Chapter Text
It’s been 25 years since Stu’s been home.
He’s pretty sure it’s been about that long since any other Macher was home too, as soon as the cops cleared out his parents must have started packing because they tried to sell it about a month later. There wasn’t quite a market for that stuff yet though. Murderabilia. It kinda just sat on the listing until the movie came out a little over a year later, and after that everyone wanted it. The guy who bought it from his parents turned it into some kind of museum, and he sort of loves that.
They obviously didn’t let him look it up while he was in the slammer but it didn’t take him long to hunt down that particular rabbit hole after he was released. The Woodsboro Massacre Memorial Museum’s been closed for years now but there’s still lots about it online, pictures of kids dressed up as their characters in the movie, promo videos re-uploaded to YouTube. All the advertising says it was set up to look exactly the way it did that night, but he’ll be the judge of that. Apparently they even used to do re-enactment tours, and god, what he wouldn’t do to get his hands on some footage of that.
Not that it even matters how accurate it is, he can’t not be proud of the mark they made. The scar they left on this town, on fucking Sidney Prescott (wherever she is). The narrative of it, the urban legend it turned into is part of that too; people only bother to fictionalize things they can’t stop thinking about. He’s pretty sure Billy would have hated the mistakes though.
Stu’s half smiling as he fits his key into the lock.
It’s not the same lock as it was back then, obviously. The ring camera is new too, Leslie ordered it for him before he moved in. He’s not used to that part of modernity yet; there are cameras everywhere now, always someone watching you. It would have gotten in the way of a lot more than murder back then.
He pauses here, with his hand on the door knob. There’s a part of him that doesn’t want to open it, to write over his memory of it with the way it looks now. It’s the same part of him that considered staying away from this whole town for the rest of his miserable life. He’s used to small spaces these days and he’s got pretty much nothing to his name aside from money, he could have fit himself into some bachelor apartment somewhere far away. It might have been nice. He can imagine it being peaceful.
Stu’s not exactly a peaceful guy though, so he pushes the door open and steps inside.
The first thing that hits him is the way it smells, it’s just sort of… stale. Dry. That night it was wet, spilled beer and blood, gunpowder and burning flesh. The left side of his face aches as he closes the door behind him.
It’s not really surprising that it smells stale, as far as he knows no one’s been here since 2010, after the dude who ran the massacre museum bit the dust. Apparently his widow wasn’t a fan of the family business so she listed it as it was, not bothering to sell off the shit inside even though she could have made bank off it. Leslie took it off her hands pretty much immediately.
He remembers her talking about it during visiting hours, dropping her voice low like she didn’t want anyone to know she bought it. He’s not stupid, he knows she’s ashamed of the legacy he’s left for the family and she’d do anything to starve it out. She fucking hated the fact that it got turned into a tourist trap like that in the first place, used to go on about how disgusting it was for someone to try and make a profit off it at all. Unsurprisingly she’s got a bone to pick with a certain Gale Weathers.
He’s never bothered to mention how funny he thinks it all is, just doesn’t seem worth upsetting her like that. So maybe he’s matured a bit after all.
He’s not sure why she never knocked it down but it worked out pretty well for him in the long run. It’s not like she loved the idea of him moving back here, she kept warning him about how she hadn’t touched it in years and she doesn’t even know what the museum people left behind. For all she knew it was falling apart, but he spun some yarn about needing something familiar now that he’s out, and besides, housing isn’t cheap these days.
He spent his first month of freedom in her guest room for placation sake, clumsily making his way through the process of getting the water and power turned back on before moving in. Adult shit like that, the kind of stuff you don’t learn when you live in a taxpayer funded cinderblock cell. At the end of that month he packed the single suitcase that contained all his worldly possessions and he made his way back to Woodsboro.
So here he is in his giant empty new old house, and the first thing he sees is the fucking chalk outline in the entryway. It jars him but he shouldn’t be surprised, he knew there would be shit like this left around. He just wasn’t quite ready for that. It’s not even chalk, It’s clearly painted on. There’s a plaque on the wall above it but he doesn’t bother reading it, he already knows what it says.
For all he knows that’s not even the real spot, it’s not like he was lucid enough to actually see the aftermath. On some level he’s grateful for that. Grateful that his last memory isn’t like that, but this feels like looking at a death mask. The goddamn love of his life, immortalized in his very worst moment.
He didn’t think the phony stuff was going to hit him this hard, but now he’s thinking that was pretty naive.
He finds himself on his knees, hands splayed out against the white line as his eyes sting, and fuck. It’s been two and a half decades but it still hurts more than anything else he’s ever experienced. Hurts more than that fucking TV did, so much more that it’s got him clutching his chest, gasping at air as something a little louder, a little more pained comes out of him.
And then his whole body goes cold.
It's not just a chill, it’s like being flash frozen and it’s enough to shock him into silence. He’s immediately shivering, teeth chattering from the shock of it as he struggles to his feet. He glances around like he’s going to find the source of the impossible draft but obviously there's nothing more than a lot of dust and cobwebs, and just as fast as it came on it’s gone again.
Huh. Weird.
Bodies do random shit sometimes though, doesn’t mean anything. Probably just… fucking grief. Or low blood sugar.
“Shit,” He sighs, wipes a hand over his scarred up face and tells himself it’s time to move on.
He doesn’t really get a chance to try though, the next thing he knows there’s someone screaming. What the fuck? He moves before he thinks, halfway to the living room where it’s coming from when he realizes there’s a fucking soundtrack under the shrieking. Of all things that’s what stops him in his tracks; he recognizes it immediately, even though he hasn’t been able to watch this movie since he was a teenager. He’s pretty sure ‘The Shape Stalks’ is written into his fucking DNA.
Someone is watching Halloween. Someone is in his house.
He’s moving again, practised hands balling into fists because he’s ready to teach someone a fucking lesson, only when he gets to the room it’s empty. Nothing moving other than Laurie Strode on film.
For a second Stu is a lot younger, he’s wearing polyester, and Randy is drunk on the couch. He still has both eyes and he’s holding a knife.
Shit.
He’s gotta hand it to the massacre museum guy, the house looks pretty damn close to the way it was the last time he was here. It’s obviously not the same TV, he’s pretty sure that one ended up in some police evidence locker. It’s still a CRT though, same model as the old one and everything. Maybe it’s got faulty wiring. Sometimes the old ones short out like that, it could have turned itself on.
Stu's hand is shaking more than he’d like to admit as he reaches out and switches it off.
“Hello?” His voice is loud against the silence of the house. Nothing, probably nothing. That’s what he’s telling himself but he’s still tensed up, holding his breath like he used to when he went hunting, straining to listen for any sign of life. Again, he doesn’t hear shit. Or does he? Is that a floorboard creaking? “Museum’s closed but if you’re looking for the victim experience I’ll fuckin’ give it to ya-”
It’s not an empty threat, it hasn't actually been that long since he had blood on his hands. It's a little harder to whack someone in prison than it is to whack them off, but if you pick a guy the guards don’t like so much they’ll pretty much help cover it up for you. It’s also a good way to keep people from messing with you if you’ve got a pasty ass and you're trying to avoid the dudes that are way too proud of the pastiness of their own asses.
All of that is to say he's not as out of practice as the judge who released him might think, and as much as he’d rather not land himself back behind bars it wouldn’t be the end of the world. What’s he got to lose? He lost the only thing that really mattered before they locked him up in the first place. As far as he’s concerned the rest of his life is just passing time.
“Ready or not, here I come!” He may as well have some fun with it, right?
The ‘fun’ of it wears off pretty fast when he doesn’t find anything suspicious though.
What he does find is a lot of plaques like the one in the entryway. His favorite might be the one in his parents' old room, which helpfully explains that the big red stain on the duvet is corn syrup and food coloring from Billy’s faked death. It’s not though, Stu knows that for a fact because it’s very clearly not the duvet his parents had back then, it's a completely different color.
There’s also the one that says his old bedroom is in fact, his old bedroom. That one is funny until he actually opens the door and he just… can’t. He can't step over the threshold. The sight of it alone puts this horrible feeling inside him, like a sinkhole just opened up in his stomach and it’s trying to drag him down into the floor.
He’s not sure if he’s even seeing the room at first, it feels like looking into a memory but as he looks around he does see the inconsistencies. Posters he never had on the wall, sweaters that weren’t his slung over the desk chair… It’s pretending to be a time capsule but it’s not. It’s just like everything else in this house, no less than half fiction. He could step through that in the other rooms, he could laugh at the farce of it, but here that dark feeling doesn’t lighten even an ounce as he stares. Unblinking. In the end he closes the door and leaves it behind without ever stepping inside.
Looks like he’ll be sleeping in Leslie’s old room tonight.
It’s definitely the least weird, probably because it’s also the most empty. she’d pretty much already moved out back then so it obviously wasn’t really part of the attraction. He’d been planning on trying to clean the place up a bit, maybe unpack the kitchen shit Les sent him off with, but he just keeps reflexively freezing, listening extra hard every time something in this old ass house makes a sound. Which is fucking dumb right? He’s a grown man. He’s the scary thing haunting this house. Maybe he’s just tired. Either way he badly needs a distraction so he gives up for the night, installing himself in his new room with his new laptop so he can binge movies until he passes out.
He missed a lot while he was in jail, and holy shit media piracy’s come a long way since he was burning things onto tapes and CDs. He’s only been out about a month but he hasn’t wasted time catching up on all the stuff they didn’t let him do with computers in prison.
Porn is the other big thing he missed. Oh god, the porn, so much porn. He would have jacked himself raw if he had this shit when he was a teenager.
So yeah, he torrents a couple movies of the non-porn variety and shotguns a lethal dose of twenty-first century gore. God bless you James Wan. He would have jacked himself raw if he had this shit when he was a teenager too. And hey, speaking of jacking it’s about that time so he clicks on over to pornhub.
Just in time for his wifi to cut out.
At first he’s mildly annoyed at the inconvenience, only then he tries to turn on the bedside lamp and it doesn’t work. He tries the overhead but it doesn’t work either and that's enough to straighten his spine. Wifi cuts out every once and a while, he learned that while he was living with Leslie and all you have to do is restart the thing. But if the power is out? That’s a lot fucking weirder. He literally just paid them to hook the place up again and the sky is as clear as it could possibly be.
They're back. Someone was messing with him before, and now they’re here for more.
He’s on his feet and running the moment he has that thought, sweeping the house for a second time. This time he has to do it in the dark though, and it feels ridiculous that it’s enough to unsettle him. Like, he’s a big dude! He’s pretty damn ripped these days, he’s an ex-con and he’s a fucking serial killer but reminding himself of that does nothing to slow his heart rate.
Every time he turns a corner he swears he sees something darting into his blind spot, blinking out of existence the moment he tries to look at it directly. It’s not just that either, the house feels cold too. Way colder than it should be given that it’s August. It’s not even this cold outside right now, but even so he checks every door and window. They're all locked, and in the end there’s only one place he hasn’t checked. He almost talks himself out of it too, but the thought of not knowing if someone’s in there is worse than the idea of forcing himself to go inside.
It’s that sinkhole feeling all over again as he stands in the open doorway of his old room. He’s just about to lift a foot when every single hair on his body stands to attention and every instinct in his body tells him there’s someone right behind you.
For a second he desperately doesn’t want to check, desperately wants to ignore whatever it is that his mind is blowing out of proportion just like he wanted to ignore this room all together. It comes down to the same thing though, either it's nothing or it’s some asshole who broke in and that’s nothing he can’t deal with, so he whips around and-
Darkness. Only darkness.
…Right?
As he stares the shadows start to stretch, warp and morph, and he knows it’s just a trick of the eye but he can’t help staring a little longer, just in case. More darkness.
“Get it together, old man.” He hears himself sigh, forces his shoulders to drop and turns to step into the sinkhole.
Fuck. The feeling hits so strong that he nearly staggers, and between the weight dragging him down and the raw adrenaline screaming at his heart to beat faster he feels like he might as well just rip in half. You’re alone, there’s no one here. That’s what he’s telling himself, repeating it under his breath like a mantra but the fine hairs on his skin still stand on end. He’s breathing faster against his own attempts to slow down but it’s all in his head, right? He’s going senile thirty years early, or maybe he’s just plain going crazy but either way there’s no one in his bedroom. No one in the storage space behind it. No one anywhere in the fucking house as far as he can tell.
He checks the powerline in the end but it’s intact. All it takes to fix is a couple switches on the circuit breaker, so it really is all in his head.
Still, he grabs a chair from the kitchen and a weighty metal ‘sculpture’ from the mantelpiece before marching back up to Leslie’s room. He barricades the door with the chair, then he gets back in bed with his new weapon under the blankets beside him, and this time he leaves the light on.
The silence is gnawing at him as he lays there so he puts on another movie, but he can barely follow the plot. It mostly ends up being background noise as his mind spins itself out, until he’s too tired to think and finally he passes out with a hand over the tattooed remains of a B shaped scar on his chest.
…
…
…
He’s not sure exactly when he wakes up but the moonlight filtering in through the blinds tells him he can’t have been out for long. He’s about to go back to sleep when it occurs to him that the bedside lamp is turned off again. And the door is open.
A cold shot of panic rushes up his spine and it should have him on his feet at the ready, blunt instrument in hand, but he can’t move. He can’t move? He can’t move, fuck-
Out of the corner of his eye he sees something shift, and that’s when he realizes; there’s something in the doorway.
There’s something standing there, watching him and he’s trying, he’s really trying to remind himself that it’s all in his head. But this thing doesn’t disappear like the shadows in the hallways, no, if anything it’s coagulating, darkening, getting more and more defined. This is not a shadow. Stu knows shadows, he’s seen more than enough of them, and that is not a fucking shadow. It’s a tear in the universe, it’s the entire absence of light and it has eyes.
Or at least it has the suggestion of them, positioned right where they would be if this thing had a face. If anything they look more like pin-prick holes in a projection screen, focusing the light behind it into tiny beams as it passes through to the other side. Stu’s watched a lot of horror movies, he’s seen all the worst ways a person can die and he didn’t give a shit. He doesn’t believe in god and he’s not afraid of going to hell, but he looks at this thing, and all he can think is that’s a fucking demon.
It’s moving too.
He didn’t realize it at first but it wasn’t right in the doorway, it was just a little way down the hall and it’s been getting closer this entire time, looming larger and larger until it actually crosses the threshold. The temperature in the room drops by what feels like 50 degrees in a matter of seconds and Stu’s really trying now, fighting with every ounce of strength in his body to move anything, a finger, a toe, a fucking eyelid. Even his lungs feel like they’re freezing now, muscles between his ribs stiffening, contracting against every inhale as this thing stands over his bed, stares down at him.
In this moment he wishes more than anything that his eyes were closed, that he could at least pretend to be asleep because it knows that he’s awake, knows that he’s looking back at it and somehow that feels like provocation. Under the weight of those pinhole eyes the sinkhole opens back up in his stomach and he feels like he’s slipping, sliding down a cliff face, unable to reach or grab for anything that could possibly hold him up. It’s like one of those dreams where you’re trying to run but you’re on some invisible treadmill, not moving even an inch as doom rushes up behind you.
Only this isn’t a dream; at least it doesn’t feel like one. The room is too clear, too right, unblurred at the edges, and then there’s the fact that he’s even wondering if it’s a dream in the first place. He doesn’t do that in nightmares. It doesn’t even occur to him.
This is when the dark thing above him drops out of view, and he forgets how to breathe entirely.
His heart is hammering in his chest, the thud of it so heavy and forceful that he can hear it in his ears as he feels its weight dipping the mattress near his feet. He can’t move his head, can’t look down to see it but he knows exactly where it is. It’s got something like hands around his ankles, hands like the shackles they used to chained his legs together when they took him to court.
For a second he thinks it’s going to yank him off the bed, drag him to the floor and rip him to shreds, but it doesn’t do that. Instead its moving up, crawling up his legs, pinning him down like he’s not already paralyzed and somehow this is so much worse. It’s up to his hips, to his stomach, coming into view again as it settles on his chest.
As if he wasn’t already struggling to breathe it’s even harder now, not just from the stuckness of his lungs but from the mass of it, pressing down, somehow getting heavier until he feels like his ribs are going to start cracking. It’s leaning in now, empty holes boring into him, drilling through his skull and only inches away.
Then he feels hands around his neck.
The room is a deep freeze but these hands are on fire, burning the skin of his throat on contact, and he’d be screaming if he could but he can’t breathe at all now. His brain is going static, hazy and closing in on itself more than it already had, and in the split second before everything goes black it feels… familiar.
“YOU SHOULDN’T BE HERE.”
It sounds like anything but a person; like a thousand raw voices screaming, like nails on a chalkboard and the hiss of a snake before a fatal bite.
Stu wakes up gasping.
The moment he opens his eye he’s blinded by a combination of sunlight and the still-lit lamp on his bedside table. The chair is still pushed up against the door too, so everything is exactly the way it was when he went to sleep. He’s alive, he’s breathing, and the room is a normal temperature, but he can’t shake that weight on his chest.
Can’t shake the boner either.