JMariotte - Boogeyman Read online

  The thick fog had enveloped the entire world, it seemed. Streets that might have held traces of familiarity by daylight, or even under a bright moon, were strange and forbidding in the mist. At this hour, the streets were wet, slick, and silent. A few houses showed porch lights or the soft glow of someone fighting a losing battle against insomnia, but for the most part, except for the nimbus encircling streetlights, the town was dark, asleep.

  Almost by instinct, Tim found the half-remembered park. A grassy stretch, a baseball backstop and bleachers that had always needed paint, even in his youth, and a little playground. A boarded-up shack had sold burgers, ice cream, and sodas during Little League games or July Fourth celebrations. Tim drove with his window rolled partly down, because with the fog and the spiderweb of cracks on the windshield, he couldn’t see through it very well, and when he heard a loud, sharp squeak he braked to a halt in the middle of the lane. He peered through the mist, looking for the source of the noise. The little merry-go-round was empty, the teeter-totter abandoned, the slide collecting moisture from the fog.

  But on the swings, her fists wrapped around the chains, head inclined toward the ground, was a little girl in a red sweater and a long scarf.

  Franny.

  He was glad he hadn’t had to go door-to-door looking for her. Tim parked, dug in the glove compartment for a flashlight, left the car. Memories came flooding back as he crossed the playground—spinning on that merry-go-round until he was dizzy and nauseated, laughing with Katie on the swings, summer afternoons watching Little League games, sometimes from the shade underneath the bleachers, while his dad drank beer and shouted at the umpires. He had begun to think that the only memories he had were awful ones, but that wasn’t true. There had been happy times, too, even some involving the old man.

  They were harder to dredge up. But if they hadn’t existed at all, he wouldn’t have missed his dad so much in the first place.

  His shoe scuffed bare earth, and Franny glanced up at him. Her expression, thoughtful, bordering on morose, didn’t change. “You couldn’t sleep either?” she asked.

  Had he even tried? No, he remembered—things had happened too quickly once he’d found her backpack. “Nope.”

  “Some nights…when I think he’s in my house…I have to come out here,” Franny said. She spoke so quietly that Tim had to strain to hear her. “Sometimes all night, until the sun comes up. And then everything’s okay again.”

  “What if your parents come to check in on you?” he asked.

  “I won’t be there.” So matter-of-factly that she might as well have added, “What a dumb question.”

  Tim sat down on the other swing, felt the chains biting into his hips. Franny pushed off with her toes, swinging slowly, barely moving. Distant and absorbed. “I told you a lie,” Tim admitted. “The story about the night my father disappeared.”

  Franny glanced at him sideways, her eyes mostly whites. She was terrified. “I know.”

  “He took my dad,” Tim went on. “Tonight he took a friend of mine. He’s going to keep taking people—everyone who means something to me. He’s calling me out.” He realized how self-aggrandizing that was—as if he alone, out of all the people on Earth, was the Boogeyman’s big concern. Franny’s backpack proved that wasn’t the case at all. But that was how he felt. “I need your help,” he admitted.

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re the only ones who believe.”

  Franny stopped her swing by digging her feet into the dirt. She didn’t even look at him any more. “I have to go home,” she said.

  Mike Halloran heard the noise, but it was a long way off, and he tried to ignore it. Damn thing was persistent, though, whatever it was. He turned over in bed, pulled a corner of the pillow up over his ear. Still, it continued, as obnoxious and persistent as a hungry cat yowling for a midnight snack.

  Finally, he climbed up out of sleep long enough to recognize it. Telephone. He pawed at the nightstand, finally dropping a hand on the thing, tugged it from its cradle, and brought it to his head.Middle of the freaking night, this better be good . “Hello?”

  At first he thought there was no one on the other end, but after a moment he realized someone was speaking, soft and fast. He hadn’t been able to make out a word. “What? Whoa, whoa, slow down. Who is this?”

  She spoke up a little, but still talked in a loud whisper, as if trying not to wake someone up.Too bad she didn’t show me the same courtesy, Mike thought.“It’s Kate Houghton,” the woman said.“Listen, I think Tim might be in trouble. Maybe you should go over to the house and check in on him.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Mike said, his own words still slurry with sleep.

  “Sure,”Kate said.“You’re welcome.”

  Mike was about to put the phone down, but he heard Kate’s voice again, and he paused, not sure if she was talking to him. “Dad?” she said. “Is that you?”

  He shrugged, hung the phone up, and sat up in bed, rubbing his eyes with his fists. He should have demanded more information from Katie Houghton, but he’d been too sleepy to think straight. Anyway, it didn’t matter what she knew, or how. If Tim was in trouble, he had to get over there. First he’d try the phone, see if he could reach his nephew that way. If not, he’d just have to drive on over and see what there was to be seen.

  It seemed like he had spent most of his life rescuing Tim from one thing or another. Taking the kid in when he was ten and his mom couldn’t handle having him around any more, getting him through the hell that was high school. Caring for him when he’d been in the Danville Institute, and when he’d come out of it, fragile as an eggshell. He couldn’t count the nights he had gone into Tim’s room because the boy was crying, or screaming, sitting up in bed with his lamp on and usually a flashlight in his hands. Shadows, guys in the closet, monsters under the bed. All kids went through it, he guessed, but most of them got past it. Not Tim Jensen.

  One more thing he owed Rob for, if he ever saw him again. Traumatizing his own son by walking out on them like he did.

  That Katie was one sharp girl—smart, pretty, and she obviously felt something for Tim or she wouldn’t have been looking out for him in the middle of the night. Maybe getting together with someone like that could calm the boy down, help him get over the fears that he’d carried around with him all his days.

  It was something to hope for, anyway. Mike stretched, picked up the phone again, dialed Mary’s old number, which he still knew by heart even though he’d had no reason to call it for a couple of years now.

  Her phone rang and rang, but no one answered. When he tried Tim’s cell, he got the same result.

  With a low groan, he pulled a T-shirt from a dresser drawer, then grabbed yesterday’s slacks from the laundry pile. It looked like he would be going for a drive.

  Sixteen

  Without another word to Tim, Franny started off across the playground. Tim didn’t want her to leave. He didn’t know how or why, but in some inexplicable way, she had a greater understanding of the Boogeyman than anyone else Tim had encountered. The shadow man seemed to be an obsession of hers. Tim’s too, for that matter, but he had always been too afraid to study him, too scared to honestly want to know if he was real. If it was possible that with all her research Franny had discovered a way to deal with him head-on, Tim had to find out.

  She walked away from the playground with apparent purpose, her arms and legs scissoring stiffly. Tim ran after her. “Franny!”

  She stopped without looking back. When he caught up, he bent at the waist and legs, his hands on his knees, so he would be closer to her eye level.Not that eye contact is a big priority for her, he knew. “I opened your pack,” he said, letting it all spill out quickly. “I saw all the pictures. All the articles. I just had to ask you something.”

  She answered without enthusiasm, but at least she didn’t sound angry at his assault on her privacy. “Okay.”

  There were probably better ways to approach the topic, but with Kate in danger and Jessic
a already gone, Tim felt that the time for subtlety was long past. “How do you beat him?”

  Franny chewed on her lower lip, her eyes downcast. Fear or anger bunched her small hands into tight fists. “I’m not sure.”

  Tim rose, fighting back his frustration. Franny had put more effort looking into this than anyone. If she was clueless when it came to taking definitive action, then how was he supposed to figure anything out? He followed along behind her, trying to come up with another way to pry from Franny the information he figured was locked inside her. But as he walked, his gaze came to rest on a small house outside the park, partially hidden by a copse of trees and nearly obscured by the ever-thicker fog. The place looked long-abandoned, ramshackle…but somehow familiar.

  A sudden flash of perfect clarity struck him, and Tim dug into his jacket pocket, pulling out the photos he had stashed in there. Rifling through them, he found the picture of the little house he had not recognized before. It had been taken years earlier, of course, and in the daylight. The trees were smaller then, the weeds choking the front yard not as high, but the structure was undeniably the same. Tim felt a tingle of excitement, mixed with a healthy dose of anxiety. While he had not known the house when he’d seen the picture, or even remembered taking it, now that he stood in front of it some long-buried memory was trying to emerge through his consciousness, like a drowned body floating to the surface.

  “I know that house,” Tim said. He walked toward it, fixated on its faded, paint-peeling walls, its sagging roof. Chain-link fence surrounded it, but it was loose and easy for Tim to tug aside. Franny slipped through the gap, Tim following. “I’ve been here before.”

  Franny didn’t reply. She shoved through the thick weeds, some of which were almost as tall as she was, toward the house. Stalks she pushed away sprung back to swat Tim as he trailed behind her. Getting closer, he saw that some of the windows had been boarded over, but others still had glass in them, coated with years of grime. No light shone from within. “I used to come talk to the old man who lived here,” Tim said, remembering more about the place with every step. “Everyone said he was crazy.”

  The door was locked, and a yellowed scrap of some ancient notice—a condemnation, most likely—was nailed to it. The nearest window had a couple of boards nailed over it, but the glass had long since been broken out. Tim grabbed the first board, ignoring the splinters from the raw, weather-beaten wood, and pulled. Nails squeaked but gave easily, the window’s frame too rotted to give purchase. He tossed that board aside and removed the next one. Now black, empty space yawned before him. Hoisting himself up, shivering from the idea of going into that darkness, he climbed inside.

  I should have boosted Franny in first,he thought, but even as he turned back to offer a hand, she scrambled in effortlessly. The room was dark, deeply shadowed, and smelled of mildew and decay. Tim drew the flashlight from his pocket, flicked it on, trained it around the room. Plaster from the ceiling littered the floor, the door had been removed from its hinges and leaned up against a wall, wallpaper was black with mold.

  “Are you scared?” Franny asked him, her tone making it evident that she was.

  Tim saw no shame in admitting the truth. It would be insane not to be afraid in this place, at night. Not that he was making any overreaching claims of sanity anyway. “Yeah.”

  “Where do you go…when he takes you?”

  Tim had been hopingshe had the answer to that one. “I don’t know.”

  They left this room and moved out into a short hallway leading to a combination living room and dining area. Floorboards were missing, holes had been punched through walls. Bare wires dangled from the ceiling where a light fixture had once hung.Beautiful, Tim thought.Place looks like Uncle Mike decorated it . His flashlight’s beam trailed over an old couch, one of its springs pushing up through the seat and a rat’s nest of stuffing exposed.

  The next room was the kitchen—large appliances still in place but with their doors taken off, so they stood there like empty sarcophagi, sink full of debris, a rusted-out hot plate still plugged into a wall socket that hadn’t carried electricity for at least a decade.

  Suddenly Tim remembered the first time he had been inside this house. The neighborhood’s older kids had warned younger ones away from it, telling stories of the crazy old coot living inside who quite probably ate small children. But almost every day Tim saw the old man who lived here. He looked older than Tim could imagine, just an ambulatory mass of wrinkled flesh in baggy orange pants and a threadbare brown sweater, even in the summer. The man either worked in his garden or just walked in circles around his house, as if searching for something he couldn’t quite recall. After a few months of near daily encounters, he began to smile at Tim, and even though he was old and kind of scary, his smile seemed genuine and friendly.

  They began to pass a few words from time to time, and finally, exchanged entire sentences. And after a couple of months of that, on one particularly hot summer’s day, the man invited Tim in for a glass of lemonade. He had brought Tim into this kitchen, sat him down at a little wooden table, and from his refrigerator—the ruined husk of which still stood there—he had pulled out a silvery pitcher that contained the best lemonade Tim had ever tasted, before or since. Through the layer of filth overlaying everything, Tim thought he could still see the avocado green surface of the refrigerator’s sides; he was sure that, in that special part of memory reserved for the finest aromas and flavors, he could still taste that perfect combination of tart and sweet and cold that the old man had poured into a jelly-jar glass for him.

  Beyond the kitchen, Tim and Franny moved into what looked like a bedroom or den, a small room with no windows and only the one door. The air inside was musty. When Tim trained the flashlight on the walls, the first thing he saw was a papering of newspaper clippings stuck there. The headlines brought a shiver to his spine, and reminded him of Franny’s collection.

  “Local Girl Vanishes.”

  “Still No Leads in Missing Girl Case.”

  “$10,000 Reward Offered to Help Find Child.”

  “Police Question Father in Disappearance.”

  The newspapers were dated from 1961. If there had been photos, they had been torn away, as had ads and anything else extraneous to the news stories.

  The man Tim remembered had been gaunt, with small sunken eyes and a face that seemed to animate only when he grinned. He had never brought Tim into this room, but had entertained him in the kitchen with stories of old-time ball games he had seen, prize fights he’d heard on the radio, and gossip about neighbors. He had mentioned a daughter from time to time, in passing, and Tim had had the impression that she had grown up and moved away. Tim recalled the man seeming lonely and appreciating the boy’s company, sometimes telling his tales long into the afternoon, as if he just didn’t want Tim to leave. There had been times that Tim had been a little creeped out by the guy, but at the same time, he had found the man oddly fascinating. And the man had never tried to eat him at all, or to hurt him in any other way.

  This room cast the whole thing in a different light, however. The guy had suffered a serious tragedy. No wonder he had always seemed so sad and alone. As Tim moved the flashlight along the walls, its beam revealed another twist. The man had torn pages from a bible and stapled them up. Mixed among them were blank pages and torn sheets of newspaper on which he—or someone—had drawn tormented sketches of chairs and black rectangles, the pencil jabbing down so hard that the paper was ripped in spots.

  Along with the drawings, he had written directly on the walls, scrawling words or names that Tim could make no sense of. “Phioras, Kenestir, Trigonon, Pliat…” The words jarred against one another in Tim’s head, as if refusing to be translated.

  “What are all these words?” Franny asked.

  “He was trying to understand, trying to give it a name,” Tim guessed. He couldn’t have said how or why, but he thought he had a glimmer of recognition, the slightest peek into how the old man’s mind had
been working.

  Scary,he thought, continuing around the room.

  In the middle of the wall was a doorjamb with no door in it. A hammer and screwdriver collected dust on the floor, up against the base of the wall. On the other side of the jamb was a shallow closet, an empty rod across it. Tim, always nervous about closets, shone his light in.

  Scrawled on the walls inside, in what looked like thick black Magic Marker—smudged by the same hand, as it wrote over and over again—and spilling out onto the jamb itself, he saw a single phrase that froze his blood like nothing he had seen yet:

  face him face him face him face him face him face him

  A thousand times, Tim estimated at a glance. More, probably. An insane man’s Herculean effort.

  And when it comes to insane,Tim thought,I know what I’m talking about .

  He worried about Franny, seeing all this. Girl was out there on the edge as it was. She stuck close, her breathing shallow. When he caught a glimpse of her in the light, he saw tears streaming down her pale face, her nose running.Brave kid, he thought.Terrified, but she’s staying with it . He was about to say something to her, but then the light fell onto an object behind her.