Old Man Babay

When I was a kid, my folks intimidated me into my best behavior with a boogeyman called Babay. He was supposed to look like an old, twisted man with a cane and a sack that would take me away if I misbehaved. What made this little disciplinary measure very much effective was the fact that the creature was based on a homeless person in our neighborhood. A very creepy homeless person. We called him the Old Man. He was a short but stocky geezer dressed in rags, white strands of hair poked through his hood. He was missing a bunch of his teeth, and one of his eyes was completely wall-eyed, making him look like a chameleon.

He carried his sack everywhere he went, and no one ever knew what he had there. This man was what my nightmares were made of. See, when I was seven; I came face to face – eye to eye with the Old Man. Woke up to get a glass of water in the middle of the night and as I headed back to bed, I glimpsed at a figure standing by the window. Curious, I looked a little closer.

And I guess he noticed me, too. He shifted his gaze to me, and those fucked up eyes. Man, I pissed myself. I still remember the face of a hell-spawned ghoul staring back at me. All gray and wrinkled, missing teeth, random strands of hair. A malevolent shine in those misaligned eyes. One locked onto me as his smile widened, revealing a jigsaw of gums and yellowed teeth, and the other staring at something somewhere.

That face haunted me for years to come. He was harmless, as far as I know. I’ve heard rumors of him masturbating on street corners and whatnot, but I’ve seen nothing like that. No one ever complained about him doing anything either, but if he had an eerie presence looking like a zombie during the day, imagine what he looked like at that moment. In a child’s mind. He was death personified.

I kept myself as far as I could, from that man for years. I dreaded an encounter with the Old Man. As silly as it is, he became my real-life Babay, the boogeyman. Until I grew up and stopped believing in ghosts and monsters. I moved out and started my own family.

Years later, when my father celebrated his sixtieth birthday and I came back to my childhood home and came face to face with the Boogeyman again.

Once the party was over and everyone went to bed, I stayed awake. My head swept away in the nostalgia. Mentally reliving my childhood as I smoked my cigarette. Something moving in the dark brought on some less-than-pleasant memories.

See, my parents live on the corner of the street, right by the road, and it’s not the best-illuminated part of the street. Across from their house stands this ancient oak tree. Absolutely magnificent oak tree and as I was sitting there, smoking my cigarette, I saw a shadow of a person creeping up towards that tree. A familiar silhouette; Short and stocky, with a stick and a sack dragged behind it.

The Old Man…

I don’t even know what on earth I was thinking. I probably wasn’t thinking… in an act of alcohol-fueled bravado. Putting out my cigarette, I walked outside onto the porch. For whatever reason, I felt like I had to confront the boogeyman. So, I stood there on the porch, waiting for the silhouette to get any closer. To do something, maybe say something. I did not know what was going to happen. I was just standing there, eyes locked on that shadow in front of me. It probably locked its gaze on me too, and we stood there along with time. Just standing and staring like reflections of one another.

Even time seemed to slow down in this moment of eerie stillness. You could cut the tension with a knife. Finally, the shadow across the road broke from its stupor as its silhouette limped its way slowly toward me. I was getting almost excited at the thought of interacting with the Old Man, in a weird way.

The sudden appearance of two bright orbs tearing across the night cut my drunken giddiness short. A loud thunderclap and a sickening pop followed it. The shattering of glass and a moment of deafening tinnitus ringing like a sonic ghost in my ears. Lights began illuminating the interiors of the houses around me, and people started running outside.

There was a lot of screaming and panicking, but I just stood there, letting it all sink in. The flashing lights darted across space; the noise of an engine tearing through the nocturnal silence, the screeching of tires against unforgiving concrete, and the metal behemoth flying uncontrollably through the darkness.

By the time I finally processed that split second in which a can of metal flying at insane speed compressed itself against a tree dissecting a person in the process and turning half of their body into a finely ground paste the police and ambulances were all over the street.

I didn’t really pay attention to what had happened throughout the night. I was too busy trying to digest the moment in which I’d seen a person become sprayed paint on metal and wood. It was a sleepless night. Filled with unpleasant numbness and alertness at the same time. It all happened too fast to be processed and yet slowly enough to pick apart every detail. A night filled with brain fog.

Come morning, everything died down again, no pun intended. Three people had died that night, and I vaguely listened to the details of their identities. Still dealing with the mental image of a lethal collision stewing in my brain. After all, you get to see that kind of thing every day.

After the departure of the last police cars, I grabbed yet another smoke and walked out onto the porch again. Getting lost in my thoughts again, my gaze shifted to the wet grass in my parents’ yard. A patch of cloth peeking through the grass caught my eye. It wasn’t there last night, that’s for sure. I walked towards the cloth only to realize it was the Old Man’s sack. It must’ve flown all the way across the road when he got pulverized.

I didn’t want that thing in my parents’ yard, so hell-bent on getting rid of the sack, I picked it up by one of its edges and pulled it off the ground. I wish I’d grabbed it in any other way because once the sack left the ground, I nearly pissed myself once again; my eyes met the Old Man’s. One of his glossy eyes fixated on mine, while the other stared into dead space.

His decapitated head laying at my feet…