He's a Shape. She hasn't found out his name, if he even has one.
He doesn't speak. He doesn't answer questions, or respond to demands, or acknowledge any of the taunts she spits at him when they linger in the Mist together, between trial and nonexistence. She dares him to move. Breathe. Blink. Kill her, even if she knows he can't.
He kills for the Entity, as she does; as others do. It, capital, is displeased by his service. Him? It? Is it John's will taken form? No. She thought it was at first, when It called for her in the darkness of death.
Amanda knows it isn't him. Isn't, cannot. John was a person. If his will took a form tangible enough for her hold, it would be the puppet, as corporeal as it could become in a realm like this. It wouldn't serve as the mouth of whispers by her ear. It, the Entity, seeks hope through a ritual she doesn't care to find out. In death, It is a service she anchors herself to.
Whispers in the fog tell her he wandered into Its realm. She searches across the fragments of memories, locations and half-homes brought out of the fog, to find his name.
A shape is a shape. It simply is.
There is no morality, logic, or instinct within a shape, for it only is. Things don't work like humans - humans form what they are, for better or for worse. Shapes are pieces in the fog, memories she searches for through minds opened in webs. Memories that aren't hers.
Humans, as cold and terrible as they are, are still predicable. They use codes and creeds to be selfish and destructive and ungrateful. And if they are like her, then they are not bound to morality. Logic applies. Instinct applies.
She can pick out what is right and what is wrong. What could a Shape know about right and wrong?
Michael Myers.
Projected through forgotten memories of that street, and telling the story of a house of pain - Michael Myers is just a shape, but a shape with a name, and a knife, and no motive. Simple evil as a figure in the fog.
Amanda watches him. He watches her, as he watches everything. Stalking is his thing.
"What are you?" Amanda asks. Asking gets you nothing, just eyes as blackened as the devil catching no light. In the period between reality and rest, she grows restless. "Did you die?"
Michael doesn't move. There's nowhere to go, nowhere to die. Nowhere to avoid her frustrated glare, but it isn't something to celebrate. Bothering the Shape doesn't break him.
He doesn't speak, but he does breathe.
"I thought you were just some thing It made Itself," she says, folding her arms and hunching her shoulders. "Like pretending to make a body and kill on Its own."
Michael is a thing. He looks at her, and tilts his head, and Amanda is frustrated all over again.
"So you don't talk much."
One of the girls died with him. She knows all of the hiding places on that street.
Amanda tries to leave her for last each time.
She drops her arms at her red coat's side. Inhales, and exhales through her own mask.
The frustration has moved farther back. She's just curious now.
There's nothing to sit on in the void of fog, but she takes her place by him. The air that manages to pass through the mask John gave her so long ago is thick, and warm.
"I don't want to talk," she admits. "Just want to stand next to something."
Michael looks at her. The way he breathes sounds like a hum of acknowledgement. She ends up folding her arms, ends up staring at nothing, ends up keeping herself quiet for long enough that Michael fucking Myers gets back under her skin, ripping her patience out like frayed wires in a machine. Amanda's never been one to be patient, nor mature.
"Do you understand what I say?" she asks, sharper, the frustration tough behind her teeth. Michael stares, and he nods, once. The darkness of the realm's fog keeps his eyes so dark, so much she wonders if he has them at all - if they're just figments projected at her, looking for the shape of a human in the fiend's form. A human delivering wickedness and evil makes more sense than an apparition created by a reality she can't control.
He revels in the violence, just like others. Why kill without a purpose? A purpose is a way to live. A purpose stops your anger from boiling over.
Amanda rips her mask off. She grabs the fake rubber flesh at her neck and lifts it up, feeling the longer, clumped and wet hair drag up her short cut. When she breathes in, the air is far more cooler, and it feels better to breathe, as grainy as it remains. As much as emotion can dwell inside of him, Michael takes note of what she looks like.
"There's always someone under a mask," she says, staring up at the tall force. "You ever take that off?"
He tips his head while he shakes it slowly. Her mouth frowns, and she pulls the suffocating headpiece back on.
"Fucking freak," she murmurs into the head. When its secure over her head once more, she takes note of his clenched fist, once hanging open.
Every trial she is called to has been on that street. Maybe Its indulging her curiosity. Or maybe punishing her for it.
She cuts the throats and palms of every sobbing survivor. Looks them in the eye so she can dig through the house with the pumpkin on the porch. When she breathes in the stale air, it tastes like wet leaves and old wood, just like autumn.
There's never anything here. Just debris of whoever lived there before. She sits in a room with the memory of a little boy in it, and thinks of the path he took to get a knife and kill the sister. The fog tells her everything - pieces of what once happened, the torment and pain that doesn't rip at her anymore. She felt a little bad the first time she was pulled within the shroud and made to kill; not anymore.
Feels like routine.
Amanda finds a kitchen knife, but they're all dead. She leaves it in the ribcage of one of the men that she ripped the throats out of.
Shapes are shapes, but she thinks it's possible they can exist as human ones. Maybe that explains all the rotten lives she got to put out before - just figures in a fog from the future, tormenting and destroying everything they get to rip apart. A Michael Myers that exists in the worst of living beings.
Amanda curls up on the front porch of the house as reality bleeds away.