“Spare me the details. I really don’t want to hear about all this nonsense. Anyway, I don’t know a Boogeyman, but—“ Ulfric was laughing at Loki in the background. “But I can call my dad. He surely knows about that creepy stuff. In fact, he might give me a name and address.”
“Remember, I don’t want the best Boogeyman in town. The worse, the better,” Loki didn’t want to get scared. “And when am I going to meet your father?” Loki wondered, although it didn’t matter. Once he completed his job, he was going to leave town.
“Maybe if you’d bother going to school?” Lucy mused.
“As if you go to school.”
“You’re right. We’re all horrible. School is for dummies who study to go to Hell. Say what? I’ll call you in an hour,” Lucy hung up.
“One hour from now and we have our Boogeyman, recommended by Professor Rumpelstein himself,” Loki told Axel and fable, watching the sun about to sink.
“So, Fable,” Axel said. “Since you and Loki’s mom are friends like Cinderella and the Fairy Godmother, why exactly do we need a Boogeyman? I know we need him for the Baby Tears. I just don’t see how they’re related.”
“Boogeyman, Baby Tears, Hello?” Fable said slowly as if Axel was the dumbest person in the Cadillac. “What happens when babies cry? They shed tears! Who makes babies cry—an expert in scaring babies. Duh.”
***
It turned out to be true; they could actually hire a Boogeyman in Sorrow.
Loki drove his Cadillac, following the address Lucy had given him. The radio turned on by itself, and the Pumpkin Warriors played a song that went like this:
There's a big-bad-boogeyman dancing through our house.
He locks himself in the dark of a closet like a mouse.
And when you sleep, snore, and dream,
He’ll scare you silly until you scream.
Fable giggled as she heard the Pumpkin Warriors stop playing and argue that the singer sung the wrong lyrics to the song.
“It’s how Carmen works,” Loki explained. “She plays the songs she wants, and this band seems to be her favorite.”
“Wow,” Fable leaned forward from the backseat. “Can I talk to them?”
“Yes, you can,” a band player said. “So what’s on your mind?”
“I know another Boogeyman song,” she told the Pumpkin Warriors. “Better run away, better run away, pretty little maiden better run away. When the woods are black as night, that's the Boogeyman's delight. Better run away, better run away, pretty little maiden run away.”
“You like this one, boys?” the band member asked his fellow players. After a little discussion, he talked back to Fable. “Here’s the thing. We know you all think that this is the kind of Boogeyman everyone’s told you about, but our records here tell of something else entirely, so we’re going to stop playing until we get to know who the Boogeyman really is.”
Loki then drove to Nifelheim, an unusually vibrant neighborhood in Sorrow that Lucy had texted him about.
“Wow!” Axel’s eyes widened, wanting to reach for the fancy-looking girls walking on their way to the few clubs and bars in high heels. “I didn’t know that such a place existed in Sorrow. Hell on heels, baby!” he waved at the girls, kinda drooling. “The closest I’ve been to any girls that hot were on my desktop computer.
“This is very strange, Loki,” Fable said. “I don’t think this neighborhood ever existed before.”
Loki didn’t comment. He knew Fable and her brother didn’t get out much. How were they supposed to know about this place?
“You want to find the Boogeyman. You got to go to Boogie-town,” Loki frowned in the mirror at Fable. “Lucy said we should meet her here so we can hire a Boogeyman.”
“Why here?” Fable wondered. “I thought we’d find the Boogeyman in a cemetery, a dark place, or in a closet.”
“We are looking for a bar where Boogeymen spend their time when not working.”
Loki took a left at a street called Sackman Street. According to Lucy, we should find the bar here and she should be waiting for us. Do you want to guess its name, Fable?” There was no use to start a conversation with drooling-Axel at the moment. He kept on checking girls out and getting grinned at for his stalking eyes.
“Let me guess,” Fable leaned forward, resting her head on Loki’s shoulder. “Is it called The Scary Fairy Boogeyman Bar?”
“Noooo,” Loki circled his lips into an O. “That’s a really long name. It has two words and is a really efficient name. Makes you really think of a Boogeyman.”
“Boo Bar?” she tried to scare Loki in the mirror. He felt her booing breath on his neck.
“Nah,” Loki drove past the curb and parked the Cadillac, pointing at a purple neon sign flickering off and on. A big, tall bouncer stood next to the sign.
Fable read the sign, “The Closet?”
“Right to the point,” Loki said as he hit the breaks, giving his wheels a chance to squeak. “You want to hire a Boogeyman; you have to go talk to him in The Closet.”
“So clichéd,” Axel shook his head, finally giving up on the girls. “The Closet my—“
“Is there a specific Boogeyman in The Closet who will help us?” Fable asked.