JMariotte - Boogeyman Read online

  A chair, like an ordinary wooden dining chair or a teacher’s desk chair. It was carefully placed, positioned so that it faced the closet from which the door had been removed. This, Tim could tell, was intentional.

  Finally Franny spoke, her voice cracking with terror. “I don’t want to be here.”

  Instead of acknowledging her, Tim kept his flashlight aimed at the chair, examining it. Nails had been driven at an angle into the legs, securing the chair to the hardwood floor.

  Running the beam up the legs, he brought it to rest on something else, hanging about a third of the way up the front pair. Franny bent over and lifted them. Leather straps, attached to the chair. Restraints. She sniffed and gulped a couple of times before she could get her words out. “He sat here. Waiting…”

  Tim nodded. She was right. He had put it together at the same instant. “He was trying to bring him out.”

  What this man had put himself through…Tim was horrified by the images racing through his mind. Strapped to the chair, terror darting through his body as he waited for the shadow man to emerge from a closet that couldn’t be closed, no matter what. Battling his own instincts, forcing his eyes to remain open when all he would have wanted to do was to close them.

  Facing the Boogeyman.

  Tim realized that Franny had stepped away from him, crossing the room in the near blackness. He didn’t want her far away from the only source of light, and he spun, aimed the flashlight beam at her. She had gone to a far corner where another set of papers had been tacked to the wall. Franny stared at the papers, immobile, as if she’d fallen into a trance. From here, Tim couldn’t make out what they were, so he stepped closer.

  “My father was trying to find me,” Franny said, her voice distant, dreamlike. “Trying to beat it…”

  Tim shone the light on the papers she was looking at. Missing persons flyers, like the ones he’d found in her backpack. Except these were all of the same girl. “Have You Seen This Child?” emblazoned in big letters across the top, photos beneath. A ten-year-old girl playing soccer, riding a bike, smiling over a birthday cake. A happy girl, with red hair and bright eyes.

  It was Franny.

  Tim felt like the room spun around him, like that dizzy, drunken moment when you discovered that you would fall down if you didn’t hang on to something, and even then your chances were fifty-fifty. Franny washere, with him. She couldn’t have been ten in 1961. He studied the face on the pictures, looked at hers again. She had stopped crying. She bit her lower lip gently, but otherwise she looked calm, resolved.

  But he had no doubt that it was her. What was one more impossibility in a lifetime full of them? He realized he hadn’t heard the mocking voice in his head for awhile, and suspected maybe that this house was one place it couldn’t follow.

  “You need to go home,” Franny declared, almost as if she’d read his thoughts. “You have to go to the place where it started. That’s where you face him. My dad got too scared.” Tim was holding his breath, listening to Franny as if she were an oracle, a font of wisdom. “You can’t beat him if you’re scared,” she finished.

  It was crystal clear to Tim that he had been dismissed. He used the flashlight to guide him out of the house. Franny followed him most of the way, but when he reached the window through which they’d come in and dropped down to the damp ground, she stayed inside. Tim turned back to her. “I have to help you—”

  She cut him off. “You can’t. You can only help yourself.” He felt so sorry for her—lost for so long, as alone in her way as her father had been. He wished there were something he could do for her. “You were the only one who said my dad wasn’t crazy.”

  “He loved you. Very much.”

  “I know,” Franny said.

  Tim knew it was time to go. The night sky was still dark, plenty of hours left before morning. It had to be at night, Tim was convinced. The Boogeyman could only be faced down in the dark. Anyway, Franny had done all she could for him. She had shown him the path he had to walk, if he could just summon the courage to do it.

  He thought, with her example, he could at least try.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  She smiled, and he started away from her. A moment later, he turned back, just to get another glimpse of her looking happy, as she had in the pictures on the flyers.

  But the window was an empty, dark rectangle, as if she had never been there at all.

  Seventeen

  Mike pulled up to Mary’s house and parked his red pickup. He had made that drive so many times over the years, the truck probably could have come here without his guidance. Tonight he’d had a weird feeling on the way over, as if the fog was pressed down like a pillow on the town, smothering everyone but him trapped inside their homes. The streets had been empty and still, with not even the usual nighttime sounds of crickets and frogs and howling dogs breaking the silence.

  He approached the kitchen door, used his own key to let himself in. “Tim?” he called as he opened it. Tim didn’t answer. Mike closed the door and went further inside. “Hey, Katie called!” he shouted. “Said things are gettin’ a little loose here. You okay?”

  There was still no verbal response, but Mike did hear a noise—the sound of a power tool buzzing away in the living room. No wonder Tim couldn’t hear him calling. “Aw, Tim,” Mike complained. “I told you I got this job under control.”

  Last thing I need is him “helping” me,Mike thought. Tim had never shown much of an aptitude with tools more complicated than hammers and screwdrivers—and even then he was better with the vodka kind than the metal ones—so he was more than a little surprised that his nephew was working so late into the night. Did he think he was going to claim the house for his own, maybe cash in on all of Mike’s hard labor? “Tim, you know I sunk a lot of my own cash into this place. And I’ve been takin’ care of your mom all this time.”

  He shoved the plastic aside, ready to give Tim a piece of his mind.

  Tim was surprised to see Uncle Mike’s truck parked in the dirt drive in front of Mom’s house. It was the middle of the night—what could he be doing here? Uncle Mike was, Tim knew from hard experience, a guy who valued his sleep, and could be cranky as hell if he didn’t get it.

  Under ordinary circumstances, Tim would be concerned about this unexpected visit. But tonight, of all nights…concern didn’t begin to describe what he felt. Tim quickened his step, hurrying into the house. He pushed the front door open onto a dark, silent foyer. “Uncle Mike?” he called.

  No response broke the quiet. Tim dashed through the downstairs, then up, taking the steps two at a time. Flicking on light switches everywhere he went, chasing shadows away. “Uncle Mike? Hey Uncle Mike, where are you?”

  Ultimately, the house wasn’t all that huge, and there were only so many places one could hide…if hiding was what one had in mind. Somehow, Tim was pretty sure that was not what his uncle was up to. Panic threatened to engulf him. He didn’t think he could stand to lose another loved one…

  He couldn’t just let himself fall apart, though. Uncle Mike’s truck was outside, so he had come here. But he wasn’t here now. That could only mean that he too had been taken. And still more innocent people would certainly be, unless Tim could do what needed to be done. He had to set aside his terror, shove his sorrow in a cage and lock it away.

  He had to face it. Facehim .

  Are you sure you can?the voice asked, apparently back again now that Tim had returned to his former home.You sure you’re up to that, Timmy? You’ve been hiding from him for a long time…a very, very long time .

  “Shut up,” Tim said out loud. “You don’t even enter into it any more.”

  He waited, expecting the voice to keep arguing with him, but it didn’t. Once he was confident that it wasn’t going to, he got to work.

  The first chore was to gather the tools he’d need. Uncle Mike had left stuff strewn all around the house, and Tim scooped up what he wanted—hammers, nails, a nail gun, a power drill, duct tape.
There were closets and cabinets throughout the house, possible entry points forhim . They all needed to be sealed. Tim started with the small closet under the stairs, the one his dad had shut him inside. He pried boards up from the floor and laid them across the closet, using the nail gun to drive nails through them, locking them in place. When he was finished, he rattled the closet door, but couldn’t force it open.

  Good. He wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and moved down to the hall closet. Touched the raw cuts on his cheek from the hangers in there. That had only been this afternoon, after the funeral, but it seemed like years had passed. He took the hammer and pounded nails in at an angle, going through the door into the jamb.

  The kitchen came next. He sealed cabinets with duct tape, driving screws through the doors when he thought the tape alone might not hold. The big double-doored cabinet under the sink was the hardest, but he splintered a chair with a hammer and used the slats from its back, sticking them in place with the nail gun.

  Every door he approached filled him with trepidation. There was no telling behind which the Boogeyman might lurk, from which he would reach out to grab Tim as he had Tim’s dad, Jessica, and now Uncle Mike. But the job had to be done. No one else was going to do it. If anyone else had ever connected the dots, they’d still have needed a Franny to put them on the right track. And even then—as with her dad, himself probably a victim of the Boogeyman—it wouldn’t work if he lost his nerve.

  So it was all up to Tim now. He finished with the downstairs and went up. He allowed himself a grim smile, imagining that the Boogeyman was trying all the sealed-off doors, feeling a building, seething frustration similar to what Tim had been going through all night.

  Upstairs, Tim started in his mom’s room. He grabbed the lower edge of her bed and hoisted it up, flipping it over, mattresses down. There would be no getting in that way. The wooden bed frame he kicked apart, using his hammer on the more stubborn sections. This gave him large wooden slats, which he nailed up against the closet door.

  Sweat ran down him in rivers and he had to stop to catch his breath. It had already been a very long night, he hadn’t had much sleep lately, and he was near exhaustion. But he couldn’t let up yet. Too far to go, too much to do. The Boogeyman still had to be faced.

  At least the battle lines had been drawn.

  The confrontation would come in Tim’s old room.

  Tim’s mom had preserved his room during all the years of his long absence, and even Uncle Mike’s various home improvement projects during Mom’s hospitalization hadn’t made a dent in it yet.

  His twin bed was made up with a red cotton bedspread, as if someone might want to sleep in it at any time. A thin layer of dust covered it, as it did everything else in the small room. A bookshelf held a scattering of books, mostly Tim’s old science fiction paperbacks, and a stack of yellowed comics. Action figures and toy rockets claimed another shelf, and the bottom one was piled high with board games: Monopoly, Stratego, Clue, a few others. Between his nightstand and the bookshelf, a stained and worn Louisville Slugger leaned against the wall. Looking at it, he remembered Kate threatening him with a bat, not all that long ago. He had thought maybe they were reconnecting after all these years, but apparently that was one more in a series of bad guesses.

  On the wall over his bed were drawings Tim had made. He remembered drawing superheroes and spaceships, various action scenarios, all with the unpracticed hand but unbridled enthusiasm of youth.

  But those drawings were not there now. Instead, he saw different pictures, made with the same set of limited skills and all of a single subject.

  The shadow man. The Boogeyman. Dark and sinister, his body twisted and warped, as if seen through a veil of heat. Tim had no memory of drawing these, but obviously he had. He was amazed that his mother had left them up. If he’d been a parent, he would have thrown them away and made his kid an appointment at—

  —well, someplace like the Danville Institute.

  Tim stood in the quiet room, his tools clutched in his hands. Now that he wasn’t making a racket with them, he could hear the wind outside, buffeting the walls, making shutters creak and the roof groan. He looked around at his things, the remnants of his youth. On his dresser was a lamp shaped like a rocket ship. Inside, if he opened the drawers, he would probably find clothes he had last worn a decade-and-a-half ago. In the corner next to the dresser was his desk. He’d done his homework there, he remembered, unless he needed help with it, in which case it had been the kitchen table. He had sat there to draw pictures, to read. Sometimes his dad had come in and perched on a corner of it while Tim worked, offering fatherly advice and wisdom. His brand of wisdom, anyway.

  Tim realized, looking at these things, that he had suffered an interrupted childhood. It had been normal, or close to it, when he was very young, but then after his father had been taken away, he’d had to try to be the adult. His mom hadn’t functioned well, then or later. She’d already started with the pills. When Uncle Mike finally gave him a new home, he treated Tim almost as just another guy he happened to take care of, not as a son. Not as a child.

  Tim’s childhood had ended inside this room. It was unfinished business—business that would never be finished now. He couldn’t go back to that.

  But that didn’t mean he was helpless. Not anymore.

  Shoved inside the desk’s foot space was Tim’s old wooden desk chair. It had always been a little large for him—had been his dad’s, until the old man had traded up. But it would do for now.

  He pulled it out, dragging it to the center of the room. Positioning it so it faced the closet, Tim knelt down and used the cordless drill to drive long screws through the chair legs and into the floor. When he was satisfied that the chair wasn’t going anywhere, he cut sections of some belts he’d found in Mom’s closet and drove shorter screws through them, attaching two to the chair’s front legs and one to the left arm. He wouldn’t be able to strap in both his arms, but he figured one would be sufficient. If he started to lose his nerve, it would take him that much longer to run away.

  He yanked on the chair, but it wouldn’t budge.

  Perfect.

  He sat down. Put his arms on the chair’s armrests. Looked straight ahead.

  Into his wide-open bedroom closet. Inside, old clothes still hung where he’d left them, so very long ago. A chest of drawers stood up against the right wall. On the left, the hamper where he had tossed dirty clothes, on those nights that he remembered not to just leave them lying on a chair. He imagined he could still see marks on the top jamb where his father’s bones had been shattered, right before the Boogeyman had dragged him away. But he knew that was an illusion—those marks had never been seen again, by family or police investigators.

  Tim had propped the door open with a couple of books, and now he stared into its shadowy recesses. Without taking his eyes from the closet, he bent forward and strapped his legs down. Tested them. Tight. He sat upright again, fastened the strap around his left arm.

  Expelling a deep breath, Tim pressed his back against the chair and waited.

  He tried to keep his mind from wandering. Being back in this house set his memory racing, but dredging up the past—and maybe restarting the vivid hallucinations he’d been experiencing—wouldn’t help him now. He needed to keep his head clear, to be ready for whatever happened. He was positive the Boogeyman couldn’t resist an engraved invitation like this.

  What he didn’t know for sure was what he’d do when the Boogeyman showed up.

  So he waited, trying to stay alert, to keep his breathing steady and even. Last thing he wanted to do was hyperventilate, take a chance on being dizzy or disoriented when the Boogeyman finally came. He stared into the closet’s depths. After a long spell, the shadows in there seemed to shift before his eyes, to merge, to coalesce into a figure of some sort. Tim tensed, expectant, his heart galloping. But nothing came out of the opening, and after he blinked, the shadows had gone back to the way they were. Could
have been a trick of the faint light—a cloud passing over the moon, maybe, or the headlights of some distant car striking the window.

  He began to relax again, starting to wonder if maybe the Boogeyman had called it quits for the night. Maybe he had bagged his quota.

  If that was the case, then Tim was willing to keep this routine up, every night if need be. The people who meant the most to him in the world were already gone, so the only urgency was protecting strangers from the Boogeyman’s clutches. If it took a night, or two, or ten, Tim would be here, in the chair.

  Waiting.

  Sooner or later he would come. Tim would face him.

  Tim glanced out the window. Still a couple hours of darkness left out there. He’d wait a little bit longer, just to see what might happen.