The smartest thing for Lindsey to have done would have been to go back to the station and turn the jack-o-lantern in for evidence. But there was something about her simply just being in the car with that thing that made her skin crawl. Michael had touched it, had left it specifically for her as a grisly little Halloween treat. Being near it made her feel as though he were still there, watching her every move.
In the immediate aftershock of having seen Michael, Lindsey tried with all of her might to convince herself that everything, from the stolen truck to this macabre pumpkin was just a coincidence and that the masked man had just been another practical joker but it was a feeble fight, one fought out of a paranoid desire to keep things in Haddonfield peaceful.
The truck, the missing mask, Laurie's destroyed tombstone, the clear message in her cruiser...it all pointed to the one undeniable fact that Michael Myers had returned. The sighting had only been him sealing that reality and when she really thought of it even the most devoted prankster couldn't hold a candle to how intimidating the man was, how tall and threatening he was even in just simply standing motionless.
She slid against the side of the cruiser, that frightened little girl still clinging to her and before she could help herself she was sobbing uncontrollably in broad daylight. Never mind that she was now a sheriff with twenty years of experience as a cop in one of the toughest cities in the country. What were drug dealers and gang-bangers when compared to the sheer, unstoppable evil of that nightmare of a man? What could she possibly do to stop him if he was truly here to wreak bloody havoc once more?
You can get the hell a hold of yourself for starters, a sharp voice that sounded like Laurie rang out in her mind as it often did whenever she found herself weighed down by moments like this. You're a grown woman Lindsey Wallace and a damn fine sheriff.
Lindsey stifled her sobs and wiped at her tear stained face, nodding as though in answer to that voice. Yeah she was going to calm down. There was a town at stake and it wouldn't help anybody for the sheriff to go bursting into tears just because the boogeyman was back.
Lindsey glanced at her watch. It was almost noon now.
She radioed the station and told them to send two officers to the cemetery to gather evidence, more as a way to give the groundskeeper a peace of mind as well as to process her cruiser and requested all units to be extra vigilant and immediately report any sightings of people dressed in Michael Myers costumes.
It wouldn't do any good to ring the alarm. Nobody would want to believe her anyway.
After sending out the dispatch Lindsey started walking towards the high school, hoping the exercise would help calm her down and allow her to think straight. She kept a hand close to her belt and scanned the sides of the street but somehow she knew without really knowing how that she wasn't in any danger yet.
Michael wouldn't want his presence discovered this early in the day. Still as she took the twenty minute walk from the graveyard to the high school she couldn't help but look at every shadow in a curious paranoia, wondering what he was doing back here and what, or rather who he wanted this time.
To Lindsey's knowledge he'd never come back. There were of course those people who swore to God that they'd seen him on the live internet broadcast over a decade ago but the fact that most of those people had been drunk partiers at the time of the feed didn't add much credibility to their statements. The authorities had even gotten a confession from the head of Dangertainment who had admitted to dressing up as Michael to add some excitement to the broadcast and as far as they were concerned that was good enough to explain what few sightings they'd gathered from the surviving video footage.
She felt helpless but with that came a stubborn determination to put a stop to whatever it was that Michael wanted now. The trouble was she had no clear idea how to meet him head on and there was now nobody left alive who knew how that man's mind worked. Lindsey figured that not even the redoubtable Dr. Loomis knew quite what it was that made his old patient tick, although she guessed that the man had come closer than anyone.
By the time she had the high school in her sights the bell for lunch had already rung. Students were pouring out of the doors, heading to their cars or to the field or else walking in little groups, all costumed for the holiday, all talking excitedly. Lindsey watched them and her maternal instinct went into overdrive. If Michael thought he was going to have himself a repeat of thirty-five years ago then he had another thing coming. This was her town and even though some of the teens here frustrated her beyond belief they were as much her children as they were their parents'.
Mickey usually spent the hour in the cafeteria or the library but as Lindsey entered the spacious foyer of the school she was struck by a sudden, unexpected inspiration.
There weren't any experts on Michael Myers in Haddonfield anymore...but there was one former fanatic, someone she knew worked as a teacher now, somebody she hadn't seen in a very long time. It was a slim chance but at the moment Lindsey really needed somebody to share her fears with and after what they'd been through together when they were children they had a lot of common ground.
She stopped one of the students and asked where the art room was located and after being directed she headed through the halls of thinning students. Mickey could wait for ten minutes and given the reception she'd received that morning he probably wanted to postpone meeting with her again as long as possible.
The art classroom was empty, a cluster of paintings set up on easels the only evidence that students had actually been there at all. One in particular, close to the door of the classroom, caught Lindsey's eye the second she entered. A carving more than a painting really, the word FATHER etched into the canvas and smeared with a thick coat of crimson paint. She shivered involuntarily as she looked at it, unnerved by the primitive simplicity and sheer suggestive brutality of the piece.
A door opened at the back of the room and Lindsey looked around the easels and saw a stocky man with an untidy ponytail and a five o'clock shadow step out of a back office, munching on a bit of bagel.
She had only seen him once since he'd come back to Haddonfield, at a safety speech she'd given at the high school shortly after he'd started teaching and he looked the same as ever, stuck in a perpetual state of bachelorhood.
Tommy blinked in surprise when he saw her approaching his desk and swallowed his bagel before saying in a somewhat disbelieving voice, "Lindsey?"
She chuckled at the look and then nodded. There would always be the singular trauma of Michael's attack that connected them. They'd lost touch after high school although Lindsey had at one point gone to a convention and gotten Tommy to sign a copy of his graphic novel for her.
She strode around the desk and hugged him briefly before she could stop herself. Tommy seemed a little taken aback by the embrace but was smiling when she finally stepped away from him. He was a good seven or eight inches taller than her although Lindsey figured he was probably dwarfed by most of the male students.
"You look good," he told her with an appreciative grin.
"Likewise," Lindsey replied.
"Oh cut the bullshit I look ridiculous and I always have."
Lindsey laughed and then looked over her shoulder at the distant easel. "Hey Tommy who did that one back there? The, uh, carving?"
Tommy's face clouded for a second as he gazed at the easel. "A student in my last period...Mickey Morris."
"Fantastic," Lindsey muttered to herself as she felt her heart sink. She'd been afraid of that. "What exactly was the assignment?"
"I told the class to either draw something that scared them or what evil looked like to them." Tommy frowned as he thought for a moment. "Most chose to make something that they were afraid of but I don't really know what Mickey's is supposed to mean."
Lindsey considered telling Tommy about what was happening in the Morris home but thought better of it. She would never betray Mickey's or anybody else's trust that way and she knew that the last thing the kid wanted was having a teacher knowing what his home life was like.
Tommy seemed to get the memo that she wouldn't be elaborating. "What brings you here Lindsey? I doubt you wanted to pay me a visit just to talk shop about my student's art projects."
Lindsey took a deep breath and then, looking him square in the eye she said, "What would you say if I told you that...that I thought Michael Myers was here in Haddonfield?"
Tommy's eyes widened. Without hesitation he answered, "I would say 'holy shit I hope not.' Why, did you see him?"
Lindsey nodded and told him about everything that had happened that morning, from the stolen truck to the pumpkin in her cruiser. When she told him about Michael watching her from the trees by the cemetery Tommy shivered and sat down in his chair behind the desk.
"And he just stood there?" He asked, his eyes wide as dinner plates.
Lindsey nodded.
"Jesus Christ," Tommy said with a low breath.
"It wasn't a kid in a costume," Lindsey said. "I hauled one in this morning and the way that he stood was nowhere near what Michael was like." She didn't have to tell Tommy about what it felt like to see that man watching you with his soulless eyes. He knew all too well. He was silent for a moment and Lindsey in desperation to seize the opportunity quickly added, "You...you believe me right?"
Tommy looked into her eyes and Lindsey was taken back to that night when he'd desperately tried to alert Laurie to the boogeyman outside. Their babysitter had thought Tommy had just been trying to scare her but Lindsey knew perfectly well that Tommy had seen him, had only tried to warn them.
"Course I believe you," he said, holding her gaze. "You believed me that night, even when Laurie didn't."
Lindsey smiled wanly at him and said, "So you think he's alive then?"
"There's no proof that he ever died."
"But all that's happened to him," Lindsey said persistently, "getting stabbed, shot, blown up...it's just hard to imagine him cheating death that many times."
Tommy shrugged. "There's always an explanation."
Lindsey grinned and said teasingly, "Like curses?"
Tommy laughed but shook his head. "Curses are for hacks struggling to make a resolution to their story. No I think that among his other tendencies Michael's impervious to pain." He paused and added, "You ever heard of congenital anhidrosis?"
"Um I can't say that I have," Lindsey said with a little laugh. She wasn't even sure that what Tommy had said was actually English.
"It's a rare inherited nervous system disorder," Tommy explained. "It's known by other names. I did a shit ton of research back when I first started writing the comics, trying to find things that would explain Michael...like, everything about him really and one of the things I found was this disorder."
"What exactly makes you think Michael could have it?"
"Well basically what happens with it is that it makes certain people impervious to feelings of pain and extreme temperatures and things like that. I mean, you could shoot someone three times in the chest and they'd keep coming at you because they just don't feel anything. At least until you blast them between the eyes."
"Why go with the curse angle then?" Lindsey couldn't help but ask. It unnerved her to think that Michael was so resilient due to perfectly legitimate medical science and she couldn't help but wonder if Tommy had been onto something in his research.
"From the marketing side of things," Tommy side with a wry grin, "that kind of scientific shit didn't sell back in the day. People were hyped on all that New Age mysticism and wicca stuff in the mid-nineties. My agent wanted something a bit spookier." He sighed and added, "From a personal perspective giving Michael's...evil a medical explanation made him human. And I don't like to think of anything with that kind of antipathy towards human life as human. Making it psychological just means that anybody could become Michael Myers if the right chips were in place and that scares the hell out of me." He met her eyes and she knew at once that Tommy, like her, still held onto that fear of the boogeyman in some way. Perhaps that was why he'd chosen to write about it, not as a way to cash in as some people believed, but as a way to exorcise his fears.
"I don't know what I'm going to do," Lindsey told him in a small voice. "I can't cancel Halloween...that didn't work out so well in...what did you name that chapter? Oh yeah...The Curse of Michael Myers."
Tommy looked at her, surprised.
"What did yo think?" She asked him with a laugh. "That I'd just picked up your book on the day I got you to sign it?"
"Well kinda," he admitted. Then becoming serious again he said, "It'd still be Halloween in Michael's mind anyway so even banning trick or treating and all Halloween parties wouldn't do much but keep people secluded in their homes and it's not like that's ever stopped him before."
"I hate this," Lindsey said bitterly. "He's making me feel so goddamn powerless and I'm the fucking sheriff for Christ's sake!"
Tommy shrugged. "You're a smart girl Lindsey. You'll figure something out. And hey at least this time you won't have me hiding behind the drapes and trying to scare you."
They laughed at the little inside joke. Even though things still seemed hopeless she had to admit that sharing her fears with her old friend had helped calm her down, at least a little.
The door to the classroom opened. Lindsey looked around and saw a girl with long red hair in a shockingly revealing angel's costume standing tentatively at the back of the classroom, her pale blue eyes unsure behind her glasses.
"Oh sorry Mr. Doyle," the girl said, "I'll come back at the end of the day."
"Don't worry about it," Lindsey told her. "I need to get going anyway." In a low voice she said to Tommy, "Do not tell anybody about this alright? The last thing I need is a panicked town on my hands."
"I'll take it to the grave," Tommy said solemnly.
"Don't say that," Lindsey told him sharply. Then, turning, she walked out of the classroom and back up to the foyer, her eyes travelling from student to student.
Whatever it was that she was going to do she wasn't going to let Michael take more innocent lives, even if she had to bite the dust with him to see to that.