Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

It was quiet. It was the kind of silence that follows a midnight stroll. Quiet. Almost empty. It could even be a wonder on its own, if only there weren't a growing smolder of orange in the air.

I could almost smile at the sight of it, but the muscles have long since forgotten the useless memory I had abandoned years ago. It was time for other things to be accomplished.

The gravel pressed cool against the soles of my feet. Each step was identical to the last.

Home.

I knew where I was going, and what waited there, so I kept walking, not minding the alarms blaring somewhere behind me, not noticing the blood sliding down my wrist or even acknowledging the illusion that anyone here could restrain me.

Because nothing could subdue me. Not truly. Not cage me and watch me decay like a specimen under white light.

I may have been compliant for all their little tests, listened to their promises and lies with a straight face, and become their perfect patient for fifteen years, but patience could only buy so much time.

And when my body had become strong enough to break out of their chains, I didn't look back.

All that mattered was seeing Judith’s memory again. One more night with the pattern I had understood and replayed in my mind for so long.

Yet, I didn't expect her…

Laurie...

Everything that happened that night. Most of it went the way I molded it to, but she was the one piece that refused to meld with the design I had created.

Yet my memory still recounts how loud and hurt her scream was, how desperate and terrified her sprint was. And her tears, such details my mind still has yet to let go of.

That memory in particular... When it was all quiet except for her stifled sobs, all dark except for the pale moonlight shining in on her face... on her tears. 

I must have been distracted. I had only just grazed her skin and missed her neck by more than an inch. And because of that, she escaped…

Laurie. Laurie...

Her name stayed intact in my mind, as did her face behind my eyes. And so did the memory of her frantic pulse beneath my fingers, and of her thin hands reaching up and—

Laurie. Laurie. Laurie…

And her breath, her voice... No matter how much I tried to contain it, the image of her defiance could never leave me, never stop festering like a mad idea. Like the infection curling around my eye, the pin-prick on my neck, the gunshots along my chest; her name was an unintended mistake catalogued when the police wanted to interrogate me, every inch of it haunting my head.

Where did this sickness not infect? Why could I never shake it off? 

It had all started because she had lived. The sole survivor. And so, for the last three years, all my thoughts were capable of was the image of her beneath my blade, my hands soaked in her blood, standing over her cold corpse...

She must die.

The wind brushed past me. I inhaled the cold air. This night was not raining. Not snowing. And even still, not a single car in sight. Not a stray animal or even a wandering human. Just the night and the slow march of memory toward midnight.

I wondered if she was still in Haddonfield. If she still thought about that night. Maybe even thinking about me? After all this time? I certainly hadn’t forgotten…

I wish… I had you… all alone… Just the two of us… I would hold you… Close…

But the humming drew nearer, too clear and loud to be imagined. Something close to a car coming fast, not of a distant morning memory.

I turned, and the headlights blinded me. For a second, I was back beneath that sterile ceiling, locked against straps and bright light—

Then the hood of the car hit fast and strongly.

My ribs had compressed inward, something cracked as the metal folded into me, driving the breath out of my lungs before I could hold onto it or the roof of the car.

The landing was much worse.

My shoulder popped. My jaw struck gravel. My leg disconnected from command. Everything rang.

Too loud. Too fast.

The car screamed behind me, tires shrieking over grass, coughing smoke. I noted the scent of burning oil, but nothing more. Only how I felt my blood slid across my scalp and pooled down my neck, heard how broken and short my breathing became, how beneath the skin, bone no longer wanted to align and obey.

I tried to rise, yet my body refused, preferring to lie still rather than obey.

An effort to recover, perhaps.

So I stayed.

One second.

Then I’d kill whoever ran me over.

Who even does that? Runs someone down in the middle of the night?

Someone with a death wish.

Then a car door creaked open. I wasn't alone anymore.

Unfortunate for them.

I turned my head toward the sound. I could feel the fluid in my brain wobbling with the motion, but I didn't care. Not when she stepped out.

The smoke drifted around her, half concealing her, yet nothing hid that blonde hair, bright in the headlight’s ruin, and instead of that blue shirt, she wore a white sweater this time.

You.

Laurie staggered out of the car, one hand clutched to her forehead, the other bracing against the door as if it were the only thing keeping her upright.

My mind tightened around the recognition of her image, but I forced it down and buried it beneath the whispers all chanting for her demise.

I watched as she swayed toward the passenger side, keeping one grip on the car frame as if it might vanish. Half her upper body disappeared into the cab, scavenging for something inside.

I moved then, rising from the ground like an animated corpse given life just as something silver caught the light, something small and sleek. Laurie pocketed it before I could get a better look.

Then a flashlight snapped on.

I moved low behind a tree before the light scraped past where I’d been.

Blood filled every sense. Whether it was the scent from my own body or the pounding in my skull, I held my breath and stayed still. Waiting until the light waved somewhere else.

Then, I peeked around the bark to examine Laurie, my head unconsciously swaying at the sight of her.

She’s changed.

Her hair’s longer, lighter. I did not see any tears, nor did her hands waver. Only she had seemed to stand straighter, breathe deeper, calmer, no matter the damage she had done to me... no matter if she had not just wrecked a car if it were to hit me.

It’s unexpected.

She should have been shaking. Broken. Diminished at the very least.

But no, she wasn't, and now I was the one stepping back from the light, hesitating and assuming.

I watched as she examined the blood trail—my blood—cataloguing each drop.

Then I saw the revolver in her hand. I tilted my head at the sight.

So she came armed. Not scared, but prepared. Not waiting for help, but rather doing the hunting instead.

Anyone else would’ve stayed by the wreck, screaming for help, curling in themselves until paranoia tears them apart. But not her. Not the anomaly. Not the mistake I’d failed to correct.

She continued to follow the blood deeper into the trees. I had stepped back, shifting around each twig to make sure none of them snapped. The flashlight passed close enough to graze the edge of my gown.

She was closing in fast, and I was only slowing down. Too much blood loss while she remained persistent... and still predictable.

I pressed my wound against a low twig and smeared the fresh blood like paint.

This might buy me some time to circle around, let me drift in the dark until she never notices me behind her.

Laurie would be focused on the trail. The flashlight raked across the trees, her grip on the gun tighter now as she stepped deeper into the darkness.

She narrowed her eyes at something. I inched ever closer.

Suddenly, the bushes rattled ahead of her. She raised the gun, ready to shoot. But it was just a blur of fur, some small animal scurrying off into the brush.

Laurie let out a quiet breath—

And I moved. My hand brushed her hair.

She jerked away just before I closed around it. Then the muzzle leveled between my eyes.

I shoved it aside. The shot tore past my ear, and I could feel the warm blood blooming down my lobe.

So I lunged for her throat. The flashlight fell and spun away, turning the fog into fractured light.

She clawed at my arm. I twisted her wrist until the gun fell, kicking it aside.

Being this close to her again did strange things to my skin. Not exactly emotionally... nor memory... Just a pressure inside.

Yet, as her eyes gleamed white with hatred, I noted how absent her fear was. Or perhaps, locked away behind that blinding wrath?

It won't matter. Fear always sharpens in the end—

Laurie’s hand caught my arm, on the plastic tubing still stuck in my wrist, and ripped it clean.

I recoiled slightly, my breath hissing between my teeth. I looked back and saw her holding a small knife.

My head swayed with interest.

If she's still fighting, then this could be good. I expect her end to be better than the usual collapse of others, especially given how delayed hers was.

Her swipe was wild, more decisive than before. Perhaps something new lived in her movements? A different kind of heat? A stronger defiance? No matter.

I stepped in, grabbed her wrist, and bent it until all the angles disagreed. She screamed, but dropped the knife into my palm.

I kept her wrist pinned, the bones shifting beneath my grip. Her familiar pulse thrashed against my fingers, fast and uneven. Close enough now that I could feel the heat coming off her skin, the small muscles in her forearm quivering as she tried to pull away.

One motion. That’s all it would take to end this struggle. This senseless breathing of purpose.

And yet, even as I felt her breath stutter against my shoulder, how tense her muscles grew under my grip, I still don't feel... satisfied.

What is it that she must do, that I must do, before that immature thought could leave me? Actually, maybe that's only because she isn't dead yet.

My hand slid higher along her arm to break her shoulder, but before I could, she drove her knee upward into a very painful spot.

My hips buckled before I could lock them. My grip faltered from the body’s impossible recoil to override. She wrenched free the instant my fingers loosened, tearing herself out of reach in one twisting motion, her breath rasping against the cold as she broke away from me.

Maybe that's what was missing. A chase.

With the knife raised, I began my pursuit. The ground beats under my feet.

I was closing in just until the earth exhaled and fog climbed around our legs. It took her before it did me, but that didn't stop me from stepping inside its voided entrance.

Yet, that was when I noticed how the trees had lost their edges, how the sounds of a natural forest had folded inwards, and the static was beginning to crawl up my ears, beginning to spread all around my skull into so many voices, yet only one spoke through:

“What are you?”

The next thing I knew, I was lying on a dry patch of grass, my lungs stiff, and my skin cold.

And I awoke to the sound of my own breath being dragged through synthetic lips, feeling the air returning to lungs that had not felt this movement... this muffled breath... in so long.

My hands immediately moved before I could even finish the thought, reaching around to feel my face and—

It was there. The smooth latex, the stiff fake hair, the very same hollowed stare molded into someone I'd already outgrown, yet mine nonetheless...

This was my mask. From that day. From that night.

The night Laurie Strode lived.

My body jerked upward as if the name alone compelled it, pulled straight like a wire through the spine.

The first thing I noticed was my clothes. I was no longer wearing one of those patient gowns from Smith’s Grove. My arms and legs were covered instead, suited in the same coveralls I remembered wearing once before. Yet they’ve faded a little, a shade darker than before, but not entirely unfamiliar.

Then I felt a familiar weight in my hand, something my hands had closed around enough to recognize even in my sleep.

I lifted the knife to the light, eyeing the steel and how little it reflected. It was the same one that I had killed Judith with. The very same smear of blood and faint fingerprint edged in its blade.

I remembered how it used to feel heavy in such smaller hands, how those hands had once been too fragile to close around it properly.

But I was no longer that shape. No. Something else grew in place of it.

Although now, as I looked around, gazing into the dark, I've noticed how wrong this air feels, how the night felt so dead in its silence. Even the trees looked off, too rigid and swaying to be anything but normal.

Then the whispers began. 

Curious things they were, they pushed at the edges of my skull, searching for a place to settle, yet there was none. Only static. Only void. The more they scratched at it, the louder the noise inside my head cracked and burned.

I shook them away, insisting on silence. This place was already starting to press in on my nerves, and not in a good way. 

So I stood and walked. Standing idle had felt wrong; only walking through the mist had managed to clear some of that wrongness. As I did, no path became apparent beneath my feet. And as I glanced up and searched the sky for stars, I only found more woven branches covering my vision, only a darkness succumbing every inch of it.

And the quiet. On another day, I may have been... indifferent to it, and yet, this quiet had been stretched too perfectly, too flawlessly, that even I knew something was wrong. There was always a noise to it, even inside, in those padded rooms, there was always a noise, either it rings, or it screams, there always is a noise.

But this place had nothing. 

Not a frog croaking. Not a bug singing. Not a single crow or raven calling from a branch.

Nothing.

I thought I would remain lost inside its silence, aimlessly wandering further and further in its pitch dark maze, but then a thin flicker appeared, slipping between trees as if trying to avoid being seen.

I followed it without question.

It wove faintly through the underbrush as if being pulled forward. As I closed in, its shape suddenly came close, hovering in front of me.

A white butterfly.

A pale and drifting thing, its movements too deliberate for something so small.

Then it continued its flight deeper into the dark.

And where it led me—

Haddonfield.

Specifically, Lampkin Lane—or what remains of it as a ghost of its former self now.

The hedges were not trimmed. The playground was rusted and broken. The grass was overgrown and clung to rotted fences. Half the houses that were supposed to be on my street were missing entirely.

But my house…

Nothing had really changed on the outside. A few windows may have been boarded, and the outside paint chipped, but it was mine. And only mine.

Yet, I wasn't alone.

I turned toward the playground. And there I see two figures, who were... well, they weren't playing with the slide; they were examining it.

One of them hunched strangely on one side, with muscle and bulge where it didn’t belong. It carried a chainsaw in one hand and a hammer in the other, bearing a face of smeared flesh and abnormality. 

He looked like one of my hallmates. They had a weird limp and could never close their mouth right because of the way their jaw was hinged. 

The other shape stood tall and broad. A butcher in posture and presence. He was watching the other like a handler watches a chained dog.

But they did not belong here.

This place was mine. 

The crooked one spotted me first and pointed toward me. The butcher followed his gaze, and the two shapes moved closer, cautiously, their tension thick enough to smell. 

The larger one spoke first.

“So you’re the new one?” His voice was dry, gravel-thick. “Name’s Evan. The lump behind me is Max.”

Max lifted a hand out to me. “Friend,” he offered.

I didn’t return the gesture. Just stared, my thumb rubbing over the handle of the knife over and over again. I was thinking where to cut him best, wondering if it's all really flesh or if there's some misaligned bone in that hump of a shoulder.

Evan sighed. 

“Maybe next time,” he muttered, then turned toward me again. “You got a name, big fella? Or do you just… breathe real loud?”

Names were wrong, too. 

Those are human tools, and I hadn't bothered to recall mine in years.

Not after it had become a leash. Something for others to pin me in place and define me by a truth they were too afraid to speak aloud.

Besides, I couldn't give them my name even if I wanted to. A voice was another human instrument, and I haven't played mine since Judith died.

The air shifted strangely behind me. I turned around and nearly snapped then and there.

One of them wore the scrubs of a nurse, a bag over her head, and yet she hovered above the ground as if psychics had rejected her. She held a rusted bone saw like a toy and even murmured to it, a voice frayed and stretched thin.

A nurse.

One of the last things I needed.

The other figure stood beside her like a ghost, wrapped in cloth from throat to ankle. His eyes glowed pale and empty, like smoke without fire. His skin looked burned in patches where the bandages broke. He stared through me with a hollowed gaze.

Evan gestured lazily. “That’s Philip. He's quiet too. Like you.”

Not like me.

Then he nodded toward the floating Nurse. “And that’s Sally. She’s lost most of the time, but a harmless little thing.”

I stared at them, unblinking, exhaling when his words washed over me.

Their names meant nothing to me, but their voices did, though their presence even more.

Philip tilted his head at me as soon as my fingers twitched with the thought of enclosing them around his neck. Sally only muttered louder while my mind stirred with intent. 

“Patient Twelve took the key… Naughty, naughty boy…”

A nurse. As always.

I stepped toward her, raised the knife at her voice.

Sally looked up from her saw at last, her muttering breaking off.

“Patient One-Three-One?” she asked.

I was already bringing the knife down to her throat when Evan intercepted, his machete catching my strike before metal met skin. He shoved Sally aside with one hand and pressed me back with the other.

I wasn’t impressed. 

If he chose to stand in her place, that was his decision to die for.

Then he swung again. I leaned away from the strike, the blade cutting too close to the mask’s cheek. Gravel spat under my heel as my foot slid, but I caught my balance just as he came for me a third time.

I met the next hit directly. My hand locked around his forearm before the machete could kiss my shoulder. My knife drove into his ribs. The sound it knocked out of him was sharp and unrestrained. I followed through, slamming my forehead into his. Bone cracked under the mask.

He staggered back. I stepped forward. My hand reached for his throat—

—but he struck first. His fist collided with my jaw, jolting my teeth together. My vision tipped for a second, and in the thin slice of weakness that followed, he rammed me into the side of a van. 

Metal wailed and folded around the impact.

Before breath could return to me, I felt the cold steel pressed against my throat.

“Don’t you fucking dare,” he growled. “This isn’t how you want to start this bullshit.”

My hand twitched to pierce his gut with the knife, but Evan pushed the blade an inch deeper; this time, I felt the blood seeping through the skin, trailing down my neck.

I didn’t flinch. He could slit my throat and watch my corpse turn cold, but that wouldn’t stop me from getting back up and cutting his—

A gust of wind whooshed past us. The air suddenly became dense and heavy, something even the others had felt, as each of them adopted an anxious expression.

“It owns you now,” Evan said. “You don’t have control of the wheel anymore, not from whatever shit-hole you crawled out of.”

A breath of fog curled low through the trees.

“Do what it says,” Evan continued. “And you’ll last longer than the others.” 

He stepped back but didn’t lower the blade. 

“Think whatever you want of me,” he said. “But listen well.”

The machete pressed deeper still, a slow slice grazing at the neck.

“Touch one of us again,” he said, “and I’ll drag you through every trap I’ve ever set and leave what’s left hanging. And that’s still a mercy compared to what it will do.”

If there was ever a moment when my mind felt different about its usual purpose, it was right then, because I was only riddled with questions that the voices wanted answers for. 

Who was he to speak this way? 

What gave him the authority?

And what entity made even these killers, these creatures, behave like prey?

What was he so afraid of that he couldn't kill me over it?

The whispers ticked louder at the back of my skull. My thumb traced the knife’s grip.

I exhaled once, letting the tension ease through my chest. Evan mistook the breath for compliance and stepped back.

I didn’t get time to reconsider.

Something screamed inside my head. A sound so sharp and absolute that the world around me flickered. My balance nearly broke under its weight.

Philip blinked once, slow and detached. 

Sally crouched near the house, dragging her bone saw through the dirt in looping shapes, carving flowers that didn’t exist. 

Max lingered behind Evan, still watching me, braced and unsure.

Evan kept his eyes on me, machete lowered but ready. 

“Don’t screw up the first one,” he said. “It won’t be so forgiving.”

Then Fog began to cloud my vision, and everything turned black.

I awoke to being surrounded by pale pink wallpaper and a wooden floor riddled with small debris, a few torn posters hanging on the cracked walls, and a dusty vanity on one side, a rat or two skittering off of it when my gaze bore into them.

This was Judith's room. 

I could never forget it. Never. My memory of her will never lose its grip, never with her.

Yet some things were still missing, of course, always the finer details that go missing. 

Her jewelry, her small belongings. When I tried pulling out the dresser's drawers, they wouldn't move. Not even the chair to her vanity could be shifted. Although the bed, the desk, her scent, the silence, everything essential remained...

The room still seemed wrong to me, like it wanted me to believe in this fractured memory that reeks of a different presence... a different soul haunting its structure. 

The first time I ever got a glimpse of this soul was when I was staring at the meathook that hung at the foot of Judith's bed. All rusted and slightly creaking, its sight begged me silently, almost whispering its wants and needs to me like familiar cruelty.

But I quickly drifted away from it the moment my eyes caught on the gaping hole in the exterior wall, open to the outside air that howled through it like a wound left unstitched.

I touched the broken frame and felt the rot crumble under my fingertips.

A pressure rose in my throat, so cold and fast that it almost breached my nerves.

How did my house become in such a state of ruin in so little time? How come it has decayed into a shelter for the rats and roaches to fester in?

What… or who had done this?

Then a movement flickered across the street.

I stepped through the broken wall, boots scraping along rooftop tiles. Below, small figures gathered around some strange machine, digging into its innards, tugging wires and levers as if entitled to them.

Something whispered behind my thoughts then. Not one of my own patterns, but something older, something… hungrier.

It urged me to hunt. To cull and sacrifice in its name.

The latter, I was not interested in, but the former… well…

There was no reason not to pretend; this was an opportunity.

I watched the intruders, studied the anxiety in their movements as they picked apart what didn’t belong to them. 

They scattered around my streets, touching my cars, pressing their scent into my houses.

Their intentions were clear enough. And I wasn't set on giving them an easy time.

I broke away from the shadows the moment the nervous one in the tie looked away. All it took was one second, one blink, and my blade met his flesh with clean efficiency.

But even though he screamed, when I stepped back, expecting his body to crumble down, he had only scrambled away, clutching at his shoulder and retreating across the rust-coated cars.

That wasn't right.

They should have dropped. This was not the shape the kill was meant to take.

But it didn’t matter. Sooner or later, he'll fall either from blood loss or from me catching up to him. It's inevitable otherwise.

The next hit sent him crashing to the ground as intended. But his breathing persistently continued.

It's odd, usually they die at this point. All the more to end it now, though.

As my hand closed over the boy's face, ready to break those glasses, crack the skull beneath them, and still the twitching for good...

The soul of this unstable world made itself known in my mind, trying to inflict its poison into my ears for the first time.

 “Sacrifice, child of violence... Savour...”

But this was not how I preferred an ending. It was supposed to be over when I said so, not this. Not something that didn't even work for the kill.

And when my instincts chanted for that, I could not kill the boy. Not yet. I needed more time.

I left his body, expecting it to die because who could live through what I've done? Except, he did, and he was not alone. A dark-skinned girl came and helped him up, and he was on his feet in no time. 

Delayed. Again.

I would not let this slide anymore.

I grabbed the empathetic girl's throat, denying her the right to breathe until her eyes bulged red and her face flushed a muted purple, and I heard this pop in her neck.

The redhead I had to catch off guard runs too fast for me to be able to catch her normally in a chase. So when she finally turned away, I grabbed one of her braids and dragged her across the street, gripping her head and smashing her against the hood of a car until her face was unrecognizable and fractured beyond repair. 

The other two, one so quiet that even when my knife carved through his spine, he still remained unyielding and gritted his teeth.

And the last one, the first I had "spared", well, I had found him cowering inside of a locker, too loud even as I lifted him off the ground and buried the knife up to the hilt inside his organs.

I thought that would be the end of it. I returned to Haddonfield. No one was there. It was just me. My house, me, and the other houses. It was all like some big dream, but only more controlled and graphic, allowing me to remember every detail. 

But then I was forced into another playground of torture, and they came back.

Still wearing the same faces. The same bodies. Their own blood still on their clothes. Screaming again. 

Alive.

It was then I knew, death here was a lie.

And lies only waste time.

There was no need for hooks or pointless theatrics. Just blood and the quiet end of movement in their hearts, in their breath.

That part of me untouched by their influence recognized the correctness of that.

However, this new voice? The one that wasn’t mine swelled with agitation.

“Cease Shape! Punishment awaits!” 

I was once the perfect rule follower. But that was for the arrogant humans and their arrogant regulations, which could be easily abused and swayed for their own intentions. 

How easily manipulated they could be once they believed the lie they dared not utter aloud. All but one did, and yet, Loomis had only dug himself a deeper hole by insisting he be heard, to be believed in...

Yet why would they admit to the Evil when it comforts them in their beds? In their food? In their promises?

All I see is a lie. From this unseen being they called the Entity, it dares to think it could subdue me by making me think all of this bloodshed is worth my effort? 

No. I let the crows have their feast once I was done with them. Never again had I ever tried to satisfy its demands.

And from then on, I didn't hear its voice. So, I was left alone again, to my own devices, slowly understanding this new pattern I was forced into.

This place I had been sucked into was a nightmare for some, a paradise for others. For me, it was simply… structure. Just another set of rules. A purpose, perhaps.

But that purpose was so simple and short-sighted.

All I was expected to exist with was to wait until I was taken and placed into one of these boarded-off "play-areas", to seek out and cull four different victims. 

Originally, I was meant to let them rot on the hook, but as I've been pulled around too much even to count how many times I've been called to these "rituals", I've barely even looked at them. 

But that does not mean my tasks weren't without an out. 

If they managed to repair enough generators, a loud horn would blare, and the gates would power on. That only left them to pull the lever, hoping it would open just in time before I could reach them. 

And if that didn't work, then there was the hatch...

A black, gaping loophole in the middle of the ground that seems as if it shouldn't even exist. 

They escaped occasionally, but when they did, I didn't care. 

This place has a habit of reminding me why I should not. It's constant, repetitive, and guaranteed that everyone in this place will meet my blade at least once.

Yet, after the tenth or eleventh Trial, or however many it has been since it started, it became clear to me that this sort of work was still cracking beneath the surface.

Maybe it was because death here wasn't really death. For once, none of what I did, no matter what exactly I did, had ever changed something. Not even their screams changed.

I wasn't complaining. I was always meant to kill. But what's the point of it if they just kept showing up? Is any of it true? Would any of it have meaning? I should not care, but lately the silence has made me more than just aware.

Where was Laurie?

That thought had quickly cut through the static so much that even the whisper had begun to falter.

“The girl you pursued… still she lingers in your thoughts? You will not find her… not while my table remains bare.”

A feast.

The voices churned; I could almost hear them laughing.

Death should be final. 

It should not beg. 

Or loop. Or hunger.

But—

Was Laurie here?

“I could return her to you… If you would kneel. Serve.”

My spine locked.

No.

I’d kneeled for far too many already. I’ve played the obedient patient long enough. Listened to too many lies, not caring really where my path ended, except not in their hands.

And Laurie was mine. 

She was the one who made me miss. The one who reached for the mask. She wasn’t something to easily hand over. She wasn’t an offering to this whisper.

She was my kill.

The voice recoiled, then bristled like wind scraping bone.

“Then be caged. Let eternity pass without her shadow. If you will not yield, then you will never have what you crave.” 

True to its word, I could never leave Haddonfield.

Any time I approach one of the two gates lining the end of the street, metal thorns would always spring up from the ground. Never shifting, never rusting. Only growing.

Perhaps fate did have a sense of humor.

I escaped from one confinement, only to be handed over to a new leash, and the worst part: I was chained down inside my own neighborhood.

Yet, the isolation had never frozen me or broken me before. I could live with that. 

However, sometimes it would send me elsewhere, somewhere shaped by others' memories.

The swamp was muddy and damp. The mud covered my boots to the ankles, the sludge kept creeping up my sleeves no matter how hard I paid attention to my surroundings, and the water smelled like bones and excrement.

The others were there too. The same shapes I met when this whole circus had started. Evan. Philip. Max. And Sally

But there was also a new face.

Small. Wild. Lisa.

The only name Sally had surprisingly managed to coax out of her.

But to me, she was nothing more than an old, weathered, wild hag of bones.

She was small for a Killer, yet her teeth were large and sharp, her limbs snapping with every twitch of movement, and she could leap great distances if she had the leverage to do so. This time, Max had kept his distance, not even bothering to offer his hand when she stalked him and Evan in the brush. 

Evan gave her the same welcoming, punching across her jaw when she tried to take a bite out of his neck, shoving her to the ground as she hissed and spat, screeching loudly. 

Just another animal.

But she vanished when the Trial called her. The rest of us were scattered back to our spaces, as if nothing had happened.

All except me.

I was the only one never permitted to cross the threshold of my realm. Never allowed to wander the Fog. I was just a fixed point, nailed to one ritual ground too deeply to pull free.

But no matter, the cycle continued. Never broken, never pausing for anything to keep count of.

As more Killers arrived, meetings grew crowded and strange. Not many to remember or brush shoulders with.

Same with more Survivors to dissect. Their fear catalogued and forgotten. Names spoken but never held long in my mind. Faces opened and discarded, yet not even their cries had managed to spark an interest in me.

None of it should have mattered. 

But even still, my thoughts continued to rebel, circling the only one thing that has ever spoken more than just a voice in my head.

Laurie.

What would she look like under this starless sky?

I only had the fragments stored in memory. Always running them backward. Forward. Replaying all over again.

Her image never managed to elude me. To me, she was still moving, still resisting, still vengeful.

Although these disobedient thoughts had been enough to stir that hollow pressure in my stomach, the one that tore and tightened without reason, no matter how many crows I took apart.

So, I returned to old habits.

When I was too young to keep track of the years, Judith had brought us a pumpkin, bright and heavy in her arms.

“Do you want to make a Jack-O-Lantern?”

It helped ease away that hollowed ache. Just slightly.

The pressure didn't suffocate me as hard when I worked. The sound of the blade entering the orange flesh steadied the house, made it less empty.

I lined them along the porch. Whole, rotting, collapsing. An entire parade of broken faces.

But even that had lost its effect. That same hollow pull would return, a steady nail would hammer into my thoughts, giving me constant intruding aches to fend off.

It was then that I started hearing Judith again. Laughing in her room like nothing was wrong. Sometimes humming a tune I've forgotten.

Eventually, she would come down from her room.

“Hey, Mikey. What are you up to this time?”

 Staring at the crows.

“Do we have any bread left? Why don’t we go feed them?”

 They don’t eat bread. They eat meat.

“What difference does it make? They’re scavengers.”

 Fine.

Having her near occupied the dead air. But she asked so many questions. So many about the Trials, about whom I saw and killed, or whether I’d found a girlfriend yet.

That last one had me staring at her until she told me to stop.

Now, time here didn’t shift naturally.

The rituals continued, as always. More Killers showed up. More Survivors appeared. Endless repetition occurred. Events folding over one another until memory blurred.

Sometimes the landscape changed. Snow and lights. Ghosts and pumpkins. The Entity’s idea of humor, maybe. 

The cryptid itself hadn’t spoken to me all this time. Just left me with the quiet. Perhaps a small mercy from it.

Then, during one meeting, held in a lab this time, the temperature had dropped sharply. Not as cold as the ski resort, but cold enough for my breath to slip through the mask’s small holes.

I didn’t think much of it. Not when the air stank of copper and ozone. Too many bodies decomposing in corners, some still twitching.

The others had already crowded around the newest addition, another animal, trying to stop it from tearing into Frank's arm. I, on the other hand, drifted from room to room, studying the machinery with idle interest.

That was when I heard something straining, grunting with effort, and someone quietly threatening another to be silent.

It happened to be the Doctor dragging the Cannibal aside. Why? No reason. Maybe impulse. Everyone here was guided by something they pretended to control. But he had Bubba strapped to a makeshift table with electrodes pressed to his chest, the power humming.

So it wasn’t harmless. Obviously.

But why here, with others nearby? 

Oh, I didn’t question stupidity. I only cut through it.

I grabbed something nearby as I heard him laughing manically, a hammer. Bubba’s screams were muffled behind a gag.

Then I grabbed Herman’s shoulder, turning him around. I swung the hammer into his jaw, sparks crawling across his face as he crashed to the floor.

I only did it because I felt like breaking his face open. Not once was I sentimental with the others, but with him, I could hold more of a reason to, since he reminds me so much of my own doctors... arrogant, experimental, and constant noise.

Yet, Bubba stared as if he were witnessing something rare. However, my hands were only capable of death and violence.

And so I left without expecting anything from it.

Yet as more Trials passed and the next meeting arrived, the Cannibal saw to it to follow me around like some persistent… dog.

I tried to drive him off. Perhaps if I raised my knife at him or stared at him for too long, he'd finally go away. Yet he brought pumpkins to my doorstep instead.

In any other sense, I would have kicked them back or ignored them, but truthfully, I had been running out of faces to carve, and Judith kept pestering me to leave the birds alone.

So, an arrangement was made. One that isn't two-sided, Bubba just kept insisting.

Yet, as more Trials, more Killers arrived, and more Survivors to cull, this ritualistic dance was starting to lose its lustre.

It didn’t feel new anymore.

Again and again, they all screamed the same way, all the chases fell into a circle of repetition, no matter the change of scenery. I had managed to memorize their organs by touch at this point, so much so that I had almost completely forgotten their faces. 

Even the new ones. The loud boy who never shut up and the girl who clung to him. The racer who preached more than she spoke, and the armored beast who roared before charging, built entirely of rage.

All noise. 

All static. 

All forgettable.

Except her.

There was something inside these walls, inside the ash barriers, that I had meant to extinguish the moment I arrived. Always close, always shifting just out of reach.

And the Fog tried to make me forget it, tried to smother memory under cycles and noise.

But I will never forget about it, I couldn’t.

The proof stared back at me every time I caught my reflection, every single time the milky white of my damaged eye caught the light. It was a reminder of what she did, of what she took, and how little of that debt I’d collected.

I had never forgotten who she was to me.

And she had every reason to scream when the moment came, when I finally had her blood on my hands, and the knife slid through her chest, through her beating heart that I would rip out of her and crush within my hands.

It was only a matter of time before I would find her.

A whisper slid back into my mind, one I hadn’t heard in some time.

“They dig too deep now, these little ones. Their hands disturb what was meant to rest.”

I paused mid-step, my hand hovering over the front knob. 

“You are no longer bound, Shape.”

Something shifted beneath my ribs then. Not an emotion exactly. Just movement. Like a foreign current pressing inward in a motion I couldn’t control.

“The Fog shall open to you, but not for favor, nor for faith, but because their trespass invites consequence.”

I didn’t answer. I never do. But my grip on the knife tightened of its own accord.

“Hunt, Michael Myers. Unravel the overgrowth. And if your little ghost returns…”

I tilt my head up, turning back toward the street, feeling the wind suddenly gush down a gentle breeze.

“…do with her as you will. She is yours.”

The voice disappeared, but its residue remained. A static that buzzed along the bones.

Mine. Mine. Mine—

I turned toward the edge of Haddonfield, where the thorned barricades had always risen like iron fangs. This time, they retracted when I approached.

I moved faster than I had in months. Years. Hard to tell. But the Fog didn’t resist me anymore. Instead, it pulled.

I didn’t care who else walked inside it. I didn’t care which Trial was active or what creatures had been called to their roles. Only one directive fed my muscles…

Find her.

Mark her.

Finish what was started.

I passed scenes of violence where Survivors bolted through brush. A hatchet splitting the dark with a familiar whistle. Someone screaming. Something in the distance roared to life. 

The Fog itself was more alive than ever. 

Yet none of it mattered.

Only the instinct that kept pulling at me, driving me forward toward something unseen. More protected until I heard it.

Something breaking. Something dragging itself through dirt. A sound too small to ignore.

And when I reached the clearing—

Laurie.

She was on the dirt. One of her arms was limp. Blood was smeared across her ribs, old or new, but it didn’t change the weakness in her posture. 

And above her—

Clown.

He had crouched low, his bulk hanging over her like bloated meat. One hand pinning her shoulder down, the other moving a knife between his fingers as if testing the weight of it.

“Ever see a finger roll like a peeled banana?” he wheezed. “Bet you’ll scream real nice for me.”

Even through the darkness, I heard her breath stutter. A noise too soft to matter to anyone but me.

That pressure from before, when I thought I had been alone in this shadowed cage, returned, stronger than ever before.

She was mine. Marked by me. Altered by me. Anyone else touching her would be a violation of that rule.

So I grabbed his shoulder, instantly felt his flesh give under my grip, heard the knife slide sideways through the fat of his neck in one slick slice, and saw the hot blood burst out in a thick spray.

He made a wet, choking sound. Gurgling through the edge of blood and spit.

I twisted the blade and felt the connective tissue tear like wet rope.

He dropped beside her, slack and leaking. His part in this intrusion was finished.

Slowly, Laurie’s head lifted. Her one uninjured eye found me through the streaks of dirt and blood.

She gasped.

Something tightened low in my ribs from that sound.

She remembers me.

Three years gone, and she still recognized the thing she’d tried to escape.

And she had been here the entire time, inside this exhibit of death and rebirth, while I was locked behind Haddonfield’s borders like a specimen.

And the others had gotten to her first.

The others had cut her, broken her, touched what was bound to my design.

A surge of something cold rolled through me.

They had trespassed only where I should have walked.

I was supposed to be the one pursuing her, tearing through her breath, ending her pulse, completing the correction she ruined.

But now she wasn’t the same. Not the anomaly who tore my mask off just to see what lived beneath. Not the girl who ran into the shadows to hurt me.

No. This was a compromised version. Damaged by someone else’s hand. Ruined by this ageless darkness for so long that she was completely unrecognizable.

I don't finish what another has spoiled.

But with nothing left, the only choice I had to take was to step back into the Fog, let it swallow me whole before she could move, no matter how much my body tried to resist every step.