Either November 28 or 29
My arms ache. And my head.
I open my eyes to a bleakly lit room. I am sitting up already, and when I try to move my arms, they constrict back to their original positions. I crook my neck back: as best as I can determine, I am handcuffed to a pipe.
My left eye waters terribly. It feels like something is lodged within my eyelid. I blink, my only defense against the gritty dust.
I move my head to survey the room I am trapped in. Immediately, I meet with the familiar white masked figure, who is chained just across the room from me.
I yelp. My handcuffs rattle against the pipe as my hands instinctively try to move towards my mouth.
Michael Myers does not react to my scream. He sits there, staring through his hollow eyes. For a minute, I entertain the idea that it's not Michael; that it's a scarecrow dressed up in a hospital outfit and a mask. And that this is all a practical joke. Because if it were Michael, he would have moved. He would have yanked himself free of his constraints and crawled to me, unveiling a knife that had heretofore been hidden from his captor.
He still doesn't move.
A door creaks open.
The host of this bizarre set-up enters with a tray. She is wearing a set of scrubs, dyed black, and carries a tray. The uniform looks similar to Michael's hospital garb from my bizarre dream.
I brace my watery eye open, so I can see clearly who has done this.
"Don't cry, Judith," Lila Wallace tsks. "You'll smear your make-up."
I look down and notice that I am not wearing my normal clothes. Mrs. Wallace has dressed me in a pair of short shorts and Judith's purple halter top. I lick my lips and taste the heavy layers of lipstick. I suppose the gritty crap in my eyes is clumps of mascara.
Mrs. Wallace crouches down in front of me. "Stop that, Judith. I spent a lot of time on that makeup. I thought you'd like it."
"Mrs. Wallace." I gasp when she lowers the tray to reveal a knife.
"Relax," she croons when I jump. "It'll just be a little cut. To wake him up."
"No," I say. My head swivels back and forth loosely. "That's not . . ."
Mrs. Wallace applies the blade to my leg and slices. Like she promises, the cut is shallow; I can barely feel it through the chill of the room. Then she dabs a Kleenex to absorb the blood.
"He's not at his strongest," Mrs. Wallace explains. "Hasn't been since Halloween. This will keep him occupied for a little while."
"Why are you keeping him here?" I croak.
"You know why, Judith. It's the only way to defeat him. It's the only way to keep him away."
Mrs. Wallace stands and crosses the room, holding out my blood sample as an offering.
"Michael," she says playfully. "Michael, wake up. I found your sister. I found Judith Myers."
I watch in terror as she waves the bloody tissue below his nose. I watch closely for what must be several minutes. Michael does not react.
Lila retreats in disappointment.
"I don't have her blood," I tell her, in a surge of boldness. Or stupidity. I don't know why I am helping with this. "Reincarnation doesn't work that way."
Lila sighs. She balls the tissue and flicks it toward Michael. It lands on his chest.
"Very well. I'll leave you two to get reacquainted."
She strides out of the room and slams the door.
II
I try not to look at Michael while I figure this out. If Michael has been here the entire time, then who has been kidnapping Chelsea, Alice, and the girls from Berryville? Who made all those appearances around my house and at Lindsey's school? Who changed my ring and wrote on my cake and left all those dead rats?
Maybe Mrs. Wallace let Michael out of the chains during those times, but I doubt Michael would return to those chains each time, even in his apparent weakened state. The other option - the more heartbreaking explanation - was that Mrs. Wallace was doing Michael's legwork. Those times she had been doing business in Winoker, she had actually driven to Berryville and surveyed and abducted girls who would be dismissed as runaways. But why? If she had chained Michael to prevent him from killing, why would she supply him with victims?
Unless she hoped Michael would avoid one certain victim.
Lindsey.
Laurie, Tommy Doyle, and Lindsey were survivors of the Halloween murders. And Laurie and Tommy Doyle had moved out of Michael's range.
So why couldn't Mrs. Wallace just move Lindsey out of Michael's range as well? Instead, she went through great lengths to convince me I was Judith's reincarnation so Michael would have another urgent target. Maybe she labeled Judith's name on my things and left the dead rats, then gave me Audrey Rose so I would come up with that idea by myself.
I suppose Mrs. Wallace had planted the box in the Myers' house. And Mrs. Wallace came into my room that night and stabbed me. The simulation of Judith's wounds - that came straight from Audrey Rose. Although she could not have sneaked into the sleep lab the night my stitches reopened, but that might have happened on its own. One coincidence on top of a heap of non-coincidences.
And the dreams . . .
Hypnotism. The song that kept interrupting my sleep, "Don't Fear the Reaper," could have contained a hypnotic signal. Assuming Mrs Wallace learned something about short wave radio, she must have set my clock radio to a local station so she could broadcast that song all those mornings. (I never checked to see if the radio was set at my usual station.) Dreams, memorable dreams, occur in the last few minutes of sleep, so the song could have coincided with those crucial moments of sleep. It also explains why I was compelled to search for Judith's "box" today. I responded to a certain trigger, like a cat yowling. (I recall that I heard a shriek just before I traipsed over to the Myers house.)
I am confronted with the possibility, for the first time in days, that none of my dreams were real. That Judith never sat at the table molding Play-Doh shapes with her brother, or had gotten frustrated with her family's games, or cut class to swap dating tips with her friends. That the rubber ball and the dolphin pendant never belonged to her. That she never burrowed in her bed covers on Saturday mornings or made stupid jokes about toilet paper. That she had not lived in fear ofTonyHammond and had never fought off Ronnie White's pedophiliac advances. (Though she unquestioningly would be better off without the last two items.)
It was all made up by Mrs. Wallace or my imagination.
III
I awaken to the rattle of chains against the pipe. I'm not sure if it's my handcuffs or Michael's chains.
It looks like he shifted position slightly. My eyesight has not improved, so I can't say for sure. I'm only certain that his mask eyeholes are still fixed straight onto me.
Mrs. Wallace checks in on us. She carries in a tray. This one has no knife, only a sandwich and a couple of sports bottles.
She sets the sandwich in front of me.
"What happened to Alice and Chelsea?" I growl. If she was responsible for their disappearances, I want her to admit it. I want her to confront what she did.
Mrs. Wallace's body twitches. She withdraws her hand, clenching it into a claw-like shape.
"No point in worrying about them now," she snaps.
"But you did it. You killed them."
"I didn't mean to," she howls. "None of them were supposed to be from Haddonfield; the police would catch on. When I got to Alice and her boyfriend, I didn't realize it was her until it was too late. She shouldn't have been in Cremona."
My mouth dries.
"And Chelsea?"
"She deserved it," Mrs. Wallace says venomously. "She was snooping through my things. She would have found out about Michael."
She bends over to unlock one of my handcuffs and solicitously pushes the sandwich and a sports bottle towards me. "Aren't you going to eat your lunch?"
Eating is the last thing I want to do after what I heard, but I don't want to be too weak if the opportunity to escape presents itself. I take the sandwich and stuff a bite in my mouth. The dry taste clings to my mouth.
"It might be a mistake," Mrs. Wallace says conversationally, "having you babysit Lindsey. I didn't realize she would get so attached to you and your parents. Because of Annie's death, I guess. This'll be hard on her. I thought it would be the best way to keep an eye on you. Poor Lindsey. But she'll get over it eventually. She's resilient. Don't you agree?"
She doesn't wait for me to answer. She reclasps my handcuffs after I finish eating and take a shallow sip from the sports bottle. Then she sways over to Michael.
She lifts the bottom of mask.
"Don't do that," I warn her, because he hates it when people try to mess with his mask and it might enrage him. She ignores me; of course, she has done this enough times already that she's not worried about his sudden attacks. She places the straw at his mouth. Apparently, he consumes some of it.
I shudder at the sight.
How was Lindsey going to take it when she finds out her mother has gone completely loony? I can't fathom how Lindsey wouldn't find out eventually. Mrs. Wallace could not keep Michael hidden in this house forever without someone catching on. Mrs. Wallace must know that, unless she plans on killing anyone who asked questions.
She just admitted she killed Chelsea.
A sob escapes my throat. Lila twists from Michael's lap to face me. "Oh, stop it, Judith. It isn't any different from what you did."
I narrow my eyes. The way I see it, there is a huge gulf of difference between what Judith did and what Lila is doing. For one thing, Judith never killed anyone.
Lila flings the sports bottle on the floor. Brown broth sprays the room.
"You always were judging me," she shrieks. "You thought you were so much better than me. You and that pregnant slut."
Her mouth folds at a sickening angle.
"Luckily you went to the hospital when you did, Judith. That bitch's spawn sustained us for a long time."
She pats Michael's shoulders in solidarity, then, without glancing back at me, she stalks out of the room.
I hear another scrape of metal. Another rattle of chains. I glance over at Michael again. He has definitely moved. He appears to be sitting up straighter.
"Lila made a mistake," I say. My voice booms within the otherwise silent, empty room. "I'm not Judith Myers."
I doubt he really cares if I'm Judith Myers or not. To him, I'm just another slutty teenager that needs to be punished. Or maybe he just needs to kill. Maybe that compulsion to kill is all that's left of him.
Another rattle. I'm looking right at him, and I don't see him move.
The pressure on my arm eases. I look at my hands. I suspect the worst: that my arm has gone numb from lack of movement. There was this story in Ripley's Believe It or Not about a man who kept his arm raised over his head for months because a bird built a nest in his hand and he didn't want to disturb the nest until after the babies hatched. Afterwards, he was unable to lower his arm because there was no blood flow during all those months and his muscles atrophied.
When I spot the problem, my worry transforms to total elation.
Both my handcuffs have fallen loose.
IIII
Suspicion skitters through my head again and I stop to figure it out.
When Mrs. Wallace leaned over, ostensibly to reclasp my free hand after I ate, she must have instead unlocked my other cuff. But why would she do that? Especially in light of her contempt for Judith? Unless that was a decoy, so Michael would not suspect her of letting me escape.
The longer I stay alive, the longer he is hunting for me. And not Lindsey.
I still find the whole setup freaky. Mrs. Wallace is treating the whole thing like a game. Like she doesn't understand how risky this is. And what if I'm wrong about Mrs. Wallace aiding in my escape? God knows I've been wrong before.
But if I stay here, I will die for sure.
I watch Michael out of the corner of my eye as I, as silently as I can, unhook the handcuffs. He is watching me, but that cannot be helped: his gaze has been riveted at me the whole time. I can only hope the chains hold. Or that he decides to be a good sport and give me a head start.
I free my hands. Then slowly, I stand up. I keep my focus on Michael as I back out of the room, so I'll be alerted if he makes the slightest move.
As my hand hits the doorknob, I get a sudden fear that Mrs. Wallace is waiting at the other side to capture me. I should check, but I don't want to take my eyes off of Michael.
I part the door open a wedge, then I slip through and shut the door.
With the heels of my hands pressing against the door, I look behind me. Mrs. Wallace is not in sight. I listen for movement in the room, for the telltale clanks that Michael has broken out of his chains. The only sound I can hear is my heart thudding noisily within my ribcage.
I just as slowly step away from the door. I move away from the door, on edge because this escape is too miraculously easy. The only way out is a staircase.
It's not until I ascend the stairs and leave the basement that I can place where I've been held captive. I'm in the Doyles' house. If my parents and Sheriff Brackett were searching for me, they would look at the Myers' place. Not at the Doyles' which technically isn't even abandoned.
I don't start running until I venture outside. The cold air bites into my bare skin, slices through my halter top. Once I clear the front stoop, I do not stop until I'm back at my house.
I reach my driveway when I realize another possible twist. That Mrs. Wallace, or Michael himself, is waiting inside, ready to carve me up as soon as I reach safety. I resume my stealth. I find the spare key and fit it in the lock and open the door as quietly as I can.
I stand in the hallway for a moment, shivering from the recent blast in the cold and listening for any surprise attacks. I listen for my parents' voices, as well, or for Lindsey's voice, or any normal sound. The wind batters the walls of the house, but there is nothing loud enough or significant enough.
I creep to the phone and dial Sheriff Brackett's number.
A hand lands on my shoulder.
I scream and whirl around.
"Stella," Mom hugs me reassuringly. I lean against her and start to cry.
