JMariotte - Boogeyman Read online

  As he was resigning himself to the wait, he heard a familiar sound—a low, animal moan. He hadn’t heard that since he’d been in the city, but he believed he knew what it meant. The shadow man. He still couldn’t see anything in the closet, though…where was it coming from?

  Tim twisted in the chair, strained against the straps that held him down. Not behind him. Somewhere else in the house.

  Then other noises joined in. They were strange at first, but within moments he could make out what they were. Nails popping out of wood. Screws tearing themselves free. Duct tape ripping, peeling itself.

  Someplace in the house—maybeeveryplace —the Boogeyman was coming through.

  Everywherebut here.

  Tim clawed at his restraints, the fingers of his free hand suddenly clumsy on the belt buckles. In the seconds it took him to free himself, the noises magnified, intensified, the racket deafening. Tim heard the clank of nails and screws hitting the floor and rolling, heard the creaking of doors. Finally released, he lunged from the chair, dashing out into the hall. At the top of the stairs, he paused.

  The door to the closet under the stairs was open. The door to the closet at the end of the hall was open. He peeked into his mother’s room—her closet too. The noise continued downstairs—probably the kitchen, he guessed.

  The whole house was coming undone.

  Where do I go?Tim wondered.Where do I face him if he’s everywhere?

  At a loss, he went back into his own room, plopped back down in the chair. He knew the Boogeyman liked closets. Sooner or later he’d come to this one.

  Instantly, the house fell silent again.

  Tim peered into the closet’s gloom. Nothing had changed there.

  “You’ve got to go in.”

  That was not Tim’s internal voice, but Franny’s, speaking right in his ear. Startled, Tim lurched in the chair, his own legs getting tangled in the chair’s bolted down ones. Heart hammering, he turned around.

  She was gone.

  If she had been there at all.

  Knowing what he did about Franny—which, admittedly, wasn’t much, but at the same time was all he needed to know—he was sure that she had been.

  He swallowed, looked at the closet. The open door swayed a little, creaking. Inviting.

  She’s right,he thought.Maybe I’ve known it all along .

  I’ve got to go in.

  Eighteen

  Sitting and waiting had been one thing. Tim had been frightened, but he hadn’t had to take definitive action. Now he forced his stiff, reluctant legs to carry him toward that open doorway. He wondered if he should take a weapon of some kind with him. But what? He had no idea how one might hurt the Boogeyman, if he could be hurt at all. His hands quivered with terror, his palms damp. He took short, quick breaths through his open mouth. With every step he wanted more than anything to turn around, to run away.

  He knew it would mean spending the rest of his life in the light, afraid of shadows, afraid of the dark. And he knew that it would mean never forming attachments with another living soul, because they would simply become targets for the shadow man. He wondered momentarily if that wasn’t a price he could pay, in return for being able to walk away from this confrontation.

  In the end, he knew the trade-off was no good. He had to do this, had to carry it through to its conclusion.

  Whatever that would be.

  Steeling himself for anything, Tim entered his closet.

  And that’s all it was…a closet. Clothes that he couldn’t come close to fitting into anymore, their bottom edges hanging much farther from the ground than his current ones did. The chest of drawers, a cheap wood laminate with a few stickers adhered to its surface. The familiar once-white wicker hamper across from it. He had been in this closet a thousand times during his childhood.

  There was nothing scary about it. Tim waited a moment, expecting the mocking voice to give him crap about his fears, but it didn’t come. He had, it seemed, banished that.Thank God for small favors, he thought. Maybe that was a fringe benefit of actually facing his fears, rather than hiding from them.

  Only one other thing remained to do. Tim turned, his clothes bumping him as he did, and gripped the doorknob. Once again, his hand trembled.

  It continued to tremble as he slowly pulled the door closed, shutting out the light.

  Leaving him alone in perfect darkness.

  Perfect silence. The utter absence of any stimulus.This, he thought,must be what people experience in sensory-deprivation tanks . He couldn’t imagine doing it for pleasure. Gradually, his eyes adjusted, pupils taking in the faintest light that seeped in around the door’s edges, and he was able to make out shapes, if not details.

  Then, the faintest sound intruded on the silence.

  From the back of the closet, behind the clothes. He wasn’t sure if it was real, imagined, or maybe just some clothing he had jostled. But then he caught a fleeting glimpse of motion back there—black against black, more an impression than a look.

  Something…

  Tim reached out, shoved the hanging clothes aside with both hands, making a passageway through them.

  And saw—impossibly—himself. But himself delayed by several seconds. As if in a trick mirror, he watched Tim Jensen enter the closet, look around, pull the door closed with excruciating slowness, then push the clothes aside and stare at the back of the closet.

  Staring at himself. Making eye contact.

  Tim’s world had stopped playing by the usual rules a long time ago. This was beyond strange, however, even by current standards. He turned to the front of the closet, toward the door. He thought it looked like the door was still there, but he wasn’t sure of anything any more. He was losing his bearings. Was he really facing the door, or maybe the hamper? Glanced back behind him, to see if the other Tim—slow Tim—was still there.

  He wasn’t. Nothing was.

  Realnothing.

  Absolute black. The utter absence of light, of form. Deeper than shadow, because shadow requires light to exist. This was the void.

  Tim couldn’t look anymore. His reality was too fragile for that, the sight of nothing at all was far too terrifying. He turned away, back toward where the door had once been.

  But instead of a door, he looked into a room, through a narrow space. He was close to the floor, somehow. There was carpet right in front of him, darkness above. After a few seconds, he realized he was looking at a bed, from beneath it. Box springs, a dust ruffle hanging down.

  Tim crawled forward, feeling the scratchy carpeting under his fingers. The bed scraped against his back. This was impossible, but real. He could smell the dust trapped in the carpet’s fibers, feel the weight of the mattresses above him. The carpet was gold and oddly familiar.

  Finally, he emerged from under the bed.

  He was back inside the motel room. The one where he and Jessica had been, that he and Kate had visited. Room 3 of the Travel Inn Motel.

  Jessica’s tank top remained draped over the lamp, creating mood lighting for an interlude that had never happened. Little bottles of liquor stood on the table, next to cans of Coke and Red Bull. Steam billowed from underneath the bathroom door, where he could hear running water.

  Steam? Running water? Tim pushed himself unsteadily to his feet. Even on this night where nothing made sense anymore, this threw him. Jessica had filled the bath hours ago—then disappeared from it. They wouldn’t have rented the room out to someone else already.

  Certainly not without taking her shirt from the lamp and cleaning up the drinks.

  The closet door was open, he noticed, a sliver of blackness showing through. He suppressed a shudder, looked away from it.

  He had to check the bathroom, where he’d last seen Jessica. He called out to her, receiving no reply. Reaching the door, he pushed it wide.

  Hot water roared into the tub, releasing steam into the air. The mirrors were fogged. Jessica’s underwear dangled from a towel rod. Everything as he remembered it.

&
nbsp; But there was no broken glass on the floor, no spilled drinks.

  Suppressing a shiver, he moved closer to the tub, looking down into its depths. As he watched, the water from the faucet turned darker, started running black. The color of tar, of night, of liquid shadow. Within moments, all the water in the tub had turned black, shining like obsidian.

  The faucet stopped, as if it had shut itself off.

  A few last drops rippled the surface.

  Then, all was still. Tim stared into it. It was like looking into the back of his closet, the utter emptiness of outer space. Except in space, he believed, you could see stars.

  He leaned closer, and closer still, almost as if he were hypnotized. Black or not, this was just water; he should be able to see his reflection. Unless it had become something else. He wasn’t even certain it was still liquid, for that matter. Maybe it had changed, or vanished altogether, replaced by infinite nothingness. He lowered a hand toward it—

  And two hands burst through the surface, thrusting up toward him.

  Tim screamed.

  As he tried to back away, his left foot slipped on wet tiles and his knee slammed into the tub’s wall, sending a shock of pain through his leg. A figure emerged, dripping black, its hands grasping for him. A shriek tore from its awful throat, like a wet echo of Tim’s own scream.

  Tim found his footing, staggered away until the bathroom wall brought him up short. Through his horror, he realized that he recognized the black, flailing figure—

  —and it was Jessica, gasping for breath, clutching the air for some kind of purchase, eyes wild, mouth gaping open like a fish—

  —and he went to her, threw his arm out to grab her, to pull her from the tub.

  She smacked his arm away, in her panic not even recognizing him. He reached for her again but she drew back, clawing at him with her nails. Slapping him.

  “Jessica, it’s me!” Tim cried desperately.

  Ignoring her battering fists and the black slime that coated her, he leaned toward her, started to wrap his arms around her, to pull her free.

  Which was when a second figure erupted from the black surface.

  The Boogeyman, warped and wet.

  He didn’t come out of the black water so much as he was composed of it, as if it were the very stuff of shadow, and he could manipulate it at will. One of his impossible fists lashed out and connected with Tim’s jaw. Tim’s head snapped back, his feet skidded out from under him.

  The shadow man wasreal after all. Material. Malevolent. Andstrong .

  Tim’s head crashed into the wall behind him. A bright burst of light, as if from a camera’s flash, blinded him for a moment. He simply sat there on the floor, stunned. Immobile.

  The Boogeyman wrapped his arms around Jessica, who continued to shriek, frantic now as she tried to climb out of the tub. He reached a hand up, tangled his fingers in a fistful of hair, and pushed her down. She smacked the surface with her hands, clutched at the rim of the tub. Still, he held her under.

  The black goo was running off of her now, and Tim could see that the skin of her hands was pale, turning more so by the moment. Veins blue beneath it. She had never been pale like that.

  Tim tried to get to his feet. Shook his head, put his palms flat against the damp tile floor to press off from.

  The Boogeyman stood up to his full height, lifting Jessica from the tub as easily as if she were a child. She had lost consciousness, drowned in the pitch. The black stuff dripped away from her and Tim could see that she was pale everywhere, not just her hands. The pallor of death, he feared.

  But the Boogeyman didn’t shake the blackness. It clung to him as he stepped out of the tub, like a shadow emerging from a pool of shadow.

  Tim got a foot beneath himself, his back against the wall. Forced himself to his feet, still dazed.

  But now the Boogeyman had both feet on the floor, Jessica dangling limply from his arms, her skin almost paper white. The Boogeyman’s head turned toward the open doorway. Tim knew he had to move now.

  He hurled himself at the Boogeyman.

  Plowed into him, making solid contact.

  The Boogeyman swatted him away with one arm, as easily as Tim might swat a fly. Tim spun, once more failing to hold his footing on the soaked floor, and landed flat against the tiles. He turned his head just in time to see the Boogeyman leave the bathroom with Jessica.

  Tim got a hand on the tub’s rim, pushed himself to his feet again, and gave chase.

  He hit the main room just in time to see the closet door bang shut.

  The Boogeyman was gone, and Jessica with him.

  Tim knew he couldn’t hesitate. If she wasn’t dead yet, she was almost there, could not have much time left in his clutches. Tim dashed back into the bathroom. If that tub was an entry point into the Boogeyman’s world, he would take it. Maybe he could head them off at the proverbial pass. The bathroom was a horrific mess, oily black spots smearing tiles and walls.

  But the water was clear. Tim could see the bottom of the tub, the little rubber tracks in there to prevent skids, the drain plug.

  Two drops of dark blood marred the rim of the tub. He had seen those earlier, with Kate. But not when he had been here with Jessica.

  None of this was possible. All of it was real. He didn’t dare look at a clock, afraid that time itself would be spinning randomly. The laws of physics—immutable, or so he had believed—had been declared null and void. He thought his mind would collapse in on itself at any moment. Faced with one impossibility on top of another, how could he continue to function?

  Jessica needs me,he thought.Kate needs me. Uncle Mike .

  Franny.

  He left the bathroom, went straight to the closet in the other room. Throwing the door open, he dove in.

  Nineteen

  He came out in a familiar hallway. It took him a moment to place it, because he had never seen it from precisely this angle before. But when he turned around to see where he had been, he saw the linen closet at the top of the stairs in his mom’s house, its shelves filled with towels and sheets, the big shelf at the bottom piled high with blankets and quilts. The duct tape he had used to seal it was nowhere to be seen. He had simply walked through the closet as if it wasn’t there, as if its atoms rearranged themselves to allow his passing. It would have been impossible, if that word still had meaning.

  His gut churned from the passage. Breaking the boundaries of space and time had consequences, of some kind. He ignored the discomfort. No time to let something like that slow him down.

  But there was no sign of the Boogeyman, or Jessica. He didn’t get it. He had followed them, only moments behind. They should be here now.

  Except he remembered the spots of blood, which he hadn’t seen the first time—not until he’d gone back to the motel with Kate. Then they had not been there, when he had entered from his closet. Then they were, after the fight.

  And the broken glasses, the spilled drinks that had been there, and then were not.

  The Boogeyman wasn’t limited to moving through space. He could manipulate time, as well. And moving along his shadowy paths, Tim wasn’t bound by time’s restrictions either. He had edited an article once by a theoretical physicist who had tried to explain, in layman’s terms, how time was more fluid and less linear than most people believed. It had made his head hurt to read it, and as soon as he was finished he couldn’t remember the arguments he had just read.

  Now he wished he could, because maybe it would help him negotiate through the Boogeyman’s multidimensional realm. Somehow he needed to get a handle on this, so he could anticipate the Boogeyman’s moves, come out ahead of him, or at least close enough behind to catch him. Jessica’s life—and his own sanity—depended on it.

  He hurried down the stairs, into the living room. Missing-persons flyers still littered every surface, but there were power tools on the ground—tools he had taken upstairs earlier. But that (in this time continuum, anyway) hadn’t happened yet. He reached out to touch
a circular saw, to make sure it was real, and as he did, the tool roared into life, its blade slicing into his finger. “Ow!” Tim shouted, drawing his hand back. Blood came to the surface and Tim instinctively lifted it to his mouth, sucking at it. The saw continued to buzz, and a power drill joined in.

  As he stood there with his cut finger at his mouth, he heard a familiar voice. “Aw, Tim,” his Uncle Mike groused. “I told you I got this job under control.”

  It sounded like it was coming from the kitchen, as if Uncle Mike had come in through the other door. Tim remembered seeing his uncle’s truck earlier, but not being able to find the man in the house. He started toward the dining room, hope rising in him.An ally! he thought. He could use some help here, that was for sure. And Uncle Mike was steady, level-headed. Just what he needed.