the first stop for most people.

Instead of following the crowd upstairs to the room where an aunt that John had never met was murdered by an uncle he wished he'd never met, he led Molly to the right into a small living room. A dozen people milled about, and from somewhere the song "Mr. Sandman" played softly. The only furniture in the space was a low round coffee table. A woman in a flowing red dress, her black hair twisted into a single braid that fell over her left shoulder, sat cross-legged in front of the table. Her eyes were closed and she swayed slightly, a soft hum issuing from her lips. On the surface, a half dozen candles burned, their wicks flickering in the breeze caused by the movement of everyone in the room. There were two other items on the tabletop, and these items immediately drew John's attention and made him feel as if the air had turned to thick molasses in his throat.

"This must be where they are holding the séance," Molly said, not noticing her husband's sudden discomfort.

Letting go of Molly's hand, John stepped toward the coffee table. "Why are those here?" he said in a hoarse croak.

Several people in the room shushed him. A middle-aged woman wearing a jogging suit pointed at the woman in red and said in a whisper, "She's in a trance, reaching out into the realm of the dead."

Heedless of the requests for quiet, John raised his voice. "I said, why are those here?"

Molly grabbed his arm. "John, what's gotten into—oh!"

She had spotted the items on the table that had upset John so. A blank white Halloween mask with a tuft of tangled brown hair, and a gleaming butcher knife.

"They're props to help her focus," said the woman in the jogging suit. "So she can call on the right spirit."

"What spirit?"

"Michael Myers, of course. She's going to channel him."

"You people are fucking insane!" John roared. "Why would you want to channel the spirit of a deranged psychopath?"

"To find out why he did it," said a man with a scraggly goat-tee and thick-framed glasses.

"You were right," John said to his wife. "This is just sick. We shouldn't have come."

John reached down and snatched the mask and knife off the table, meaning to toss them in the trash on the way out, and at that moment a wind sprang up inside the room as if someone had turned on an industrial fan, fluttering the curtains and extinguishing the candles. John cried out, an intense cramp in his gut doubling him over...

...and then he was gone.

#

The candles were out, but a lamp burned in the corner of the room and by its light Molly watched her husband pull the Halloween mask over his head.

"John, what are you doing?"

Instead of answering, he suddenly lashed out with the knife and buried it in the medium's throat. Her eyes sprang open and she seemed to be trying to scream, but only a garbled gagging sound emerged, as well as copious amounts of blood.

For a few seconds, everyone in the room froze, as if unsure if this were real or part of the show they'd paid to see. Then the woman in the jogging suit screamed and that broke the paralysis that had afflicted everyone.

Pandemonium broke out, people screaming and shoving and knocking one another over to get out of the room. Molly saw her husband yank the knife free of the medium's throat, the woman slumping forward onto the table, her blood pooling like dark wine beneath her head. John started slashing indiscriminately, slicing at anyone within his reach. He cut a few jugulars, sank the blade into a few stomachs, four or five dead before they could make their way clear of the room. Including the man with the goat-tee and glasses.

Molly wasn't sure what to do. Her mind balk at the scene unfolding before her. She'd known her husband since high school; he was a gentle man, not capable of this kind of violence. How could this be happening?

Before she had time to further contemplate the question, another inexplicable wind tore through the room and the bulb in the lamp exploded. Molly screamed, collapsing to the hardwood floor...

...and then she was gone.

#

Laurie Stroke stood up, wearing Molly's body like a suit.

As if sensing her presence, Michael turned toward her suddenly, the bloody knife clenched in his fist. Except for the dead and injured, the room had cleared, and the two stood staring at one another like two outlaws from the old West preparing for a duel.

"Hello, Michael," Laurie said after a moment of silence. "I knew this wasn't over."

Michael lunged for her, but she dodged him, dropping to the floor, rolling, then leaping back up on the far side of the coffee table. Without looking back but knowing her brother was in pursuit, she bolted through the dining room into the small kitchen. Alerted by the screams and fleeing patrons, the house had emptied and the back door was standing wide open. Laurie did not make for it, however. Instead she started pulling open drawers, looking for a weapon. To her dismay, she discovered the drawers were as empty as the house.

As Michael came bounding through the door, Laurie yanked out one of the drawers and tossed it at her brother. He batted it aside like it was a paper airplane. Having nowhere else to run, now she did rush out the back door, circling around to the front.

The crowd that had made the exodus from the house were gathered on the front lawn and in the street, many of them clinging to one another. When they saw Laurie rounding the corner, they moved back en masse. "What's going on?" yelled the man in the Creed T-shirt from the sidewalk.

"Get the hell out of here!" Laurie yelled back, making her way to the steps.

The crowd let out a collective scream when Michael came around the side of the house. The noise attracted him and he started toward the throng. Laurie picked up one of the jack-o'-lanterns and threw it at Michael's back. It struck him and splintered into pieces.

"Michael!" she screamed. "I'm the one you want. You tried to kill me your whole life and never succeeded. This is your last chance."

She had his attention now, and as he turned and started back toward her, she retreated into the house. She couldn't let him loose on the populace; she had to keep him contained here until she could dispatch him again.

Grief and doubt seized her heart. This was the spirit of her murderous brother, but it was housed in the body of her son. The only way she knew to send his spirit back to hell was to kill the body it possessed. But could she? Could she kill her own child?

Once through the front door, Laurie bounded up the stairs, following the signs to Judith Myer's bedroom. Where this whole nightmare had begun back in 1963. She scanned the room quickly for something she could use to defend herself. This was the only room in the house that had been properly furnished, a small bed and a vanity with mirror. Draped on the bed was a child's clown Halloween costume. Setting the scene.

Knowing that hesitation would mean death, Laurie crossed the room and punched her fist into the mirror, shattering the glass. She picked up the largest shard in her bleeding hand and went back to the door, hiding behind it. She clutched the glass shard to her chest, remembering John as a baby, the love she'd felt for him, the way they'd clung to each other for support after his father walked out on them. The years at Hillcrest, the way their roles reversed every October and he'd been the one parenting her through the trauma she had tried to drown in alcohol. He'd always been such a good kid, strong and compassionate. He didn't deserve this.

But Judith hadn't deserved what happened to her, or Laurie herself. Certainly not those caught in the crossfire. People like Annie and Lynda and Will and even Loomis. They were all casualties of Michael's inhuman wrath, and Laurie was the last gatekeeper. There was no one else.

So when Michael came through the door, she didn't allow herself time to think; she just acted. She kicked the door closed, and when Michael turned toward her, she plunged the mirror shard deep into his gut, dragging it up toward his chest as if unzipping him. His intestines slid out like snakes, dropping in loops on the floor at their feet. "Happy Halloween, fucker!" she hissed.

#

John resurfaced for just a moment, staring into his wife's eyes but recognizing it wasn't Molly before him. It was his mother. Keri Tate to some, Laurie Strode to others.

He had come here tonight hoping to make contact with her one final time, but this wasn't what he'd imagined at all.

He wanted to tell her that he understood and he loved her, but he hadn't the strength. The world went gray around the edges and he felt himself falling...

...and then he was gone.

#

Laurie stared down at the body of her dead brother, her dead son. She was both winner and loser of this battle. A war of conflicting emotions erupted inside of her, and white-hot pain enveloped her like an Iron Maiden. She wanted to scream out her pain...

...and then she was gone.

#

Molly resurfaced to find herself staring down at her husband's disemboweled body. She dropped the shard. It hit the floor and broke into smaller shards, all reflecting the grisly scene. She fell to her knees next to John, pulling the mask off of his head and tossing it aside.

Outside sirens filled the night, but they weren't as loud as Molly's screams.

# HALLOWEEN: DAY OF THE DEAD

By David C. Hayes

The hospital was in a state of utter chaos. What was left of the Haddonfield Police Department, and the volunteer fire department, sifted through the contents of the operating room where it happened... where the doctor killed him, blew him up with oxygen tanks and a lighter. A great deal of what they found they expected to find: twisted and rent metal canisters that held the gas, burnt and melted hospital equipment, a bed that had gotten so hot it collapsed under its own weight and resembled that weird modern art piece the Haddonfield library had commissioned the year before... the usual.

Halloween night. Leo Marx was the member of the volunteer fire department and he had the dubious honor of finding what was left of Dr. Sam Loomis. Leo, the school's English teacher by day, pushed away a cabinet to find the charred and scarred body of Dr. Loomis. He almost moved on from there, angry (like everyone in Haddonfield) about what this so-called doctor had set loose on the town. Fortunately for Dr. Loomis, and Leo, the volunteer fireman remembered his commitment and training. With an exasperated sigh, he leaned in to the still-smoldering body. He reached out to where he assumed Loomis' neck to be, searching for a pulse. At that moment, Loomis' eyes snapped open and he dragged in a ragged breath. Leon stumbled backwards, shocked that someone that horribly disfigure could still be alive and surprised at his own callousness. Leo called out to his compatriots and, with the utmost care, Loomis was lifted and transported to the burn ward section of the hospital.

Leo returned to the search, allowing for the adrenaline to work its way through his system. He was disappointed. Not in the notion that Loomis was alive and all those poor kids were dead, but that he was ready to give up on another human being. That doctor obviously didn't want this to happen and he paid a heavy price to end it. Leo wiped back tears as he shifted more debris. The guys always chided him for being too smart. The idea that he had taken some college courses over at the University of Illinois in Champaign was enough to get him labeled college boy and that he thought too much. Maybe he did. He thought that he was some kind of a monster for almost walking past another human being in need, no matter what that person did.

Moving a file cabinet out of the way proved to be that karmic moment where Leo Marx was given the chance to reassert his own humanity. Lying before him, on the floor, was the burned and blackened remains of Michael Meyers. Just the thought of the name caused Leo to shudder involuntarily. Before last night, the idea of Michael Meyers was used to terrify children and adults alike. Leo had been two years younger than Michael and, like everyone else in town, lived right down the street. That Halloween in 1963 shaped the image of the town and its residents. He grew up in the shadow of a little kid in a clown costume. Now, fifteen years later, the town was faced with the real shadow... that of a man. Fully grown and fully able to actualize evil. The name, the smoking body in flame-licked coveralls and the effect this man had on Leo and everyone else put the fireman's humanity to the test.

Shaking uncontrollably, Leo Marx knelt down next to his personal definition of evil. Every moment required Leo to make a judgment call on whether or not he would go further. Decision: kneel. Decision: Lean forward. Decision: Reach out. On the verge of tears, and to Leo's credit, he was far more terrified of becoming an inhuman monster that could get used to the suffering and misery of others than he was of Michael Meyers... but just barely. Decision: Does Meyers even qualify as human? Leo banished the thought. He joined the volunteer fire department to make a difference. He wanted to help people, even those that were marginally human.

With the shock and fear from discovering that Loomis was still alive fresh in his mind, Leo prepared himself for anything. Meyers could sit up at any moment, the bad guys always did.

Leo thought he saw Meyers once when they were kids. Everyone's memory of the young Michael was cloudy before, well, before the incident. It was like the kid didn't exist. He went from a non-entity to the personification of Haddonfield overnight. Leo always wondered what made the kid do it. Why hack your sister to death? Did she abuse him? Was there a reason? The rumor mill flew at the time. His mother was a stripper. His father was an alcoholic. His sister was molesting him... none of them were true. It turns out that Michael Meyers was just plain old evil.

And Leo Marx was about to touch that evil. His fingers floated millimeters from Meyers' neck. Swallowing hard, Leo touched the charcoal skin and waited patiently. He heard a heartbeat slamming in his ears, but that was his own. Leo exhaled, loudly, forgetting he had held his breath. There was no pulse. Meyers was dead.

Laughing, Leo fell backward onto his rear end breathing heavily. He yelled for another body bag but couldn't keep the joy out of his voice. As the paramedics loaded Meyers on the gurney, Leo felt giddy. He shot the mass murderer's corpse the bird as they wheeled him off toward the morgue. He was going to be shipped off up-state eventually and, even dead, Leo and the rest of Haddonfield couldn't wait to see him go.

#

The morgue in the basement of the hospital had never seen so much activity. The best that anyone could do was to arrange the corpses by relative injury. Therefore, the stabbing victims (Annie Brackett, Bob Simms, Alice Martin, Debra Lane, Ted Garrett, Fred Mixter, Jill Franco and Terry Gummell) were placed in one area, the fresher bodies sharing tables. The implement doing the stabbing was of no concern, ranging from a butcher knife, like Bob Simms, to a claw hammer, like Ted Garrett or even a syringe, like Dr. Mixter. This made up the bulk of the evening's casualties. The poor souls who suffocated by telephone cord, drowning, etc. (this includes Lynda Van Der Klok, Bud Scarlotti and Karen Bailey). Janet Marshall and Virginia Alves had a corner to themselves since both of their deaths involved intravenous foul play which left only the burn victims. By themselves, tucked away, sat the unfortunate Ben Tramer and the man of the hour, Michael Meyers.

Carlos Santiago's mouth hung open as he surveyed the scene. He had just arrived from Chicago, just after midnight, coming down state at the behest of the State Police due to an emergency situation. He was a coroner and he had never, in the history of the body game, heard of an emergency need for coroners. Haddonfield had a reputation, of course, but he had no idea.

Carlos looked for toe tags, but it appears that there wasn't time. Small pieces of paper with the last names of the victims were scotch-taped to the sheets that covered the remains. Tramer. Meyers. Van Der Hook. Brackett. He had no frame of reference, each of them were just another job to process. That is how he managed to get through the grit and grime of everyday life. He saw the job and nothing else. Today was tough, though. He knew that a vast majority of these people were hospital staffers. Doctors. Nurses. Paramedics. His colleagues. He knew that someone had killed them, and many others, but stopped the police escort before they could name names. That would be too personal. Too much. So, with a sigh, he went to work.

Carlos had Alves on the slab, cleaning the body down and remarking at the complete lack of blood, when the double door to the morgue flew open. He looked up as a small Caucasian man dressed quite proper in a black suit entered. The breeze from the door sent the scraps of paper identifying the remains flying. The man stopped short as Carlos looked up.

The small man managed a wan smile and took off his fedora. He brushed the four or five strands of hair he had left back over his head and said, "Excuse me, could you tell me who is the acting coroner?"

Carlos smiled. He knew from the moment he heard the man speak that he ran a funeral home. The melodic tone, every sentence ending quietly... they all talked the same. He also knew that Carlos was probably the first, real live Hispanic this man had ever seen. Another one of Haddonfield's reputations. Lily white and naïve.

Carlos extended his hand. "Carlos Santiago from Cook County in Chicago. I'm the acting coroner as of right now."

The look on the man's face was priceless and it was all Carlos could do to conceal his smile. After a moment, the little man stepped forward and placed what felt like a dead fish in Carlos' extended hand. This was what passed for a handshake. Carlos smiled again, definitely a mortician.

"I, I am," the little man stammered, "Hugo Lamb from the Lamb Funeral Home and I am here to collect the remains of Bennet Tramer."

"What was the cause of death?"

"Excuse me?" Lamb asked. That wasn't a question normally asked.

"There are so many bodies here that the fire department grouped them by cause of death. Was your vic one of the... you know... the Michael..."

Before Carlos could finish the name, Lamb cleared his throat, cutting the young coroner off.

"There is no need to say that name. Not ever again. Young Bennett was not a victim of, well, HIM. He was burned alive in an automobile accident."

Carlos nodded. He jerked his thumb toward the corner where the two burn victims sat. He went back to washing down Alves. "If you need anything else, gringo, just let me know."

Carlos giggled to himself. Without turning he could see how flustered that made Lamb. He could hear the little man's mouth opening and closing in faux indignation. It really wasn't fair to have so much fun with the hayseed mortician, but he had to do something to take his mind off of the carnage.

Mr. Lamb, on the other hand, was truly upset. Not only did he have the horribly disfigured corpse of a teenager and his distraught family to deal with, he just had to deal with a Mexican that hated him. Wishing to leave the morgue as quickly as possible, he stomped over to where that awful, and he didn't use this term often because it was disrespectful, wetback had indicated. There were no toe tags and nothing on the sheets. Lamb turned to ask the coroner, even going so far as to take a breath before the question, but thought better of it. He wouldn't give that man the satisfaction. Lamb lifted the sheet of the first corpse in front of him. He saw the charred and blackened foot of someone that had been horribly burned and that was enough. After all, the other bodies were the result of HIM, knives and the like, so this had to be Tramer.

Mr. Lamb pulled the wheeled table forward and pushed Bennet Tramer toward the double doors, opening them without a word.

Carlos couldn't help himself. "Hasta la vista, Senor Lamb!" he called out as the mortician exited.

From down the hallway he heard the little man snort in derision and that just made Carlos' day.

#

The trip to The Lamb Funeral Home was uneventful. Mr. Lamb's family-owned establishment was one of four funeral homes in Haddonfield. Even smaller communities needed the caring and services of a competent, licensed funerary director. For over fifty years he had serviced this community with the Lamb Home's patented brand of family care. For only small additional fees, families could put their loved ones to rest and receive psychiatric counseling from Hugo's brother, Dr. Harold Lamb. They were, in 1978, the first funeral home to offer the service and knew it would catch on soon.

Being in Haddonfield for so long, the Lambs were well aware of the Meyers issue. Hugo could think about nothing else as he pulled Bennet from the hearse and wheeled him into the basement where the body work was done. This was late night so the staff was gone. Hugo preferred to work like that. Alone. Him and the departed, dancing one final dance before nothing. He had done that final dance with Judith Meyers fifteen years earlier. When he was finished, she looked as if she were napping and not hacked to pieces by her brother. Hugo fancied himself an artist and, for all intense and purposes, he was.

Hugo turned to the body before him. It was burned, but intact. The department must have been mistaken when they considered the injuries to be total immolation. Hugo sighed. Still, no matter how much magic there was in his hands, this would be a closed casket.

"I'm sorry," he said to the body as he pulled the sheet back fully. He talked to the bodies, constantly. His was a lonely profession and he found it therapeutic. His brother thought he was insane, but Hugo blew that off. He liked to think that the conversation helped them into the afterlife.

Hugo stood back and furrowed his brow. The hysteria of the previous evening was evident as he checked from the police documents and to the body in front of him. Apparently, Mr. Bennet Tramer was eight inches taller than reported on the certificate of death and, from what Hugo could tell, he had a slightly different hair color. The mortician reassured himself has he knocked away pieces of melted white rubber from the corpse's face and pulled burnt strips of blue coverall away from the charred flesh. This, at least, was consistent with the report.

"You realize, young man, that I am this town's leading cosmetic mortician," Hugo announced. "You have nothing to worry about."

He leaned over the body and using a small metal scalpel, began to chip away at the burned skin. He stopped from time to time to take a metallic sponge to the foreign anomalies that had melted themselves to the poor boy. All the while, Hugo talked.

"My brother and I started this home in Haddonfield in 1959 so, in a year or so, we will be celebrating our twentieth year. That isn't so remarkable, but it is noteworthy. This town is a special one..." Hugo took this moment to lean in close and whisper into the blackened ear. "Death has comfortable home here, so you won't be lonely."

Hugo giggled and stood for a moment. He turned away from the body to exchange tools and prepare a sponge just to see how much of the black he could wipe off. Soot vs. skin.

"We've had some terrible times here and last night looks to be the worst. You are my first job for this season, young man. I know that the Bracketts and Scarlottis had already made inquiries and I expect a few more before tomorrow's close of business. That Meyers boy is hell on wheels, but he is good for the bottom line... no offense."

Hugo laughed to himself again and turned to the body. He started with the feet and wiped the sponge along the leg. A great deal of the blackened skin lifted with the moist sponge revealing burned, but not horribly so, skin underneath.

Shocked, Hugo stepped back. He looked at the skin and smiled. "Well, I'll be. You may be an open casket after all!" He moved forward, with relish, and began to wipe down the remainder of the legs and feet. "It wouldn't be the first miracle I've performed. I made Judith Meyers pretty as a picture for her big day."

At the mention of his sister's name, Michael's eyes shot open. The shots fired into his face earlier had missed the eyes themselves, but had cracked and disfigured the orbital bone. His face, charred and blackened, cracked around the corners of his mouth as the fiend sucked in a breath. The brunt of the explosion centered on Meyers' upper torso and face. He looked as if he still had the mask on, only a picture negative version of it.

Hugo, working on the lower part of the body had no idea. Neither did he notice anything as Michael sat up. Hugo caught a glimpse of the body stirring, specifically the burnt hands and fingers lifting off the slab.

Meyers dug his fingers into the sides of Hugo's head as the mortician was mid-sentence. Something about making harlots like that prettier than they should be... or something similar. Regardless, Michael swung his legs off of the slab and slipped off as he spun, holding Hugo in the air. Speechless, for the first time in human record, he could only work his mouth up and down.

Michael regarded him for a moment the way a dog regards a meal, and finally slammed the small man down on the table.

Hugo squeaked as he thudded down. That small exclamation allowed Hugo to get his wind back and he screamed, long and loud. It was seven in the morning on the day after his town had experienced the worst massacre in their history. No one heard.

Unfortunately for Hugo, Michael found the noise annoying. He changed his grip, pushing down on Hugo's forehead and grabbing the lower part of the small man's jaw with his free hand. Meyers pulled down and out, as if he were removing a desk drawer and Mr. Lamb's lower mandible cracked, splintered and pulled free with a wet sound that resembled wringing out a mop. The skin and muscle and gristle all pulled away, tearing and rending. Hugo bucked and thrashed since the pain must have been intense.

Michael threw the lower mandible to the side as if it were nothing and stared at the little man. Hugo's tongue remained intact, but it flopped around without an anchor. Soft mewling noises, like those a cat would make, were all that Hugo could manage. After a moment, Hugo's entire body spasmed, mimicking the dying fish aspects of his tongue. Michael stepped back to watch as Hugo went into cardiac arrest from the pain and shock. His small body jumped and shook and jittered as Hugo's heart stopped and started, unsure whether or not to continue.

Blood continued to pour from what was left of Hugo's face so, either way, he would be dead soon. There was no way to gauge what Michael Meyers thought, if anything, but he did stay the entire time. It took Hugo a full three minutes to die. An agonizing three minutes and, at the point of his expiration, the large grandfather clock upstairs in the funeral home itself tolled three times. Three in the morning and people would be safe and snug in their beds.

Michael turned toward the stairs and saw the light streaming in through the single basement window from the moon as it hung over Haddonfield. He paid it no mind but it was after midnight. A new day. November first, the Day of the Dead.

# HAINT NIGHT

By Jarred Martin

A pale moon shone over Haddonfield woods turning the skeletal limbs of trees to scrawls of black ink. Tomorrow it would be November. The air was already turning colder, but Kaden Fenn was only vaguely aware of the chill. Rotten leaves and wet earth clung to the leathery soles of his bare feet as he followed his little brother through the brush.

"Where is it, Jess? This is dumb. I wanna go back," he whined.

"It ain't much farther." Jess Fenn walked with an arm outstretched, holding a lantern in front of him.

"But if daddy catches us out here-"

"Here it is!" Jess interrupted. "See? Here it is, just like I said!" He lowered the lantern over the dark mass sprawled out on the forest floor.

"Je-sus. He's all messed up," said Kaden.

In the dim light they could see through the tatters of the man's coveralls. His body was a hash of wound: gouges, gunshot and blackened blisters of charred flesh.

"What do you think happened to him?" Asked Kaden.

"Everything," said Jess gravely. "And look how big he is."

"He's dead," Kaden concluded. "His face. It's just hangin' off him."

"It ain't his face, ijit."

"Don't call me that."

Jess ignored him. He leaned over the figure and began to roll the ductile flesh of its pale face upward.

"It's a trigger treat mask," Kaden whispered.

Jess pealed it off. There was something heavy and wet clinging to the inside of it. Jess turned it over and the boys stared in perverse fascination as a dark pulp dripped out; shards of white stuck in it like pieces of eggshell.

"It's his brains," said Kaden. "That mask was the only thing holdin' 'em in."

Jess tossed the mask away and held the lantern over the man's face. Wavering light swung in the boy's grip, causing shadows to ebb over his maimed visage. He was chewed up with bullet holes; the exit wounds had blown the back of his skull away. Beyond that they could see the man was disfigured. A severely cleft pallet split his upper lip apart up to his nose, and his front teeth were clownishly buck with a wide gap between them.

"No wonder he was wearin' a mask," said Kaden.

The man's eyes were open. The boys sensed docility. It was like the gaze of a cow or a basset hound that had been beaten too often.

And just then the whites of his eyes flared in the yellow light.

Kaden jumped back. "He's alive!"

"I know," said Jess calmly. "I poked at him with a stick earlier."

"What are we gonna do?"

"Well," said Jess. "I figure if we both was pullin' him, we could drag him all the way to the barn and keep him there till he gets better."

"No," said Kaden. "No way. If we do that, daddy is sure to know we been out in the woods at night. He'll beat us till we look worse than he does."

"I don't give a damn if he does," said Jess.

"Well I do," said Kaden. His fingertips touched a fresh bruise around his eye.

"He'll beat us no matter what we do. But if we don't help this guy, he'll die. Do you want that to happen? Look at him."

Kaden did look at him. He felt sympathy, but he was still unconvinced.

"I'll tell daddy it was all my idea and you didn't do nothin'," Jess offered.

Kaden looked at his younger brother. "You will?"

"Yeah. Promise. Now are you gonna help me, or not?"

Kaden sighed. "Yeah, I guess so."

"Alright," said Jess. "Get one of his legs."

Although the task was daunting, the two brawny farm boys were more than capable of dragging the big man through the woods. They looked back, now and then, as he moaned and rolled his eyes around with all the awareness of a stunned cow about to be slaughtered. Before long they were through the tree line that designated their property.

The Farmhouse lay beyond, in silhouette; a weathered dwelling with a collapsing, swaybacked roof and a genuine stovepipe from a wood stove jutting out.

The barn was across from the house. It held nothing but musty, rotting hay and some rusted tools. It had not housed livestock since before either of the boys were born.

They dragged him through the wide door and set him down on a straw pile.

"What do we do now?" asked Kaden.

"I don't know. He needs some medicine, I guess. Bandages."

"How are we gonna get all that without wakin' up daddy, or Uncle Ricky?"

"We'll just have to keep quiet. Besides, when daddy's been drinkin' you can't hardly wake him up no how."

"Yeah," Kaden agreed.

They took a last look at the man. A clot of dust and hay clung to the dark morass of half-dried blood and mangled tissue leaking from the back of his skull.

With their backs to the door, they did not see the slender, growing shade eclipse them; leather strap dangling from one hand like a writhing snake. Jess had been right about one thing: daddy had been drinking, but he was very, very awake.

#

Cherilynn's heels echoed in the sterile halls of Smith's Grove as if she were walking through a vast mausoleum. But it isn't a crypt, she reminded herself, it's only an insane asylum.

The orderly led her to outside Laurie's room. He frowned, fumbling with the snarl of keys hanging from the ring on his belt. "Really, I don't know why you're even bothering with her. It's like I said, she's catatonic. Post-traumatic something-or-other, the doctors say. She hasn't moved a muscle the entire year she's been here."

Cherilynn gave him an annoyed look. "I've known Laurie Strode since we were in second grade. Today's gonna be really hard for her. It's the anniversary of ... everything that happened. She could use a little cheering up if you ask me. Catatonic people can still see and hear, you know."

He looked up from his keys. "They can? Shit. I didn't know that."

"Maybe her doctor should have brought me here instead of you."

The orderly tried a key and couldn't make it fit. He snorted. "Yeah, well her doctor couldn't tell you that she's not really catatonic; she's waiting."

"For what?"

The orderly gave her a sidelong smile. "Halloween." He found the key and twisted the lock, pushed the door in. "Laurie! Oh Laaauriiee, dear. You got a visi-" He stopped, eyes wide in shock, mouth hanging open. "Oh God!"

"What?" said Cherilynn. But she could already see.

The orderly murmured two low words in response. "She's gone."

It was noon at the farm. Pleasantly warm for the last day of October. A butterfly flitted its soft wings in golden sunlight, and a sizable hand extended a finger in the hopes that it would perch there.

"Push me higher, Michael Myers! Higher!" Jess Fenn called, giggling and kicking his legs through the tire swing. The giant obliged him with a wide, split-faced grin that would have horrified anyone other than Jess and his brother.

It had been a good year for the boys. Not just good; it had been the best they could recall. The big man's convalescence had been supernaturally brisk. Although the flesh that had grown over the back of his shattered skull was grotesquely sunken like a hideous fontanel, he was fully recovered. Elmer Fenn, was reluctant to quarter the lumbering ghoul at first, but he changed his mind when the man proved to be as strong as a pair of mules, not a fraction as stubborn, and much cheaper to feed. They kept him in the barn. With the boys and the big man doing all the farm work, it left him to his own devices. And that suited Elmer Fenn finer than Men's Warehouse. It was even finer for Jess and Kaden. Their father was shy to strike them in the giant's presence.

Jess laughed again. But like a lone black cloud in a clear sky, Elmer appeared.

"Alright, son. Playtime's over. I want you to hitch your pet retard up to that plow in yonder field. I want the whole plot rowed by sundown, you hear?"

The swing slowed to a halt and Jess climbed out sullenly, but he did not protest. Elmer unscrewed the cap on his flask and took a long pull as he watched his son take the monster's hand and lead him away.

#

It was a banner day for Walter Boone. He had bagged a prime doe late that afternoon and had it strapped to the hood of his car. He smiled, walking out of the Kum 'N' Save, juggling sacks of groceries. If he played his cards right, he might bag another.

She was a pretty brunette thing, barefoot and in a hospital gown. She stood looking at the kill tied to his hood, her cold black eyes indistinguishable from the doe's. He watched as she stuck a hand out to caress the stiff, blood-matted fur around the bullet hole.

He approached her. "You like that? Single shot. You can see for yourself. Bam! Dropped down deader than a doornail. Didn't use no scope, neither."

She did not respond.

"Shy huh? You a shy girl? That's alright, cause I can read your mind. What do you think of that? Don't tell me, I already know. You want a ride, well, I'm obliged to give you one. Anywhere between here and Haddonfield, that's where I'm headed, Haddonfield. Of course, you're welcome to come home with me."

This, finally, elicited a response, and the girl gave him a long, slow stare.

He was unnerved, momentarily, but he shook it off. Her stare may have been death, but her ass was the resurrection.

"Hop in, sweet thing."

They were on the highway minutes later, heading toward Haddonfield. Walter took his eyes off the road every few seconds to take her in. "That's a good Halloween costume you got on there. I've seen sexy nurse, sexy girl cop, but I don't think I've ever seen sexy uh ... sick girl before. You ain't contagious, are you?" He chuckled.

She stared straight ahead.

"Honey, you got blood all over you from the deer. Here." He reached over to open the glove compartment. "Stick your hand in there and see if you can't find some napkins or something."

She reached in and pulled out the massive hunting knife he kept in there. She looked down at her reflection in the blade; cold, emotionless.

"Uh oh," Walter laughed. "She found the murder weapon." He smiled at her uneasily. "Naw, I'm just kidding. You like that, do you? Just be careful, that thing could cut glass. You know, most girls would be scared of something like that. You ain't one of them go-"

In the next instant he could feel steel between his back teeth.

She buried the knife to the hilt in the side of his face, gleaming chrome stuck out the other. In a single motion, she brought the blade forward, turning the flesh of his jowls into a ragged, gaping grin. He tried to scream as the knife penetrated him again and again, but he could only manage to gargle hot blood.

#

Kaden Fenn drew in a breath, steadying his hand as he pushed the knife in, slow and deliberate. He jerked as the screen door clapped shut behind him. Uncle Ricky stepped out onto the porch, squinting in the dying October light, cheeks and chin stippled with ever-present pricks of black stubble. He had awoken with a thudding hangover and the empty jug he carried down by his side suggested that he meant to remedy it. He looked down at Kaden.

"Why you cuttin' on that gourd, boy?" He rasped, wincing at the sound of his own voice.

Kaden maintained focus. "I'm makin' jackal lanterns. This one's for me and Jess to share, and I'm makin' another for Michael Myers. Daddy says they scare away the haints that come to get you on Halloween night."

"Your daddy said that? He's more full a shit than a chili store outhouse. Tell him I said so." He looked across the property and there was Elmer, sprawled under a tree, dead to the world. He also clocked the menacing imbecile the kids kept in the barn. He was in the field, hitched to a plow, but something was wrong with it. The idiot was just dragging the thing behind him, oblivious, with that dopey, lumbering gait he had. But the blade wasn't turning over any earth. Ricky smiled to himself. Elmer was gonna shit when he saw that. He looked back to Kaden, "If your daddy asks after me, you tell him I went to the still to fill up my tank. Hear?"

"I hear," Kaden muttered.

Uncle Ricky vanished into the woods.

#

She had to abandon the car. She would have driven it right to him if she were able. To him. Over him. Over and over. Until blood slung off the back tires like gravel. It was in the woods somewhere, buried up to the bumper in mud. But that was okay. She was close enough. She could smell him. She had been smelling him for an entire year; a stink like a festering wound that refused to heal. She was mired in it, and it got stronger the closer she got. But there was something else she sensed as she walked beneath the frail trellis of branches. She stopped. Here it was, staring up at her from under a mass of black leaves. She stooped to pick up the pale, flaccid rubber. She pulled it down over her face.

#

Ricky felt a sense of satisfaction as he approached the still. His life's crowning achievement. He had never worked harder at anything in his life. It was a thing of artistry and craftsmanship; a massive stainless steel boiler connected to spirals of copper tubing. He had even designed a sophisticated receptacle for the finished product, complete with a ball valve spigot for easy access.

He set the jug down, kneeled to put his mouth around the tap. He closed his eyes, savoring the hot splash down his throat that ended seethed in his belly.

There was pressure on his spine followed by a sickening numbness. He almost didn't feel the knife when it slipped into his back, but he definitely heard his spine pop with a sound like a raw chicken wing being snapped in half.

There was a hand at the back of his head now, forcing him toward the nozzle. He opened his mouth to scream, and when he did the end of the spigot tore through the roof of his mouth and jammed down his throat. His eyes bulged as a hand reach out to twist the valve wide open, and a deluge of corn mash gushed into him.

Somewhere in his mind he was screaming to struggle, to fight, but the message was lost among the frayed wires of his central nervous system. He could only manage the odd gurgling sound as he drowned in his own high-octane booze.

#

Somewhere on the tenuous border between waking and nightmare, the haint was watching. Rippling shroud of white beneath a bloodless, icy stare, just at the edge of the darkening woods.

Elmer could feel his heart pounding as he awoke. He snapped bolt upright, searching the shadows between the trees. Was that real? Had he really just seen that? He strained his eyes against the shade. No. Of course not. Nothing there at all.

He turned his attention to the field and his fear instantly ripened to anger.

"Jess!" He shouted, pushing himself up. "Jess Fenn, you get your ass over here double-quick!"

The boy hurried over. "What?"

"Don't what me." He took his son by the shoulders and spun him around so that he was facing the field. "That's what. See that?"

He saw Michael Myers hitched to the plow, taking slow, short steps as if he weren't dragging anything behind him at all.

"Fucking Frankenstein done busted the plow blade on a rock or somethin'. He's just been walkin' around like that for God-knows-how-long, he ain't plowin' nothin'! You gonna fix that blade. Or I'll fix you."

Jess wrenched out of his grip. "His name ain't Frankenstein; it's Michael Myers. He told me so. And if you was watching him like you were supposed to-"

Elmer struck out, lightning-quick, and hit the boy with a backhand hard enough to send a dribble of blood running out of one nostril.

"Don't you ever tell me what I'm supposed to do. Nobody tells me that. 'Specially not my sawed-off little shit for a son."

Jess looked up at his father, eyes boiling. "Daddy?"

"What?"

"Uncle Ricky's looking for you," he lied through clenched teeth. "He's-"

"I know where he is."

Jess knew that if his uncle hadn't come back from the still yet, there was a good chance that he was drunk. And if he was drunk, there was an even better chance that daddy and Ricky would fight. He only hoped that his dad came away with more than a bloody nose.

#

The fire was lit under the boiler, but Ricky was nowhere to be found. This was odd, because if the whiskey was cooking, he would usually wait for it to drip out the end of the copper tubing, looking like a hungry dog at the dinner table. Odd, alright. But not as odd as that queer sucking sound coming from the boiler. Like a half-clogged sink trying to drain. And now there was something dripping from the tubing, but it wasn't mash. Elmer looked closer: thick and red, gobs of something in it. The hell? He took the lid off the boiler, waving his hand through the churning fog of steam. Inside was a boiling red pulp. A hands bobbed to the top, like a drowning man, but it wasn't attached to anything.

His expression was pure terror as he staggered back from the still.

He didn't know whether to cry or be sick.

"Oh,God! Rick-"

His last words became a muffled choke as his brother's belt slipped down around his neck and tightened.

#

Full night had come at last. Wind blew through the crumbling farmhouse, forcing it to creak and sway. Every lamp in the house was burning, casting eerie shadows along the walls. The three of them sat on the sprung living room couch. The big man sat between the boys. They listened to the wind howl and whistle while a pot of thin soup bubbled on the stove.

Kaden was fidgeting, jumping at every sound real and imagined. He clung to the slack arm of Michael Myers. He started again and peaked around to look at his brother.

"You hear that?"

"It's the wind," said Jess.

"It's the haints!" countered Kaden

"It's dad," said Jess.

"Somebody's on the porch!" Kaden raced to the door. He threw it open and the bluster tore it from his hands and it smacked the side of the house.

Something gleamed in the darkness.

Looking down at the porch, his cries suddenly rivaled the howling wind.

Jess came running. He shouldered past his brother, motionless in the doorway. He saw why he was screaming.

Twin orbs stared up at him. Hideous. Oblong. Glowing with flickering candle light. The jack-o-lanterns had been replaced with the severed heads of his father and uncle. He could see flame dancing through the hollow sockets where his father's eyes had been.

"Get back!" he shouted, reaching to slam the door shut. "Stay down here. Keep away from the windows."

"The haints," Kaden sobbed. "Where are you goin'?"

Jess turned at the foot of the stairs. "To get dad's gun."

Kaden stumbled into the living room. There was Michael Myers, staring through the window, his hideousness reflected in black glass.

"You're not supposed to be by the window," said Kaden. "The haints is upon us, but you'll keep us safe, won't you, Michael Myers?"

He turned to look at the boy.

The window exploded behind him in a hail of shards, and a pale arm burst through the shattered pane.

Kaden stared, slack-mouthed, at the trembling behemoth. Twin streams of blood dribbled down the deformed contours of his face from his eyes, and he swooned.

The thing's fist had ripped through the boneless fontanel where the back of his skull had been blown away. And as Michael Myers fell to the floor, the arm remained, clutching a viscid mass that glistened dark red in the lamplight.

Kaden watched in horror as the haint slithered through the frame.

She was awful to behold. A foul skein of hair like black kelp spilled out from under her formless, sallow face. Her shroud, once ghastly white had turned a filthy brown with bloodstain.

She stood over the prone form on the floor, holding the glinting steel of a knife. Kaden knew she aimed to kill Michael Myers if he wasn't dead already.

She swung the blade down in a slow arc with bad intentions, but before it could find purchase in the big man's flesh, Kaden flung himself at the haint. Their bodies collided and Kaden swung his little fists at her with his eyes closed. Her reaction was like a startled cat's, hissing and spattering, swinging the knife around in blind fury.

Mercifully, Kaden was not cut, but he was dealt an equilibrium-shattering blow to the top of his skull with the knife handle, and his legs folded under him like a cheap lawn chair.

The haint returned to the man sprawled on the floor.

She was met with the lightless shaft of a shotgun barrel. Jess leveled the gun at her, aiming for her chest.

His eyes narrowed and his lip curled. "I don't know what dark hell you crawled out of; but I'm sending you back!" He squeezed the trigger.

Instead of the deafening blast of buckshot he had braced himself for, there was only the impotent click of the gun misfiring. Elmer Fenn had never once cleaned the weapon, and the firing pin was clogged with a gunk of dry grease.

He tried to rack another shell into the chamber, but his trembling hands failed him.

The haint slashed at him with the knife, and he leaped back, tripping over a footstool. The gun slid across the floor.

He squeezed his eyes shut as the haint came over him and raised the knife above her head.

He heard the splash of something wet and then a horrible shriek, and when he open his eyes again he saw the haint clutching at the oozing mass of blistered red and white her face had suddenly become. Kaden stood before her, holding the empty, still-steaming soup pot. The scalded haint howled again, as a sizable portion of her profile dripped into her hands.

Jess wasted no time and scrambled for the gun. He racked it, forgoing the witty one-liner this time, and fired.

The haint's chest burst apart in an explosion of gore and she sailed back against the wall, sliding down to land in a crumpled heap.

For the next few seconds, the world was a high whine and the smell of gunpowder.

"She's dead," Jess said, lowering the smoking gun.

"So is Michael Myers," said Kaden.

But when the boys looked, there was nothing on the floor but a pool of his drying blood.

And when they went back to the haint, there was only the crimson spatter of viscera stuck to the wall.

The boys were lost in stunned silence.

"Where do you think they went?" Kaden asked, a while later.

"I don't know," said Jess.

All he did know, was that it was midnight, and Halloween was finally over.

# BEHIND THE MASK

By Dusty Davis

The bullets pierced his flesh and he felt himself falling backwards, flailing his arms until his body was stopped by the hard ground. Above him, he heard voices speaking in hushed tones. Gathering the strength he had left in his battered body, Michael Myers rolled over to his hands and knees. The damp grass stuck to his pants. Sticking to the shadows he made his way around the house and into the neighbor's yard.

Sirens filled the night making his ears ring. The pain in his chest was intense but he kept moving regardless. The sound of the approaching police faded the further he retreated into the darkness. He found an alley and ventured into the opening. A derelict was sitting with his back resting against the front of a trash reciprocal. A streetlamp cast Michael's shadow out in front of him, coming to rest at the bum's feet. Michael cocked his head at the strange man who had yet to move. He took a step forward, his feet kicking up loose gravel. The bum startled up to a standing position with the bottle of booze that rested on his lap falling to the ground. An explosion of glass erupted and a dark liquid pooled over the man's shoes.

Michael took another step forward, his shadow entering the man's space. The bum eyed Michael and then looked down at the broken bottle on the ground. "You made me drop my medicine," the man yelled at Michael.

Confused, Michael cocked his head at the glass. He was never given any medication in a bottle like that at Smith's Grove Sanitarium. He wondered if the dark liquid would take away the burning pain that he had in his chest.

"Hey, I'm talking to you man," the bum continued, his voice raising. He stepped out of Michael's shadow allowing him to see his face more clearly. A beard that was speckled with silver and grime covered his face. His gray hair was greasy and slicked back. Michael was intrigued by his appearance. He didn't look like anyone he had seen at the hospital or anyone that his sister had brought home while she was babysitting him.

The bum kept talking but Michael was no longer interested in the things he had to say. He closed the distance between them and the man put his fists up. When Michael was close enough, he swung. The bum's fist connected with Michael's jaw. Michael reached up and straightened the mask on his face so he could see out the eyeholes again and saw the man shaking his fist. He grunted and howled in pain. Michael watched him for a moment and then reached out and grabbed him by the throat. He lifted him off the ground with one hand and held him in the air. The bum struggled to breathe. Gurgling sounds escaped from his lips. Michael tossed the bum into the trash reciprocal and picked up the broken bottle of medicine. He held it up to his face and thought back to the shots they gave him and how weak they made him feel. Michael tossed the broken bottle to the ground and made his way to the end of the alley.

It opened up into another neighborhood in Haddonfield that he didn't recognize. Small houses with white picket fences lined either side of the street. Some of them had lights on in the windows while the rest remained dark. Michael didn't like all the light, he felt too exposed, like he did at the hospital. Images of Dr. Loomis flashed through his mind. How he would call him pure evil when Michael wouldn't speak to him. Anger filled his chest where the bullets had passed through.

Michael grabbed the nearest fence post and ripped it from the ground leaving the front yard of the dream house looking like a nightmare. He walked up the walk and peeked into the bay window. Inside was as dark as his heart. With his forearm, he smashed in the window. Glass rained onto the floor. Michael climbed inside. Voices sounded from upstairs but he didn't care what they were saying. He followed the sound and found a young man coming down the stairs holding a golf club in his hand. Behind him a woman wearing a cotton gown stood with a frightened look on her face.

Michael was intrigued by her more than the man but he was coming at him. He swung the golf club like a baseball bat hitting Michael in the ribcage. He trapped the club with his arm and tossed the guy to the floor. The woman screamed and ran down the hall. Michael heard a door slam somewhere upstairs as footsteps sounded behind him. He turned around and the man ran into him, tackling him to the ground. He landed hard on his back with the man on top. Punches rained down into his face, knocking his mask to the side. Michael flung the man to the floor and sat up. Adjusting the mask, he saw the man charge at him again but Michael was too quick for him this time, and sidestepped him. He ran by Michael and crashed into the wall. Bouncing back, Michael picked up the fallen golf club by the head and waited for the man to turn around. Then he jammed the shaft as hard as he could through the man's eye socket. He dropped to his knees in front of Michael, the club lodged in his skull. Michael watched until the man fell to the floor, dead, before remembering the woman in the white nightshirt that escaped up the stairs.

#

Kara Winston slammed the bedroom door shut so hard it rattled the hinges. She heard noises coming from downstairs even over the pounding of her own heartbeat that shook her entire chest. Kara ran to the dresser that was flush against the far wall and tried to push it in front of the door but it wouldn't budge on the carpeted floor. Looking around the small room, she saw the nightstand beside the bed. She ripped the drawer out and drug the stand to the door. Wedging it in between the floor and the doorknob.

Kara then ran to Jim's side of the bed and picked the phone up. She spun the dial, calling the police station but the line rang busy. Slamming the receiver back on the cradle, the phone fell from the stand. She caught it by the cord and swung it back up to her and dialed the station again. Busy. Dropping the phone on the bed, she strained to hear what was going on downstairs. It was quiet. Too quiet. Then out of nowhere something hit the closed door. Kara screamed. Another thud pounded against the door and then a fist found its way inside, breaking the flimsy plywood. It pushed the nightstand out of the way with ease. Kara scrambled away from the bed to the window. She struggled to get the latch open and finally lifted the pane. A cold burst of air found its way into the room chilling her. Behind her, she could hear the door being pushed in but she didn't dare look back over her shoulder. She threw a leg over the jam and started to climb out the window when she was stopped. The man in the mask grabbed her by the hair and yanked her back into the room. He tossed her to the floor in a heap.

Looking up at his white mask, she had never been more terrified. She closed her eyes and prayed to God that it was all just a bad dream and she would wake up in bed next to Jim. When she opened her eyes, she didn't find herself in bed, but in front of the monster that held a large butchers knife over his head. He brought the blade down into her chest. An explosion of pain went through her flesh as the knife penetrated her body. Blood seeped out around the hilt as she met the masked man's eyes. They were black. In her last moment of life she remembered the saying that the eyes were a portal to a man's soul. This man had no soul, she thought as she collapsed to the ground.

# 7 FACTS ABOUT THE PERSONIFICATION OF EVIL

By Charles Coffman

Fact #1: the first image we see in Halloween is a Jack-o'-lantern during the opening credits.

October, 31st, 2015. Halloween Night.

I use a switchblade to gut the pumpkin, hacking open sloppy gashes, getting its hairy orange insides stuck in my fingernails. I'd have used a better knife, a kitchen knife or something, but my mom started hiding the knives because when I was little I'd get overexcited whenever I watched Friday the 13th and stab up all the furniture. She says I should stop watching so many horror movies, she says they'll warp my mind.

My mom doesn't know I have this knife, it's old, the kind of switchblade you see in almost every 80s slasher movie. There's a little lever on the red handle that fires the blade in and out the front. I bought it from Tommy Wilt in the school bathroom for thirty bucks.

I'm not carving a face into the pumpkin, I'm just stabbing it. Driving the blade in and out, prying loose fat chunks. The pumpkin looks better this way, all stabbed up like a slasher victim. I squirt fake blood into the cuts, fling blackish red zigzag splashes across the front. I carry the pumpkin outside and set it on the porch. I watch the pumpkin bleed dark red from its dozen knife wounds.

Trick r' Treaters pass on the sidewalk in their cheap cloth and plastic Wal-Mart costumes. My babysitter Laurie peeks through the window and motions for me to come inside.

The rabbit ears of her Playboy Bunny costume give the shadow of her head a funny shape. Laurie doesn't really like the costume, I think her boyfriend made her wear it.

I stick my switchblade into the top of the pumpkin and go inside, leaving the knife there, its red handle sticking out at a slant. The pumpkin sits there on the porch, knifed and bleeding.

#

Fact #2: Halloween's original title was "The Babysitter Murders"

October, 25th, 2015.

Sloane's sister was always my babysitter. Sloane is nothing like her sister. I wouldn't exactly call Sloane ugly. Really, she should be pretty. Her hair's the right shade of blonde, her face the same size and shape of Laurie's, only younger. I think it's Sloane's lack of expression that bothers people, how her face is always stuck in the same place and how the muscles never move. Maybe it's her way of looking through people that puts them off, her eyes kind of look at you the way a toad's eyes do, not registering you as human, basically registering you as nothing.

I'm the only one that understands so much as half of her. She's an outcast like me, smothered by the shadow of her popular cheerleader sister. She's an outcast that nobody in Haddonfield, Illinois wants to talk to or acknowledge.

Sloane and I sit in the crook of an oak and watch its dead leaves fall while Laurie and her friends get drunk on Milwaukee's Best in the back yard. I'm proud of my Halloween t-shirt, Michael's on the front with a kitchen knife. Sloane thinks it's stupid, she hates horror movies.

She knows Halloween's a big deal to me since we live in Haddonfield, but that doesn't stop her from lecturing.

"That shit's not scary. They're what scares me, Wes," Sloane says, nodding at Laurie and her friends in the dark lawn, "look at them. Not a care in the world."

I peer through the branches. Laurie's boyfriend pulls at her blouse and pours beer down her back. They shriek with laughter when Laurie squeals in shock. They're loud.

"It's their lack of care that bothers me. Just look at her, fucking around with her friends. She's supposed to be watching us, Wes. Anything could happen. I could fall out of this tree, you could have an asthma attack. And she'd be too fucking drunk to do anything about it."

The light of the fingernail moon made Sloane's face seem tired and old. "Nobody thinks anything bad will ever happen to them, that's what's scary."

I had nothing to say to that so I watched my breath come out in steam, it was cold enough to do that, the air was chill and sweet with dead leaves. I love October.

"I have a cousin that was molested," Sloane said, "I ever tell you that?"

I stared at the flickering Jack-o'-lanterns that dotted the street, occasionally Sloane gets weird like this. It's best to ignore it.

"My aunt used to let one of my uncles watch her and he'd been touching her for years. My cousin told me he'd made a game out of it called Purple Hearts. My aunt refused to believe it when she found out."

Sloane laughed. What scared me was there was mirth in that laugh.

"People never think anything bad will happen." Sloane said.

I watched Laurie and her friends drink beer in the lawn.

Executive Producer Irwin Yablans originally wanted to call Halloween "The Babysitter Murders". A lot of people don't know that, I do. I love horror movies. He'd thought babysitting was something all kids could relate to. The best horror movies are ones you can relate to, ones that seem they could be a reality.

I tried to meet Sloane's eyes, they could have been on the verge of tears or hilarity, honesty I couldn't tell, her eyes seemed empty, like she was hollowed out on the inside, hollowed out like a pumpkin.

There are some realities in this world that nobody can relate to.

#

Fact #3: Despite popular belief, the film is NOT secretly about punishing teenagers for fucking.

October, 19th, 2015.

Teenagers fucking, teenagers fucking, if there's one thing about the slasher genre I'll never understand it's its obsession with showing teenagers fucking. Maybe it's got something to do with relatability again, maybe all Hollywood thinks teenagers do is fuck. Well, that's not my reality. Most guys like me never get laid in High School.

Fun Bonus FACT #1!---Did you know that in the very first POV scene in Halloween Michael's peeping on his big sister making out with her boyfriend?

There is no describing how much I love Laurie. Doesn't hurt a bit she's got the same name as the female protagonist in the first Halloween. I love the way she chews on a piece of her hair whenever she's thinking. I've loved her since the first night she babysat me, that crush struck hard when she handed me a bowl of spaghetti-o's she cooked for me in the microwave and said "Here you go, tiger" looking pretty and blonde, like a goddess.

She'd never love me back though, kids never get to fuck their babysitters, especially kids like me who have the "The Thing" movie poster on their wall, and can name twenty reasons why Wes Craven's Last House on the Left is a masterpiece.

I was peeping on her again, lately I'd taken to peeping on Laurie.

She was fucking her boyfriend on my mom's bed. Her boyfriend wore a gag Donald Trump mask he'd bought in Wal-Mart's Halloween section, looking up at her through the eyeholes in the lifeless rubber while she rode him. I could see Laurie's naked tits, they bounced.

I've always heard killers in the movies were punishing kids for having sex. Watching through the crack in the door, I wanted to punish them. I wanted to punish them for doing something I couldn't.

Fun Bonus FACT #2!---My favorite line is Loomis when he says, "I met this six-year old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face, and the blackest eyes."

The blackest eyes. I always thought those three words sum up the dark pockets of reality nobody sees, realities where people live their lives with black eyes. Some people have hot passionate sex, normal sex they show in movies. Others live a grim reality Hollywood doesn't want to show.

I stood up from the crack in the door and found Sloane in my bedroom staring at the dead flies on the windowsill. She'd been wearing the same ugly gray skirt for the past few days. The fabric was stained and greasy with her sweat.

I want to do it again, I told her.

We had started to do it when we were in Middle School and had found one of her dad's porn videos.

Sloane didn't want to right now but gave in when I cried and begged her.

She sighed and lifted up her ugly skirt.

I slobbered on her while we did it, and she stared up at me passionless. Her face was like Laurie's Boyfriend's Donald Trump mask, rubbery, dead.

When I finished Sloane went to the corner of my bedroom. Hiking up her skirt, she squatted and pissed on the floor like an animal.

Neither one of us spoke to each other.

We have the blackest eyes, I thought.

#

Fact #4: John Carpenter made the conscious decision to constantly shoot Michael in the background and tint him with blue light, it was scarier that way.

October, 29th, 2015.

Michael Myers is the embodiment of evil, that was the great Mr. Carpenter's idea, and what a genius one it was. There was a reason he was referred to as 'the boogeyman' several times during the film. I like to think Michael's the spirit of evil, the evil that lurks outside campfires, that dark man that's stalked mankind since ancient times. He's the lunatic with the hook, he's legend, he's the evil in our hearts made flesh. He's always in the background, watching us from the corner of our sight.

There are nights you can feel Him, especially if it's dark and you're alone. Maybe you're taking out the trash or going to your car when it's late, and you'll feel Him watching you, you feel that jerk on your spine, that urgent itch at the base of your skull. You freeze up, standing in the dark. And you know He's in the shadows watching you.

From out of nowhere I felt like that. I had been taking a walk and stopped and looked around. The street was empty, only Halloween decorations and carved pumpkins watching me from every porch. A cold wind drug dead leaves across the street.

I seemed alone, but an animal part of my brain told me He was far back where I couldn't see, that He was standing under a streetlight in His blue jumpsuit and plain-faced white mask, and He was raising his kitchen knife.

He was following me.

That's when I saw her far ahead of me, I had been following her for hours and hadn't realized. Laurie was in a running suit jogging down the sidewalk.

I was the one in the background under the streetlight's cold blue light, and yes, I had my knife.

#

Fact #5: Halloween didn't make much money at the box office at first, but suddenly EXPLODED.

October, 30th, 2015.

"I don't 'wanna watch it, that shit doesn't scare me." Sloane said.

I was putting the disk in the DVD player and told her she might like it, that she should give it a chance.

Her laugh made my balls shrink. She traced the puckered slashes on her wrist with her finger. She'd put them there with razorblades, not because of depression like other people, but because she liked the feel of thin steel in skin. I've watched her do it before, I've seen how she smiles when the dozen purplish red lines of blood run down her arm.

"I'm not afraid of anything, Wesson," She said, "you should know this by now."

And I think to myself, she has the blackest eyes, the devil's eyes.

I press Play.

Sloane LOVES Halloween after the very first scene when Michael stabs his sister to death.

Sloane's transfixed each time He appears on screen in his plain-faced white mask. Her eyes are glued to him whenever his great black shape stalks teenagers through the dark.

I knew she'd love it, Halloween's a classic.

#

Fact #6: the crew chose two masks to pick from, a Don Post Emmet Kelly Smiling clown mask and a 1975 Captain James T. Kirk mask that had the eyebrows and sideburns ripped off and painted fish belly white. They tested the Kirk mask and found it creepy because it was vaguely human but completely emotionless. Michael Myers was born.

October, 31st, 2015. Halloween Day.

I'm shocked how into Michael Myers Sloane is now. She even helps me make the mask.

She sits working on the mask in the kitchen and won't let me touch it. She's in a trance, hands splotched with milky papier-mâché, eyes so dark they're almost black, so focused she doesn't realize she's fucking it up in places. Tearing holes here, leaving lumps and globs there. Making the eyeholes ragged and violent looking.

Sloane refused to speak to me while she painted the mask ghost-white. She was dripping in sweat by the time she finished.

The mask was unlike anything I had ever seen before. Michael Myers's bland and pale humanoid face stared at me from the table, only the classic mask was scathed, in rough condition, and ripped in some places, cracks ran through the face in others like it was patch-worked and stitched together.

The mask was grisly.

Fun Bonus FACT #3!----My second favorite Loomis line, "I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply...evil.

"Do you like it," Sloane asked.

I stared into the eyeholes and was haunted by their emptiness.

"Do you like what I've done?" Sloane asked.

It had the blackest eyes.

#

Fact #7: In the original script Michael was called 'The Shape'.

October, 31st, 2015. Halloween Night.

The shape, the shape, the shape, it's obvious Mr. Carpenter wanted Michael to be the embodiment of evil. That word, shape. It means Michael could be anyone, anything. He's legend and prophesy, the shape. Michael is more than an on-screen boogeyman, he lives in the dark and empty insides of people with the blackest of eyes. Michael is anyone who is purely and simply born evil.

I leave my knifed and bleeding pumpkin on the porch with the switchblade sticking from its side when Laure calls me into the house. Trick r' Treaters pass by in cheap plastic and cloth costumes, dead leaves blow across the street.

Laurie asks me to sit next to her on the couch. I try to stop staring at the fishnets of her Playboy Bunny costume but I can't.

"Where's Sloane?" She asks.

I shrug and tell Laurie she's out somewhere I guess, that she left earlier.

Just as Halloween comes on the T.V, playing the opening credits and famous ominous score, an arm clad in a purple polka dotted clown costume reaches out and a small hand pries my switchblade from the pumpkin. A thumb presses the lever up and down, and the 1040 surgical steel blade fires in and out with a sharp click.

"You two didn't have a fight did you?" Laurie asks.

I tell her no, that everything's fine.

Outside a shape is watching us through the window as it breaths hard through its nose.

Laurie suddenly looks sad, there's a sheen in her brown eyes, and for a second I'm terrified she might cry.

"Is Sloane okay," she asks, "we never talk much and I worry about her."

Carpenter's brilliant foreboding score picks up its pace, and the shape outside walks up the porch steps, knife in hand.

"I really do care about her," Sloane says, "she's my sister, I love her."

The shape unfurls from the shadows behind us, and yanking Laurie's head back, it plunges the knife into her neck a dozen times to the beat of Halloween's score. Laurie's screaming at the top of her lungs and ropes of her blood fling everywhere, across the walls, on my face.

She finally goes limp, bleeding down the front of her Playboy Bunny outfit, and the shape stares down at me. It's Michael's plain humanoid face, ragged and splashed with blood, the shiny clown costume He's wearing is splashed with the red, staining of the stuff on the frills around his neck.

Sloane peels off the mask. It looks like Sloane, but it's not Sloane. Her face is blanker than the mask, the eyes holes. It's Michael's face. Sloane's not here anymore.

Babbling, I beg her to put the mask back on her, anything thing is better than seeing that dead face of hers.

The shape steps toward me, switchblade raised. Halloween's theme song reaches its intensity.

# YOU MAY THINK THEY SCARE ME (YOU'RE PROBABLY RIGHT)

By Michael Leonberger

Haddonfield always smelled like ghosts.

I was a kid when he murdered all of those people. I used to walk that circuit sometimes. Along the sidewalks and past the houses where it happened.

I'd walk it when I was bored. Before the Center. Trying to feel anything, I guess. Wondering if I could still hear their screams, if I just listened hard enough. If I could feel any of the horror of that night, even years later.

Which would have been a better feeling, I assumed, than what I was feeling at the time. Something close to nothing. The dull blank of late teenage years, when all those hormones exhausted themselves into a quiet depression.

So I'd find myself doing that walk. Using their deaths, I guess, the way we all did in that town. Using all that misery to validate ourselves.

"I come from Haddonfield," and all that's ever meant to anyone is Michael Myers. You come from the town where he killed those kids.

You come from the town that created a monster.

I grew up with candlelit vigils. Black armbands. Faces peering at me from magazines at the check-out counter. Grainy high school year book photos of the victims: Annie Brackett, Lynda Van Der Klok. Even Ben Tramer. And while Michael Myers didn't kill him, our hometown did. That same night.

Some magazine snuck an autopsy photo of Ben's body. Burned flesh stretched over a skeleton. The skeleton's mouth open, screaming. Forever screaming.

I think about that image when I don't want to, and I feel sympathy for his parents, because I'm sure they do, too. I know they sued that magazine. Know they lost, know they left town.

I know most everyone left town.

Laurie Strode's the one we wonder about. The girl who survived. There are ugly rumors, tabloid stuff; that she's Michael Myers' little sister. That's why he came after her. That's why all those people died. I know some people blame her around Haddonfield. How she hasn't come back, like she owes them something. I hope she never comes back. I hope, for her, Haddonfield is nothing but a bad memory.

That's what I want for myself. I want Haddonfield to leave me. I've already left it. Started my adult life, far and away, working with traumatized children. It's something of a miracle, looking back. Thought I'd never get out.

Thought it would suffocate me.

But it has a way, even now, of following me around. Because people want to know. They want to know about him (that's what's twisted about it), and because they want to know about him, they want to know about me.

And I admire Laurie Strode, wherever she is, for never doing what I'm about to do. She never felt she had to explain herself. There is no tell all. She never cashed in on those cuts. I don't know where she is now, and I wish her luck, and I'd like to apologize to her, if this drags it all out. I guess I don't know that I have her strength. Survival gives you a stubbornness, I think, that I'm not sure is bravery.

So, stubbornly, I present to you my own story

You've gotta understand that after that Halloween, Haddonfield changed. People just took off, their kids in toe. What you were left with were the people who couldn't leave. Couldn't afford to live anywhere else. The town was suffering from a petrified wound and it slowly died.

We were the kids who grew up in that wound. Michael Myers' children, for better or worse, the ones who grew up in the shadow of his shape. Our ratty generation that couldn't live up to those fuzzy year book photos, of the Annies and Lyndas, those great kids sainted by their deaths. We were their malformed little siblings.

And we knew it.

Or maybe I only remember it that way because I was always sort of screwed up. Saw the place how I wanted to see it.

I don't want to bother you with the details of what got me into the Haddonfield Residential Treatment Center for Troubled Youth. Only to say that the kids there understood, implicitly, that we were what the town feared. We might become the next Michael Myers, you know, if we weren't watched, if they weren't careful. I don't know that they were wrong. I know they were trying to help. They'd stress again and again that they weren't Smith's Grove, that theirs was a happier treatment.

I know I had scars on my skin. Hate in my heart. I know what I did to end up there, and while I maintain it isn't important to the story, I think now that maybe I was where I belonged.

I didn't think so then.

All I thought back then was that I missed my big brother, James. I guess that's important. He'd lit a match in the sewers, when we'd both been kids. I was just a little girl, watching, smiling down at him from the manhole, and he'd said, "Watch this," and he'd lit the head of it, and his skin had caught fire. Something to do with the fumes, something to do with God being asleep that day.

It had burned his skin (I think of Ben Tramer when I think of him, isn't that awful?). Burned him bad, and they wouldn't send him to school after he got out of the hospital. Too frightening, they said. I remember him joking with me that he could just wear a mask. But Haddonfield doesn't look kindly on masks, and not kids who wear them. Not after Michael Myers.

James found Dad's gun while I was at school. It hurt too bad, I figure, and he ended it all. Became one of Haddonfield's ghosts. I envied him. Hated him, missed him. A few short years later I was living at that Center, thinking about burned boys. Thinking about how, if God ever woke up, I'd be waiting for him, with Dad's gun or one of my own. Like I said, hate in my heart.

I remember sitting in David Retson's office, the man who ran the facility. Kind face. Crow's feet and a pleasing smile, but I knew he was full of shit. His office was adorned with hunting trophies and a big bear trap he'd used to catch a massive grizzly. I remember thinking this contrasted with his supposed compassion.

He had a photograph of Doctor Samuel Loomis on the bookshelf behind his desk. A reminder of the tireless effort that went into working with troubled kids. Loomis gave his life for Haddonfield's children. That was the presumption.

But it was (and still is) a shit presumption, because Loomis had given up.

He had gotten a young Michael Myers as a patient and decided he wasn't a person with a mental disease, but a thing. Cloaked in human flesh. He popularized that idea when he failed to treat a child.

He failed to treat him because he'd given up, and never realized what the rest of us understood: that Michael Myers wasn't born that way. Wasn't some happy kid who suddenly switched, either. He was like the rest of us. Like all the bad kids who ended up at the Center. Something had happened to him. Something had taught him a language of cruelty, had legitimized his anger.

I look at old photographs of his family, with little Michael smiling front and center. They look so happy, don't they? And I don't trust those pictures for a second. I know pictures lie. I have pictures of my own family, and I know the things those pictures hide.

Frankly, it's more fun to have a town boogie man. Easier to wrap your brain around, than all of the tragedy and mental scarring that must have lived behind that boy's eyes.

But there's a problem with creating monsters out of people. Sometimes, with enough talk, you can make anything real.

Regardless, we felt a kinship with him. Is that awful? And when I saw that picture of Dr. Loomis, I knew that I was in trouble. Loomis had failed that kid. This place would fail me, too.

It lived in the bowels of what had once been Haddonfield Memorial. After it burned down, the scraps were bulldozed, the land repurposed to house the kids nobody wanted. A breathing memorial, with the dream of never again letting one bad kid go. We were worse than the garbagy siblings of those murdered kids: we were symbolic test subjects through which the town could try and correct old sins. Maybe save the Lyndas and the Annies from a fate they hadn't deserved.

And we'd whisper to each other, out of rage and resentment: Why, maybe they did deserve it. Maybe it was their own fault, for living such easy lives. They'd dodged the bullet of misery for so long. Maybe it was only karma that eventually swung back around and killed them.

I resent myself for ever thinking that, but I know I did.

It wasn't just me. I remember Oliver Kask: a freight train, with bulging muscles and a buzzed head, a scar snaking from his right ear to the top of his neck. He was in there for beating some kid's face in with a sock full of combination locks. He called me "Mosquito Bites" several times too many. I took my keys, tucked them between my fingers, and punched him as hard as I could when the staff wasn't looking.

He never forgave me for that exactly (and it landed me in a hot mess of trouble), but he stopped calling me that name. A mutual respect bloomed. I liked his swagger, and I heard he was weirdly proud to have my mark scarred into him. Better than a sex story, he'd said.

And I miss him.

He had a thing for my best friend there: Kelly Reynolds. Strong, wiry girl, wrapped in hard muscle. I figured she had to be. She came from a hole somewhere in Haddonfield, had known some kind of abuse she never talked about, had delivered some abuse of her own. We didn't talk about the things that had landed us there. Some kids did. They'd prattle on and on, as part of their therapy. I think now that talking probably would have healed us sooner, but we were stubborn and angry. She had this incredible mess of whitish blond hair on top of her head that I wanted to wrap my fingers through. It looked like it was always permed, as though Marilyn Monroe's scalp was stapled to the muscular, angry frame of a teenage delinquent.

She'd talk to me about Oliver. At first I didn't know if she'd wanted to punch him out, like I had, or sleep with him. I soon learned it was the latter, and I tried to help her.

She, in turn, tried to help me get with Harper Childs, who was (and still is) the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen. We swam recreationally at the Center, something to relieve stress, to fire off our endorphins or some horse shit. I remember her emerging from the pool in a red one piece. The sight of her body made my breath light. My skin tingled. I thought (as silly as it sounds) that maybe there was a reason I was in there, after all. I lined up behind her as we waited to swim laps. She was shy, couldn't look me in the eye. Small in stature, with a strange scar on the top of her foot that stopped short of her knee.

"God, I hate swimming," was my opening line, and I remember she just muttered something about how much she loved it, and I knew I'd screwed it pretty royally.

She sat alone in the cafeteria, so Kelly and I ended up sitting with her. Kelly would regale her with stories about Oliver. The outrageous things he'd say when they'd see each other, how much those things fired her up. How badly she wanted him, and how she hated herself for it. She was funny. Charming. I wondered if she sort of resented me for marking up his beautiful body.

I talked about how much I hated being there. That's all I had at the time. I must have been a bore. I complained about the staff getting physical with the kids who'd act out violently in class. Theorized they must have gotten a kick from the adrenaline high. Theorized that the whole town must have been afraid of us, this motley group of freaks, and the other girls would nod and poke at the slop on their trays. I never figured Harper was into me, so I wasn't really trying to impress her. I guess I would have talked about something different if I had known.

It was at those lunch tables in late September that we began to hatch our plot for Halloween. Born from resentment, Kelly and I would laugh about how we'd all steal blue jumpsuits from the janitorial staff. We'd get masks like the plain, white one Michael Myers had worn. We'd cover ourself in ketchup. Run through the halls, screaming. Why, if we were really lucky, we'd make a break for it in general. The crazy lunatics from the Center finally going full-tilt Michael Myers. Flooding the streets, shrieking hysterically, reminding Haddonfield of just how much we hated them.

We were their children, after all.

But when Halloween arrived, Kelly had other thoughts in her head.

Oliver had snuck her into his room. He'd convinced a younger member of the staff that he was cool, that it was reasonable he'd have a girl in his room that night. Such was his charm. Such was also the vibe at the center: friendly and laid back, until someone had you in a full nelson, dragging you into a quiet room. The place doesn't exist anymore, if you're wondering. Just an empty building, a haunted place. A quiet reminder that you can't kill the boogieman.

There was a Halloween dance scheduled. They'd decorated the building: cardboard cut-outs of witches on broomsticks. Jack-'o-lanterns flickering on the councilors' desks and in the classrooms. Someone had taped that picture of Ben Tramer's burned body to the elevator doors, and it had promptly been pulled down. Laurie Strode's picture was taped on the inside of the bathroom stalls. Nobody pulled those down. Nobody defaced them. They only made the bathroom stalls feel like confessionals. Our Lady of Scars.

I'd actually gotten my hands on a blue jumpsuit, and was pulling it over my body when Harper knocked on my door. She was dressed like a mouse, grease paint on her nose, eyeliner whiskers. And she looked upset.

"You don't like it?" I asked.

"You'll just get into trouble."

"Such is life," I said, but she frowned. She put her hand on my arm. Her touch made me sort of light headed.

"Please," she said. "Just let it go. Don't dress up at all, if you don't want to. I don't want to see you get hurt."

I stared at her, somewhere between angry and mortified. Maybe aroused. A stupid goddamn teenager.

"I've got to get out of here," is all I said.

"Well don't leave in too much of a hurry," she smiled. "I think I'd really miss you."

And that did it. Made my heart beat up in my throat, made me tremble with excitement.

"You want a beer? I can get some from Oliver. We don't have to go to the dance at all, we can just stay in here and drink and talk forever. What do you think?"

"Forever sounds nice," she said. "I'd like that a lot."

"Don't move," I smiled. I put on my clothes, ran up a flight of stairs to where his room was, knocked on the door and was surprised to find it open all by itself.

But I should have known.

For the record: no one knows how he got in.

No one.

I've heard stories. I try not to think about it (I get short of breath and feel like he's in the room with me). Some people think they never removed his body from the ashes of Haddonfield Memorial. That they literally built the Center around him.

Maybe. But I don't think that's true.

I think he got in a few days earlier. Hidden somewhere, and just waited.

Like he was waiting for me in Oliver's room.

"I'm not looking," I said. I saw the outline of Kelly's body under the covers, her curly hair on the pillow. I was surprised she was asleep already, but figured Oliver had been that intense, that good, that he had wiped her out. I crept over to his closet, and reached in the back of it for the beers I knew were there.

I felt cold flesh instead. I parted the clothes. Kelly stared back at me. Eyes glassy, dead, beads of red blood running down her face. She looked bald, but it wasn't that: it was that the skin had been sliced from the top of her head. I was literally seeing her skull through her scalped face.

I fell backwards, felt vomit shoot from the pit of my stomach and stop in my throat. Terror exploded in my brain. I could smell it now. Smell the blood. I turned, saw eyes staring at me from under the bed. Oliver's eyes. He was trembling, a finger in front of his lips, silencing me.

Only it wasn't intentional. His arms were broken. I could see the bones shooting through ruptured flesh. He was broken, a pretzel, staring at me, silencing me. He wasn't trembling, I was, my vision jumping.

Then the figure in the bed moved. Sat up, her scalp sliding off its head.

It stood, and I saw the jumpsuit. Charred. Melted over a sinewy frame. Saw the hands, burned and oozing with blisters. Saw the chaotic black hair. Saw the mask itself, only it was burned, and where it ended and his flesh began was impossible to make out. Rotten plastic, pink and red skin, fused together, with black pits where his eyes should have been. I couldn't see them, could only make out skull like cavities in the top of his head. His mouth was a frown of teeth and peeled back gums.

Her scalp fell to the floor. He had a butcher's knife longer than my arm, and he lunged for me.

I spun, felt the tip of it slice through my back; that wound singing as the metal kissed bone. Then I was out the door, and he was on top of me. I pushed through the exit, into the stairwell, and fell headfirst down the steps, stopping in a heap at the bottom. I looked up and saw him walking down towards me, patiently, my blood dripping from his knife. Burned, and I thought he looked like my own brother just then.

Wondered if James had hated me for not stopping him in the sewers.

Thought that, if I'd just saved him -- if anyone ever saved anyone...

Thought that maybe it was our fate, in Haddonfield, to be killed by our siblings.

Then I pushed open the door. I screamed and a girl emerged from her room.

"Christ, what is it?" she asked, wiping an eye.

"Help!" I must have shouted, and she looked at me bitterly.

"Ha ha," she said. "I heard about this prank \--"

Then he pushed the door open, thrust his knife through her neck. Literally lifted her entire body and pinned her to the wall. Her scream caught on the blade, came out broken. I don't know how long it took for her to die.

I saw Harper standing frozen in the hall, and I ran towards her, pushing her along. We ran blindly into the main part of the building. We could hear the music from the dance, some mellow eighties pop song. The sight of the dance hall will never leave my mind:

All those kids, broken and bleeding in a frozen mound, their skin sliced open, their bones sagging through. I remember sliding on the floor, on the blood. Someone was writhing on the floor: not a kid, but a staff member. We slid past him, ran, looked back just in time to see the shape push open the door into the room and stomp the staff member's face in. Blood rained up his leg.

We pushed through the door, down the hall, and into Dr. Retson's office. He sat in his chair, hands on his desk, but his eyeballs had been removed from his head. They sat in front of him, sharpened number two pencils piercing them to the top of the desk. He looked like he was groping for them, like some gruesome art project.

I remember we waited. Crouched beneath Dr. Retson's desk, by his legs. Tried not to breath. I could feel the cold on the sweat of my skin. The room smelled like candy corn and rust and I could hear it. His footsteps. Getting louder, always louder.

Harper's teeth were clicking together beside me. Her breath escaped like a whistle. I put my hand over her mouth, thinking I could catch it, maybe. Thinking I could save her. The warm, wet sensation of her breath on my hand. Sometimes I'll wake up in the dark, even today, and I don't know why my heart is hammering in my chest, and I realize it's because I can feel my lover's breath on my hand. It reminds me of Halloween, all of it reminds me of Halloween, and I tense myself for what comes next.

The awful crashing sounds. His fists against the door. His blade, hacking through the wood. The hate that fueled him.

He was through the door when she jumped to her feet and my heart froze in my chest.

"Hey!" she shouted. Her voice loaded with nerves and shattering in the air. "Come get me!" And she was running to the back of the room, creating a distraction. He tilted his head and stared at her curiously, before bolting in her direction, knife out.

I sprung to my feet, got what I needed. Lifted that goddamn bear trap off the wall just as he lifted his knife over her body. He brought his weapon down, but I brought mine down quicker. He jerked around as the thing snapped, the teeth chomping into his neck. He didn't scream. Blood oozed from the holes in his throat and sputtered past his shredded lips, but he didn't scream. His knees wobbled and he crashed to the ground. As he fell, his knife sliced through my abdomen, and I still have that scar. Opened the skin there like lips drooling red.

She collected the blood from my stomach in her hands while we waited outside for the police. Kissed the tears off my face.

She still kisses the tears off my face. All these years later, when I wake up in the dark, screaming. Thinking about Michael Myers and that Halloween. When I worry he might be under our bed. Hiding in our closet.

She comforts me. Holds my hand and tells me everything will be okay. Like she did that night. When I laid in the hospital, purpled and bruised and stitched up, wondering if I was dying.

When they released me, we ran away together. Left town. Two bad kids who up and disappeared.

Two more Haddonfield ghosts.

He disappeared too, you know. Michael Myers.

His body escaped from whatever hole they threw it in. Like it always does.

Because you can't kill the boogieman.

God forgive us forever making one in the first place.
