The Bogeyman by Steve Wade

Jamie was now in the bogeyman’s house. The bogeyman had a wife. And there was a boy. The boy was smaller than Jamie and crazy. He had long hair like a girl’s. Jamie had heard the boy laughing and talking to himself during the night. Jamie had been locked into a room next to the crazy boy’s. Morning time now, and the crazy boy wanted to play with him. He called Jamie by a different name: ‘Wiley’. But the bogeyman called him ‘Riley’.

 “Pa, Pa,” the boy called out. “Wiley won’t play diggers with me.” He ran out the door into the scary place where the bogeyman hid in the shadows. 

Through the open door came the cold. The cold had fangs. And the skeleton hanging in the porch rattled. 

“Riley,” the skeleton said. And Jamie felt in his tummy that feeling he sometimes got when he needed to go to the toilet. “Riley,” the skeleton said again, only this time it was the bogeyman stepping into the house. He spoke with the skeleton’s voice. 

It’s okay, son,” the bogeyman said. “No one is going to hurt you.” White hairs grew down from inside his nostrils.

Jamie grasped the curtain, and pulled it round him the way he often pulled his Dracula cape over his shoulders in his own house.     

“What are you doing, the two of you, to the frightened lamb?” he heard a woman’s voice go. The bogeyman’s wife: the woman who had spoken to him on the street when he was trick-or-treating - the woman who had taken him to the bogeyman’s car. 

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