Bones for the Magpie

Part Two : Chapter One

    [1963]

"Is there anything you've noticed about your son's behavior that has concerned you, Mrs. Myers? Any little bit helps." Loomis spoke over the phone with the mother of his husk of a patient.

Mrs. Myers hesitated, not wanting to rat out her own child, but determined to try and save him, "Well...He got a hold of some collar and refused to take it off, uh—he broke off a bird's legs and left its body on the dining table...It was still alive when I found it."

Mrs. Myers remembered her young son, never wanting to speak to her, approached her wearing a brown leather collar, similar to their neighbor's dog's collar.

"Michael, take that off, you are not a dog." She scowled.

Michael only tilted his head. The term was foreign to him, he'd never seen himself as a dog. The collar was merely a plaque to him. An empty one. As October neared, Michael removed the collar, but it was not due to his mother's request. He kept it tucked away in a box under his bed, hoping to have something to put on it soon.

[2018] ... Halloween Day ... 2:13 p.m.

A man exited the gas station bathroom, his hands and dark clothed torso soaked in rich amounts of blood. He was alone—he knew he was alone, no one would see him or grow suspicious. He had managed to work his way around the station and slaughtered all of the inhabitants in the area. The man walked towards a black vehicle and lifted its trunk. He knew this car would have something he wanted. Needed. The two people that owned the vehicle were currently lying dead in the bathroom he just left, both suffered a fate of similar brutality, not much left to the imagination when they'd be found. This pair of adults had visited the man the previous day while he was in Smith's Grove Sanitarium, harassing him with questions, begging for him to respond. But the Magpie Child never uttered a word. They didn't know of his capabilities once he'd broken free from the hospital, but he displayed his gory nature to them in raw form when he trapped them in the restroom. The blue tiled floors now splattered with their blood, stray teeth lying around, coated in the red liquid like candied apples. The mirrors shattered, glass fragments punctured one of their heads, the man didn't care which one of his victims it was. The walls dripped with the same carnage that laced the rest of the room, as if a blood bomb exploded.

The man peered into the trunk and, with an unusual gentleness, lifted up a white—or what used to be white—mask. It aged, just like him, it was now an off-gray color, with a more muddied gray that seeped into cracks and crevices in its face and neck. Its face of beautiful tragedy stared back at the man, like a lost dog returning to its owner. But what the man cherished most was what lied under the head of the mask. Ancient bones, brittle but jagged, browned from years of being kept away, stuck out from its neck, a string holding more trophies dripped down like a garland, all supported by one ragged collar. He ran his hand along the left eye of the mask, examining the ugly scar—they shared the same scar. The one received by the girl who managed to escape him, she jammed a bone through his eye socket, tearing into the mask just to get to his bare skin, scarring his face forever. He moved his hand back down, now onto the necklace of bone, he held up a tooth, his first prize. He had enough studying and slipped the mask over his head, reached around and buckled the collar tight to his neck, feeling the familiar strain as the bones pressed against his trachea and stifled his breathing. He could feel pressure on his vocal cords but wasn't bothered, he didn't have much use for it anyway. He saw himself in the rearview mirror. The Magpie Child had escaped Smith's Grove and returned home.

...Halloween Night... 10:45 p.m.

"Is this thing on? Heh.." A man said, approaching a microphone in front of a large crowd.

The man was aged with fear that seemed to have built his body to a sturdy stature. His hair was shaved down to a buzz cut and his eyes were sunken yet barely hopeful. The crowd's blinding chatter died when they heard his voice echoed across the bar.

"Yeah..." He trailed off, nervous about starting his speech, "I've got a story for you tonight, folks. I'm sure a lot of you have heard of The Boogeyman—or are some of you too young here? Or perhaps you know him under a different name—The Magpie Child."

The crowd all seemed to have a gleam in their eyes as they heard him speak. The bar was filled with a thin smoke from cigarettes and the smell of beer and alcohol soaked into the wood of the walls and floors. Everything was still and no one dared to breathe. He knew right away he'd caught their attention.

"On this night, forty years ago, a little boy had walked in front of a house bound by curses and ghosts—or so it was rumored to be. He didn't know of the..spooky stories that lingered in the area. On that same day, when he was returning home, he saw something in the bushes. A face—pale like a ghost that left its grave and ventured home. It followed him home. And that night, when everyone had gone home, when all the kids were done trick-or-treating, he attacked. I am Tommy Doyle, and I was that little boy."

Tommy aimed a spotlight to a woman standing in the distance, listening to his story. She had brunette hair reaching her shoulders, had mismatched painted nail and a thin jacket that covered her arms.

"My good friend Lindsey Wallace was with me that night. As well as her babysitter, Annie Brackett. Annie was slaughtered that night trying to keep us kids safe. My babysitter, Laurie Strode was there too, she fought hand to hand with this man—this thing. I only saw him for a minute that night, but that was enough to stain the image of it in my mind forever. He was bathed in blackness—both from shadows and the clothes he wore. His face was ghostly, it looked agonized and its expression full of tragedy as its neck was pierced by eclectic attire. Bones, broken and split, adorned this thing's shoulders and throat, it was truly the creation of one's own nightmares. This was The Boogeyman, the Magpie Child everyone had known of. This thing changed the meaning of Halloween for Haddonfield that night. Forty years later, everyone still knows of the Babysitter Murders."

Tommy continued his speech, leaving everyone enthralled, consuming every word he spoke with a hypnotized understanding. After a few minutes of paying respects to those that had died to The Boogeyman, Tommy bid farewell to the crowd and stepped down to return to Lindsey. It wasn't too late in the evening, the sun had since set, but it was still early enough to gather with friends and spend the rest of the night getting drunk. And that's what Tommy had planned to do. He didn't know of a bus crash that occurred the previous night, the bus that held the very creature that shaped his fear-instilled life and was now stalking the streets once again.