JMariotte - Boogeyman Read online

After Dad had…after he’d left, Tim had never gone back inside. Screw the yard, he had thought. Mom hadn’t made an issue of it.

  Tim shrugged, steeling himself. No time like the present. He reached for the door, hesitated, then closed his hand on the latch, lifted it, and swung the door open. It was rusted and stuck when he pulled, but he tugged harder on it and it gave, opening wide with a frightful, rusty screech. Inside on the right, he remembered, was the light switch. He flicked it, thankful that, miraculously, it still worked. Two bulbs flashed on, one just over the door and the other out over the center of the shed.

  The inside looked pretty much as he remembered it. Spiderwebs joined the two lawnmowers, push and gas-powered. Tools had rusted in place on their Peg-Board home. Gas cans and paint cans, a genuine fire hazard, were piled in a corner. A thick layer of dust covered all of it.

  He was reaching for the switch again, to turn off the lights, when he saw a flicker of motion behind the lawnmowers. He peered through the webbing, through the shadow. Were those eyes, looking back at him? A rat? No, too big. He kept his hand on the switch and tried to sound forceful. “Hello?”

  After a moment, a little girl emerged from behind the lawnmowers. Eleven or thereabouts. She walked on stiff legs, her hands held close to her sides, and she looked up at him with terror. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer.

  “You want to come out of here?”

  Still no answer. Tim backed away from the door, beckoning her to join him. She followed, out into the moonlight. “What were you doing in there?” he asked. She remained silent, and Tim kept staring at her, pieces slowly coming together in his head.

  He recognized her.

  “You were at my mother’s funeral, weren’t you?” The girl under the tree. Red sweater, striped scarf. Hair like hammered pennies. Eyes like summer sky.

  She looked at the ground, at the house, at the moon. Anyplace except at Tim. Her voice was soft, almost inaudible. “My dad knew her.”

  She hadn’t been there with any dad, though. He was sure of that. And the funeral had been miles from here.Even, he thought grimly, remembering his shattered, blood-streaked windshield,as the crow flies . “What’s your name?”

  She swallowed, as if he was asking her to give up state secrets. “Franny.”

  “So, Franny, you want to tell me why you’re following me around?”

  Now she was looking at him, but not at his face. Maybe his knees, or his ankles. Bolder, though. Her voice was little girlish, maybe even young for her age. Girls seemed to grow up so fast these days, he thought. This one wasn’t trying to emulate Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera, though. She had an innocent quality that seemed hard to come by in this oversexed, media-hyped age. “I wanted to talk to you,” she said. “I wanted to ask you something.”

  Now Tim was really curious. “All right.”

  “I got too scared.”

  “You want to ask me now?” he suggested.

  She swallowed, moved her gaze up to somewhere around his midsection. “Is it true?”

  “Is what true?”

  Franny lowered her head, staring at the ground again. Tim was afraid she was losing her nerve, would never get around to her question. She bunched her hands into little fists, like she was bracing herself, willing herself to continue. “That the Boogeyman took your dad.”

  Whoisthis kid? Tim wondered. He stared at her, his heart suddenly hammering, a vein throbbing at his temple. For half a second he wondered if she was even real, or just another one of his crazy visions. But she looked real enough. She cast a shadow, and the details—the spot on her sweater where a little section of the lace pattern was missing, and the fraying of its cuffs, the damp spot on her knees where she had knelt in something wet—were convincing. She even smelled real: slightly earthy, like she hadn’t had a bath in a couple of days.

  “Look,” he said at length. “I don’t know where you heard that, but…it’s just a story. There’s no such thing as the Boogeyman.” He realized even as he spoke the words that he was echoing phrases drummed into him by his parents, by Uncle Mike, even by Dr. Matheson. But he believed in what he was saying, so he kept on. “I was just trying to make sense of things. My dad left, and I was upset. That’s all that happened, okay?”

  Something changed in Franny’s face as he spoke. She had finally summoned up the resolve to make eye contact, and she had been watching him with a hopeful expression. Hearing his words, her eyelids drooped, her lower lip began to tremble, even her cheeks seemed to sink in. She turned her back to him then, without saying another word, and began to walk away.

  Tim felt a surge of guilt, as if he had done something wrong. He couldn’t guess what, though. He had told her what she needed to hear—what he had needed when he was her age. But he didn’t want to just let her walk off into the dark of night. “It’s late,” he called after her. “Your parents are probably worried. I’ll give you a ride home. Where do you live?”

  “Next to the park,” Franny answered. “I’m all right. I got my own ride.” She reached down into the deep grass behind the shed and hoisted up an old mini-bike, wet with dew. A cord, like on the gas-powered mower inside the shed, hung from the engine. Franny gave it a hard yank and the antique bike roared to life.

  Tim couldn’t let her leave without at least offering a piece of advice.

  “Hey, Franny!” he called, shouting to be heard over the engine. She looked over at him as she mounted the bike. “Count to five. When you’re afraid, I mean. Just close your eyes and count to five. Sometimes it works for me.”

  Straddling the bike, she cocked her head and narrowed her eyes at him. She looked older that way—still childish, but somehow ageless at the same time. “What happens when you get to six?” Without waiting for an answer—not that Tim had one ready—she throttled up and drove away.

  Tim stood in the yard, listening until the night was quiet again.Weird little kid, he thought.But she reminds me of me.

  He wasn’t sure that was a good thing. He’d been one messed-up kid himself.

  He went back into the shed to turn the lights out. Before he did, though, he took a last look around in there, and spotted something he hadn’t seen before: a mint-green backpack with a tiny rubber frog dangling from the zipper pull and Magic Marker doodles all over its surface, laying on the ground. This couldn’t have been left over from his mom—it was too clean, too new. It had to be Franny’s, then. Tim picked it up, switched off the lights, and carried it into the house.

  Twelve

  Tim stood in the foyer at the base of the stairs, trying to decide what to do with the little girl’s backpack. Open it and see if he could find an address, a way to get it back to her tonight? Maybe not the greatest idea—he didn’t want to freak her parents out by having a total stranger show up at her place well after dark and toting her backpack…especially if she had sneaked out of the house in the first place. Perhaps wait and see if she came back for it in the morning?

  Before he could come to a decision, the door to the storage closet under the stairs banged open. Tim sucked in a quick breath, startled, but then his dad and young Tim appeared and he knew it was just another memory, or hallucination. He still wasn’t comfortable with these, but they were starting to become old hat.

  “Tim,” Dad growled, his voice tight with anger. “Look! There’s nothing in there.”

  Young Tim sounded almost hysterical with fear. He sniffled and replied, “No! I don’t want to!”

  Dad grabbed him by his scrawny arm and dragged him toward the closet, yanking the door open with his free hand. Tim couldn’t see if there was anything inside it from here, all he could make out was a pitch-black space. “Please, Daddy, don’t!” little Tim shrieked. Tim remembered the sensation even today, the panicked, helpless feeling as the older man muscled him under the stairs.

  Then Dad closed the door. Inside, in the dark, Tim lost all control. He cried, screamed, pounded on the door. “Dad! Dad! Please, let me out!
Please!”

  “Tim, stop it!” Dad answered. To grown Tim, the old man sounded heartless. He figured his father had just been trying to teach him a lesson—the same one he had tried to impart to Franny, just a few minutes ago. There is no Boogeyman, nothing waiting to grab you in the dark. “There’s nothing in there,” Dad went on. “Just count to five like I told you. Close your eyes and count to five.”

  Inside the closet, Tim could hear his child counterpart trying to count through blubbering sobs. “One…two…three…” As he reached three, the closet door started to creak open of its own accord. A strip of light from the hallway slipped inside.

  Grown Tim walked over and looked in the closet. Nothing. Dust, cobwebs, a stray gum wrapper on the floor. The vision had passed.

  Tim looked at his hand, almost surprised that he still held the backpack.Having a hard time telling what’s real from what ain’t, Timmy? the voice asked him.Or is it all real? Or none of it? How are you supposed to keep things straight, anyway? And how can you tell other people what’s real and what isn’t, when you don’t know yourself? You think you did Franny a lot of good, back there?

  “I’ll worry about that,” Tim answered out loud. “You just worry about who you’re going to harass after I get rid of you.”

  No response. He carried the backpack into the living room and sat down on the couch. Turning it over in his hands, he noticed that a slip of paper had jammed in the zipper, preventing it from closing all the way. He worked the zipper, tore off a little of the paper’s edge, and then got it to unzip.

  Tim tried to tell himself it was her property, and he shouldn’t mess with it. But it was open now, and he realized it was stuffed to the brim with sheets of paper. No wonder one had tried to get away. He tugged out the sheet that had been stuck and looked at it.

  It was a missing-persons flyer. Caryl Richman, fourteen years old, last seen on April ninth. A picture showed a sullen-looking girl with bleached blond hair and dark roots, wearing a fake leather jacket and a black, torn rock band T-shirt. On the flyer were details of when and where she had disappeared, and her vital statistics. Ninety-five pounds. Five-one. Green eyes.

  On a hunch, Tim dumped out the rest of the papers from the backpack. There were dozens upon dozens of them, maybe numbering into the hundreds. Some of the flyers were yellowed with age, some cut out of milk cartons, some ripped from telephone poles or other spots where they’d been stapled or taped. Boys, girls, men, and women. Every race, age, and income level one could imagine. Tim saw one that was about an entire family that had vanished in Mississippi. Others detailed the search for kids over periods of years—using the same childhood pictures, but in some cases artist’s renditions of how they might look now, years after they had disappeared.

  He pored over them, astonished at Franny’s collection. What could possibly drive a young girl to obsess over something so morbid?

  A sound caught his attention. Footsteps, running fast, somewhere behind him. They sounded like small feet—a kid’s, maybe. Had Franny come back? Tim whipped his head around and caught just the slightest glimpse of a small towheaded boy racing across the foyer. Then the footstep sound was gone, as if the boy had never been there.

  That was weird,Tim thought, recognizing even as it crossed his mind that “weird,” for him, in this house, held an entirely different meaning than it did for most people. This had been something different, at least—not some random memory from his own childhood. And there had been a different visual quality to it, as well. When he saw those memories unfold before him, it was as if he were really back there, in that time, with whatever lighting conditions had existed then. This running child, however, had been a fast-moving blur, but clearly in the present, the light and shadow of the foyer playing off him as it would naturally.

  Just nerves, he decided. Probably a sound outside, and he had only thought it was in here. And seeing things wasn’t exactly out of the norm. He went back to the backpack, pawing through more of the papers that had been inside it.

  They were not just missing-persons flyers, as it turned out, but a veritable encyclopedia of the missing-persons phenomenon. Franny had amassed newspaper clippings about disappearances from all around the country. “Missing Girl!” one headline screamed. “Amber Alert for Tri-County Tyke.” “Family Holds Out Hope in Search for Son.” There were even pages printed from online news sources, including several, he noticed, from a site called www.fear_made_real.net. Tim had never heard of the site, but then as far as he was concerned, the Internet seemed mainly good for spreading bad jokes and spam in nearly equal proportions—though spam had, in the last couple of years or so, taken over more and more from the jokes.

  He read a scrap of yellowed newsprint from an Ohio paper. The article began:

  Police admit to having no leads yet in the Tuesday disappearance of seven-year-old Nicky Anders from his Cleveland home. “Nicky is out there somewhere,” police spokesman Bill Krain said. “We’ve been turning over every stone, knocking on every door, and we’ll keep it up until the boy is safe at home.”

  Nicky Anders had been sleeping in his room, according to his parents, when he simply vanished. Police have not been able to find any signs of forced entry to the Anders’ home. The boy’s bedroom is on the second floor of the house, but the window was closed and locked, as were all the doors. Mrs. Helen Anders discovered her son’s disappearance when she went in to wake him for school, at about 7:30 Tuesday morning.

  Early speculation centered on the parents, because of the police detectives’ description of the house’s condition, with all the doors and windows locked and apparently not tampered with. After extensive interrogation, though, detectives released both Ben and Helen Anders. Bill Krain, speaking for the police department, confirmed that neither parent is a suspect, and the investigation has moved in other directions.

  Tim let the paper flutter to the floor. He couldn’t read that anymore. He knew there wouldn’t be any good news there—Nicky Anders wasn’t going to be found, he was sure. He wondered if the police had checked to see if the poor kid had a closet in his room. Nowthat would have been a clue.

  One of the pages printed from the Web site contained nothing but names and dates—several hundred of them. At first, he thought these must be birth dates, but then another idea chilled him to the core. Given the context, these were no doubt dates of disappearance. He spread all the pages out on the floor, covering parts of the fireplace, tools, and furniture as well. Choosing a name from the list—Vicky Sipchen, basically at random—he scanned all the missing persons notices. He didn’t see her name anywhere, so he picked another one. Jayce Norbury. He repeated the process, and this time he found a flyer, with duct tape still adhered at the top. Jayce Norbury, thirty-seven, had disappeared from his home in Waterbury, Connecticut, four years earlier. This wasn’t even one of those gone-to-the-store-for-

  smokes disappearances. According to the flyer, he had gone upstairs while the family watched TV, and had never come back down again. Reading that one raised goosebumps on Tim’s flesh, remembering the dead-end investigation surrounding his own father’s departure.

  Tim sat down again, surrounded by the haunted faces of the missing. He realized he was shivering, as if from extreme cold. He picked up another sheet from the website, an interview with a Dr. Tomas Jaeger of Heidelberg, Germany. A photo showed that Dr. Jaeger had glasses so thick his eyeballs were almost completely obscured, flyaway gray hair that stuck up in every direction, and bad teeth. The interviewer didn’t identify him or herself, but just launched into the first question.

  “Dr. Jaeger, thank you for your time. What evidence has your research shown that abject terror can have a physical manifestation in addition to an emotional impact?”

  Tim chuckled as he read Jaeger’s response. The man was obviously addled.“Laboratory subjects have demonstrated a remarkable ability to physically manifest their fear in various ways,” he said, according to this “news” report.“I have worked, for instance, with
a subject who at the moments of most extreme fear caused all the furniture in the examination room to levitate off the ground and smash against a far wall. That was a mild example, of course. Other subjects have shown much, much greater abilities, including the manipulation of time and space.”

  This is nut-ball stuff, Tim thought.I thought I was crazy, but this…

  He dropped the page at the sound of a muffled scream, coming from the dining room. Jumping up from the couch, he tore across Franny’s collection, hurrying to the dining room door. At first, he didn’t see anything, but then he looked down into the shadows beneath the big family dining table. A small hand pawed noisily at the ground. A blond boy in a blue sweatshirt stared at Tim, terror in his eyes. The boy tried to cry out, but a large hand was clamped across his mouth, muffling his screams. The hand drew the boy back, back, until he was swallowed by the shadows, and then all was quiet.

  Tim bent over, moved closer for a better look. He could see under the table, see through it to the other side. There was no one down there, no place to hide. Just a pool of shadows on the hardwood floor.