by Cameron Jace
“That’s actually true,” Axel said. “I don’t think I’ve ever read a fairy tale with names of the prince or the huntsman or even the queen. I wonder why no names were ever mentioned? Maybe that proves they were forged or played with, someone hid the names intentionally.”
“Now, you’re reading too much into it. So how about the Baby Tears,” Fable said. “We need to find a Boogeyman.”
“About that,” Loki said. “Don’t you think this is a big joke?”
“You don’t believe in Boogeymen, now?” Axel said.
“I don’t know,” Loki shook his head. “I know we live in a town full of vampires, ghosts, haunted houses, and even werewolves, but I don’t think we can just go find a Boogeyman. Do you even know what a Boogeyman looks like?”
“Ugly,” Axel shrugged, remembering the one who ate his serial when he was a kid.
“Your mom said there are many Boogeymen in children’s closets. Maybe we could ask around,” Fable said.
“Closets?” Loki said.
“According to your mom, it’s where they live,” Axel said.
“She said that if we ask the right person, we might be able to hire a Boogeyman to get us the Baby Tears,” Fable said.
“Right person?” Loki said.
“Someone who’s been around the block a few times or an authority on specific items teen vampire hunters might need to know about,” Fable said.
“I think I know someone who might be able to help,” Loki picked up the phone and dialed a number.
“Who’re you calling?” Fable asked.
“Lucy Rumpelstein” Loki replied, waiting for the Beep.
“Lucy?” Axel’s eyes glittered.
“Who’s Lucy?” Fable asked.
“She is Professor Rumpelstein’s daughter,” Axel informed her.
“Kewl,” Fable mused. “Who’s Professor Rumpelstein?”
“You don’t know the owner of the school you go to?” Loki asked with amazement.
“Oh, that one,” Fable said. “You know I hate school. Don’t go much unless I feel like I want to have a bad day, which is a good thing for witches. The bad energy is sometimes needed for certain spells.”
Loki and Axel exchanged looks, trying not to remember the Fable who had trapped them in the house.
“Don’t let her go to school again,” Loki mouthed to Axel.
“So why do you care so much about Lucy, Axel?” Fable furrowed a suspicious single eyebrow.
“Me? I don’t,” Axel said defensively, averting his eyes from meeting Fable’s. Loki shot him a you-are-such-a-dork glance. “I don’t even like her. She is weird,” Axel said, leaning back in his seat and putting the hood back on to cover his lying facial features. “Does it really show that I like her?”
“Not with the hood on,” Fable said. “I can still see you, by the way. You’re not wearing the cloak of invisibility, you know.”
“I know. This is my miserable cloak of nerdidity,” Axel mumbled.
“Nerdi—what? That’s not even a word,” Fable said. “Anyway, so this Lucy—whom I have a feeling I will not like— knows how to find a Boogeyman?”
Lucy finally picked up.
“Hey,” Loki tried to sound cheerful.
Lucy didn’t reply right away. Loki heard strange crunching sounds on the phone and the last breaths of a long moan, and Lucy laughing in the background.
“What do you want, buster?” a voice growled.
“Moonclaw,” Loki acted happy to hear his voice, something that he hadn’t done since he’d arrived in Sorrow. “Wussup, man?”
Axel grinned.
“Don’t wussup me, buster,” Ulfric Moonclaw said, spitting into the phone. “You made my boys look like fools, and you’re gonna pay for it when I see you.”
“Pay? How much?” Loki mocked him.
“Are you trying to be funny?” Ulfric lowered his voice, maybe so that Lucy couldn’t hear. “My friend, Big Bad, saw you in the castle, you and the two lousy witch’s kids,” he grunted, and Loki could already picture Ulfric turning into a werewolf like Big Bad. “It was foolish of Big Bad to expose himself, but now that you know our secret, you’ll have to die.”
“Is that it?” Loki said. His heart was beating faster already. They had escaped Big Bad once and he knew that facing him again wasn’t going to be easy.
“What do you mean?” Ulfric said angrily.
“Where’s the ‘Muahaha’ part?” Loki said. “I mean you talk like an evil goblin. There’s always a ‘Muahaha’ in the end.”
“Who’s on the phone, Ulfy?” Loki heard Lucy ask as she seemed to grab it from her boyfriend. Loki wondered if she knew that he and his gang were werewolves.
Lucy was in a good mood. Loki wondered if they had been making out.
Some people are just ordinarily happy. They get to do what everyone else loves to do, like making out once they reach a certain age. I wonder when I will get to make out freely with someone I like without the girl turning out to be a demon.
But then Loki remembered Lucy was practically making out with a monster, too. Ulfric was a werewolf, so it seemed that he really needed to stop whining.
“Lemme toke to ya gal,” Loki said with sleazy smile on his face. The one syllable words felt like music to him. He ended the sentence with a high note, more of a cliffhanger. “Mooonclawww,” Loki said.
He heard Ulfric tell Lucy that he was going to make Loki pay for making fun of him.
“Hey,” Lucy said. “What’s up, Loki? Are you still a lousy vampire hunter?”
“You won’t believe it,” Loki rubbed his hair in the mirror. “It gets lousier. I think I’m changing into a chicken hunter for a while.”
“Sorry, buddy. The job is already taken. Foxes are on it,” Lucy said. Loki could hear Ulfric tickling her or something. “So what kind of help do you need this time?”
“How did you know I need help?”
“You always do, Loki,” she said, shushing Ulfric behind her. “I take it you haven’t killed the vampire princess yet. Two girls were missing from school today. So what do you want?”
“Do you happen to know a good and reliable, not too scary, not too expensive—did I mention not too scary—Boogeyman?” Loki said. He glanced around as if not wanting anyone to hear him. He still couldn’t believe he just asked.
“What?”
“Like I said,” Loki shrugged. “I need a Boogeyman, tonight. And again, one who isn’t that boogey.”
“Wow,” she said. “Sorrow has gotten to you, too.”
“We need the Boogeyman to—”
“We?”
“Yeah,” Loki said. “I’m working with a team now,” he explained, looking at Fable biting her nails in excitement in the rear view mirror.
“Spare me the details. I really don’t want to hear about all this nonsense. Anyway, I don’t know a Boogeyman, but—“ Ulfric was laughing at Loki in the background. “But I can call my dad. He surely knows about that creepy stuff. In fact, he might give me a name and address.”
“Remember, I don’t want the best Boogeyman in town. The worse, the better,” Loki didn’t want to get scared. “And when am I going to meet your father?” Loki wondered, although it didn’t matter. Once he completed his job, he was going to leave town.
“Maybe if you’d bother going to school?” Lucy mused.
“As if you go to school.”
“You’re right. We’re all horrible. School is for dummies who study to go to Hell. Say what? I’ll call you in an hour,” Lucy hung up.
“One hour from now and we have our Boogeyman, recommended by Professor Rumpelstein himself,” Loki told Axel and fable, watching the sun about to sink.
“So, Fable,” Axel said. “Since you and Loki’s mom are friends like Cinderella and the Fairy Godmother, why exactly do we need a Boogeyman? I know we need him for the Baby Tears. I just don’t see how they’re related.”
“Boogeyman, Baby Tears, Hello?” Fable said slowly as if Axel was the dumbe
st person in the Cadillac. “What happens when babies cry? They shed tears! Who makes babies cry—an expert in scaring babies. Duh.”
***
It turned out to be true; they could actually hire a Boogeyman in Sorrow.
Loki drove his Cadillac, following the address Lucy had given him. The radio turned on by itself, and the Pumpkin Warriors played a song that went like this:
There's a big-bad-boogeyman dancing through our house.
He locks himself in the dark of a closet like a mouse.
And when you sleep, snore, and dream,
He’ll scare you silly until you scream.
Fable giggled as she heard the Pumpkin Warriors stop playing and argue that the singer sung the wrong lyrics to the song.
“It’s how Carmen works,” Loki explained. “She plays the songs she wants, and this band seems to be her favorite.”
“Wow,” Fable leaned forward from the backseat. “Can I talk to them?”
“Yes, you can,” a band player said. “So what’s on your mind?”
“I know another Boogeyman song,” she told the Pumpkin Warriors. “Better run away, better run away, pretty little maiden better run away. When the woods are black as night, that's the Boogeyman's delight. Better run away, better run away, pretty little maiden run away.”
“You like this one, boys?” the band member asked his fellow players. After a little discussion, he talked back to Fable. “Here’s the thing. We know you all think that this is the kind of Boogeyman everyone’s told you about, but our records here tell of something else entirely, so we’re going to stop playing until we get to know who the Boogeyman really is.”
Loki then drove to Nifelheim, an unusually vibrant neighborhood in Sorrow that Lucy had texted him about.
“Wow!” Axel’s eyes widened, wanting to reach for the fancy-looking girls walking on their way to the few clubs and bars in high heels. “I didn’t know that such a place existed in Sorrow. Hell on heels, baby!” he waved at the girls, kinda drooling. “The closest I’ve been to any girls that hot were on my desktop computer.
“This is very strange, Loki,” Fable said. “I don’t think this neighborhood ever existed before.”
Loki didn’t comment. He knew Fable and her brother didn’t get out much. How were they supposed to know about this place?
“You want to find the Boogeyman. You got to go to Boogie-town,” Loki frowned in the mirror at Fable. “Lucy said we should meet her here so we can hire a Boogeyman.”
“Why here?” Fable wondered. “I thought we’d find the Boogeyman in a cemetery, a dark place, or in a closet.”
“We are looking for a bar where Boogeymen spend their time when not working.”
Loki took a left at a street called Sackman Street. According to Lucy, we should find the bar here and she should be waiting for us. Do you want to guess its name, Fable?” There was no use to start a conversation with drooling-Axel at the moment. He kept on checking girls out and getting grinned at for his stalking eyes.
“Let me guess,” Fable leaned forward, resting her head on Loki’s shoulder. “Is it called The Scary Fairy Boogeyman Bar?”
“Noooo,” Loki circled his lips into an O. “That’s a really long name. It has two words and is a really efficient name. Makes you really think of a Boogeyman.”
“Boo Bar?” she tried to scare Loki in the mirror. He felt her booing breath on his neck.
“Nah,” Loki drove past the curb and parked the Cadillac, pointing at a purple neon sign flickering off and on. A big, tall bouncer stood next to the sign.
Fable read the sign, “The Closet?”
“Right to the point,” Loki said as he hit the breaks, giving his wheels a chance to squeak. “You want to hire a Boogeyman; you have to go talk to him in The Closet.”
“So clichéd,” Axel shook his head, finally giving up on the girls. “The Closet my—“
“Is there a specific Boogeyman in The Closet who will help us?” Fable asked.
“We’re looking for a Georgie Porgie,” Loki replied.
“Georgie Porgie?” Axel laughed. “I feel like drowning in a pool of clichéd pudding.”
“That’s the worst metaphor I’ve ever heard,” Loki said. “For your information, Georgie Porgie is the most famous Boogeyman in Sorrow. In fact, he’s the leader of all Boogeymen,” Loki stretched his arms. “Even though I wanted the worst, Lucy said he was the only one who could help with Baby Tears.”
“This can’t be.” Axel insisted.
“Yeah, Loki, “something is wrong here,” Fable backed her brother up for the first time.
“You have no problem believing there is a Boogeyman, and then you complain about his name?”
“The thing is no one names their child Georgie Porgie,” Axel said, “Because it’s a famous nursery rhyme.”
“Huh?” Loki had only spent a year in the Ordinary World, and he hadn’t heard about the nursery rhyme.
“Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie,” Axel started singing.
“Kissed the girls and made them cry,” Fable followed, laughing at this part.
“When the boys came out to play,” Axel raised his questioning eyebrows at Fable.
“Georgie Porgie ran away,” Fable completed the rhyme. “I love it,” she added.
“O.K.?” Loki was confused. “I still don’t get what the problem is. The Boogeyman is named after a rhyme, so what?”
“Well, for one if he is a Boogeyman, he wouldn’t have been described as ‘Running away when the boys came out to play,” Axel said. “Why would he be able to scare girls and be afraid of boys?”
“What Axel is saying is that in a town where we supposedly have the real Snow White, and a Big Bad Wolf, we might have the real Georgie Porgie,” Fable said.
“What are you two talking about?” Loki said.
“That all nursery rhyme characters and all characters in fables are real,” Axel said. “That’s what I partially understood from Jacob Carl Grimm’s diary.”
“Oh, come on,” Loki waved. “You don’t even know it’s his diary. Give me break—”
“And they are all living in Sorrow,” Fable seemed to like the idea.
“Please,” Loki said. “We have other things to take care of, and I’m exhausted. Let’s just focus on how we’re going to get the Baby Tears from Georgie Porgie.”
“How are we going to get inside The Closet anyway?” Axel, the pessimistic, questioned. “We are minors. We aren’t allowed in bars.”
“Please tell me we’re going to break the law,” Fable said with bright eyes. “If you give me some time, I could find the right spell to make the bouncer see us as adults, or I could turn him into a troll.”
“How is turning him into a troll going to make him let us in?” Axel wondered. “Besides, you’re not going in there anyway,” Axel played protective brother again. “No way! She is not going into a bar,” he sneered at Loki, pointing a warning forefinger up at him.
“Yeah?” Fable fired back. “So I can’t go into a bar, but you can get drunk without me knowing? Just for your information, I saw you drinking last Valentine’s Day in your room.”
“You got drunk on Valentine’s Day?” Loki asked in amazement.
“It was that Strawberry Sawdust drink, and don’t be a smartass, Loki.” Axel puffed in anger-coated embarrassment. “Not all of us are good looking and have dates on Valentine’s Day like you.”
“That’s not the point,” Fable said. “You’re underage and you’re not supposed to drink.”
Loki didn’t say anything. Playing big brother was getting annoying, but watching Axel suffering was fun.
“It’s no big deal, Axel,” Loki said. “Just let her in with us. They won’t allow any of us to drink if we manage to get inside anyway,” Loki heard the sound of boogie music being played inside the bar. Nice guitars and a lot of boogie. “It’s better to have her with us than to leave her out here with the likes of Mr. Godzilla,” Loki pointed at the bouncer, who seemed not to lik
e them at all.
“Is smoke going to start rolling out of the bouncer’s ears or what?” Fable wondered, and she was right. The way he was irritated with them was daunting.
“That just might happen,” Axel laughed. “I’m thinking he is an Ogre disguised as a bouncer, or maybe a small dragon.”
Someone tapped the Cadillac’s window. Loki freaked out, thinking about Ogres. Fable and Axel laughed.
It was Lucy Rumpelstein, sticking her nose to the glass again. Loki rolled the window down.
“You need to get yourself together,” Lucy said in her elegant voice.
“We need to stop meeting this way,” Loki smiled. “Always knocking on my window?”
“Yeah, right,” she handed him three fake I.D.s that were very weird. The I.D.s had their names on them, but not the pictures; those were photos of crying children.
“May I ask what that is?” Fable said.
“Under normal circumstances, nerdy birds like you may not,” Lucy said. “But since it’s a crazy day, you should know that Boogeymen take their trophies very seriously.”
“Their trophies?” Loki said.
“To a Boogeyman, the most important thing in the world is to scare a baby, get its tears, and brag about it.”
“I hate Boogeymen already,” Fable said. “They must be so ugly that they don’t want their photos on their I.D.”
“Not necessarily,” Lucy said. “The Closet gives away VIP cards to certain visitors every now and then, so we’re pretending we’re those.”
“So all we have to do is get in, meet this Georgie Porgie and get our Baby Tears?” Loki asked.
“Yes,” Lucy nodded. “We need to look like a couple so they let us in, though, and you should lose the hood. It’s not the Grim Reaper’s club,” Lucy told Axel.
Axel swallowed hard, losing his smile. It didn’t seem like he’d be able to impress Lucy today.
“You two should play couple while we’re at the door,” Lucy suggested, talking to Fable and Axel.
“They can’t,” Loki said, handing Axel and Fable their fake I.D.s, hoping Mr. Godzilla didn’t see them “They’re kinda brother and sister.”
