JMariotte - Boogeyman Read online

  Obviously, they didn’t know Max. The TRO just infuriated him all the more. He turned threatening. Kate didn’t quite get how “I love you, I have to have you” could have turned so quickly into “So, you think you’re something special? I’ll show you just how special you are.”

  Then again, she had long since stopped believing Max was sane. Around this time she had decided he probably was truly dangerous after all.

  She had wanted to stick it out, to make life in the big city work for her. But her dad’s stroke—she hated to think of it as convenient, but sometimes that word came to mind—had happened. She loved her dad more than anything, and by that time it didn’t take much to convince her that she needed to move back here. She had left Boston with no forwarding address, and come home. Not even Max had been able to find her here.

  She wasn’t crazy enough to think she could just jump-start a relationship here, though. She didn’t know Tim anymore, not really. It had been so long that all of their history together was ancient. He might as well have been a complete stranger who just happened to resemble an old friend. And anyway, he had told her that he had a girlfriend.

  Still, that didn’t mean they couldn’t be friends, did it? At the very least, good neighbors.

  So, as she had promised, she had prepared a plate of dinner for Tim after feeding her father—sandwiches made from leftover turkey on crusty French bread, mashed potatoes, gravy, green salad—and had wrapped the plate in plastic wrap. Now she knocked on Tim’s door, and waited.

  Waited some more.

  Knocked again. His car was in the drive. Lights blazed inside. Had he gone to sleep already? It had been a hard day for him, but it wasn’t all that late yet.

  Kate tried the door. The knob turned easily in her hand. She cracked it open a few inches. “Tim?”

  He didn’t answer. She went inside, pushing the door closed with her heel. “Tim? It’s me, Kate.” Her voice echoed hollowly back at her.

  As she entered farther, her gaze landed on the living room floor—carpeted in leaflets, newspaper clippings, sheets of paper of every size and color. The common thread was immediately apparent, and a chill raised goose bumps on Kate’s flesh. This time, she called out louder, anxiety lending a quaver to her voice. “Tim, where are you?”

  Tim stood at the ice machine, hand on the button, watching cubes shoot into his bucket. When it was full, he released the button, and the machine churned noisily.

  That was okay with him. Coming over to the machine, along the lighted walkway, the darkness of the parking lot had been disturbing. He could almost hear the shadows surging toward him, like waves on a beach lapping at the sand. He preferred the racket of the well-lit ice machine.

  Another sound broke over that one, and he spun around. A family had driven up, while he had been facing the machine. A woman pulled suitcases from the back of their station wagon while a man gently unstrapped a sleeping boy, probably no older than Tim was when his dad had left, while trying not to wake him. The man lifted his precious bundle from the car and carried him to the hotel while the woman went ahead with one suitcase and the room key. The man spotted Tim watching, gave him a friendly nod. Tim returned it.

  Those people stood in darkness, walked through shadow, without a care in the world. They were fine. Nothing grabbed them, nothing took them away. He had never had a family vacation like that, never visited a national park or a historic site with his parents. If he started cataloguing the things his parents had never done with him, though, he would be standing here for a long time.

  “There’s a name for what you have, Tim.” Dr. Matheson’s voice came to him almost as clearly as if she’d been standing right there next to the ice machine. “Several names, actually, because you suffer from several related conditions. Achluophobia, sciophobia, nyctophobia. When things can be named, Tim, they can be treated, dealt with. Defeated.”

  Tim breathed a sigh of relief. He had been suffering a relapse of his childhood problems. But they were just mental disorders, “conditions,” she had said. They weren’t real dangers, simply his mind playing tricks on him. And they could be beaten.

  Better get this ice back inside before it melts,he thought.There’s a beautiful naked woman waiting for me in there.

  Fourteen

  Kate pushed through the plastic sheeting and into the kitchen. Still no Tim here, but at least every surface wasn’t covered by flyers about missing people. Maybe she had underestimated Tim’s weirdness after all. Papering his house with that stuff certainly wasn’t normal, not by any definition she knew. And if moving away from Boston, leaving behind a psycho boyfriend, a job that was no longer fulfilling, and a few friends—running awayfrom, if one wanted to be totally accurate, more than comingto —to live with her sick dad wasn’t some people’s idea of normal either, well, it still didn’t come within a country mile of this kind of strange.

  She put the plate down on the kitchen table. “Hello?” she called to the empty air. The house had that vacant feel to it, the way houses did when no one was around. Kate was pretty sure Tim had taken off somewhere. He had left on foot, however, unless someone had come and driven him away.

  You really should get out of here,she thought anxiously.

  What if he was hurt, though? What if he heard her calling for him but couldn’t answer? He hadn’t said anything about leaving, and he had known she would be bringing dinner by. No, before she took off she had to look around, to make sure he really was gone. She had an uneasy feeling about it—Kate wasn’t ordinarily the type to snoop around; she valued her privacy and respected that of others. But that sense of unease was overwhelmed by the greater one she felt at Tim’s seeming disappearance, made worse by his choice of reading material.

  She went back out into the dining room, the living room. Wading through his freakish paper sea, worry gnawing at her like a dog on a steak bone. Having covered the ground floor, she stopped at the foot of the stairs and called up. “Tim, are you up there?”

  Wind rattled a window and she felt her heart skip a beat. She swallowed and fought back her natural tendency, which tried to push her bodily from the house, to persuade her that here was yet another situation best dealt with by running away.Get a grip, girl, she told herself.Someone’s got to keep things in perspective around here. Looks like it might as well be you .

  Tim entered the motel room confidently, with only the slightest shiver from showing his back to the darkness outside. Maybe this was all he had been needing—a human connection, a reminder of what normality was—to get through his funk. Jessica had closed the closet and bathroom doors, draped her tank top over the table lamp in the room and turned off the bulbs over the bed. But the new semidarkness, which would have been terrifying just a little while before, hardly phased him. Mood lighting. Sexy. He rattled the ice in its bucket, carried it over to the table near the minibar. From the outside, he wouldn’t have expected this to be the kind of place that would even have a minibar. But he was glad it did.

  He opened it up, scanned the contents and price list. Coke, beer, energy drinks, and various airplane-sized bottles of the harder stuff. Bottled water at three bucks per. Milky Way bar, a buck-fifty. Cleaning out the bar would cost more than the room did. Choosing a little bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a Coke for himself, the requested Red Bull and vodka for her, he swung the door shut and carried his mixings to the table. A couple of cubes of ice in each glass—“plastic-wrapped for your protection”—then a shot of Jack, some Coke on top of that. He was an estimator, not a measurer. You got to know what a shot was without having to weigh it out, when you did it long enough. You also had a good sense of when a shot was not enough. On a whim, he poured in some more Jack. He mixed Jessica’s drink to the same imprecise formula.

  Taking a sip of his, he winced a little.Whew . “I might have made these a little strong,” he called to her by way of warning. “Nice job with the redecorating in here, by the way.”

  She didn’t reply, but he heard water sloshing in the tub. He
would carry her drink in to her. That would be something Jessica would appreciate. And the shirt over the lamp reminded him of just what was waiting in there.

  Except for a breeze that had picked up in the last half-hour or so testing it, tugging at doors and pushing at windows, the Jensen house remained quiet. Kate climbed the stairs, calling out for Tim occasionally. She got no response. Her concern had boiled up to the point that she felt like a single giant, exposed nerve ending, and she was growing terribly afraid of what she might find up here.

  Even after all these years, the layout of the house was still familiar to her, as if she had been up here a week ago instead of more than a decade. Tim’s room at the end of the hall, his parent’s room on the left before that, bathroom across on the right. “Tim?”

  This time, Kate thought she heard a noise in response. She froze, listening, and heard it again, an indistinct, muffled sound. It could have been a low voice or a faraway thumping bass note. She thought it came from his mom’s room. She tapped at the door, then opened it. She realized that she’d left her cell phone at home, didn’t know if this place even had phone service. What if she needed to call 911? She’d have to run all the way back to her dad’s place.

  Biting back her fear, she went into Tim’s mother’s room. It was dark inside, a little moonlight trickling through the French doors, but the wind hadn’t yet blown away all the fog, so it was filtered and dim. She could tell that floorboards had been torn up, wallpaper peeled away, but otherwise the room seemed relatively intact. A bed and a bureau and some smaller pieces of furniture were still in place. No one was inside, though, and she couldn’t find any source for the sound she had heard. On shaky legs, she waited until it came again.

  After a few moments, it did.

  The closet.

  She started for it.

  “Listen, Jess, I just wanted to thank you for coming out to see me. And for bringing me here.” He paused for a second, and realized he needed to add more. “For everything.”

  Jessica didn’t respond. Tim envisioned her half submerged, with the water over her ears, her eyes closed. Just the mounds of her breasts and her knees rising above the surface. With a drink in each hand, he pushed open the bathroom door. Steam billowed out to meet him.

  But Jessica was gone.

  Water rippled softly against the walls of the tub, as if she had just climbed out. Tim blinked. The glasses, forgotten in his hands, slipped away, shattering on the tiled floor at his feet. “Jessica!” he called.

  The tub enclosure was empty. No place else in here big enough for her. He ran back into the room, also empty, and went through it, yanking open the door. The lighted walkway was clear and Jessica’s BMW still sat in its parking space, where she had left it.

  Where the hell could she have gone? “Jess!” he shouted, frantic now. “Jessica!”

  He noticed lights flicking on in another room. A curtain was pulled back, a face looking out, wondering who was raising holy hell in the parking lot. But no Jessica. She didn’t reply; she didn’t suddenly appear. He went back into the room, glancing around. A dust ruffle hung down from the mattress, brushing the carpeted floor. He dropped to his knees and forced himself to push it aside. Nothing under there but shadow.

  He had seen that kid get sucked into the shadows beneath his dining room table.

  That wasn’t real, he reminded himself. That kid wasn’t ever in the house. Jessica, though, was here. Not five minutes ago.

  Gripping the edge of the bed frame, Tim hoisted himself back to his feet. Made another quick scan of the room.

  There was only one other place she could be, he realized. He had known it before, but had not wanted to face the knowledge, not wanted to admit to the certainty.

  The closet.

  He remembered noticing that she had closed it.

  She wouldn’t hide in there, wouldn’t play that kind of trick on him. She would know how upsetting that would be.

  Are you sure, Timmy? Maybe she wants to upset you. Maybe she wants you to face your fears. That could be what this whole trip has been about—setting you up for this test.

  Tim shook his head like a wet dog. Jessica wasn’t inside that closet, couldn’t be there.

  But he had to check, just the same.

  As Tim neared the closet door, all of his old fears came rushing back.He wasin there, inside the closet, and he had taken Jessica. Just like he’d taken the old man—Tim’s dad—and all those others, all the lost ones. He was waiting to take Tim, too, if Tim was stupid enough to open that closet door and let the shadows out.

  Which means,Tim realized with a start,he’s real .

  Tim had spent years working with Dr. Matheson and other shrinks, persuading himself that he had imagined what he’d seen—his dad’s abduction by something from inside his boyhood closet. He had come to believe it, just as surely as he believed the sky was blue and the grass green. He had never been able to completely shake his fear of the dark, of the shadows. He almost had to chuckle.Completely? What an understatement .

  The point was, he had worked so hard to convince himself that his fears were unwarranted, unrealistic, and it turned out that the exact opposite was true.

  He had every reason to fear the man in the dark. He was as real as Tim was.

  Tim’s dad hadn’t deserted the family. He had been taken. Where he was taken to, Tim had no idea. He hoped he never would.

  Now, the shadow man had come back. He had taken someone else that Tim loved. He didn’t want to go near that closet, didn’t want to have anything to do with it. The not-knowing, the believing he’d been insane, the fears that seemed irrational and groundless—they were all preferable to what he faced at this moment.

  But it’s Jessica,he told himself.And she’s here because of me, to help me. If she’s in trouble, I have to help her. There’s really no other choice .

  He rested his hand on the knob. Glanced back over his shoulder one last time, in case there was someplace else in the room he had forgotten to look. Nothing. He pulled open the closet door.

  And in the darkness, in the shadows, was motion. A blurred figure, trying to escape. Tim screamed and reached in after it, stepping into the dark.

  That same muffled sound came from Tim’s mother’s closet. Kate still couldn’t tell if it was a voice, or some kind of music. “Come on, Tim,” she said angrily, although she wasn’t at all sure it was really him in there. Who else, though? He had been alone in the house, and his was still the only car in the drive. Some kind of sick joke? She remembered that she barely knew the guy. “This isn’t funny.”

  She reached for the closet door, touched the handle. “Tim?”

  She was about to turn it when the door burst open, knocking her aside. A dark, shadowed figure charged out of the closet. But she was already standing to the side because of the door, so instead of slamming into her, the figure glanced off her, stumbled, and hit the floor hard. Kate couldn’t restrain the scream that burst from her mouth.

  When he scrambled to his feet, she saw that it was Tim. The look on his face was one of abject terror. Kate figured it just about matched her own, but her fright was quickly turning to anger. “Damn it, Tim, you scared the hell out of me!”

  Tim looked around, blinking. He seemed lost, utterly confused.Which is a familiar sensation right now, she thought. She wanted answers, wanted to know what Tim was doing hiding inside his mother’s closet, frightening her that way. “How did I…” he began, but he let that drop. “Where’s Jessica?”

  As if this whole thing wasn’t confusing enough. “Who’s Jessica?”

  “She was here,” he said breathlessly, making no sense to Kate at all. “We went to a hotel—a motel. And…”

  “Tim, what are you talking about?” Kate demanded. She was really worried now, maybe more so than if she hadn’t been able to find him at all. He needed help, she was thinking, and not the kind that she could provide.

  He pushed past her, out of the room. Paused at the top of the stairs, and
then thundered down them. Kate followed, trying to keep up. “Tim!”

  He ignored her. Hit the ground floor and looked around.Is Jessica one of the people on those crazy flyers? Kate wondered.One of the missing? “Tim, what the hell is going on here?”

  Tim stopped suddenly, and she almost ran into him. He spun around and grabbed her upper arms, squeezing hard enough to hurt. “Come with me.”

  “Where?” she asked. But her question went unanswered. He had already released her and dashed outside, leaving the front door wide open. She closed it behind her, giving a passing thought to the dinner she’d left inside.Never getting thatplate back, she mused.

  Tim ran to his car, fished keys from a pocket, and opened it up. Kate was frightened—of him, of the situation—but she didn’t think he should be driving alone.He shouldn’t be out without a keeper, she mentally amended. She had come this far, though, and figured that maybe she could help keep him out of trouble. At least make sure he didn’t hurt anyone.This is stupid, she thought, sliding in beside him and buckling her seat belt. Tim reversed out of the driveway, hit the main road, and mashed down on the accelerator. The Mustang’s wheels skidded, then found purchase on the fog-slick roadway.