He went back into the living room, pausing in the doorway for a moment. Papers were still spread everywhere. Those were real. The kids he was suddenly seeing all over the house? Not real.You’ve got to keep your head screwed on, he thought.You can’t let this stuff get to you.
But it was getting to him, and there was no way around that. Since coming back to his mother’s house, he had entered a twilight zone where the old rules no longer applied. Anything could happen here, it seemed, and the more terrifying, the better.
Maybe,he thought,crazy old Dr. Jaeger of Heidelberg has something after all. Could Tim be manifesting these children from his own psychic pain, his own fear at being back in this house? He had already decided that the memory/visions were some kind of manifestation caused by his presence here, so it wasn’t really such a huge leap to think that he could make other things happen as well—or appear to happen, more accurately. Especially images of kids in trouble, brought on by opening nutty Franny’s backpack and leafing through her collection of psychoses.
He stepped more gingerly across her papers this time, realizing that he’d torn and smudged some of them. When he sat back down on the couch, he put Dr. Jaeger aside and looked at another handful of sheets. These were photocopies from a little kids’ fairy-tale book.Hansel and Gretel. Little Red Riding Hood . The modern versions of those ancient stories, he knew, often had happier endings than the originals. In those, people disappeared and didn’t always come back. You couldn’t always get Grandma out of the wolf’s belly intact.
Tim scanned page after page, feeling increasingly overwhelmed by the enormity of it all. As he read he became aware of a sibilant whisper, growing louder with each passing moment. “He’s gonna get us…” he made out, once he was able to focus on it. Then another childish voice took up a counterpoint, singing, “Don’t look under the bed. That’s where he’s hiding…”
Other voices took up the chant, a chorus of them. “Don’t look under the bed,” they sang. “He’s gonna get us, he’s gonna get us.” There must have been a hundred kids joining voices. Tim threw the papers down, clamped his hands over his ears. It didn’t help. The singing might as well have been inside his own head—he could muffle it, but only slightly.
“I can’t hear you!”he shouted at the top of his own lungs. But even that couldn’t drown out the children’s choir. He could no longer make out individual words—each of the children sang his of her own song, repeating a private mantra of pain and heartbreak. It all merged together into a deafening crush of noise, as if he had his ear pressed to the amplifiers at the loudest punk rock concert in history. Tim pressed his fingers against his temples. If he could have pushed through his skull into his brain, he would have. But even that might not have silenced the voices of the lost.
Their faces swam before his eyes, faces from the myriad flyers on the floor. Haunted eyes, sad mouths, grim, hopeless expressions.Didn’t anyone take smiling pictures anymore? he wondered.These people couldn’t have all known that they would disappear, could they? Anyway, didn’t I see…?
He was searching the pages for the single cheerful picture he remembered seeing, a kid in a cowboy hat with a broad smile on his face. But as he did, he realized that the scared and lonely faces he had been looking at weren’t on the scattered papers at all. Instead, they were standing all around him in the room. A dozen or more. They could have been torn from these pages—several, in fact, looked horribly familiar, as he had just been looking at photographs of them.
Speechless and open-mouthed, Tim turned in a slow circle. More kids behind him, still more on the stairs. Pale, lost, frightened.
The children didn’t speak, didn’t move their mouths, but Tim began to hear their voices anyway. “Help us,” they pleaded. “Find us, Tim. He took us…”
Tim thought he would surely go mad from the inescapable voices, if he hadn’t already. He kept turning, hands on his head, crumpling and twisting Franny’s papers with every step, turning faster and faster, spinning, really, like a top, the room a whir before his eyes—
Suddenly, the children’s heads snapped toward the front door. Tim stopped his dizzying spin, glanced all around—every single one of the kids was looking that way, as if their gazes had been yanked there by strings, or directed by some signal Tim could not detect.
And then they were gone.
In less than the blink of an eye, Tim was alone again, the house silent, the voices not even an echo. He felt no relief, though. This wasn’t better, just…different.
And the closet at the end of the hall, the one where he had hurt himself earlier, began to swing open. The hinges creaked ominously. The light didn’t flash on and off like it had before—only darkness waited within.
In a way, that was worse. Tim’s heart pounded, blood roared in his ears like Class 5 white-water rapids. His eyes widened, his mouth dropped open.
Inside the closet—and coming out—was the Boogeyman.
Thirteen
Tim ran.
He had seen too much, experienced too much here. Time to get gone. He sprinted for the front door, wrestled with the knob, yanked it open.
And the Boogeyman, all black, wrapped in shadow, stood on the porch, right in front of the door. Clawed hands reaching in at him.
Tim uttered a strangled cry, all he could manage, and sank back, away from the open door.
The dark shape came inside, out of the shadows, passing into the light.
“Tim?”
It was Jessica.
Tim rushed to look past her, out onto the porch, and then spun around to check the closet. No Boogeyman in either place. Just Jessica, and a closet that was closed again.
Jessica looked at him, concern mixing with fear on her face.I must look like a crazy man, Tim thought.Not far from the truth, probably. “Where were you going?” she asked.
“We gotta get out of here,” Tim said breathlessly.
“I called your uncle. He said you were here. I’m sorry about everything I—”
“I gotta get the hell out of here,” Tim said again, more urgently this time. He suddenly knew escape was crucial. It was because he was here that all this stuff was happening, at his boyhood home. The place from which his father had been taken. “We gotta go. Please.Now .”
Jessica drove. Her BMW made a comfortable cocoon cutting through the night, its headlights slicing the darkness ahead of them with surgical precision. Tim had made her open the doors before he would even get in, so he could check out the front and back seats under the dome light. But he hadn’t seen anything inside. Once they were under way and the lights went off, he was nervous again, drumming his fingers on his knee, tapping his foot. Shadows pooled in the back seat, on the floor around his feet. He didn’t like that at all.
“What the hell is going on with you, Tim?” Jessica asked him as they pulled away from the house.
He tried to answer. Wanted to answer. But the words wouldn’t come. He didn’t even know where to start. With the children? Franny’s collection? Or farther back—his dad, his bedroom closet. The Boogeyman.
Fear made real.
Words were his stock in trade. He was educated, trained, skilled in their use. He could tell virtually any writer how to fix his or her prose, but right now he couldn’t formulate a coherent explanation, could barely manage a simple declarative sentence. “I’ll tell you later,” he said, finally. Even as he said it, he suspected that it was probably a lie. He didn’t know if he would ever be able to figure out a way to explain.
Jessica tried twice more, over the next thirty minutes or so, to draw Tim out. But caught up in his own thoughts, memories of the lost ones, of the Boogeyman coming out of the closet at him, he didn’t respond. Finally, she ticked her head toward a motel, its neon sign glowing through the fog. “Look, it’s late,” she said. “Why don’t we stop and get some rest? Talk about what’s going on.”
Tim just stared at the lights, gave a barely perceptible nod. Jessica pulled into the motel’s parking lot. Tim looked a
t the lights on tall stanchions in the lot, the neon of the Travel Inn Motel sign, the soft glows emanating from curtained windows. Those were good things.
But there were still a lot of shadows around.
She parked the Beemer and climbed out. Suddenly afraid of being left alone in the car, Tim followed. She checked them in, the desk clerk eyeing him suspiciously when he refused to talk. Tim didn’t care. The desk clerk, a thin, sallow man with long greasy hair, had haunted eyes and gaunt cheeks, and he reminded Tim of the missing children.He lost someone once, Tim decided.That’s why he looks so lost himself .
The man rushed through the paperwork, took Jessica’s credit card, and handed over the key to Room 3, just down the walkway from the office. Jessica had a bag in the BMW, but Tim had come empty-handed, still dressed in his increasingly sloppy funeral suit and T-shirt. Tim stayed on the walkway, near a droning, rumbling ice machine, while she crossed the damp, foggy parking lot and retrieved it from the trunk. When she got back, she unlocked the door and went in, turning on the light as she did. Tim followed, closing the door, setting the dead bolt and the chain lock. Then he went to the lamps mounted on the gold papered walls on both sides of the bed, switched those on. Lights over the sink, lights in the bathroom. When that was done, he stood in the middle of the room, looking at the closet door. Jessica nodded—humoring him, he was sure, even though she didn’t understand. But she opened the closet and pulled the string on the light fixture inside. A few empty hangers hung on a rod, a spare pillow sat on the shelf above.
Tim felt as if he might be able to finally relax. He wondered why he had ever doubted her. She hadn’t made his mom’s funeral, but she had come just when he really needed her, and she was willing to do whatever it took to make him comfortable. She really was a terrific lady.
“Let’s take a bath,” Jessica suggested, turning to him. She had hung her winter coat up in the closet, leaving her in a clingy white tank top and faded jeans. She came close, pressed her lips against his cheek, her breath hot on his neck as she murmured into his ear. “It’s been a stressful few days, for both of us. A nice hot bath will work out all our kinks.”
Tim nodded, still not trusting his own voice. Jessica went into the bathroom, and he heard the rush of water flowing into the tub. He sat on the end of the bed, still stiff and anxious. She came back out and climbed onto the bed behind him, her weight tugging at it. He felt her fingers on his shoulders, his neck. Rubbing, massaging, trying to break through the knot of tension there. He glanced up, saw Jessica in the mirror, and was comforted by that. He didn’t want someone touching his back and neck if he couldn’t see who it was.
“Tim, come on,” she said, almost pleadingly. “I drove two-and-a-half hours to be with you.”
He didn’t answer, didn’t know what he could say to that.
“You’re going through a lot right now,” she continued, ignoring his silence. “I mean, your mom just died.”
And you weren’t at the funeral,he thought. Saying that wouldn’t help matters, he knew. Anyway, she had made up for that by coming to get him tonight. More than made up. But he felt like he had to say something, had to interact on some human level before he was lost forever, just like the missing people he had seen. Jessica was an offered lifeline, if only he could latch on to her. “I’m seeing things,” he said finally. “I’m seeing horrible things.”
Jessica blew out a sigh, exasperated. That had been the wrong approach. “Tim, I can’t do this. It’s too much. I’m too tired.”
Find us, Tim. He took us….
Tim shivered but Jessica didn’t seem to notice. “Can’t we just forget about all the bad stuff? For one night? Just try to have some fun. Pretend that nothing else is out there.”
He felt lips against his neck, checked the mirror again. Still Jessica’s lips. Kissing him, her tongue darting out, touching the back of his neck. Her voice lower, now, throaty. “Listen, why don’t you grab some ice. I’ll get the bath ready. We’ll raid the minibar and have our own little ‘forget about the world’ party. Okay?”
He managed a smile that he feared wasn’t terribly convincing. But it seemed like Jessica wanted to believe. She returned it with one of her own, maybe a little overdone but encouraging, just the same. She kissed him once more and twisted away from him, heading into the bathroom. “I’ll take a Red Bull and vodka,” she said as she closed the door.
She’s too good for you, Timmy. Too sweet, too giving.
She didn’t even come to my mom’s funeral,Tim thought.She’s here for me now but I could have used her then too . Even as the thought flitted through his mind, he realized that arguing with himself was not a healthy sign.
You freaked her out. You scare her—and here she isanyway. She’s facing her fears head-on. Wasn’t that something you wanted to do, once upon a time?
Tim had to acknowledge that it was—that had been the whole point of staying in the house. But that was before Franny and her backpack, all those missing people, and the kids running around the house, chanting at him, begging him to help them. How could he face all that?
Jessica’s bath water was running, though, and she was counting on him to make her a drink. His specialty. The question of whether or not he deserved her could remain open for awhile. He was going to at least try to devote his attention to her tonight, to make her not regret having come to him. He grabbed the ice bucket off the counter, unlocked the door, and went outside.
Kate Houghton had been pleasantly surprised by the reappearance of Tim Jensen, after all this time. Meeting an old friend after a long absence was never a sure thing—more so since she and Tim had lost track of each other when they were still kids. But he had grown up something like gorgeous, and if he was still a little bit on the skittish side, he tried, at least, to present an acceptable face. He had always been a strange kid, and he remained a little off as an adult. In spite of that, he seemed kind and gentle and decent. Combine that with the gorgeous part and she was glad he’d turned up again, even if the circumstances of his visit were less than ideal.
She loved her dad, of course. With just the two of them in the house, though, Kate had to admit she was starting to feel more than a little lonely for the company of someone her own age. Even the butcher at the grocery store in town was starting to look good to her, and he was missing a couple of his teeth, and married besides. But a girl needed to have some loving once in awhile, especially one who was used to a steady diet of it.
Boston had been a lot of things—wildly diverse, full of interesting stores, restaurants, and historic locations. It had also been chock full of interesting and eligible men. Coming from here, she had been kind of like that proverbial kid in a candy store, but with five bucks in her pocket to shop with. She had, she supposed, gone a little crazy with the plethora of choices available to her. There were weeks when it seemed like she was trying to avail herself of all of them at once.
Before too long, she had understood that some were better for her than others. Some were only available in limited ways—marriage, work, or other commitments keeping them occupied too much of the time. Some were just wrong for her. She remembered one morning waking up next to a guy with whom the only thing in common was that they were both mammals. Some were too right—she didn’t want to find herself involved with her own mirror image, after all, and that one who had wanted to borrow her nail polish, “so we’ll match,” had been a little too similar for comfort.
And then, some were just plain crazy.
Like Max Kinmont.
Good old Max. The kind of guy because of whom restraining orders had been invented. He seemed fine at first—a little clingy, but that Kate could cope with. But then he had gone from kind of sweet to marginally annoying—showing up at her apartment unannounced, calling three or four or five times a night. Kate started to get concerned. When he confronted her while she was outside her building with another date, she broke it off with him.
That was when Max the annoyance became Max the stalker. He k
new her phone numbers at work and home, as well as her cell phone. He knew her e-mail address and her street address. She found she couldn’t escape him. If he wasn’t calling, he was instant messaging or standing around her door. He showed up at work so often that her job was in peril.
The final straw came when she discovered she had personal e-mails that had been read—and not by her. Max was pretty tech-savvy, and he had, she was convinced, managed to hack her account. She unplugged her computer, afraid he might be rooting around in there through some backdoor entryway.
And she called the police, only to be told that there was nothing they could do unless he was proven dangerous. She had heard that story before, but always thought it was a myth. The only way someone could be proven dangerous was for them to commit a violent action, and didn’t it make sense to stop that sort of thing before it happened, instead of after?
But no. That’s what she was told. The best she could do, they advised, was get a temporary restraining order. That would keep Max from coming near her, keep him from calling and harassing her.
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