by Matthew Tait
Yet nothing had quite prepared Dillion Cook for Providence Place.
They stood in the central courtyard, three former students, a former janitor, and one filmmaker from another state. Although an open area, the main courtyard was an oppressive square ringed by five other crumbling buildings. To their left, one of the school’s gyms; to their right, the canteen and kitchens.
To think … this place once played host to hundreds of frolicking children playing games of basketball.
The courtyard itself was unadulterated chaos. A massive waste receptacle, usually trundled in at the end of a school year, sat perched in the center like a marooned sea vessel. Inside lay all manner of detritus: moldering work desks, sporting equipment, and even whole sinks presumably ransacked from one of the restrooms. There were exercise books and ceiling fans, broken doors and entire closets. On a large mound of old-fashioned computer screens, something moved … and it took Dillion a moment to comprehend exactly what he was looking at: a large rat, fat with liveliness, stared at them fearlessly across the refuse.
‘Jesus H. Christ,’ Alyssa said. ‘Would you look at all this shit.’
Training his camera away from the trash, Dillion’s screen alighted on the third building walling the yard: a two-story edifice once supporting elementary school classrooms. Each level, both encased in filth and grime, were now a repository for even more flotsam and jetsam – things that would be deemed alien in any school: shopping carts and mobility walkers, rusted refrigerators and hulking air-conditioners. Jeff, seemingly hypnotized by these items, had wandered over to the stairs.
‘People have been using the school as a dump?’ he asked nobody. ‘Just how in God’s name did most of that stuff get up there?’
Dillion had no answer for this. Some of the objects (like the mammoth church bell) were placed on the balcony as if a giant’s hand had simply positioned it on the second floor. Too cumbersome to be transported by the staircase (or by other means immediately evident), Dillion could only surmise an industrial crane had done the work. Why anyone would desire such a thing for the bell’s final resting place was the biggest mystery of all.
‘Oh God, no.’
The voice belonged to Jason, who was standing with his back to them and inspecting the outdoor fish pond. Artificial and rectangular (a joint project of the middle school students), the communal pond had once housed common Shubunkins in addition to a variety of turtles. Or so Dillion had read. Though information regarding the school’s history was sometimes hard to come by, there were still a few websites devoted to unearthing its mysteries.
Carolina and Alyssa had joined him, and together they stood staring down into the pond as if the secrets of the universe were etched there.
‘What is it?’ Dillion asked.
His camera found the oddity first.
A solitary fish (one large Shubunkin) swam languidly in three feet of crystal clear water. Weeds, densely packed tendrils of them, floated their tips just above the surface. Dillion could even smell the malodorous stink of the pond itself: a gamey reek of sewage and groundwater.
Unconsciously stroking his tie, Jason said, ‘Somebody’s been here, cleaning this thing and keeping it functioning.’
‘And feeding the fish,’ Carolina added.
Through the screen of his iPhone, Dillion zoomed in on the lone inhabitant of the pond. Physically healthy, there could be little doubt the Shubunkin dined as regularly as the rat. Despite the ruinous state of the courtyard itself, animal life appeared to be thriving.
Bending down, Alyssa gently placed an index finger into the water.
‘Careful,’ Jason said. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Just testing is all. Seeing if it’s real.’
She stood back up, brought her nose to the tip of her finger. ‘What? Have you forgotten Providence Place has been branded a notorious hot spot for the supernatural? Isn’t this the main reason why we’re here? Who’s to say whether this pond is … natural.’
‘Good point,’ Dillion said, and then bent down himself. Although he didn’t deign to touch the water. ‘Everything here sure feels real. You can hear the gurgling sound of the pump beneath the reeds.’
Carolina said, ‘Lacking a few more residents, I bet this is just how the pond looked at its peak.’
No one replied, preferring instead to simply stare down at the water and frown. The sun, already obscured by low-level clouds, had finally dipped beyond the horizon. A grey soot stain had invaded the courtyard, transforming the already Cimmerian atmosphere bleaker still. For a moment, Dillion felt a pang of anxiety brought on by the sheer unknown that lay ahead. Of course, they had no permit to come here, and the grounds themselves were off limits to the public at large. Besides the four present, he had informed only one other person of his pet-project, preferring instead to keep the entire thing under wraps until he had some decent footage and paid for an appropriate domain name. What if something were to go wrong or one of them injured themselves traversing this muck? No insurance – and certainly no compensation policies –existed for a piddling production company dealing with the paranormal.
‘What’s wrong, Dillion?’ Alyssa asked. ‘You look lost.’
‘Nothing,’ he said. Standing up, he tried to project a calm assurance. ‘All of you – if you could walk over to the dumpster and stand in a horizontal line please. And … try to look serious.’
‘The money shot?’ said Jason.
‘I think that’s supposed to come later,’ Jeff answered.
Doing as instructed, all four gathered in a loose knot by the receptacle. Carolina, completely self-conscious now the camera was out, had taken to smoothing out her bulky flower-print dress with nervous energy. Jason’s eyes remained fixated on the southern end of the courtyard, their next stop and where the hidden chapel lay in wait.
Running his iPhone through a variety of apps, Dillion had managed to find an agreeable backdrop where decent light prevailed. ‘Alyssa, could you at least wait until we’re finished to light up please? I don’t want this looking like an advert for Lucky Strikes.’
‘And just what are you doing? Filming your whole project on a freaking iPhone? I bet you’re one those sad-sacks who camp out for days waiting for their next hit of tech.’
Taking a long, slow drag of her cigarette, Alyssa stared at Dillion as if mounting a challenge. Ever the pacifist, Dillion chose not to prompt her further. Let her smoke – he could work with that. It all added to the crestfallen quality of his cast.
When they were suitably lined up, Dillion spoke into his phone.
‘Thirteen years ago, unimaginable tragedy befell Providence Place – an upper-class Rhode Island school of over seven hundred fulltime students. A lone gunman opened fire on one of three chartered school buses as it pulled into the rear parking lot to drop off children. Four students died that day, all of them pupils under the age of fifteen. This was the catalyzing event that brought Providence Place into the mainstream consciousness. But what many people do not know is the calamity that day was only an epilogue in a long line of misfortunes … malevolent incidents that have been going on here ever since the original trustees met to establish the school in 1847. There have been accidents, and there have been suicides. In 1991, a high school junior, Carolina Gates made local headlines by claiming she was attacked while training for the upcoming state freestyle swimming championships. Alyssa Asterious’s encounter in the theater has also been well documented. Apparitions have always been a constant, everything from moving shadows in the corridors to the presence of unknown children who briefly appear only to disappear again.’
Sudden cackling broke the monologue, and Dillion looked away from the screen to find the drama student herself grinning into the camera. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, but continued to snigger, one hand clamped over her mouth. ‘It’s just that you sound like that guy who does those honest trailers.’
Dillion thumbed the camera off, barely managing to hold back a rising tide of anger. In the real
world, Alyssa Asterious was boisterous and opinionated; he’d garnered this insight and more after their first meeting together. But he had also paid her handsomely for her presence here; the least she could do was afford him some respect while filming.
‘If looks could kill,’ she said, grinding out what remained of her cigarette. ‘I apologize, okay? Just trying to cope with this situation in my own weird way. Please continue, Dillion.’
‘Forget it. I’m done for now anyway.’ Reaching down, he reclaimed his backpack and re-shouldered it. ‘It’s time for all of us to head over to the chapel.’
At the words his cast remained motionless, standing stupidly by the dumpster as if only now becoming aware of their true surroundings. Although full dark was still more than an hour away, their collective silhouettes were but charcoal smudges in the gloom, each individual incorporated perfectly with the debris behind them. Finally, as if awakening from a fugue state, the four silently made their way over to where Dillion waited.
Walking as one, they covered the rest of the distance to the chapel, one doorway among many into the greater heart of Providence Place.
Three
Caking the pews and festooning the carpet, mold grew like a strain of algae over every surface and wall of what had once been a place of worship.
Playing over the fungus, five separate flashlight beams illuminated a high ceiling festooned within a network of spider webs traversing biblical friezes. The church’s many pews (stadium-like stalls arching down diagonally to the main pulpit) formed a wide circumference of vandalized seat cushions whose stuffing lay exposed like disgorged innards. And littered among this stuffing: dozens of small, leather-bound books – what Dillion could only assume were decaying copies of the New Testament.
‘This isn’t how I remember it,’ Jason said from behind the group. The timid man stood well back in the shadows of the first foyer, holding one hand up to his nose as if to ward off the reek of mold.
‘Of course it isn’t how you remember it,’ Jeff said, and began traversing down one of the aisles to the center stage. ‘It’s gone to shit, just like everything else here.’
Dillion pointed his flashlight down in order to reveal an aisle’s narrow path. With each successive step he took, more of the chapel’s features swam into focus. At ground level, further spider webbing was evident, each frothy string like a lattice-work of vines connecting one aisle to another. The smell of the church – like a forgotten cellar only recently opened to the modern age – only intensified the closer he came to the lectern.
‘Look – the original Bible is still here,’ Jeff proclaimed. He’d already reached the pulpit itself, and stood behind the central dais, shining his torch down on the aged parchment of something more akin to a scroll. Inching forward, he blew dust from the surface of its pages. ‘Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on,’ he read aloud. ‘They will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.’
Alyssa had also found her way to the raised pulpit, stepping up to join Dillion at the same well-timed moment. ‘Well that’s just fitting, isn’t it?’ she said, shining her torch on the black mop of Jeff’s hair. ‘It’s been flipped open to Revelations all these years. I bet Father Parrington would have an orgasm seeing all of this – his promised apocalypse made flesh.’
‘How much do you remember?’ Dillion asked her. And (furtively so no one would notice), he casually removed his iPhone.
‘All of it,’ Alyssa replied flatly. ‘Mrs. Cowman was a fan of shuttling us through here every morning after homeroom. Morning prayers and then confession on Tuesdays. I was scared of this place; everyone was. Thought the holy water by the door would burn right through my hand like acid.’
The crunching sound of footsteps came from their right: Carolina. At the foot of her cheap black boots, a shallow pool of broken plaster lay heaped. She wasn’t looking at them, however – Dillion noticed her gaze trained steadily on the rafters above.
‘What?’ he asked. ‘What is it?’
‘Holy water didn’t frighten me,’ she replied. ‘That did.’
By a narrow beam of jerky torchlight, Carolina revealed a Christ-impaled crucifix fully seven feet in length. Attached slantwise to one of the upper rafters, the cross was a life-sized caricature intended to brood over the pulpit and visiting audience alike. The Nazarene’s face, usually one of mawkish serenity, was here instead a brutish countenance seeming to bristle with anger and judgement. Buttressed on a fierce cowlick, a crown of thorns pierced the side of his head in at least a dozen different places, welts that oozed a dripping morass of wine-dark blood. Though Dillion had known about the statue and had anticipated its survival, the sight of it now through their collective beams was enough to genuinely unnerve him. Not for the first time, he pondered the hypocrisy of the Christian faith – a system of belief that inwardly encouraged love yet outwardly projected the macabre.
Dillion said, ‘Father Parrington was the chaplain while you were a student?’
‘Yes, he was.’
It was Jason who answered the question, the man shuffling slowly down the center aisle like a ghost. Though his features were hard to discern, the suit he wore was not. Headless, it floated up through the murk as though it were a suit alone.
That’s Jason’s cue to unload, Dillion thought morbidly. Time for the man to give us one last confession.
Thumbing the record button, Dillion once more brought out his iPhone in full view of the others. Nobody objected when he took a lingering shot of each of them in turn before finally settling the camera on Jason. He stared back into the phone blearily, as if already exhausted by the night’s excursion.
‘Mr. Parrington was originally like a father to me, to all of us here in the church.’ For a brief moment he seemed to become acutely aware of Christ’s visage staring down at them. ‘There were five of us here back in 1989 – five altar boys under Father Parrington’s tutelage. I volunteered here whenever I could, anything was better than being at home with Ma. The school was sometimes strict, but after my dad died …’ Jason shook his head sadly. ‘Let’s just say being at home wasn’t a nice place for me to be.’
Dillion, already aware of this part of the tale, had made it apparent to Jason (and everyone else standing beside him), the crux of their stories would have to be divulged while filming within the school itself. Specifically, the very locale where things of a supernatural bent had transpired. While such a novel directing technique might be considered cruel for the storyteller, there was no other way to achieve what those in the business lovingly coined production value. This, and more, had been outlined in each individual contract. A contract all of them had willingly signed.
‘It seems so creepy these days, doesn’t it? Little boys running around and performing errands for old men who believed they were appointed by God? You have to understand, this was at the tail end of the eighties. Most of the high profile cases involving abuse had yet to come to light or were ongoing back then. It was –’
‘The same-old lame excuses,’ Alyssa interrupted. ‘It was a different era, everybody behaved differently back then.’
Dillion said, ‘Alyssa, please.’
‘It was a different era,’ Jason told her. ‘And we did do things differently back then. There was … innocence to our faith and duties. Nobody could have predicted what would happen to Father Parrington.’
Alyssa cackled. ‘You mean nobody could predict a celibate old man would lose his mind and go bat-shit crazy?’
Ignoring the gibe, Jason merely continued to stare into Dillion’s camera with a fixed attention. A mop of fringe, so blonde it sometimes appeared white, plastered his forehead in sweaty curls. After a while Dillion gave him a reassuring nod, his silent cue to proceed.
‘As head acolyte I did it all – acted as thurifer and carried the incense, poured wine during consecration, and rang the bell when I was called upon to do so. I participated in communion and sang in the choir. I even cleaned the rectory toilets on occasio
n. And for most of my tenure, Father Parrington conducted himself in the proper manner befitting a priest. But then one day during the term of lent …’
‘Ablutions,’ Jeff said from his position at the pulpit.
Jason was nodding vigorously, as if the word and practice were common knowledge. ‘Usually the act entails rinsing the hands first in wine and then in water. But sometimes it means washing parts of the body, typically the feet.’
Dillion thrust his camera back to the pulpit and gave Jeff a beseeching look, hoping the man could read his features in the waning light.
‘Word gets around in any school, Mr. Dillion,’ the old man said. ‘First it travels though the teachers’ lounge, and then sometimes it makes its way back to us. Teachers often get talkative with the help after hours.’
Tells of embarrassment had begun to show on Jason’s face. ‘Father Parrington … at first he requested some of the altar boys wash his feet before mass. I thought it was a little strange, of course, but my mother told me to press on with my duties, just said our Father was a traditional man; a conservative throwback to the old ways. Soon, he had us washing each other’s feet, the kind of routine that got some of older boys talking during recess. And he’d watch us while we did it, too … beaming at us from his couch and stroking his beard.’
‘Jesus wept,’ Alyssa muttered.
‘He had his favorite helpers for tasks, myself and another boy named Gifford. Working in tandem he made us wash his feet … and it wasn’t long before he requested other parts of his body, too.’
Swallowing hard, Dillion cleared his throat to make it heard above a whisper. ‘Would you say all of this was going on around the same time Father Parrington’s sermons were becoming … more erratic within the school?’