Halloween Read online

  Halloween

  a novel by Curtis Richards

  based on the screenplay by John Carpenter and Debra Hill dedicated to the memories of Donald Pleasence and Debra Hill Copyright 1979 by Bantam Books, Inc.

  Prologue

  The horror started on the eve of Samhain, in a foggy vale in Northern Ireland at the dawn of the Celtic race. And once started, it trod the earth forevermore, wreaking its savagery suddenly, swiftly, and with incredible ferocity. Then, its lust sated, it shrank back into the mists of time for a year, a decade, a generation perhaps. But it slept only and did not die, for it could not be killed. And on the eve before Samhain it would stir, and if the lust were powerful enough, it would rise to fulfill the curse invoked so many Samhains before. Then the people would bolt their doors.

  Scant good it did them, for the thing laughed at locks and bolts, and besides, there were the unwary. Always the unwary.

  Samhain. The Druid festival of the dead. The summer had passed, and so too had that outburst of early fall warmth now know as Indian summer. The green had gone out of the land, the crops harvested, and the chill of winter had descended like an angel of death. The people, fearing the sun might never again warm the land, held their festival to appease Muck Olla, their deity. On hillsides and in the caves and daub-and-wattle huts great fires were lit to which the spirits of the departed were invited by their kinsmen to warm themselves, to be cheerful before the snows blanketed the earth.

  Druid priests divined who would live and die in the coming year, who would marry, bear children, wax rich, enjoy good health. And they attempted to hold at bay, through sacrifices and other rites, the witches and goblins that ran amok at that time, stealing infants, destroying crops, killing farm animals...

  and sometimes worse.

  Deirdre was the third and youngest daughter of the Druid king Gwynnwyll. Her hair was sandy brown with amber highlights, her eyes sea green, her complexion cream and wild rose. She was already taller than her older sisters, and her early development had been the cause of much concern in the tribal community. The other virgins tittered with envy; the married women voiced disapproval and counseled her mother to marry her off before the girl yielded to her budding impulses; the young warriors eyed her yearningly, and the old warriors thought forbidden thoughts and reflected on their faded memories.

  His name was Enda. He was fifteen, and he loved Deirdre with a secret passion that tortured him and at night caused him to cry out in his sleep. When it became rumored that Deirdre's father, the king, was preparing to offer her hand in marriage, Enda consulted his kinsmen and asked if they thought his suit would be looked upon in favor. He suspected what the answer would be, but his longing overcame his embarrassment.

  “Ho! Deidre marry you?” his father cackled. “With your shriveled arm and your twitching mouth?” For Enda had presented himself wrong end first when his mother birthed him, and the midwives had made a botch of his delivery.

  “She would as soon marry my goat!” howled his uncle.

  “Or Bulech!” his brother added, pointing to the runty dog worrying a greasy bone in the corner of their hut.

  “Besides,” said his father, “I'm told she's but betrothed to Cullain.”

  “Now there's a lad worthy of that wench's pretty hole!” his uncle burst out, raising his wineskin to his fat lips, and they continued to discuss Deirdre's charms as Enda retreated miserably from the hut into the cold night.

  The boy suffered tortures such as only the adolescent can. At length, he determined on a plan. If he could somehow get directly to Deirdre, he would convince her that though he was ill-favored physically, he was in every other respect a fitting candidate for her hand. This was easier said than done, however, because virgins were closely watched by their mothers or by truculent warrior brothers. Nevertheless, one day Enda seized an opportunity when Deirdre went to fetch water from the stream at the foot of the hill. He followed her furtively, darting from tree to tree until he found her stooped over the stream, singing softly to herself as the water filled her clay pitchers.

  “Deirdre?” he called timidly.

  She turned and gasped, eyes round with fright.

  “You! What do you want?” Her body tensed, and she seemed ready to bolt.

  “I... I want to...” The panic in her face alarmed him. He had expected to startle her, but had not imagined she would greet him with such revulsion. He stepped forward, hand extended pacifically.

  But she jumped back, misinterpreting the gesture. She stumbled, almost falling into the stream, and Enda moved swiftly to rescue her.

  “No!” she shrieked. “Get away from me, monster!” She found her feet and burst into a run, crying, “Help! Help! He means to rape me!”

  Enda's body had been deformed at birth, but not until that moment had his soul been formed...

  And now it was Samhain, and Enda humiliated beyond reason, stood on the perimeter of the celebrants dancing and chanting around the bonfire. In his left hand he held a fat wineskin, from which he drank often. In his right he held a foot-long butcher blade which he used to cut the throats of pigs and chickens.

  His eyes were fixed bitterly on the figures of Deirdre and Cullain, whirling exuberantly around the fire, to the immense approval of the tribe. For their betrothal had been announced, to the joy and relief of all.

  Enda's legs shook and his body trembled in the cold night, though the heat of the fire was intense. And when the couple pirouetted past him once more, he leapt like a wildcat on his twin prey.

  Unarmed, their elbows linked, they didn't have a chance. Enda's blade sliced easily through Cullain's jugular and windpipe. His legs kicked out in a grotesque finale to his dance of life. Then he fell like a slaughtered bull, dragging Deirdre downward. Her head turned away, she laughed, believing that her drunken partner had merely stumbled. Enda's blade caught her with laughter on her face, the same laughter that had mocked him after she had run safely into the arms of her tribesmen the day he had approached her at the stream. The highly honed weapon plunged into her breast up to the hilt. In the clamor, no one heard the explosion of wind from her lungs, the gurgle of blood, the whimper, or saw the look of dreadful recognition as the light faded from her eyes – except for Enda.

  The thrill of revenge was the last emotion Enda knew, for a moment later he was literally torn apart by the enraged tribe. Only his head and his heart were preserved, gathered up after the frenzy had subsided, at the request of the grieving king. After Deirdre and Cullain were buried on the hallowed ground the following day, Enda's head and heart were carried to the summit of the Hill of Fiends, where cowards and other outcasts were left to rot unblessed. The king asked his shaman to pronounce a special curse over the remains of this vile murderer. “Thy soul shall roam the earth till the end of time, reliving thy foul deed and thy foul punishment, and may the god Muck Olla visit every affliction upon thy spirit forevermore...”

  The sky darkened and lightning flashed. The day suddenly grew black and cold, and out of nowhere gusts of snow lashed the tribal party. In the history of the tribe, it had never snowed so early in the year. Satisfied that Muck Olla had heard his prayer, the shaman summoned his people to turn their backs on Enda and return to their bereft village...

  The celebration of Samhain's eve was transmuted over the centuries. The invading Romans carried the tradition back from the English Isles with them in the form of the Harvest Festival of Pomona, and the early Christians deemed their celebration Hallowmas. The popes of the Middle Ages consecrated November 1 as All Saints' Day, and All Hallow Even slurred into Halloween as the holiday was transmuted over the next millennium.

  With the coming of modern civilization, the superstitions and traditions of the original festival lost their meaning and vitality. Token rec
ognition could be seen in the custom of lighting candles in jack-o'-lanterns, hanging effigies of witches and goblins outside homes, and playing good-natured pranks that were a feeble cry from the mayhem of the old times. Children paraded about in costumes whose significance hand long ago lost their correspondence to the terror of evil that had once gripped the world at the onset of winter. Halloween, like many of the holidays, had become an empty shame.

  Except that from time to time, the innocent frolic of All Hallow Even was shattered by some brutal and inexplicable crime, and the original spirit of the celebration was brought home to a horrified world. Then the people would bolt their doors.

  Scant good it did them... and besides, there were always the unwary.

  Chapter 1

  It was 1963, and America was sure of itself, or at least seemed to be. Particularly in Haddonfield, Illinois. The tensions of the Cold War, of Cuba, the dark stirrings in Southeast Asia, lapped at the door of this placid and undistinguished midwestern town, but didn't really touch it. In less than a month, the president would be murdered in Dallas, signaling an era of tremendous violence and heartbreak that would reach deeply into the homes and hearts of Americans across the land.

  But that was in the future, and tonight, October 31, was a time for fun. It was Halloween.

  Perhaps even more than Christmas, it was the most innocent holiday on the calendar. Yes, more than Christmas, because Christmas celebrated a happy event, and jolly St. Nick was a benevolent symbol anyway. But Halloween's origins were darker, very much darker, and if the children celebrated it as a happy event like Christmas, it was a symptom of how far we'd come from the time when mankind respected the forces of evil.

  Little Michael Myers's grandmother clucked her disapproval as the visiting rosy-faced six-year-old showed her the costume in the Woolworth box. “What's that supposed to be?” she said, leaning forward in her recliner and adjusting her specs.

  “A clown, Grandma.” He ran his hand over the red and green nylon jester's costume, with matching cap with a pompom on top.

  “A clown,” she sighed.

  “Now, Mother,” Michael's mother, Edith, came to the rescue, “I know what you're going to say.”

  “Well, it's true, darn it. We never had that five-and-dime junk when we grew up on the farm. We took Halloween seriously. Why, when we set up scarecrows and jack-o'-lanterns, it was because we were genuinely trying to scare off the bogeyman. Bogeyman, now he played real pranks and did some real damage. He didn't just go around like they do today, slapping people's clothes with socks filled with chalk-dust and soaping their windows.”

  “What did the Bogeyman do, Grandma?”

  Mrs. Myers shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “I don't think Michael wants to hear that,”

  she said looking significantly at her mother. “It might give him bad dreams.”

  But grandma wasn't taking the warning. “Nothing wrong with bad dreams. At least they remind us that things aren't hunky-dory in this world. Lord, everything is so clean and – phony these days. Just one big television commercial. Clown costumes!” she sighed, fingering the cheap material in the Woolworth box.

  “What did the Bogeyman do?” Michael insisted.

  The silver-haired woman leaned forward confidently, a perverse smile lighting her pleasantly lined face. “Well, if you were lucky, you got away with nothing worse than finding some of your chickens beheaded.”

  “Beheaded?”

  “Their heads cut off,” she explained with a relish. Micheal's eyes widened; his mother grimaced and picked up a copy of Look, riffling nervously through it. “If you weren't lucky, you lost a cow or two.”

  “Unheaded?”

  “Be-headed, yes.”

  “Were the heads just lying there next to the cows or were they... ?”

  “Mother, that will be enough. Really!” Mrs. Myers gasped, snapping the magazine shut.

  But grandma had warmed to the subject. Behind her spectacles, her blue eyes had drifted off to her girlhood, and her head nodded in memory of some awesome event. “Once he burned somebody's barn down. Was it Winfield? No, Winterfield. Burnt Mr. Winterfield's barn down to the ground, livestock and all.” She looked at the wide-eyed boy, then at her horrified daughter, and realized she'd gone too far. “Of course, Michael, we always suspected it wasn't the Bogeyman. Perhaps neighbors getting even with each other for some slight. In costumes and masks, it was easier to get away with that sort of thing. But I do remember one incident...”

  “Not the chimney story,” begged Mrs. Myers.

  “Oh, tell me the chimney story!” implored the grandson.

  “Well,” the woman said, “it was Halloween, nineteen-ought... nine? Nineteen ten?”

  “Just tell it,” said Michael. Even at six he recognized a boring attack of grandma's What-year-was-it-again?

  “Yes. It was Halloween, but way after midnight. Maybe two or three in the morning. We'd all gone to sleep, leaving the fire burning in the parlor because it was a terribly cold night. Well, suddenly I hear my brother Jimmy shouting, 'Smoke! Smoke! Wake up everybody, the house is on fire!' I grabbed my robe and rushed down the stairs right behind my daddy, who'd picked up the bucket of water we always kept filled at the top of the landing. Sure enough, the whole downstairs was thick with woodsmoke. But I couldn't see any fire. The smoke was coming from the fireplace, and it looked as though the flue had been closed.”

  “What's a flue?”

  Grandma explained what a flue was. “We put out the embers and opened the doors and windows to let the smoke out. Then daddy looked at the flue and – glory be – it was open. Something was jamming up the chimney. Now, we didn't have a ladder on account of daddy having just taken it apart to replace some rotten rungs. So Jimmy had to shinny himself up the drainpipe to find out what was obstructing the chimney.”

  “What was it?” the boy asked, while his mother shook her head in painful anticipation.

  “A dead hog.”

  “Wow!”

  “Someone – or something – had cut out our hog's throat and laid it atop the chimney.” She laughed humorlessly. “The thing is, that hog weighed near three hundred pounds. How did it get up there without a ladder? Without our hearing anything? Without our dog, Toby, raising hob with his barking like he usually did when he heard something prowling? Without disturbing a gate or making a footprint? Answer me that, Mister Woolworth Clown Costume.”

  “I don't know.”

  “Well, I do. 'Twas the Bogeyman, that's all there is to it.”

  “Mother, that will do!” Mrs. Myers snapped. “The boy's been having problems enough at night without your adding to them.”

  “Problems? What kind... ? Um, Michael honey, run into the bedroom and try the costume on for Grandma. I'll tuck it if it's too baggy.”

  “It's supposed to be baggy,” said the little boy, carrying the box into the next room.

  “Now, what's this about 'problems'?” she demanded of her daughter.

  Edith Myers, a younger, darker-eyed replica of her mother, ran a hand through her curly blond hair. “I told you, he's been getting into fights at school. At home, too, with Judith. He's been wetting his bed again, which he hasn't done in three years.”

  “Fighting about what?”

  “Mother, can we just forget... ?”

  The old woman's eyes narrowed. “No, we can't. What kind of trouble is that boy in?”

  “Voices,” Mrs. Myers finally blurted after a minute's tortured pause. “ He hears voices.”

  “Oh, Little Lord Jesus!” the old woman cried. She exchanged a long, meaningful look with her daughter. “I'm afraid to ask what these voices say.”

  “'They tell me to say I hate people.' That's how Michael put it when I asked him. Don thinks maybe we ought to send Michael to someone.”

  “You mean a psychiatrist?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don't put much stock in psychiatrists, but I don't suppose it could hurt. And I don't think it will help, if it
's what I'm thinking.”

  The younger woman began to get agitated. “I know what you're thinking, and that's why I didn't want to get into this with you. You're going to say that that's how it started with Grandpa Nordstrom.”

  “We have to face up to it, child, that is how it started with your father's father.”

  “Mother, all children hear imaginary voices. Don't you remember my Bobby Bear, who used to... ?”

  “It's not the same. At least, it's not something you should ignore. Does the boy have dreams?” Her daughter nodded. “Does he remember any?”

  “Yes, and they're very violent.” Her face reddened and she turned her eyes away from her mother's piercing gaze. “Mother, when Grandpa Nordstrom... that is... Well, you've never spoken to us about that incident, and I think there are enough similarities...”

  “Hush, here comes Michael. When you get home, call me as soon as you can, I think the time has come to tell you everything. Ah, there's my little boy,” she cooed as Michael came back into the room with a rustle, “right out of a Punch 'n' Judy show.”

  He stood before them, an angel in red and green nylon, elastic ankle and wrist-bands making the costume cling at the extremities and bag out everywhere else. A ruff around the neck and the little droopy pompom cap completed the charming picture.

  “Grandma's baby!” she laughed, clasping the boy to her bosom. “Edith, please fetch me some cold cream and lipstick from the tray in my bedroom. Might as well complete the picture.”

  “I don't want makeup,” Michael protested.

  “Of course you do. You don't want anyone to guess who you are when you go around playing pranks.”

  “I'm not going to play pranks. I'm just going to ask for candy.”

  “You do that, child. You just have an innocent, Woolworth kind of Halloween.”

  She saw them out the door. “Remember, Edith, call me as soon as you can.”

  “I will, Mother. And don't worry.”

  “I won't,” she said, shutting the door. She began to tremble, wondering if she should have said something to her daughter about Grandpa Nordstrom's dreams.