Джон Пассарелла - Halloween - The Official Movie Novelization

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

Karen started to protest but Laurie shook her head.

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

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

“How do you know he’ll come here?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No response.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—and took a quick step back in shock.

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

Propped on Phillips’ lap was a severed human head.

And it was glowing!

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

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

Overwhelmed, Ray stumbled backward.

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

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