JMariotte - Boogeyman Page 6

  He fixed that image in his head, and kept driving.

  Six

  The Danville State Children’s Institute was a drab, bureaucratic-looking place from the outside. Gray stone, windows trimmed in peeling white paint. The sky overhead seemed to mirror the color of its walls, glowering and leaden on an overcast afternoon.

  Inside, though, attempts had been made to cheer the facility up as much as possible. Interior walls were painted in soothing pastels or bright, primary colors. Painted animals romped on their smooth surfaces, and even administrative necessities—plastic mailboxes outside office doors, for instance—were decorated with fun, colorful stickers or crafted to look like the faces of lions or bears.

  As much as his old room at his parents’ place, or the apartment behind Uncle Mike’s bar that Jessica was so fond of bringing up to people, this place was Tim’s boyhood home. He still recognized its hallways and public spaces. This was where he had learned the word “scotophobia.” Afraid of the dark. Dr. Matheson had been a firm believer in the power of words, of ideas. “Name that which you are afraid of,” she often said, “and it gives you a handle with which to control it.”

  For young Tim Jensen, that had been a very long list of names. Afraid of the dark, the night, shadows, closets.

  Afraid, most of all, of the Boogeyman.

  He had watched Dr. Matheson’s kindly face with the utmost care, the first time he had dared to speak that name to her. He waited for a hint of a smile, a lifting of the brow, a twinkle in the eyes that would indicate how amusing she found his worst fear.

  None of those things happened.

  Dr. Matheson had held his gaze for a moment, nodded, then looked away to scribble another note on her pad. She had not said, “There’s no such thing,” or any of the other phrases he was used to adults tossing out every time he mentioned the dark man he claimed had taken his father away. She had simply accepted it, like it was just another one of his litany of fears, every bit as real as closets and shadows.

  “Sciophobia,” he remembered. Fear of shadows.

  Eventually, of course, she had tried to persuade him that the Boogeyman didn’t exist. She had to, he realized. She couldn’t let him go on believing his dad had been snatched away by some mythical monster. That would be unprofessional, irresponsible, and Dr. Jane Matheson was neither of those.

  “Parents tell their children horrible things sometimes,” she had explained. They had been in her office, she sitting in the leather chair beside her desk and he sprawled on the fluorescent purple beanbag she kept for her young charges. “They don’t mean to frighten them, not really—mostly, they are just looking for a way to persuade their children that their actions have consequences. But when you’re six or seven, do you think it’s easy to understand that if you don’t eat your vegetables, you may not get all the nutrients your body needs? Or is it easier to understand that if you don’t eat your vegetables, some awful monster will come out from under your bed and get you?”

  “The monster,” Tim answered solemnly.

  “That’s what I think, too,” Dr. Matheson said. “In the long run, it may not be the best idea. But at the moment, a six-year-old may not care as much about getting proper nutrition as he does about not being eaten himself. Parents expect that, before belief in these monsters becomes a serious problem, their children will be old enough to realize that they are not real.”

  “And I’m old enough,” Tim said.

  “Yes, you are. But it’s not always just a function of age, Tim. Sometimes other things get mixed in. In your case, it was your father, leaving you and your mother, while you were at that impressionable age. In your young mind, you couldn’t understand why he would do that—couldn’t even accept that someonemight do that. So your mind had to substitute another explanation. And what it chose was what you feared the most—a Boogeyman, coming out of a dark closet, stole him away. It’s perfectly understandable, and not as uncommon as you probably think.”

  Tim had brightened at that idea. “You mean, other kids believe in him too?”

  Dr. Matheson nodded and tapped the end of her pen on her little notepad. “Parents around the world tell similar stories to their children, and sometimes the children believe it. Not just about Boogeymen but about vampires or werewolves or changelings—all kinds of strange and scary monsters.”

  “But those things aren’t real,” Tim said. “I’ve seen them in movies andScooby Doo and stuff, but—” He stopped, comprehension dawning on him.

  “That’s right, Tim. Those things aren’t real. And neither is the Boogeyman. He only lives in your mind. He’s only something that we might call a construction, or a personification, of your fears. He does not really exist, and he cannot hurt you, ever.”

  Dr. Jane Matheson’s hair had silvered during the time he had known her, lines had formed around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, but her soft blue eyes hadn’t changed and her manner still radiated calm wisdom. Her white lab coat looked new, and she wore it over a cheerful red pants suit. He felt better just being in her presence. She exuded a kind of centeredness that never failed to reassure him. As she walked through the art room with him, he watched kids working with crayons, clay, and water colors, and remembered when it had been him playing with those things.

  “So the funeral’s today?” she asked. She had a way of cutting right to the heart of things.

  “Yeah, this afternoon.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Her empathy, Tim had no doubt, was genuine. Dr. Matheson was one of the best people he had ever known, and he trusted her absolutely.

  “Me too.”

  They watched a boy coloring in black eyes above a red house—chimney on top, smoke curling out of it. It reminded Tim of his childhood home—the house that had figured in so many of his conversations with Dr. Matheson. Arching an eyebrow at the picture, he figured she knew it, too. “I’m thinking of going by the old house,” Tim said.

  “Really?”

  “My uncle’s been fixing up the place since Mom went into the hospital last year,” he explained, knowing even as he did so that it was hardly a sufficient explanation. One of Dr. Matheson’s many gifts, though, was patience. She knew—had always known—that he’d tell her what was really going on with him when he was ready to.

  Apparently satisfied with his masterpiece, the kid put down the crayon, regarded his work for a moment, then picked it up off the table and offered it to Tim.

  “He wants you to have it,” Dr. Matheson told him.

  For a moment, he thought she was talking about his family’s old house, saying that Uncle Mike wanted him to have the place. Then he realized she meant the picture, and he took it from the boy’s hand. “Thanks,” he said, smiling, genuinely touched by the offer.

  The kid beamed and Dr. Matheson tousled his hair. Tim looked at the picture a moment longer, but realized that it kind of creeped him out. It was just a kid’s idealized version of a house—door, four windows, that chimney. But the eyes, floating in the sky above it, were disturbing. He remembered the eyes he thought he’d seen in the back of the man’s head, in the park the other night.

  Dr. Matheson moved on, heading out the door and into the long hallway toward the front, and he followed. “I haven’t been home since I was a little kid,” he admitted. “I’m scared something horrible will happen the second I step in that house.”

  “Aren’t the horrible things already happening?” she asked. “Your fears have disrupted your personal life, gotten in the way of your relationships. Tim,something happened in that house, but it wasn’t supernatural. There’s nothing in there but memories.”

  He tried to think of something to say in response, but nothing would come. Of course, she was right. She always was. And she always sounded so sensible when she spoke.

  But she hadn’t been there on Thanksgiving night, when his mom had “visited.” Maybe that was all in his head, too, but the way her appearance had corresponded with her death…that couldn’t be mere coincidence. Th
ere was more to it than that. It was in the dark, in the shadows, when Dr. Matheson wasn’t around, that he most needed her calm rationality.

  “You dealt with your father leaving the best way you could,” she went on. “But you were eight. You’re a grown man now. It’s time to move on. These feelings you have are going to get worse and worse unless you face this. Come on, you’ve been coming here for, what…fifteen years? Look around you. There are only children here, Tim.”

  She was right again. Tim knew that, knew he was too old to continue seeing a child psychologist. A little girl carried a red ball down the hallway, holding it close, as if it was a beloved stuffed animal. She smiled shyly at Dr. Matheson, looked away from Tim.

  “I want to get better,” Tim declared. “I want a normal life.”

  “Then you know what you have to do. You’ve always known.”

  Tim thought he knew what she meant, but he wanted her to say it. Needed her to. It wasn’t an idea he could embrace easily, certainly not one he would volunteer without a little prodding. He stayed silent and let her spell it out.

  “Go home, Tim. Spend one night in that house. Trust me, it’s going to help.”

  There it is, Timmy. It’s so simple, isn’t it? At least, the way she says it.

  Tim started to respond, but an electronic voice from an overhead speaker cut him off.“Dr. Matheson to observation.”

  She put a hand on his arm. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve got to go.” She started walking backward down the hall, still looking at him, her expression sincere, concerned. “Just one night, and you’ll see. The only monster is the one you created in your mind.”

  Then she turned around and hurried away. The intercom crackled again, but Tim barely heard it. He was listening to an inner voice now.

  Is that right, Timmy? Just in your mind? There’s only one way to find out, isn’t there? Are you really ready to grow up?

  Tim stood alone in the quiet hallway for a moment, trying to steel himself to leave the place. He felt safe here—it was one of the few places outside of his own apartment where he did. He knew it was a strange perception to have of such a place. He had been drugged here, and physically restrained, especially in his earliest days, when Uncle Mike had realized he couldn’t deal with Tim’s panic attacks, when everyone had been afraid he’d hurt himself, or worse. He had been so lonely on those nights, away from anyone he had ever known or loved. He had felt like a castoff, a pariah, a prisoner. Thrown into this pit because no one wanted to love him or care for him, because even his own family members couldn’t stand to have the crazy kid around.

  It had taken a while to get over that, but he had. With Dr. Matheson’s help, and then with the other kids in their group sessions, Tim had worked through those feelings of persecution, of being unwanted. He had come to realize that they had put him herebecause they loved him, because they wanted him to get better, and knew they had reached the limits of what they could do to help him.

  His mom had come to visit him sometimes, but mostly Uncle Mike came. He explained that it was hard for her to see her son and not to be able to take him home. It made her cry, he said, made her so sad she could hardly bear it.

  Tim always thought that maybe Uncle Mike was trying to put one over on him on that count. She had never had any problem leaving him at Uncle Mike’s place on the days that the three of them did something together, or on those more rare occasions when she took him by herself for the day. Tim guessed it was seeing him in an institution that bothered her, more than having to go home alone.

  In those days, he had never thought about how much it would hurt in another fifteen years when he had to visit her in a nursing home. Turning the tables, he had learned, didn’t make things any easier.

  Finally, his feet were willing to obey his head, and he started for the exit. But as he pulled even with a doorway, a piercing, terrified scream from within shattered the silence. Tim stopped short, looking in both directions for a nurse or orderly. Seeing no one nearby, he shoved through the door.

  Inside, the room was a traditional hospital-type room except for the colorful cartoon character wallpaper. On the bed, a little girl thrashed wildly, her blankets flapping around her as if in a hurricane wind. Her blue eyes wouldn’t settle on anything for more than a fraction of a second, but darted around madly. Tim had a quick flash of recognition, almost déjà vu, when he realized that he must have looked very much the same in his first days here.

  “It’s okay,” Tim said, trying to soothe her. He was afraid to approach, though—the way she floundered made him worry that she would hurt herself, and his presence only seemed to make things worse. “It’s okay,” he repeated, over her screams. Then he stuck his head back out the door. “Hey! We need some help in here!”

  The girl didn’t stop flailing or screaming. Tim was certain she would suffer serious injury if someone didn’t calm her down fast. At the back of her bed, he spotted the nurse call button, and he dashed over, squeezing it. Her tiny fists and feet lashed out toward him when he neared her, the violence of her motion somehow incongruous with her bunny rabbit pajamas. “Easy,” he said. “The nurses will be right here, I promise. It’s all right. It’s all right.”

  For a second, he thought his words were having some impact. She stopped thrashing, went still—but her gaze was fixed on something over Tim’s shoulder, fear still etched on her pretty young face. “What?” Tim asked her. “What is it?”

  She gave no answer. She had stopped screaming, but her mouth hung open, chin slack, a line of saliva trailing from her lips. Tim looked over his shoulder at walls, cartoon characters. “There’s nothing there.”

  But even as he spoke, a sound moved behind him, like a rat’s little claws—up the far wall, across the ceiling, stopping, finally, at a spot where one of the overhead acoustical tiles was loose.

  And there was a dark, shadowed gap in the ceiling.

  From the shadows, a pair of tiny eyes glared down at him.

  Tim glanced back at the little girl, who was shivering now, shaking uncontrollably, spittle flying in every direction from her open mouth. Before he could move toward her again, nurses rushed into the room, shoving him aside.

  “I was…she was screaming,” he tried to explain. “There was something in—”

  No one was listening to him. “Prepare a syringe!” one of the nurses shouted. “She’s having a seizure! Someone help me hold her down!”

  Other nurses and orderlies crowded around. Tim saw one push a bite plate into the girl’s mouth while others tugged on long nylon straps, fastening them beneath her, tying her down on the bed. A needle appeared in the first nurse’s beefy hand and she drove it into the little girl’s flesh. Tim hated needles, had to look away.

  Instead of looking down, though, or to the side, he felt his gaze drifting inexorably up. At the ceiling, the gap in the tiles. Nothing there, now. If there ever had been.

  He looked back at the girl again, locking eyes with her. Already, her shuddering was starting to come under control, but her eyes still showed the fear she had known. She held Tim’s gaze. She couldn’t speak, but her eyes seemed to communicate for her.I saw it too, they said.We both saw the same thing….

  Seven

  The funeral home had once been the grandest building on a block of impressive structures, with its Doric columns, its Greek Revival façade, its stately air. But the neighborhood around it had become depressed, gone downhill. The bank that had once commanded the corner had been knocked down a decade before, and a strip mall had taken its place. Half of that mall’s storefronts were empty now, boarded over. The remaining ones held a laundromat, an Asian restaurant, a video store. Between there and the funeral home was a pawnshop and a bar, a scummy joint with a couple of motorcycles parked in front and a cardboard sign on the door that gave its hours of business, 6A.M .–2A.M ., in bright orange letters. On a rainy day, with thunder rolling overhead and lightning flaring through the clouds, the block was an especially dreary place to be. Only
one thing would draw Tim into this neighborhood.

  And that one thing had happened. Mary Ellen Jensen had finally succumbed. The world had, Tim believed, had it in for his mother for a long time. That she held out as long as she did had been an amazing accomplishment, an act of will. Or else it was a giant middle finger raised to the forces that battered her, the fates that gave her the old man, Tim’s dad, for a husband—small-minded, bullying, uninterested in anyone’s happiness but his own—and that took him away so suddenly and mysteriously, that made Tim withdraw into himself and his nightmares, that finally snatched away his mother’s health and sanity too.

  Inside, the place had a sickly sweet aroma, as if all the flowers around were slowly rotting in their vases. Tim had met the funeral director—a thin, myopic ferret of a man in an appropriately black suit—had shaken hands with a couple of people, hugged Uncle Mike. Now he was alone in the viewing room, approaching her for the first time. Her casket was simple, your basic mahogany box. The open lid showed red velvet lining.