JMariotte - Boogeyman Page 11

  Outside, the sun was sinking past the western horizon. The sky, gray and overcast all day, was underlit with pinks and deep indigoes. Soon it would be dark. Night. He had not spent a night in this house since the day he had just—what? Witnessed? Relived? Dreamed? He didn’t know how to categorize what was happening. Something told him that it was meant to be this way. Maybe this was all part of the healing process Dr. Matheson had told him about. Maybe he needed to see these flashes of his former life in order to put them behind him once and for all.

  He just couldn’t help wishing there was an easier way to do it.

  The seventh time someone stopped by her office to ask Jessica about Tim, she wanted to break a pencil between her fingers. Just to feel that satisfying snap, that pressure that indented the flesh, to smell the fresh wood and graphite scent that resulted, to hear the loud crack as it went. But the only pencils she had handy were three fat ones—twice the diameter of a normal number two school pencil—that had been a gift from an ad agency, and a couple of stainless-steel mechanical pencils. Her fingers would break before the fat ones would snap between them, she suspected, and the mechanicals were more likely to bend. Even if they did break, they wouldn’t provide the same visceral pleasure.

  Pencil snapping or no, she grew increasingly impatient at the queries. Then, while she bemoaned the lack of an easily breakable object, she started to think about why people were asking her.Because they know we’re in love, she thought.They know we are together and would be up on what was going on with each other. They probably think we’ve spoken on the phone half a dozen times today already .

  But they hadn’t, and she thought she had been fine with that. She tried to focus on the article she was laying out, something about a homeless woman who had started a shelter for abused homeless women, and had raised money to fund it even while continuing to live on the streets herself. There was nothing in particular about it that related to her situation with Tim, but he had edited it, and with each sentence Jessica read (she shouldn’t have been reading at all, she knew, but sometimes she got too involved in the stories to just ignore the content while she worked on them), she found her thoughts turning in his direction more and more.

  Finally, she snatched her phone out of its cradle and punched his cell number on the keypad. Tim’s phone rang and rang, but no one picked up. After a short while, an electronic voice told her that no one was available, which she had been perfectly capable of figuring out on her own. She dropped the receiver back onto the cradle.The smarter computers get, she thought,the dumber they think we are .

  Part of her wanted to let this be one more thing to be pissed off about. Instead, Jessica was a little surprised to find that she was more worried than angry. She decided, on further reflection, that it had mostly been the stress of being at her parents’ house—at bringing a man to her parents’ house, a serious relationship kind of man, for the first time in her life—that had caused her to react as she had when he had received that call from his uncle. She should have been more sympathetic, more understanding. She was just used to being on edge around the family, to trading barbs with her dad and trying to bait him, just like when she’d been back in high school. Waiting for her sister to pull some stupid stunt. And then the way her mom had been flirting with Tim, like she was twenty instead of fifty—that had really put her over the edge. She had been willing to let Tim ease the tension (he was good at that easing part, she thought with a slow smile), but he’d never had the chance. Crazy nightmare, and then the phone call.

  But—God, it was his mother’s funeral. And she had just blown it off.Probably thinks I’m some kind of gigantic bitch now. Maybe I am .

  She had some making up to do to him. She would be doing some tension easing of her own, for that one. Lots of it. Tim was good, but she wasn’t half bad herself. That was part of why they were so perfect together.

  She glanced at the clock. Colson Temple liked for people to work late when deadlines were near, to stay at their desks for as long as it took to get the job done. She had fully expected to do so tonight. She’d eaten a big lunch, and brought in a frozen burrito that she could microwave later. Carbs, protein, and caffeine would keep her working late into the night.

  But now she thought there was something more important she had to do, someplace she was needed more than in her office wrestling with a recalcitrant computer.

  She launched her address book, scrolled through it for Tim’s Uncle Mike. If anyone knew where Tim was, it would be him.

  Most marriages, Mike Halloran knew, dissolved slowly, over time. With the exception of those cleaved apart suddenly through accident—a car crossing the median to hurtle headlong into a truck, a bullet through the brain at the wrong convenience store on the wrong night—whether they ended through death, divorce, or simply stagnation, there was plenty of warning.

  Mike sat behind the bar he’d tended for decades and looked out at the empty room, dark and deeply shadowed, the neon beer signs turned off. A sign on the front door told potential customers that the bar was closed on account of emergency, but if that sign hadn’t been there, a couple of drinkers would have been perched on stools, and at least one of them would have had his or her own tale of marital woes. Mike had never married, but he felt like he’d been divorced a hundred times, vicariously, through the stories of those who sat across the polished oak counter from him.

  Even in cases where the marriage’s ending seemed sudden—a husband coming home to find his wife on the living room floor doing things with a strange man that she hadn’t done with him for years, a wife discovering that her husband had more interest in other men than in her—at least one of the affected parties always knew the end was approaching. And usually that party dropped clues, hints that could be read if only one knew how.

  In his sister’s case, there had been no warning. Maybe Rob Jensen had known—probably he had, Mike figured. His leaving must have been premeditated in some way. But Mary had been completely in the dark. Sure, they’d had their problems. Rob had a temper and a bad way of using his fists to get his way. She hadn’t liked that, but she’d been willing to look past it, hoping he’d calm down sometime. There was always some extenuating circumstance, she had told Mike. Rob’s job wasn’t going well, debts were piling up, or his boss had yelled at him, or someone had cut him off in traffic. Aggravations that other people could just cope with enraged Rob.

  Mike remembered one such occasion, right here in this bar—in the third booth from the far right corner—when Rob had lost control because someone had played “Cat Scratch Fever” one time too many on the juke box, and Mike had had to get him outside and send him home before the cops were called in. Mary had explained later that it wasn’t really the song, that Rob had been turned down for a credit card that day, and he’d been stewing about it, and the song just set him off.

  So their marriage wasn’t a storybook one, by any means. But neither was it all horrible. They loved each other, mostly, and they had a son and loved him too.

  And yet,Mike thought,and yet…he up and left . No word to anyone—not family, friends, or co-workers—no note, no letters or phone calls after he’d resettled someplace else. They had simply never heard another thing from him. He also didn’t touch any joint bank accounts, didn’t take any personal belongings except the clothes he’d been wearing and his wallet and keys, which had been in his pockets. His vanishing was complete, with no trace left behind.

  The police had come over, of course. Normally they wouldn’t even begin to investigate until a person had been missing for twenty-four hours, but when Tim told his wild, terrifying tale of his father’s abduction into his bedroom closet, they had come and checked it out, just in case.

  But there had been no evidence. If what Tim had claimed was true, there would have been blood all over his room, and the doorjamb would have been battered, at the very least. The cops who looked at it found nothing of the sort, though. They decided that Tim had hallucinated the whole thing, trying to explain
his father’s abandonment in some way that his child’s mind could comprehend. That had been the beginning of young Tim’s involvement with psychiatrists, and the start of his mother’s slower but more complete descent into madness.

  Now Mary was in the ground, finally free of the demons that had begun to torment her after her husband’s disappearance and her son’s psychotic insistence that his father been taken by some malevolent entity. A couple of times over the years she had told Mike that she thought Tim was right—that Rob wasn’t clever enough to have vanished so completely. She had said that she regretted not taking him more seriously at the time, that forcing him into psychiatric care, making him learn to deny what his own senses had told him was true, had been a mistake. By then, however, she had been deep into her own psychoses, her periods of lucidity few and far between, and Mike had never known if she really thought that or not.

  It didn’t matter any more. Tim was better now, and she was gone. And if the cops or anyone else had never turned up any sign of Rob Jensen, the world was probably a better place for it.

  Mike drew half a glass of beer from the tap and put it down on the bar. Then he drew another for himself. He clinked the rim of his glass against the first one, which was for his late sister. “Here’s looking at you, Mary Ellen,” he said quietly. “Life was never kind to you. Let’s hope things are better now.” He was just about to down a swallow when the phone started ringing.

  The TV didn’t pick up anything out here. No cable, no satellite. There had been a roof antenna once, but Tim didn’t remember having noticed it there when he drove up. Probably part of Uncle Mike’s haphazard beautification process. One of these days, Tim would have to talk to his uncle about making a plan and sticking to it.

  He switched channels, again and again. Nothing came in at all. Just snow and static, and the latter reminded him disturbingly of the police walkie-talkies in the park the other night, when the cops had been looking for a missing boy.

  All in all, it was probably just as entertaining and intellectually stimulating as most of what was on TV these days. Finally he clicked it off and sat in silence for a few minutes. Outside, crickets kept up their strident symphony, with bullfrogs occasionally adding bass notes. Inside, the house had been peaceful since he’d been up in his mom’s room—no more visions, no more random audio hallucinations or even the usual voice inside his head. Tim had almost begun to relax. He had changed his shirt, putting on a dark T-shirt, but the house was cold inside, and he couldn’t get the heater going, so he’d put his funeral jacket back on over it.

  He had been avoiding the box of photos, since all looking at them did was bring back memories. That’s what he was here to do, however—to face memories. So he went back to it, opened the flaps, dug into the pictures again. Color, black and white, in various sizes. He shoved pictures around, not really sure what he was looking for until he found it.

  A stack of photos, rubber banded together. Tim took the stack from the box. The rubber band decomposed as soon as he tugged at it, little bits of it sticking to the top picture, which showed his dad mugging for the camera, his tongue lolling from his mouth, eyes wide as if he’d been frightened by something just behind the photographer. The picture was shot at a cocked angle, and from below, looking up. He thumbed through the rest of them. A shot of a pre-adolescent Tim taking a picture of himself in the mirror, the flash burning a white spot in the frame. A picture of Katie, fingers in the sides of her mouth, pulling her grin into a grotesque frown. An animal Tim barely recognized as Lulu, the family cat—taken from just inches away, her face was blurred out, filling the frame completely. Tim chuckled, remembering this roll—he had borrowed Mom’s camera for a day and taken these shots. They had cracked him up when they’d been developed, and she had put them away for him.

  The next picture didn’t look familiar, though. It didn’t seem to go with the rest, which had been taken in and around their home. This was a picture of a small, rundown house, with trees pressing in on it from every side as if trying to overrun it. He had no memory of the little house, or of snapping the picture. Staring at it, trying to summon it from imperfect memory banks, he frowned.

  A wet thumping noise attracted his attention. He stacked the photos in his hand, shoved them into his jacket pocket, and stood. The sound had come from near the fireplace. Tim looked into it. There was a gap between the base and the remaining section of chimney, and he hadn’t been able to tell which part of it the noise emanated from. As he stood there, he heard a similar sound—liquid and creepy. It seemed to be coming from the chimney section, so he stuck his head under it and tried to peer up into the darkness.

  He couldn’t really see anything. Not enough light filtered up from the lamps he had blazing all over the room. And it was dark up there, shadowy, which made him ill at ease to begin with. But if there was something in there, he wanted it out. He reached up, felt around for whatever it was. His hand closed on a stick, lodged inside. That was odd, but obviously it didn’t belong in a chimney. He yanked it out.

  When he did, something else came down—held in place by the stick, he guessed. It dropped from the chimney and bounced off Tim, landing in the fireplace. Wet and sticky and stinking to high heaven, smelling of decay and fouled soil. He gagged, brushed the crap off him that had stuck when the thing had hit him, and looked in the fireplace.

  It was a cat.

  Most of a cat, anyway, but the animal had partially rotted away, bits of bone and muscle visible where the fur was gone. The thing was obviously dead—but still moving, Tim realized with horror. He started to back away, feeling his gorge rise again. He still held the stick in one hand, and he thrust it out in front of him like a weapon, in case it came at him. Looking closer, he realized that the cat wasn’t moving—it was crawling with maggots. Repulsed, he brushed frantically at his own clothes again, his hair, threw the stick he had pulled down to the floor. The squirming white maggots were on him, on the floor, everywhere, though most of them were contained in the fireplace.

  Tim thought he would vomit. He raised an arm, held it across his mouth, and tried to look away from the sickening sight. He knew that was a bad idea, though—knew he needed to get this cleaned up fast, as disgusting as it was, before they could spread. He stomped on the maggots on the floor, then ran into the kitchen and dug under the sink until he found a plastic trash bag. Carrying it back into the living room, he opened it up and held it by the fireplace. Poking and prodding with the stick, trying to ignore the sickening squishy sounds when it jabbed through the poor animal’s tattered fur and flesh, he managed to scrape the cat into the bag.

  It wasn’t spending another minute in this house. Even though it was dark outside and the yard was no longer as familiar as it had once been, Tim was sure he could find the trash cans and dump the bag. There had been a shed out back, and they had been stored next to that, he recalled. Turning on every light whose glow would reach into the backyard, he set out, carrying the black plastic bag at arm’s length. He imagined he could feel the cat writhing inside it, but was pretty sure that was his overactive imagination again. He couldn’t guess how the thing had gotten into his chimney in the first place—and more important, how it had managed to move around enough to make the thumping noise that had alerted him to its presence. But he didn’t want to give that a whole lot of thought, since it seemed that it would only lead in unpleasant directions.

  Outside, there was a cool breeze. The sky was dark, but a bright moon shone down, the layer of clouds that had hung on all day having finally blown over. The breeze rustled the long grass of the backyard, pushed a swing on the old rusted swing set he and Katie had played on so many times, making its chain rattle and the whole structure squeak. Shadows caused by the moonlight leaped out everywhere. Tim did his best to look past them, to focus on the lighter spots between the shadows. The big trash can was where he remembered it. He flipped the lid open, tossed the bag in, and slammed it shut again.

  He sincerely hoped there was hot wate
r in the house. He would need a long, steaming shower after his maggot bath, and after handling that wretched cat. He paused out here, though, enjoying the silvery light of the moon and this angle on his old house. He’d spent so much time out here in the backyard, playing on the swings and in the grass, that this, more than the front, was the view he remembered most fondly.

  He could only stay out for so long, though. The sharp-edged shadows made him nervous, the vast patches of blackness beyond where the light reached almost terrified. He started back toward the house, then stopped, turned around.

  As long as you’re here, Timmy, you might as well check it out.

  Tim shook his head. That voice had been gone for hours. He had hoped that by facing up to his fears, he had already succeeded in driving it away for good.Guess not, he thought.

  Anyway, it had only said what he was already thinking. The shed. He had been deathly afraid of it as a little kid. It was dark inside, with deep shadows. Spiders lived there for sure, maybe even snakes. His dad kept gardening tools inside, and sometimes he sent Tim in to get shears, or a weed whacker, and Tim would dash in and grab whatever he’d been sent for and then leave again as quickly as possible.