Down in the cellar, bathed in green light among the wine racks and the dartboard, the Bogeyman is in an abstruse rage. He hangs a mirror from the ceiling and tries on his murder garments: easy-wipe aprons, boo-masks, a skin-thin pink plastic rain mac.

One of the more flaccid theories about sensory disability proposes that the loss of one sense is ‘compensated’ for by the heightening of another. So although the Bogeyman hears not, I give his face a rash of extra noses. He sniffs to inhale everything through his numerous nostrils, particularly (since the audience generally encounter him in ones and twos), the giddying smell of fear.
He uses sink drainers to give himself insect vision and in between re-fixing his appearance to hone the victim-to-be’s horror, he performs Bogeyman tasks as if limbering up for a night’s mayhem. I give him bow legs and a nasty growl, proud to take my place among the illustrious company of monsters defined by crippledom.

He sharpens knives, fashions a cosh (filling a stocking with sand), and swings his shovel to smack all jiminy-hell out of a blanket-wrapped body on the floor.Then he looks again in the mirror, flicks the hair from his face and asks himself: ‘who’s a pretty boy then?’

* The Woodshed by Hayley Newman