With death near at hand, a host of crazy thoughts tumbled through Laurie's brain. It was not exactly as they said, your life passing before your eyes. It was more like random snapshots of herself pulled from an unsorted collection: a trip to a Michigan with her father, when their canoe was blown ashore by a violent sudden squall; a two-layer cake baked with her mother, and the discovery they'd made only enough icing for one layer; a baby raccoon she'd kept for a pet until it tore up the den in a fit of rage.
She wondered what it would have been like to go to bed with a man; she wondered who would come to her funeral; she wondered what grades your teachers gave you if you died mid-term; she wondered what they'd dress her in for the funeral, and whether her face would be mutilated when they opened the coffin; she wondered what would have happened if she'd kept her date with Ben Trainer.
She wondered what it was like to die, and to be dead.
She sat at the foot of the couch almost serenely, like a condemned person awaiting execution. Beside her lay Mrs. Doyle's knitting kit. The needles...
The needles!
Her bloodstained hand enclosed one of the long needles at the precise moment his forearm encircled her neck. His arm might have been carved out of mahogany, it was solid and muscular, and for the instant before she acted it clamped off her windpipe as effectively as a steel vise. She smelled the vile reek of blood on his arm and the stench of his breath. She knew that if she hesitated even two seconds it would all be over, for even if he did not strangle her to death, the blade in his other hand might even now be describing the arc that would terminate her belly.
Measuring her next move carefully, knowing it might be her last if she were wrong, she thrust the eight-inch needle over her shoulder in the vicinity of his face. She felt it sink deeply into flesh.
She heard a grunt, and his forearm relaxed long enough for her to slide out from under it. She ran for the stairs, looking behind her for just a heartbeat. He was staggering back from the couch, clawing at a needle buried in his neck. She ascended the staircase three steps at a time despite the agonizing pain in her swollen ankle.
She pounded on the locked bedroom door. "It's me, Tommy, Lindsey. It's me. Open the door, hurry."
Tommy opened the door and peeked out. She rushed into the room, knocking the kid on his behind for the second time. She kicked the door shut and locked it. The children's faces were stained with tears, and their eyes rolled involuntarily. They were perilously close to passing out from shock. She embraced them, shushing. "It's all right, kids. Shhh, it's all..."
She cocked her head. She cold hear movement downstairs. Furniture being shoved around, heavy footsteps staggering toward the stairs.
"Now," she said, fighting desperately to contain the fear savaging her chest, "I want you to change your clothes, Tommy. We're going to take a walk outside."
"It was the Bogeyman, wasn't it?" the boy said, his little body trembling like a trapped
animal's.
"No," said Laurie, listening. There was a heavy thud at the foot of the stairs, then silence. She brightened. If that noise was what she hoped it was, the threat was over. "No, it wasn't."
"I'm so scared," whimpered Lindsey.
"There's nothing to be scared of now," she reassured the little girl. Again she listened. It
was quiet.
"Are you sure?" Tommy pleaded.
"Yes."
"How do you know?"
"Because I killed him."
"But you can't kill the Bogeyman."
"I can, and I did. He's lying at the foot of the..."
Her sentence was shattered along with her peace of mind by a tremendous blow on the door. It held, but the panel closest to the knob arched inward, showering the floor with paint chips. The next blow would shatter it.
Though the fight had all but drained out of her, Laurie moved instinctively to save the children, hauling them into the bathroom. They bawled like cattle in a slaughterhouse as she closed the door on them, shouting "Lock it! Lock the door!" She waited ten lifetimes for the click, and wondered what good it did to lock doors when this beast was able to shatter them like rice-paper screens. Already his fist had broken through the weakened panel and was groping for the lock. She would have liked to strike that vulnerable hand with a heavy weapon, but she couldn't leave her post until the kids locked their door. "Tommy...!"
The bolt clicked on the bathroom door just as the bolt on the bedroom door gave. Laurie backed away, looking around the room for a weapon or someplace to hide, but nothing better than a louvred walk-in clothes closet presented itself. She dashed for it, parting the double doors and slamming them closed behind her.
She noticed a tie rack just inside the door, and she now grabbed a tie and wrapped it around the little porcelain doorknobs so as to hold the double doors closed. What good this would do she didn't know, and she laughed grimly to think that anyone who could punch through half-inch plywood would be fazed by a door of thin pine slats held closed by a necktie. But perhaps it would buy her three seconds to think, to prepare, to defend herself.
Or maybe it would merely buy her three more to live.
She heard the bedroom door burst open and his stumping footsteps enter the room. He growled as he breathed, and again the reek of her friends' blood freshly spilled on his hands permeated the room.
She moved farther back into the closet and sent some empty hangers jingling to the floor. Nice going, Laurie, she said to herself. Why didn't you just shout, "I'm in here, Mr. Murderer!"
He shuffled toward the closet and rattled it with tornado-like force. Laurie retreated to a comer of the closet and slumped to the floor. So this is where you die, she declared inwardly.
A second later the fist came through the louvres with the ease of a hammer smashing a balsa toy. The blood-clotted hand swept the closet, fingers seeking a piece, any piece, of Laurie's body, but finding only clothes and hangers. These fell on her, and with them fell on her exhausted mind the only, the last, thing to do before succumbing to the assassin's crazed assault.
She picked up a wire hanger.
She began to untwist the handle, which consisted of the two ends of the heavy-gauge wire wrapped around themselves. As the killer's hands played up and down the louvre slats she at last managed to separate the two ends of the wire and unbend the hanger. She grasped it tightly halfway up and held it ready.
The door hung on a splinter. The next strike would destroy it. Sure enough, it belled in, buckled, and exploded in a million fragments, and Laurie seemed to see them all in sharply focused slow motion, like the fragments of a life blasted beyond recognition - a father, a mother, a home, a school, a friend, a past, a future, a present...
The snarling thing was inside the closet with her, lashing out at the limp clothing and sweeping it aside or tossing it to the floor. The ferocity of it was wonderful to see, and some detached,
dispassionate part of her watched the performance with admiration, as if it were a circus ring and she safely stood outside.
Then she was no longer a spectator. She was now the prize at the bottom of the bin. Though dark as a coal mine, she could see that he had turned away from the far corner of the closet and now faced her, his eyes as keenly focused in the darkness as hers were. They confronted one another silently except for the hiss of their breath. There followed a moment when Laurie fantasized that he would not make his lunge, that he would tear off his mask and laugh and say it was all a Halloween prank and the bodies across the street were just cleverly made-up store dummies and you could get up now and go home and we'll see you next Halloween.
Or maybe he had decided he'd had enough slaughter for one night and would turn away and deliver himself into the hands of the police. Or maybe he'd succumb at this very last instant to the wound in the neck she'd inflicted in his neck with Mrs. Doyle's needle.
Sure, Laurie, sure. Still dreaming right up to the last, aren't you?
Slowly, deliberately, he drew the knife out of his belt and knelt before her, gauging the precise spot where he would plunge the blade in. She wondered what part of her he would consider prime. He seemed to be studying her the way a butcher studies the carcass of a steer.
She clutched the wire hanger with both hands and concentrated on the one vulnerable area she thought she could damage. She felt his hot stinking breath on her face and knew he would never be closer while she lived. With a prayer to God she thrust the hanger into the black hole in the mask where a glint of eyeball reflected what scant light there was in the room. For a second there was resistance, as if the wire had struck his cheekbone or nose or eyebrow. Then the point punched through with a squish and he recoiled with a primitive howl that would stay in her mind forever as the most chilling sound she'd ever heard.
Reflexively he swung at her with the knife, but she'd already slid out from under and was rolling out of the closet and staggering to her feet. The assailant lurched out after her, both hands covering his face. His knife had dropped to his feet and she saw it and wondered if she could snatch it before he did. Her jab with the wire hanger had penetrated one eye but he had one good one left, and she knew that as long as his heart beat at all he would come on, his determination as fixed as if his entire system had been programmed with but one function: to kill.
She circled out of range of his good eye, but he stood almost atop the knife and she had to get him off it. What she did next was either incredibly or incredibly stupid, and maybe it was a little of both. Picking up one of Mrs. Doyle's perfume atomizers, she threw it at him, shouting "Over here!
Over here, buddy!"
He pivoted in the direction of her voice, and as he did she pivoted with him so as to keep to his blind side. He staggered toward the spot she'd been in, giving her the opportunity to lunge for the knife. She grasped the handle with both hands. Suddenly all the agitation drained from her, and a calm and clarity settled upon her. "Over here, pal. Here I am. Come and get me," she beckoned, almost seductively.
If anyone had told her a mere three or four hours ago that she would be shoving a knife into a man's body she'd have had that person certified and committed to the funny farm. But now that she realized that this nightmare wasn't going to end by itself, that no one was going to shake her shoulder and say, "Come on, wake up, it's time to go to school," she felt capable of anything. She had, in the course of a half hour, gone from a wide-eyed innocent to a willing, even eager participant in this deadly game. No soldier had ever gone through a quicker basic training.
With one hand over his blind and bloody eye and the other swiping the air for a piece of his tormentress, he stumped toward her, bellowing in rage and pain. She crouched so that he loomed over her filling the space above with his black presence.
Now, Laurie?
No, not yet, one more second, let him get close enough to stumble over you.
Now, Laurie? Now, please? Hurry, before it's too late.
Yes. Now. Do it now, Laurie.
Just as his knees were about to collide with her, she plunged the blade upward with both hands into his groin. The knife went in so easily she wasn't sure if she'd actually stabbed anything.
Only his bellow of pure pain confirmed the strike. She wanted to twist and slash the blade inside his guts the way he'd done to Annie, but he dropped away from her, groaning, to a comer of the room, and she didn't want to risk administering a coup de grace in the dark.
The kids, meanwhile, were crying hysterically in the bathroom, and she had to get them out. She'd heard of people actually being frightened to death, and now she knew it was entirely possible. As it was, the kids would bear the mark of this traumatic night in their souls forevermore.
And you, Laurie said herself as she rushed to the bathroom door, won't do so badly in that department yourself.
It took her several minutes of pleading and reassuring to get them to open the door. She kept looking over her shoulder and listening. There was a stirring in the comer, but presently it ceased. He's got to be dead, she told herself. But her mind played back the memory of the big pickerel her daddy had caught on a trip he'd taken her on to the Wisconsin woods. Having forgotten to bring his creel, he wrapped the fish in newspaper and placed it in an old shopping bag. On the way home a half hour later, the fish, which she had thought long dead, began a violent death thrash that had startled both of them so much, her father had nearly driven into a tree.
At last she coaxed the children out of the bathroom. They fell blubbering into Laurie's aims. Their eyes were swollen from crying, and they trembled like puppies. "Listen to me, listen, children," she begged them. "Catch your breath. Breathe deeply, and don't think about it anymore. It's all over."
"You said that before."
"No, this time it really is all over. Now, I want you to walk to the door, down the stairs, and right out the front door."
"You're coming with us," Lindsey said, a question and a command.
"Listen to me. I want you to walk down the street to the MacKenzies and knock on their door. You tell them to call the police and send them over here. Do you understand?"
"Laurie, you come with us," Tommy pleaded.
"No! Do as I say."
She guided them across the bedroom to the head of the stairs and sent them off with a smack in the fanny each. They scampered downstairs and fled screaming into the night as Laurie collapsed on the top step to catch her breath and summon her wits for one last visit to the bedroom to make sure the monster was dead. She would never be able to sleep again if she did not witness for herself that it would never more raise a hand against mankind.
She buried her face in her hands and fought to regain control of herself.
Thus situated, she did not see the shadowy shape dragging itself out of the bedroom.
The shrieking came from the next block, and Loomis knew this was no Halloween prank. It was too late for children to be outside, and if that was not true terror in their cries for help, Loomis did not know what true terror was.
He cut across the lawn to find them racing up a walk to a white ranch house. They saw him, a Mephistophelean figure in goatee, bald head, and trench coat fluttering in the wind, and they shrieked even louder, turning tail and fleeing into a backyard. "It's him, the Bogeyman!" he heard one shout.
He hurdled a rustic fence and dashed into the yard. "Children, it's all right," he murmured in his most reassuring tone, "it's all right, kids, I'm your friend."
They were not difficult to find. He spotted their light clothing behind a tree too narrow to conceal them, and though he knew it would scare the wits out of them if their wits hadn't been totally scared out of them already, he had to capture them to find out what they were running away from.
