Unfortunately, she drew a blank on the younger girl’s name.
“Wow! Look at you, all dressed up,” she said, a phrase she’d repeated throughout the evening. “So, what do we have here?”
Andrea always enjoyed seeing the kids in their costumes. And the littlest ones were so cute. They reminded her of Emma, when she was so small she’d hold her mom’s hand as they walked door to door. Of course, now that her daughter was well into her teens she kept her mother at a socially acceptable distance, basically an adolescent restraining order. Just a phase, Andrea told herself. I was the same way with my parents.
“Let’s see,” Andrea said. “A pretty princess… and a rainbow unicorn, right?” Both girls nodded. “Ooh, and an alien. That’s spooky!”
All three McClaren kids held out their candy bags.
“You guys are my last customers for the night,” she said as she dropped a treat into each bag. “Happy Halloween!”
Mumbling their thanks, the kids rushed off, probably trying to make up for a late start. Only a few costumed stragglers roamed the street. And judging by the number of extinguished porch lights, the flow of candy had cut off at many homes. With a sigh, Andrea closed her door and turned off her own porch light. It was all over so soon.
As she crossed her living room her cellphone rang. Nobody bothered with the landline anymore—other than robo-callers. Not for the first time, she wondered why she still paid for the damn thing.
She stopped in the middle of the living room, pulled her phone out of her jeans pocket and answered the call, immediately recognizing Sally’s voice. “Hey, Sally,” she said. “No, just me. I know. I volunteered as a parent chaperone, but Emma vetoed that idea. Said I’d embarrass her in front of her friends. Well, I hope she’s enjoying the dance. What’s up?” Glancing through the window as she listened, she noticed movement outside, a dark shape, but also something pale—a face or a mask. Another straggler, she thought absently. Tall. Probably a teen making the rounds one last year before—
“Really? Where did you hear that? That’s awful…”
Feeling a chill race down her spine, Andrea suddenly felt exposed.
She hurried to the window, grasped the cord for the horizontal blinds and yanked it to the left to lower them. As the slats dropped, she caught a momentary glimpse of her reflection in the window glass—and she wasn’t alone!
Whirling around, she dropped her phone and screamed.
The dark shape with the pale face stood before her.
Wielding a long chef’s knife, a hand blurred in front of her, slicing left to right below her jawline.
For an excruciating moment, she felt an intense burning pain in her throat—then her world collapsed into darkness…
The Shape watches the middle-aged woman crumple to the floor, blood gushing from the deep neck wound. The blood pools around her tilted head, coating her splayed hair as her empty eyes stare into space.
Turning, The Shape walks out the open front door, knife held low. Drops of blood fall from the tip of the blade, splattering the carpet in his wake…
Dr Ranbir Sartain sat up with a gasp in his hospital bed, covered in sweat. Disoriented, he glanced around the dark room, breathing heavily. The only light came from medical equipment beside his bed and a sliver of light from the hallway outside his room. He was in a hospital now, but he remembered he’d been shot… by the boy who discovered him… on the prison transport bus…
The memory triggered earlier impressions from that evening. Images flashed through his mind; a jumble of violence, like a jigsaw puzzle tossed in the air—accusing faces, staring at him in their final moments—
—a prison guard, Kuneman, bleeds from his neck—
—the bus driver looks up at him, in horror and surprise, involuntarily spinning the wheel as his throat is slit—
—the bus rocks wildly on its suspension as it swerves off the road and down a steep embankment—
—through it all, the Smith’s Grove patients rattle the mesh barrier separating them from the guards, screaming as blood spatters their faces, like a feeding frenzy or a descent into madness—
—a second guard, Haskell, screams, his bleeding face smashed against the mesh-covered window until a gunshot blasts through his skull—
Trembling, Sartain reclined in the hospital bed, focusing on the dull pain in his shoulder to anchor himself. He slowed his breathing to lower his heart rate, watching the display on the monitors as a type of biometric feedback. Though he was alone in the hospital room his recollection of the memories had been so vivid it seemed as if they were on public display.
But the only one who mattered had been there with him.
A witness to the moment.
22
Even from outside Haddonfield High School Allyson, Cameron, and Oscar could hear the thumping bass of the music seeping through the walls and windows of the gymnasium. Other than a few strategic spotlights shining on doorways and one angled up the flagpole, the exterior of the high school looked appropriately dark and moody. Even though they were running a bit late, they stopped at the twin brick columns of the entrance gate to take themed photos. Members of the dance committee had mounted painted plywood gargoyles atop each column. The style of the artwork was reminiscent of two-dimensional television animation rather than an attempt at photorealism. Looking more realistic than the gargoyles were the two plastic skeletons attached with fishing line to the columns.
The Exquisite Corpse Dance had officially begun about thirty minutes before she arrived with Cameron and, naturally, Oscar, who had tagged along with the pair. A few of their costumed classmates lingered by the main door. Everyone else had already gone inside.
They had arrived late due to Oscar’s eleventh-hour costume change. He’d planned to go as a vampire in sunglasses, but after tripping a couple times, he reconsidered that plan. Keeping the black cape with its wide red collar and red interior over a black novelty t-shirt designed to look like a tux, he pocketed the plastic fangs and sunglasses and put on a pair of curved devil horns. “Rather be a horny devil than a blind bloodsucker,” he explained.
“Either way’s fine with us,” Cameron said, urging him along.
“What about Mephistopheles,” Oscar said, snapping his fingers. They’d recently read Goethe’s Faust. “Anybody asks, I could say, ‘Don’t Meph with me, bro!’”
With a weary shake of his head, Cameron said, “Please don’t say that.”
“Okay, horny devil it is,” Oscar said.
“Truth in advertising,” Cameron said.
Allyson chuckled.
“Oh, don’t laugh,” Oscar said, raising his cape with both hands more in the manner of a cinematic vampire about to transform into a bat than any movie devil she’d ever seen. “Chicks dig a guy in a cape.”
“I have literally never heard that,” Allyson said.
“After tonight,” Oscar said, “you’ll know it for a fact.”
Cameron laughed. “Dream on, Casanova.”
Allyson and Cameron stuck to their original plan to go to the dance as Bonnie and Clyde. And Cameron had embraced his role as the effortlessly glamorous gun moll, wearing a tan knit beret at a jaunty angle, a brown-patterned scarf low over a mustard-yellow short-sleeved cardigan, and a brown plaid-patterned pencil skirt, along with brown socks and black loafers. He’d abandoned the blond bob wig in favor of his own shoulder-length loose curls, and his commitment to character ended short of shaving his exposed legs, though that choice was more a nod to the comedy of the moment.