Halloween IV: The Ultimate Edition (6 page)

Turning, Rachel nearly stepped into an apologetic Jamie. She was standing in the kitchen doorway, Sunday the Labrador at her side.

Looking up at Rachel, she told her faintly, “I’m sorry I ruined everything. If I wasn’t here, you could go out.”

Then she turned and disappeared with Sunday into the livingroom around the corner. Rachel was left, staring guiltily into the empty space where the little girl had been. She could feel her parents’ disapproving stares.

“Good job, Rachel,” her father told her. “That little girl needs all the love we can give her, and all you can think about is yourself.”

Without looking back, Rachel left the kitchen in pursuit of Jamie.

***

Rachel followed Jamie and Sunday into the girl’s bedroom. Jamie didn’t bother to close the door on her, but ignored her presence just the same by slipping onto her bed and pretending to toy with a pink marshmallow doll. Rachel joined her, sitting close. A moment of silence went by, Rachel trying to summon the right words to say to her, the words that best suited a six-year-old girl with a heavy heart. Finally, the words did come, and she hoped to God they would work.

“I’m sorry, Jamie. I didn’t mean it like that. I can go out with Brady tomorrow night. No biggie.” Jamie remained preoccupied with her doll. “Hey, come on,” Rachel continued.

“But you wanted to go out tonight,” Jamie responded softly. It was clear that she was struggling to keep her voice calm. She was holding back tears, and being a real trooper at it, too. “It’s my fault you can’t.”

Rachel had to think of something. Anything. “Well, tonight we’re going to do something better. We’re going to go trick-or-treating. How’s that?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Okay.”
Let’s try something else
. “How about I pick you up from school this afternoon and we go for ice cream?”

That did it; Jamie just couldn’t hold back that smile. There was something about little kids and ice cream, and Rachel had long since forgot what. Maybe it just tasted good.

“Double scoops?”

“Double scoops,” Rachel said, and smiled back.
Thank God
.

Rachel gave her a big hug within the next instant, just as Sunday jumped up onto the bed. He was dying for a little love, too, and Rachel obliged him with a little scratch behind his ears. Then she stood up.

“Come on, kiddo. Let’s get some breakfast.”

             
Chapter Six

Norman Dale had popped a couple of ruby red pill capsules no later than five minutes into his lunch break, and here he was, thinking
I’ll be goddamn if this shit’s kicking in and already it’s time to get back to rebuilding that busted tranny.

Rebuilding transmissions was never in Norm’s adult life a problem. Right now, the problem was finding his way
to
it. Until after he’d found himself marrying into a family which transplanted him from Chicago to this shithole roadside service station in the middle of nowhere, he hadn’t been as nearly impressed with any sort of recreational drug. He was halfway into the forty-somethings, and he was afraid things were going to be just as predictable for him throughout the next half of his life as they’d been today and yesterday, and the day before that.

He was better off single and home, than nowhere and
stuck
there.

As he thought this, he decided to make a mental note of it and adopt it as a motto.

A useless motto.

Damn Glen for being out of weed today
was his next thought, as he entered the service station’s glass EMPLOYEES ONLY side door and faced the mirror above the corner wash area. He took a shop rag from the top of the porcelain sink and thumbed it down a rear pants pocket so that it hung out halfway.

If his coworker hadn’t been out of weed, he wouldn’t have had to resort to those “mystery pills” he took from him. Norm had no clue what those red pills were, nor what to expect from them. They were something new, something
mysterious
, as Glen put it.

They were kicking in
big time
.

He dared not gaze into his mirrored reflection for too long, lest the grey-brown hairs on his month’s growth of beard start spreading across the rest of his face.

That was it; he was going to find Glen and march right over to him, tell him he’s having an extended lunch break, maybe extend it into tomorrow. He’ll apologize, and offer to bring Glen a Big Buster pastrami on rye from the other half of his father-inlaw’s desert wilderness empire: the café next door. After all, it was Glen who offered him this hallucinatory surprise, and it was Glen who therefore had to
understand
.

He abandoned the wash area, determined to carry out the proposal. The rusty-white Plymouth Belvedere upon his right appeared to melt like warm vanilla ice cream as he stepped past it.

I can do this
, he insisted to himself and to the garage door he approached. The door was closed and chained down into latches cemented into the floor, and as he halted the small rectangular door windows fell within his line of sight.

He peered out one of them.

He spotted a figure outside, standing between the service pumps.

He stared.

The figure looked like a mummy. A
mummy
, dressed in a tattered white hospital gown, standing there, staring straight back at him.

Goddamn Halloween crazies
, he muttered aloud, scratching at his own wolf man bearded reflection in the glass.

Another glance at the service pumps revealed the mummy-like figure was no longer there.

Norm turned away.

A sound distracted him. Something metallic clanked and echoed inside the garage like a tin can kicked purposely, and it was at that moment when Norm realized the garage had been silent the whole time after he’d returned.

He focused his gaze on the employee’s side entrance door. It hung open, though Norm couldn’t remember if he’d shut it or left it that way.

Another sound.

“Hey Norm?” It was Glen’s voice, from the other half of the garage. “You there? How ‘bout a nine-sixteenths socket over here?”

Relieved just then from a feeling of mounting unease, Norm couldn’t think enough to summon an answer. He backed away from the garage door, trying to refocus on his original plan. A stack of red metal toolbox drawers towered between him and the other half of the garage, and he sidestepped to avoid its menacing build.

It wept at him.

Norm wanted nothing to do with
that
hallucination, until after his next few steps when he found himself face to face with yet another the figure he’d spotted at the service pumps outside.

The shape glared down upon him through thick bandages wrapped around its face and head. It was garbed in no more than a generic hospital gown, soiled and weathered and torn. The arms at its sides were massive; limbs of tissue so hideously scarred that it was a wonder they weren’t wrapped in bandages also. His right hand gripped a long, steel rod.

Norm had time enough to question the reality of the situation, and the shape allowed him time. Was this real?

“Glen, is that
you
?”

With a sudden upward thrust of the shape’s arm, Norm’s surreal mental trip at once came to an end, and as the shape’s blow thrust him into an eternity even more surreal, his final thoughts drifted into a stifled hush:

I don’t have to be stuck in this shithole no
more.

Norman Dale’s body now hung from the top of the steel rod like a flag, the toes of his shoes teetering above the cement floor. The rod had impaled him upwards through the spot beneath his jaw and above his throat, as far into his brain as to play peek-a-boo through his skull out the top of his head.

The shape lowered the victim and, with the heel of one mud-caked bare foot, slid the carnage off the rod.

“Norm, are you there? Did you hear me?” The shape turned.

Glen slid out from the underbelly of a station wagon, looked up from beneath the front bumper. The shape stepped into view, towering above him. It raised the bloody rod for a moment long enough for Glen to let out a scream, then plunged it into his lower abdomen. It let go of the rod, stepped back in fascination as the service mechanic spasmed and writhed and grew still.

It lifted its gaze to the tow truck resting at the far side of the station wagon. It turned, studied the lifeless body at its feet, then turned towards the other corpse, eyeing the coveralls the mechanics both wore, sizing them up.

It was time to get busy.

Chapter Seven

After driving for a few miles off the interstate, surrounded by nothing but desolation as dust and brambles and tumbleweeds rolled in the warm breeze as he passed, Doctor Loomis came upon a single roadside gas station/cafe. As he pulled up to the unleaded fuel pumps and stepped out of the sedan, he discovered that the place was just as desolate and weatherworn as the miles of wasteland surrounding him. There didn’t appear to be a soul around, and Loomis at first suspected whoever was here were all inside, or his presence would summon someone, an attendant most likely, and everything would be fine.

But everything wasn’t fine. He sensed it as soon as his shoes met the dusty asphalt.

Nevertheless, he proceeded to fill the sedan’s tank up with gas. As he did, he surveyed the area. Still no one came out to assist him. No one came out for any reason.

There was a vacant lot next door; nothing but a chainlink fence surrounding the same desert inside as there was outside. He expected there to be a dog of some sort within the boundaries of the fence, but as he gazed closer, his eyes momentarily blinded by the sun, he saw nothing.

Behind him stood a three door mechanic’s garage, one door was open, disclosing a racked, weather—beaten blue station wagon, the series of rectangular windows on the other doors revealed nothing but darkness. Still, there was no movement save for the rustling of papers within the center garage, and the steady
rap rap rap
of what the doctor presumed to be a remote screen door on the other side, loosened by the wind.

The gas pump nozzle clicked off; he was finished pumping gas. The meter read nine dollars, and the doctor counted the money within his wallet and drew out a ten. He then proceeded toward the open garage.

Still, there was no one in sight.

He halted. There was movement now, from behind the station wagon.

“Hello,” he called out. He waited.

There was no answer.

He must have been seeing things within the garage; for as he carefully peered inside, he found that no one was there. The wind gently swept through the garage’s interior, rustling block and tackle chains hanging to his right on a wooden beam.

“Hello?” he called out again, this time louder. Still not a soul.

Cautiously, he stepped past the station wagon and into the shadows, eyes searching, finding an old, Plymouth Belvedere and a glass doorway at the end of a row of tool-lined shelving.

He called out a third time. “I said, hello. Is there anyone here....?”

His gaze went to the opening of the garage, out into the area of the pumps where his sedan rested. He turned, and suddenly his face knocked dead center into dangling human legs and feet. Frantically, Loomis fought blindly at whatever was before him, arms waving impulsively, until he stumbled back and beheld what was hanging before him.

It was a body; nude, hanging among block and tackle chains, motionless---pale.

Dear Jesus.

He stared upon the corpse, himself motionless, stunned---disbelieving. There was silence again, silence save for the steady creaking of the wood beams from the body’s weight as it slowly rotated above. He turned. There, upon the floor, not far away from a rolling red tool chest of drawers, was another body, clothed in bloodied mechanic’s coveralls, sprawled as though tossed there in a discarded heap.

Loomis began to regain his footing; he was shaking from the sudden shock. He quickly exited the garage and entered through the glass double doors of the cafe. A door chime announced his panicked entrance, and he wavered over to the edge of the counter, gasping. He found that the diner was just as deserted as it had appeared on the outside. There was a long line of empty booths and tables, and the counter was empty save for unfinished portions of breakfast on white plates.