Stephen King – Night Shift – The Boogeyman
THE BOOGEYMAN
‘I came to you because I want to tell my story,’ the man on Dr Harper’s couch was saying. The man was
Lester Billings from Waterbury, Connecticut. According to the history taken from Nurse Vickers, he
was twenty-eight, employed by an industrial firm in New York, divorced, and the father of three
children. All deceased.
‘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.’
Dr Harper turned on the tape recorder.
Billings lay straight as a yardstick on the couch, not giving it an inch of himself. His feet protruded
stiffly over the end. Picture of a man enduring necessary humiliation. His hands were folded corpselike
on his chest. His face was carefully set.. He looked at the plain white composition ceiling as if seeing
scenes and pictures played out there.
‘Do you mean you actually killed them, or -‘
‘No.’ Impatient flick of the hand. ‘But I was responsible. Denny in 1967. Shirl in 1971. And Andy this
year. I want to tell you about it.’
Dr Harper said nothing. He thought that Billings looked haggard and old. His hair was thinning, his
complexion sallow. His eyes held all the miserable secrets of whisky.
‘They were murdered, see? Only no one believes that. If they would, things would be all right.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Because
Billings broke off and darted up on his elbows, staring across the room. ‘What’s that?’ he barked. His
eyes had narrowed to black slots.
‘What’s what?’
‘That door.’
‘The closet,’ Dr Harper said. ‘Where I hang my coat and leave my overshoes.’
‘Open it. I want to see.’
Dr Harper got up wordlessly, crossed the room, and opened the closet. Inside, a tan raincoat hung on
one of four or five hangers. Beneath that was a pair of shiny goloshes. The New York Times had been
carefully tucked into one of them. That was all.
‘All right?’ Dr Harper said.
‘All right.’ Billings removed the props of his elbows and returned to his previous position.
‘You were saying,’ Dr Harper said as he went back to his chair, ‘that if the murder of your three children
could be proved, all your troubles would be over. Why is that?’
‘I’d go to jail,’ Billings said immediately. ‘For life. And you can see into all the rooms in a jail. All the
rooms.’ He smiled at nothing.
‘How were your children murdered?’
‘Don’t try to jerk it out of me!’
Billings twitched around and stared balefully at Harper.
‘I’ll tell you, don’t worry. I’m not one of your freaks strutting around and pretending to be Napoleon or
explaining that I got hooked on heroin because my mother didn’t love me. I know you won’t believe me.
I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. Just to tell will be enough.’
‘All right.’ Dr Harper got out his pipe.
‘I married Rita in 1965 – I was twenty-one and she was eighteen. She was pregnant. That was Denny.’
His lips twisted in a rubbery, frightening grin that was gone in a wink. ‘I had to leave college and get a
job, but I didn’t mind. I loved both of them. We were very happy.
‘Rita got pregnant just a little while after Denny was born, and Shirl came along in December of 1966.
Andy came in the summer of 1969, and Denny was already dead by then. Andy was an accident. That’s
what Rita said. She said sometimes that birth-control stuff doesn’t work. I think that it was more than
an accident. Children tie a man down, you know. Women like that, especially when the man is brighter
than they. Don’t you find that’s true?’
Harper grunted non-commitally.
‘It doesn’t matter, though. I loved him anyway.’ He said it almost vengefully, as if he had loved the
child to spite his wife.
‘Who killed the children?’ Harper asked.
‘The boogeyman,’ Lester Billings answered immediately. ‘The boogeyman killed them all. Just came
out of the closet and killed them.’ He twisted around and grinned. ‘You think I’m crazy, all right. It’s