Halloween by Curtis Richards Page A

debating. Then, after three rings, she picked it up and held it to her ear for a long moment before venturing to speak. "Hello?"
    "Why'd you hang up on me?" Annie said indignantly, swallowing whatever she'd been chewing.
    "Annie, was that you?" Laurie's fingertips flew to her bosom in relief.
    "Of course."
    "Why didn't you say anything? You scared me to death."
    "I had my mouth full of peanut butter. Couldn't you hear me?"
    "No."
    "What did you think it was?"
    "I don't know, an obscene phone call or something."
    "Well, now you hear obscene chewing." And she smacked her lips and tongue around the remnant of the soggy sandwich. "You know, you're losing control, Laurie."
    "I think I've already lost it."
    "I doubt that. Listen, my mother is letting me use her car. I'll pick you up. Six thirty."
    "Sure. See you later."
    "Don't speak to any strange bogeymen—unless they're good dancers."
    "Okay. 'Bye." She put the phone down and tried to do some homework, but the books lay on her desk as if written in some extraterrestrial script. Every subject she tried to study led her by free association to the phantom prowler who'd been dogging her footsteps all day long. The English lit homework on the theme of fate brought her mind back to poor Judith Myers, who'd met hers precisely fifteen years ago this very day—almost this very hour! She tried math, but all she could think of were all those stab wounds seeping crimson blood from Judith's brutally violated body. In history they were studying Julius Caesar's reign, and she'd just begun to get into it when she came across the passage about the emperor's assassination by Brutus and his friends—by daggers concealed beneath their togas.
    She pushed her chair back violently, stood up, and began to pace around the room, pounding her fist in her palm. "Calm down, Laurie, this is ridiculous," she told herself aloud.
    And it was. But she kept glancing out the window anyway.
     

9
     
    The sky had turned a marble gray with storm clouds rolling in from the west, but the setting sun ignited them from underneath like an orange blowtorch, illuminating the polished marble gravestones of the Haddonfield Town Cemetery in a rare display of joyous glitter.
    Angus Taylor, the caretaker of the nondenominational cemetery, puffed up the sharp incline, reading from a note pad as he led his trench coat-clad guest along a flagstone path. "Can't take this hill like I once used to," he said between anguished breaths. "Too much beer, not enough sex. Of course, I hold that a man can't have too much of either, but I suppose if I had my druthers it'd be . . ."
    A glance at the visitor, who stared at him with a mixture of indifference or repugnance, subdued Taylor's chatter. He stopped a moment, panting, to look at the map on his note pad. "Let's see. Myers. Judith Myers. Row eighteen, plot twenty. Over this way."
    They veered onto a secondary path whose stones had all but sunk beneath the encroaching grass. Willow branches whipped their faces as they peered through the impending gloom at names and dates that bespoke lives rich and inglorious, lives joyous and sad, lives short and long, but all terminated inexorably by the same grim hand.
    The garrulous Taylor waxed silent. Though he'd been in the undertaking business all his life, it wasn't until lately that he'd begun to realize that his interest had become more than professional. At the age of sixty-two, the dozens of graves whose excavation he supervised had begun to beckon to him, and he'd started to ponder what it meant to spend an eternity in one. He'd arranged to be baptized so that he could be buried in a churchyard, where at least there might be the illusion of grace and salvation, and where he'd be surrounded by people bound to him by their mutual faith. "You believe in God, mister?"
    Sam Loomis studied the man from beneath craggy brows and decided it wasn't worth getting into a philosophical debate. "Doesn't everyone?" he said. "Which way?"
    "Left."
    They