JMariotte - Boogeyman Page 9

  And that noise, the whirring sound, was familiar somehow. “Hello?” he asked again, but there was still no response, just that continued noise.

  But then he heard a voice call his name—soft, feminine, a voice that he knew well, and that couldn’t possibly be calling him. He swallowed, braced himself, pushing the plastic aside with a quaking hand.

  His mom stood at the counter—blonde and pretty, as he liked to remember her. In her mid-thirties, he guessed, wearing a pink shirt with polka dots, and soft jeans. She watched as a can of cat food rotated on the electric can opener, whirring until it had completed its circuit. When it was done, she forked some of the food into the cat’s red supper dish. Lulu, their chubby calico, waited beside the dish, and she dove into the meal as soon as Mom put the dish down on the floor. Mom gave Tim a stern look, but there was still a bit of a smile in her eyes. “Tim,” she said, “it’s your cat. You’re supposed to feed her.”

  Tim was about to answer—he’d been planning to feed her, but his math homework had taken longer than expected—but his dad’s voice boomed from the back hallway, drowning him out. “I can’t find it!” Dad shouted, anger giving the words a fearsome edge.

  He came into the kitchen then. His hair was uncombed, his sleeveless white T-shirt untucked. He shot Tim an angry glance.

  “Can’t find what?” Mom asked.

  “My gun,” he replied. “It’s missing. It’s not in the nightstand.”

  Tim’s mother wiped her hands on a towel and then draped it through the refrigerator handle. “I swear,” she said, “if Tim took it…I told you to fix that lock.”

  The old man threw his hands up in the air, his face starting to turn red. Tim knew that look. It meant an explosion wasn’t far off. He begged his mother, silently, not to push the old man’s buttons, to just let it go. “Wait, wait, wait,” the old man answered. “How is this my fault?”

  “He’s scared, Rob. Because of that story you told him. He probably took the gun because—”

  Dad cut her off midsentence. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he declared flatly. “That…it was just a story. A warning. My dad did the same thing to me.”

  “Yeah, well…” Mom ticked her head toward the doorway where Tim stood. “Tim has a vivid imagination.”

  Tim felt something, a presence, behind him, and he spun around, frightened for a second. But it was just a little boy. It took Tim a moment to realize that he was looking at himself, standing in the doorway watching his parents argue about him. Young Tim looked scared, but mostly he simply looked sad. As if this happened all the time, was a regular part of his life, and one he wished would stop.

  Tim knew that was the case, remembered the feeling vividly. He had always hated the arguments. Especially when he was stuck in the middle, a weapon each used to bash the other. In this case, he recalled, his mom had been right. Dad’s stories about the Boogeyman had freaked him out so much that he had borrowed his dad’s gun, figuring that if anyone came out of his closet, a bullet would persuade him to go back in.

  He couldn’t look at his own sorrowful, young face any longer. He turned back to the kitchen, but Mom and Dad were gone, as if they’d never been there. Glancing back, he saw that young Tim was gone too. The kitchen smelled close, musty, and it looked like the rest of the house—torn up, half the floor tiles missing, cabinets partially disassembled. The old kitchen table, wood, with four chairs, was over by the window where he remembered it. A refrigerator, gray with grime, still stood in its usual spot, but there were no other appliances, just gaping spaces where they had once stood.

  On the floor near the counter, though, was Lulu’s red cat dish, coated with a layer of dust.

  He had known coming back to this house would stir up a lot of memories—some good, but most not. He just hadn’t realized how quickly they’d set in, or how vividly. He shrugged and crossed the kitchen, heading for the back hallway…the one the old man had come in from, in his flashback, or hallucination or whatever that had been. It occurred to him briefly that he should probably worry, probably shouldn’t take that sort of thing for granted.

  But if it wasn’t normal for most people, it was becoming the standard for him.Wonder what Dr. Matheson would make of that? he thought.Or Jessica, for that matter?

  He had had, in his youth, a serious mental problem. He’d never been diagnosed as schizophrenic, but he suspected he hadn’t been far from that. If Dr. Matheson hadn’t interceded when she did, he probably would have ended up there.

  Now, though—he shuddered, thinking things through. If seeing things that weren’t there wasn’t symptomatic of schizophrenia, he didn’t know what was. Dr. Matheson had made it clear that she was done with him. But she hadn’t said that he didn’t need a psychiatrist, only that he was too old for a child psychiatrist. She hadn’t made a referral, but she’d been interrupted by that page, and then the incident with the little girl had pushed everything else from Tim’s mind. If he asked, she probably would give him the referral. She was most likely still convinced that he needed one.

  He wasn’t sure he could disagree with her. Wasn’t a sign of insanity the certainty that one was sane? If he could still question his own mental faculties, maybe that meant he hadn’t gone too far over the edge yet.

  When he started taking these bizarre visions for granted, that would be when he was beyond help. He determined not to let it get that far. But he wasn’t going to call in the forces of medical science right now. Today, he had another agenda.

  He still had to spend the night in this house. Maybe that would cure him, once and for all. He couldn’t see going to a shrink before he had tried it, at least.

  At any rate, it would be a lot cheaper.

  Mike Halloran sat alone in his tiny kitchen, spinning a beer bottle between his palms on the yellow linoleum tabletop. He would miss Mary, he knew. She had been nothing but difficult lately, an emotional and financial drain—actually, she had been those things for more than a decade. But she was still his sister. They’d grown up together, a couple of years apart in school. He was older by nineteen months, and always felt that meant he had to take care of her.

  Which, when her son had been ten years old, meant taking care of him. He had believed that she’d kick in financially when she could, but her health—mental and physical—was fragile in those days, and ever since. She had barely seemed to have enough money to make her own way, so the kid had been his charge. School, clothes, medical care, even the stint in Danville, had all come out of what Mike earned.

  And Mary, naturally, hadn’t had any insurance, so her stay at the nursing home and her burial expenses had been on him too. He would see a little return when he sold her house, assuming he could get it fixed up enough to sell, but in the short term, even that was a drain. He’d had to pay someone to cover his hours at the bar so he could be out there working on the place, and she hadn’t made it any easier, letting it all go to hell since Rob had left.

  Not that he was complaining. He wasn’t the kind of guy who put much stock in bitching about the way things were. He was more the kind who simply rolled up his shirtsleeves and set to work trying to make them better. And he really did love Tim. Couldn’t have asked for a better kid if it had been his own son. But he would never have one of those, of course. Was that Mary’s fault too, he wondered? Had he never married because he’d shot his own emotional wad on his sister and her son?

  He took another hit off the bottle, then set the empty down on the table with its brothers. This kind of thinking did nobody any good, he figured. But what else did a man do on the day he buried the last surviving member of his immediate family? Especially a man like him, who’d made his living by pushing booze across a bar to guys trying to bury their own troubles with it. Mary’s problem hadn’t been booze so much as pills—a handful a day keeps the memories at bay.

  They had all gone, first his mom, then his dad, finally his little brother, killed in a war halfway around the world. Now Mary, who had been so wrapped up in her ow
n psychoses that Mike was never sure she knew that Jack had died, or if she remembered that she’d ever had another brother at all.

  No, all he had left now was Tim. And Tim was his own man. A little scattered, maybe. Psychically scarred from everything that had happened in his childhood. Damn Rob anyway, for walking out on them like that—that had been the trigger that had sent Mary into her spiral of depression, drugs, and madness, and had done the same to little Tim.

  Mike hadn’t liked Rob Jensen, not from the start. Mary always said she’d met him at a nightclub, but that was a lie. She wasn’t the kind of girl who hung out in nightclubs. More likely it had been a bar that was only slightly more upscale than Mike’s own; maybe a little wallpaper, red velvet, like some kind of brothel. The kind of place where they pushed the champagne—the cheapest stuff they could get, but they served it in a bucket full of ice, just like downtown, and reamed the patrons on the price. That was more her speed, and definitely Jensen’s.

  Rob had sent her a drink from across the room, she claimed, then raised his glass to her, acknowledging her gratitude. Finally, he had come over to her, the perfect gentleman, introduced himself. They had started talking, had danced a little, and had stayed at the place until it closed, at which time he had made sure she was in a cab before he worried about how he would get home.

  Mike saw it a different way in his mind’s eye. Years behind the bar had given him plenty of firsthand insight into how it worked. Yes, maybe he’d sent her the drink, and waited a few minutes to approach her. But knowing Rob the way he did—and guys in general, for that matter—he figured Rob sent drinks around the joint on a regular basis, targeting girls like Mary—pretty but not sophisticated, lacking something in the self-confidence department, there with a girlfriend or two but no guys. Rob was big, muscular, swaggering, not great looking but with plenty of cocky attitude to make up for that. When he went up to Mary, he would have seemed like the height of urbane sophistication, to a naïve girl like her. Then he had sat with her, no doubt keeping the drinks coming to the table much faster than she would have done on her own. By the time the bar closed, he would have already had her phone number, maybe even stealing a few kisses and copping a feel while he helped her to the cab.

  Of course, it was always possible that the cab was a convenient myth, and he’d driven her back to his place.

  Either way, this conquest had stuck. Mike didn’t blame Rob for that. Mary had been a doll, no two ways about that. Great figure, too. Most of the women Rob met at places like that would have paled in comparison. She’d been a beauty, impressed by him, taken in by his line—why not keep her around for awhile? Then that stretched into years, as both of them aged, gravity working its unavoidable magic on their physiques. Finally, when she and the kid both got to be too much to handle, he had taken off without warning, possibly hoping to recapture his glorious youth at some bar a couple of states away. The unbelievable way he left, the strange circumstances surrounding his disappearance, and the fact that he’d never been found didn’t change that Rob had turned out to be a coward who drove both his wife and son into their own private hells.

  He had seen through Rob, even back then. But Mary had been blinded by love, or lust, and had refused to see what Mike tried to point out. Next thing any of them knew, she and Rob were married, then she was pregnant. After that, Mike stopped pressing her, figuring it would be to everyone’s benefit for her to stay with him and try to make things work. He had seen Rob’s drinking by then, seen his nasty temper, knew the day would come when he’d start taking it out on Mary and their kid. He had tried to warn Rob to get a handle on his problem. But Rob had just blown him off, and Mary had gently suggested that he mind his own business.

  So when she had that mysterious black eye one day, he had known where it came from. Not the accident with the kitchen cupboard door that she claimed. More injuries followed—bruises on her arms, legs, neck. More black eyes. Mike had offered to intercede again, but was turned away.

  Finally, Tim had turned up with unexplained bruises, and Mike had been furious. Planning to have that talk with Rob anyway, over Mary’s objections. It would be a talk that would be backed up with force, if need be. Mike was a tough guy—working-man tough, not bully tough, like Rob—and he knew people who knew people, if it came to that. He would not stand by while his brother-in-law abused his only nephew.

  But Rob had vanished into thin air, and it seemed to put an end to that concern while opening a whole Pandora’s box of new ones.

  Mike went to the refrigerator, took out the last bottle of the six-pack. Unscrewed the lid. Sat down heavily, taking a big swallow as he did. It wasn’t a pretty family history, but there it was. Somehow, he and Tim were the survivors.

  Now they only had each other.

  Ten

  When you go back to childhood haunts,Tim thought,things are supposed to look smaller than you remember. You’ve grown, you’re no longer looking at them from a child’s perspective .

  That didn’t apply to the door, though. The door to Tim’s room loomed at the end of the hallway, looking huge and forbidding. It was closed, and dark down there. The light from the ceiling fixture in the hall barely reached it, and because all the doors up here were shut, sunlight didn’t leak in through the windows.

  Tim approached the door slowly, cautiously, as if he might have to run away from it at any moment. His knees felt weak, like they might give way beneath him. That room—his room—was where things had gone from bad to crazy-making, where his entire young life had been turned upside down, shaken like a box of Cracker Jack, except that the only prize that had fallen out was his dream of a happy family.

  He stopped just short of the door, not willing yet to touch the knob. On the jamb were penciled notches marking his growth, with dates noted beside them. “Tim, age 4,” he read. “Age 5½. Tim, 7 years old! Birthday boy!” He remembered the routine. His mom would press him up against the jamb, his back straight and head up, and lay the pencil across the top of his head while she made the little marks. She was always effusive in her congratulations, as if growing taller had been an act of will in some way, a voluntary effort on his part.

  Standing out here in the hall wouldn’t accomplish anything, Tim knew. He had to go in. The prospect terrified him. But Dr. Matheson had told him to face his fears. That was what he needed to do to become whole, and until he was whole he was no good to himself, to Jessica, or anyone else. “Just do it,” he whispered to himself. He reached for the knob.

  And as his hand closed on it, the door went away. In its place he saw strobing images of his father’s supposed demise—his twisted, childhood version of it, anyway. Flesh tearing, blood spurting. He heard the splintering of bone, heard grunts of pain and screams of anguish. Through it all, he saw himself, young Tim, sitting up in bed with his eyes wide as a nightmarish scenario played out in front of him.

  Tim caught himself against the wall. None of that stuff had been real. The police would have found evidence, if it had been. The physical violence Tim had believed he’d witnessed would have left marks. But it didn’t. So it was all in his head.

  Now, being back here, he had almost fainted, he realized, the terror of the moment had taken him away and he had blacked out for a second. He eased himself away from the door. He had to go in there, had to face his fears.

  But he didn’t have to do it right this minute.

  Before he was halfway back to the stairs, he heard the sound of a horse whinnying outside—not a friendly nickering, but a terrified or dismayed horsey version of a scream. Opening the door to his parents’ master bedroom, he passed through to the second floor porch, barely noticing missing floorboards and wallpaper half-peeled, strips of it coiled like sleeping snakes on the ground as he went. The French doors stuck for a moment but he muscled them open and went out. This porch looked out over the side of the property, toward the Houghtons’ place, and he thought that was where the horse’s cry had come from.

  Looking down, he saw the gr
own-up Kate in a nearby meadow, struggling to stay mounted on top of a horse that bucked like a rodeo bronco, its eyes wild, nostrils flaring, spittle spewing from its muzzle. She fought it, but something had spooked the animal, and it seemed determined to throw her. As Tim watched, helpless from this distance, it succeeded. Kate lost her seating and flew backward off the horse. She got her feet down, tried to catch herself, then stumbled forward, landing flat on her stomach and not moving. She might have had the wind knocked out of her.

  Or she might have broken her back.

  “Kate!” Tim called. She didn’t answer, didn’t budge. Tim ran back into the house, rushed down the stairs and outside.

  By the time he reached her, she was on her feet. Her clothes were stained and disheveled and she walked gingerly, with maybe a little bit of a limp, but she was upright and lucid. She looked out across the fields toward the horse, who had run far away.

  “Kate!” Tim shouted, almost breathless from the unexpected sprint. “Are you all right?”

  She turned slowly, maybe still a little dazed. He hoped she didn’t have a concussion, but knew he needed to be alert for signs that she had. He tried to run through them in his mind, so he’d know what to watch for. Drowsiness or confusion, nausea, pupils of different sizes. Blood marked her forehead, and she wiped it off as she answered. “Yeah. I think I hit my head.” She turned away again, noting the position of the horse. “I was just riding him home. He’s never spooked like that before.” When she looked at Tim again, she swayed, still woozy. Tim caught her arm.