CHAPTER 9: Recovery

Jamie saw him at recess.

She had eaten her lunch with Billy, who still sat with her and talked with her, even though he never talked about Halloween. Billy then had to leave for his special class (to help with his stutter, he had said), so she had been left alone, since John was with his own friends.

But Jamie kind of liked it this way.

Nobody really bothered her anymore. Kyle and his friends had stopped saying mean things to her. Nobody really even talked to her. Her classmates didn't, and neither did her teacher. Sometimes she felt invisible, because they wouldn't even look at her now. But she didn't mind much. She didn't really feel like talking to anyone either. And since the teacher had stopped constantly telling her to get back to work, it made it a lot easier to just stare out the window all the time, thinking back to…

(Halloween)

…thinking about their new house (big and scary and really, really close to where it had happened) and where John was (just in the classroom down the hall, where nothing could happen to him) and where Mommy was (all the way on the other side of the building, which was far away, too far away for Jamie).

Jamie and John had tried to take lunch in Mommy's room once, and Mommy had let them for a while, but she had eventually told them they had to go outside like the other kids. But at least she was at the school with them. At least Jamie could see her sometimes. She thought it was funny how before, having Mommy in the same school had made her want to hide from all the other kids. Now, she just wanted to see her mommy all the time.

She had been so scared that night (Halloween) when the police came and pulled her and John and Mommy apart.

Sometimes she had dreams that the police took Mommy away and she never came back. That they told her that she and John had to live with the Carruthers forever. She had been so scared that the first week Mommy came back, she'd asked if she could sleep with Mommy in her room. Mommy had hugged her and told her everything was okay and let her. Later, Jamie had just tried to not sleep at all, except she started getting in trouble for napping at school all the time.

But it was still better than dreams about…

(Halloween)

Maybe this was why Mommy was talking about pulling her and John out of school and teaching them at home.

And all of that was why Jamie had been alone and wandering near the fence that went all around the playground, and how she saw him.

Uncle.

He'd just been standing there, across the street from the school, hiding in the shadows of the tree. He looked different from the times when she and John and Mommy had visited him in the hospital, and from when she had seen him on… that night. He had a big coat with a hood which hid his face, and he wasn't wearing a mask. Still, Jamie had known it was him.

(Halloween.)

Jamie also had nightmares about him. That night. A few times it was him chasing her through a dark street. Sometimes it was in the car, with fire and everything spinning. But mostly it was when he had tried to grab her. She would wake up crying, and John would wake up too. Sometimes he would crawl in bed next to her. He didn't have bad dreams, he said, he just couldn't sleep very well. He also said she kicked really hard when she dreamed, so it wasn't much fun for either of them. But it felt good to be near him. The doctors had put them in the same room in the hospital, but John got to leave early, so there was one scary, scary night where Jamie was all alone, no John, no Mommy, wondering if they had died or been taken away and she was going to be left all alone.

Most of all, Jamie hadn't wanted to look at or be near her uncle. She had told Mommy that, thinking Mommy would tell her to be a big girl and that Uncle wasn't actually bad. Instead Mommy had nodded and hunkered down to her level and told Jamie that it was fine, that she'd said that she'd been scared of Uncle too, and sometimes she still was, and that it had taken a very long time for her not to be, and if Jamie was scared then Mommy would make sure he never came near her and that she would never, ever have to see him again.

But Jamie had seen him, many times, sometimes at school, sometimes at home. At first she had thought she was imagining it, and she hadn't told anybody at all, because even if Kyle thought she was crazy, she didn't want John and Mommy to think so. But then John had seen him too, and Mommy had overheard them talking and said, yes, he was there. So she'd known her uncle was watching them.

At first she'd been so scared she'd run inside the house to find Mommy, or closed her eyes to not look. She'd even screwed up the courage to ask her teacher for a seat farther from the window so she wouldn't be tempted to stare outside. But after a while, she'd noticed that he had never really done anything to her. And that was a bit strange, because they were all alone now too, in the big house at the end of the road where it happened. The car, and Mommy getting hurt, and Uncle. She had looked at the place where the car had crashed just a few days ago. There was still a big burnt spot where the fire had been, and she had remembered waking up and Uncle grabbing her hand and pulling her out...

Mommy had sighed and told them that she hadn't wanted them to move to this house either, because of everything that had happened. Jamie still didn't like going outside the house because of that. She didn't like going near the hills or fields because of… that night. But Mommy said it was safest here, that they had to be away from the town.

So they were alone, just her and John and Mommy… and Uncle.

Who hadn't done anything to them. Who Mommy said had saved them, once. Who had pulled her out of the car, and carried Mommy when she was hurt, and – Jamie suspected this, deep down – had done something to the strange, scary doctor that had made him go away.

And Mommy had said she was not scared of him anymore.

So now, instead of running, Jamie walked closer to the fence. To her uncle. Even if it made her feel all shivery inside.

Uncle moved behind the tree. She did not see him emerge.

Jamie looked behind her, but all the other kids were playing far from her, and the recess ladies weren't looking at her either. She felt all sneaky, like when she tried to do her homework under her table in class. Still looking behind herself, she continued to walk until she reached a corner of the fence that was half covered with bushes and trees.

She managed not to jump when Uncle stepped out from behind one of those bushes.

Jamie took a big breath, like her Mommy sometimes used to do. She was behind a fence, and he wasn't moving... and Mommy had said she wasn't scared.

"Uncle?"

It was shadowy enough under the bushes and trees that she couldn't have seen his face clearly, even without the hood on, and she had to arch her neck back to look at him. She could tell, when he tilted his head down a bit, that he was looking at her, but otherwise, he didn't move.

I was scared of him, too, Mommy had said. But Mommy could talk to him now; she could be near him.

And she remembered, before the car crash, the fire, before he had broken through a window to grab her… that Uncle had chased her into an alley but had not done a thing, except to stop, and look at her, and hold out a hand…

So Jamie lifted her hand, palm up, and placed it on the fence, watching him warily, the chain-link bumpy against her fingers.

For another moment, he remained unmoving. But then, he stepped close – very close – and bent down to her level, bent down until their faces were almost level. He put his hand on the fence too, right where hers was. His hand was really big. She could feel the heat of his palm against hers, very different from the cold metal, and when she stared into his hood, she could just see his face, covered by strands of his long hair. She smiled tentatively at him, and felt him press his hand harder on the fence, on her hand, fingers curling through the links.

"Hey, girl by the fence!"

Jamie dropped her arm and turned. One of the proctors had found her and was beckoning her over.

"What were you doing over there, kid?" the proctor asked when Jamie had come over.

Jamie tucked her arms behind her back. "Nothing."

The proctor eyed her suspiciously, then glanced back at the fence. "Pretty sure I saw somebody skulking around there. Did they try to talk to you?"

"No." She stared at her feet. "Nobody was there." And indeed, when Jamie turned to look, her uncle was gone.

"Well, if you see anybody, don't talk to them. Especially now, with…" The proctor stopped herself. "Just don't go where we can't see you. Go play on the swing set."

"Yes ma'am."

"I saw Uncle at recess today."

"I know," John said, looking at his sister. "I saw you."

They were waiting for their mother to pick them up from school; Jamie was swinging her legs as she sat on the bench. Mom would usually pick them up right from their classroom, but sometimes she had really long meetings, so they would wait for her by the office, or Mom would have Rachel come by and take them home. But Rachel wasn't coming around as often, and John preferred it when Mom would just get them. Once he had been sitting at home with Rachel, waiting for what seemed like a long, long time for his mom to come home, getting more and more scared that she wasn't ever going to walk through the door, that something had happened to her…

"He didn't do anything," Jamie told him, eyes big. "He was just looking."

"He's always looking," said John.

Which he was. John had seen him too, many times, a lot of it outside their house, sometimes at school. Once, he even thought he saw him when Mom was shopping, but he hadn't been too sure about that time. He didn't like looking out windows anymore because of that – not his room, or the car, or the classroom.

He wondered if Jamie was going to stop being afraid of Uncle now. Jamie had had a lot of bad dreams lately. For some reason, John didn't, or at least not as much as her. She was always waking him up, or kicking him in her sleep, which he got angry at even though he wasn't asleep anyway. Mom had had to tell him to be nicer to his sister, that what had happened to both of them had been very scary and while it was okay to feel mad or sad, he also shouldn't take it out on other people.

He wasn't being mean though, or at least he wasn't trying to be. He was scared too. That was the problem – he still felt scared, but Jamie didn't.

A lot of the other kids had left the school by now. John hoped Mom would come out soon; his stomach always started aching if she was really late. He saw Molly and waved bye to her as she got into her dad's car; she waved back. That was nice. Jamie had said Kyle and his bully friends had stopped teasing her. He had also stopped talking to John… but that was probably because the one time he did (It was your uncle, your uncle murdered everybody on Halloween and he's gonna do it again!), John had punched him in the face. He remembered how it felt, like a big hot wave. He had gotten into big, big trouble for that, with his teacher, his principal, and Mom.

But mostly Kyle had stopped because everyone had stopped talking to them. Except for Molly. And Rachel would still babysit, though their house was so far now she couldn't do it so much.

And he knew it was because of Uncle, because he was Michael Myers.

Mom had sat both of them down and told them the whole story. She had said that their Uncle had killed a lot of people when he was younger, a lot of his own family, and that was why she had a different name from him. She'd said she hadn't known for a long time that they were related, and then he had escaped and killed many more people before getting sent back to jail again, and that for a long, long time, she'd been afraid of him. She'd said she wasn't so scared anymore, that she didn't think their uncle would hurt them, but it was okay if they felt differently. And she'd said a lot of other people knew, and that was why they would look at them funny or talk about them differently.

It was why she'd moved them so far away, she'd said, so they wouldn't have to see that anymore. Even though it was to the same place where the weird doctor had driven them off the hill, where they'd been stuck in the car until it was blown up, where Mom had been hurt…

Jamie didn't like to go outside because of that, but John… he couldn't help wanting to go outside. He didn't like to look at the place… but sometimes he really, really wanted to, wanted to walk over to the burnt out spot where the car had been, or look around in the grass where Mom had been hurt. Maybe if he looked hard enough, he could stop being so scared… or even change everything so it was like back to before.

John also wasn't sure if he was more or less scared after that talk. He had to remember that Jamie hadn't seen everything he had. He hadn't seen their uncle kill someone. Sometimes it was all he could think about. Once he had almost drawn a picture of it, until he realized his teacher wouldn't like it. He wondered if it had hurt, to be cut up like that. He'd tried asking Mom what happened to people after they died, but she'd said she didn't know. He'd even tried looking at her books, especially the ones about Uncle, but Mom had hidden them. And when he went to the school library, the librarian would always look at him funny if he went to certain sections.

Mom had told them that she would never, ever let Uncle hurt them.

And there was one more thing.

They didn't have neighbors at their new house, just fields and forest and more fields that all looked the same. There weren't even many lights, and they kept flickering in and out because nobody took care of them, according to Mom. So when it got dark and he was outside, it was really easy to get lost.

That had happened to John a couple weeks ago. He had been outside, trying to play but mostly staring at the spot where the car accident had been, and his ball had rolled off. He'd run off to retrieve it and thought he could find his way back, but then had realized he couldn't see the house because he had run down a hill and the grass was tall, and all of a sudden the sun was setting and it was getting very dark and very cold.

He'd wandered randomly for several minutes, getting more scared and more cold, and was just starting to wonder if he should start yelling for Mom, when he had walked – or crashed – into something big and hard and tall, and for a second he'd thought it was a tree but no, it was his uncle, who had been standing behind him.

John had yelped and almost started running in the opposite direction, except that he was chilly and tired from walking and very afraid of the dark and getting more lost, especially because the other way led only to trees. But his uncle hadn't really done anything. John couldn't really see him at all, but he remembered that his head had been tilted down and having the funny feeling that Uncle was looking at him. But he still hadn't moved, or talked, and finally John had said,

"Um... I'm lost."

There had been a long, drawn out silence. Then his uncle had turned around and started walking. Or he did for about five feet before stopping, facing John, and staring at him. Only at that point had John realized: Oh, I think he wants me to follow him.

So he had, which was hard because Uncle was very tall and walked very fast, and all the grass he pushed out of the way would come flying back to whack John in the face, so he had to run to keep up with him only to keep getting slapped with wet grass – but then they were climbing up a hill and John had seen the porch light of the house, and he knew that his uncle had managed to lead him back there.

Said uncle had just turned around as soon as he saw John was atop the hill and started walking off, probably figuring that John knew where he was going now. But before he had left, John had dashed after him (but just a bit) and, gathering up all his courage, said, "Thank you… Uncle."

His uncle might have stopped walking for a moment. Might have tilted his hooded head just a bit, like he'd heard. John still wasn't sure. But then he'd straightened and gone on, and in a few seconds John hadn't been able to see him at all.

When Mom had asked, in a very worried voice, where he'd been, John had told her the truth. He'd thought she'd be angry, or scared, but she had only looked distant, and told him to go get ready for dinner. John had stayed close to the house after that, and he still did not like looking out windows… but he thought maybe he could see why Jamie wasn't that scared anymore. That maybe he wasn't that scared now.

Jamie tugged on his sleeve, pulling him out of his memory. "John, look."

He followed where she was pointing to, across the street, to a shape hidden just between some trees. There he was, just like always, watching.

Then they heard running, and Mom came up behind them, smiling tiredly, apologizing for being late, reminding them to grab their backpacks and lunchboxes. By the time they'd all gotten to the parking lot and piled into the car, John had almost forgotten about seeing his uncle. But Jamie didn't, and he saw her craning her neck behind her to look, just before they drove off. Pushing down his instinct not to, he looked out the window too. But their uncle was gone.

Haddonfield was emptying out.

It was evident even with Laurie living so far from the town. There were less teenagers walking the streets home from school. There were less children in her classroom with every passing month. There were less families shopping at the local grocery stores, less students doing research in the local library, less cars on the road every morning as she drove to work.

She knew it was because of what had happened on Halloween. Every family with children, every retired elderly couple, every resident who lived alone, was finding reasons to get out. Nobody felt safe, not with the knowledge that a known serial killer was walking the streets. Sheriff Barker had finally broken the news the day after Halloween, and a low tension had settled on the town. Nobody went out at night anymore. Police cars could be seen roaming the streets. Laurie knew the station had been inundated with calls the first few weeks from people who insisted they had seen Michael Myers skulking about in their backyard.

Some of it was no doubt true, which was why Laurie had chosen to move.

She had told her children it was to avoid the scrutiny of the town, and to an extent that was true. The whispers from her coworkers had become unnerving in those weeks after Halloween. People in the supermarket, the bookstore, the movie theater, would give her long, lingering looks full of blame. The vice principal had eyed her with trepidation every time she spoke. She'd even spotted some of her own students clustered in the hallways, stopping with guilty expressions on their faces when she looked at them. Jamie and John had told her that all their classmates were avoiding them too, that even their teachers had stopped calling on them. The parent-teacher conference Laurie had attended a month ago had never gone so quick, despite her children's failing grades and worrisome behavior, like Jamie and John's teachers had wanted nothing more than to get her out of their classroom as fast as possible.

All of that was part of the reason for moving, even though the house at Cherrywood Lane was probably the last place she wanted to go. She knew it had been the site of a traumatic event, both for her and her children; knew Jamie and John did not like being there; knew the move, just five months after Halloween, had been upsetting for their routines, was at least partially responsible for the changes in their schoolwork, their activities. She tried to justify it, telling herself that it had been cheap, that Annie and Mr. Brackett had been willing to let it go at a far cheaper price than she really deserved, that it was one of the few houses that was far from town that was not connected to a farm.

But there was a greater reason, confirmed when her children had whispered that they had seen a figure watching them at school or when she saw a dark shape outside her window.

Wherever she'd go, Michael would follow. So she would go as far away from the town as possible, and hope that her brother would leave its people alone. It was all she could do.

It had been difficult. First had been the long days of healing. She had spent two weeks in the hospital just going through all the surgeries and check-ups. Once she was let out, she'd had to spend a further week either lying in bed or moving very, very slowly so as not to re-open her wounds. Her children had visited every day while she was in the hospital, and she had probably annoyed the Carruthers to distraction with her constant phone calls.

Her leg had taken months to heal – in fact, the doctors had removed the cast the day before she had sold her house. Over ten years ago she had been forced to wear a heavy boot for her ankle after Michael… well, after she had hurt her ankle. But this had taken far longer and was definitely more of a hassle, forcing her to trundle about in a wheelchair or hobble on crutches everywhere.

Then there was the moving itself. With so many leaving, housing prices in the town had fallen; Laurie had had to sell her own house at a loss, and that process itself had taken longer than it should have. She then had to pack up everything to move into a house that was in the process of falling apart. There had been a few days where the power wouldn't go on, there was no hot water, or the heating had broken down. And with only herself and the twins to move in the furniture, it had taken some time to fully furnish the rooms – she was sure half their things were still packed away in boxes.

It had been strange to enter the house as well, to remember her old bedroom, Annie's old bedroom... the living room where Sheriff Brackett had told her the truth about her heritage. And outdoors, where she and Dr. Sartain and Michael had confronted each other...

But it was far from town, and she would take anything to lighten the burden she had placed on herself.

She had stopped following the local news; she didn't want to know about mysterious disappearances or violent deaths anymore. She didn't want to wonder if a teenager vanishing without a trace was due to an accident, running away, or something more sinister. And she did not need Jamie or John to see anything violent, to have any reminders of what they had experienced. So she tried to fill their days with activities (puzzles, coloring, trips to libraries and bookstores and theaters, movie nights, game nights… anything to keep out the empty night), to stick to their old routines, to talk to them freely and hold them when they were scared and reassure them that nothing would ever happen to them.

There had already been one incident. She'd been driving home at night – she'd had a meeting, Rachel had been babysitting the twins. It had been in the fields, she might have missed it if not for the fact that the victims had been driving a gigantic truck with multiple high beams which had illuminated the shape in the darkness – drawn his outline, black against the white lamps, arm raised up, swinging a knife down.

Laurie had never run so fast in her life as then.

She hadn't been able to save the two men, but she'd been able to save the girl and her dog. The girl had been hysterical, babbling something about how her father and husband had seen a bum wandering their land for the last few days and had tried to teach him a lesson this night, only for the bum to start fighting back.

Laurie had almost gagged at the sight of one of the men, impaled on the antlers that had decorated the hood of the truck.

Go! Get out of here, get out of here, now!

In the time it took for Laurie to throw herself in front of the girl, for Michael to shove her aside, she'd managed to buy a few precious seconds of distraction. Enough time for the sobbing girl to get back in her truck and tear off across the fields.

Enough, Michael! Enough! Enough.

She'd known then, by the stance of his body and the weight of his glare at her, that she'd come close, terribly close to overreaching his limits. He had not even acknowledged her presence, had turned his back on her and disappeared across the fields. But she'd saved the girl. The two men, those would stay with her forever, but the girl at least would not.

For the next few days, she had kept waiting for a police car to pull up to her house for questioning, but there had been nothing. Perhaps it had been so dark and frenetic that the girl had never gotten a close look at her face. Perhaps she did not want to relive the experience, wanted to pretend the two men had simply disappeared. Laurie had later read in the paper about a freak tractor accident...

She had watched, especially, to see if it would be Hawkins pulling up to her door, questioning her. Laurie had seen him a couple of times, usually just passing him by in a store, out on the street. He did not ignore her like the other townspeople, but he did not greet her either, just fixed her with a level gaze. She always did the same. She was surprised he had not set officers watching the house; perhaps he thought it so isolated it would be instantly noticed, or the sheriff did not want him wasting resources on following her.

She wondered what he was doing. If he was still watching for Michael, waiting for his chance.

When they reached home, Jamie and John pulled her aside and told her they had seen their uncle outside their school. In a whisper, Jamie also said she had gone up to him, how he had responded to her. Laurie nodded and sent them to their rooms to do homework. She waited until they were upstairs, then pulled aside the curtain of the window, looking out into the surrounding forest.

Nothing to be seen. But she knew he was there.

She saw him almost every day now. At first, she had thought it was her paranoia, her trauma returning as it did those first few years, when every movement seemed to be him. Slowly she had realized it really was him out there, that when she would shut her eyes to will his image away, he would remain.

Laurie thought that should frighten her. Several years ago it would have. Now, she only felt… what? Acceptance? Resignation? Or maybe just relief, because if he was here, then at least he was not near Haddonfield. At least she knew he was not killing innocent people.

Jamie and John had claimed to have seen him multiple times in other locations, but she most often saw him here, near her home. She thought it was partially because the schools were too near the town, too near people who might recognize him – but she had to admit that Michael had never particularly seemed to care who saw him. And he had his methods for dealing with those who tried to do something about it.

No, most likely he was here because she was here.

Over eleven years ago, he had brought Laurie to the Myers house – their old home. Laurie wondered now if there had been some kind of transferal of allegiance – if out on that field, when she had returned his photos to him, she had signaled something only his mind could comprehend, if he now thought of this location as "home". It was hard to say how she felt about that.

Dr. Beckett had suggested that Michael might be released, come live with her. She had reacted with horror to that suggestion. But now that she was virtually living that life… the fact that she didn't find it upsetting… well, perhaps it showed the extent to which anyone could become used to something.

Laurie opened the fridge, trying to resume her normal schedule. Dinner, then help Jamie and John with homework, some grading, maybe a cheerful children's movie to wrap up the night. She set a pot boiling, her thoughts drifting as she skinned and sliced vegetables.

There had been one other incident.

A few weeks after they had moved in, Laurie had seen a car parked a little off the road near the house. It had driven up sometime in the evening and just idled there for hours. She hadn't dared go out – she was a single mother, alone in the house with two children, far from any neighbors, and there were many in town who knew it. She had not thought of calling the police, had not wanted to face Hawkins's flat look. Instead, she had locked all the doors and windows, kept the lights on downstairs, and had Jamie and John bundle all together into her bed, her bedroom door locked with a chair up against the knob and a telephone plugged into her nightstand. Throughout that sleepless night, she had considered getting some kind of guard dog…

The next day, the car had remained where it was parked, but shut off. It had been the weekend; Laurie had not dared to leave the house, thinking she might come back to find it robbed... but it had not moved. Not that day, or the next, or the one after, when she had finally had to leave for work, Jamie and John for school. When she drove by, she had not seen anyone sitting in the car... just, ominously, a broken window.

When she returned that afternoon, she'd finally given in and called the police to report the car. They had arrived – perhaps a few minutes delayed, though that might have been her imagination. There had been a check around the area, quite routine, before they sent someone to tow the car. She'd never found out who the car belonged to, though she'd heard a couple rumors, of men missing from another town, of a minor uptick in break-ins before they disappeared, of police looking for evidence of foul play. Beyond that… she did not want to know.

Sometimes she imagined her brother walking in a radius around the house, like some kind of terrifying barrier of protectiveness – possessiveness. Or was it around her?

How long would it last? As long as he lived? As long as she lived?

When she had been in the hospital, her doctor had casually mentioned that had a bullet hit her liver, or an artery, or her spine, she might have been paralyzed or comatose or dead. Michael was ten years older than her, by all rights he should die before her, and that was assuming he just dropped dead of natural causes rather than a more violent death… but what if she died first, through accident or illness? What if she was indeed the only remaining link Michael had to his humanity – and he lost her? What would happen to the town? She tried to imagine a completely unhinged Michael wreaking his rage on Haddonfield, but always shuddered away from the horrible fantasy.

And what about her children? Did he truly only see them as extensions of her who would lose any protection they had upon her death? Or did he actually see them as separate beings, worthy like her, for some inconceivable reason, of his special regard?

She did not know, and the only person who did would never tell her.

Evening fell; she finished dinner, ate with Jamie and John. They completed their homework , had their bath, took a little time to watch half a movie. Finishing their homework – that was a bit of a new one. She could only hope her twins would remember to bring it – work completion at school was becoming an issue for them, though she thought they were improving. Laurie considered again pulling them out and placing them in some kind of home schooling. There were several reputable programs with approved curriculum that she could use, and it would keep them close to her, help them recover until they were ready to return to their old school… if they ever did. And she would soon have plenty of time on her hands, if the school kept losing students – she was one of the younger teachers, and sooner or later there would not be enough children to justify keeping her on...

She looked out the window then, just out of habit, and saw him. Waiting.

Jamie and John were in bed by the time she headed outside.

He had never come into the house; he'd never tried, she'd never invited him to. She didn't try to interact with him more than necessary, didn't leave food out, as if he were a wild animal she was trying to feed and tame. She didn't know anything about how he spent his day, other than watching her and her children; didn't know what areas he frequented, where he slept, how he cared for himself.

She just knew he was always there.

And sometimes, he would come to her.

That, she knew now, had been at the heart of Dr. Sartain's obsession, him and Dr. Beckett and Dr. Loomis and the journalists, all of them trying to categorize their relationship. The non-entity. The victim. The sister. The only person Michael listened to. She wondered which of them had come closest to the truth, how correct any of them were. Perhaps all of them; perhaps none of them. Perhaps it was as simple as the fact that she had something he craved, something she had needed as well, a nebulous sensation she had caught the edges of that Halloween night, as she had stood in that field and rested against him and he against her. She thought that maybe she brought a peace to him, a quiet to whatever was raging in his mind.

Laurie didn't know if she was right. She didn't know why, or how he chose when to come, knew she'd never get an answer even if she asked. She just knew that he did. Like her other burden, she had come to accept her strange, contradictory role in his life, without needing to dissect its precise nature.

From the moment she'd been born, she'd occupied an unreachable, unfathomable place in his mind, and that was where she would remain, for as long as either of them lived.

She stood on the porch, the lights dimmed down so that it barely illuminated the area beyond the house. She stood and waited, peering into the night. Though she could not see, she could sense his approach, the crunch of his footsteps on the grass, the growing weight of his gaze, his presence.

The footsteps slowed, stopped.

He stood there now in front of her, a hooded figure in a ragged coat, gazing at her, just outlined by the dim porch light. She took one step down to draw nearer. The porch was high enough that she was almost at his level, perhaps a little taller than his shoulder.

Slowly, she raised a hand and pushed back his hood, felt and moved aside some hair. It was too dark to see his face clearly, but she knew at least that he was not wearing the mask. For a moment they stood there, letting the memories, the thoughts, float around them and drift away.

Laurie rested a hand on his arm, not tight enough to grip. Nevertheless, he sensed it, and she felt him lean into her touch. She tilted her head towards him, and he in turn moved his body towards her, close enough to feel one another. As she looked up, regarded him, she thought she could make out the shadows of his hair, the barest trace of his face. His body blocked out everything else, the light, the stars, the moon.

She lowered her head and felt him press closer. His coat brushed against her forehead; she could feel the warmth of his body heat. She breathed, felt him breathe as well.

She said, "Hello, Michael."

END

And that's all she wrote! EXCEPT... for this monster of an author's note.

First, I want to say a massive thank you to everyone who has reviewed this story and Rules of Conduct. I genuinely never thought either of these stories would get even half the number of glowing reviews they've received, or that it would become one of my popular fics. I just want everyone to know that I read every one of them and that they all make me smile, and that I go back periodically and reread some of them when I'm having a bad day. Half the reason I eventually wrote a sequel was because of them, though I did become ludicrously nervous over whether this one would measure up to the first. I hope it has.

I also want to apologize to any fans of Karen and Allyson's characters from the 2018 movie. I really did try to include Karen in the story (Allyson was impossible given that Laurie's age in this story makes her way too young to be a grandmother), but I was hampered by the fact that I'd killed off Laurie's husband in Rules of Conduct and couldn't think of a way for Laurie to suddenly get a baby without it coming off as OOC. I felt bad, because Karen has huge potential to be important and an interesting contrast to Jamie and John's character, but it just didn't work. If I really regret it, I'll retcon her in somehow.

Finally, a couple of little things I wanted to bring up. 1) Find all the random references to other Halloween movies! I went a little overboard with that. 2) Names are important! Names of chapter and the names people use to refer to Laurie. Again, way too much fun with that. 3) Whereas I thought of Rules of Conduct as having a more out-and-out happy ending, I did try to make this one a bit more ambiguous. Don't know if I succeeded, but that was my intent.

And lastly, I have no intentions of writing a sequel to this one, but given there are two more Halloween movies coming out, I'll probably end up changing my mind...