Part 3
But me really being an actual supernatural creature? That initial seed was planted in my childhood in 1956....
My sister Gail and I were urchins in the first and second grades respectively, easy targets for older school bullies who terrorized us with, "The Boogie Man will get you! He'll slip into your bedrooms at night and steal you away!" (Gail took a dim view of me putting an arrow on the wall labeled, 'She's in the next bed.') One day, after being relentlessly teased and frightened by the big kids, we ran home to our mother, crying, "The Boogie Man's going to get us! The Boogie Man's going to get us!"
Mom quietly continued to wash the dishes in the kitchen sink. "No, he's not."
Gail protested, "But they said he was going to get us!"
Mom rinsed off the plates, a calm in this childhood storm. "The Boogie Man is not coming to get you. He never messes with relatives."
I howled, "But, Mom..." I then realized what she had just said. "Huh?"
"What?" my equally stunned sister gasped.
We were silent for the next five minutes, unable to think or talk. Mom savored the quiet like only a mother of noisy children could appreciate.
I finally asked, "We're related to the Boogie Man!?!"
"Uh-huh," Mom rinsed the pots and pans. "On your father's side. You remember. He sent us that ghastly green Christmas card last year. Good thing he lives back East or he'd always be dropping by for a visit. Scares the neighbors every time."
Gail and I stared at each other.
"Of course, there's more than one Boogie Man," Mom continued her chores without glancing up. "He's not like Santa Claus or anything like that. His assignment is the upper Northeast. Don't think he has the New York City area, though. That place is so horrifying by itself that it needs a Boogie Man of its own on-call twenty-four hours a day."
Gail wondered, "So another Boogie Man could get us?"
"Yea," I piped in. "A regional representative?" Dad was in radio management and sales so we knew about such things.
Mom drained the sink and wiped her hands. "Don't be ridiculous. That would be against union bylaws. Besides, when you each are old enough, being blood relations, you have the option of going into that end of the family business."
Gail pointed at me. "MARK could become a Boogie Man?"
"Thanks a lot," I sneered. Then I wickedly smiled at my sister. "Better be nice to me."
Mom explained, "They're now accepting Boogie Women as well. I believe Hawaii has one."
Gail grinned, "I like the beach."
"Yes, but you'd have to work nights. There are other occupations other than Boogie Man, you know." She sighed, "When I married your father, I had the opportunity to become a witch... but, instead, I became a housewife and the mother of you two."
My jaw dropped. "You could have been a witch?"
Mom shrugged her shoulders. "It would have never worked out. I could never get the hang of turning creatures into stone and I kept falling off the broomstick. Which reminds me. I have vacuuming to do." She then left us in the kitchen to continue her housework.
We thought about that for a while. Gail remarked, "That's probably why Mom & Dad sometimes call us 'little monsters'."
I nodded in agreement.
The following day at school, the bullies started in on us again but Gail and I repeated our mother's tale. That shut most of them up except for the tough Thomas kid. He didn't believe us. He wanted to hear more.
So we took him home after school.
Rather than denying the story, Mom pulled out her wedding album. Pointing to some shadowy character in the pictures' backgrounds, she explained that that was our family's Boogie Man. Whoever the guy really was, he was never in the foreground of the photographs... and he was always hiding his face. (Of course, if I looked like a cross between Nosferatu and a giant rat, I'd be camera shy, too.) "The Boogie Man's not his real name, naturally," Mom explained. "We can't reveal his true name since that incident with those children in New Jersey."
"Which children?" Thomas gasped.
"The dead ones," she evilly sighed. "You see, since Mark and Gail are related by blood, they are completely protected from the League of the Undead. No monster is allowed to harm them or those under their protection. In that way, they can still have friends and families of their own someday. One of the union benefits." Mom then stared at the boy in a way that made her eyelids seem to disappear. "Say, are you a friend of my children or THEIR ENEMY?"
The eight year old almost had a coronary. "Friend! I'm a friend!" Thomas stammered.
Mom slammed shut the wedding album in a dusty thunderclap! "Good! Should any of the League desire a child to devour, I'll tell them to pass you by."
Thomas nervously thanked Mom for her story & her compassion for sparing his life. Then he sped away so he wouldn't wet himself in our living room.
The next school day, Thomas spilt the beans. After that, everyone wanted to be our friend. Boy, did Gail and I milk the hell out of that for a few years.
As for that strange shadowy character in the wedding pictures? Gail and I never did find out the whole truth... but for a few more years we did receive ghastly designed Christmas cards from someone "Back East." Someone with a nasty scrawling signature that may have begun with the letter 'N'. Nigel, perhaps?
I later learned that the supernatural haunted the Corrington family in other delightful ways, everything from voided death certificates to Gypsy blessings to possibly being the tutors of the boy Brams Stoker based his famous tale upon. Again, stories best saved for another time. All I know is, when my Aunt Jane researched our family tree seeking nobility and royalty, she was aghast at what she discovered. She shook our family tree and monkeys fell out... as well as a few bats.
Let's just say that my affinity for vampires may be genetic as well... and let it go at that...
As for the Quantum Leap people, I called them. They initially didn't believed that my real last name was Corrington nor that I had been a vampire, professional, amateur or otherwise. So I sent them a couple of photographs of my artworks that were clearly affected by my parents' tales and my spooky family tree. Quantum Leap never returned my photos nor called me back. They might have thought I was going to sue them for using my family name (even though I found it quite flattering) or that I was going to fly into their executive producers' homes on my bat-like wings and drain them of their blood. The latter I would never do. Becoming a Boogie Man may be a future career option one day but becoming a Hollywood lawyer or agent? That low this formerly little monster will never go.
