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Halloween, 1978.
The defining night of her life.
A night as inescapable as birth or taxes (but not death, because she knows to leave the phone on the hook and forward those calls to voice mail) which comes no matter how often she plays the game. Rearrange the board, roll the dice; Halloween, 1978. Draw a card, move the cheap diecast avatar to a new space; Halloween, 1978. Flip the board, refuse to play, go to sleep early; Halloween, 1978.
If some greater, cosmic being were to tell her that she’s lived through Halloween, 1978, more times than she’s been born she’d believe it. In reality— a twisted, sad, too true reality— it’s more of a birthday then Whenever, 1961, printed on her birth certificate (under what name and issued to which family she gets no say). There is a time she knows she lived—a full seventeen years of life as Laurie Strode, which she may as well live again— but it’s all unimportant background in the grand joke of the universe.
Her origin—the origin that matches birth certificates stuffed in a file cabinet at Haddonfield Memorial, carefully kept folded at the bottom of a shoebox in Pamela Strode’s closet, tacked up next to her polaroid in Sam Loomis’ study— is a multiple-choice affair. Laurie has a key with the answers carefully bubbled in, but the test’s adaptive and she never manages a passing grade. It’s not like her—seventeen years of pre-Halloween, 1978, Laurie Strode—to perform so poorly, but this is one she’s not sure she’d pass even if she cheated. It’s no easy feat when your administrator is the devil (or possibly God, but she usually thinks of him as an overly permissive principal who doesn’t care so much about the welfare of his students as much as acing those standardized tests.)
She is born sometime in 1961. That much is consistent. She is always born (even if she’d really rather sleep in today, thank-you-for-understanding) in 1961, in Haddonfield, Illinois at Haddonfield Memorial Hospital. She is a healthy baby. Her first hours are filled with screaming, a cruel bit of foreshadowing on behalf of the universe. In the omnipotent clarity of birth, where she understands God (or whatever Entity saw fit to make small meatsacks filled with false hope) not to be compassionate, but a tyrant; fickle and cruel. It’s yet another prank at humanity’s expense: the cycle of life and death. You’re either too small or too broken to do something about what’s to come (or what’s to come again, after yet another mulligan). Foresight fades away to a baby’s lack of memory retention, or hindsight ceases to the unflinching chill of oblivion.
She is born, and the doctor doesn’t comprehend this act perpetuates a cycle. Life, death, life—repeat ad nauseum. He delivers the news to her parents with the glee of an executioner enamored with his craft.
Her father is thrilled. Most often his name is Myers, rarely it’s Strode. Static role, exchangeable character.
Myers never has a chance.
Morgan Strode is different. He may not always play in the beginning of her narrative, but he finds his way in eventually. Her father, even when he’s not. He is always there, a member of her small supporting cast, even if it’s a minor part— a footnote. Lucky bastard.
Whatever her parentage, Strode or Myers, only child or youngest sibling, Laurie or Cynthia—the importance is benign. Others would disagree, but she’s lived both identities enough to know that it doesn’t matter. She paid attention in English Comp. Shakespeare uses Juliet to ask the audience a simple, but profound question: what’s in a name?
Laurie knows. It’s a distinction without a difference. Fate doesn’t care about once-blood ties. Fate loves a good tragedy. Does it matter what your name is when your older brother instigates a literal blood feud at six years old, or a masked man with a butcher knife just so happens to target you— you— out of all the girls on a suburban street because your family owns the realty company trying to get his shithole family house off the market?
No, it doesn’t. It always finds you, no matter what, no exception, on a brisk night in Haddonfield, Illinois, on Halloween, 1978.
When she’s born as Cynthia—which is most often, she thinks— it’s only a transitionary phase. It’s like Seventeen-Years-of-Laurie-Strode-Pre-Halloween-1978; not built to last. Morgan Strode would call it ‘planned obsolescence’. The role exists to bridge the gap to the day Fate has circled in her calendar with fat, red marker. In her time as Cynthia, she has two parents who ostensibly love her (not that she ever remembers them) and two older siblings who die before she utters her first word. The fall of her family is a national headline. Everyone knows about the ‘unspeakable tragedy’ which occurs at the Myers’s residence in October of 1963. Everyone hears the story of a little boy who stabs his elder sister to death with a butcher knife on All Hallows Eve. It plays on TVs coast-to-coast and features in newspapers across the country. All while she’s still teething.
After the Myers parents die (and there’s no deviation— car accident while Dad Myers is under the influence), little Cynthia is taken in by family friends and has her history erased with a few signatures and a name change. It’s a shoddy job; just good enough for the average survivor of a family’s implosion to live her new life none the wiser, but Fate knows someone in the records department. Fate knows people in the police force and at the kindergarten and at Strode Realty. She’s got connections. One three-way call between Fate, God and the Devil, and Fate can etch together the scuff marks left by the eraser on the adoption papers into something legible. Then, just because she can, she’ll whisper it into the ear of a stoic, white hunter whose days had been spent idling, absent-mindedly staring at blank walls. Dreaming with his eyes open.
She can wake him up.
Basically, Fate is a fickle bitch.
Fifteen years later and Haddonfield will reach national headlines again because some lessons refuse to be learned. It’s unavoidable. It’s death or taxes or Halloween, 1978, and she is Laurie Strode, seventeen and without a date to the dance, with a busy schedule of babysitting and carving jack-o’-lanterns and her skin crawling at the sensation of eyes on her back and a blade in her arm. The day her life changes forever. The narrative term would be ‘inciting incident’, her brain helpfully supplies, because she’s always loved fiction and reading and thinking too deeply about things that really, truly, don’t matter—not when her friends are being stalked and strangled and stabbed and the kid down the street is safe, but will have nightmares for the rest of his life.
In the mundane morning when she’s getting dressed for school, brushing her hair and rushing to get her books together, she never realizes this song and dance number, the epitome of mundanity, is really just the start of the movie, rewound and repeated until the reel’s so tight it could snap. She kisses Pamela Strode—a mother of blood or not— on the way out the door, grabs the key to the old Myers place from Morgan (there’s a showing at ten, but the prospective buyers never show or shoot a courtesy call), and meets with little Tommy Doyle on his route to school.
Tommy is cast in the same roll each time— cheerful, cautious and so, so innocent.
She drops the key off at the Myers place and feels eyes on her back but ignores it. She’s being paranoid, and for no earthly reason. There’s no one else on the street but her and Tommy. She goes to school and thinks about the dance and the holiday and stupid fucking Samuels and his definition of fate (hindsight is everything when you’ve lived a conversation more times than you can count, even if during the midst of it you don’t have a single clue.)
“Answer the question,” the teacher commands the first time Laurie sees the Shape watching her from across the street.
“Costaine wrote that fate was somehow related only to religion, where Samuels felt, well, fate was a natural element, like earth, air, fire and water,” Laurie takes her eyes off the window and turns her attention to the head of the class.
“That’s right,” the teacher says, like God announcing his intentions directly to her face. Just to make sure she’s paying attention. “Samuels definitely personified fate. In Samuel’s writing fate is immovable like a mountain. It stands where man passes away.”
“Fate never changes.”
The rest is clockwork because there can be no deviation. Lynda and Annie— no, no, no not Annie— walk home with her and the Shape follows. Behind the wheel of a stolen car, barely concealed by the brush—it doesn’t matter. He watches and plots and only Laurie seems to notice. When he steps out in front of her while Annie is distracted, Laurie expects it to happen even if she’s not sure why.
She’s never sure why.
She spends most of the evening at the Doyle residence as intended. Tommy is excitable as always, but there’s something on his mind other than Radioactive Man and the other trash comics he keeps hidden from Mrs. Doyle: he’s convinced he’s seen the boogeyman. Laurie should heed him, but she never does. She never even considers it, even though she’s seen the boogeyman too. But on Halloween, 1978, she’s not allowed to remember. Or, rather, she’s not allowed to really comprehend.
Annie phones with news she’s hooked Laurie up with the boy she secretly likes. Laurie worries and frets about Ben Tramer when her time would be better spent screaming at Annie to run from a Pale Rider; the white face of death always just beyond the kitchen window and on the outskirts of their conversation. It’s ridiculous, of course, because Laurie should have no way of knowing that her closest friend has become the focus of the Shape’s obsession—the therapy that usually comes later reinforces it—but whenever Laurie reaches the end of her life and has the revelation that this has all happened before and she’s going to have to start it again, kicking and screaming, she knows it’s a big fat lie. Annie’s going to die—Annie always dies, and Laurie is always powerless— and if she could just force herself to remember next time then maybe she could change one goddamn thing.
She never does. It makes sense. Of all the pain Laurie goes through that night, it’s the loss of Annie that shakes her the hardest. Why would she be able to lessen that pain, even just once? That’s not what Fate wants from her. It’s just endless, repeated suffering until her final breath passes her lips and the memories of previous lives come crashing back to her and she can feel the crushing weight of her own endless cycle of despair. Rise, rinse, repeat.
Annie dies, and so does Lynda and her boyfriend, Bob. Laurie gets to hear it. It’s a tale as old as time: girl answers the phone, mistakes the sound of her friend being strangled as a tacky prank, and listens as said friend dies and gets stuffed into a cabinet. It’s the kind of thing that could happen to anyone; like leaving your keys on the kitchen counter or forgetting to adjust the thermostat when you leave the house.
Laurie wants to scream and scream and scream and
The rest is like it’s been rehearsed: Concern—good ol’ Laurie, worrywart and square team mom— sees her puts the kids to bed so that she can check in on Annie, who should be with her boyfriend Paul at the Wallace’s. She steps outside and shivers against the brisk evening air, walks across the street to the Wallace residence and finds the backdoor ajar. Her careful footsteps are enacted with trepidation. Her heartbeat thuds in her ears as she knows that something is very wrong. She calls out to her friends—Annie says Paul isn’t known for his ‘endurance’, so there’s no way they could possibly still be going at it, and Bob’s van has been outside the house for a while now—hoping she’ll get any sort of reply. The quiet is unsettling.
Cautiously, she ascends the stairs and sees light filter out from behind the slightly ajar master bedroom door. She pushes the door open and finds Annie (cynical, sarcastic, loyal Annie) splayed out on the bed. She’s dressed in the same men’s white button-up that she’d had to put on after spilling something on her own clothes. She and Laurie had laughed about it over an hour ago. Her throat is slit. Above the bed is a tombstone.
OUR
BELOVED
DAUGHTER
JUDITH MYERS
That’s not Judith, Laurie thinks—because her mind is short-circuiting in flashes of hot, white light— That’s Annie.
She finds Bob and Lynda next. She sobs, her heart breaks (again and again and again) and then he appears: Michael Myers, twenty-one years old, clad in a jumpsuit and featureless white mask. He emerges from the darkness as the Shape and carves into her arm with his knife. It will forever bear the raised flesh, a memento of her rebirth (figurative, at least she thinks), like the remnant scar of a c-section.
What happens next is a blur, but within seconds she is vaulted over the stair railing and falls to the landing below. Her leg bends with a vicious crack. Her head spins. She wants to throw up. The Shape appears at the top of the stairs. Laurie can’t scream, the animal instinct which sparks to life inside her not something capable of dialogue. Her desire to survive is visceral. The fear surges through her veins and kickstarts adrenaline which numbs the immense pain shooting through her body. She climbs to her feet and hobbles outside. She can’t stop to breathe. Her voice returns when the October air hits her face. She screams. She bangs on the neighbor’s door. She calls for help but no one comes. She makes a break across the street for the Doyle residence.
The Shape is only a few steps behind.
Laurie thinks about Tommy, who saw the boogeyman and tried to warn her, and Lindsey Wallace, entrusted to her by—she can’t even think her name, not now. She’s got to keep them safe. She refuses to let him get them.
Laurie never knows, in any of the times she goes through this scenario, that the Shape only has eyes for her.
Tommy lets her inside and she sends him upstairs to hide. He’s as scared as she is. She listens to his footsteps pad up the stairs as her heart threatens to rip out of her chest and pound after him. She swallows, takes a deep breath.
She hears someone in the room breathing with her.
A window which was closed is now open. Laurie cries, terrified. She wants to sprint up the stairs and hide with the kids or run out the door and call for help again. Instead, she arms herself to fight off the man who killed her friends and now wants to kill her too. She’s the last line of defense for the kids.
Her hands are shaking, her breath is shallow, her eyes dart nervously around the darkened living room, and she is on the verge of breaking into a fit of anxious sobbing. There’s nothing within reach except the knitting she brought from home. (“Oh, Laurie, you’re such a grandma. What are you gonna do, sew a shawl for prom?” Annie would have laughed)
She lifts the long knitting needle from the layers of yarn and holds it like a knife, then huddles in front of the couch. The Shape attacks from behind, his knife missing and stabbing the cushion. Her reaction is immediate. With one decisive strike, she stabs the needle directly into his neck. He staggers back, grasping at the half-embedded piece of steel jutting from his neck, and collapses.
Dazed, she can barely find the strength to stand. She thinks of the children and it is enough to push her to climb the stairs to ensure their safety. Moments later the Shape follows.
The closet is the only place she can hide. The Shape finds her. He smashes through the door with murderous determination. This moment she relives whenever she closes her eyes, all within the same lifetime. The light turns on, then off, and then the shadow of his eyes loom directly over her. She stabs him with a wire hanger, then his own knife. He plays dead— or he is dead, and he’s just figured out how to come back to the same life he left behind, while she’s always forced to start from square one— and attacks her again. They struggle. His heavy breathing is a tempest in her ears. She does the only thing she can—she wrenches her fingers beneath the cheap plastic of his mask and rips it off.
The Shape transmogrifies back into man. Michael reaches for the mask as the adrenaline floods from her body and she collapses against a wall. A man—she’ll later come to know of him as Sam Loomis, Michael Myers’ psychiatric doctor— appears, having been alerted to the altercation by the children and shoots Michael six times, sending him off the balcony.
He’s dead, just as he was dead when she stabbed him with the knife. In that moment, for a mind bending, horrific few seconds, Laurie knows everything. She knows what has come and what will be. She can see the cycle repeat itself over and over. It is a hopeless, endless vision and she’s completely overwhelmed.
“It was the boogeyman.”
The story could end here. There’s something about the moment in the Wallace’s house, with Michael and Loomis and her back against the wall where she can feel a thread which leads to an alternate ending—a golden ending. She’s read a plot summary for the wrong movies, production notes and all. It’s possible to steer the course and avert destiny. Maybe, then, she could be free. She just doesn’t know how.
The Shape is gone by the time Laurie passes out. When she regains some reasonable level of lucidity at Haddonfield Memorial, the memories of past lives are completely gone and she’s just this Laurie Strode again. She’s in the third act now, and she learns why she’s become the fixation of Michael Myers, a focus to ward away his perpetual ennui. Cynthia Myers now exists, and Laurie and she are the same. Michael has come to unite Cynthia with their older sister.
The events at Haddonfield Memorial never feel like they’re real, but she lives through them all the same. She is typecast as the prey. The Shape; the predator. She runs and stumbles and screams. The Shape stalks and kills. Through the halls of Haddonfield Memorial, through the town, through her dreams and her repeated lives. Laurie is just a two-bit actress with the range of a wooden board, because no one wants to see her be anything else.
Sam Loomis comes to her aid—twice in a single night, a trillion times in sextillion lifetimes—and attempts to purify the evil that is the Shape with fire. It’s ritualistic, like the fires of Samhain meant to cease the evil as humanity forges on into winter. It takes both Loomis and the Shape and knocks Laurie to the ground. She watches the Shape emerge from the conflagration as an inferno in vaguely human form, like Amaterasu stepping from her home in the myth—but she was pure and unharmed, and the Shape is burning because, because—and then Michael collapses to the ground and it’s over, it’s all over.
This time.
“I wish I had you all alone,” she sings to herself on the sidewalk on the way home. She never looks at the thing watching her from behind.
“I wish I had you all alone,” she sings to herself three hundred times.
“I wish I had you all alone,” it’s been Halloween, 1978, so many times.
Initially, or what she thinks is initially—everything blurs together when you’re bleeding out at your steering wheel— she reacts to the aftermath (which is what the news calls it, but they are so, so out of touch she can’t stomach it) the same way. It’s not until the fifth or sixth (or thirty-third or fifty-second) round that she is able to change things, even if she doesn’t realize it. Maybe it’s subconscious. Some part of the Laurie that is made up of every Laurie who came before her— every Cynthia or Keri who exists or ever existed, contributes with every new tragedy added to her collection— must know about the endless cycle of death and rebirth. Multiple women with the same heart and mind and soul, scratched in the margins of a ledger that goes on and on. Maybe she exerts a will that even Fate can’t crush completely which somehow pushes Laurie to try a new path. The night he came home is unalterable, but the strings of destiny in the events afterward are more malleable. She can create ripples; small, miniscule differences, but they are hers.
The overall picture is the same: she physically survives the harrowing of a blank-faced killer, but he lives on in the hell that is her mind. He comes at her in her dreams, materializes in the reflection of the sideview mirror, watches her from behind billowing laundry. He’s everywhere, just for her. She hears him. In the middle of the night, from the direction of her closet: steady, heavy breathing.
She keeps her closet door open and sleeps with the lights on.
“Tell me how you’re feeling,” Pamela says, standing in the doorframe, concern on her face. Laurie wrings her hands together. She can’t talk about it, because it hasn’t ended. It still happens in her dreams (or vague recollections of past lives, who really knows the difference anymore) and she doesn’t know how to tell anyone that she’ll never feel safe again.
“You’re so strong,” someone tells her. She sits in the shower with the water beating down on her back and cries.
“You’re lucky you survived,” someone says. She unthinkingly dials Annie’s number and freezes when Mrs. Brackett answers.
“Laurie, you have to talk about it,” Morgan says.
“I’m okay,” Laurie forces a tight smile. She goes back to school as soon as she is cleared by the doctor.
People whisper. They stare, rarely openly, but she’s gotten a sixth sense for knowing when eyes are on her back. There are a few kind people, but no one knows how to interact with her now that she’s ceased being Laurie Strode. Now she’s the Girl Who Survived Halloween. The final girl of a psychopath’s rampage. The one who got away. The sister of the man who murdered the sheriff’s daughter—whose funeral she’s fortunate to be alive to attend. She sees herself plastered on the front cover of every paper in Illinois. Annie and Lynda die, Laurie lives. It’s an inequitable trade and for that people say that she is lucky.
She can barely get out of bed most mornings.
It’s trite, but tragedy and alcohol often go hand in hand like old friends. Laurie learns splashing at anxiety with whiskey is more effective than fielding questions about her feelings. It worked for Dad Myers, after all. She doesn’t know if she originally found comfort with the Strodes or was cast out by them or even blamed them—but at some point, one must always occur. Sometimes she copes by lashing out because she has been left alien and altered: Post-Halloween-1978-Laurie-Strode, unable to overcome trauma.
Pamela and Morgan sit with her and offer what comfort they can. (Morgan denounces and casts her out). Laurie chooses to leave when Pamela begs her to stay and never returns. Should she stay, or should she go? Laurie always makes a choice. The world has defined her as the girl from Haddonfield; never a Strode, always a Myers. The last of her line; heir to cursed blood and a haunted house.
No offers are ever made on the dilapidated Myers house.
Laurie goes to college and finds it easy to lose herself there. She spends her time with people too drunk or high to care about anyone’s history—even the Girl Who Survived Halloween. She meets someone. She makes a mistake. She carries that mistake for nine months and then cradles it in her arms. She names her Jamie.
She’s always loved kids. Her dream has been to be a teacher since she was old enough to read. Jamie gives her hope. She starts to get better.
After work one evening, Laurie—now nineteen—feels eyes on her as she walks to her car. She abruptly stops and looks around. The lot is devoid of people. She’s the only one left. The next time (and the time after that and) this occurs she’ll have the strongest sense of déjà vu. Purse clutched to her chest and key held between her fingers like a weapon, Laurie hastily climbs into the only car left in the lot. She locks the doors and quickly checks the backseat. She places her hands on the steering wheel and takes a deep, steadying breath.
She is the first one.
She moves the stick into gear and backs out onto the interstate. Her eyes flit between road and rearview. At seven minutes and thirty-one seconds of driving she glances in the rearview and sees a flash of white. Heavy breathing fills the car. Laurie cries out and jerks the wheel to the left. An oncoming car collides with hers. High beams fill her vision. Metal screams. Glass shatters. Laurie tries to scream, but it’s wet and throaty.
So comes the anticlimactic end of her life.
Cynthia Myers is born, then adopted into the Strode family. Her name is changed to Laurie. She survives Halloween, 1978. Laurie goes to college, makes a mistake, names her Jamie. Laurie starts to get better. One night after work, Laurie, aged nineteen, feels eyes on her as she heads to her car. At seven minutes and thirty-one seconds of driving she glances in the rearview and sees a flash of white. Laurie cries out. An oncoming car collides with her. Laurie tries to scream.
Cynthia Myers is born, then adopted into the Strode family. Her name is changed to Laurie. She survives Halloween, 1978. Laurie has a child and names her Jamie. One night after work, Laurie, aged nineteen, feels eyes on her as she heads to her car. At seven minutes and thirty-one seconds she sees a flash of white in the rearview. An oncoming car collides with her.
Cynthia Myers becomes Laurie Strode. She survives Halloween, 1978. Laurie names her daughter Jamie. One night after work, Laurie feels eyes on her as she heads to her car. She sees a flash of white in the rearview.
One night after work, Laurie feels eyes on her. She freezes. Something is wrong. She takes one step forward, pauses, then turns around and returns to the building where she works. She locks herself inside and holds her breath as she scans the parking lot from the window. It’s eerily silent outside. She waits until the lights of an oncoming car pass. An unbidden sense of relief blossoms in her chest. She shakes her head and tells herself she’s being ridiculous. She really wants a drink, but she can’t. Not anymore, not when Jamie is relying on her.
After gathering her thoughts and feelings and packaging them tightly up and doing everything short of topping them with a bow, she cautiously goes to her car. She checks the backseat. Twice. It’s empty save the car seat. She shakes her head.
“Real nice, Laurie. You’re going to be late now,” she mutters to herself. She starts the car and carefully pulls onto the interstate. She limits turning her eyes from the road to the rearview as much as her anxiety will stand. She’s taken to ignoring the pressing feeling on her spine; for Jamie’s benefit. For her own. As she closes in on her turnoff, the headlights catch a gleam of something as they pass. A silhouette—tall, familiar, ghost faced. Laurie whips her head back for a second look. Nothing. She stares for too long and drives off the road at the sudden curve. Her body jerks as the car stumbles down the rocky hills and crashes at the base of a smattering of trees. It’s the sort of place she would take Jamie for a picnic.
Laurie looks up through the smashed windshield and shudders. It stands at the trunk of a nearby tree, in the line of her head lights. She tries to move, but something long has pierced her stomach and pins her to the seat. The movement sends waves of pain through her and all she can do is cry out weakly. Her entire body feels like it’s freezing but also on fire. Her hands and neck feel sticky.
“You can’t have her,” she tries to say through blood and saliva. One of her teeth hangs from the roof of her mouth. She suddenly sees everything—the stories of the Lauries who came before and the paths she won’t live to see. She sees a dark-haired girl and knows that it’s her Jamie. She sees Jamie running down a hall, fleeing the figure wielding a butcher knife as an executioner would his axe. Their Pale Rider.
She dies knowing that Jamie will suffer, and she can’t do anything to save her.
One night, Laurie dreams of a terrible car accident. It sends her into a panic and she calls out for Annie until she wakes Jamie. Jamie’s cries ground her, and Laurie takes her panic and packs it down—she’s always packing and each time her feelings are put deeper and deeper into an ever-growing set of nesting dolls. She cradles the baby to her chest and rocks them back and forth.
“I wish I had you all alone,” she sings quietly.
Laurie dies forty-three times in a car accident one night on her way home from work. Jamie is left an orphan and is taken in by the Lloyd family in Haddonfield. Ten years after Laurie’s first encounter with the Shape, on Halloween, 1988, he returns to consummate the desires of his curse despite his presumed death. He exists solely to enact revenge on his niece. Laurie won’t live to see it except in her fleeting, final moments.
Fate laughs at her. Laurie grits her teeth. There’s glass from the windshield embedded in her left eye.
Something shifts. Less than a month after burying Annie, Laurie, days from high school graduation, is visited by Loomis. Everyone has assured her that the man in the mask burned alive. The fire killed him and Loomis both. Loomis’ sudden appearance is confirmation of a nightmare more than a relief.
“The question is, Ms. Strode, do you believe he is still alive?” Half of Loomis’ face is covered in ugly welts from the explosion. He survived—somehow—and now he sits in her living room while her parents are away (they would be aghast to know Laurie entertained a middle-aged man in their home without a chaperone) and waits patiently for her answer.
“I don’t—” she stops herself, “I don’t think you can kill the boogeyman.”
Loomis’ look of appraisal tells her that she’s been right all along. He gives her his number, as well as the number of Dr. Marion Chambers, his associate who had been there with them that night at the hospital.
“Don’t hesitate,” he says.
She tries to talk to the Strodes, but Morgan tells her that Loomis is insane. He calls Sheriff Brackett. Before she knows it, Laurie is sitting in her living room, trapped between the Strodes on their couch and Brackett in the chair across the table.
“You can’t trust that man, Laurie.” Brackett says with more force than necessary. “He’s a snake.”
“He saved me, I think—”
“He let this happen! It’s his fault—” he stops himself and bows his head. Morgan and Pamela don’t say a word.
Laurie misses Annie so, so much.
She dreams of a dark-haired girl sitting in front of a vanity. She brushes her hair, her gaze focused on the reflection of the doorway over her shoulder. A Shape fills the doorframe and watches her with intent.
Loomis answers the call on the first ring. “He’s going to come for you,” he admits. “He’ll never stop. I don’t believe he can stop. I want to help you.”
A ghost pain presses on her abdomen. Her left eye aches. The roof of her mouth feels dry.
“I have an idea,” she says.
The papers say Laurie Strode is killed in an automobile accident leaving work for the evening. The idea should be wholly original, but it fills her with a strange sense of nostalgia. In one single cycle she dies and is reborn in California. Fate is unwilling to facilitate such a rebirth, but Loomis and Chambers are her champions. Her new name is Keri Tate. She pursues an education so that she can follow her dream of helping others. So that, maybe, she can heal. Annie, Lynda and the others are still in her thoughts, and October becomes a month of white noise, but she tries to live her newly given life to the best of her ability.
“It’s best we not remain in regular contact,” Loomis says. He seems reluctant. “I won’t have you at any further risk. I… will continue to search for Michael.”
“Good luck, doctor,” she embraces him tightly. He’s strange and focused and the closest thing to a best friend she has now, “Thank you for everything.”
“Yes, well,” he shuffles awkwardly. “If you have need of me, I will arrive with utmost haste.”
“He’s feeling guilty for leaving you like this,” Marion Chambers says when Loomis has left the two of them alone. She puffs on her cigarette. “He feels responsible.”
“I am so grateful to him. To you both. I couldn’t have done this on my own.”
“Don’t worry about it. I know what Loomis said, but feel free to call me anytime. I’m pretty much washing my hands of the Michael Myers thing from here on out, but I’m always available. Everybody needs a friend.”
Marion will have her throat slit by the Shape in eighteen years.
“Anyways, good luck. By the way, Keri,” Marion grins conspiratorially, “I like the hair.”
Laurie liked girly things—dolls and dresses and wearing her hair long—but Keri must be someone else by necessity. Both Laurie and Keri are avid scholars, but Keri likes bourbon and hates talking on the phone and likes wearing her hair short. She’s more confident, more powerful. More masculine, but it suits the image of strength she wants to convey to the world.
Hello world, I’m Keri Tate, and I’m okay.
Fate doesn’t care if it’s the late seventies or early eighties. She can call herself whatever she wants— Fate still presses upon her what she can. There are still night terrors and sudden bouts of anxiety—sometimes she can go weeks without incident, but other times it takes a bottle of little blue pills to give her the strength to see the end of the day. She never really makes friends, at least not friends like Lynda or Annie, but she makes a conscious effort not to be too aloof.
She goes to therapy. Her therapist talks out his ass for more than he’s worth (and his time doesn’t come cheap) but she tries to humor the system. To his frustration she keeps the details of her trauma vague: a bad man butchered her friends when she was in high school and almost killed her too. He makes appreciatively sympathetic noises when she talks and calls her ‘Keri’ with professional concern.
The role doesn’t always come naturally, but she grows into it. During the first year she considers calling Marion when she can’t stand the silence of her apartment and can’t stop seeing person-like shapes at the edge of her vision. She refrains. Marion’s dark wit reminds her too much of Annie.
She speaks to Loomis even less. He calls her a total of three times in ten years.
After fourteen years living as Keri Tate, Marion calls her out of the blue. Loomis is ill and will be moving in with her. Eleven months pass and she phones for the last time.
Keri doesn’t attend Loomis’s funeral.
The vestiges of her old life behind her, she focuses on building something new. Laurie was never good at meeting men but finds it easier as Keri. Alcohol loosens her inhibitions (to say nothing of her standards) and soon she meets the man who fathers her child. They’re both running from something they can’t face alone—but together they’re even more fragile and divided. Keri secretly worries they will infect their son. They discuss names—he wants to honor a grandfather who died in the war, she gets stuck on the name Jamie.
A dark-haired girl reaches for her in her dreams.
They agree on John.
Twenty years pass in a flash. Keri buries Laurie in the backyard, pours cement over the grave, and pretends it has always been a parking lot. October comes and goes, and her nightmares and paranoia come and go with it. Her partner runs and runs until he finds drugs and younger women to comfort him, while their son grows into an emotional but cynical young man. John is like her in so many ways—broody, sarcastic, sensitive—and she swears he won’t suffer like she did.
(She’ll never save Jamie.)
Keri becomes the headmistress of Hillcrest Academy—her dreams of becoming an educator realized. Things aren’t perfect, but they could be worse. It could be 1978 and she could be in Haddonfield, wondering when Annie will call. She never stops running.
Fate catches up.
On Halloween, 1998, the sense of déjà vu so prevalent in her early life returns with a bloody vengeance. She’s standing at the front of class, an argument with John that morning nagging at the back of her mind. The class is discussing Mary Shelley’s magnum opus, and she’s already full of John-brain when she asks Molly, John’s girlfriend, for her dissertation.
“I think Victor should have confronted the monster sooner,” Molly says. “He’s completely responsible for Elizabeth’s death because he was so paralyzed by fear that he never did anything. It took death for the guy to get a clue.”
A small pain starts in Keri’s stomach. Her left eye feels numb.
Molly is still speaking, “… finally had to face it. It was about redemption.”
“It was his fate.”
That night Keri—Laurie—comes face to face with the Shape.
Laurie hides the kids in a closet (John and Molly, Tommy and Lindsey), then sends them down the street. Tommy’s eyes are wide with fear, John is pale from blood loss. Laurie takes the hanger—knife—axe and fights back.
Twenty years and thirty-five thousand lifetimes and Laurie murders a man by separating his head from his neck with a fireman’s axe.
It’s not Michael.
The rouse is revealed—Fate laughs again and again—and everyone knows Keri is Laurie is the Girl Who Survived Halloween 1978 is the Psychopath Who Beheaded a Paramedic She Thought Was Her Brother.
When her axe connects with the neck of the man who was not her brother, she gains a spark of insight. Vague flashes of lives unlived, experiences she has never experienced. Her understanding is limited, but she knows Time-Space is not supposed to be an eternal recurrence and alternate universes should be relegated to Science Fiction. She knows this, and still she knows that what she thought of the universe—the cruel, awful cold place—is fundamentally lacking.
Laurie is institutionalized. It’s a ploy, a play from Michael’s book. She now knows she is only a cog in Fate’s game. She is the first Laurie to realize this before her death, and it gives her the determination of every Laurie before her. She models herself the perfect patient. She doesn’t cry, she doesn’t scream. She waits. She bides her time. The Raggedy Ann doll—just like the one Cynthia had when she was little—hides the pills meant to keep her sedated. Her hair grows out long and, really, it’s the right time. She’s Laurie, she’s always been Laurie at her core, and Keri is dead.
She has one picture of John tacked to the wall. It gives her strength. She lacks context for her dreams of the dark-haired girl (She knows her name but can’t acknowledge it or her mask might crack and reveal the true her) and has no picture to join with John’s. How could she, when in this world the girl was never born?
She stokes the flames of fury deep in her belly. When he comes, she’s ready.
She lures him to the roof and into her trap. The game has changed entirely and she’s one space from the end. He is at her mercy. The Pale Rider, dethroned. She is victorious for the first time in so many cycles. Her hair blows in the brisk wind. The heavy breathing in her ears is her own. She reaches for him.
He’s been waiting just as long as she has. His knife pierces through her bringing with it a jolt of pain. Her eyes are opened to a long, horrific history. Suffering without end, and the death—Judith, Annie, Loomis, Marion, John, Jamie— and images from times unlived flash through her mind like the strobe of police lights. Red blue red blue. It leaves her briefly blinded. When her vision returns, she is suspended off the edge of the Institute, their bodies pressed tightly together. She stares into the eyes of evil and—she knows this is it. He’s finally won.
Now, she can be free.
She leans her head forward with effort and presses a kiss to the lips of his mask. Shakespeare also said parting is such sweet sorrow, but the feeling welling in her chest isn’t grief. It’s relief.
“I’ll see you in hell,” she promises. She falls.
Halloween, 1978. Laurie slides down the wall of the Wallace residence, the sound of Dr. Loomis’ gunshots filling the air. Once, twice, all the way to six. The Shape falls off the balcony with a thud. She sees everything—she sees herself reaching enlightenment, and then falling with that knowledge, like Lucifer. Like the Shape.
“It was the boogeyman.”
She burns with a desire for vengeance.
She is born Cynthia Myers. As Laurie Strode she survives two attempted attacks by the creature in her brother’s body and cannot overcome the aftermath. She gives birth to a baby girl she names Jamie before she stages her own death in a car accident with the help of Loomis and Marion. As Keri Tate, she gives birth to a son named John. When John turns seventeen, she learns that Michael hunted Jamie for years until he finally claimed her, and he’s now come for the rest of his family. She sits in an institution, Laurie Strode once more, and dreams and dreams and realizes
She’s done this before.
The confrontation on the roof ends the same way. Laurie falls to her death, the Shape’s breathing following her and drowning out her last fluttered heartbeats. There’s no escape. A ripple of change through the worlds she’s inhabited is no cause for celebration when they all come to the same end. Victory denied, game rebooted. The timer begins anew, her piece is set right-up, and she is placed on the first tile of the gameboard with a linear progression path to the space for Halloween, 1978.
Laurie just wants to be allowed to die.
Something goes off the rails in Fate’s design. In the unknowable, timeless gulf between death and rebirth, she becomes aware. She has no body. A garbled sensation, not one she can place like sound, touch or sight, shakes the universe. The pull of reincarnation drags her atoms and essence and soul through the blender and into the fog. The cosmos chitters.
She is born Angel Myers. She is different, very different, far different from those who came before her. As is the world. Haddonfield, her parents, Annie—Michael—are all altered.
Halloween.
Laurie screams into the universe.
Halloween, ??XX
Her entire being is being rebuilt.
Halloween, ????
Everything has finally changed but she has no control. It’s all wrong. It’s
Halloween, [Redacted].
Michael Myers returns to Haddonfield to reunite with his sister, Cynthia Angel. He is a man of his own accord, and when he pulls a featureless white mask over his face it is to hide knowing eyes. He moves with the knowledge of lives unlived and a purpose unknowable, and it gives him the clear advantage.
And he finds her in the walls of the old Myers house.
They fall off the balcony—together this time—and Laurie grips Loomis’ gun in her hand and points it at Michael’s face. He stirs. She pulls the trigger and blood splatters across her face. The gunshot leaves her ears ringing and she screams and screams and screams.
Annie-not-Annie lives. The Strodes die. Laurie-not-Laurie exists and sees nothing beyond her current life, but she, too is altered. Incomplete. Corrupted. She has dreams, but other lives and other Lauries are silent. Two years later, Michael stalks again. He comes for his Angel, motivated by a voice from the fog. She begins to have visions where she sees Michael; her hunter, the man and her brother, the child. The other realities are so far, far away.
Her visions are conducted by a ghostly Shape in the form of their mother, Deborah Myers.
Annie-not-Annie dies. Haddonfield dies. The Shape calls to Laurie in visions, “It’s time to come home.”
Michael dies to Laurie-not-Laurie.
Trapped behind thick white walls at the beating heart of the sanatorium, she smiles blankly at the Shape.
The universe rumbles.
Laurie wakes up in the fog. She shivers and remembers—things. Some things she can recall with clarity—Tommy Doyle and his stupid comic books, Lynda never returning the green blouse she got from Macy’s— but others are as muddled as the air in the forest she finds herself in. She stands up and brushes dirt from her jeans. She is seventeen and wearing the clothes she wore on Halloween, 1978 and she feels an overwhelming urge to call out for John.
But she doesn’t know anyone named John.
She meets other pawns of Fate’s whims at a campfire in the center of the woods. She almost introduces herself as Keri but forgets the name before it can pass her lips. She is—not aware, but more of an amalgamation of each cycle that came before. Even Angel, the victory of the Shape, is a small part of her being. She holds tightly to forgotten memories of dark-haired girls and cynical boys and the blinking light on the dashboard after a fatal car crash.
“Tell me how you’re feeling,” Bill says, sitting next to her at the fire. He served in Vietnam and has all the gruffness expected of an old soldier, but always treats her with overwhelming kindness. He lights a cigarette (where did he even find that?) and stares into the fire. Laurie wrings her hands together. She’s not sure how to explain whatever this is—none of them can—or elaborate on how the repetition of cycles is nothing new to her.
“You’re so strong,” Dwight tells her. She can barely stand after their most recent trial, and the shard of glass in her hand is still wet with their enemy’s blood.
“You’re lucky you survived,” Ace winks in her direction. She was the last one and stumbled across the hatch by dumb luck. Ace always calls it “intuition”. She bows her head down with a smile.
“Laurie, you have to talk about it,” her friends say after a trial in a theme park recreation of Haddonfield where she faced the Shape on the top floor of the Myers house. She stabbed him in the neck with a knitting needle and ran until he caught up and thrust his knife through her stomach.
“I’m okay,” Laurie forces a tight smile as the fog rolls into the campgrounds, summoning her to the next trial. The forest is alive with the sound of chittering in the vast darkness.
A infinite lifetime passes.
She is reborn in 1961 at Haddonfield Memorial to Morgan and Pamela Strode. They bequeath her the name Laurie. Her first seventeen years of life are uneventful—she spends her days reading, talking with friends on the phone, and babysitting for pocket change. She has two very close friends—Annie Brackett and Lynda Van Der Klok—and a crush on a boy named Ben Tramer. Of all the kids she babysits, her favorite is inquisitive Tommy Doyle. She is fairly passive, but has a dry wit that the people closest to her can appreciate.
As October reaches its end, she secretly frets about not having a date to the school dance—Annie says she should woman-up and ask Ben, but there’s no way she could ever do that— while preparing a list of activities to keep Tommy occupied. She picks up a pumpkin that they can make into a jack-‘o-lantern and though her friends tease her about her ‘old fashioned sensibilities’, she looks forward to it.
Halloween, 1978 occurs as it always has. Laurie slides down the wall, exhaustion and shock draining her body of all her energy. Her arm throbs where the knife sliced through her flesh and she can’t move her broken leg. Her chest heaves and she watches Loomis fire his gun six times until the Shape is forced off the balcony, her face tear stricken. It was the boogeyman.
Laurie sees Jamie standing at Judith’s vanity, her small hands reaching out. John and Molly running through the halls of Hillcrest Academy. Herself, falling into the outreach of trees beneath the institution. Pamela refusing to sacrifice Angel as Morgan bleeds out on the far side of the room. A hook piercing her friends as spindly tendrils of black break through the sky to pull them into the fog. A massacre at Haddonfield Memorial.
She sees a way to break the cycle.
“Yes,” Loomis says, “I do believe it was.”
The Shape of Deborah Myers glares hatefully at her from behind Loomis’ shoulder.
Sheriff Brackett and his men catch Michael a few streets away, the featureless white mask in his hands. He is placid when apprehended and silent when sentenced at court. Laurie hears it all and recovers, but she keeps the memories of Jamie and John and Annie and everyone she’s ever loved who she’s seen die again and again deep in her heart. She goes through the same steps as before—trauma, counseling, alcohol, mistakes. She never leaves Haddonfield. She has a baby girl and names her Karen.
She doesn’t believe in God and doesn’t pray, but she lights a candle the night she brings Karen home for Jamie and John and hopes they will forgive her. She is known all her life as the Girl Who Survived Halloween 1978. She becomes Haddonfield’s dirty laundry while Michael Myers goes about his existence behind the walls of Smith’s Grove. Laurie waits.
She knows he’ll come home.
Even after Karen is taken by the state, Laurie waits. She arms herself and her home and prepares. The Shape of Deborah Myers appears over the years, warning her, but as it watches Laurie grow older it senses an end to the endless merry-go-round of death and rebirth and stops revealing itself.
It fears her.
She has nightmares, but she wakes every morning with the solace that she will never experience Halloween, 1978 again. She leans against the kitchen counter and closes her eyes. She’s never lived this long in one sitting before. It feels strange.
Outside her window, deep in the woods that surround her home, she can see a campfire. She scoffs and cocks her gun, watches the fog linger just out of range of her porch. Dares it to come uninvited into her home.
She lights two candles for the final time and tearfully says her goodbyes to her never-born children. She calls Karen and swallows the lump in her throat when it goes to voicemail.
“It’s me,” she says shakily, “Just… thinking of you. I hope you’re doing well. I…” she watches shadows move across the wall from the light of the candle, “I… just wanted to check in. It’s almost—” she stops herself, “Well, you know. Just… be careful, okay? Lock your doors and windows, and please don’t open the door for anyone you don’t know. I know—just do it, okay?” She sighs.
“I hope to see you soon, maybe for Allyson’s graduation? Not that I’m inviting myself, I just… well, anyway, give my love to Allyson and say ‘hi’ to Ray. I…” she trips over the words clumsily. “I love you baby.”
She places the phone on the countertop and shudders. She looks to the Glock sitting next to it. Thinking of what’s to come causes her hand to tremble, but she takes a breath to steady herself. She glances at the near wall, to the day circled in thick red marker on the calendar.
Halloween, 2018.
What will be the defining night of her life.