JMariotte - Boogeyman Read online

  The rest of her time at her parents’ home had been a little strained as a result. Jessica’s sister, Chelsea, in particular, took delight in needling her about her missing boyfriend at every possible opportunity. Even Brad, Chelsea’s husband, finally told his wife to stop picking on Jessica. To escape their criticism, and what was even worse, their pity, Jessica took to spending more time in her room, or watching old movies on TV, dodging the rest of the clan.

  No wonder she wasn’t in the best of moods this morning. The high of the holiday had been shattered. Normally she would have thought of Thanksgiving as the start of the Christmas holiday season, a time of building excitement, shopping and planning and baking, all culminating in a year-end festival of warmth and joy. This year, Tim’s crisis had derailed that. She was sure she could get the train back on the tracks in a week or two, but it wouldn’t be the same.

  And as she walked through the offices, she wasn’t sure if she’d be celebrating with him or without him this year. He hadn’t called, hadn’t been in touch at all since the night he had left. Maybe she should have tried his cell phone, but she thought that since he was the one who had left without notice, he was the one who needed to apologize. The more time passed without a call from him, the angrier she became that he wasn’t calling, and the more determined thatshe would not callhim .

  Stupid, she knew. But who doesn’t do stupid things from time to time?

  After settling into her own desk and reading the numerous e-mails that had piled up over the long weekend, she decided she needed to go see Colson Temple, Tim’s boss. With everything that had been going on, it was unlikely that Tim had bothered to call him, and with the next issue’s deadlines fast approaching, he would wonder where his associate editor was.

  Colson’s office was a mess, as was the man himself. His desk was piled high with papers, file folders, CDs, books, and magazines—bothEnd and a wide variety of others. Colson was a voracious reader, everyone said. He consumed words the way some people consumed coffee, or chocolate, or crack. His appetite for language was closely mirrored, judging from his size, by his taste for food. His desk was disheveled and unkempt, as was his person. He must have weighed in at a little more than three hundred pounds. His white shirts could have been sewn by tentmakers, and the ties he insisted on wearing with them seemed miniature by contrast, barely reaching halfway down the massive expanse of his front. His hair looked like it hadn’t seen a comb or brush in years, but straggled from his head like escapees during a prison break, diving in every direction at once. He wore thick glasses that might never have met a cleaning cloth. Jessica wondered how he could even see to read.

  She knocked on his door and he looked up from the sheaf of papers in his hands. “Hi, Jessica,” he said pleasantly. “Have a good Thanksgiving?”

  “Yes, thanks, Colson.” She paused, suddenly not sure how to bring the topic up.

  “Something I can do for you?”

  “I was wondering if you’d heard from Tim.”

  “Jensen?” he asked. “No, and I’m a little upset about it. Crunch time, you know.”

  “I know,” Jessica assured him. “You might not, though. Hear from Tim, I mean. His mother passed away over the weekend, and he had to go home for her funeral and everything. I was afraid that, with all the commotion, he might forget to let you know.”

  Colson’s forehead wrinkled and his lips turned down. “I’m really sorry to hear that. You’re not going?”

  At first, Jessica didn’t understand what he meant. “I’m sorry?”

  “To the funeral.”

  “I…no. Tim…he’s kind of private about family stuff, and everything. I’ve never even met her. And we thought it would be better if I stayed here. Plus, you know, deadlines, right?”

  Colson smiled at that. The way he regarded her from behind those thick, smudged glasses made her think he was going to ask more questions. But then, she remembered, he was a journalist, and that’s what they did.

  He refrained, though. He smiled and nodded knowingly. “Deadlines, right. I appreciate you being here. It’s got to be a hard time, for both of you. You and Tim have my deepest condolences.”

  “Thanks, Colson. When Tim calls me, I’ll make sure he talks to you.”

  An easy promise to make, Jessica thought. Maybe a hard one to keep, though, because it presupposed that Tim would in fact call her. She excused herself and went back to her desk, still wishing for that new computer that would make meeting her deadlines less of a challenge.

  The old house was surrounded by miles of brown, denuded farmland, already harvested at this time of year, sitting and waiting for the new planting and the spring. Tim hadn’t been out this way in a long time, but the road was familiar to him as he drove it, less like real life than something from a movie he’d seen several times. He recognized a barn that drooped in the middle like a broken-down old nag, the rust stains on mailboxes and irrigation pipes, the blue farmhouse with yellow shutters that squatted right next to the road. Tim played the radio softly as he drove. He felt almost relaxed for the first time since Thanksgiving.

  Sitting on the passenger seat was the key ring Uncle Mike had given him. It occurred to him that he had never before had keys to the place—when he had lived there with his folks, he’d been too young. Since he had moved away, there had been no reason to have any. Uncle Mike had taken care of the place for his mom, not that she had been able to live there for awhile. But now—

  A blacksomething dove right toward his windshield, startling Tim out of his reflections.

  Tim stomped on the brake. Tires squealed on the blacktop, the car starting to fishtail on the country lane, but it was all too late. Whatever it was slammed into the glass. The windshield shattered but held in place, a spider web of fractures. Tim turned into the skid, correcting, starting to get back on course, but a truck’s air horn blared at him, surprising him all over again. Through the broken glass he could see that he was in the middle of the narrow road, and the semi barreling down on him couldn’t get around. Tim braked once more, pulling hard on the wheel, trying to get back into his own lane.

  The truck boomed past, and Tim pulled over to the dirt shoulder, stopping in a cloud of dust. In a nearby field, horses whinnied and ran away from the car, no doubt horrified by all the noise on the previously quiet country lane. Tim was shaking, his mouth dry, his mind emptied of everything but terror. His heart pounded in his chest like he’d swallowed one of those horses and it was frantically beating its hooves against him from the inside, trying to get out.

  Finally he was able to look up and through the glass, where he saw what had started the whole chain of events. A huge black crow was almost flattened against the shattered glass, a mass of bloody feathers, with one round, beady eye staring in at him. He thought he would retch, but swallowed a couple of times and fought it back.

  He sat in the car for another minute, afraid that if he got out, his legs would refuse to support his weight and drop him into the road. Realizing he couldn’t go anywhere with the bird on his windshield, though, he eventually forced himself from the car.

  There was no other traffic. With his engine off, the only sound now was the ticking of his car and the distant whickering of the horses, who had stopped up on the hill and watched him. Tim found a stick by the side of the road and tried to pry the sticky black mass off his windshield with it.

  He remembered reading somewhere that crows were very intelligent birds—smart enough to drop nuts under the wheels of moving cars, and then to keep out of the way until they could come back for the insides, opened by the cars’ wheels. Maybe this one had been trying to do that, but its timing had been a little off. Now it was meat—red goo and black feathers, pasted to glass. Scraping at it, poking the persistent bits of matter that refused to let go, made Tim feel sick.

  When he had as much off as he could, he got back in behind the wheel, cranked the engine, and turned on the spray and wipers. Water splashed in the filigree of cracked glass, then turned re
d, and the wiper smeared the bloody cocktail across his entire field of view.

  Tim shrugged. Nothing more he could do about it right now. He checked the rear-view mirror and pulled back out onto the peaceful road. Squinting through red, feathered muck, he drove the rest of the way to the old family home.Just think of it as rose-colored glasses, he heard in his head.Everything’s right with the world through those, isn’t it?

  Soon, the old house loomed ahead, separating from the gray sky at his approach. Tim pulled off the road onto the rutted, weed-tangled driveway. The familiar mailbox was so black with age and mold it looked like it had survived a fire. He didn’t think it had—his mom or Uncle Mike would have said something if that had happened. A fence that had once surrounded the property was mostly gone, knocked down or carried away or simply disintegrated with age. The yard had grown wild—whatever Uncle Mike had been doing to the place didn’t include gardening, apparently.

  But the house itself looked like it did in Tim’s memory. It was a Gothic Revival structure, with white walls, steeply pitched dark gray roofs broken by dormers, and white, curvilinear trim around the eaves and gable edges. A front porch with its own roof and trim wrapped around two walls. A couple of red brick chimneys topped the house. A fine house, in its day, and one of the neighborhood’s standouts. It had been built originally by someone with serious money. By the time Tim’s folks had bought it, it had fallen into disrepair. Tim’s dad had tried to fix it up, but he’d been handier in his own mind than in reality, and while he had improved it, he had never gotten it back into prime condition.

  Then, of course, he had vanished. Tim’s mom had never done anything to the house after that, and it had degraded fast.

  Tim had conflicting feelings about the place. On the one hand, he had lived here as a kid, had grown up here to some extent. Even though not all his childhood memories were happy ones, there were certainly some that qualified, and this house—and the surrounding countryside, where he’d hiked and run, fired BB guns, seen rabbits and foxes and opossum—was part of them. On the other hand, if he had been driving around looking for a house that looked haunted, this would have been the one he would have stopped at.

  He climbed from the blood-caked car and regarded the place. Took a deep breath, blew it out.

  Itwas haunted. There was no denying that. The place held memories Tim was afraid to face, images that had fed his nightmares ever since. This was the place that had stolen his sanity, taken his youth, shaped the rest of his life. When he really thought about why he had turned to journalism as a career, it came back to this house, to what had happened here. No one on Earth had believed Tim’s story of his dad’s disappearance. Tim’s response to that disbelief, after the years of therapy that had ensued, had been to find a career where people did believe—where the whole point of the job was that he wasn’t making up stories, but reporting what had really taken place. Shaping facts into a coherent story so that people would have no choice but to believe them.

  So yeah, it was a haunted house. Its effects had carried over into every aspect of Tim’s life.

  And now, if Dr. Matheson was right, he had to face the house again. Had to go inside, to spend the night there. He had to confront his fears—the ghosts that had chased him from it in the first place.

  Maybe the night of his mother’s funeral wasn’t the best time to do it.

  If I can do it tonight.he thought,I can beat it. I know I can .

  You just keep thinking that, Timmy. Be brave, that’s a good boy. That’ll take you far, just you wait and see. Just you wait, Timmy.

  He pushed the voice away, determined to ignore it.You’re going into a box, he told the voice,and the box will be put into another box and dropped into that deep ocean inside my head where forgotten things go .

  After tonight, I won’t be hearing from you any more.

  He took another breath, held it for a second, and approached the front door, carrying the keys Uncle Mike had given him.

  Nine

  Uncle Mike had, indeed, been tearing the place up.

  Tim stopped just inside the open door. At first, the place had been pitch black, immersed in shadow, and Tim had stiffened, almost turned around and gone straight back to the car, back to the city. But he found the light switch just inside, where he remembered, and flicked it on with trembling fingers. Illumination from a chandelier fixture bathed the room, and he breathed a little easier.

  Semitransparent plastic sheeting hung all over the place, some of it spattered with paint or sawdust. Sections of wall had been torn away, exposing studs and beams. Enough tools, paint cans, and containers of nails to fill a hardware store were strewn around, almost haphazardly. For just a second Tim had a vision of his uncle as some kind of madman, tearing the place down little by little with no plan, no design, but as he examined the house further he realized that progress was being made. It was just slow, Uncle Mike working alone on a job that should have taken a team, and doing it around his schedule at the bar.

  A breeze sighed through the place, rattling the plastic sheeting. Tim jumped, startled, and closed the open door behind him.

  He was inside.

  Whatever was going to happen would happen now.

  The living room had a fireplace in its center, around which people had gathered on winter nights when his parents had both been around. Hot toddies, eggnog, and hot chocolate were consumed; jokes told; neighbors gossiped about, all sitting near its toasty blaze. Now it had been torn apart, dismantled. The brick base still stood in its usual spot, but some of the copper chimney was gone, a section sticking down from the ceiling its only remnant. An old cabinet TV stood in a corner with a plastic sheet draped over it, the big leather chair that had been known as “Dad’s chair” still lorded over its usual corner, but the floor lamp that had stood behind it was gone.

  On the floor, off by itself, sat a big cardboard box. Curious, Tim went to it, pried open its flaps, and sat down next to it. It looked as if Uncle Mike had been tossing stuff into it willy-nilly as he came across it. Tim found his mom’s prized silverware wrapped in velvet, next to some everyday dinner dishes that were chipped and cracked. They rested unevenly on a surface that shifted every time Tim lifted something off. He dug down to find out what was in the bottom of the big box, and found photographs. Lots of them—loose, in shoeboxes, in an old leather album.

  Crossing his legs on the floor, Tim brought the album onto his lap and thumbed through it. Family pictures, mostly. Vacations at the beach—Tim and his dad, shirtless, “making muscles” while they squinted into the sun. Mom’s shadow lay across them, elbows out, holding the camera steady. She had never been a great photographer, but she had enjoyed capturing what moments she could.

  He found another picture of himself as a small boy, bundled up against the cold in a coat, galoshes, and snow hat. He looked like a miniature version of the Michelin man, roly-poly and virtually immobile. Next to him, equally constrained, was a little girl with long dark hair. Their arms were wrapped over each other’s shoulders, and both had broad smiles on their faces. Was it Kate? he wondered. He freed the photo from a couple of the corners that held it in place, turned it over. “Tim and Katie” was written on the back. Tim smiled, not remembering the exact moment, but enjoying the memories that it did bring up. He and Katie had been best pals in those days. He remembered having seen her at the funeral earlier. He really would have to make a point of visiting her while he was in the neighborhood.

  Another photo caught his eye a couple of pages later. Taken by someone else, maybe Uncle Mike or some family friend, it showed Mom and Dad, both looking much younger, happy, in love. They sat together on a sofa, leaning in toward each other, Dad’s muscular arm thrown across Mom’s shoulders. On Dad’s knee, facing the camera with a quizzical expression, was a tiny tyke who could only be baby Tim. Everyone smiled, except little Tim. The scene was practically idyllic.

  But that was so long ago. The picture was fading with the years, just like the memory of t
hose happier, more innocent days had largely faded from Tim’s memory. He tried to bring them back, wanted to remember when things had been good, and—

  A whirring noise, electric, emanated from the kitchen. Some kind of appliance or power tool, Tim guessed. Uncle Mike wasn’t here working, though. Maybe he had a helper after all. That would be a good thing, considering how much needed to be done. “Hello?” Tim called. He put the album back in the box, pushed to his feet.

  His funeral pants were dusted white from the plaster he’d been sitting in. He batted at them as he walked into the dining room. A sheet of paint-smeared plastic hung in the doorway that separated the living room from the kitchen, but through it he could see a vague outline moving around in there, its shape distorted by the plastic.

  He hoped.

  He remembered the shadow man from the park, his own form misshapen and strange. This person didn’t look quite like that had—but he or she didn’t look completely dissimilar, either, much to Tim’s dismay.