"Yesterday upon the stair I saw a man who wasn't there I saw him there again today. I wish to hell he'd go away" - Gregor Kesler "Mommy!" cried Bobby, tugging at his mother's big white pillow. "Come quick! I'm scared!"
"What?" was the best thirty-five year old Nancy Rogers could muster with a voice swathed in the deepest sleep.
"The bogeyman, Mommy! He's in my closet!"
"Ssh, Bobby," she said softly, propping her auburn head against a big cloud of white satin. Her son's voice reverberated like a wild drum in her ears. "There's no one there, darling," she said, stroking the child's curly dark head. "Daddy and I checked under the bed and in the closet last night before you went to bed. Remember?"
The six-year-old nodded tearfully. "Yes, Mommy, but he came back. Tell him to go away!"
Mrs. Rogers reluctantly peeled off the layers of satin coverlet, careful not to rouse her sleeping husband, Jim, who had gotten even less sleep than she over this "bogeyman affair." The clock radio on the end table seemed to shriek 4:02 AM in orange neon. A precious Sunday morning of sleep wasted on the bogeyman. She sighed heavily at the lesser joys of motherhood.
But Bobby was such a special little boy and had been conceived at great physical and emotional cost. A subsequent hysterectomy made him the only child Nancy Rogers would ever have. She and her husband, Jim, adored and doted on the precocious six-year-old. Still, in moments like these a few hours of sleep seemed an almost comparable commodity.
Outside, the rain tapped impatiently against the mullioned windows. It had been a wet winter, but as Jim said, it would bring a verdant spring. The thought almost made her smile. Always the optimist, he was. She on the other hand, couldn't afford a shred of brightness in her thinking. She had to deal with a bogeyman lurking somewhere in her child's bedroom.
"Okay, Bobby," murmured Mother, her small feet striking the delicate rose pattern of carpet with a soft thud. "Let's go see, but be quiet," she whispered, placing a well-manicured finger in front of her mouth. "We don't want to wake Daddy."
Two brass sconces bathed the long, narrow hallway in a soft pastel glow. Together mother and son walked under the twelve-foot ceiling and past the textured wallpaper down to Bobby's room. The Rogers family had been happy in this charming Victorian home set off from the main highway by woods so deep that they almost hid the property from view. Everything about the old house and its trappings held the enchantment of another era, long faded into time. No one wanted to move again, even though the doctors had strongly advised this last upheaval for Bobby and everyone else.
"A new start," they had said. "In a new neighborhood with a new school and new friends."
