JMariotte - Boogeyman Read online

  Kate clutched the dashboard with both hands. “Tim, you might want to take it a little slower,” she suggested.

  She might as well not even have been there.

  Her mind raced as Tim’s car cut through the night. She was nuts for even being here with him. She had known him as a child—and he’d been an odd kid, even then. Who knew what kind of man he had really become?You spent a few minutes with him this afternoon, he patched you up after a fall, and suddenly you’re getting into a car with him? Surely you’re smarter than that .

  Yeah, only apparently not. Because here you are.

  Tim had retreated into himself. He drove the car, he scanned the road through a smudged and shattered windshield. What he didn’t do was talk, or even acknowledge her questions. They drove into a thick fog bank, and he didn’t even slow down. Kate let go of the dash, but gripped her seat cushion ferociously, as if that would save her if they ran into something.

  “I took this same drive,” Tim mumbled. It was the first thing he’d said in half an hour. Kate didn’t have the slightest idea what he meant, but saying it made him sound almost human, and she tried to take that as an encouraging sign. She needed one, just about now. She wished again that she had brought a cell phone, but why would anyone need a phone just to drop off a plate of dinner at a neighbor’s house?

  “Tim, what’s going on?” she asked again. “Where are we going?”

  Finally he answered, but his response might have been less comforting than his silence. “I don’t know,” he snapped. He glanced at her and his eyes were wild, a madman’s eyes. Was it just the loss of his mother that had done this to him, or something deeper? “I don’t know anything,” he continued. “I don’t know where I’ve been. I don’t know what I’ve done. I just don’t know.”

  Yeah, that’s really encouraging,she thought.Thanks, Tim . She wondered how long she’d have to be gone before her father noticed, before he called the state police. And maybe the National Guard.

  Up ahead, red light glowed through the fog. Bright neon. Tim spotted it and stomped down on the brake so hard, the Mustang fishtailed on the damp pavement. She thought they’d flip for sure, but the wheels held on. “Oh, God,” Tim said, with something like anguish in his voice. “That’s it. That’s the motel.”

  He had mentioned a motel before, she remembered. Kate allowed herself a moment’s hope that here, all would be explained to her. Tim pulled the car into the lot and brought it to a shuddering halt, parked haphazardly across a couple of spots. As soon as the car had come to a stop he twisted the key, and jumped out, pocketing it. Kate followed, trying to stay right with him. He hurried to a cement walkway with lights along its ceiling, pacing by the doors as if trying to mystically divine the room he was looking for.

  Finally, he stopped in front of Room 3, grabbed the knob, wrenched it. If someone was sleeping in there, Tim was going to have some explaining to do. But given Tim’s general state of mind, Kate figured, she would probably have to do the talking.

  At least she could claim that he’d been drinking, if it came to that. Anybody watching him for even a moment would buy that story. She wished she had smelled booze on his breath, but she hadn’t—only the sour stink of sweat. Flop sweat, she’d heard it called, tinged with fear.

  When the door didn’t open, Tim began to pound on it. “Jessica!” he shouted.

  Kate touched his shoulder, wincing at the din he raised. “Maybe we should go to the front desk,” she suggested. “And ask if—”

  She let the thought trail off. Tim had reached in his pocket, and now he held a key out in front of his face like it was some kind of prize. The tag on the key had a big brass number 3 on it. Moving like he was in a trance, he pushed the key into the lock, turned it.

  The door opened. Tim stepped inside, Kate right behind.

  A lamp burned on a table, with a swath of white fabric draped over the shade. A couple of little liquor bottles stood on a table with two drink cans and an ice bucket. Its lid was off, and when she glanced down she saw a few stray cubes floating in a pool of water. But there was no one inside. No Jessica, whoever that was.

  Tim looked at the scene before him, blinking. “I was here,” he said. “We were here.”

  That much at least made a little sense, Kate realized. He had a key, so chances were that he had been here before. And that shirt over the lampshade didn’t look like a man’s. It looked like something a woman would do if she was trying to set a mood, maybe take a guy’s mind off his mom’s funeral or something. She had tried similar stunts herself, back in Boston. Usually when it was already too late to change the trajectory of a relationship, when the downward spiral had already hit high gear and a nasty afternoon in a cheap motel was less exhilarating than it was humiliating.

  Kate circled around him, shaking those thoughts from her head like dust from a mop. Light glowed from the doorway, and she wanted to make sure the place was really as vacant as it looked. There was water in the tub, but from the door, she couldn’t see anyone in the water. As she entered, fearing the worst, her foot kicked a shard of glass, sending it skittering across wet tiles. Looking down, Kate saw broken glass all over the floor, puddles, discarded jeans and underwear. It looked like maybe there had been a fight, and she realized with heightened anxiety that she had come into a motel room with a virtual stranger. “What happened here, Tim?”

  His answer was offhand, as if he hadn’t really heard her. “What?” Then his voice sharpened as he regained focus. “I don’t know. I went to get ice and…”

  He came into the bathroom—she could sense him, standing right behind her. She tensed. If he tried anything, put a hand on her, she would scream and fight. Her trust for him had just about gone out the window.

  “…and he took her,” Tim continued. “I mean—”

  Kate cut him off. She was in no mood for puzzles anymore. “Who took her?”

  “You won’t believe me,” Tim said.

  Which was pretty much true.

  Because on the edge of the empty tub, Kate saw two spots of blood, almost black-red. She had seen no fresh cuts or wounds on Tim, just a tear on his coat sleeve and some scratches on his face that he’d had before.

  So the blood had come from somebody else.

  “Tim,” she said, barely able to catch her breath. “Take me home.”

  Fifteen

  Leaving the motel’s parking lot, Tim had caught a glimpse of Jessica’s BMW, sitting in the shadows. That sight convinced him that he was not crazy—well, not completely crazy. He had come here with Jessica. Something had happened to her. He just didn’t know what.

  But he hadn’t been willing to look in the closet again, just in case.

  The last time he’d done that, he had fallen into the shadows and out of his mother’s closet. His stomach still churned when he remembered that trip, as if he had stepped into aStar Trek transporter, or something, and had come out miles from where he’d started. There had been a dizzying, twisting sensation, like some kind of bizarre carnival thrill ride, and then he had tripped from the closet and bumped into Kate.

  He had never much liked carnivals or thrill rides. They relied too much on darkness for their scares. He knew that for some people they provided nothing but a momentary fright, an enjoyable frisson of unease that they looked forward to and were willing to pay money to experience.

  Not him. He had always been able to get scared like that for nothing, just by turning off the lights.

  The only bright side he could see to all this was that his shadow-jump proved that this wasn’t all in his head. Hehad been at the motel, with Jessica, then he was at the house with Katie. Witnesses. Not that the first witness was around to give testimony, but still…

  Anyway,he argued with himself,it doesn’t really prove a thing. What if you’re only imagining that Kate is beside you now? And for that matter, what’s the difference, when it comes down to it? He had always thought the all-in-your-head thing was kind of an artificial distinction. Even when he�
�d been a kid and had a stomachache, and his mom had accused him of just trying to stay home from school because the illness was all in his head, he hadn’t understood the concept.So what if it is? he had thought.Either way, I feel crappy .

  He drove back toward his mom’s house, back toward Kate’s. She sat silent, huddled up against her door. He could feel her tension from here. He knew he had to try to explain. Somehow.

  That would have been easier if he’d had the answers himself. “Kate, I…”

  “Where did the blood come from, Tim?”

  He shook his head. How could he respond to that? He didn’t have the slightest idea, didn’t remember seeing it there earlier.

  “Who do you think took your friend?” There was an edge of anger in Kate’s voice, as if she were pissed off by her own terror. He couldn’t really blame her for that.

  At least he knew the answer to this one. He didn’t know how to explain it to her, though—knew from experience that to try would just make him sound completely insane. So he didn’t even try.

  “Tim…if something happened to her, if you accidentally did something…”

  “I didn’t hurt Jessica!” he interrupted. He wouldn’t do that, ever.

  Wouldn’t you, Timmy? If you had to?

  He pushed the voice away, tried to visualize a hand cramming it down into a drawer and locking it in.

  But Kate echoed its query. “Are you sure?”

  He steered the car, kept a steady pressure on the gas. Not too much farther now. “Everybody told me I was making it up. For fifteen years…ever since my dad left. Telling me over and over.” Kate’s father’s house loomed through the fog, up ahead on the right. Tim braked for the driveway, turned into it. “But they were wrong.”

  He stopped the car, and she cranked open the door immediately, without another word. She ran to her front door, throwing one last look his way, and then dashed inside, slamming it behind her.

  Tim sat in the car, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. It was possible, of course, that he had gone completely insane. That seemed to be what Kate believed. It was even possible that Kate herself had never been in his car at all, but was just one more hallucination. Possible, he supposed, that his mother was still alive, that he was still in Jessica’s parents’ house on Thanksgiving night, having an incredibly freaking awful mother-fucker of a turkey-induced nightmare.

  Possible, sure. But not probable.

  He needed help. He was sure of that much. He didn’t know what had become of Jessica, and he was certain that he’d just blown any chance of a renewed friendship with Kate, who he could have used as an ally.

  He sat there in the car in her father’s driveway, looking at her father’s quiet house. He didn’t know where to turn to help Jessica, didn’t know how to reach out to Kate. Could he have lost both of them in one night? The girl he had liked most during his childhood, and the one he’d loved as an adult? It was sure looking that way now.

  And he felt like he was running out of options. Call the cops? They’d lock him up in a second, as soon as he started telling his story. Normally he would have called Jessica when he was in a bind, but that door was closed to him now. Uncle Mike, maybe, though he’d been through a lot already, what with losing his sister. He pawed through his pockets, but couldn’t find his phone.

  Tim wasn’t a guy who made friends easily, though, so he didn’t have a lot more numbers in his phone book to try. Making friends was hard when you didn’t like to be out after dark or to visit strange places—places that might be full of shadows and unexplored doorways. People tended to try once or twice to get him to go out and do something after work, or on the weekend, and then they gave up.

  There had been a few women, too, but those relationships had tended to end even more disastrously. Dinners in romantic, candlelit restaurants were occasions for panic, not intimate conversation. Nervous about dark places, constantly checking under the beds of potential partners—these habits of Tim’s seemed to impair budding romance. But try as he might, he couldn’t seem to shake them. Jessica had been the first one that had really taken off, the first woman he could truly relax with.

  Early in his career, Tim had edited a story about one of those wacky old codgers who never went outside, but filled his house with books and magazines and pizza boxes—all delivered, of course—letting the trash pile up until it reached the ceiling. Then, as invariably happened, something had disturbed the careful stacks and he’d been buried under a landslide of his own refuse.

  Tim was neater (he threw his garbage away, at least), but otherwise, he had become, in his midtwenties, a younger version of that codger. He had cut himself off from the world, isolated himself. Now when he really needed others, there was no one to call.

  Just Uncle Mike. He hated to disturb the old guy, but he was helpless here, desperate.

  Kate would have a phone.

  He looked toward her house. Most of the windows were dark, with only the soft glow of hallway lights showing through them.

  Behind an upstairs window, Tim saw a dark, shadowed figure flitting this way and that.

  Panic gripped him like a fist around his heart.Not her too!

  He leaped from the car, ran to her front door, and banged on it with his fists. Kicked it. Leaned on the doorbell.

  Finally, Kate’s face, flushed with anger, peered through the window in the door, between the curtains. “Go home!” she screamed at him. “Just go home!”

  “Kate, please! Open the door!”

  “Get off the porch!” she demanded.

  “He’s in your house!” Tim called to her urgently. The stress of the evening, all the running and driving, the fear—he was wrung out. Even so, he tried to make the importance of what he was saying clear to her. “I saw him.”

  The door rattled in its jamb, and a glimmer of hope rose in him. She was letting him in, or coming out. Either one would work.

  But when she opened the door, she had a baseball bat clutched in her fists and a grim expression on her face. “Tim, listen to me,” she began.

  He tried to put on a soothing look, to disguise the naked panic that he felt. “You need to get out of this house,” he said calmly.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It was upstairs!” Tim insisted. “I saw him.”

  “Mydad is upstairs. Probably waiting for me.”

  How can she believe that I’d make that kind of mistake?Tim wondered. Her dad was in a wheelchair; he didn’t look at all like the Boogeyman.

  “Tim,” Kate went on, “I think maybe you’re sick. I wish I could help, but I can’t. Now, if you don’t go home, I’m calling the police.”

  He couldn’t just walk away from her. Every minute she stayed in that house, she was in danger. He had turned his back on Jessica for a couple of minutes, just long enough to get some ice, and that had been all the time he had needed to snatch her.

  But if he tried to grab Kate, she would hit him with the bat.And call the cops. Either way, she stayed inside, and he couldn’t help her. He was out of ideas, out of hope. “Isaw him,” he insisted. He sounded forlorn, even to himself. “It wasn’t your dad.”

  “I’m going inside now. Go home,” Kate said, her anger seemingly replaced by deep sorrow. “You need help, Tim.”

  She moved back into the dark house, closing the door behind her. Through the window, Tim saw her heading up her stairs. Nothing he could do for her now. She would go up those stairs, and she’d meet…

  …who? A figment of his imagination?

  “I need help,” he said softly, to no one in particular.

  Starting back toward his car, he realized where to look for it.

  He might once have turned to Dr. Matheson. She had always been able to calm him down before, but there was no way she would accept what he knew to be the case now. He may have been completely fucking insane, but that didn’t mean the Boogeyman wasn’t real. Far from it, in fact. It was the Boogeyman’s essential reality that had driven Tim nuts. He d
idn’t lose his mind and imagine that he saw his dad taken—he lost his mindbecause he saw the Boogeyman snatch his dad, right in front of him.

  He climbed back into the car and pulled away from Kate’s house. He couldn’t afford to sit here and have her call the police. Jessica needed him, and the time it would cost him to explain himself, if he even could, would doom too many innocent people. Somebody had to do something about the Boogeyman, and if no one else would step up to the plate, it looked like it would have to be Tim himself.