Harvestland

TEN

The fax machine rang in Dr. Loomis's office.

He turned in the swivel chair at his desk and rolled over to the machine, snatching up the papers as more continued to spill out.

He splayed the documents out among others already on his desk.

Missing persons. Dozens of them. All girls or young women.

He had started with Livingston County, Illinois. Haddonfield was there, the hometown of Michael Myers. But then he expanded his reach, requesting missing person reports as far back as November 1978 when Michael disappeared, and from all the counties bordering Livingston—La Salle, Marshall, Woodford, McClean, Ford, Kankakee, Grundy.

Loomis knew that Michael's reach went far beyond even that, as evident from his sprees across the Midwest. For years that was how he tracked Michael's whereabouts.

But since his discovery of the tunnels underneath the old Myers house, he began a more localized approach.

That was where the missing girls came in.

Like this one. Loomis looked at the most recent posting he had. A girl named Chelsea Bowles. She was pretty. She was seventeen. She had disappeared just three days ago from her hometown of Russellville.

While Loomis knew of only a handful of murders over the last eighteen years he could with certainty attribute to Michael, the gaps always bothered him, the years between killings.

Because as long as he was not locked up, Michael would not stop. Killing was his addiction.

Every victim, every kill, every hapless teenage girl in his sights—Michael needed them. Needed them ever since the age of six when he killed his seventeen-year-old sister, Judith.

Every girl was Judith to him—starting with his younger sister, Laurie Strode, and then all the ones that came after. Melissa Phelan. Katelyn Gregory. Isabelle Harris. Alison Brown. All of them.

Michael was killing her again and again and again, forever trying to capture that ecstasy of blood and pain with every brutal stab of his long blade.

So there had to be others.

It went something like this: Sometimes Michael wanted an audience, those sporadic Halloweens when a victim was made well-known. But other times he kept quiet, killed silently. Made sure the victims went missing and their bodies were never found.

Maybe Michael did spend the majority of his year wandering the Midwestern countryside, scoping out girls that reminded him of his sister, planning for years the inevitable kill.

But what if sometimes he came home? Like now—in the dead of winter. Came home to live underneath his old house and ride out the cold and wind and snow. What if then he went on the hunt close by?

It made sense. The missing girls from Livingston and the surrounding counties. Coupled with the occasional sighting of an ominous stranger around the old Myers home and the fact that Loomis had never found a trace of Michael actually living within the house itself.

But down in the tunnels...

How many girls, Michael? How many of them have you dragged down there quietly over the years to try and satisfy your insatiable lust for blood and screams and tears, for the sacrifice of nubile young flesh in the name of your evil pagan god?

Loomis wished he could still drive, could still get up out of the house whenever he wanted to and go to work like back in the day. Work meaning his hunt.