Читать книгу Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Darkside - Brad Steiger - Страница 58

Peter told me that when he was a kid, eight or nine-years old, he was playing hide and seek with his cousins in their parents’ house. It was daylight, he emphasized. He was wide-awake and not dreaming.

Then, in Peter’s own words:

Islipped upstairs, thinking that maybe my younger cousins wouldn’t think to look for me on the second floor. I slid under the bed that was in the single room that occupied the guest room. Great! This was a fantastic hiding place!

After one of Brad Steiger’s international broadcasts on “The Bogey Man in the Closet at Night,” Eugenio, an artist from South America, sent Brad this imaginative drawing.

A few minutes later, I heard someone mount the stairs. I held my breath and listened. It wasn’t one of my cousins. The stairs creaked as if whoever was climbing them had some weight to him or her. This had to be an adult. Great, I assumed, I’d get in trouble now.

I followed the creaking sound as it grew louder. I couldn’t really see the stairs from where I was.

Lying quietly, I watched from my hiding place as two legs strode from the area of the stairs. They were clad in grey dress pants … but the feet were bare and c1awed … big, black claws … and covered with grey hair.

I think I forgot to breathe at that point. I heard a loud “sniffing” noise. I’m not sure where I got the courage to crane my neck and look up, but I did. And when I did, I saw what was very likely, the most unusual sight of my life—even until this day.

It wore a shirt and a bow tie, and its hands were hairy and clawed, just like its feet. And it had a wolf’s head! Swear to God. This thing, whatever it was, seemed to be the living, physical embodiment of “The Big Bad Wolf” from fairy tales. It stood, looming over the bed, and sniffed.

I bit my tongue, because I sure as heck knew what would happen if I screamed. I closed my eyes, tighter than I’d probably ever closed them before, and I prayed silently.

And when I opened them again, it was gone. I didn’t leave my hiding place for a long, long time. And when I finally did, I told no one about this, as I knew no one would believe me. So, here it is for the first time … I’m telling you.

I told Peter that he had shared a really great story. Off the top of my head, I had two thoughts for him to consider:

1 The entity probed your young mind and pulled out the image of the Big Bad Wolf from your knowledge of fairy tales and animated cartoons.

2 The entity, being of a horribly negative nature, may manifest in our dimension in a grotesque appearance. In this case, it manifested as a werewolf, a man wolf, yet with an offbeat touch—the bow tie.

Peter thanked me for my quick reply, and replied that he had given this incident a lot of thought over the years and he realized that there were some odd points:

1 It was an isolated incident (I didn’t spend my childhood seeing The Big Bad Wolf or any other fairy tale denizens, for that matter).

2 The entity certainly wasn’t what I pictured as a “werewolf” at that point in time. Aside from the clothing, this was like something out of the movie The Howling which wouldn’t be around for another decade or more. I’d guess my mental image of “werewolf” would have been of the Lon Chaney variety at that time in my life. So, whatever it was, it either simply looked like it really appeared to me, smashing bow-tie and all (yes, the bow-tie bothers me a tad, a bizarre little detail to say the least). Or, as you suggest, the creature pulled a “Big Bad Wolf” image from my own psyche.

3 If, in fact, it did pull information from my subconscious, that would indicate that it knew I was in the room. If it knew I was in the room, why did it act as if it didn’t? My take on this is it was simply, literally trying to scare the hell out of me. It did its job well, but I’m not certain I understand the reasoning behind this, unless it was feeding off of the fear I was projecting or some such pseudo-scientific babble.

4 I have also greatly pondered the creaking of the stairs and what seemed to be the entity physically coming into the room. Again, as a supernatural entity, it didn’t need to do this, unless, of course, it was building up my inner fear to, essentially, “milk all it could” from me. I don’t, for a second, assume this was something physical, even though it behaved as such.

5 What the heck was it doing in my cousins’ house? It’s not something that, as children, was discussed among us, it was simply “there,” in broad daylight, pretty darned bold for something akin to this thing, wouldn’t you say? And no one ever mentioned seeing anything like it later. Is it possible it was “just passing through”? (Of course, I never talked about it to anyone else, so I probably shouldn’t assume anyone else would have told me if they’d had similar experiences.)

6 It went away when I prayed. I believe my prayer was something very much like, “God, please make it go away… .” I don’t know if this is a significant point or not. Maybe it’d already done it’s duty and simply left when I had my eyes closed, not being affected by the “praying” that my eight-year-old brain could muster at all. But, at that point, I put a real significance on the fact that it was gone after I prayed.

Okay, here’s what I’ve come up with. Could this have literally been a “Boogie Man”?

I’ve considered this for years, what if this is what children fear when they’re in the dark or alone in an unfamiliar place. Maybe I’m getting a little too Stephen Kingish, but I’ve often wondered if what I saw wasn’t some sort of entity who’s assigned “job” was to frighten small humans. Aside from the “daylight” element of the encounter, it had all the earmarks of a classic bedroom night-visitor.