From Chapter Four

It was true.

Annie Bracketts head was centered perfectly on the pillow.  Her dark, curly
hair was attractively tousled.  Only this time her hair at her forehead was
stiff and caked, matted.  Her pretty face was empty and without expression.

Her throat had been cut in a brown line from ear to ear; a few thin vertical
striations had dried on her neck and the collar of her blouse.  She almost
looked as if she had fallen peacefully asleep with her eyes open.

A flashbulb went off, catching her hair in a nimbus around her head.

Brackett said nothing.

He leaned over her, directly over the stretcher, until his eyes locked with hers.
Then very slowly, so slowly you could hear the joints crack in his fingers, he
reached down and suttered his hand over her face, closing her eyes forever.

He nodded to Hunt, the deputy.  Hunt dropped the sheet.

Hunt looked at him grimly, a bit fearfully.

Brackett cleared his throat.

"I, uh, have to, uh, go and tell my wife. Before someone else does."

Hunt let Jimmy and Bud carry the strtcher away.

"Go on home, Leigh," said Hunt to the Sheriff.  "Go on home.  I'll take care of
everything."

Brackett turned his eyes on Loomis then. They were black and smoldering.  He
straghtened his massiv shoulders.

"Damn you."

"I'm sorry. . ." began Loomis.

"What have you done?"

Loomis attempted to explain. "I haven't done anything."

"You let him out!" The Sheriff's growling voice rose to a howl.

Hunt touched his shoulder and the Sheriff snapped out of it.

He went back to the car before he could say or do anything else his large hands 
were balled into fists at his sides.

"I didn't let him out," Loomis explained uselessly to Hunt, to himself. "I gave
orders for him to be restrained."

Two more sheeted bodies were rolled out of the house, down the walkway and past them.

Hunt watched them being loaded away. Flashing police lights reddened his face.

"Now is there anything else that we can do for you?" he said to Loomis.

"If that wasn't Michael Myers burning up in that car," said Loomis, no longer concerned
about sounding reasonable, "then a lot of other kids are going to be slaughtered tonight."
The words caught in his throat.  Words that were thoughts, thoughts that were feelings.
They made his voice break.

Hunt cut him off. "He's dead. I saw him."

"You saw a man with a mask," Loomis explained.

"It was him."

"I want to believe you."  That, thought Loomis, is the truth.  "But I've got to be sure.
I can't stop until I'm certain he's dead."

Now that the Sheriff was gone, a cameraman moved in on them.

"Your talking about him like he's some kind of animal," said Hunt.

"He was--"

"Will you keep'em back?" hunt noticed the camera and motioned for some assistance.

Loomis stared past Hunt into the pumpkin on the porch, lost in its eyes.

"He was my patient for fifteen years," he said in a low voice. "He became an obsession
with me until I realized that there was nothing within him, neither conscience nor reason,
that was even remotely human.  An hour ago I stood up--and fired six shots into him.  He
just got up and walked away." He moved in front of Hunt and grabbed his attention.  Perhaps
if this man would listen. . . . If Brackett wouldn't, maybe this deputy would.  "I'm
talking about the real possibility that he is still out there!"

Hunt's face and eyes were as blank as a manikin's. He was waiting for the doctor to finish.
Not so that he could believe him, but so that he could figure out what to do about
this out-of-town offical who had been sent here to give orders which even the Sheriff
obeyed, albeit reluctantly.  Hunt had that non-expression of a man who is paid not to think.
He was probablyh just now reassessing the authority which had been given to a doctor who
specializes in the criminally insane.  It takes one to know one, his eyes said. But I still
sure wish I didn't have to listen to you.

MORE EXCERPTS SOON!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!