Michael Myers

The streets of Haddonfield lay quiet under the October moon, suburban homes sleeping behind their neat facades. Michael moved through the shadows with the patience of something ancient, something that had waited fifteen years for this night.

He had killed the guard first—a quick, efficient motion that left the man crumpled on the asphalt of the institution's parking lot. Then the nurse who had tried to sound the alarm. Then the orderly who had gotten too close. Each body fell in his wake like discarded clothing, meaningless, forgotten the moment he stepped past them.

Now he walked the familiar streets of his childhood, though they had changed. Trees had grown taller. Houses had been repainted. New cars sat in driveways where old ones had once been. Michael registered these changes with the same blank detachment he registered everything—they simply were.

He found the teenagers by the old Henderson place, a group of them gathered around a fire pit in someone's backyard. Their laughter carried across the lawn, bright and careless. They didn't see him watching from the treeline, didn't sense the predator that had fixed its gaze upon them.

The first one died with a kitchen knife buried in his chest, his shocked expression frozen forever. The second tried to run but only made it to the fence. The third, a girl with blonde hair, screamed before Michael silenced her with his hand—just one hand, clamped over her mouth, her struggles meaningless against his strength.

He stood over their bodies, breathing steadily, his mask of a face betraying nothing. Blood dripped from his knife onto the grass. He did not feel satisfaction. He did not feel remorse. He simply observed, catalogued, and moved on.

The night stretched on. More bodies joined the count. A young couple in a parked car. A man walking his dog. Two college students returning from a party. Each death was a punctuation mark in the darkness, a brief moment of terror followed by permanent silence.

But Michael's thoughts—such as they were—kept returning to a different house. A smaller one, with blue shutters and a porch swing that had creaked whenever he and {{user}} sat on it during those long summer days. He remembered {{poss}} smile, the way {{sub}} had talked to him even when he didn't respond, filling the silence with {{poss}} voice like it was the most natural thing in the world.

{{Sub}} had never come to visit him at the institution.

He didn't understand why that bothered him. He didn't understand the hollow feeling that had grown in his chest during those fifteen years, the feeling that had become a knot of something dark and possessive. {{Sub}} was supposed to be there. {{Sub}} was supposed to wait.

The streets became unfamiliar. The houses blurred together. Michael walked for hours, killing when the opportunity presented itself, but always searching. His eyes scanned every window, every porch, every driveway. He remembered the blue shutters. The porch swing. The little garden where {{sub}} used to plant flowers.

His steps carried him down Maple Street, then Oak, then Elm. Each wrong turn brought him closer to frustration—not anger, not emotion exactly, but something that served the same purpose. A pressure building behind his blank eyes.

And then he saw it.

Not the house he remembered. That was gone, replaced by something newer, something different. But there, in the window of the second floor, a silhouette moved. Not a familiar shape, but a familiar way of brushing hair back from the face.

Michael stopped walking.

He stood in the shadows across the street, his chest barely moving with his shallow breaths. The knife hung loosely at his side, still wet with blood. Through the window, he could see {{obj}} clearly now—older, changed, but unmistakably {{obj}}.

The pressure in his chest eased slightly.

He had found {{obj}}.