Laurie thought for a moment, nodded. “Sounds about right.”
Dana looked around the room, seeking and finding no evidence of other occupants. She was far from neighbors and had infrequent, if any, visitors. “Do you feel isolated?”
“I don’t.”
Such a simple, declarative statement. Dana couldn’t tell if she believed it or not.
But Aaron wasn’t buying it. “You tell yourself that you’re protecting your family. That if he comes for you again, you’ve distanced yourself from everyone you love.”
Dana nodded, seeing the logic in it.
“Aaron and I have made several award-winning public radio exposés. Our last project shed new light on a murder case from twenty years ago. We like to re-examine incidents with an unbiased lens. When people are willing to look at things in a different light over time, new truths can sometimes emerge. I believe there is a lot to learn from the horrors you experienced.”
Frowning, Laurie said, “There’s nothing to reexamine. Nothing to learn from something that happened forty years ago.”
“So,” Aaron said, “is he real?”
“Who?”
“The Boogeyman,” Aaron said. “I’ve read you quoted—”
“You don’t believe in the Boogeyman?”
Dana looked for the hint of a smile, a telltale sign that Laurie was joking, as unlikely as that seemed. But she’d posed the question with complete seriousness.
“I believe in Michael Myers,” Aaron said reasonably, “a deranged serial killer. But the Boogeyman? No.”
Laurie took a sip of her milk before replying. “Well, you should.”
“We have archival recordings of Dr Loomis after that horrific night,” Aaron soldiered on without conceding the point. “His intellect was overcome with abstract and apocalyptic observations.”
“He just wanted Michael dead,” Laurie said, “and no one would listen.”
Maybe Loomis’s irrational attitude had rubbed off on Laurie. Both were unwilling to see Michael Myers as a seriously flawed human, instead elevating him to some sort of supernatural entity, a physical embodiment of evil.
“Michael Myers is a human being that killed his sister when he was six years old,” Dana said, sticking to the facts rather than succumbing to metaphysical speculation. “And then he came after you… We want to know why. We want a glimpse inside his mind. That’s why your story is important.”
“My story?”
“Two failed marriages. A rocky relationship with your daughter and granddaughter.” Aaron looked askance. “Among other issues…”
“Aaron,” Dana said, a light note of caution in her voice.
Aaron nodded to several empty prescription pill bottles scattered on the table.
Laurie sat up straighter, a defensive posture. “It’s interesting that Michael killed five people and he’s a human being. I’m twice divorced and I’m a basket case.”
“My apologies,” Aaron said hesitantly.
“I have nothing but vague, very flawed memories of that night,” Laurie said. “The insight you’re looking for does not exist.”
Aaron nodded, silently acknowledging defeat, Dana imagined. His line of inquiry seemed to be a dead end.
“They’re transferring him,” Aaron said.
“I know,” Laurie said. “Tomorrow.”
“He’ll be locked away till the end of his days,” Dana said, as if it were her promise to make, hoping perhaps that Laurie would take solace in the finality of his fate and maybe, just maybe, change her mind.
“That’s the idea,” Laurie said, almost too casually, with an undertone of skepticism. Dana thought she understood the source of Laurie’s doubt. Because she had blown her belief in a Boogeyman out of rational proportion, she was unwilling to accept a simple, permanent solution to her forty-year nightmare.
“Do you surrender any efforts of rehabilitation?” Aaron asked her.
Laurie scoffed. “Because everyone knows forty years is when you typically turn the corner.”
Sensing another conversational dead end, Dana switched gears. “Let’s talk about when the state came to take your daughter away,” she said, broaching a sensitive subject and hoping for a more emotional response. “She was twelve years old. They said you were an unfit mother. How long until you regained custody?”
“I didn’t,” Laurie said flatly. “But I bet you knew that.”
Laurie stood, wandered toward the front door, shifting her gaze and attention to the stand of trees outside. Getting lost in the wilderness that encroached on her property. Dana wondered if she was thinking how her life and her daughter’s life might have been different if she had chosen a different path after the tragedy. The costs of her lifelong fear…
“Laurie,” Aaron said, urgency creeping into his tone, sensing as Dana did that they were losing her. “We want you to sit down with him. Sit with Michael—in a safe environment. He won’t speak to anybody… but he might speak to you. Finally, you can get the chance to say what you’ve always wanted to say to him.” Aaron paused, unsure if his words swayed her. “Come with us. Let us help you… free yourself.”
Laurie tore her gaze away from the woods and stared down at them, a hard glint in her eyes. “Time’s up. I’ll accept my payment.”
With a nearly inaudible sigh, Aaron stood, brushed off his jeans and pulled the orange envelope out of his back pocket. Silently, he walked it over to her and waited as she counted.
Stuffing the envelope in her own jeans pocket, she turned her attention to the door, releasing each lock in turn before removing the heavy metal crossbar. Dana had the weird sense of depressurization. Being locked in Laurie’s makeshift bunker gave the air a sense of weight, as if each breath required effort. The ticking of a nearby wall clock seemed amplified, giving a strange gravity to the passage of time.
Dana recalled—perhaps in an oversimplified way—how astrophysicists claimed time slowed down near the event horizon of a black hole, that anything approaching that point of no return eventually stopped moving, frozen forevermore. Dana had the sense that time spent within these fortified walls would play tricks on the mind, a psychological quirk infecting any occupant with a severe case of emotional inertia. She believed the past had a death grip on Laurie Strode, and that it had festered in her home. Aaron had offered to help Laurie “free herself.” But the older woman refused to acknowledge her own psychological captivity, to recognize she had become her own jailer.
Laurie pulled the door open wide and stood back. “With your journalistic insights, I’m sure you’ll be able to find your way out.”
As they walked away from the house, Dana glanced back to see Laurie standing in the doorway. In the moment before Laurie closed the door, Dana thought she glimpsed a look of honest contemplation in the woman’s eyes.
Maybe there’s hope for her yet…
6
In the morning rush before start of classes, a river of students flowed through the hallways of Haddonfield High School. Those accessing their lockers became the rocks and shoals that redirected the stream. Dozens of conversations overlapped in a discordant buzz punctuated by the irregular slamming of narrow metal locker doors.
When the warning bell rang, Allyson clutched her armful of notebooks and books and closed her locker with her free hand.
As she turned, a husky voice startled her. “Gotcha!”
A split second later, she registered Cameron’s face and realized he’d intended to spook her by sneaking up on her and disguising his voice. But not before she dropped her books. “Cameron,” she said, annoyed. “Jesus.”
He crouched beside her to help pick up her scattered texts.