Halloween 5:

The Return of Michael Myers

Excerpts of Nicholas Grabowsky’s special edition novelization for those of you who can’t wait forever for its release

(characters & situations owned by Trancas International Films, used here with respect to them and from a fan’s perspective only, for now.  For the current status on this project, go to “News & Updates” page.  Keep returning to this page for new & different excerpts in the future!)

 

 Prologue

 

     “I forgive you, Uncle Michael……”

     Jamie Caruthers should have remained upon the passenger seat of the old pick-up truck.  She very easily could have, traumatized as she was from the climactic horrors this Halloween night had put her through, from all of the senseless, terrible death.  She could have remained frozen where she sat, surrendered herself to the paralysis grimly beckoning from every corner of her six-year-old mind.

     Yet a greater force beckoned, overwhelming the temptation to give in to absolute shock.  It was a force outside herself, yet tugging and pulling from everywhere within.

     Uncle Michael had to be dead.

     Her foster-sister Rachael had seen to that when she ran him over with the truck several times just now.  Though her uncle seemed superhuman in his restless pursuit of the little girl’s life throughout the greater part of the day up until this very moment, Jamie understood that Michael was a man and not a supernatural ghost.

     And a man could be stopped, could be killed.

     Somehow.

     But even after the police and the other townies, Sheriff Meeker and Doctor Loomis arrived seconds afterwards, Jamie knew the nightmare would not be over unless she vacated the truck and made it so.  Rachael wasn’t available to protest;  she’d abandoned her to greet the onrush of vehicles arriving at the scene.

     She pushed open the passenger door and her feet dumped onto the asphalt.  Before she even realized she’d taken her first step forward, the pick-up’s front headlights were already several paces to her rear and her feet brought her to the ravine where her uncle lay.

     Uncle Michael.

     The Nightmare Man.

     The very embodiment of unstoppable evil now vanquished by a repetitive collision by a beat-up old Ford.

     He lay there bloodied and motionless, ragged and sprawled upon his back against tall grass and shards of weathered wood trailing from a darkened obstruction only a few yards ahead.

     She knew what that obstruction was, with what she’d heard about and seen of the old mineshafts on the outskirts of town, from the frightening tales whispered by Rachael’s friends of the Wicked Hermit of the Haddonfield Mines and nonsense like that.

     The culmination of everything frightening about the small Illinois town of Haddonfield was right before her now, and, without even contemplating, Jamie knelt down and took it by the hand.

     “I forgive you, Uncle Michael.”

     His hand was oversized against hers, hardened with calluses and laden with scars of twisted flesh just the way Frankenstein’s monster’s had been when the doctor reached for it as it moved for the first time while he shouted it’s alive!

     She did not linger long;  she returned her uncle’s lifeless hand to his side upon the wet grass.  She lifted herself up, turned to head back to the truck.  After only the first step or two but too quickly for even that, Jamie raised her gaze before her in the direction of the truck and found herself facing a congregation of the entire cast of the townies and officers who’d just arrived.  Their gazes all upon her, they were standing all in a row with weapons drawn and aimed and readying to fire…..

     ……upon her??

     A voice cried out from one of them, from whom she wasn’t certain.  Sheriff Meeker?  “Jamie, drop!!!!”

     No time to think, and it all happened to rapidly after that ---- her spinning to catch a view of Uncle Michael towering above her, arisen from death, knife poised and readying to strike her as it had meant to all weary night long.

     Jamie threw herself to the ground.  Gravity’s aide sent her tumbling away toward the asphalt at the edge of the grass.

     Every one who drew a weapon opened fire, and the air became filled with deafening bursts in rapid succession as each rifle, shotgun and pistol set the night ablaze and blasted into Myers’ body.  The force propelled the Shape backwards as bullets flung past into dense underbrush and through the wooden boards sealing the entrance of the mine shaft behind him.

     Another shotgun blast.  Another.

     The boards gave way as Michael’s body spilled onto them against the impact of firepower, plunging him deep into the abysmal mouth of the shaft.

     The air grew silent in the aftermath.  Two of the townies approached just then, lighting dynamite sticks and hurling them into the shaft after Michael.

     More blasts, cataclysmic, disturbing, resounding…..

     ……resounding into memory.

     She recalled one lingering thought before she collapsed backwards into her own horrible abyss, finally surrendering to her body’s desire to lapse into shock.

     One thought.

     One damnable, awful, unspeakable thought:

     Michael lives……somehow, he’ll always live, even if he didn’t survive the assault of gunfire and the fall.  Michael lives…..he lives, because now he lives in me.

     The next thing little Jamie knew was the sensation of standing at the head of the stairway back home…..back at the Caruthers’ home…..fully garbed in the Halloween clown costume she’d worn for what was to be a fun frolic of trick-or-treating before all hell had engulfed her world…..

     …..Doctor Loomis was at the foot of the stairs facing upwards at her, shouting in terrified desperation as he drew his pistol from beneath his coat…..

     ……she could feel her own breath from beneath the cheap masquerade mask which covered her eyes and the cotton ball red clown nose glued upon the tip of where her nose should be.  She could feel the rubber band which held the mask around her head pressing against her hair…..

     ……she could even feel the dual handles of the scissors she clenched, its blades dripping with the blood of Mrs. Caruthers, her foster-mother…..