December Park

by Ronald Malfi

  “It sure would make it easier to abduct those kids if the Piper were walking around in a police uniform,” Michael said.

  “That’s scary,” said Adrian.

  Michael nodded. “Heck, yeah, it’s scary.”

  “But what do we do about it?” I asked.

  Peter scratched his chin. “Could you say something to your dad?”

  “What would I tell him? That a cop he obviously knows has been following us around? That Scott and Michael caught him going through our stuff in the woods—the woods where, by the way, I’m not even supposed to be hanging around?”

  “Come on,” Michael said, marching past Adrian. “We’ve only got two hours before curfew. We came here to check out the Patapsco Institute, so let’s do it.”

  It was like stepping into a rain forest. The late afternoon was muggy, and mosquitoes dive-bombed us with keen accuracy and devilish hunger. We trampled through kudzu and passed between curtains of reddish-green palms. Black-eyed Susans scrutinized us in their Cyclopean fashion, and, far above us in the treetops, birds and squirrels announced our trespass.

  Our little band continued through the woods just as the reality of what we were doing firmly seated itself in my chest like an iron spike. It had all started out as a game for us—Adrian had found a heart-shaped locket and we were going to find the Harting Farms child killer. But this was no longer a game. The Piper had continued snatching his victims, and we had continued pursuing him. Now, a heart-shaped locket, an iron fleur-de-lis, and the decapitated head of a concrete statue later, we were seeking out a half-sunken building among the cliffs at the edge of the woods. I was terribly certain that we were heading toward some ultimate showdown. The notion made me tremble.

  The trees soon parted, and then there it was: the old girls’ school, the abandoned institute. It looked every bit as intimidating and malignant as it had when I’d approached it as a little boy chasing after a balsa wood airplane. It still radiated that same dread and sense of premonitory danger I had gotten from it back then, too. As I stared at it, I felt my palms go clammy and my mouth go dry.

  On the most basic level, it hinted at a skeletal similarity to our high school. But beyond that it was its own prehistoric creature, its limestone skin the color of rotting pistachios intersected with jungle vines and bristling with hawks’ nests. Semicircular stone risers fronted the building, unruly tufts of sea grass and wildflowers burst through cracks in its foundation, and the ancient front doors—twin hubs made of cast iron and shrouded in the shade of a stone arcade—faced us. There were words engraved in the stone above the entranceway, but time and weather had dulled them to illegibility. On either side of the arcade, large holes had been punched into the masonry only to be sealed up by metal latticework and poured concrete. It took me a moment to realize these rough holes had been windows.

  It was as hideous and as powerful as the face of God staring at us.

  “Whoa,” Scott said, stopping in his tracks.

  “That’s one ugly fucking building,” Michael whispered.

  I pressed one hand against its dinosaur hide. The stone was cold and solid. There were striations resembling black ribbon that indicated where the fire had run rampant, and even all these years later, I thought I could still smell the smoke and smoldering timber, the charred flesh.

  “Guys!” Adrian shouted. He had disappeared around the side of the building. “Come look!”

  We followed his voice around one corner to find him staring at a stone ledge no more than three feet off the ground. On the ledge stood replicas of the stone statues that were in the Dead Woods clearing. Most of the heads were intact, the faces as stoic and expressionless as Greek busts. Farther down the ledge, the statues had fallen to the ground where they had broken to pieces and then been covered by underbrush. Some of their heads were missing.

  “This must be where that head came from,” Adrian said, walking around. “The one we found in the Werewolf House.”

  “What I’d really like to know is where that head is now,” Peter said.

  Scott studied the building. “Do you think there’s a way in?”

  “Not through those windows, that’s for sure,” Peter commented, gesturing at the series of barred portholes filled with concrete that ran the length of the building.

  “What about the doors?” Adrian suggested.

  We all went back around to the front of the building and down the short arcade to the doors. They were massive bestial things that reminded me of a medieval drawbridge. Each metal rivet in the frame was nearly the size of my fist. An industrial chain had been wound through the handles several times and was held tightly in place by a padlock. The keyhole in the lock’s faceplate looked large enough to accommodate a key roughly the size of a dinner fork.

  “Shoot,” Michael muttered. “If it had been a combo lock, I could have tried to pop the sucker.”

  The wind picked up and channeled through the rents and cavities and cracks in the frame of the building, and an eerie howl emanated around us. The sound caused the hairs on my arms to stand at attention. It was the same sonorous moan I’d heard when my airplane had gotten tangled in the trees. Back then, I had attributed the sound to a faceless ghost I had seen—or thought I had seen—flitting past a window. Older and wiser, I knew this sound was the wind fluting through the openings in the rock, yet this knowledge did little to assuage my discomfort.

  “I just remembered there’s an open window in the back,” I said. “At least it was when I was a kid.”

  “Why in the world would you come out here when you were a kid?” Michael asked.

  “I was flying a toy airplane.” I pointed through the thicket. “The woods end up there along a cliff that overlooks the bay.”

  As we walked to the back of the building, I kept catching glimpses of Stanton School in its façade—but those glimpses were like seeing fleeting sanity behind a crazy person’s eyes. This building was something else, something other.

  The rear of the building was overgrown in ivy. It looked deliberately camouflaged, and I was overcome by the unsettling notion that the building was an ancient and living thing that purposely hid itself from the rest of Harting Farms. It didn’t want to be found. It wasn’t part of our world.

  But yet it was.

  “There,” I said, pointing at a high window that was mostly overgrown with ivy. It was the black pit, the Cyclops eye I remembered from my youth.

  “If the interior is anything like Stanton,” Peter said, “then this would be where the gymnasium is.”

  Adrian came up beside him. “That window is pretty high. How are we supposed to reach it?”

  “We’re not,” Peter said. “That’s the point.”

  “That’s the only way in that I can see,” I said. “I wonder if the ivy is strong enough for handholds.”

  Adrian approached the building and grabbed a fistful of ivy. The leaves came away in his hand, revealing spaghetti-thin vines underneath. “Not a chance.”

  “That’s nothing,” Michael said. He juggled bits of stone that had probably come off one of the busted statues. “I can get us up there.”

  “Yeah?” Scott said. “How?”

  “My parents are freaks. They’re always worried I’m gonna get hit by a car, drown in the river, or die in a fire. I’ve got this fire-escape ladder in my bedroom in a box. We can hook it to the window and climb up.”

  Peter nodded. “That could work.”

  “Of course it’ll work. Why wouldn’t it? We can come back tomorrow when I get out of school.”

  “It’s getting late,” Peter said. “We should call it a night.”

  “I’m not going home,” Adrian said.

  “You have to,” I told him.

  “I don’t care about the stupid curfew. I want to go in there.”

  “We will. Just not tonight.”

  “I can feel it,” he said. “We’re at the end of it. Whatever we’ve been looking for is in there. I want to go in and find it.”
/>   “We will,” I said again. “Tomorrow.”

  “I want to find out what happened to those kids.” Adrian looked at me. There was a firmness to his face that I’d never seen before. “You guys go if you want, but I’m not going with you. I’m staying here. I’m going to find a way in.”

  I snagged his backpack off the ground. It was heavier than I’d expected. “We’re going home, man.”

  “No.”

  “We’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “No!” Adrian dropped to his knees and hung his head. I didn’t know what he was doing until I heard him release an agonized sob.

  We stared at him in utter amazement.

  “You guys don’t understand,” he bawled. “This is important! Do you think this is some kind of game?”

  “Hey, man,” Michael said, taking a step toward him. But he froze and said no more the second Adrian spun his head around to glare at him. His face was red, and slick tracks of tears spilled down his cheeks.

  Peter put a hand on Michael’s shoulder. “If the cops catch us out here after curfew, we’re in big trouble,” he said to Adrian. His voice was calm and reasonable. “We’ll all be grounded, and we can forget about coming back here for the rest of the summer. Do you understand?”

  “I won’t get grounded,” Adrian returned. “The cops can’t do anything to me.”

  Just as calmly as before, Peter said, “Then you’ll have to finish this on your own. But then you’re breaking your promise.”

  “What promise?”

  “The promise that we stick together, that we do this together.” His words were almost visible things that got caught in the air like flecks of dust in a spider’s web.

  I anticipated another hysterical outburst, but Adrian remained on his knees and stared at Peter in silence, his Adam’s apple jouncing each time he swallowed. He flexed his hands in the dirt and cleaved trenches in the soil.

  Adrian stood and brushed the dirt off his legs. He sniffled, then wiped his nose on his arm. When he looked at us, his grin was so unexpected it frightened me.

  “Okay,” he said in his small birdlike voice. He could have been ten years old as he shuffled over to me and took his backpack strap out of my hand. He worked his shoulders through the straps, a runner of snot glistening across his left cheek like the trail of slime left behind by a snail. “Let’s go home.”

  That night I dragged a folding chair out to the front porch and, with a book in my lap, kept watch over the Gardiner house. Adrian could fool the others but he didn’t fool me: I knew it wasn’t beyond him to sneak out and go back to the Patapsco Institute by himself.

  By ten o’clock, my grandmother came out and handed me a glass of iced tea. The night was still and hot, and the mosquitoes were having a field day.

  At eleven, my father’s unmarked sedan pulled into the driveway. He smiled resignedly at me as he clumped up the stairs and across the porch. “Doing some reading?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How was work?”

  “The usual,” I said, thinking of the cop who had followed me home. “How about you?”

  He laughed but there was no humor in it. “The usual,” he said, and went inside.

  Since our fight on the morning of July Fourth, a space had opened up between us. I had used Charles to hurt him, and it had been a much more lethal blow than I had recognized at the time.

  When midnight rolled around, my father appeared in the doorway and muttered, “Go to bed,” then retreated inside.

  I realized I’d been nodding off. Across the two yards, the Gardiner house looked as dark and empty as a satellite coasting through space.

  Chapter Thirty

  The Patapsco Institute (Part Two)

  At five thirty the following evening, the five of us met at the far end of December Park, where the chestnut trees flanked the footpaths and the swings moved in the warm breeze. Michael carried a large box by a plastic handle. On the box’s cover was a picture of a smiling family climbing down an aluminum ladder that hung from the windowsill.

  “Who smiles like that when they’re escaping from a window?” Scott asked.

  We had all our equipment with us—the walkie-talkies (fully charged), the flashlights, our pocketknives. Peter also had his Walkman, which he cranked up so we could listen to one of his mix tapes.

  Once more we entered the woods and climbed through the underbrush. I could feel the land gradually inclining as we went. Erosion had dumped old trees into dried-out ravines, their twisted roots like petrified boa constrictors. At one point, we saw a beehive nearly the size of a football hanging from a tree limb.

  As we drew closer to the Patapsco Institute, the quality of the air changed: it was possible to smell the salty, fishy scent of the Chesapeake Bay on the breeze. The day was blisteringly hot—that morning’s weather report put us in the high nineties—and by the time the old building appeared through the trees, my T-shirt was soaked and my hair was dripping water into my eyes.

  “Is it possible it looks even uglier today?” Michael said as he paused before the looming monstrosity.

  “I say the same thing about you every time I see you,” Peter said, switching off his Walkman. The sudden quiet lent an air of significance to the scene.

  “Hilarious,” Michael said, checking the bottoms of his shoes. “I think I stepped in something.”

  “I smell it, too,” said Adrian. He had his backpack on, which must have been tough to carry all this way. His brow glistened, and the front of his Superman T-shirt was dark with sweat. “I think it’s coming from in there.”

  As I walked around the building, I couldn’t take my eyes from it. When we passed the ledge of crumbling statues, they all seemed to be staring down at us, judging us. Or perhaps they were trying to warn us?

  Don’t start freaking out, I thought. Save it for tonight when I’m home, safe in bed.

  At the back of the building, Michael set his box on the ground and opened it.

  “That’s not gonna be tall enough,” I said.

  “It’ll be tall enough,” he said, unfolding the ladder out of the box.

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s for climbing out of two-story windows. I think it’ll do the trick.”

  “Unless your parents lied to you, and they were hoping you’d die tragically in a house fire,” Peter said.

  Without looking up, Michael shot Peter the bird.

  Adrian undid his backpack and let it drop to the earth. His respiration was wheezy. He took his glasses off and wiped the sweat from the lenses with his T-shirt. I saw that he still wore Courtney Cole’s locket around his neck.

  “This is crazy,” I said.

  Adrian looked at me. “You’re changing your mind?”

  “No. I’m just stating it for the record. I want to make it known.”

  “For what?”

  “For when we can’t get back out and we have to resort to eating each other,” I said. “I just want it stated that I think this is a lousy idea.”

  “You’ve said your part,” Scott said. He took a pack of peanut butter crackers from the pocket of his cargo shorts.

  When the cellophane crackled, Michael looked in his direction. “I just know you brought enough to share with the rest of the class.”

  “There’s only four crackers,” Scott said.

  “So who goes hungry?” Peter asked.

  “It should be Scott since he was holding out on us,” said Michael.

  It was Scott’s turn to flip the bird. “Screw you. You should have packed your own food.” Then he reached into his back pocket and pulled out his deck of Uno cards. “Four highest cards get the crackers,” he said, fanning the cards out.

  “What about the draw cards?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Peter. “Or the reverses and skips. How many points are those worth?”

  Scott considered, then said, “They’re all worth zero, except for the Draw Four. If someone pulls the Draw Four, they get all four crackers.”

&n
bsp; Peter nodded. “Ground rule double. Nice.”

  Scott turned the fan of cards in his direction. “You pick first.”

  Peter picked and came up with a green seven.

  Scott said, “Not bad,” then stepped over to Michael.

  Michael licked his fingertips, began to pull out one card, considered this, then tucked it back in. He pinched a second card between his fingers but did not slide it out from the deck.

  “Will you just pick?” Scott barked.

  Michael selected a red seven. He frowned at it. “What the fuck? I’m tied with Chubby Checker over here?”

  “Or I could knock your teeth out and you won’t have to worry about eating anything that isn’t through a straw,” Peter offered.

  Scott turned the deck toward me.

  I selected what turned out to be a green zero. “Perfect,” I muttered.

  “Welcome to Loserville, buddy,” Michael said, throwing an arm around my shoulders.

  Scott held the cards out to Adrian.

  Adrian picked a yellow draw card.

  “Zero points,” Michael shouted, pointing at Adrian’s card. “Eliminated. Ha!”

  “Grow up.” I shrugged his arm off my shoulders.

  “My pick,” Scott said, and he selected a card from the middle of the deck. He looked at it, frowned, then showed it to the rest of us: a blue zero.

  “So,” I said. “Three zeroes and these guys are tied with sevens. Who’re the four winners?”

  “I think me and Peter should get two each, since you guys didn’t get any points,” Michael said.

  “You’re a real altruist,” Scott said.

  “What is that, some kind of bird?”

  “It means all five of us share,” Peter suggested, handing his card back to Scott. “Just break ’em up into pieces.”

  Scott tucked the cards into his pocket, then looked down—somewhat mournfully, I imagined—at the pack of peanut butter crackers in his hands. He squeezed the crackers, reducing them to crumbs held together by stale brownish paste. Everyone held out their cupped palms, and Scott emptied a bit of the crackers into them.

  We all popped our handfuls into our mouths except Adrian; he just examined the heap of crumbs on his palm the way a botanist might scrutinize new plant life. “I can’t eat this,” he said finally. “I’m allergic to peanut butter.”