Джон Пассарелла: Halloween: The Official Movie Novelization

“I’ve examined every case file written on him,” Ranbir said. “I was a student of Dr Loomis before he passed away. Then I lobbied the University of Illinois to be assigned to Michael myself.”

“Any progress?”

“He has been seen by over fifty clinical psychiatrists. And with each, many different opinions.” He paused for effect. “Loomis concluded that he was nothing more than pure evil.”

“And do you agree with this diagnosis?”

“Evil is not a diagnosis,” Sartain replied. “Under my care, we implemented a holistic form of therapy. Since that time, his tendency for violence has essentially been erased.”

Aaron asked, “His response to your specific treatment has been effective?”

Sartain turned to look at them as they continued down the corridor. “We left two kitty cats in his cell overnight and both were retrieved unharmed.” Smiling, he spread his hands. “I hate to disappoint you.”

Aaron stopped walking. “So, are you telling us that there is no similarity between the homicidal maniac that made headlines in 1978 and the… amenable patient of this institution?”

Sartain laughed. “Michael Myers is an evolving, aging animal like we all are. And although we have worked very closely with him, these halls display the limitations of my analysis.”

Nodding, Dana took in their surroundings again. Stone walls, steel doors, iron bars. A caged animal , she thought.

“Loomis saw Michael as an animal in the wild,” Ranbir continued, leading them farther down the hall. “He witnessed human behavior at its most primal, while the rest of us only have the opportunity of observation in captivity.”

Sartain paused at a heavy door and removed a key from his trouser pocket to unlock it. “A bigger cage,” he said as he pulled open the door and led them out into the hospital’s courtyard, “is still a cage.”

Dana blinked, her eyes adjusting to the change in brightness despite overcast skies. She pulled the headphones from her ears and let them rest around her neck. Here and there it seemed as if the sun might break through the cloud cover, but she would bet against it. She sensed a storm brewing.

In the open air, surrounded on all four sides by two-story white concrete walls and barred windows, the courtyard offered plenty of space but no real sense of freedom. After a while, a patient might have the sensation of roaming in a wide pit with a concrete floor decorated like a checked game board, with alternating squares of muted red and gray. No bushes or trees to provide a link to nature. No murals or decorations to engage the mind. Sterile , Dana thought. No mental reprieve from institutional confinement.

As Aaron and she followed Sartain, Dana noticed a man with burn scars on one side of his face, his neck contorted at what must have been a painful angle. Perhaps he’d become accustomed to it, adapted to the limitation. With the passage of enough time , she wondered, could any infirmity or limitation become normalized?

All the patients in the courtyard wore shackles, wrist and ankle manacles connected by chains around their waists. In their drab white hospital inmate tunics—some with a stenciled “S.G.” or “Smith’s Grove” in black letters—they could walk, but not run, their overall mobility limited. An older, balding man with long wispy gray hair trailing from the sides of his head walked under the protection of a white umbrella. To Dana’s right, an old man with sparse gray hair and burn scars on his face clutched the arms of his wheelchair as a clinical escort pushed him along the perimeter of the courtyard. A dark-haired man—young enough to be a teenager—stood within the confines of a single muted-red square as if performing mental calculations to determine which square he should move to next. The fingers of both hands, held at his sides, rippled from index to little finger in a repeated pattern. Several other patients shambled along in their shackles, content to traverse a space much wider than the confines of a cell.

“Our patients get fresh air and sunshine, a view, proper exercise, a healthy diet. It pains me to see him transferred to a ‘less than desirable’ facility.” Sartain pointed to an open area at the center of the courtyard. “There he is. He can speak. He just chooses not to.”

Aaron and Dana both stared in the direction Sartain had pointed, anxious to get the first glimpse of the subject of their visit. There! She spotted him—the shape of a man—a man who had assumed mythic proportions in her mind, a man who had slipped the bonds of his humanity to become something else, something other . Malevolence incarnate. But that was precisely why they had come: to strip away the misperceptions of urban legend and expose the man, to understand what had shaped him and motivated him to commit his heinous acts. Rather than something unknowable, he was a mystery to be solved.

Beams of fractured sunlight had begun to slice through the cloud cover, dappling the courtyard with intermingled sections of light and shadow. To Dana it seemed as if a veil were lifting.

The Shape stood sixty feet away, shackled to a block of concrete on the ground, like an anchor, in the middle of the courtyard, his back to them. A yellow-painted square created a twenty-foot frame around him. Tall and strong—but aged. Close-cropped gray hair, but mostly bald now. Urban legends didn’t age, but he had. Forty years left no one unscathed, not even him.

Beyond the painted square two security guards stood watch on either side of him. Other patients roamed the rows and columns of painted squares nearby, but all stayed well clear of the yellow warning zone. Despite any mental infirmities they might possess, their sense of self-preservation remained strong enough to keep them far from his reach.

While Dana had struggled earlier to contain her nervous energy, Aaron’s excitement had simmered beneath the surface, almost unnoticed, until this moment, with Michael Myers in their line of sight. Aaron stepped forward as if entranced by The Shape.

“I’d love to stand near him and get a sense of his awareness… or lack of awareness.”

“Make no mistake,” Sartain said. “He is aware. He was watching you as you arrived. When he’s not out here in the courtyard, he walks from this window to that window, to the other. Observing things.”

Aaron exchanged a look with Dana. So close, and yet neither of them knew what would happen next. Not that they expected Michael Myers existed in a state of catatonia, but what did he think, what did he feel—if he felt anything—after all this time? Finally, they hoped to have some answers.

Dr. Sartain addressed Aaron, “And perhaps you’d like to tie your left shoelace. Mr Tovoli, the gentleman with the umbrella, has a fixation for such things. Underestimate no one.”

Without their having noticed, the patient holding the white umbrella—in preparation for rain or to ward off the sunlight—had drifted into their orbit. As Dr Sartain spoke, the man bit a fingernail and smiled at them in dark delight.

An embarrassed expression flitted across Aaron’s face a moment before he bent down to tie the lace of his gray trainer. Disappointed, umbrella man wandered off. Dana thought she heard him sigh.

After Aaron composed himself, Dr Sartain said, “Step up to the yellow line. No further. Do not pass the line under any circumstances.”

Sartain exchanged meaningful looks with the security guards, no doubt seeking reassurance that nothing had upset Michael Myers leading up to their visit, anything that might trigger an unexpected reaction or violent behavior. One guard gave a slight nod, which Sartain returned.

He ushered Aaron and Dana to the yellow line on the concrete. The Shape, shackled within the painted barrier, did not turn to face them. Sartain called out to him, raising his voice a level above his conversational tone, “Michael. I have some people who would like to meet you.”