by Ronald Malfi
“I brought you some of those poems I wrote,” she said. “You know, if you still want to read them.”
“Yeah, I’d really like that.”
“You’re sure? Because you don’t have to. I’ll let you off the hook.”
“I want to.” And I meant it. I didn’t know anyone else who enjoyed writing. My friends complained if they had to write anything more substantial than a two-page book report.
“Okay. Here.” She gave me a few folded sheets of lined notebook paper. “Just promise not to laugh.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
Some lummox knocked into me with his shoulder, and I nearly crashed into the lockers. C Hall was ripe with assholes this afternoon.
Rachel laughed.
“Glad I could amuse you,” I said, stuffing her folded pieces of paper into the rear pocket of my blue jeans.
“So, I gotta run,” she said, backing down the hall. Her smile shook something inside me. “Have a good weekend, Angelo.”
“You, too,” I said and inadvertently took another shoulder to the chest.
Cutting across December Park, I surveyed the debris the storm had left in its wake—felled trees, lawns strewn with garbage, soil so saturated that it squelched with every footstep. It was like traversing a field of quicksand.
I kicked a Taco Bell cup until I reached the fence that separated the park grounds from the woods. The storm had ravaged the fence, plucking pickets out at random intervals and launching them like spears into the nearby trees. A glance at the mud revealed such random items as a license plate, a lone red rubber boot, busted terra-cotta pottery, a few cushions from someone’s outdoor furniture, and a deflated basketball that appeared to be frowning at me. I hopped the fence, my backpack thumping against my back and straining on my shoulders, and dashed into the trees.
Peter, Scott, and Adrian were in the clearing. The dynamo-powered radio was tuned to a classic rock station, and the air was haunted by recently smoked cigarettes. I could smell the stink from the sewers’ backwash, too; it hung in the air like a wet and fetid cloud.
Scott shouted my name from a perch in a tree. Below him, seated on one of the headless statues, Peter curled over a sketch pad. Inspired by Adrian’s artistic talent, Peter had taken to drawing his own doodles lately—mostly trucks with heavy artillery guns mounted on them.
Adrian sat in his usual spot—the opening in the bole of the tree—and scribbled furiously in his notebook. I saw that he still wore Courtney Cole’s heart-shaped locket around his neck on a length of shoelace. He barely looked up as I approached.
“Where’s Michael?”
“Detention,” Peter said. “He won’t be gracing us with his presence anytime soon.”
“What’d he do?”
“Got caught wiping boogers in Kiki Sullivan’s history book.”
I crossed the muddy clearing and sat down next to Peter on the headless statue. All around us was the sound of water dripping from the trees. The foliage looked overly green and heavy after the storm, the leaves bright and shiny, the boughs sagging from the force of the past days’ unrelenting rain. There was trash everywhere, washed down from the streets above and snared among the bushes and weeds. I spied a pair of boxer shorts flapping like a battlefield flag in one of the high branches of an oak tree.
Some of the trash couldn’t be attributed to the storm, however: five plastic shopping bags, filled with the random junk we had collected that day we trekked through the tunnel under the highway, sat in a mound between two of the headless statues. We had gone through the items, but we couldn’t discern any significance from them. In hindsight, traveling through the tunnel hadn’t been about finding clues; it had been about realizing someone could actually go from one side of the highway to the other while completely hidden underground.
“Check it out,” Peter said, tapping his pencil on his sketch pad and grinning.
“You’ve moved on to fighter planes with big guns,” I said, looking at his drawing.
“The big guns have little guns mounted on them. Pretty cool, huh?”
We lounged around for about an hour, pretty much just wasting time, when Scott shouted from his perch in the tree, “Hey! Someone’s coming!” He pointed at the trees. “Identify yourself!”
“Identify this, jack face,” Michael said, coming through the trees with his middle finger extended. He got caught up in a tangle of bushes, cursed, stumbled, then righted himself with one hand against the trunk of an oak tree. He stepped in a puddle of mud, splashing filth up the leg of his khakis. “Christ. It’s like a toilet down here.”
Scott scrambled down the tree, then clapped the loose bark from his hands. He had his Orioles baseball hat turned backward, and he wore what we referred to as his Oh Shit Shark Shirt, a T-shirt depicting a giant cartoon shark about to devour a tiny scuba diver whose little cartoon thought bubble proclaimed, “Oh, shit!”
“We weren’t expecting you today. You get time off for good behavior?” Peter asked, closing his sketch pad.
“Fuck it,” Michael said. “I snuck out.”
“You snuck out of detention?”
“I was bored.” He bent down and fiddled with the knobs on the radio. In freshly pressed slacks, a buttoned oxford shirt, braided belt, docksiders without socks, and his hair neatly parted as usual, he didn’t look like the type of person who would wipe boogers in Kiki Sullivan’s history textbook. Which was part of his charm.
“It’s detention, asshole,” Peter said. “It’s supposed to be boring.”
Michael located a station playing a Huey Lewis song, then grinned. “Besides, when I heard old Poindexter was sneaking out of class, I thought that was cause for celebration.”
“Your face is a cause for celebration,” Adrian said, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. There was a thumbprint of mud on the side of his face.
“Ha! Holy shit!” Michael cried. “Was that an insult? That’s great. I’m proud of you, man. Lousiest fucking insult I’ve ever heard, but goddamn, it’s the thought that counts, right?”
We all laughed. Even Adrian.
“Anyway, come here,” Michael said, waving him over. “I got somethin’ to tell you guys.”
Adrian closed his sketchbook, tucked it under one arm, and joined us on one of the headless statues.
Scott dug a can of Jolt from his backpack, popped the tab, downed a mouthful, and then passed it over to Peter.
“So I’m in detention with Tommy Orent,” Michael said. “We got to talking about the Piper and everything that’s been going on around town—”
“You didn’t tell him about the locket, did you?” Adrian said.
“Heck, no. Am I an idiot?”
“Well . . . ,” both Peter and I said at the same time. Michael kicked the can of Jolt out of Peter’s hand, which set Peter laughing.
“You guys wanna hear what I gotta say or what?”
“Go ahead,” Scott said, though he was smirking.
“So we get talking about the missing kids, and Tommy, he says, hey, you wanna hear something fucked up? And you know I always wanna hear something fucked up, so I say sure. He says he was friends with a kid from Glenrock named Jason Hughes. Mostly he said he just used Hughes for cigarettes, since Hughes had a fake ID and would buy cartons of smokes down at Lucky’s and sell ’em to his friends.”
Lucky’s was a sundries shop not far from the city limits, where Harting Farms ended and the depressive blue-collar community of Glenrock began. There were a few bars in that area, too, renown for attracting the lowest common denominators from Glenrock’s working class.
“Well, anyway, Orent says this kid Hughes took his money but never showed up with the smokes. This was back in June of last year, right? Orent figured Hughes would turn up eventually, and he wasn’t too pissed at first. But then he heard that Hughes had run away from home and he owed a bunch of other guys money, so Orent said he got real pissed. He thought Hughes had dicked him over.”
Scott said, “No
shit. I’d be pissed, too.”
Michael nodded. “But when those kids went missing in the fall, Orent says he started to wonder if Hughes really ran away. Like, maybe something bad happened to him.”
“How come this Hughes kid’s name hasn’t been in the papers with all the others?” I said.
“Don’t you pay attention? This was months before the Demorest kid disappeared, so no one was talking about the Piper yet, and everyone, including Hughes’s parents, figured he ran away, which he’d done a bunch of times before.”
“That would mean the Piper was in Glenrock before coming here,” Peter said.
“Or maybe the Piper got him when he was here in town,” I offered.
Michael shrugged. “I don’t know what the fuck it means, but it’s something, isn’t it?”
“How can we find out more about him?” Adrian asked.
Michael shrugged again.
“We can look him up in the newspapers,” Scott added. To Michael, he said, “You said this happened last June?”
“Yeah.”
“That should narrow it down.”
“But would there be a newspaper article on some kid who was thought to have just run away?” I said. “Especially if his disappearance happened months before any of the others here in town.”
“I don’t know,” Scott admitted, “but it couldn’t hurt to check and see.”
“You could ask your dad,” Adrian suggested, looking at me. “See if the local cops know about Hughes and if they consider him one of the Piper’s victims.”
“I could try,” I said.
Just then, a strong wind swooped into the woods, stripping leaves from the trees and blowing grit and pebbles into our eyes. Thunder rumbled directly overhead.
“Christ,” Michael said, gazing heavenward. In a matter of seconds the sky had gone from sunny and blue to rumbling and overcast.
Then the rain hit, a sound like gunfire rushing down through the trees. We all pulled our jackets over our heads and shrieked like girls.
Heavy thunder woke me in the middle of the night. I remained lying there and staring at the ceiling, listening to my locomotive heartbeat, fearful I might succumb to a heart attack if I didn’t force myself to calm down.
The filaments of my nightmare, though quickly fading, still pulsed inside my head. The dream had been a combination of memory and make-believe. It was of the time Charles and I had run relay races during a neighborhood field day in December Park. I had been seven or eight, but in the dream I was my current age. Also in real life I had pissed my pants in my nervousness while standing on the starting line with the other runners. I had run, come in last place, then hid behind some trees where I had cried, mortified. Charles had comforted me, telling me that sometimes he gets so scared about things that he cries, too, and it made me feel better.
Standing at the starting line in my dream and anticipating the starter’s pistol, a warm wetness spread through my crotch and down my legs. I looked up at the crowd of ogling onlookers, a dreadful sense of shame radiating from my face so that it actually burned, and tried to make out Charles’s face in the crowd. But Charles was not there.
The starter’s pistol went off, the report echoing in my head like the blast of a cannon, and the runners took off. I stumbled forward, my dream muscles as uncooperative as rusted machine parts. The other runners were far ahead of me, but I soon closed the distance despite my rusted legs. Flanking me on either side of the track, the spectators watched me in silent condemnation. I felt their burning stares firmly on my sodden crotch.
As I closed in on the runners, I realized they were corpses, and one of them was Courtney Cole, her head caved in on one side, her right eye milky and dead and turned outward toward the sky. The other runners were the missing children—Bethany Frost, her nude body blue and so skinny I could see every twist of vertebra, every xylophonic rib, the asteroid knobs of her knees and elbows; William Demorest, his colorless, featureless face leaking blackish gore that spewed across his boyish chest from what looked like a slender, proboscis-like appendage dangling from beneath his chin; Jeffrey Connor, his eye sockets wriggling with doughy white maggots and his decomposing flesh being ravaged by enormous horseflies.
There was the boy I knew to be Aaron Ransom, too, though he possessed no identifiable features. I ran up alongside him just as he turned and grinned at me. His face was nothing but a gleaming skull, bits of gray flesh still clinging to it in places. A number of teeth had been busted out. His nose was missing, leaving behind a dark, spongy cavern in his face. Only his eyes were alive—bright blue, leering, soul-searching, and terribly hideous in that fleshless skull.
Sweating beneath the blankets, I sat up in bed and propped open the nearest window to let some fresh air into my room. I imagined I saw a man standing in the yard, looking up at my bedroom window. His was the flimsy, insubstantial frame of a scarecrow, with tendrils of inky black hair whipping about in the wind. The longer I stared at the shape, the less it looked human. And after what must have been a full minute, I realized there was no one down there and my overworked imagination had created this stark character out of tree limbs and shadows.
Once my heartbeat returned to normal, I eased back down on my mattress and listened to the spring wind blow through the leaves of the trees in the yard.
Chapter Fifteen
Neighborhood Watch
After dinner a few nights later, my father called to me from the foyer where he stood by the front door tugging on a Windbreaker.
I saw the butt of his pistol poking out of the waistband of his jeans as I came up behind him. “Yeah?”
“You finish all your homework?”
“Yes. Are you going on another patrol?” It was his night to take part in the neighborhood watch.
“Just for an hour or so,” he said. “I thought you might want to take a ride with me.”
“Really? I sure would.”
My dad rubbed the nape of his neck. His were the weary, red-rimmed eyes of a bloodhound. Based on the noises I’d heard coming from his bedroom at night, I knew he hadn’t been sleeping. “Go grab a jacket. It’s chilly out.”
I raced upstairs, stripped a nylon Windbreaker from its hanger, drove my feet into a pair of Nikes, and a minute later followed my dad to his car in the driveway. The sedan started with a grumble. We backed out onto Worth Street, my dad turned left, and we coasted down the block toward the old rock quarry.
“How come we’re going down here?” I asked.
“Just checking up on all the quiet places,” said my dad.
Houses fell away, and the roadway narrowed as tree boughs stretched out toward the car. Through the windshield, wisps of clouds threaded in front of the full moon. When we reached the fences around the quarry, my dad turned on a side-mounted floodlight and panned its beam back and forth across the grounds. On the far side of the quarry, giant limestone monoliths looked like something on a lunar landscape.
“Hang tight a sec,” my dad said, leaning over my lap and opening the glove compartment. A flashlight rolled into his hand. He winked at me, then climbed out of the car. Clicking the flashlight on, he went over to the gates in the fence. The flashlight’s beam reflected off the large No Trespassing sign screwed into the fence. A large, rusted chain was knotted around the posts and secured with a padlock. My dad checked the lock by tugging on it. Seemingly satisfied, he returned to the car.
“Do you ever see anything when you’re out patrolling?” I asked.
“Not really. Usually teenagers getting into trouble. Nothing exciting.” He tucked the flashlight between the door and the driver’s seat, then turned the car around. We headed back up Worth Street. “Got a birthday coming up, huh?” His voice was low, resonant.
“Yeah,” I said. “I almost forgot.”
“Anything special you want to do?”
“Maybe we could go to The Wagon Wheel.” It was my favorite steak house in town.
“Don’t see why not.” He cracked the window to
get some air circulating in the car, then depressed the cigarette lighter under the dashboard. “Your English teacher left a message for me this afternoon. I’m gonna give him a call on Monday, but before I do, is there anything you want to tell me?”
“Oh.”
He took a cigarette from the breast pocket of his shirt and stuck it between his lips. When the lighter popped, he touched it to the tip of the cigarette. Bluish smoke whirled out the partially open window. “Something bad?”
“Well, no. Mr. Mattingly wants me to take Advanced Placement English next year.”
“Is that right?”
“I don’t think I’ll be able to cut it, but he seems to think so.”
“Why don’t you think you can cut it?”
“It’s mostly seniors in those classes.”
“Don’t you think you’re smart enough? You’re always reading. You’re a smart kid.”
“I guess.”
“Is it up to you? Your choice to take the class?”
“Yeah.”
“What will you do?”
“I told him to put my name in for it.”
He exhaled smoke out the window. “That’s good. I’m glad.”
We drove up Bessel Avenue past Aaron Ransom’s house. At the far end of the neighborhood, my father turned onto one of the wooded roads. He clicked the floodlight on, causing shadows to shift deep in the woods.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“Sure, pal.”
“My friends and I heard about this kid Jason Hughes from Glenrock, who went missing last summer. People thought he just ran away back then, but now some kids from school are thinking something might have happened to him.”
“So what’s the question?”
“Just that, well . . . is he part of all this, too?”
“All this?”
“You know—the Piper.”
My dad frowned. “Well, Glenrock isn’t our jurisdiction. But, no, we know nothing about this kid from Glenrock.”
“Do you think the killer’s from town?” I asked. “Like, has he lived here very long? Or are you guys looking for someone new, someone who just moved in around the time the murders started?” Michael’s theory still haunted me. I hated that my mind summoned Mr. Mattingly’s considerate face as I asked the question.
