Laurie Strode stepped out of the door of the white frame house on Oak Street and sniffed the air. It was cool and tangy with a faint touch of woodsmoke. Someone had lit a fire in a fireplace somewhere down the street, and for Laurie it had a special significance: It marked, in her own mind, the official start of winter. Of course, winter didn't truly begin until the third week in December, a little less than two months away, and you couldn't ask for a more autumnal event than Halloween, which took place tonight. Nevertheless, Laurie thought about winter, and felt that same mixture of eagerness and dread that most mid-westerners feel about the season.
She was a pretty girl, slim and angular, with straight, brownish-hair falling without fanfare to her shoulders. Farrah hairstyles were all the rage but Laurie thought it was an affection and a pain in the ass to keep up. Though not exactly a bookworm, she had decided there were simply too many more interesting things to do, like reading, than to spend all that time washing, blow-drying, teasing, and combing, to say nothing of dyeing or frosting your hair if you really wanted to do that trip the right way.
She dressed in simple school attire, a print skirt, knee socks, sensible shoes, and a boy's shirt under a sweater. Loaded down under two heavy book bags, she appeared to be round-shouldered and flat-chested, but that didn't worry her. She knew that when she set out to dress and make up for a date, she could hold her own with anybody in her high-school class. But today was a school day and there is no way you can look glamorous on a school day short of getting your own private porter of chauffeur to carry you and your books to school. So you do the best you can, and if your friends tease you about your waddle, you grin and bear it.
She was slightly surprised to note several younger children already dressed in Halloween costumes. Then she realized they were not trick-or-treating at eight in the morning, but merely dressed up for Halloween parties at school. Her cool blue eyes warmed as two little six-year-old girls with eminently solemn faces glided by in satin gowns and rhinestone tiaras, turning occasionally to bark warnings to the gruff little pirates and cowboys who teased them ten paces behind. She wasn't sure if one of the boys was Tommy Doyle, for whom she was to babysit tonight.
Babysitting, Number one boring job. Boring! Some of her girls friends used babysitting as a means for making out. Perhaps if Laurie were interested in somebody she might do the same thing, but there wasn't anyone in her life right now, so it looked like she would be spending another evening supervising Tommy's addiction to horror movies and satisfying his craving (and, she admitted, her own) for popcorn.
She thought about what her girl friends did with their dates on babysitting jobs. Some of them had confessed - even boasted - that they went all the way with their boyfriends. Laurie wasn't inexperienced, and she wasn't a prude either, but she knew herself well enough to understand she wouldn't be able to handle that trip at the tender age of seventeen. In fact, she sometimes wondered if there was something wrong with her, if she was a little retarded or something. The smoldering fires of adolescence had never really tortured her body the way it did some of her friends (like Annie, for instance). And although almost everybody in her class smoked grass, she not only had never gotten high, she couldn't draw the smoke into her lungs without coughing. And she was too smart to be interested in any other kind of drug.
"Laurie, Laurie," she said under her breath, shaking her head morosely, "at this rate you'll end up to be as sensible as your mother. What a drag!"
"What are you dreaming about, sweetheart?" came her father's voice from behind. Chester Strode stood on the front doorstep, fooling with a keyring.
Oh, the usual: sex and drugs," she laughed, knowing he wouldn't take her seriously.
"Thank goodness," he said. "I was worried you were O.D.-ing on English lit and political
science."
"No danger of that," she retorted. "My parents brought me up to be a straight and decent
kid."
They walked together to his car, a black sedan with "Strode Real Estate" emblazoned in bold red and white on the door. It never failed to embarrass her, this advertisement glaring at people wherever they drove. Maybe things like this were done in Cleveland or Chicago or St. Louis, but in a small town like Haddonfield most people kept a low profile. Oh well, it brought daddy business, and (as her father was fond of pointing out) business meant food and clothes and a college education. So she couldn't really complain.
They stood beside the car for a moment until her father managed to slide the proper key off his ring, which had so many keys on it (he called it his occupational affliction) he looked like a jailer. Handing a simple brass key to her, he said, "Now don't forget to drop this off at the Myers place."
"I won't," she said. She decided to keep it in her hand instead of dropping it into her book bag, where it would be "out of sight, out of mind."
"They're coming by to see the house at ten-thirty. Be sure you leave it under the mat."
"I promise."
She started to walk away.
"Haven't you forgotten something?" he called after her. He stood by the car, head tilted, exposing his freshly shaved cheek.
Laurie walked back and put her lips hastily to his cheek, hoping none of her girl friends was watching, then feeling guilty immediately afterward. Why should a girl be embarrassed about kissing her own father, for crying out loud?
She set out down Oak Street, rolling slightly from side to side with the weight of her books - the famous Laurie Waddle. In her right hand the key to the Myers house seemed to tingle, and suddenly she found herself thinking about the house. It was the one property her father handled that he was ashamed to speak of, and his relief at unloading it for once far outweighed his profit motive. For this was the house in which a seventeen-year-old girl had been brutally slain by her little brother fifteen years ago.
The Myerses had moved away a few months after the tragedy. The grief, shame, and harassment by the press and gawking neighbors and passersby had made their lives in Haddonfield intolerable. From somewhere in Indiana they continued to pay their mortgage loan and taxes, which, as Laurie's father had often said, was a terrible double burden. Not only could they not find a buyer all those years, but they had to bear the emotional burden every time they wrote out a check to support the unsaleable house.
Chester Strode had used every trick in his prodigious salesman's bag to sell The White Turkey, as he'd come to call it. But as soon as prospective buyers heard about the events of October 31, 1963, from neighbors all too eager to tell them, their superstition invariably got the best of them and it was good-bye sale. Mr. Strode couldn't even persuade customers to buy the property for the value of the land. "Buy it and raze the house, if that's the way you feel," he would tell them. But the property was tainted, and no one went for the bait.
Thank God for the New York couple who thought the house was just what they were looking for, and who were too sophisticated to believe the nonsense the neighbors prattled about. In fact, the New York couple actually thought the idea of a haunted house was charming, something they could boast about. So Mr. Strode gave the New Yorkers something else they could boast about - a price so ridiculous, it was (to use his patented phrase) "lower than a song."
Laurie wondered what it must have been like that night for the Myers girl, seeing her tiny
