The Boogeyman is a short story by Stephen King, one of my favorite authors, and can be found in his horror short story collection, Night Shift. I read this story late last night and it really freaked me out.
This story is of particular interest because it takes place in an psychological setting with the main characters being the client and and an analyst who he is seeing for the first time. The story opens on Lester Billings, a hyper-masculine chauvinistic protagonist, talking to a therapist saying, ”I came to you because I want to tell my story…I can’t go to a priest because I’m not a 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.” We come to find out that Lester did not actually murder his children, but he knows who the murderer is and the truth of it is much more frightening than infanticide.
The Boogeyman
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Lesters children have all died at very young ages(2-3 yrs old), all deemed as accidental, and/or crib death (old vernacular for SIDS). But Lester’s children were haunted by something that lives in the closet. The Boogeyman. It comes for them when the child is alone in their own room, they cry out and plead with their parents, but Lester wont hear it, and wont let his wife go help because he doesnt want his children to become “sissies”, “Spoiled”, and other hyper-masculine, Eisenhowerian Era notions of how to make children “independent.” When they find the first child dead Lester noticed something odd and says ‘The closet door was open. Not much. Just a crack. But I knew I left it shut, see.’ Each time the child tries to tell their father what is happening saying ‘Boogeyman, Daddy’. ‘Craws’ (claws). Even though neither parent has taught the child the word Boogeyman. After the events surrounding the death of the second child Lester is convinced there is something in the closet. A third child is born to the family,and the family moves. The boogeyman doesnt come for some time, but it does come. At first Lester tries to protect his child by keeping him in the same room. But It knows that Lester knows and starts to play mindgames with him:
You’d wake up at three in the morning and look into the dark and at first you’d say, “It’s only the clock.” But underneath it you could hear something moving in a stealthy way. But not too stealthy, because it wanted you to hear it. A slimy sliding sound like something from the kitchen drain. Or a clicking sound, like claws being dragged lightly over the staircase banister. And you’d close your eyes, knowing that hearing it was bad, but if you saw it.
‘And always you’d be afraid that the noises might stop for a little while, and then there would be a laugh right over your face and breath of air like stale cabbage on your face, and then hands on your throat.’
Lester, afraid for his own skin,moves the child into his own room knowing it ‘would go for him, see. Because he was weaker.’ Needless to say the Boogyman comes and in the most gut wrenching part of the story, before the monster comes and finishes its work the child cries out “The boogeyman, Daddy. . . boogeyman.wanna go wif Daddy, go wif Daddy.”‘ In the end Lester’s karma comes full circle, when the analyst is not who Lester thought he was.
This is an interesting horror story. The horror psychology in it is fascinating.The children are learning the word Boogeyman from somewhere, and since the parents aren’t telling it to them, that leaves only the monster to have given it to them. Why?
Lester is a protagonist that leaves a lot to be desired, and is not very likable, we feel both sorrow for his loss and loathing for his cowardice. Why didn’t he do something?
What do you think about these two questions?
I have two very young children, and I have often been awoken in the middle of the night with cries of fear from my two year old boy, and sometimes, with a hand pointed to the window, or a dark corner of the room, that word is on his lips: “Monster”. It never ceases to send chills down my spine.
I think what scares us the most about the boogeyman is the truth that come with it. We are all afraid of the dark. It’s True. We spend our whole lives convincing ourselves that there is nothing there, nothing to be afraid of. The truth is there is plenty of things out there in the dark to be afraid of. The truth is, the dark holds all of the unknown, all at once. Lovecraft himself said it best, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
I have never been comfortable with closets in the dark. My wife still thinks it’s funny that I shut all the closet doors at night. My biggest fear is that I will wake up in the middle of the night and find one open.Not much. Just a crack.
Horror Struck 