by Billy Wells
The shiny objects that had attracted the parents to venture under the bridge were (1) a gold watch (2) a silver necklace (3) a silver music box (4) a gold doubloon (5) a gold watch (6) a bronze statuette, and (7) a diamond ring.
The composite drawings of the six ugly women by the six sets of parents were almost identical. All depicted an old woman with a large mole and a big black eyeball.
Ramsey pulled his chair closer to his computer and entered “kidnapping- Black Shadow Bridge, NY in the NYPD data base.” Twenty cases instantly appeared in the search engine on the first page. Paging down, the screen filled with twenty more cases. The data was not consistent in every ten-year period, but it appeared seven children were abducted in a six-month period every ten years. Details of the particulars were sketchy, but in every instance, the parents told of an ugly woman with the same distinguishing marks. Some of the reports mentioned the shiny object, and some did not.
During the search, Ramsey had found a reference to an archived cold case file titled “Black Shadow Kidnappings” He hated to think of how he would suffer if he went to the basement. He had allergies, and the dust on the files would have him sneezing and short of breath for days.
Descending four floors to a space that reminded him of the morgue, a clerk signed Ramsey in and escorted him to the cold case section of the archives.
Once inside, he located the files from 1981, 1971, and 1961 relating to the unsolved kidnappings. All three files had several artist sketches of the mysterious woman under the bridge. Although the drawings were markedly different in style and artistic ability, they all depicted the mole and the false black eye on a monstrous face. Ramsey doubted if any detective before him had taken the time to backtrack the case this far.
Feeling like a zombie, and barely able to breath, he signed out the three files and returned to his office. The files were thick, and knowing he would be there quite awhile longer, he poured another cup of rank coffee, took another hit from his inhaler, and continued combing the files. It was 9 p.m., and he hadn’t checked in with his wife, Eleanor, about working late. He felt guilty about not being home for dinner, but couldn’t get himself to pack it in for the night.
It wasn’t long before Ramsey discovered someone had done an enormous amount of research on the kidnapping not only for the years he’d taken from storage, but even years before. Each file contained copies of the Star Ledger accounts of all seven children kidnapped in each year. Also, Ramsey discovered that in 1961, the Ledger reporter, Max Bellamy, had given the child abductor the nickname, “Troll” after he’d linked the disappearances from that year to the seven kidnappings from 1951. His blockbuster, front-page headline read, “The Troll Strikes Again.”
Each kidnapping that followed generated a front-page story about the latest child abducted by the Troll. Apparently, Bellamy did not cover the stories of the 1971 kidnappings, and the reporter at the time did not link the disappearances from 1951 and 1961 to the current ones.
After hours of reading all three files and making notes on the white board, Ramsey took a timeout to review the facts of the case so far. Aidan, the child kidnapped yesterday, was the seventh in the six-month period. If history repeated itself, the kidnapper or kidnappers would go into hiding for another ten years and return to continue the cycle in January of 2021. He didn’t know how many total years the string of kidnappings had spanned, but he knew it was at least 60; however, Bellamy’s accounts in the Star Ledger claimed the history exceeded 100 years. If this were true, it was certain that several generations of kidnappers following in the footsteps of one another were involved, or some deranged maniac had discovered the fountain of youth.
Turning back to the computer, the Wikipedia history of missing children at the Black Shadow Bridge included one drawing of a strange woman from 1931 by the mother of the final victim that year, who happened to be an artist. Ramsey couldn’t believe the similarity of the drawing to Curt’s description of the ugly woman he’d described. The pencil sketch the artist had drawn eighty years before showed the mole and the bulging black eye. The detective didn’t believe it was a coincidence that both women had the same grotesque, distinguishing marks.
Ramsey googled “troll” and found it meant “a very ugly man or woman who lives under a bridge who eats young boys and girls. The monster is a staple of legend and folklore and a popular bad guy in fairy tales.” He continued to search every word he could think of regarding missing kidnapped children, disappearances under a bridge, and trolls. He printed all of it.
Looking up the name of the lead detective on the disappearances in 2001, he discovered Lieutenant Hank Fiordilino headed the investigation at that time. He worked out of the same main precinct as Ramsey did now. Accessing the files, he wondered if he could contact him for a consultation. Fiordilino might remember something pertinent to the case. Looking him up in the police personnel files, he found to his dismay that Fiordilino had taken his own life on July 7, 2001. He checked the date of the seventh and final kidnapping and found it peculiarly coincidental it had occurred on July 6, 2001.
Fiordilino’s partner and all the officers who knew him had found the suicide unfathomable. His son’s wife had just given birth to his first grandson, and Hank had planned to take a trip to see the new baby the following week. There was no indication of any concerns to account for why he had blown his brains out.
Ramsey dug deeper and found the lead detective on the 1991 kidnappings was Claude Motherway. The records indicated that he had also mysteriously committed suicide one day after the final kidnapping in that year.
The lead man in 1981 was Dominic Ocello with the same result, another suicide, two days after the seventh victim.
A cold chill crept up Ramsey’s spine as he listened to the various officers chirping around him. Three detectives sat at their desks accessing information on their computers. He went to Central files and asked to see the folders of the three officers who committed suicide.
The clerk on duty was busy working on deadlines and said he’d have to wait until she could assist him. When Ramsey volunteered to pull the files himself, she waved him through the turnstile.
Finding the personnel records, he immediately selected the files for the three officers and took a seat in a small conference room. Leafing through the files, he found a list of cases, accomplishments, awards, personal statistics, and even photos of the detectives, their partners, and their families at various stages of their careers.
Taking out a pencil, Ramsey started doctoring the copies he’d made of the drawings of the ugly woman. Suddenly the pieces of the puzzle came together on the desk before him.
As he headed for the parking lot, he believed he would be the next victim of the Troll. At some point in the next twenty-four hours, he would commit suicide for no apparent reason.
As he drove home in the Crown Vic, he reminisced how happy he had been since Eleanor had come into his life. They had met at a New Years Eve party ten years ago. Just two months before, a yellow cab had killed his first wife, Martha, when she absent-mindedly stepped into the street without looking.
Ramsey unlocked the door to his apartment and turned on the light in the foyer and the living room. It was 2 a.m., and Eleanor was asleep in their bedroom. The rest of the apartment was dark.
He went into the kitchen, grabbed a beer, and popping the cap, went out on the balcony. Taking a chair and a long pull on the Bud, he looked out across the expanse of Manhattan. The Empire State Building stood in the distance. He felt like a man waiting to be called for his final walk to the electric chair.
He’d solved the case. The drawings he’d found in the files and the drawings from the Internet, which spanned eighty years, had confirmed the troll’s identity. He’d recognized the woman immediately upon viewing the drawing from 1931. The three recent images seemed familiar, but the old drawing had brought everything into perspective.
The troll who had kidnapped and apparently killed at least seventy children over a period of 100
years was the same woman wearing a disguise. When he had doctored the drawings by removing the mole, adding back the missing eye, and smoothing out the deep caverns of wrinkles, he saw the same woman who had somehow remained the same age through all those years. He’d seen this same woman in the family photos of the three officers who’d committed suicide. She had used different names over the years, depending on whom she had married at the time. Now, her name was Eleanor Ramsey, and she was lying in his bed in the next room. Every ten years, she became the troll and ate seven children over a six-month period in order to stay young for another ten years. Ramsey worshiped the ground she walked on and had never been so happy since she came into his life. Now, even though he knew she was a monster, he was powerless to stop her. He loved her more than life itself.
Taking another long swallow on his beer, he heard the sliding door open behind him. The sound of her voice was angelic. He thought of the sirens in Homer’s Odyssey who attracted sailors to the reefs and certain death with their songs. He felt the power of her mind willing him to stand. The beer bottle crashed on the cement as he rose from his chair. Then, walking slowly to the edge of the balcony, he looked down at the street that beckoned to him forty floors below.
* * *
The Boy Who Cried “Boogeyman”
I could feel a shiver crawling up my spine as I saw the house where I lived when I was ten years old loom in the distance. My hands were trembling on the steering wheel as I recalled the hideous face of the boogeyman who came to eat me every night when it got dark twenty-five years ago.
Before I left New York, I emailed one of the friends to find out if the house was still standing. I was excited to find out when he responded that the house was not only standing, it was for sale; consequently, I made prior arrangements with a realtor to show me the house at 5 p.m. today.
Now that I was here, I didn’t know how I would react when I went inside. The memories returned with a vengeance as I remembered the horror I had experienced so many years ago.
The one-story, white frame house was surrounded by grass. It needed a paint job, but otherwise, it was just the way I remembered it. The trailer park that was located behind the property also rekindled memories. I remembered the eight-year-old kid that told me how babies were made and the teenagers that had caused me to crash my bicycle.
I blamed my parents for not believing the boogeyman lived in my closet, but in retrospect, I wondered what I would have done in their place. They hadn’t ignored my pleas for help at first. They came running into my room in the middle of the night many times and found nothing out of the ordinary. After weeks of false alarms, they finally stopped coming to my rescue and just yelled, “Go to sleep. There’s no such thing as the boogeyman.”
After I knew they would not get involved, I begged them to leave the light on in my room when I went to bed, but they said it would increase the electric bill for no reason.
I found a flashlight in the kitchen drawer that I kept with me under the covers each night, but up to that time, I had never used it. When my parents turned out the light in my bedroom, I simply pulled the sheet and sometimes the blanket over my head to keep from being eaten during the night. I never understood why my sheet protected me, but it always did.
Once at breakfast, my parents asked me to tell them what my monster looked like. I told them I had never seen him in the daytime. He only came out after dark when they had gone to bed. Every night I heard the closet door creak open and his foot dragging across the floor toward my bed. When the streetlights came on outside, I could see his silhouette in the window standing over me, poised to strike if I left the protection of my sheet.
I pleaded with my parents to let me sleep in their bedroom, but they wouldn’t hear of it. The boogeyman was smart; he wanted to get me alone. He could not eat me up when my parents were with me or when the lights were on. These were the rules I lived by every day and every night I was in this dreaded house.
Once I went to my school library and looked up the word in an encyclopedia to see what could keep such a monster at bay or what could kill it. Unlike a stake through the heart for a vampire and a silver bullet for a werewolf, the encyclopedia didn’t say how to kill a boogeyman.
During the last month I lived in the house, I finally caught a glimpse of him when I had to go to the bathroom and couldn’t wait for morning. When I could hold it no longer, I turned on the flashlight and pointed it at his face. To my amazement, he was momentarily blinded. I gathered up my sheets and my blanket and threw them at him as I ran for my life from my room into the bathroom. In the split second the flashlight was on him, I saw his claw like fingers on the bed post, a mouthful of long pointed teeth, and two snakelike eyes glaring at me. Since I dared not return to my room until morning, I had to sleep on the sofa in the living room for the rest of the night.
My parents rolled their eyes when I told them what had happened at breakfast, and I drew a picture of what I had seen in hopes they would finally believe me. That evening after dinner, my mother read me a story from a book she had gotten at the library titled The Boy Who Cried Wolf. It was useless; they still didn’t believe me.
I was so happy when my father got a new job, and we moved away from that dreadful place—never to return.
My new home didn’t have a boogeyman. In fact, none of the houses I lived in during my adult life had one. I never forgot what had happened then, but I never talked about it to anyone since I knew they would say, “There is no such thing as the boogeyman.”
As I pulled my Mercedes into the driveway at the back entrance to the house, I saw a man hammering a new “for sale” sign in the grass on the front lawn. I got out of my car and approached him.
“Are you Mr. Payne from Mt. Vernon Realty? I’m John Green, the one who called to see the house. I lived here until I was ten years old many years ago.”
The man smiled and shook my hand, which was abnormally cold to the touch, and said warmly, “Yes, I am Tom Payne, and if you like the house, I think you can buy it for an unbelievable price.”
“There are so many memories from so long ago (All bad, I thought without saying). I can’t wait to see my old room and the rest of the house. It seems like yesterday I cut the grass for my father.”
“The owners have instructed me to have a crew come out next week to give the house a new coat of paint. Try to imagine this improvement as we do the walk-through.”
“Would you mind very much if my initial walk-through is by myself? I really want to take my time in each room.”
“No problem. Whenever you’re ready, I’m here to answer any questions you might have.”
“Thank you so much.” I said as a strange familiarity tickled my senses as we approached the house. “I hate to admit it, but I was very afraid of the boogeyman when I lived here, and I am hoping that some of my old anxieties will be relieved once I see my room as an adult.”
I thought he was going to tell me, “There’s no such thing as a boogeyman,” but he ignored the comment and proceeded to the front porch.
As the realtor and I approached the front door, I noticed he had an awkward gait. He couldn’t seem to lift his left foot from the ground. He unlocked the large white door and, after opening it, showed me the living room. Afterward, complying with my request, he shuffled through the kitchen and took a seat on the back porch.
To my amazement, the living room was almost the same as I remembered. There, inside the door, was the piano my mother had played when I was a boy. I had forgotten all about it since it was not in the house we bought after this one. The other pieces of furniture seemed familiar in the positions they occupied in the room, but the small-screen television I had watched Gunsmoke and my other favorite shows on had been replaced with a new flat-screen television.
A second feeling of déjà vu crept over me as I went into the kitchen. I remembered the time I wrote “shit” in soap on the kitchen window on the night before Halloween. My mother thought some of the kids that lived in the trail
er park had sneaked into our yard and soaped the window. I never told her I did it.
When I returned to the kitchen, I noticed the realtor was no longer on the back porch.
I continued my tour and inspected my parents’ bedroom and also the third bedroom. Both rooms seemed very similar to the way they had been when I lived here.
My initial pang of trepidation returned as I walked toward the room where the boogeyman and I lived so long ago. Taking a deep breath, I pushed open the door and timidly inched inside. My eyes surveyed the four walls that had given me so many sleepless and terrifying nights. The closet door was closed as I approached it. My hand trembled as I put it on the doorknob and opened it with apprehension. A loud creak startled me as I stepped back at the ready for something to spring from the closet upon me. Nothing moved from within as I peered inside.
There were clothes on the hanger and a number of boxes on the shelves. I pulled a cord, which turned on an overhead light. Everything inside was washed in the glow of a 100-watt bulb. There was nothing foreboding about the interior of the closet. I looked back at the room and turned on the overhead light with a switch on the wall. The room was cheerful and neat without any ominous overtones.
I heaved a sigh of relief and sat on the bed. It seemed that the rules had not changed regarding the boogeyman. In the window, I saw the sun fading through the trees and the sky turning dark. I remembered what that had meant when I lived here.
I lay back on the bed and rested my head on the pillow. With deep concentration, I tried to bring back the way I felt as a child. I had never experienced anything since that felt more real than the monster that lived in my closet when I was ten.
