“Both of us, I know, became utterly silent from that moment. Alcide, of course, went on talking. He was very talkative, and under the influence of wine, was becoming loud and boastful. He began to tell the old man, who was alone in paying attention to him, about his early struggles in America, and then his increasing successes there.
“He spoke in French, of course, the characteristic, twanging drawl of the midi, and with, actually, a queer kind of American intonation, noticeable every now and then. I can remember very vividly the effect of relentlessness that his loud tones, going on and on, made in the small room.
“He was still talking when – the thing happened.
“You can, of course, call it what you like. An apparition – a collective hallucination – or the result produced by certain psychological conditions that are perhaps not to be found once in a hundred years – but that were present that night.
“The feeling of unease that had been with me all the evening was intensified, and then – it suddenly left me altogether, as though some expected calamity had taken place, and had proved more endurable than the suspense of awaiting it. In its place, I experienced only a feeling of profound sadness and compassion.
“I knew, with complete certainty, that some emanation of extreme unhappiness was surrounding us. Then Madame Amede, who sat next me, spoke, just above her breath:
“ ‘What is it?’
“There were two sounds in the room. . . . One was the excited, confident voice of Alcide, now in the midst of his triumphant story, the other was a succession of sobs and stifled, despairing wails.
“The second sound came from the corner, exactly facing the place where Lamotte was sitting.
“There was a door there, and it opened slowly. Framed in the doorway, I saw her – a young girl, in the dress of the late eighties, with a scared, pitiful face, sobbing and wringing her hands.
“That was my revenant – Sophy Mason come back.
“I told you, when I began the story, that the – the apparition had not frightened me. That was true.
“Perhaps it was because I knew the story of the poor betrayed girl, perhaps because I have, as you know, been interested for years in psychic manifestations of all kinds. To me, it seemed apparent, even at that moment, that the emotional vibrations of the past, sent out by an anguished spirit all those years ago, had become perceptible to us because we were momentarily attuned to receive them.
“In my own case, the attunement was so complete that, for an instant or two, I could actually catch a glimpse of the very form from which those emotional disturbances had proceeded.
“Amede and his wife – both of them, as I said before, in an unusually receptive condition – heard what I did. Amede, however, saw nothing – only an indistinct blur, as he afterwards described it. His wife saw the outlines of a girl’s figure. . . .
“It all happened you understand, within a few minutes. First, that sound of bitter crying, and then the apparition, and my own realisation that the Amedes were terror-struck. The old man, Amede’s father, had turned abruptly in his chair with a curious, strained look upon his face – uneasy, rather than frightened. He told us afterwards that he had seen and heard nothing, but had been suddenly conscious of tension in the room, and that then the expression on his son’s face had frightened him. But he admitted, too, that sweat had broken out upon his forehead, although it was not hot in the room.”
“But Alcide Lamotte?”
“Alcide Lamotte,” said the narrator slowly, “went on talking loudly – without pause, without a tremor. He perceived nothing until Madame Amede, with a groan, fell back on her chair in a dead faint. That of course, broke up the evening abruptly. . . .
“You remember, what I told you at the beginning? It wasn’t the poor little revenant that frightened me – but I was afraid, that evening. I was afraid, with the worst terror that I have ever known, of that man who had lived a crowded lifetime away from the passionate, evil episode of his youth – who had changed his very identity, and had left the past so far behind him that no echo from it could reach him. Whatever the link had been once, between him and Sophy Mason – and who can doubt that, with her, it had survived death itself – to him, it now all meant nothing – had perished beneath the weight of the years.
“It was indeed that which frightened me – not the gentle, anguished spirit of Sophy Mason – but the eyes that saw nothing, the ears that heard nothing, the loud, confident voice that, whilst those of us who had never known her were yet tremblingly aware of her, talked on – of success, and of money, and of life in Pittsburg.”
The Boogeyman
Stephen King
Prospectus
Address:
Waterbury, Connecticut, USA.
Property:
Small family house in quiet back street. Two-storey building with well laid out ground floor living rooms and kitchen. Fitted bedrooms with spacious closet.
Viewing Date:
March, 1973
Agent:
Stephen King (1947– ) is the bestselling horror writer who began writing in his college newspaper and then a number of pulp magazines before bursting on to the world scene with his novel of possession, Carrie, in 1974. This was followed by The Shining (1977), a brilliant tale of a couple and their little boy who are snowed in for the winter in a Colorado resort hotel full of ghosts. In that book, and subsequent short stories such as “The Boogeyman” (1973), King has taken the old “haunted house” tradition as presented in the pages of this collection and moved it on for the new century. Robert Englund (1949– ) is the actor who created Freddy Kruger, the most popular screen monster since Dracula and Frankenstein. In seven movies that began with Nightmare On Elm Street in 1984, he has brought to life the fiend with razor fingernails who haunts a typical American street just like the one the one in this last story. “I am a great admirer of King’s books,” Englund says, “and his story, ‘The Boogeyman’ scared the hell out of me when I first read it!”
“I came to you because I want to tell my story,” the man on. Dr. Harper’s couch was saying. The man was Lester Billings from Waterbury, Connecticut. According to the history taken from Nurse Vickers, he was twenty-eight, employed by an industrial firm in New York, divorced, and the father of three children. All deceased.
“I can’t go to a priest because I’m not Catholic. I can’t go to a lawyer because I haven’t done anything to consult a lawyer about. All I did was kill my kids. One at a time. Killed them all.”
Dr. Harper turned on the tape recorder.
Billings lay straight as a yardstick on the couch, not giving it an inch of himself. His feet protruded stiffly over the end – picture of a man enduring necessary humiliation. His hands were folded corpselike on his chest. His face was carefully set. He looked at the plain white composition ceiling as if seeing scenes and pictures played out there.
“Do you mean you actually killed them, or—”
“No.” Impatient flick of the hand. “But I was responsible. Denny in 1967. Shirl in 1971. And Andy this year. I want to tell you about it.”
Dr. Harper said nothing. He thought that Billings looked haggard and old. His hair was thinning, his complexion sallow. His eyes held all the miserable secrets of whiskey.
“They were murdered, see? Only no one believes that. If they would, things would be all right.”
“Why is that?”
“Because . . .”
Billings broke off and darted up on his elbows, staring across the room. “What’s that?” he barked. His eyes had narrowed to black slots.
“What’s what?”
“That door.”
“The closet,” Dr. Harper said. “Where I hang my coat and leave my overshoes.”
“Open it. I want to see.”
Dr. Harper got up wordlessly, crossed the room, and opened the closet. Inside, a tan raincoat hung on one of four or five hangers. Beneath that was a pair of shiny galoshes. The New York Times had been carefully tucked into one of them. That was a
ll.
“All right?” Dr. Harper said.
“All right.” Billings removed the props of his elbows and returned to his previous position.
“You were saying,” Dr. Harper said as he went back to his chair, “that if the murder of your three children could be proved, all your troubles would be over. Why is that?”
“I’d go to jail,” Billings said immediately. “For life. And you can see into all the rooms in a jail. All the rooms.” He smiled at nothing.
“How were your children murdered?”
“Don’t try to jerk it out of me!”
Billings twitched around and stared balefully at Harper.
“I’ll tell you, don’t worry. I’m not one of your freaks strutting around and pretending to be Napoleon or explaining that I got hooked on heroin because my mother didn’t love me. I know you won’t believe me. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. Just to tell will be enough.”
“All right.” Dr. Harper got out his pipe.
“I married Rita in 1965 – I was twenty-one and she was eighteen. She was pregnant. That was Denny.” His lips twisted in a rubbery, frightening grin that was gone in a wink. “I had to leave college and get a job, but I didn’t mind. I loved both of them. We were very happy.
“Rita got pregnant just a little while after Denny was born, and Shirl came along in December of 1966. Andy came in the summer of 1969, and Denny was already dead by then. Andy was an accident. That’s what Rita said. She said sometimes that birth-control stuff doesn’t work. I think that it was more than an accident. Children tie a man down, you know. Women like that, especially when the man is brighter than they. Don’t you find that’s true?”
Harper grunted noncommittally.
“It doesn’t matter, though. I loved him anyway.” He said it almost vengefully, as it he had loved the child to spite his wife.
“Who killed the children?” Harper asked.
“The boogeyman,” Lester Billings answered immediately. “The boogeyman killed them all. Just came out of the closet and killed them.” He twisted around and grinned. “You think I’m crazy, all right. It’s written all over you. But I don’t care. All I want to do is tell you and then get lost.”
“I’m listening,” Harper said.
“It started when Denny was almost two and Shirl was just an infant. He started crying when Rita put him to bed. We had a two-bedroom place, see. Shirl slept in a crib in our room. At first I thought he was crying because he didn’t have a bottle to take to bed anymore. Rita said don’t make an issue of it, let it go, let him have it and he’ll drop it on his own. But that’s the way kids start off bad. You get permissive with them, spoil them. Then they break your heart. Get some girl knocked up, you know, or start shooting dope. Or they get to be sissies. Can you imagine waking up some morning and finding your kid – your son – is a sissy?
“After a while, though, when he didn’t stop, I started putting him to bed myself. And if he didn’t stop crying I’d give him a whack. Then Rita said he was saying ‘light’ over and over again. Well, I didn’t know. Kids that little, how can you tell what they’re saying. Only a mother can tell.
“Rita wanted to put in a nightlight. One of those wall-plug things with Mickey Mouse or Huckleberry Hound or something on it. I wouldn’t let her. If a kid doesn’t get over being afraid of the dark when he’s little, he never gets over it.
“Anyway, he died the summer after Shirl was born. I put him to bed that night and he started to cry right off. I heard what he said that time. He pointed right at the closet when he said it. ‘Boogeyman,’ the kid says. ‘Boogeyman, Daddy.’
“I turned off the light and went into our room and asked Rita why she wanted to teach the kid a word like that. I was tempted to slap her around a little, but I didn’t. She said she never taught him to say that. I called her a goddamn liar.
“That was a bad summer for me, see. The only job I could get was loading Pepsi-Cola trucks in a warehouse, and I was tired all the time. Shirl would wake up and cry every night and Rita would pick her up and sniffle. I tell you, sometimes I felt like throwing them both out a window. Christ, kids drive you crazy sometimes. You could kill them.
“Well, the kid woke me at three in the morning, right on schedule. I went to the bathroom, only a quarter awake, you know, and Rita asked me if I’d check on Denny. I told her to do it herself and went back to bed. I was almost asleep when she started to scream.
“I got up and went in. The kid was dead on his back. Just as white as flour except for where the blood had . . . had sunk. Back of the legs, the head, the a – the buttocks. His eyes were open. That was the worst, you know. Wide open and glassy, like the eyes you see on a moosehead some guy put over his mantel. Like pictures you see of those gook kids over in ’Nam. But an American kid shouldn’t look like that. Dead on his back. Wearing diapers and rubber pants because he’d been wetting himself again the last couple of weeks. Awful, I loved that kid.”
Billings shook his head slowly, then offered the rubbery, frightening grin again. “Rita was screaming her head off. She tried to pick Denny up and rock him, but I wouldn’t let her. The cops don’t like you to touch any of the evidence. I know that—”
“Did you know it was the boogeyman then?” Harper asked quietly.
“Oh, no. Not then. But I did see one thing. It didn’t mean anything to me then, but my mind stored it away.”
“What was that?”
“The closet door was open. Not much. Just a crack. But I knew I left it shut, see. There’s dry-cleaning bags in there. A kid messes around with one of those and bango. Asphyxiation. You know that?”
“Yes. What happened then?”
Billings shrugged. “We planted him.” He looked morbidly at his hands, which had thrown dirt on three tiny coffins.
“Was there an inquest?”
“Sure.” Billings eyes flashed with sardonic brilliance. “Some back-country fuckhead with a stethoscope and a black bag full of Junior Mints and a sheepskin from some cow college. Crib death, he called it! You ever hear such a pile of yellow manure? The kid was three years old!”
“Crib death is most common during the first year,” Harper said carefully, “but that diagnosis has gone on death certificates for children up to age five for want of a better—”
“Bullshit!” Billings spat out violently.
Harper relit his pipe.
“We moved Shirl into Denny’s old room a month after the funeral. Rita fought it tooth and nail, but I had the last word. It hurt me, of course it did. Jesus, I loved having the kid in with us. But you can’t get overprotective. You make a kid a cripple that way. When I was a kid my mom used to take me to the beach and then scream herself hoarse. ‘Don’t go out so far! Don’t go there! It’s got an undertow! You only ate an hour ago! Don’t go over your head!’ Even to watch out for sharks, before God. So what happens? I can’t even go near the water now. It’s the truth. I get the cramps if I go near a beach. Rita got me to take her and the kids to Savin Rock once when Denny was alive. I got sick as a dog. I know, see? You can’t overprotect kids. And you can’t coddle yourself either. Life goes on. Shirl went right into Denny’s crib. We sent the old mattress to the dump, though. I didn’t want my girl to get any germs.
“So a year goes by. And one night when I’m putting Shirl into her crib she starts to yowl and scream and cry. ‘Boogeyman, Daddy, boogeyman, boogeyman!’
“That threw a jump into me. It was just like Denny. And I started to remember about that closet door, open just a crack when we found him. I wanted to take her into our room for the night.”
“Did you?”
“No.” Billings regarded his hands and his face twitched. “How could I go to Rita and admit I was wrong? I had to be strong. She was always such a jellyfish . . . look how easy she went to bed with me when we weren’t married.”
Harper said, “On the other hand, look how easily you went to bed with her.”
Billings froze in the act of rearranging h
is hands and slowly turned his head to look at Harper. “Are you trying to be a wise guy?”
“No, indeed,” Harper said.
“Then let me tell it my way,” Billings snapped. “I came here to get this off my chest. To tell my story. I’m not going to talk about my sex life, if that’s what you expect. Rita and I had a very normal sex life, with none of that dirty stuff. I know it gives some people a charge to talk about that, but I’m not one of them.”
“Okay,” Harper said.
“Okay,” Billings echoed with uneasy arrogance. He seemed to have lost the thread of his thought, and his eyes wandered uneasily to the closet door, which was firmly shut.
“Would you like that open?” Harper asked.
“No!” Billings said quickly. He gave a nervous little laugh. “What do I want to look at your overshoes for?
“The boogeyman got her, too,” Billings said. He brushed at his forehead, as if sketching memories. “A month later. But something happened before that. I heard a noise in there one night. And then she screamed. I opened the door real quick – the hall light was on – and . . . she was sitting up in the crib crying and . . . something moved. Back in the shadows, by the closet. Something slithered.”
“Was the closet door open?”
“A little. Just a crack.” Billings licked his lips. “Shirl was screaming about the boogeyman. And something else that sounded like ‘claws.’ Only she said ‘craws,’ you know. Little kids have trouble with that ‘l’ sound. Rita ran upstairs and asked what the matter was. I said she got scared by the shadows of the branches moving on the ceiling.”
“Crawset?” Harper said.
“Huh?”
“Crawset . . . closet. Maybe she was trying to say ‘closet.’ ”
“Maybe,” Billings said. “Maybe that was it. But I don’t think so. I think it was ‘claws.’ ” His eyes began seeking the closet door again. “Claws, long claws.” His voice had sunk to a whisper.
“Did you look in the closet?”
The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books) Page 70