Halloween by Curtis Richards Read Free Book Online Page A

The evil is gone."
    Somehow she took no comfort in that at all.
     

6
     
    Laurie Strode stepped out of the door of the white frame house on Oak Street and sniffed the air. It was cool and tangy with a faint touch of woodsmoke. Someone had lit a fire in a fireplace somewhere down the street, and for Laurie it had a special significance: It marked, in her own mind, the official start of winter. Of course, winter didn't truly begin until the third week in December, a little less than two months away, and you couldn't ask for a more autumnal event than Halloween, which took place tonight. Nevertheless, Laurie thought about winter, and felt that same mixture of eagerness and dread that most midwesterners feel about the season.
    She was a pretty girl, slim and angular, with straight, brownish-blond hair falling without fanfare to her shoulders. Farrah hairstyles were all the rage but Laurie thought it was an affectation and a pain in the ass to keep up. Though not exactly a bookworm, she had decided there were simply too many more interesting things to do, like reading, than to spend all that time washing, blow-drying, teasing, and combing, to say nothing of dyeing or frosting your hair if you really wanted to do that trip the right way.
    She dressed in simple school attire, a print skirt, knee socks, sensible shoes, and a boy's shirt under a sweater. Loaded down under two heavy book bags, she appeared to be round-shouldered and flat-chested, but that didn't worry her. She knew that when she set out to dress and make up for a date, she could hold her own with anybody in her high-school class. But today was a school day and there is no way you can look glamorous on a school day short of getting your own private porter or chauffeur to carry you and your books to school. So you do the best you can, and if your friends tease you about your waddle, you grin and bear it.
    She was slightly surprised to note several younger children already dressed in Halloween costumes. Then she realized they were not trick-or-treating at eight in the morning, but merely dressed up for Halloween parties at school. Her cool blue eyes warmed as two little six-year-old girls with eminently solemn faces glided by in satin gowns and rhinestone tiaras, turning occasionally to bark warnings to the gruff little pirates and cowboys who teased them ten paces behind. She wasn't sure if one of the boys was Tommy Doyle, for whom she was to babysit tonight.
    Babysitting. Number one boring job. Boring! Some of her girl friends used babysitting as a means for making out. Perhaps if Laurie were interested in somebody she might do the same thing, but there wasn't anyone in her life right now, so it looked like she would be spending another evening supervising Tommy's addiction to horror movies and satisfying his craving (and, she admitted, her own) for popcorn.
    She thought about what her girl friends did with their dates on babysitting jobs. Some of them had confessed—even boasted—that they went all the way with their boyfriends. Laurie wasn't inexperienced, and she wasn't a prude either, but she knew herself well enough to understand she wouldn't be able to handle that trip at the tender age of seventeen. In fact, she sometimes wondered if there was something wrong with her, if she was a little retarded or something. The smoldering fires of adolescence had never really tortured her body the way it did some of her friends (like Annie, for instance). And although almost everybody in her class smoked grass, she not only had never gotten high, she couldn't draw the smoke into her lungs without coughing. And she was too smart to be interested in any other kind of drug.
    "Laurie, Laurie," she said under her breath, shaking her head morosely, "at this rate you'll end up to be as sensible as your mother. What a drag!"
    "What are you dreaming about, sweetheart?" came her father's voice from behind. Chester Strode stood on the front doorstep, fooling with a keyring.
    "Oh, the