Halloween IV: The Ultimate Edition (23 page)

Uncle Michael.

The Nightmare Man.

The very embodiment of unstoppable evil now vanquished by a repetitive collision by a beat-up old Ford.

He lay there bloodied and motionless, ragged and sprawled upon his back against tall grass and shards of weathered wood trailing from a darkened obstruction only a few yards ahead.

She knew what that obstruction was, with what she’d heard about and seen of the old mineshafts on the outskirts of town, from the frightening tales whispered by Rachael’s friends of the Wicked Hermit of the Haddonfield Mines and nonsense like that.

The culmination of everything frightening about the small Illinois town of Haddonfield was right before her now, and, without even contemplating, Jamie knelt down and took it by the hand.

“I forgive you, Uncle Michael.”

His hand was oversized against hers, hardened with calluses and laden with scars of twisted flesh just the way Frankenstein’s monster’s had been when the doctor reached for it as it moved for the first time while he shouted it’s alive!

She did not linger long; she returned her uncle’s lifeless hand to his side upon the wet grass.  She lifted herself up, turned to head back to the truck.  After only the first step or two but too quickly for even that, Jamie raised her gaze before her in the direction of the truck and found herself facing a congregation of the entire cast of the townies and officers who’d just arrived.  Their gazes all upon her, they were standing all in a row with weapons drawn and aimed and readying to fire…..

…
…upon her??

A voice cried out from one of them, from whom she wasn’t certain.  Sheriff Meeker?  “Jamie, drop!!!!”

No time to think, and it all happened to rapidly after that ---- her spinning to catch a view of Uncle Michael towering above her, arisen from death, knife poised and readying to strike her as it had meant to all weary night long.

Jamie threw herself to the ground.  Gravity’s aide sent her tumbling away toward the asphalt at the edge of the grass.

Every one who drew a weapon opened fire, and the air became filled with deafening bursts in rapid succession as each rifle, shotgun and pistol set the night ablaze and blasted into Myers’ body.  The force propelled the Shape backwards as bullets flung past into dense underbrush and through the wooden boards sealing the entrance of the mine shaft behind him.

Another shotgun blast.  Another.

The boards gave way as Michael’s body spilled onto them against the impact of firepower, plunging him deep into the abysmal mouth of the shaft.

The air grew silent in the aftermath.  Two of the townies approached just then, lighting dynamite sticks and hurling them into the shaft after Michael.

More blasts, cataclysmic, disturbing, resounding…..

…
…resounding into memory.

She recalled one lingering thought before she collapsed backwards into her own horrible abyss, finally surrendering to her body’s desire to lapse into shock.

One thought.

One damnable, awful, unspeakable thought:

Michael lives……somehow, he’ll always live, even if he didn’t survive the assault of gunfire and the fall.  Michael lives…..he lives, because now he lives in me.

The next thing little Jamie knew was the sensation of standing at the head of the stairway back home…..back at the Caruthers’ home…..fully garbed in the Halloween clown costume she’d worn for what was to be a fun frolic of trick-or-treating before all hell had engulfed her world…..

…..Doctor Loomis was at the foot of the stairs facing upwards at her, shouting in terrified desperation as he drew his pistol from beneath his coat…..

…
…she could feel her own breath from beneath the cheap masquerade mask which covered her eyes and the cotton ball red clown nose glued upon the tip of where her nose should be.  She could feel the rubber band which held the mask around her head pressing against her hair…..

…
…she could even feel the dual handles of the scissors she clenched, its blades dripping with the blood of Mrs. Caruthers, her foster-mother…..

The Falling

(Author's not
e: this story was inspired by my experience at the Halloween 25
th
Anniversary convention in Pasadena, California 2003 and mentioned in an interview at Halloweenmovies.com.)

Sometimes when I used to dream of falling, I’d dream of never hitting the ground.  Just before I would, I would always wake up.  And then one day I hit the ground, and I don’t think I was dreaming that time.

It was at the La Heridan Hotel on Halloween night when I learned to bleed, really bleed, doing just that.

Falling.

I had been attending a convention that day, a grand horror industry extravaganza showcasing such fanfare as horror films, film industry icon artists, costume contests, and little old me.

Thirty-seven years old, and I’d finally made a good name for myself.  I’d written a handful of successful novels that reached enough readers in the world to
fill
a convention, and most of them had been there that day.  I was treated like a celebrity from the time I introduced myself to the guests in the hotel lobby and things only got better throughout the duration of my stay, which in the very least placed my shoulders a few inches above the poor persecuted soul I was in high school, and yards above the ones that insisted I’d never amount to anything.

The attendance mushroomed into the thousands on that day alone, and the hotels and motels were packed with fans and celebrities and the countless eccentric personalities crossing paths with the average attendee enough to make anyone know who they were by the end of the day if you hadn’t heard of them at any time before.

Given the nature of what brought us all together to this specific geographic section of the earth and the nature of the people that gathered there, this was indeed
Halloween
.  What’s more, I’d heard whispered rumors from passers-by that the area was
haunted
, of all things, haunted by the ghost of some poor soul who’d taken a plunge from an umpteenth-floor hotel room window.  Or something like that.  It was believable, because shit happens.  It certainly made for great lore, considering the conventioneers and the basis of the weekend’s festivities.

The convention itself begat parties the likes of which
no
convention could shake a stick at, except perhaps a biker convention or one hell of a Rave.

From hotel room to room I wandered that night, a two-fisted drinker of whatever beer can or whiskey glass fell into my hands, until a bottle of tequila eclipsed my vision.

I was on the eighteenth floor, my final social call of the night.  By the look of my watch at the time, I’d say it was past last call under public circumstances.

My
last call was just moments away.

I was seated out on the balcony of a room a few levels higher than my own, a room complete with a king-sized bed, cable television with channels exhibiting movies still in theaters, a refrigerator bar chock full of tiny bottles of the finest alcohol that you’d have to pay for at checkout time for each partaking, and a little more than three dozen young adults from an age range of high school until the point where they were no longer in the category of being a young adult.

I was quite comfortably intoxicated, slouching back within a cushioned metal-framed chair and smoking the last cigarette in my pack, over-looking what seemed to be the entire city of Pasadena and beyond, when someone slid open the sliding glass patio door beside me and an arm extended the accursed tequila bottle to obscure my view.

I grasped it.
  I guzzled.  You’d have to be a seasoned drinker for a feat like
that
.

I continued with my ramblings on to some enthusiastic unpublished writer, encouraging him about the whole “writing what you know” curse that all of us writers have to deal with now and again.
  To the opposite side of this person assembled a group of four post-teen individuals taking part in smoking the most elaborate hookah, questioning one another as to whether they were actually getting a weed high or if what they were smoking was really incredible tobacco, they didn’t seem to know for certain.

The sliding door slid open again;
  a young twenty-something flaunted herself into the crisp night air as though she were mother earth and the rest of us dwelt upon the moon and revolved around her, and she was greeted by the hookah-smokers with all the fanfare of a celebrity making a grand entrance.  If I had been born a blonde-haired little sweet thing and flaunted myself at her ripe young age in tight and frilly witch’s lingerie, I wouldn’t have had to sell books to be in such a status quo.

For some reason beyond my day-to-day etiquette, I stood up and offered her my seat.

Something happened just then.

There was no time to reflect on events just then, or even to prevent what happened next.
  Perhaps the young woman merely tripped and collided into me by some clumsy half-ass accident, or it was some morbid twist of fate that sent me with such force off the balcony railing.  There was no time to reach out for a flailing grasp at life itself, for that panicked rush of adrenaline which courses through one’s reflexes towards the red alert/survival instinct mode which would cause hands and fingers to lash out at anything to hold onto for dear life to make best of those urgent seconds of nightmare.

No time for reflexes to kick in, no time to think.

I fell.

I fell eighteen floors.

That gave me less than eighteen seconds to live, like a bungee jump without a cord, and I thought no last thoughts.  There was wind against my chest, battering my dime store black windbreaker and assaulting my face and blurring my eyesight like a videotape on fast forward.

I remember the impact.

My body splattered like a tomato thrown by a major league baseball pitcher with a game at stake, my bones shattered like glass.

I felt no pain, as instantaneous as the entire incident was, and oddly enough no degree of pain set in as I found myself still conscious, still able after a few moments to move.

I raised my head.  A portion of my senses adjusted to the extent that I could feel the cool chill of the early morning breeze, and I felt at one with the hedges and flower beds which met with the paved cement walkway which cradled my otherwise cold dead body.  There was a silent hush in the darkness which enveloped me with an alertness and the comforting assumption that I wasn’t truly dead…..

……that I was still
alive
.

I could still see.
  I could feel the pounding of my heart within a rib cage impossibly fractured yet intact enough to protect it and keep it going, cradled between lungs miraculously operable and taking in each heaving breath.

As I raised my gaze to the flower bed facing me and then to the hedges just beyond, I began to notice a sleek wispy smoke rising from the foliage and streaming towards me ever so slowly but deliberatively as though it was alive, making its way as though it in itself was an entity emerging to curiously inspect what had fallen from the sky.

It appeared as like cigarette smoke, and I surmised from the countless butts discarded from the party-mongers in the balconies above that perhaps one or more hadn’t quite extinguished yet but was fanning in the breeze and fueled by dead leaves or my traumatized imagination.

But then it began to speak to me.

“Be still,” it said in a calm voice, as if I was preparing to go anywhere.

It was the voice of a young male, perhaps as generally young as the hotel room partiers who’d unwillingly scratched me from their festivities.

“I shall overtake you,” it instructed, “and the both of us together will show them just how it feels to fall from a grace so high above themselves.”

Not knowing altogether exactly what the voice meant, I found myself asking, “Who are
they
?”

And then the vaporous spirit overwhelmed me, giving me no further time to accept it nor deny it; as far as
time
was concerned, it had deprived me of any chance to have thwarted my fall, and its sly scheme of depravity couldn’t award me
this
chance to fumble for a moment to fend myself away from the immediacy of my fate, when it came down to it, down to eighteen stories and cold hard cement and a ghost that had been waiting below to possess me.

By the blink of an undead eye, I suddenly wasn’t myself, or whatever I
had
been, lying there.

I had become someone else, or some
thing
…….

***

I could not recall exactly what events transpired on my way back inside the hotel.  I couldn’t remember how I raised myself from the cold cement walkway, nor could I tell whether anyone had witnessed the initial event of my remarkable resurrection.  I know I had no time to consider whether or not I’d even left any marks or remains of myself on the ground where I impacted.