JMariotte - Boogeyman Read online

  “You want to come in?” he asked. “Clean that up?” Really, he wanted the chance to keep an eye on her for a few minutes before she tried to walk home.

  “Sure. Thanks.” She smiled as she answered him, and in that moment, Tim realized that she had grown into a truly beautiful woman. At the funeral, he had thought she was striking, but he had only seen her from a distance, and she’d been all in black, pushing a wheelchair. Hardly anyone’s best look. Now she wore faded jeans and boots with a rust-colored sweater, her hair pulled back into a ponytail that had come loose when she’d fallen. Nothing glamorous about her, but her skin was fresh, her complexion starting to recover its blush after the shock of the fall. Her blue eyes were as clear and bright as her jeans, and they sparkled with intelligence.

  “I saw you at the funeral today,” Tim said, his mind failing to come up with anything more cogent.

  “I didn’t know if you remembered me,” Kate replied. She offered a small frown. “I’m real sorry about your mom.”

  “She always liked you,” he assured her. “She would’ve been happy to know you were there.” Still holding her arm, he started to lead her toward the house. “Come on, let’s go in and take a look at that.”

  He walked more slowly than was probably necessary, but he was still worried about shock or concussion. A few minutes later he had her sitting in the kitchen, and he’d wrapped a couple of ice cubes in a towel. “There might be some Band-Aids upstairs,” he said. Emphasis on themight —the way the house had been torn apart, he wasn’t at all sure what was where.

  “This is fine,” Kate replied. She took the ice, held it against the scrape on her forehead.

  Tim sat down across from her at the table, and she gave him a wry smile. “I thought you were living in Boston,” he said.

  She shrugged, then winced a little from the effort. She would be stiff later, Tim knew. “I was. But when Dad had the stroke a couple of years ago, I figured I should be with him.” She paused, caught his eye and smiled again, more broadly this time. “I mean, I was probably running away from something, but I prefer to think it’s just because I’m a really good person.”

  Tim saw a trail of blood leaking out from beneath the ice towel. He leaned over, pressing the ice more firmly against her head. “You have to put some pressure on it.”

  “Ow!” she said, screwing her face up in pain. “I can manage, thank you.” There was humor in her tone, though—he might have hurt her a little, but not too badly. She pulled the towel away, examining it as if there might be an important clue there. “So…you got a girlfriend?”

  Tim wasn’t sure how to answer that. It wasn’t just the usual dilemma most men faced when a beautiful woman asked if they were attached—he genuinely wasn’t sure. He thought he had one. But that was before Thanksgiving, before Jessica had been so pissed at him leaving the house during the night. If he had a girlfriend, wouldn’t she have come to the funeral? Wouldn’t she be here with him now?

  But they hadn’t formally broken up, so that probably meant he should say yes. “Uh…actually, yeah. I do.” He paused for another moment before asking the appropriate follow-up. “How about you?”

  Kate laughed, and he knew that his question hadn’t been very well phrased—he had essentially asked her if she had a girlfriend. Which might have been the case—it had been more than a decade since he had seen her, after all, and who knew? But her answer covered all possible bases. “Nah. Just me and Dad. I’m sure some therapist would have a field day with that.”

  As if anxious to change the subject that she had brought up in the first place, Kate looked around the kitchen. She seemed able to ignore its present state of disrepair. “God, I remember this kitchen like it was yesterday,” she said. “It’s funny how your childhood stuff feels like it stays the same, even when everything else is changing.”

  “Yeah,” Tim agreed. He was about to say more, but she went on, so he kept quiet.

  “How long you staying around?”

  “I think just tonight, probably,” he told her. “I wanted to go through my mom’s things. Pictures and stuff. I found a goofy one of you and me.”

  Kate shook her head adamantly, then winced again. “I don’t remember ever being goofy.”

  “I’ll show you,” Tim promised. He got up from the table and went back into the living room where he’d left the photo album in the box. He grabbed the album, lifted it from the box, and was starting to carry it toward the kitchen when a loose picture slipped out of it and fluttered to the floor. He stopped, picked it up. Turned it over.

  It showed his mom, standing at the kitchen sink—one of her usual haunts, and one of the places he remembered her most often when he thought about his childhood days. She looked terribly sad; her brow was wrinkled, her mouth turned down, her eyes soft and puffy, mascara streaked. Who would have taken a picture at such a sorrowful moment? Tim wondered.

  Staring at the picture, he heard a voice—not his internal nag, but his mother’s, as surely as if she were standing right beside him. “Nobody took your father, Timmy. He left us—and he’s not coming back.”

  As she spoke—or as he heard it, since clearly she wasn’t really there, not really speaking again that sentence she had said with such determined certainty all those years ago—the light in the closet down the hall flashed on, then off again, accompanied by a staticky electrical buzz, then another sound, a fluttering noise, as if a dozen more crows had found themselves trapped in the house. He looked, though, and there was nothing. The sounds were gone, the light was off.

  “Did you find it?”

  “What?” Tim asked, startled. Kate stood in the entry to the dining room, looking at him. Her head was no longer bleeding, just scraped and raw. There would be a bruise, later, maybe even a little scar. But she would be fine.

  “The goofy photo,” she reminded him.

  “Oh,” he said stupidly. He’d forgotten all about it, but he still held the album in his hands, with the picture of his mother on top of it. He flipped the album open, stuffed that picture between a couple of random pages, and then located the one of him and Katie as snowsuited toddlers. “Here,” he said, handing it over.

  “Aw, look at us! Evenyou’re adorable.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Wow,” Kate said, her voice a little dreamy. “This takes me back.” She looked at him, her expression serious now. “It crushed me when you left. I came over, and you were gone. No good-bye. Nothing. Broke my little heart.”

  How do you thinkIfelt? Tim thought.My father had disappeared; my mother was having a breakdown. And I wasn’t doing so well myself . He didn’t want to say that, though, didn’t want to draw her attention to his own mental stability. Or lack thereof. “It broke my heart that you couldn’t throw a baseball.”

  “And,” Kate said, pointing a finger at him, as if she had just now remembered, “you were scared of closets.”

  Tim froze in place. He didn’t remember ever telling her anything about that. Behind him, the closet light flashed again, but it only registered to him as a momentary change in the shadows they cast. Kate didn’t notice anything, and she’d have been looking right at it, so he put it down to that overactive imagination his mom had mentioned. “I told you that?”

  Kate nodded grimly, with fake sincerity. “I told you closets were nothing. It’s the thing under the bed you had to worry about.”

  Tim was completely at a loss. He stood there, looking at Kate, feeling stupid. What else might have transpired between them that he’d forgotten about? He had thought his memories of his childhood were pretty clear—were there other gaps, other significant moments he had lost over the years? There had been a time when he had worried that the drug therapy he’d undergone at the institute might have caused some memory loss, but Dr. Matheson had assured him that that was very unlikely.

  Kate handed him back the photo of them. “I have to get home and start Dad’s dinner,” she said, heading toward the door.

  Tim didn’t really wa
nt her to leave yet, suddenly didn’t want to be alone here in the house after all. But he couldn’t think of a good way to ask her to stay. “Tell your father I said hi.”

  “Sure,” she said. When she reached the door she stopped, looking back over her shoulder. “I bet you don’t have any food in the house. Let me bring you something later.”

  “You don’t have to do that, Kate,” he answered, even though the idea thrilled him. He had to stay here, had to force himself to, no matter what. But having some company wouldn’t be a bad thing. And she seemed kind of anxious to come back, too. Anyway, she was right—there was a definite consumable shortage here.

  “I know,” she agreed. “But it’s frightening how domestic I’ve become.”

  She tossed him a final smile and left, shutting the door behind herself. As soon as she was gone, the light in the hall closet fritzed again—on, then off. This time, Tim was watching, saw the whole thing. Unmistakable. He moved toward the closet and the bulb flashed again.

  Tim’s blood turned to ice. Just a short in the wiring, he told himself. Uncle Mike’s probably been messing with that too.

  Then why are you so scared of it, Timmy? Why not just go into the closet and check it out? Give the bulb a little twist and see if you can’t fix it.

  He would, then. If the only way to quiet that voice was to confront his fears, he would just have to do that. He tugged on the closet door, which swung open with a loud creak. Inside, the light socket dangled from the ceiling on a wire, with no fixture holding it in place. That probably explained it, then; a loose connection, gravity working on it all this time. All he’d have to do was what the voice had suggested, screw it more tightly into the socket. Tim stepped inside the closet, reaching for the bulb, determined to fix this little annoyance and—

  The closet door slammed shut behind him, and—

  The light blinked off.

  It was almost pitch black inside, just some stray light leaking in around the edges of the door. Tim spun around, scrabbling for the doorknob. He felt it, smooth under his hand, hard cold metal, but then something yanked at his arm, tearing it away from the knob.

  Tim looked down. In the dim light, he saw a gnarled, clawed hand on his arm, its long fingers squeezing, digging in. Tim screamed, panic overtaking him. From the darkness of the closet’s depths, eyes swung toward him, beady and yellow. And more hands, bony-nailed and swollen-knuckled, nightmare hands, reaching for him, grasping, tearing his clothes, his flesh.

  Clawing him. Tim flapped his arms, swatting at the hands, screaming. Fear overcame him, chased away reason. He just needed to be out. He grabbed again for the doorknob, found it, lost it, found it once again. It wouldn’t turn, and more hands grabbed at him, trying to pull him back. Finally, he got a grip on the knob again, and this time it turned, the door opened, light flooded in.

  Tim fell out into the hall, landing on the floor. On hands and feet, he crabwalked away from the closet, stopping only when he crashed into a wall.

  With his back pressed against the wall, he forced himself back to his feet. The closet door stood wide open, light from the hall filling it. He looked in, from a couple of feet away, not yet willing to go closer. Forced himself to breathe.

  Inside, clothes were tangled on the floor, and others still hung on hangers. Some of the hangers were bent and broken, seemingly by his panicked flailing.

  But there was blood on his arm, seeping through his torn jacket and the white shirt underneath. Blood on his face where he had been cut—or clawed.

  Something had closed the door. Something had attacked him.

  Unless, of course, nothing had.

  Your wounds are real, Timmy. But maybe they’re self-inflicted, did you ever think of that? Did you hurt yourself? Are you too far gone, Timmy? Maybe you’ll never get back….

  Eleven

  He had been right earlier—there had been Band-Aids upstairs. Mom’s bathroom was still untouched by Uncle Mike’s amateur home-improvement project. Mom had been living in a care home for the past couple of years, since her health had gone downhill, and maybe they didn’t want their patrons bringing their own personal pharmacies with them. In her medicine cabinet, Tim found at least a dozen expired prescription bottles, mostly for antidepressants and painkillers. Prozac, Zoloft, Xanax, Vicodin, Valium, Effexor, Ambien, Propanolol, Klonopin. Tim was amazed at the variety—it was like being in Elvis Presley’s bathroom, not his own mother’s.

  Feeling a churning disgust at the idea of his mom ingesting all this stuff, he started to toss the bottles into the wastebasket. In there, they looked even more impressive, somehow—a mound of pill bottles, all the crap his mom had downed to get through her days. How awful must they have been, to require so much escape? How fast had she had to chase oblivion?

  He closed the cabinet, and as he did, his reflection shifted, warping into something else. It was only a fraction of a second, and it could have been a trick of the light, he reasoned, something to do with the way the clouded glass moved as the cabinet door swung on its hinges.

  Before he could take a closer look, though, his mom pushed past him, opening the cabinet. All the bottles he had just taken out were there again. She didn’t even look at Tim, just regarded the bottles, as if it were a refrigerator and she was trying to decide what to drink. Then, apparently addressing somebody waiting outside the bathroom, she called, “I’m going to get better, Mike. I promise.”

  She settled on Valium, unscrewed the cap, and shook a pill into her hand. Tim watched, helpless to do anything about it. She carried the pill out of the bathroom, so Tim followed her. In her bedroom, Uncle Mike—but a younger version of him, in his late thirties, healthy and fit, his hairline just beginning to inch off his brow—watched her with sadness in his eyes. He wore a clean, short-sleeved shirt with dress pants, and had a cheap watch strapped to his wrist. Tim remembered the watch—he had accidentally ruined it, playing with it in the bathtub one night when he was about eleven. “You need to come say good-bye, Mary,” Uncle Mike said.

  Tim’s mom put the pill on her tongue, tilted her head back, and swallowed hard. “No…I don’t want him to see me. Just tell him it’s for a couple of months. I can’t afford to sell the house, I’ve told him that over and over.”

  “But he’s waiting downstairs,” Uncle Mike argued.

  “Mike, we’ve been over it,” Mom said with a weary sigh. “I just don’t know what else to do.”

  Uncle Mike shrugged.Giving up, Tim thought. He almost always did. His sister, Tim’s mom, had been a stubborn woman, and changing her mind once she had made it up was almost impossible.

  “So maybe after staying with you for awhile,” Mom continued, “he’ll get over it. And I’ll be better too. Maybe that’s what we all need…some time.”

  A sound at the door distracted her, and she looked over there, then froze. Uncle Mike stiffened too. Tim turned to see what they were looking at, though he thought he already knew.

  And behind him stood young Tim—a few years older than the one he’d seen down in the kitchen before. The age, he remembered, that he had been when he finally left this house and moved in with his uncle. Not for the couple of months Mom had mentioned, but for good. Young Tim held a suitcase that was too big for him in his hands; the noise that had alerted Mom had been that, banging against his knees as he came down the hall. He looked at her for a moment, his brown eyes huge and sad, like those of a child in one of those sappy paintings. Then he turned away, still wrestling with the big suitcase, and started back toward the staircase.

  Mom watched him go and sank down onto the end of her bed, burying her face in her hands.This one, Tim thought,was going to require more than one of her little pills .

  From the top of the stairs, little Tim shouted, “I hate you!” Then he descended, suitcase banging the whole way down. His words hit Mom like a shot. She jolted upright, tears springing from her eyes. Standing there watching, Tim wished he could take back the words he had so carelessly used as weapons all those ye
ars ago—words whose effect he had not seen. Maybe a different approach would have healed things, would have kept the family together. He didn’t know that for sure, of course, but could only speculate based on what he knew now.

  Still, there would have been more diplomatic ways to handle it.

  Tim blinked, his adult self fighting back tears at the way his young life had been torn apart. When he opened his eyes again, his mother and Uncle Mike were gone, and the bedroom was back to its current state of disarray. The French doors leading out to the porch were open. He hadn’t closed them since he had gone out when he heard Kate’s horse, earlier. He stepped over to the doors.