December Park

by Ronald Malfi

  In one second—He won’t come down here.

  In the next—I’ll fight him if he does. Even if he kills me in the end, I’ll hurt him and make him remember me for the rest of his miserable—

  The footsteps went back up the stairs.

  At first, I thought I’d misheard. But then I heard soft footfalls in the rear of the house. I heard the back door squeal. And although I didn’t hear it bang against its frame, I was overcome by the sensation of being sealed up, so I knew the door had closed.

  I shut my eyes and was powerless to move.

  Somehow, astoundingly, Adrian and I had fallen asleep. I awoke with a jolt, gripped by a nameless terror that only intensified when I realized I couldn’t see and that I was crouching in freezing water. Then it all rushed back to me.

  I was still gripping the flashlight with both hands, so I turned it on. A jittery milk-colored beam issued out across the cellar. The walls were exposed cinder block. The water we were crouching in looked so much like cocoa that I felt my stomach tighten up in revolt. What appeared to be disassembled machine parts leaned against the walls and hung from large iron hooks.

  I jabbed Adrian with an elbow. “Wake up.”

  His head jerked and slammed against the bottom of the stair. He rubbed his head, then looked around. “This water smells like poop.”

  “Congratulations. You win the prize.”

  “Are they gone?”

  “I think so.”

  “What time is it?”

  I checked my wristwatch with the flashlight. “Crap. It stopped working.” I shook my wrist. “There’s water in it.”

  “I can’t stay down here any longer. My muscles are sore, and the smell is making me nauseous.” Adrian climbed out from under the stairwell, his backpack spilling water like a sieve.

  I handed him the flashlight so I could climb out, too, and was instantly greeted with a tightening pain beginning from the base of my neck all the way down to my tailbone. It felt like someone had driven an iron rod through my spinal column.

  “Angie. Look.”

  Adrian had the flashlight trained on a series of large wooden crates that had been stacked against one cinder-block wall. They looked similar to the rabbit hutch out back. But it wasn’t the crates he wanted me to see. It was what sat on top of them, molded out of concrete, its features buffed to rudimentary suggestions. Where its neck should have been was just over two feet of rust-red pipe threaded like a screw.

  “Holy shit,” I said. “Do you know what this is?”

  Adrian’s voice was surprisingly calm. “One of the missing heads for the statues down in the woods.”

  The head was heavy but we got it out of there. I carried it up the stairs and through the house. Before we left, I paused to peer into the kitchen. The back wall of one cupboard had been blown out, and there was blood spattered all over the place, even on the ceiling. But the possum’s carcass was not in attendance, which could only suggest that Keener and his buddies had taken it with them. What had Falconette said before Keener pulled the trigger? Don’t take off its face. I wanna keep the jawbones.

  Outside, the afternoon looked gray and drawn-out. We walked through the woods, conscious of every snapping twig and falling acorn. When a flock of blackbirds burst from the ground and took to the treetops, both Adrian and I unleashed simultaneous cries. Then we laughed nervously.

  We took turns carrying the head out of the woods. Finally, when we could see the back of the Mathersons’ house, I unzipped my backpack and we stuffed the head inside it. We didn’t want anyone stopping us and asking us questions about where we’d been and what we’d found there.

  When Adrian saw that his mother’s car wasn’t in the driveway, he said, “My mom’s still at work. You can come over and we can put our clothes in the wash. Then we can get down to the woods with the statue head and wait for the guys to get out of school.”

  The Gardiners’ house was just as dark and unwelcoming as it had always been, but after spending however long cowering like mice in the basement of the Werewolf House, stepping inside was like being embraced by a loved one.

  Chapter Seventeen

  What Adrian Saw

  The concrete head we had found in the basement of the Werewolf House didn’t match any of the headless statues in the Dead Woods. For one thing, the head had a metal pipe jutting from it. All the bodies did, too. The corresponding body wouldn’t have a pipe but rather a hole for the pipe to fit in. It felt like we were overlooking something very simple, but no matter how we considered it, the head just did not belong.

  “So what does that mean?” Scott asked.

  “It means it belongs to some other statue,” I said. “There must be one we’re missing.”

  “What do we do with the head in the meantime?” Peter said. The head was on the ground, and he was rolling it back and forth with his foot.

  “We keep it here at Echo Base,” Adrian said. “This is our place. It’s protected.”

  “What the heck were you guys doing at the Werewolf House, anyway?” Peter asked.

  We told them about the fleurs-de-lis on the fence posts.

  We also told them about Keener. It was decided that we all lay low for a bit.

  The near confrontation with Keener left us shaky and nervous, and for the next several days, I glanced over my shoulder every time I stepped out of the house. This wasn’t paranoia—twice in the following week I’d seen Keener’s pickup idling at the end of Worth Street. After seventh period, we left school from the back doors. This way, we were able to avoid the main roads.

  It was necessary to keep away from the Dead Woods for a while, too, since we spotted Keener’s truck down there again toward the beginning of May. Adrian was unhappy about this—we were all unhappy about it—but to return to Echo Base so soon was to court further trouble. So instead, we killed the hours in someone’s basement, listening to music, watching TV, and playing board games until dusk beckoned us home.

  And spring ushered us closer to summer . . .

  I read Rachel’s poems and thought they were quite good. I told her so in class, and she seemed genuinely pleased. She asked if I had written any new stories. I told her that I had been thinking about it.

  (The truth was, I had been setting aside an hour each night before bed to hammer out fresh pages. I typed quickly but too hard, pecking at the keys with enough force to pop paper circles out of the O’s, which littered my desk like confetti. After just a few weeks, a sizable stack of typed manuscript pages had materialized on my desk, smelling of ink from the new typewriter ribbon. What began as a short story soon grew into something larger and more dangerous, and I wondered if I had unwittingly crossed into the precarious and intimidating territory of a novel.)

  My family and I piled into my dad’s unmarked police sedan and headed to The Wagon Wheel, the gaudy steak house where life-sized ceramic cattle grazed in the parking lot, for my birthday dinner. I had a fat, juicy sirloin with sweet potato fries and a milk shake for dessert.

  When we got back to the house, my grandmother placed one of her wonderful apple pies speared with sixteen candles on the kitchen table. We all had several pieces, dollops of vanilla ice cream on the side. My grandparents gave me some sweaters and slacks—“church clothes,” my grandmother called them, since she was constantly complaining that I dressed like a beggar—as well as a birthday card with fifty dollars flapping out of it like a party favor.

  My dad gave me a CD player and stereo, along with a bunch of CDs and paperbacks. The novels were cool—Stephen King, Peter Straub, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway—but the CDs were from groups I’d never heard of, groups my dad probably listened to when he was a kid. Nonetheless, I cracked them open and plugged the player into the wall. Soon we were eating birthday pie and listening to such mysterious groups as The Guess Who and The Lovin’ Spoonful.

  “Next gift,” my grandfather announced, kicking his chair back from the table, then disappearing down the hallway.

  “What gif
t?” my grandmother called after him. Shaking her head, she looked at me and said, half in jest, “I really think that old fool is losing his mind.”

  When my grandfather returned, he held his samurai sword horizontally in both hands. As I watched with widening awe, he set the sword on the table among the plates of uneaten pie crusts and mugs of steaming coffee.

  “No way,” I said.

  “Salvatore,” said my grandmother, “is that really such a good idea?”

  “The boy’s old enough. When I was his age, I was being shot at by the Japanee in the jungles.” As far as my grandfather was concerned, there was no s in Japanese. “No one said I was too young, did they? When the Japanee started shooting from the trees, they didn’t think I was too young, did they?”

  I looked at my dad to gauge his approval. His expression was one of resignation. He knew better than to argue with the whims of my grandfather, though it was obvious he disapproved of the gift.

  “Can I hold it?”

  “It’s yours, isn’t it?” said my grandfather. “But be careful with it.”

  It was heavy. I needed both hands to hold it. The prospect of wielding it and chopping things up with it like they did in the movies struck me as virtually impossible. Nevertheless, I was anxious to give it a try. “Can I go chop at the woodpile with it?”

  “Are you outta your head?” my grandfather barked. “That thing’s a goddamn priceless souvenir!”

  “Watch your language,” my grandmother scolded him.

  “A family heirloom,” my grandfather continued.

  “Not our family,” corrected my grandmother.

  “Go put it in your room,” my dad said evenly. He ran his thumb along the rim of his coffee mug. “Keep it under your bed for now. When I get a chance, we can hang it on your wall.”

  “Over my bed?” I asked, hopeful.

  “Lord,” commented my grandfather, stomping into the living room with an extra slice of pie. “The kid’s gonna decapitate himself.”

  On some random night, Adrian called me up. Living right next door, he’d never telephoned me before, so it took me a few moments to place his voice.

  “Why are you calling?” I said. “You wanna hang out, just come over.”

  “Can’t,” he said. “Doing a puzzle with Mom.”

  “So what’s up?”

  “Don’t freak out,” he said, “but I think there’s someone outside your house.”

  I thought I’d misheard him. “What?”

  “I thought I saw someone walk around the side of your house just two minutes ago. I went outside to take a look but I couldn’t see anything. And then my mom called me back in.”

  “Jesus. Was it Keener?” I went to our own kitchen windows and peered out onto the street. It was dark, and I could see no sign of Nathan Keener’s truck. However, had he the foresight to park at the end of the street, where the asphalt concluded at the fenced-in rock quarry, I wouldn’t have been able to see him.

  “I don’t think so,” Adrian said.

  “Okay. I’ll go check it out. Call me back if you see him again.”

  “Yeah, I will. Just be careful.”

  “Sure will.”

  I hung up, then went to the rear of the house. I saw nothing through the windows. The porch door squealed when I opened it. I swiped the wall for the light switch. The porch lights came on, illuminating the wicker chairs and a few feet of lawn near the porch. But beyond that, the world was a black and sightless void.

  “Somebody out here?” I called, and instantly felt foolish.

  I crept down the porch steps and out onto the lawn. It was a warm night, the air scented with honeysuckle and spruce. I went around to the side of the house where the big pin oaks brushed against the aluminum siding. Suddenly I was no longer thinking about Keener but the kids who’d disappeared. I remembered the dream I’d had and how I had woken and looked out my window where I had imagined—or thought I had imagined—a man standing in the yard, staring at my bedroom window.

  I went around to the front of the house. The light from the windows threw illumination on the lawn. The street was just as dark and empty as it had appeared from the kitchen window. Lights were on at the Gardiners’ house, and I thought I glimpsed Adrian’s round head silhouetted in one of the downstairs windows.

  I stood perfectly still and even held my breath while I surveyed the property. There were certainly enough places to hide, especially at night. Anyone could be out here. When a slight breeze rustled the trees, I tried to decipher human speech in the issuance but knew that I was only making shit up. Scaring myself.

  “Angelo!” My father’s voice echoed over the rooftop from the backyard. I heard the back porch door swing shut on its spring-loaded hinges. “Are you out here?”

  “Yeah,” I called. “I’m . . . I’m taking out the trash.”

  He said something unintelligible. Then the porch door squealed and slammed shut again. I heard his heavy footfalls through the house’s aluminum siding.

  There’s no one out here. Adrian’s eyes were playing tricks on him, and now my mind is playing tricks on me. The place is desolate.

  I was trying to convince myself. It wasn’t working.

  Shivering despite the warm night air, I dragged the trash cans down to the curb, then hurried inside, glancing over my shoulder as I went.

  Book Three

  The Piper’s Song

  (June 1994)

  From the Harting Farms Caller, June 2, 1994:

  Another Missing Child, Still No Leads

  Howard Matthew Holt, 13, was reported missing by his mother, Susan Holt, when the boy failed to return home from school yesterday afternoon. This is the most recent in a string of disappearances that have plagued Harting Farms since last autumn. Holt’s disappearance is the first since another local boy, Aaron Ransom, 15, went missing on New Year’s Eve and the body of Courtney Cole, also 15, was discovered in the woods by December Park last October. Previously, three other teenagers had disappeared from the city. No other bodies have been found.

  Holt, an eighth grader at Cape Middle School, was walking home with fellow classmates yesterday when he left the group to continue home on his own, according to other students.

  “There is no evidence of foul play,” Chief of Police Harold Barber said last night. “Right now, we are handling this as an unrelated incident.”

  Roger Dollins, an attorney and spokesperson for the Courtney Cole Memorial Charity, disagreed with Barber’s assessment. “It is naïve to think these disappearances are unrelated, particularly after what happened to Courtney,” Dollins said. “This is simply a case of local law enforcement turning a blind eye because they are ill-equipped to handle a situation of this magnitude. They have no leads.”

  “Instead of placing blame, we should remain vigilant as a community,” Chief Barber responded. “We are not ruling out the possibility of abduction at this point, but to assume these other children came to the same fate as Courtney Cole is irresponsible and presumptuous. No evidence exists to suggest this.”

  Nonetheless, county executives have expressed their displeasure with Barber’s handling of the situation, and parent groups are calling for Barber’s resignation.

  “I think it’s time the city bows out and allows federal investigators to take over,” Dollins said. “How many more children have to vanish before someone does something?”

  From the Harting Farms Caller, June 3, 1994:

  Holt Boy’s Backpack Found

  Police discovered the backpack of Howard Matthew Holt, 13, yesterday evening in the woods off Magothy Road in the section of Harting Farms known locally as the Cape. Holt was reported missing June 1 by his mother, Susan Holt, when the boy failed to return home from school.

  Police said the backpack was discovered after conducting a thorough search of the area surrounding Cape Middle School and the route Holt would have taken to walk home. Holt’s mother had informed police that it was a route her son had taken every day to and from sch
ool, usually with a group of his friends.

  “We spoke to a number of Howard’s friends who had been with him on June 1 when school let out,” explained Detective John Ebbett of the Harting Farms Police Department. “The consensus is that Holt went off on his own when he and his friends reached Muraco Street. Howard’s friends said he turned and walked up Magothy Road alone. That was the last time they saw him.”

  The backpack was discovered in a shallow section of woods beside Magothy Road in view of some tenements and a small park, police said. The backpack was searched, then sent to a laboratory for analysis. According to police, it is too early to determine if the backpack contains any evidence that would assist police in uncovering what has happened to the boy.

  A search continues for more evidence in the surrounding area.

  Chief of Police Harold Barber had no comment.

  From the Baltimore Sun, June 5, 1994 (Sunday edition):

  Child Abductions, Murder Plague Bayside Community

  Howard Matthew Holt, 13, of Harting Farms, Maryland, has been missing since June 1. Holt’s disappearance marks the sixth adolescent to vanish from the streets of the small bayside community since last August. Fears about a child predator were finally confirmed last October when the body of Harting Farms resident Courtney Cole, 15, was found bludgeoned to death in a wooded area off one of the city’s main thoroughfares. To date, no other bodies have been found.

  Harting Farms Chief of Police Harold C. Barber has stated that his department is looking into the possibility that these disappearances are related, although there exists no evidence to suggest they are.

  “The only thing that links all these cases,” Chief Barber said at a recent press conference in Baltimore, where he was rallying support from Baltimore County police, “is that the children have gone missing. We are exploring all avenues and aren’t ruling anything out.”