by Ronald Malfi
We all groaned. Scott laughed.
“I’m gonna kill him,” said Michael, wiping his hands on his shirt.
“No sweat.” Peter shook Adrian’s crumbs into his own hand. Before popping those into his mouth, too, he looked around at the rest of us. “Unless you guys wanna pick more cards?”
“Just eat it,” I said, grinning.
Scott laughed harder.
Michael went back to the ladder. When he had finished unfolding it, I could see that he had been right—it would reach the window, no problem.
I helped him carry it over to the building. There were two brackets at the top, which were meant to hook over a windowsill. The window we were preparing to climb through had no sill—just a crumbling stone ledge. And to even refer to it as a window was giving it more credit than that inky black hole in the stone deserved.
It took us three tries to loop the brackets over the stone ledge, but we finally managed. Michael and I let go, and the ladder hung suspended three feet off the ground.
“I just realized something,” I said. “What do we do on the other side? Like, how do we get down when we’re in there?”
“Jump, I guess,” Michael said.
“I’d really rather not break my ankles today.”
“Maybe when you get to the top you can pull the ladder up and drop it through the window on the other side.”
“Me?”
“Huh?”
“You want me to do it?”
“Or whoever.” He looked over to Scott, Peter, and Adrian. “Who’s first?”
“We can draw cards again,” Peter said. “That worked out really well last time.”
“Shut up,” Scott told him. “I’ll go first.”
Adrian checked the flashlights to make sure they worked, then handed one to me. His fingers were grimy, the fingernails gnawed to nubs. He gave a second one to Scott, who clicked it on and off before sticking it into the waistband of his cargo shorts.
Peter stood at the bottom of the ladder, looking up. “Should one of us stay out here in case . . . Well, in case something happens?”
“Like if the roof caves in or if we’re all mercilessly butchered by the Piper?” Michael said.
“Either or,” said Peter.
“No, we all go in together. It has to be that way.” Adrian passed another flashlight to Peter.
Scott approached the ladder, shook it. It seemed sturdy enough. He lifted one long leg and set his foot on the first rung.
“Wait,” Michael said. “We need a war song. What did Jesus sing before going into battle?”
“You’re an idiot,” Scott said.
Michael scowled. “I don’t know that song.”
Peter lifted up his baggy T-shirt to expose the Walkman clipped to his belt. He dug the headphones out from the collar of his shirt and let them hang around his neck. He opened the Walkman, flipped the mix tape over, and reinserted it. “Whatever is on when I press Play, that’ll be our battle song.”
We all agreed.
Peter hit Play on the Walkman. Springsteen crackled through the headphones, belting out his immortal line—“Born down in a dead man’s town . . .”
“Well,” Michael said with a roll of his shoulders, “that can’t be a good sign, can it?”
Scott took off his Orioles hat and tossed it onto the ground. “Catch you guys on the flip side.”
“See you later, alligator,” Peter said.
“After a while, pedophile,” Scott said, and he began to climb.
We took a few steps back and watched him go. He was athletic and moved quickly, steadily, yet I wasn’t too comfortable with the way the ladder shook as he climbed. The rest of us weren’t nearly as lithe.
Scott reached the top without incident. He peered into the window, shining his flashlight inside.
“What do you see?” Adrian called up at him.
“It’s a mess. It looks like part of the ceiling collapsed.”
“Wonderful,” Peter muttered.
Scott swung one leg into the window and sat straddling it. “I don’t need the ladder to get down. There’s enough stuff for me to climb on.”
“Just don’t break your neck,” I shouted.
And just like that, Scott disappeared inside the building.
Peter patted Michael on the back and said, “You’re next.”
Michael took his switchblade from his pocket, popped it open, then held it between clenched teeth, pirate-style, as he climbed the ladder. He paused when he reached the top, peering into the black hole in the building. He said something to Scott, but I couldn’t hear Scott’s reply. Then he went inside.
Peter clicked off his Walkman, unhooked it from his waistband, and wound the headphones around it before setting it on the ground. His forehead was beaded with sweat, his reddish hair damp at the temples. “Give me a boost.”
I threw my shoulders against his buttocks and heaved him up so he was able to stand on the first rung. Bits of rock and broken pieces of mortar crumbled to the ground as the ladder thudded against the building. Peter ascended slowly, methodically.
“I wonder what we’ll find in there,” Adrian said.
“Only one way to find out,” I said, lacing my hands together so Adrian could step on them. I boosted him—he was much lighter than Peter—and he proceeded to scramble up the ladder more quickly than I would have thought him capable. At the top, he stared into the darkened window for perhaps a second. Then he climbed inside.
I was alone. Before joining my friends, I surveyed all our stuff strewn about the ground: Adrian’s backpack, the peanut butter crackers wrapper, Scott’s Orioles baseball cap, Peter’s Walkman and headphones. It struck me as a sort of portent. Like Adrian, Howie Holt had left his backpack behind. Tori Brubaker’s shoe had been found by the river. And of course there was Courtney Cole’s heart-shaped locket, dropped and forgotten in a culvert. Echoes of recent horrors.
I slipped the flashlight into the pocket of my shorts and climbed the ladder. It felt sturdier than it looked, which brought me some relief. When I got to the top, I gazed into the darkened aperture that had once been a window and waited for my eyes to adjust.
It was a large room with a high ceiling. There were zigzag rents in the ceiling through which daylight bled, casting zebra stripes along a floor so full of crumbled stone, heaps of grayish powder, and debris that it looked almost deliberately arranged. There were other windows around the perimeter of the ceiling, each one crisscrossed with iron bars. Vegetation nearly prehistoric in its appearance climbed the walls and looped around the ironwork over the crumbling window frames.
Flashlights moved around below. Someone shouted my name, but the echo distorted the voice, and I couldn’t tell who it was. Glancing over the sill, I saw a pyramid of crumbled stone arranged almost like a staircase leading from the window’s ledge straight down to the floor. I swung one leg over the ledge and stepped on the heap of stone. It was solid. I dragged my other leg in behind me and descended the sloping stairwell.
“You made it,” Adrian said, clapping me on the shoulder. His pale face was a checkerboard of light and shadow from the chutes of daylight that spilled down from the high windows. The lenses of his glasses glinted blue like the light cast by a black-and-white television set in a dark room.
It was oppressively hot and stank like sewage. Even the air felt corrupted by our trespass, and I was suddenly certain that no one—not even the Piper—had set foot inside this place in a long, long time.
“I was right, wasn’t I?” Peter said. “This would have been the gymnasium.”
Only its size alluded to that fact; otherwise, the room was a mausoleum, an Egyptian tomb deep beneath the desert, and looked nothing like Stanton School’s gymnasium.
“Check this out,” Scott said, waving me over. He trained his flashlight on a giant crater in the floor, large enough to swallow a compact car.
I approached the crater and peered down. Its walls looked to be made of stone, much like the interio
r of the drainage tunnel that ran under the highway, and it appeared ten or fifteen feet deep.
“That’s just like at the train depot,” Scott said. “Remember how Peter put his foot through the floor and it was hollow underneath?”
“I hope this whole place doesn’t come crumbling down while we’re in it,” I said.
Just then, Michael belted out, “Is anybody home?” at the top of his lungs, causing us all to jump. His voice resonated throughout the room and funneled down the adjoining corridors, loud enough to cause bits of pulverized stone to rain down from the ceiling.
I expected a tornado of bats to come flurrying out from one of the adjoining corridors, but nothing happened.
Peter slapped him on the back of the head and told him not to do that again.
The tumbling of rocks caused me to look across the ill-lit room where I saw Adrian’s flashlight wavering through the smoky dust-clouded atmosphere. “Hey,” I said. The enormity of the room amplified my voice and made it sound as if it were coming from many directions at once.
“The acoustics are funny in here,” Scott said, reading my mind.
I held up one arm to shield my eyes. “Where do we go? There’s a doorway over here.” I pointed.
“This way, too,” Scott said, pointing in the opposite direction.
They weren’t doorways, exactly—meaning, they were not geometric rectangles inlaid in the walls—but more like hasty cavities punched in the stone walls to accommodate passage. Tendrils of leafy vines hung over some of them.
Stomping over fallen rocks and mounds of crumbling white powder, we went over to one of the doorways. Ominous black sludge was packed against the walls where they met the floor, and it reeked as it baked in the humid, motionless air.
“Careful,” Peter said, gesturing to a spot on the floor directly in front of me.
I paused and, peering through the darkness and the settling dust, made out a second hole in the floor, this one a bit narrower than the one Scott had found but still wide enough to accommodate a particularly careless person.
“They’re all over.” He pointed out two more cracks in the foundation farther ahead.
My father’s voice surfaced in my head: Stay away from it. You and your friends go in there to play, you could get hurt. Or worse.
A vast labyrinthine corridor stretched out before us. Windows high up in the walls on one side painted white squares of light on the opposite wall. Many of the marble tiles buckled as if something large had disturbed them while tunneling beneath the floor.
To the right of the corridor, doorways with no doors stood every twenty or so feet. A shadow moved in one of the doorways, and I held my breath. The others must have seen it, too, because I could no longer hear them breathing, either. Scott flicked off his flashlight; I hadn’t even taken mine out of my pocket yet.
“Wait,” Peter said, taking a few hesitant steps forward. “It’s a tree moving in the breeze, that’s all.”
“A tree inside?” Michael said.
“Yeah. Come look. It’s growing right out of the floor.”
We approached the doorway, the loose and buckled tiles of the corridor shifting and sliding beneath our feet, and stared into the adjacent room. It was almost as large as the one Peter thought was the gymnasium and in similar disarray. Indeed, a spindly, unidentifiable tree sprouted through a chasm in the floor. It was leafless, and its bark was the pale whitish pink of a clam. The only sunlight that reached it came in through a fist-sized hole in the ceiling that was crisscrossed by a screen of vines.
Scott pointed his flashlight into the room. Adrian did likewise. There was nothing but forgotten emptiness in there.
I took my flashlight out of my pocket but in my nervousness dropped it. The sound it made when it struck the floor was akin to a dry branch cracking off a tree. I heard it roll away. “Shit.”
Scott tried to locate it with his flashlight, but the darkness had swallowed it whole.
Back in the corridor, the five of us went slowly down it, glancing in every ancient tomb-like room we passed.
“This is C Hall,” Peter said, pausing . . . then walking in a tight little circle so he could survey the corridor in its entirety. “See it? Structurally, it’s set up just like Stanton.”
“You’re right.” Scott directed his flashlight down the hall where another corridor crossed it. “That’s B Hall. Turn right and you go to the display case, the janitors’ closet, the classrooms that look out on the rear parking lot. Turn left, and you head toward the cafeteria, the lobby, Principal Unglesbee’s office.”
I turned around and looked at the opposite end of the corridor. “Then the library and the A Hall classrooms would be down there.”
“It’s so big,” Adrian said. There was a vein of defeat in his voice. “It’ll take us days to search this whole place. Weeks, maybe.”
At the end of the institute’s counterpart of C Hall, we crossed into a series of rooms that were joined by narrow chambers that weren’t exactly hallways but almost secretive passageways. They didn’t currently exist at our high school, though it was possible they had at one time but had been walled over during the renovation. If my bearings were correct, this was approximately where the science hall should be—Mr. Johnson’s classroom and lab and the rest. The ceiling was ribbed with iron struts, the material behind it resembling corrugated tin. What looked like blackened bits of cloth hung from some of the rafters.
I entered the room, beckoning the others to follow because I needed their flashlights even though bands of daylight filtered in through the barred and boarded-over windows. Massive oak desks had all been pushed against the farthest wall. They were terminal with rot and riddled with termite burrows. At the center of the room, undulating stone burst up from the tile like rocky hillocks on the surface of the moon.
We passed into the adjoining room. The silvery eyes of a possum were caught in the beam of my flashlight. It was a tremendous and beastly thing with fur like a matted old carpet, and it hissed at us with such venom I could see flicks of spittle spray out of its pointy, multi-toothed maw. Unlike the one Adrian and I had come across at the Werewolf House, this one turned and trundled through bits of fallen debris until it vanished into a hole in the wall. When I looked up, I spotted more bits of dark, oily cloth hanging from the ceiling joists.
In the next room, the walls had been blackened by the historic fire of 1958. One wall had been reduced to blackened rubble, and there were moist and reeking heaps of charred wood collected into Quonset-shaped dunes. Damage to the ceiling resulted in jagged cuts in the roof through which golden sunlight, intersected by a meshwork of tree branches and vines, spilled in sporadic fashion. Birds flitted in and out of the cracks and roosted in the ceiling struts. The pungent aroma of burned wood layered with the reek of decay was all I could smell: the memory of that fire was still in the walls.
As we went deeper into the connecting rooms, the damage done by the fire became more and more apparent. As did the ghostly aroma of smoke. That the smell of charred things could still haunt this place after almost fifty years was astounding. In another room, metal bed frames had been stacked against one wall. At first, the floor appeared to be covered by heaps of grayish snow, yet on closer scrutiny, I saw that it was actually soggy clumps of mattress stuffing that had been blackened by mold and left to rot. The smell made my stomach clench.
Adrian adjusted his glasses and cast his flashlight around the room, cracking open the dark and hidden places with the light. But there was nothing here so we kept moving.
At the end of the corridor, where a second hallway crossed it like a T, we glanced to the right. The floor was creased down the middle as if by an earthquake, the crease filled with all the debris that had slid into it from either side of the angled floor. Wires sprung like strange tropical plants from gaping wounds in the plaster.
To the left, I made out segmented indentations in the ceiling where light fixtures had probably once been. It looked like someone went berserk wi
th a sledgehammer on the floor, and mounds of some whitish chalky substance had been spilled on it.
“Those are bats, dude,” Michael said, craning his neck.
What looked like greasy pods were hanging from the high rafters, some of them nearly a foot long. There must have been two hundred of them.
“Holy shit,” Peter breathed.
Adrian tiptoed down the hallway. He aimed his flashlight on the floor, though he stared into the soupy black abyss that was the other end of the hallway. I moved to follow him.
Peter snagged a handful of my shirt. “This is stupid,” he whispered. “There’s no one here. We’re gonna get killed jerking around in this place.”
I watched Adrian disappear into one of the rooms. In an instant, the light from his flashlight was gone.
I looked at Scott and Michael. Scott appeared apprehensive; Michael was still staring at the bats hanging from the ceiling. “I don’t want rabies, man,” he intoned.
“There’s no one here,” Peter said again.
I turned and shouted down the hall, “Adrian!” My voice boomed like a cannon blast.
Adrian neither reappeared nor responded.
I shouted again, and some of the bats above our heads tittered and flexed their wings. The sound of their bodies rubbing together was like the crinkling of newspaper.
“Well, we can’t just leave him here.” I took the flashlight from Scott, then plodded down the hall. The fault line in the middle of the floor made walking difficult; I had to straddle the slanting tiles on either side of the crease to maintain my balance.
When I reached the room Adrian had disappeared into, it was pitch-black and, as far as I could tell, empty. For whatever stupid reason, I made a hissing sound, perhaps in an effort to call to him. I listened for movement but heard nothing.
I swiped Scott’s flashlight back and forth around the room. Showers. The tiles were black and the spigots looked grotesquely phallic. Opposite the shower stalls were rows of toilets, each one filthier than the next. Rats wove between exposed pipes, and a raccoon perched on a brick partition rose on its hind legs like a bear and released a high-pitched machine gun sound. At the opposite end of the room I discerned the black-on-black rectangular impression of another doorway and figured Adrian must have gone that way.
