Welcome to the playground. I apologize for not posting in a while; this was due to a week spent in bed fighting the flu. Now I’m back, and once again, a gathered a group of authors are ready to tell you a tale so blood chilling, it will leave you checking under your bed before you fall asleep.
After a subscriber vote revealed Michael Myers as tonight’s story antagonist, I knew this would be great. And, they didn’t disappoint….
So, let’s get to the story.
Halloween: Reborn
The revolving door groaned is it surrendered Michael’s bulky frame into the hospital foyer. The security guard may have had time to run if his eyes weren’t bound to the nudie mag. Michael paused as he loomed behind the oblivious night watchmen. The young woman in semigloss print reminded him of so many of his nameless victims.
Michael’s butcher’s knife dove into the guard’s throat. The man’s skin flexed then popped as the dull point of the knife tore through his unfulfilled life. As the smell of iron permeated the sterile halls and blood obscured the guard’s last arousing thoughts, Michael sighed.
Damnit, I’m so stupid. Why didn’t I sharpen my knife? Michael thought to himself.
Insecurity and regret haunted Michael’s mind as he watched the blood begin to spill over the counter. It poured like warm syrup over pancakes on to the tile floor. It slowed to a drip as Micheal wiped the blood off his blade and onto his victim’s back.
He inspected the dull point, trying to remember his last kill. It had been so long. He second guessed his intention on killing Casey. Michael didn’t kill out of spite or the thrill of it. He was immune to such emotions. Michael didn’t fully understand why he killed. He simply had to, it was like a perennial itch that couldn’t quite be scratched to satisfaction. He took no joy in seeing a victim suffer. The quicker they died the better. If a human simply had an off switch, he’d just as soon use that rather than his knife.
The only time Michael ever felt a glimpse of an emotion was when if strangled the family cat. He was 5 years old and it felt so strange to him. Other neighborhood cats and dogs would die at his hands but he never felt that same way again. He was chasing that feeling when he killed Judith when he was 6 years old. He figured killing a human and one that happened to be his older sister would trigger that feeling again but no it didn’t. Michael pursued that feeling through his murdering tenure. He dabbled in torturing but the screams were annoying and blood stains were very difficult to clean.
Tonight, Michael Myers hoped would be different. If killing humans couldn’t trigger some emotion then maybe killing an angel would. Casey was the closest thing to an angel that Michael knew of.
The evening breeze sighs through the dead, fallen leaves and browning grass, carrying the brittle whispers of autumn’s decay. Each thudding step of The Shape’s black boots sinks somewhat into the damp earth with deliberate rhythm.
Too human to be the tread of a ghost - yet too hollow to belong to a man. The moon hangs like a pale and watchful eye. Its light caresses the unpigmented mask that hides a face no one has truly seen. Behind that mask, something ancient stirs. His thoughts flicker like dying embers of a soul long extinguished. Memories claw their way upward from the dark recesses of his mind. Their depths, dragging him hurtling backward through time, toward the child that once bore his name. He’s six-years-old, inside a room of white walls. Across from him sits a child psychiatrist, his pen trembling as it scratches across a page. The man speaks nary a word and observes, scribing an entry into his journal.
This six-year-old child has a blank, pale, emotionless face. He has the blackest eyes - the eyes of the devil. I realize what lives behind this boy’s eyes is purely and simply… evil.
Those words now, trapped forever on the page of a forgotten journal, echo like a curse. The child did not blink then; he does not blink now. The memory contorts into another. He’s ten years old, crouched in the dying light of a fall afternoon. His fingers trace the spine of a small rabbit. It trembles beneath his touch, sensing what he did not yet understand - the difference between love and ruin. From the house comes the sound of breaking glass, his shrieking mother’s fury, and his father’s raging, drunk and slurring voice. As Edith and Donald continue to fight, he holds the rabbit tighter and tighter, its heart beats faster, for a time. Then stops completely. He remembers the silence that followed. A beautiful, peaceful, absolute silence.
The world has always been too loud for Michael Myers.
His boots strike pavement, cracked and glistening faintly with dew, and something darker. Shadows bleed from every corner as he makes his way across a parking lot. He is walking away from the silhouette of Haddonfield Memorial Hospital. Within those walls, doctors try to dissect one’s darkness, to give it shape and reason. But evil does not reason. It waits. It remembers. It returns.
Michael stops. Tilting his head, he listens to the night’s pulse. Ahead of him, a window faintly glows, fragile and warm. On the other side of it, a young woman is insouciantly falling to a sedated, nearly slumbered state. He knows her name is Casey, and he knows her face. He knows all of their faces. The breeze now curls around him, cold and alive. The blade of the knife in his hand glistered beneath the light of the moon. An unreadable expression on his unseen face promises silence. He walks, slowly, inevitably. Leaves part before him like the sea parting before a god. Michael Myers is neither man, nor ghost. He’s the memory of death itself. And tonight, Haddonfield will remember death.
...a cold breeze from the open door wrapped its icy fingers around Casey’s aching head, followed by the hoarse, too loud stage whisper from her twin sister Carrie. “Casey, are you here? Mom knows. She’s really, really pissed that you stayed out past curfew. You need to get in the car. We need to go home.”
“I’m over here, Carrie. I fell asleep. Where’s Mom’s car? That’s not her car. How did you get here?”…
Casey woke sometime after two, dragged up from the bottom of a dream by a silence that didn’t feel right. The college party was over—hours gone—but the house still reeked of beer, sweat, and cheap perfume. Downstairs, a refrigerator thrummed like a distant generator in a snowstorm. In reply to this, a clock ticked, each second too loud.
Dillon must have left the window open. Cold October air poured in, making her skin feel paper-thin. Her head swam from too much vodka, but she stepped between the bodies of her drunk friends, limbs sprawled out carelessly, and leaned at the window.
Outside, the yard glistened under the moon. Wet grass, trampled flat, and jack-o’-lanterns still burning faintly.
That’s when she saw him.
The figure stood dead-center on the lawn. Tall. Motionless. Watching. The mask on his face was white and blank, but somehow he seemed to stare straight at her. Then lifted something—a blood-soaked knife—and the blade caught the moonlight just enough to wink at her.
Behind her came a crash at the wrong moment. Dillion staggered back into the room, tipping a bottle over, foam hissing across the hardwood. She spun, cursing under her breath. By the time she looked back, the white faced man was gone. And from somewhere on the first floor came the slow, aching squeal of a door hinge.
Michael moved through the dark house like water finding its level, inevitable, patient, without thought. The knife hung loose in his grip, an extension of bone and tendon rather than a tool he consciously wielded.
The floorboards did not creak beneath his weight. He had learned that trick young, before the mask, before Haddonfield learned to fear its own reflections in the autumn dark. Silence was his native language, the only one that never lied.
The voice began as static, white noise humming beneath his skull, a frequency only he could hear. It sharpened until his breath under the mask slowed, mechanical, syncing to its rhythm. A machine that forgot it was once human.
Kill.
He obeyed. He always obeyed. The command was not cruel or passionate; it was absolute. Michael understood it as purpose, the quiet, perfect order of inevitability.
The dance had countless partners, each believing they controlled their own fate. They locked doors, screamed for help, ran until their legs collapsed. They never realized he had made the first move long before they ever saw him.
Upstairs, Casey’s mind raced while her body betrayed her. Adrenaline roared through her veins, but her limbs were heavy, slow, unresponsive. Dillon, hungry for the cold pizza in the kitchen, clung to the railing, too drunk to notice death waiting at the bottom of the stairs.
The moment before recognition, when he exists only in the corner of a victim’s vision, is always his favorite. The rational mind dismisses what it cannot name. Then the shift comes: pupils widening, the sharp intake of breath, the instant a person realizes the story they are living has already ended.
Time stretched and collapsed around Casey. Her rational thoughts scraped against panic as she sensed wrongness swelling through the air. The thud downstairs. The stillness after. She begged her body to obey her mind.
“Fucking move!”
Michael tilted his head, a birdlike gesture mistaken for curiosity but born from absolute emptiness. He studied Dillon the way one studies an engine before dismantling its parts.
He stood motionless at the foot of the staircase, moonlight from the tall windows wrapping his shoulders in silver. The mask now illuminated partially. Dillon blinked, trying to steady himself, his eyes finally adjusting enough to see the faceless silhouette below. For a heartbeat, everything held still. Even the house seemed to suffocate on the silence.
Michael stepped forward. The voice in his skull hummed again, softer now, reverent. Kill them all.
Dillon screamed, deep, raw, human, and the sound seemed to please The Shape. Somewhere in that scream was life, defiance, meaning, all the things he had been stripped of long ago. He tilted his head once more.
The night exhaled. And the dance began.
Casey’s scream caught in her throat. Dillon staggered forward, reaching for her, blood seeping between his fingers. His eyes were glassy, unfocused. “Run,” he rasped, “Mike… Michael Myers cut me,” and then collapsed. From somewhere below came the slow, certain tread of boots on the stairs. She stumbled backward, heart hammering, until her shoulder hit the glass.
“This isn’t real,” she whispered. “Wake up, wake up—” The air shimmered. For a split second, she saw two rooms at once: the college house and another place—white walls, humming machines, the steady beeping of a monitor at the psychic research center. A voice cut through the static.
“Casey, listen to me. It’s Dr. Collins. Your sister, Carrie, she’s with me, too. You’re safe. Stay with my voice.” She clutched her head, torn between two worlds. The masked figure was almost at the door now, blade gleaming, breath rattling behind the mask. “He’s here!” she screamed. “Michael’s in the house!”
“No, Casey,” said Collins, calm but firm. “He can’t hurt you anymore. You’re remembering the dream. It’s the trauma image trying to take control. Push him out.”
The killer’s outline flickered. He lunged, and she threw up her hands. The knife came down—and dissolved into light. When she opened her eyes again, she was lying flat on a padded table, Dr. Collins leaning over her, one hand on her shoulder. His face was pale with exhaustion. “You did it,” he said softly. “You crossed back.”
Casey blinked. The smell of beer, the moonlight, the blood—all gone. Only antiseptic air and the steady hum of machines remained. “Was it real?” she whispered. “It was memory, not reality,” Collins said.
“You were trapped in the echo. I pulled you out before your mind decided it was permanent.” She nodded slowly, tears slipping sideways into her hair. “Dillon?”
“A fragment,” he said. “Part of what you left behind. He helped you get out.” She looked past him toward the observation window, where her reflection stared back—whole but trembling.
“It felt so real.” Collins smiled faintly. “Every creation does, until it ends.” He pressed a button to administer a sedative; the monitors softened their tone as the serum took effect. “Rest now. You’re safe.” Her eyelids fluttered. As she drifted off, she thought she saw, for just a moment, the faintest outline of a man wearing a white mask, raising a knife above his head, in the corner of the room—somehow she had pulled a monster through before the door closed between worlds.
She tried to tell herself it was just the echo still bleeding through and took a deep breath in an attempt to ground herself but the man didn’t fade to memory, he marched towards her. Quick deliberate strides across the hospital room. Knife held high. It was Michael, he was there, and he was going to kill her.
Casey had enough, “Fuck you, creep! You think the mask makes you scary? You’re a bitch, just a monster hiding from himself!”
She kicked her legs trying to force him back. If she was going to die? She wasn’t going to do it kindly or quietly.
Michael froze.
The knife lowered, trembling.
Angels didn’t talk like that.
He’d slaughtered foul-mouthed brats before but this one was supposed to be different. To make him feel.
But she wasn’t different. Maybe none of them were.
He raised the knife high one last time and Casey closed her eyes tight waiting for her fate when suddenly a shotgun blast cracked out in the room so loud that it almost made her ears bleed. Michael was hit hard, stumbling back but somehow not leaving his feet, he turned towards the door and standing there was his angel. Not Casey, her identical twin sister, Carrie.
“Leave my sister alone, you abomination.” she hissed.
Michael’s head swivelled mechanically between the two sisters before finally locking in on Carrie.
He shambled forward as Casey tore at the tubes and cords binding her to the machines. If a shotgun blast couldn’t stop him, maybe the two of them together could.
“God turned His face from you, didn’t He?” Carrie prodded, “but Haddonfield never will.”
Michael was almost upon her. He reared his knife back as she put her finger on the trigger one more time.
“This one is for my great Grandmother,” she whispered, “Laurie Strode.”
He lunged and Casey grabbed the shotgun, jerking the barrel down toward the oxygen tank.
“Casey, no—”
Her hand slammed over Carrie’s, forcing the trigger.
The blast struck metal.
Hiss…
BOOM!
Then fire swallowed the room. The girls were thrown back.
Everything went orange and black.
The world came back in fragments.
Heat. Sirens. The copper taste of blood.
Casey jolted awake on a gurney beside an ambulance, the night around her still burning. Smoke poured from the hospital windows, carrying sparks that floated like dying stars. Someone shouted orders.
Voices blurred, distorted, distant.
A paramedic loomed over her, pressing a mask to her face.
“Easy. You’re safe. You’re outside now.” he assured her.
But she wasn’t listening.
“Where’s my sister?” Her voice cracked. She tried to sit up, hands clawing at the oxygen mask. “Where the fuck is Carrie? She was right beside me! Where is she?”
The paramedic hesitated, glancing toward the inferno. The reflection of fire danced in his eyes.
“You’re the only one we’ve found so far,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry. We don’t know what happened in there.”
Casey shook her head violently, refusing to hear it. “No. No, she—she fired the gun, she—” Her words broke off into a scream.
Flames roared in answer. The hospital roof buckled inward with a hollow, metallic groan. A shower of embers fell like rain.
“Please,” she gasped, trying to twist off the stretcher. “She’s in there. And,” Her eyes widened, voice dropping to a whisper. “Him. He’s still in there. Michael Myers.”
The paramedic pressed her shoulders down gently.
“Myers? You need to lie still. You’re in shock.” he gave a sympathetic smile, “Michael Myers has been dead for years.”
But Casey couldn’t stop staring at the burning windows.
For a moment, just a moment, she thought she saw a figure in the flames.
Tall. Still. A white mask gleaming through the smoke.
Then they were gone.
Epilogue
Darkness pressed against Carrie’s eyes before the pain did. Her skull throbbed. Her wrists burned. When she tried to move, the chair screeched beneath her, metal against concrete. Fluorescent light flickered overhead, washing the basement in sickly yellow. The smell hit next. Smoke, antiseptic, and something cooked.
On a table across the room lay what was left of him. The mask had fused to the flesh in places. Charred fabric clung to the ribs like wet paper.
Someone was humming. A man stepped into the light, gloved hands red up to the wrists. His voice was calm, almost reverent.
“You woke up sooner than expected. That’s good. You’ll want to see this.”
Carrie tried to speak, but her throat was raw.
“What are you doing? Sir?”
The man didn’t look up. He adjusted a tool that looked like something between a scalpel and a soldering iron.
“Finishing what my grandfather started.”
He turned then, and she saw his face. He was young and determined, eyes bright with exhaustion and faith.
“Dillon Loomis,” he said, like a confession. “You’ve probably heard the name Loomis. My grandfather Samuel hunted this thing for decades, swore it could never die. He was right about that much.”
Carrie’s pulse hammered.
“That’s Michael Myers?” she whispered.
“Was,” Dillon corrected. “But you, your family, make sure that he remains forever a monster. In body and in spirit. I’ve been chasing Myers’s EchoDream for years, trying to find a living conduit strong enough to pull him back so we can end this for good. And when I heard of the work being done here, about Casey’s nightmares in particular. How both your surname’s are Strode…”
He smiled faintly, almost kind.
“I knew I had my link.”
Carrie tugged at her bindings.
“Where’s Casey?”
Dillon looked past her, toward the corpse.
“I have no idea. But don’t worry, you’ll serve just as well. Even better perhaps. I need to see if a monster can still recognize what comes before evil. If he can finally reject the carrot on the stick.”
He leaned closer, his voice dropping to a whisper meant only for her.
“You want to help your sister? Then pray he remembers what mercy feels like.”
He pressed a switch.
“Pray he remembers good.”
Electric hum filled the room.
The corpse on the table arched up, smoke seeping from the stitches, and somewhere inside the mask something breathed again.
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Congratulations on a job well done everybody. As always it was a pleasure taking part in this and flexing those writing muscles. Thank you for having me around the fire Wirrowac.
Thank You