The Boogeyman - Chapter One, Part One

(Warning: Parts of the following story may be too disturbing for some readers)

Jim wasn't dumb; that fact was a large part of how he got away with his secondary role in the school system.

As a young man, leaving college, Jim knew that he had wanted to teach, had always been told that he would make a superb teacher, but the first mistake that he had made was his ignorance of just how bad high school would prove to be for him.

A week in, and Jim Prascher lost any rose-tinted beliefs that he had garnered while in college. He had idealized the process of education, and of the goodness of high school children. He's aware, even where he lays now, that part of the blame belongs solely on him, believing that he could chance a return to high school, or that he was equipped to handle young adults.

He left his position at the middle of the first semester of his first year teaching, originally planning to sign up to work at the nearby primary school. By the following week, Jim was obsessively searching for hints of any job openings that would allow him to put his teaching degree to good use, but was finding none, since he was, sadly, searching for a teaching position in the dead of the school year.

A month went by, and no matter what he tried to do - and prove - to his girlfriend, she had nevertheless decided to move back to her old apartment while he was out grocery shopping one day. She had not left a note, and would not answer his phone calls.

Jeff took to going around the town primary school, imagining that if he tried hard enough, look like he cared enough, he could get a job as a substitute teacher. This quickly became an obsession of his, and he grew to believe that if he could somehow prove himself to the school's principal, or a member of the staff, that he be would be allowed to stay on as a teacher, not only as a substitute. As unemployment continued to roll in (after phone calls and letters from debt companies) cynicism and anger began to devour all of his hopes and dreams.

The first incident happened a few weeks before Christmas break, after regular school hours. It was a little girl, but, as he learned later, it could have easily been a boy. His memory clings often to the memory of the first, moreso than to any of the others.

He had told her that her parents had told him to come and get her. He was sorry that she could not remember him - surely she could remember him from a Christmas party in the past – no? Maybe she had met his son – she must have seen him at some point in school. He had seen them playing in the park once before, with her mother and father watching from a distance, along with him.

No matter what he told her, she remained nevertheless wary of him, pulling away from him as he tried to grab hold of her arm. He backtracked then, realizing that she had, more the likely, been taught stranger danger by somebody. Working to this logic, Jim managed to make the girl believe that he lost a dog, and that he needed somebody's help to locate it.

He imagined that his heart sang, as the girl looked up at him, and tried to give him a childish show of kindness by smiling up at him. She never seemed to falter from the belief of what he had told her, even after having walked three blocks with him, she seemed to slip further and further into the delusion that they were looking for his lost pet. Walking all of those blocks, John was looking for a suitable place. He had finally found an empty-looking alley (it was not difficult to find one in the dead of winter), so he fabricated him having seen his aforementioned lost dog in it.

As they walked partway through the alleyway, he clamped a hand over the girl's mouth and, while she was still in a state of shock, he overpowered her and dragged her beyond a pile of garbage. The place he had shoved her into was perfectly secluded, but the ice and snow on the ground began to permeate every article of his clothing, and as a result of him struggling with the girl to force her into compliance, snow had been shoved into his shoes. Oh, Jim had certainly not dressed well for what he was doing at the moment. He winced as cold snow sunk and slipped into every article of his clothing, but he kept up a frantic pace to beat his discomfort.

He had knocked her small body, hard, when she attempted to struggle. Eventually, she stopped making noise and flailing, despite the fact that he had long since removed his hand from over her mouth.

During, he felt wondrous, made a new. Afterwords, he felt like Jim Nobody, horrible, and, despite how much he tried to delude himself into believing that he had been pushed into what had happened, he felt like some sick being, not deserving to be known as a person.

A part of him believed that if he killed the girl, it would destroy a lot of the guilt he was already feeling, and would help in stopping any paranoid fears of him being caught. She could talk; or somebody could suspect what had happened to her.

He let her go, only after warning her about telling anybody about what had happened. He forgot, eventually, what, exactly, he had told the girl, whether that it was threat against a pet she could have owned, or family member, but he remembered that eventually he arrived at the front door of his house, sweating and breathing heavily.

He felt as though he was only able to catch his breath after the incident, a month later. Although he became unnaturally afraid of the place, Jim came around the same school again. Remembering his creeping up the sidewalk to the school later, he told himself that his only intention that day was to see the principal of the school, to beg for a job. It was easy to believe, to himself, that he was desperate enough to barge into the principle's office, begging for a job; he was feeling desperate enough to beg for a job; any job. When he got there, however, he found that the principle that already left for the day, leaving them with nothing to show for the whole day.

As he walked out of the building, he could not help but pay attention to the many kids streaming out of the school, running to meet their parents, their buses, their friends. He tensed a bit, thinking of the girl, wondering if she could, possibly, be one of the many snowsuit-clad children that poured past him. It was possible that she could see him as he stood there, watching them, and with her watching him.

Paranoid, Jim rushed back home, slamming himself inside his home. He tried to ignore any noise he heard from outside of the house, but he soon became aware of the sounds of children playing outside. As if hypnotically drawn to the noise, Jim pushed aside the shades covering the window by his couch, peering out onto the street beyond the ice-covered glass.

There were no girls playing in the snow, only small boys, varying in ages that were likely to be between six and twelve. A snowball fight took all of their attention, and none seemed aware of Jim watching them, or, at least, the danger posed from a man so intent on watching them.

The boy arrived late to the game, or he was trying to get around the group of boys to go somewhere, but either way, when he hollered at the boys, he attracted their violent attention. He was pelted with snowballs, then small blocks of filthy ice, which caused him to sink to his knees, yelling and crying.

Jim emerged from the house, not certain of what it was, exactly, he was doing, only that the boy's cries to stop were not being fulfilled by the other boys or by any adults that should have heard him by then and run out of their houses or cars to investigate his pitiful howling.

As the sound of the door permeated the chilly late-afternoon air, Jim managed to catch sight of the boys scuttling away, believing, rightfully so, that they had been caught in the act. The only one that remained in the street was the one who have been pelted with snow.

Jim hadn't gotten a close look at the boy from inside his house, but as he got a close enough look at the boy, a feeling of pity was deeply aroused in him. It was so cold that to even have the door open for those few moments as he stared at the boy was bitterly cold. The boy, caked in snow and ice, was dressed in clothes that looked, at best, to be clearly autumnal. Even from where he stood, a good distance from the boy, Jim could clearly see that he was shivering heavily, pitifully.

The sexually deviant thoughts were not what crossed his mind initially; pity struck him for the boy, and only increased as he got the chance to finally speak to him. The way the boy spoke, answering Jim, was bizarre, and at first, Jim figured that his way of speaking was a symptom of the cold. He managed to get out of the boy that he had been on his way to the town park, because he had been told to get out of the house by his father as soon as he had gotten home from school. Jim had asked the boy why his father had seemingly sent him out of the house wearing practically nothing that could cull the wind and snow that buffeted him, but the boy appeared to either have not heard him, or he was intent on ignoring his question.

Jim invited the boy inside, and was surprised to find that the boy seemed to have no qualms with entering a stranger's house. He let the boy, shutting the door behind him. As he turned into the house, he became aware of the fact that the boy was not completely normal; he seemed to have the mind of an infant and was curious about everything. On turning to face his living room, Jim found that the boy was completely fascinated by a wall compartment that Jim had filled with travel knick-knacks. At that moment he was holding one of the snow globes and shaking it furiously, without pause. The thought crossed Jim's mind that the boy simply had no interest in watching the little snow particles settle on the little city. Maybe he was interested in the purely chaotic aspect of the snowstorm.

Jim came over to the boy and rested his hand on the his freezing shoulder, and asked, him: “Do you want anything warm to drink or eat?”

The boy paused for a long while, answering by saying the name of something that Jim could not recognize. After a moment, he asked the boy if it would be alright if he just made some cocoa for them. The boy eagerly accepted, walking past Jim to turn on an ancient radio that Jim had once collected, and plopping down the ground in front of it.

Jim disappeared into the kitchen, and came out with a tray carrying two large mugs, a can of whipped cream, and found that the boy had been oddly complacent with listening to a series of long commercials, most of which spoke cheerily about the cold and about getting summer-hot deals.

Jim did not ask the boy if he would like the hot cocoa that he had prepared for him, but instead sat the hot mug down in front of where the boy sat, cross-legged on the ground. The boy did not react to Jim, instead wrapping his hands around what had to be a searing hot cup. He kept his hands touching the mug, ignoring the heat of the drink, or not even feeling any pain at all. Jim sat on the couch, wondering what he was planning on doing. He had his own cup of cocoa still sitting in the tray, but he did not want, particularly, to drink it. The idea of slugging down the far-too sweet, hot drink wasn't pleasant. Before he had invited the boy side, Jim had been comfortable in his gloom, watching It's a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Story, not caring that Christmas had been almost a month past. Jim had been complacent, completely complacent, with running on a seemingly endless spree of gloom, until the boy had appeared on the horizon of his world.

At some point, as Jim sat on the couch that his girlfriend had bought and had decided to leave behind, he was unable to keep his mind from off of the incident that was almost a month old. It had been something amazingly exhilarating, but he had never been as paranoid in all of his life as much as he had been in the last few weeks. Whenever he got the courage to, he would turn the television to the local news channel and look for any sign that the police may have been on the lookout for a rapist. How was there any way to know that she had not told anybody, that she would never bring his house down around his head?

The stress had been killing him; he had thought constantly about moving, going anywhere to escape the small town that seemed to swallow his life, and could, easily, swallow all of them. He was more frightened about the prospect of running away, wondering how far and for how long he would have to run before he could find a place to call home.

Why did he have to choose whether or not to leave the only home he'd ever known? He had made mistakes, many of them, but didn't his own society believe that, mistake or not, everybody deserved a new chance?

Jim reached over, and, on a whim, took a small sip of the hot chocolate. Looking over, Jim saw that the boy had quickly downed his own now-empty cup of hot chocolate, and was currently focusing all of his attention on the radio, watching it as though it was doing something visually stimulating. Jim waited, patiently, until a commercial break broke up the radio show, and then he reached down and pulled the boy up, murmuring to him, pulling him towards the bedroom.

Jim didn't know why he thought that the boy would have been hard to control, but he was pleased to find the boy could not have been more passive. The thought crossed Jim's mind that the boy may have experienced abuse once before, but he had to remind himself that the boy was more than likely not right in the head to begin with.

Afterwards, Jim did what he felt that he should have done with the girl. It was a powerful crescendo to end a stirring performance, and it seemed to perfectly couple with the experience. He had located a random, heavy object that had been in arm's reach, and had beat around the boy's head until a dull look came over the boy's wide, frightened eyes. The question of what to do with the body came later, as Jim laid on the ground of his bedroom floor until but need to toilet came over him, and he rose up to look at the mess he had left behind.

He hadn't asked for the boy's name. In retrospect, Jim regretted it. He was, after all, the last person that the boy was - could - talk to. The thought crossed his mind that the next time he would do it, he would remember to ask what his – or her - name was. He did not contradict this thought, but instead smiled a soft and secret smile.