Elias hurled himself down the stairs, checking the bathroom and Selina's bed first, his bogeyman heart pounding like a drumband on parade, but Lowie was nowhere to be seen. The bright coat that should be hanging from the little-person-coatrack in the hall was gone and so where the froggy rain boots that used to be underneath. Bogs!

Bogs, bogs, bogs bogs bogs ...

Anger surged from his chest to his brain. He had an inkling where the young man was going and while cursing himself for having been blindsided by a seven-year-old, he grabbed the school's floor plan from the desk and hurried into the night.

Oh how he'd fly that young man back to his bed. No more nice bogeyman now. He'd scare him out of his wits. He'd scare him so bad, he'd never again dream of leaving his bed before morning.

Careful to stay out of the lamp light, he rushed to Lowie's school. The building sat quietly in the dark. The only thing out of the ordinary was the front door that was left ajar.

Elias slipped through and took a few turns in the darkness to orient himself, crumpled floor plan in hand. Offices to the left, a staircase up, a narrow hallway to the right. Off he went.

A scream made his nightmares tense.

Lowie!

As his nightmares rippled out in nervous waves, Elias raced through the hall without thinking.

A faint light seeped from a door. Could Lowie be in there?

The smell of bleach pricked his nose and the taste of fear tickled his taste buds.

A quiet sniffle sounded from behind the door.

"Lowie?"

He pushed inside, frantically looking for the boy but in the tick of darkness, amidst swirls of the darkest, most vile nightmares, a pair of piercing cold eyes was waiting. "What ..." a deep voice crooned, "is your worst fear?"

In his worst dreams, Elias had never imagined to be subjected to his own antics. Unprepared and with his guard down, he fell into another bogeyman's trap.

For a split second, his mind went blank, but then ... zap, Elias was in hell.

In a corner of the closet, between an industrial vacuum cleaner and a cardboard box with detergent, lay a small body. Lifeless.

He recognized the bright coat and froggy boots.

Lowie.

He rushed over but before he reached the boy, Selina popped up.

Still dressed in shrubs, her brown hair up in a functional bun, and her beautiful face lined with worry, she knelt down beside her kid. She wiped his floppy hair from his face and tried to wake him by shaking his shoulders. Her professional training and expertise kicked in swiftly. She took his pulse and dropped her ear to his mouth, checking his chest for movement.

Elias saw the moment in her eyes.

The moment where she realized her son was no longer breathing. Her hazel eyes breaking.

It was in that exact same moment that an unseen force squeezed the bogeyman's throat till the point he could no longer breathe.

He could no longer think.

He could only panic.

Selina desperately scanned the room while opening Lowie's coat. When she detected Elias, a flash of relief shortly loosened her tensed frame. "Elias, one, one, two! Call one, one, two!"

But Elias merely hovered in place, his body moving as through a jar of glue, barely moving at all.

"Elias! Get the AED and call 112! Elias!"

Her voice. The agony. The despair. Assaults on his heart and sanity.

She needed him. She needed him now.

And he was boggin useless.

"Selina?" Even his voice failed him, a pathetic croak of a sound not reaching beyond the length of his nose.

If only he could breathe, if only he could do something, but he could only watch.

Watch Selina's efforts to resuscitate her son. Breathing into his tiny mouth. Hunching over his fragile frame. Her palm on his breastbone. Pushing down methodically, probably breaking some ribs in the process.

And he knew. He knew that she knew.

Without the AED, without help, her best efforts wouldn't be enough.

So every once and again, when moving from chest to mouth and back, she called out to Elias. To boggin useless Elias.

And as time progressed and her movements lost vigor, the look in her eyes when she called him, changed.

Hope fizzed out and with it, her determination. Despair grew into disappointment and finally into loathing.

She finally broke down, ceased her efforts and cradled her son to her chest, rocking and sobbing.

Her sobs made him cry. He reached out to comfort her but as his crooked talons appeared into his view, his heart sank and his gut dropped. He was useless. He was  a monster.

She looked up and wiped her nose with the back of her hand, then stared directly into his soul. "You were supposed to watch him. Why weren't you watching him?"

"I was watching him ..." he wanted to start, but obviously that wasn't true. If he had been watching him, the way he was supposed to, they wouldn't be here, would they? So he remained silent while Selina hissed, "I hate you!"

He sagged to the floor, the invisible glue that surrounded him finally giving way. She hated him. Of course she hated him. He hated himself.

"That was delicious," a gruff voice said.

The room shifted and where Selina and Lowie had been, strings of ghouls, spiders, and velociraptors swirled around a pair of strikingly satisfied eyes. He was staring at a well-fed bogeyman in a janitor's closet.

What the bogs?

Where was Lowie, where was Selina, what just happened?

"Oh-oh," the bogeyman chuckled, his claws holding his belly, "here comes dessert."

With his renewed grasp on the situation, Elias could clearly see the stream of his fears leave his body, literally seeping from his every pore and float across the closet space into the bogeyman's opened mouth and fangs. Repeating scenarios of him searching but not finding Selina and her son, of Selina searching for her missing son, of finding Lowie dead, of Selina falling apart, of Selina realizing he had failed her ... of him failing her.

"Where are they?" he hissed, but the bogeyman didn't answer. The bogeyman threw his head back and sucked and gobbled some more.

"Stop doing that, pervert!" Elias yelled, the hypocrisy not lost on him.

He scrambled back up, reminding himself the fears were not real, probably not real.

Not real, boggit!

He wrapped his claws around the bogeyman's neck and squeezed. "Stop it! Now!"

The string of nightmares broke and evaporated. Elias seized the moment and flew the other bogeyman up against the wall while squeezing harder. "Where are they?"

Their eyes met and the other bogeyman snapped out of whatever trance or food coma he was in, for the first time actually looking at Elias, perhaps even seeing him.

Elias released pressure and let the monster have a moment to cough.

"Where are they?" he asked again.

"You look like me." Baffled, the other bogeyman stared at Elias' fanning nightmares and the claws hanging from his arms.

From his side, Elias studied the other bogeyman. The talons, the fangs, the icy, cold eyes ... like looking into a mirror. The stuff of nightmares surrounding the monster were not all that different from his own impressive collection, a bit thinner perhaps, hence the dark circles around the eyes and hollow cheeks. This bogeyman hadn't been feeding as long as Elias. With a sense of relief —or misguided pride— he noticed more physical differences. The other bogeyman's shoulders were scrawny and his eyes stood too close to his nose that was decidedly too puffy. Good.

"Sure," Elias bit back, "you're just a tad uglier. Now tell me, where's the boy?"