| THE OUTHOUSE BOOGEYMAN |
Back in the summers when I was just a little boy, my pappy would
leave me and my brother for two weeks with my Grandpa Bill out
on the old homestead down near Apple Creak.
Grandpa was a do-it-yourselfer, but not very good at it. A leak in the
roof would often turn into a gaping hole. Squeaky brakes would
turn into a disassembled automobile. So it was no surprise that
when we were dropped at his front door that summer, we would
have to follow the sound of clanking and banging only to find
Grandpa standing in a puddle of water amid the strewn pipes and
fittings of his one and only bathroom.
“There was a drip,” Grandpa informed us.
The trip to Grandpa’s took for hours and Papa didn’t like to stop, so
you might sympathize with the fact that me and my little brother
MeMe had to go something desperate. (MeMe was actually two years
older than I was, but by the time I was five and he was seven, I was
taking care of him like he was my little brother.) Just like Papa,
Grandpa wasn’t one to stop midway through a task, so he directed us
around back to water his rose bushes.
MeMe wasn’t much for words, but the picking and the dancing he did
let Grandpa know that the problem couldn’t be resolved simply by
shaking the old twig. Grandpa thought about it for a moment.
“Well, there is the old outhouse backaways in the woods. I suppose
you could use that if you promise to be real careful about it.”
Me and my brother knew about the old outhouse, but we had always
been afraid to stray too deep into that part of the woods. .
Two years ago when we were out playing fort, a gray man with only
one tooth came out from the outhouse, smelling like peppermint and
rotten eggs. He made us follow him down to his friends under the
old bridge where the train tracks split from the creek. They asked
about Grandpa and if he had nice things we weren't supposed to
touch. And then the sheriff came and told them to move on and that
we were never supposed to play in those woods alone because
sometimes bad people road on those trains at night.
Grandpa said they were just hobos and meant no harm.
“Here’s what you do, MeMe,” he told my brother as he tossed him the
roll of toilet paper. “Snatch up a good stick on your way out
there…and what you do is you take that stick and before you sit
down, you stir it around in the hole real good.”
“Why does he have to do that?” I asked.
“He does that to make sure there ain’t no spider webs down there—
wouldn’t want him to get bit right between the cheeks on his first
day here.”
MeMe’s eyes widened at the prospect.
“You ain’t scared of no little spider, are you?”
We both shook our heads.
“Even if you were, there’d be nothing to fear anyway,” Grandpa said.
“They ain’t poisonous for miles, but…”—and with Grandpa there
always seemed to be a but—“if you’re stirring away with that stick,
and something crawls up and grabs onto the other end—just be sure
to let go!”
Grandpa saw the look of terror spreading across MeMe’s face, so
started creaking up off his knees…
“Suppose it’s best I chaperone you boys out there in case of rabid
possums or some such thing anyway,” and if that were the case, I
was secretly glad he was coming along, but just then water started
spraying up from the hole where the toilet bowl had been sitting,
and in a fit of panic and rage, Grandpa came at the gusher with a
hammer and wrench.
The old outhouse was rotting around the edges and the door handle
had clean fallen off. There was a crescent moon cut in the center of
the door, but it was too high for me to peer inside. Instead, I used the
stick I had found along the way to pry the door from a reasonably
safe distance. We hadn’t considered bringing a flashlight for the
task, but that was okay—MeMe had no intention of closing the door
behind him.
Grandpa was right about those spider webs. MeMe made me stir the
stick down in the hole to get rid of them, which was actually pretty
neat, because what came up out of that hole was a thick, sticky
cotton-candy ball of silk, and trapped inside that big, sticky ball—a
big, fat spider, its hairy legs twitching and struggling.
MeMe was singing, “Plop-plop, fizz-fizz,” which meant everything
was coming out all right, and I was tormenting that spider with a
pine needle, my fears of any boogeyman almost forgotten, when
MeMe suddenly came running from the outhouse straight at me,
pants around his ankles, toilet paper unfurling behind him, his face
locked in a pained grimace…
“Did you see it?” I cried. “Did you see it?”
In the end, it had been the biting flies that had driven him out.
By that next morning, Grandpa had gotten the inside bathroom fixed,
but he had other projects to work on, and at our age we would be
more in his way than not. “Why don’t you boys go out back and make
yourself useful finding frogs for our fishing trip day after
tomorrow,” Grandpa told us. “When you’re hungry enough, come
find me and we’ll scrounge up some lunch.”
Grandpa believed boys were better off left to their own devices,
adventure abounding in the great outdoors. There were never any
frogs to be found in Grandpa’s backyard and as for tomorrow’s
fishing trip, it would probably have to wait the day after the next
and the day after that until it was time to go home and we would
have to make plans for next summer. But we set about the task with
due diligence, buckets in hand to collect any frogs that might hop
our way.
The thing about MeMe was he was always scared at first, terrified of
anything new. Give his strange little brain a night to stew, though,
and he could work up an awful sort of curiosity, and with a full
breakfast in him, he would become stubbornly brave.
“It’s just a ghost story,” I kept telling MeMe, doing my best not to
believe, doing my best to find that stubborn courage MeMe somehow
always seemed to manage. “What would a boogeyman be doing living
in an outhouse anyway…maybe spiders, maybe snakes, maybe even
raccoons, but the boogeyman isn’t real. Everybody knows that!”
MeMe steeled himself by breaking a thick branch from the nearest
tree. He looked back at me to make sure I hadn’t run off and then
disappeared into the shadows of the outhouse, a mischievous smile
crossing his face as he turned back to peer into the pit.
All sorts of things were moving in the woods that very moment,
buzzing and humming and chirping and snapping, the sun rising
higher, bending away the shadows of the big old trees around me,
bathing me in heat and warmth…but all I could think of was the
darkness down below, and what waited to grab MeMe and snatch
him away.
And to where?
Boogeymen that lived in closets and under beds had to come from
some mystical, mysterious place, a byzantine underworld inhabited
by fantastical, monstrous creatures. Here, spiders and snakes
guarded the keep. Here, an outhouse boogeyman lurked and waited
possibly all winter for a little boy to finally approach. My mind
formed an incomplete picture of amorphous claws reaching up from
the depths, reaching up and—
My brother appeared in front of me: “Flash-flash, light-light.”
After lunch we snuck Grandpa’s storm-cellar flashlight, the one we
were never supposed to touch, and moved back out into the woods.
As we went, I clicked the flashlight on again, off again—flash-flash,
light-light—and my brother carefully selected and filled his pockets
with stones of the skipping and tossing variety.
We searched every inch of the bottom of that outhouse hole with the
flashlight. “See—I told you, MeMe! It’s just a regular old outhouse
like any other!”
MeMe wasn’t satisfied, so he began to throw those stones down,
trying to scare up whatever might have been ducking and fleeing
from Grandpa’s flashlight.
Each time, we would brace ourselves, ready to run, but each time,
the stone would harmlessly plink down.
“Maybe we can rig some sort of booby-trap,” I said. “I bet Grandpa
has some old rope in his garage.”
We got a few steps from the outhouse when we finally heard it—a
low, echoing moan…
“Feed me!
MeMe froze, petrified...and me, I just now noticed how full my
bladder had become.
“FFFFFEEEEEEDDDD MMMMEEEE!”
We both slowly turned, watched the door of the outhouse teeter on
its hinge… and then Grandpa jumped out from behind the outhouse
with a “Boogidie-Boogidie-BOO!”
“Grand-Grand, Pa-Pa!!!” MeMe yipped and charged at the old man.
Me? I’m just glad I didn’t wet myself...much.
“I thought I might find my storm-cellar flashlight out here,” Grandpa
said with a twinkle in his eye. “What were you two boys trying to
accomplish?”
As we walked back to the house, I explained everything to Grandpa
and expected the sort of scolding I got at home when me and MeMe
were up to no good.
“Boys just being boys,” Grandpa mused, “but you were, in fact, doing
it all wrong.” He leaned in close to whisper. “Everybody knows
boogeymen only come out at night.”
That night, I felt MeMe shake me awake. Somewhere in that half-
sleep I managed to tell him to get back down into his own bunk…
and to this day, I swear I heard him get back under the covers and
stir and sigh and start to breathe slower and slower…and to this
day, I still can’t recall ever hearing the pit-pat of feet on the floor, or
the door creaking open, the window in the upstairs hallway sliding
rickety in its old frame.
Or maybe I just don’t want to remember. When I woke that next
morning, though, MeMe was gone. Braved himself back out to the
outhouse, in the cold moonlight, was my guess. But the sheriff and
the search parties weren’t satisfied with my version of events, and
instead went about searching every corner of the county, running
drag lines across the bottom of the creek, walking hound dogs
through the fields and trees…
Me? I kept my vigil at the outhouse, stealing out there when nobody
was looking, listening, waiting, every chance I could…
It was only this summer, my seventeenth, ten years later, I thought I
heard him again out in those woods. The outhouse was long gone
now, collapsed to the elements, and my little brother’s voice was
merely a whisper in the wind…
Flash-flash…
Light-light…
The End
leave me and my brother for two weeks with my Grandpa Bill out
on the old homestead down near Apple Creak.
Grandpa was a do-it-yourselfer, but not very good at it. A leak in the
roof would often turn into a gaping hole. Squeaky brakes would
turn into a disassembled automobile. So it was no surprise that
when we were dropped at his front door that summer, we would
have to follow the sound of clanking and banging only to find
Grandpa standing in a puddle of water amid the strewn pipes and
fittings of his one and only bathroom.
“There was a drip,” Grandpa informed us.
The trip to Grandpa’s took for hours and Papa didn’t like to stop, so
you might sympathize with the fact that me and my little brother
MeMe had to go something desperate. (MeMe was actually two years
older than I was, but by the time I was five and he was seven, I was
taking care of him like he was my little brother.) Just like Papa,
Grandpa wasn’t one to stop midway through a task, so he directed us
around back to water his rose bushes.
MeMe wasn’t much for words, but the picking and the dancing he did
let Grandpa know that the problem couldn’t be resolved simply by
shaking the old twig. Grandpa thought about it for a moment.
“Well, there is the old outhouse backaways in the woods. I suppose
you could use that if you promise to be real careful about it.”
Me and my brother knew about the old outhouse, but we had always
been afraid to stray too deep into that part of the woods. .
Two years ago when we were out playing fort, a gray man with only
one tooth came out from the outhouse, smelling like peppermint and
rotten eggs. He made us follow him down to his friends under the
old bridge where the train tracks split from the creek. They asked
about Grandpa and if he had nice things we weren't supposed to
touch. And then the sheriff came and told them to move on and that
we were never supposed to play in those woods alone because
sometimes bad people road on those trains at night.
Grandpa said they were just hobos and meant no harm.
“Here’s what you do, MeMe,” he told my brother as he tossed him the
roll of toilet paper. “Snatch up a good stick on your way out
there…and what you do is you take that stick and before you sit
down, you stir it around in the hole real good.”
“Why does he have to do that?” I asked.
“He does that to make sure there ain’t no spider webs down there—
wouldn’t want him to get bit right between the cheeks on his first
day here.”
MeMe’s eyes widened at the prospect.
“You ain’t scared of no little spider, are you?”
We both shook our heads.
“Even if you were, there’d be nothing to fear anyway,” Grandpa said.
“They ain’t poisonous for miles, but…”—and with Grandpa there
always seemed to be a but—“if you’re stirring away with that stick,
and something crawls up and grabs onto the other end—just be sure
to let go!”
Grandpa saw the look of terror spreading across MeMe’s face, so
started creaking up off his knees…
“Suppose it’s best I chaperone you boys out there in case of rabid
possums or some such thing anyway,” and if that were the case, I
was secretly glad he was coming along, but just then water started
spraying up from the hole where the toilet bowl had been sitting,
and in a fit of panic and rage, Grandpa came at the gusher with a
hammer and wrench.
The old outhouse was rotting around the edges and the door handle
had clean fallen off. There was a crescent moon cut in the center of
the door, but it was too high for me to peer inside. Instead, I used the
stick I had found along the way to pry the door from a reasonably
safe distance. We hadn’t considered bringing a flashlight for the
task, but that was okay—MeMe had no intention of closing the door
behind him.
Grandpa was right about those spider webs. MeMe made me stir the
stick down in the hole to get rid of them, which was actually pretty
neat, because what came up out of that hole was a thick, sticky
cotton-candy ball of silk, and trapped inside that big, sticky ball—a
big, fat spider, its hairy legs twitching and struggling.
MeMe was singing, “Plop-plop, fizz-fizz,” which meant everything
was coming out all right, and I was tormenting that spider with a
pine needle, my fears of any boogeyman almost forgotten, when
MeMe suddenly came running from the outhouse straight at me,
pants around his ankles, toilet paper unfurling behind him, his face
locked in a pained grimace…
“Did you see it?” I cried. “Did you see it?”
In the end, it had been the biting flies that had driven him out.
By that next morning, Grandpa had gotten the inside bathroom fixed,
but he had other projects to work on, and at our age we would be
more in his way than not. “Why don’t you boys go out back and make
yourself useful finding frogs for our fishing trip day after
tomorrow,” Grandpa told us. “When you’re hungry enough, come
find me and we’ll scrounge up some lunch.”
Grandpa believed boys were better off left to their own devices,
adventure abounding in the great outdoors. There were never any
frogs to be found in Grandpa’s backyard and as for tomorrow’s
fishing trip, it would probably have to wait the day after the next
and the day after that until it was time to go home and we would
have to make plans for next summer. But we set about the task with
due diligence, buckets in hand to collect any frogs that might hop
our way.
The thing about MeMe was he was always scared at first, terrified of
anything new. Give his strange little brain a night to stew, though,
and he could work up an awful sort of curiosity, and with a full
breakfast in him, he would become stubbornly brave.
“It’s just a ghost story,” I kept telling MeMe, doing my best not to
believe, doing my best to find that stubborn courage MeMe somehow
always seemed to manage. “What would a boogeyman be doing living
in an outhouse anyway…maybe spiders, maybe snakes, maybe even
raccoons, but the boogeyman isn’t real. Everybody knows that!”
MeMe steeled himself by breaking a thick branch from the nearest
tree. He looked back at me to make sure I hadn’t run off and then
disappeared into the shadows of the outhouse, a mischievous smile
crossing his face as he turned back to peer into the pit.
All sorts of things were moving in the woods that very moment,
buzzing and humming and chirping and snapping, the sun rising
higher, bending away the shadows of the big old trees around me,
bathing me in heat and warmth…but all I could think of was the
darkness down below, and what waited to grab MeMe and snatch
him away.
And to where?
Boogeymen that lived in closets and under beds had to come from
some mystical, mysterious place, a byzantine underworld inhabited
by fantastical, monstrous creatures. Here, spiders and snakes
guarded the keep. Here, an outhouse boogeyman lurked and waited
possibly all winter for a little boy to finally approach. My mind
formed an incomplete picture of amorphous claws reaching up from
the depths, reaching up and—
My brother appeared in front of me: “Flash-flash, light-light.”
After lunch we snuck Grandpa’s storm-cellar flashlight, the one we
were never supposed to touch, and moved back out into the woods.
As we went, I clicked the flashlight on again, off again—flash-flash,
light-light—and my brother carefully selected and filled his pockets
with stones of the skipping and tossing variety.
We searched every inch of the bottom of that outhouse hole with the
flashlight. “See—I told you, MeMe! It’s just a regular old outhouse
like any other!”
MeMe wasn’t satisfied, so he began to throw those stones down,
trying to scare up whatever might have been ducking and fleeing
from Grandpa’s flashlight.
Each time, we would brace ourselves, ready to run, but each time,
the stone would harmlessly plink down.
“Maybe we can rig some sort of booby-trap,” I said. “I bet Grandpa
has some old rope in his garage.”
We got a few steps from the outhouse when we finally heard it—a
low, echoing moan…
“Feed me!
MeMe froze, petrified...and me, I just now noticed how full my
bladder had become.
“FFFFFEEEEEEDDDD MMMMEEEE!”
We both slowly turned, watched the door of the outhouse teeter on
its hinge… and then Grandpa jumped out from behind the outhouse
with a “Boogidie-Boogidie-BOO!”
“Grand-Grand, Pa-Pa!!!” MeMe yipped and charged at the old man.
Me? I’m just glad I didn’t wet myself...much.
“I thought I might find my storm-cellar flashlight out here,” Grandpa
said with a twinkle in his eye. “What were you two boys trying to
accomplish?”
As we walked back to the house, I explained everything to Grandpa
and expected the sort of scolding I got at home when me and MeMe
were up to no good.
“Boys just being boys,” Grandpa mused, “but you were, in fact, doing
it all wrong.” He leaned in close to whisper. “Everybody knows
boogeymen only come out at night.”
That night, I felt MeMe shake me awake. Somewhere in that half-
sleep I managed to tell him to get back down into his own bunk…
and to this day, I swear I heard him get back under the covers and
stir and sigh and start to breathe slower and slower…and to this
day, I still can’t recall ever hearing the pit-pat of feet on the floor, or
the door creaking open, the window in the upstairs hallway sliding
rickety in its old frame.
Or maybe I just don’t want to remember. When I woke that next
morning, though, MeMe was gone. Braved himself back out to the
outhouse, in the cold moonlight, was my guess. But the sheriff and
the search parties weren’t satisfied with my version of events, and
instead went about searching every corner of the county, running
drag lines across the bottom of the creek, walking hound dogs
through the fields and trees…
Me? I kept my vigil at the outhouse, stealing out there when nobody
was looking, listening, waiting, every chance I could…
It was only this summer, my seventeenth, ten years later, I thought I
heard him again out in those woods. The outhouse was long gone
now, collapsed to the elements, and my little brother’s voice was
merely a whisper in the wind…
Flash-flash…
Light-light…
The End
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
|
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
|
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
| |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |  |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
| |
|
Through the ghost story, we face our fear of the unknown. Whether when we circle the warmth and light of a campfire, passing these stories from one generation to the next, or when we huddle under blankets, the storm pounding against the window, wind through the trees, candles burning, lightning firing the sky, we find ourselves drawn to listen, compelled to believe... Something stirs, something rattles... And on these cool days growing ever shorter, autumn succumbing to cold winter sleep, somewhere there in that darkness we find ourselves facing that endless sleep coming for us all. . |