BOOK SUMMARY
Dean is staying overnight at his rich friend’s house, looking forward to a weekend of fun. Wendell has everything, you see, including a giant four-poster bed in the centre of his bedroom. Big enough to hide under.
While ahead there may be fun and games aplenty, one thing is for sure. Whatever you do, DON’T LOOK UNDER THE BED.
“Iain Rob Wright scares the Hell out of me.” – J A Konrath, author of the Jack Kilborn Horror books.
“When children are doing nothing, they are doing mischief.”
– Henry Fielding.
“There's no such thing as a soul. It's just something they made up to scare kids.”
– Bart Simpson
1
Dean swallowed the last of his hamburger and accidentally let out a belch. He immediately covered his mouth and apologised, for this was not his home. “Sorry Mr Kurtz.”
Mr Kurtz smiled and said in that strange accent of his, “No problem, Dean. It is better out then in, ja?”
Wendell was giggling and let out a burp of his own, much louder than Dean’s had been. Then they were all laughing.
“Gas is just a by-product of the food we eat,” said Mr Kurtz. “All men do it, so why should one apologise? Do you apologise for taking air in through your nose? Nein. So why should you be embarrassed to let it out?”
Dean shrugged. “My mum always taught me it was bad manners.”
The hurt look on Wendell’s face reminded Dean that his school friend had lost his own mother at a very young age. But before he had chance to apologise, Mr Kurtz waved his hand.
“It is okay, young man. Wendell does not blame you for having a mother. All little boys should have mothers.”
“Not your fault, Dean,” Wendell mumbled. “Shall we go play a game? I have the new Grand Theft Awesome.”
Dean grinned, his guilt forgotten. He looked at Mr Kurtz for permission, not wanting to do as he pleased.
Mr Kurtz waved a hand again. “Go, go. Boys have fun.”
Dean allowed himself to be led by his friend into the bedroom, where a large four-poster bed filled the room. The rest of the room was furnished just like his own bedroom at home, with a large wooden dresser topped with a television and games console. There was a pair of beanbags on the floor between the bed and dresser and a model airplane hanging from the roof. One of the wings had snapped and broken.
Dean glanced curiously at the large bed in the centre of the room. “Is this your bed? It’s huge.”
Wendell seemed to understand the confusion and explained. “It was my mum’s bed. It’s kind of a family heirloom and my dad didn’t want to get rid of it, so he gave it to me.”
“It’s…pretty cool. Much bigger than my bed.”
“I know. I don’t even think they make beds like it anymore. But it’s sooo comfy. Anyway, let’s play a game.”
“Okay.”
They played videogames for a little over two hours until Mr Kurtz entered the room with two glasses of milk and told them it was time for bed. Outside, the sun had long since gone down and the windows were dark rectangles in the wall. Dean lived at a terraced house in town with his parents; it was strange to see such complete darkness outside. There were no other houses, or lampposts shining. The Kurtz’s home was a cottage on the edge of town, surrounded by fields on three sides and a road on the fourth. It was at least four times bigger than the house Dean lived in.
“Go into the bathroom and brush your teeth boys, and then get into your pyjamas. The night has arrived and it is time to sleep.”
Wendell allowed Dean to use the en suite bathroom first, and inside he found himself jealous at his friend for having his own bath and shower. He didn’t let the resentment linger for long, however, as he liked Wendell a lot, and the boy didn’t have a mum. No amount of luxuries could change that. Dean cleaned his teeth from the overnight bag his mother had packed for him and then quickly changed into his Bazinga! pyjamas, before stepping back out into the bedroom.
“Nice PJs,” Wendell said.
“Thanks. I love The Big Bang Theory.”
“Me too. I’d bend that blonde chick over and make her sore.”
Dean had no reply ready for that. It was an unexpectedly rude comment from his friend and not the type of thing he was used to hearing from a fellow twelve-year-old. It made him feel awkward. Wendell, however, didn’t seem to think much of his comment at all, because he disappeared into the bathroom without another word.
Dean went over to the inflatable bed they had set up on the floor beside Wendell’s great, big four-poster bed. They were old enough now that sleeping together would be weird. Mr Kurtz had left the glasses of milk on the bedside table and Dean took one of them now and took a great big swig. It was ice cold and creamy, not like the skimmed milk his parents made him have on his cereal. His mother was overweight, but she always went on about how she would not let him get the same way. His father, a fireman, had the opposite problem and barely ate at all, spending most of the day sleeping whenever he was home.
While Wendell took his time in the bathroom, Dean slid down beneath the sheets of the inflatable bed and shuddered as his cold feet rubbed together at the bottom. He had not realised how cold it was until he’d changed into his PJs. Outside he could hear the wind whistling.
As he shifted into a comfortable position and laid his head down on the pillow, Dean flinched as something sharp scratched the back of his head. He shot back up into a sitting position and twisted around. It didn’t take him a second to locate the strange, yellowish object on his pillow, but it took him several moments to figure out what it was. Eventually, as he held the tiny object close to his face, he saw that it was a fingernail. It was long and crinkled, obviously old. A couple of feint specks of red on the sharp tip made Dean certain it had belonged to a woman, but there were no women living inside the Kurtz home – just Wendell and his dad.
Disgusted, Dean tossed the fingernail into the dark shadows beneath Wendell’s huge bed. He let out a brief shudder and wiped his fingers on top of his blankets. Then he lay back down and tried not to think about it.
Wendell came out of the bathroom a minute later with a smear of toothpaste on his chin. Dean pointed it out and his friend wiped it on his hand and then onto his boxer shorts. He wasn’t wearing PJs, apparently unbothered by the cold.
“You okay?” Wendell asked, obviously seeing the unsettled look on his face.
“Yeah, I just found…never mind.” Dean didn’t want to tell his friend he had found a woman’s fingernail and thrown it under his bed. “Aren’t you cold?” he asked instead.
“I don’t get cold.”
“Okay. Fair enough.”
Mr Kurtz opened the door to check in on them. “Lights off, boys. See you in the morning.”
“Good night, Mr Kurtz.”
“Night, Dad.”
Mr Kurtz flipped the switch on the wall and sent the bedroom into darkness. Dean’s tummy rolled, as if he were riding a rollercoaster. There was no explanation for it. There was also the sound of hissing, but it was so brief that once it stopped, he was sure he had imagined it.
Once Mr Kurtz’s footsteps faded down the hallway, Dean sat up in bed and tried to see in the darkness. At home when he turned off the lights, his eyes would slowly adjust until he could see shapes and shadows, but inside Wendell’s bedroom the darkness did not yield. No shapes formed and he was left without any sense of space.
“You sure you’re not cold?” Dean said, rubbing at his chilly arms.
“I’m fine,” Wendell replied. “We need to go to sleep now. The night has arrived.”
Huh, thought Dean. That was strang
e; Wendell’s father had said the same thing. Was it a family motto or something? Like the Starks – Winter is Coming.
Dean lay back on his pillow and blinked. It felt strange to see no difference between when his eyes were open to when they were closed, and he suddenly wondered what it would be like to be blind. He couldn’t imagine anything worse. To lose all colour and sight. There would be no more playing videogames, no riding bikes, no watching movies or reading books – not that he even liked reading. It felt like there would be little point even living without the ability to see. Yet blind people did so; there must have been something to live for. He realised he had made himself anxious by imagining such a terrible thing and decided to turn his mind to other things. Always a bad sleeper, he would often have to find himself a story to occupy his mind enough to finally sleep. Sometimes, he would fight bad guys or humiliate his enemies from school. Other times he would design fantastic new videogames and play them in his head. Tonight, he couldn’t seem to do either. His mind was fixated on the darkness and the cold.
Something shifted in the darkness and Dean realised he still had his eyes open. The slight movement must have been his vision finally adjusting and he turned onto his side to try and make out the furniture in the room.
He found himself face to face with an old woman.
Dean knew the figure lying beside him was woman because he could smell her perfume – orangey. The tip of her leathery nose was right up against his, and the whites of her eyes seemed to float in the darkness. The woman’s breathing was heavy; he felt it on his lips.
Dean bolted upright, swiping at the darkness, and screamed. He tried to get up, but his foot tangled in his bed sheets and he tumbled back down again, right where the woman had been lying. She was still there, and her fingertips reach out to him, plunged into his screaming throat, scratching at his tongue and tickling his tonsils. He gagged and his screams were cut off.
The bedroom light went on.
Dean thrashed about on the floor, kicking his sheets away and screaming in horror. His entire body felt like it was made of liquid and all of it wanted to come up through his mouth.
“Dean, Dean, my dear boy, what is wrong?”
Dean looked up to see Mr Kurtz standing at the door, finger hovering over the light switch and looking greatly confused.
Dean glanced around the bedroom and saw no old woman. There was a bitter taste inside his mouth but no fingertips. What had just happened?
“There…there was a woman. I…she grabbed me.”
Mr Kurtz looked at Dean like he was quite insane. Dean felt insane.
“I think you had a bad dream, Dean, my boy. It’s not unusual in unfamiliar surroundings. The mind can become quite disturbed. Especially when night comes.”
“No, I wasn’t dreaming. She was lying right next to me in the dark.”
Wendell was laughing, propped up on his elbow and still tucked into his gigantic bed. “You were totally dreaming, dude. You were snoring like a pig.”
Dean looked at his friend, confused. “I was? I don’t feel like I was asleep. I don’t usually snore.”
“How would you even know, and you were. I was about to nudge you and tell you to knock it off.”
Dean opened his mouth to argue but couldn’t. Of course he had been asleep. What other explanation was there? A woman had not broken in to lie with him and put her grotty fingers in his mouth. Wendell said he had been snoring. Why would he lie?
“I…I’m sorry,” Dean said to Mr Kurtz earnestly. “I didn’t mean to be trouble.”
“You are no trouble at all, Dean, my boy. Finish your milk, ja, and go to sleep. I am right down the hall and will see you in the morgen – sorry, morning.
Dean smiled, nodded, and swigged down the last of his milk from the bedside table. He noticed that Wendell had not touched his. Mr Kurtz switched the light back off and put the room into darkness once more. Dean lay back down, his body trembling from the fright but growing gradually calmer.
“You okay?” Wendell asked him in the darkness.
“Yeah. It just felt really real. I could even smell her perfume. It smelt like oranges.”
There was silence, followed by, “Huh.”
“What?” Dean asked. “What is it?”
“Nothing. It’s just that my mom’s perfume smells of tangerines. When I was little I used to tell her she smelt good enough to eat.”
Dean gulped loudly and the sound seemed to echo back at him from the shadows. The women in his bed – in his dream – had smelt the same as Wendell’s mother? That was too weird.
“Wendell, how did…how did your mother die?”
“She was sick.” Wendell didn’t hesitate. “It was hereditary, my dad says; something that runs in my mom’s family.”
“Could you get it?”
“Maybe. My dad said that it mostly affects the woman in my mom’s family, but it’s not impossible.”
Dean swallowed again, not sure he wanted to know any more. “What is it?”
“Something with one of those long, complicated names. It made my mum really old – I mean older than she was meant to be. My dad won’t tell me much about it, but mum told me that she went into the bathroom one day and she had a wrinkle on her forehead. A few months later, she looked like an eighty-year old woman and started to get really weak. I was only five. I don’t really remember.”
“Of course. I’m sorry for asking.”
“It’s okay. You’re my best friend. I want you to know.”
“Thanks. You’re my best friend, too.”
“Go to sleep now, Dean.”
“Okay.”
Dean slid back down and tucked himself tightly beneath his covers. It was still cold in the room and the tip of his nose felt icy – right where the tip of the old woman’s nose touched him. He really wanted to ask for the heating to be turned up, but somehow he knew it would only lead to rolling eyes and huffing from Wendell and his father. He didn’t want them to find him rude.
At home, Dean’s parents always had the heating on overnight, so perhaps he was just too used to the temperature being high. Maybe a place as big as the Kurtz cottage was expensive to heat constantly. It would be wrong for him to complain. He was a guest.
When Wendell had invited him to stay over, Dean had at first been dubious. He had only known Wendell a few months since the boy had appeared at the beginning of the new school year, a stranger to all. They had quickly become friends, though, despite Wendell being rather quiet and reluctant to make any other friends besides Dean. Dean had like Wendell enough to risk the bullies and weird looks from the girls. He had never been the most popular kid at school, anyway, so what did he have to lose by being friends with an oddball like Wendell?
Then, one day, Wendell’s father had picked him up from school in a huge, silver Bentley and suddenly the judging looks that the other kids shot Dean’s way became looks of envy. They all regretted not being Wendell’s only friend.
Rumours came out over the following days that Wendell’s father was a member of the German aristocracy and that his family had owned a castle in a place called Bavaria. The Kurtz family had come to England, it was rumoured, because they wanted Wendell to have an ordinary upbringing. In Germany they were treated like celebrities, and they did not want Wendell to grow up with a big head. Dean didn’t know if any of that were true, and for some reason he had never brought it up.
Wendell had fallen asleep, his breathing sounding like a slow moving train – Kooor Chuuu, Kooor Chuuu, Kooor Chuuu.
Dean lay awake in bed, listening to the near silence for a while. He wished he knew what time it was. Back home, in the housing estate, it was obvious what time it was by the noises outside. The older teenagers would stop hanging around at about ten o’clock. The drunk, old, married men would stagger home at around twelve, chatting and singing loudly. There would be the sounds of speeding vehicles echoing off the nearby highway for perhaps another hour after that and then silence until five in the morning, whe
n the milk man would start zooming down the street in his quiet little van. Dean was a poor sleeper and usually heard it all. Which was what made his nightmare so strange. He struggled to fall asleep in his own bed, yet he had passed out unconscious on an uncomfortable inflatable in someone else’s home? It didn’t sound like him at all.
The smell of tangerines was still on his mind, so much so that he could still detect a hint of it inside his nostrils. The more he lay there in the darkness, the surer he became that he could actually smell the orange fruit, and that it wasn’t his imagination.
Dean’s stomach churned. His breath quickened. He rubbed one of his feet against his shin and dug his toenails in, checking to see if he was dreaming again. He wasn’t. The pain in his shin spiked his senses and allowed no doubt that he was awake. Even now, the pain in his shin persisted. It was a cold sensation, making his skin prickle. It turned into a tightening feeling that would not go away, like a rope being coiled around his skin.
As the unsettling feeling that something was wrong fell over Dean, he slowly turned his head to the left. He couldn’t say why, but he knew there was something there. It was the prickly sensation of being looked at, unexplainable but real. The shadows beneath Wendell’s large, four-poster bed shifted as something moved slowly towards Dean. The faint shimmer of a face appeared, staring back at Dean. Two round eyes glowed red.
Dean tried to scream, but before the noise could escape his lips, the tightening on his shin became a vice and yanked him towards the bed. In the shadows, a jaw full of countless teeth opened up beneath the evil, staring eyes. A long, ropey tongue shot towards Dean, running beneath his shirt and rubbing along his cold tummy. It felt like an icicle.
Dean felt the vice-like fingers around his shin, dragging him beneath the bed, and he smelt the acrid scent of oranges, no denying it now. Finally, he was able to scream. He kicked and thrashed with his free leg, grabbed hold of Wendell’s bed frame with his hands. The thing pulling at him was far stronger than Dean, but the fear inside of him gave him strength he did not know he had.
B is for Bogeywoman (A-Z of Horror Book 2) Page 1