December Park

by Ronald Malfi

  (statues)

  —stone.

  The man that was my grandfather only younger snatched a fistful of my shirt and thrust me toward a path that wound through the wet, dripping trees.

  My feet crashed through puddles and swampy pools of mud. Each foot felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. In my fury, I glanced down and saw I was clad in military boots that looked many sizes too big.

  We came onto a clearing studded with fragile-looking straw huts. A village. Embers smoldered in pits formed of white stone, and scraps of muddy clothing lay strewn around in the dirt. Upon closer scrutiny, I saw that those clothes weren’t caked in mud at all but blood and flecks of whitish tissue, and the white stones around the smoldering pits had eye sockets and teeth. Even in the dream, I felt my gorge rise.

  Behind us, the giant creature crashed through the trees in pursuit of us.

  —In there, said my grandfather, pointing to the nearest hut.

  I realized he wasn’t my grandfather but my dad. That explained why he looked like a younger version of my grandfather . . .

  My dad thumped me hard on the back. Go, he shouted.

  I ran across the clearing and ditched into the triangular cutout at the front of the nearest hut. Darkness engulfed me. I crouched in the stuffy, enclosed little space and stared out the opening before me. The camouflaged figure that had been my father/grandfather was nowhere to be seen.

  Beside me in the darkness: breathing.

  A vague silhouette of a human form, outlined in a shimmering nacreous light, hunched down beside me in the straw hut. I heard the figure’s respiration wheezing up through the narrow smokestack of his throat (for I knew this figure was male), smelled the fetid, almost fecal, pungency of the man’s unwashed flesh, the sour griminess of his breath. A hand much like the talon of a giant bird gripped me high up on the arm; fingernails like the hooked beak of a squid punctured my flesh, drawing blood.

  He was the Piper, the Harting Farms child killer. Panic bubbled up my throat, and I wanted to scream—to pull free of that talon-like claw and run the hell out of that hut. Yet outside, the enormous unseen creature had finally broached the clearing, its massive nostrils flaring as it attempted to sniff me out among the massacre of the villagers.

  —You will open a door, said the Piper. His voice sounded like gravel sliding around inside a cardboard box. You will open a door.

  I felt my skin tighten. In the dim light that spilled through the hut’s doorway, I watched the flesh of my exposed arms pucker and brown like paper in a fire. Sores appeared on the backs of my hands, oozing a yellowish, snot-like fluid. My fingernails thickened and turned opaque. When I examined my palms, they looked like the hands of an old wizard, a mummified Egyptian king.

  —You will crawl through, said the Piper, his grip on my upper arm tightening. I felt my own blood soaking down my arm and my ribs, plastering my tunic to my torso. You will find a tunnel, he said, and you will crawl through.

  An enormous shadow fell across the hut’s pyramid-shaped doorway. I heard the creature’s respiration, a sound like air being let out of tractor tires, and I could smell it just like I could smell the Piper, though it was a rotten fruity smell.

  As I peeked out the doorway, I saw a massive tri-toed foot plant itself into the blood-drenched soil, each toe roughly the size of a skateboard, each claw a hooked blade crested with spade-shaped growths that reminded me of the bony plates running along the back of a stegosaurus. In fact, had the foot been covered in scales I would have imagined it to be a dinosaur’s. As it was, the flesh of the tri-toed appendage looked like human skin, and I could discern the fat blue veins and arteries just beneath the skin’s surface.

  And I thought, There are no smells in dreams.

  The talon crushed the bone in my arm.

  There is no pain in—

  I shot upright in bed, my flesh burning up and nearly boiling the sweat on my body to steam. The filaments of the nightmare still clung to me. Clumsily, I pawed at my left arm, holding my breath until I was confident no one was gripping me there and drawing blood.

  A shadow passed across the window.

  I flipped the sheet off and practically spilled to the floor in my rush to the window. Pressing my nose against the glass, I looked down into the yard. Moonlight crisscrossed the black lawn, dripping between the interlocked limbs of the tall maples.

  There was a man standing in the yard. He was halfway hidden in absolute darkness, and I could make out only the tapered yet undeniable slide of an arm, the protrusion of one shoulder, and, planted in the summer grass, the shape of a foot. I held my breath, unable to pull my nose from the glass, unable to shout for my father. I knew that the moment I saw the figure move I would find my voice and shriek like a girl.

  But the figure never moved. I stared at it for such a long time the dark shapes began to lose their solidity, their realness. Things blurred into other things. The patches of moonlight turned everything into ghosts. There was no one down there. The remnants of my nightmare had caused me to see things. It fooled with my head. And despite my relief, sleep had a hard time reclaiming me.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Search Party

  Callibaugh, the proprietor and sole employee of Secondhand Thrift, was a foulmouthed old cur with three fingers missing from his right hand. Grizzled, barrel-chested Callibaugh was approximately my grandfather’s age and was a veteran of the Second World War. I wasn’t sure if Callibaugh was his first or last name, so I simply addressed him as “sir,” which seemed to please him the way not kicking a cat might please the cat.

  “Ah,” he said after I’d introduced myself. He was perched on a swiveling stool behind the front counter, one fat index finger bookmarking his place in a creased and dog-eared paperback novel with battling warships on the cover. “You’re Salvatore’s grandson, eh?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re looking for a summer job?”

  “Yes.”

  Callibaugh waved one hand across the space between us. “Look around, son. What’s the first thing that comes to your mind?”

  In fact, two things came to my mind. One, that the store was in absolute shambles, with junk piled ceiling high in spots while random items hung off shelves and lay scattered about in incongruous heaps on the linoleum floor. And two, that he and I were the only two living creatures in the place, with the possible exception of the rodents that had left behind a Morse code trail of black turds along one baseboard.

  But I said neither of these things. Instead, I surveyed the cluttered, schizophrenic amassment of junk with feigned contemplation before turning back to the proprietor. “It must be hard to remember where any specific thing is.”

  “Yes,” Callibaugh said. He possessed the voice of a 1930s radio announcer, though one who had spent a lifetime sucking on unfiltered Camels. “I have no charts. I have no inventory. Do you know how this place started?”

  I shook my head.

  “I wanted to have a garage sale but don’t actually own a garage. It started with one old man’s lifetime of accumulation that, I suppose, at one point served a purpose and had a meaning but no longer does. The accumulation, I mean. Not the old man’s life.”

  He set his book down on the countertop. “Walk around the store. Smell the place. Get a feel for it. See what junk pops out at you. If you work here, all this stuff will be yours until someone comes along and buys it out from under you. It’s important that you think of it in that way.”

  “Is there an application or something I should fill out, too?”

  Callibaugh’s laugh was as sharp and as brief as the report from a pistol. “Application,” he croaked, phlegm rattling deep down in his throat. “That’s rich.”

  Somewhat bewildered, I turned away from the counter and proceeded to walk up and down the aisles. As I’d first gleaned, there was no rhyme or reason for how the items were placed on shelves—old textbooks slid into videogame cartridges which leaned against bags of potting soil which sat up
on scruffy pairs of cleated sneakers. The only orderliness seemed to be in the way all the larger items had been shoved toward the back of the store. Sofas and love seats were packed against scuffed pieces of furniture. An old upright piano, its keys gray and furry with dust, slouched in one corner. I pressed one of the keys, only to be rewarded with a metallic and unmelodious clunking sound.

  After I’d wasted what seemed like an obligatory amount of time wandering around, I returned to the counter where Callibaugh still sat on his swiveling stool, the open paperback mere inches from his face. When he didn’t set the book down, I made a show of clearing my throat, then offered him a guiltless smile when he peered at me over his book.

  “Well?” he rasped loudly. “What say you?”

  “It’s, uh . . . neat,” was the best I could come up with. Some wordsmith was I.

  “It’s a war zone. It’s a sunken ship at the bottom of the sea. It’s a goddamned space station on the dark side of the moon.” The book rose to cover his eyes again. “You can start on Monday.”

  That afternoon, with Michael’s parents having gone into Ellicott City for a day of antique shopping, the four of us gathered on the Sugarlands’ screened-in back porch to discuss what we should do about Adrian’s mysterious disappearance.

  Though not nearly as creepy as Adrian’s house, the Sugarlands’ home was a cold and eerie museum, spotless and regal like a European church. Michael’s father was a lawyer, his mother a college professor, and to look upon their house one might surmise that the Sugarlands had never had any intention of having children. The few times I’d witnessed the Sugarland family together, their formality with one another bordered on palpable discomfort, like strangers trapped in a stalled elevator forced to make conversation. Even Michael, who was normally a live rocket ready to blast off into space when hanging out with his friends or among our peers at school, appeared uncharacteristically reserved in the company of his parents. I often theorized that his acting out at school was the equivalent of a valve letting off steam to prevent a systemic meltdown.

  After returning home from what passed as a job interview with Callibaugh, I had gone up the walk to the Gardiners’ front door and knocked loudly. The car wasn’t in the driveway, and I knew Adrian’s mom worked on weekdays, so I had no concern that she would answer. She didn’t. Neither did Adrian. He had been missing now for nearly a full week.

  “If he had been taken by the Piper and was seriously missing, his mom would have called the police by now,” Peter rationalized. “I don’t care how crazy she is.”

  The four of us were sucking down neon-colored ice pops in little plastic sleeves. Michael’s backpack sat on the patio table spewing textbooks across the pebbled glass, and the sight of such incongruity—schoolbooks in summer!—was nearly blasphemous.

  “Angie said she’s a zombie,” Michael responded. “She might not even know how to use the phone.”

  “Don’t be an ass,” I countered.

  “It’s just so weird,” Scott spoke up. “I mean, if he was going to go someplace, don’t you think he would’ve told us?”

  “Maybe he didn’t know,” Michael suggested. “Maybe his mom sent him away somewhere.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “To keep him out of the hands of the Piper, for one thing.”

  “But where would she send him?”

  “Maybe he’s spending the summer with his dad,” Peter said.

  “His dad’s dead,” I said. I hadn’t mentioned the suicide to my friends because I felt it had been told to me in confidence, but I didn’t think I was betraying Adrian’s trust by surrendering this one morsel of information.

  “Yeah?” Peter said. “I just assumed his folks were divorced.”

  I waited for them to ask how he had died, but they didn’t. I was silently grateful.

  “Hey,” Scott said. “You don’t think he’s dumb enough to go off searching for clues on his own, do you? That could be dangerous. Even if the Piper didn’t get him, he could have gotten lost somewhere. Hurt, even.”

  I considered all the places in the Werewolf House that, were someone not careful, could bring about serious injury or even death.

  “Still,” Peter said, “his mom would have called the police when he didn’t come home.”

  “But we don’t know that.” Michael’s tongue, electric green from the ice pop, lashed out to moisten his lips.

  “Maybe we should look for him,” I said. “We can check the places he might have been searching on his own. If something did happen to him, we might be able to find him.”

  “Good idea,” Peter said. “Who’s got the walkie-talkies?”

  “They’re at Echo Base,” Scott said.

  Because it had become too laborious to lug all our stuff back and forth every day, we left the equipment, including the walkie-talkies and the dynamo-powered radio, in the woods. Peter had salvaged an old nylon beer cooler from his garage, and we had packed the stuff inside it, then wrapped the whole thing in a trash bag so that anyone who might accidentally stumble upon it wouldn’t think twice about it. The only time Scott brought the walkie-talkies home was when they needed to be charged.

  “Great,” Michael said, standing up so fast that his chair fell backward and clacked against the floor. “Let’s ride.”

  Less than three minutes later, the four of us were pedaling like demons. Peter was nearly sideswiped by a blue van on Ridgley Avenue. Two policemen with a German shepherd on a short chain gaped at us from beneath the sagging awning of the drugstore as we whizzed through City Center and burned up Second Avenue.

  When I heard the deliberate growl of a car’s engine behind me, I realized I’d been hearing it for the past several seconds without actually registering it. I whipped my head around and saw Eric Falconette’s mud-streaked Fiero grinding its gears as it came up quickly behind us.

  “Hey!” I shouted, alerting my friends to the danger.

  They all turned and saw the Fiero just as its front bumper lurched out in an attempt to thump the rear tire of my bike.

  I swerved across the street, nearly losing it and spilling myself to the pavement in the process, but still managed to avoid the collision. I hopped the curb onto the sidewalk, my bike chain rattling.

  The car’s passenger window went down, and someone shouted at us. Then an empty Budweiser bottle cartwheeled through the air and shattered on the sidewalk mere feet in front of me.

  Unable to avoid it, my bike tires crunched over the broken glass. I winced. All I could do was hold my breath and hope I wouldn’t blow a flat.

  More bottles launched into the air; they smashed all around us like the blitz, leaving sunbursts of colored glass glittering on the pavement. One struck Peter’s thigh, and he howled like a wounded hound.

  In the car, I heard a pair of thugs cackling like hyenas.

  Then the Fiero pulled up right alongside me. The driver’s side window was down, and when I glanced over, I saw Falconette’s greasy white face gibbering at me like a wind-up Halloween toy. His long hair was slicked back from his face, and I caught the shimmer of a cross-shaped earring in his left ear.

  Nathan Keener had it in for me because he thought I had ratted him out to my dad. Eric Falconette, on the other hand, had no reason to come after any of us, except one: he was an evil son of a bitch who was more than just a little bit crazy.

  “You queers should really watch where you’re going,” Falconette shouted. “Shouldn’t drive in the middle of the street.”

  The Fiero jumped the curb, nearly forcing me into the bushes. Gears shrieked and exhaust burned in the air. Falconette leaned on the horn, which had been modified to sound like the air horn of an eighteen-wheeler. It nearly sent me shooting out of my skin.

  Shrieking with laughter, Falconette dumped the Fiero back down onto the roadway.

  At that point, Michael pulled a risky move: he cut across the street directly in front of Falconette’s car. The sudden unexpected maneuver caused the driver to slam on the br
akes. As Michael hopped up the opposite curb and joined me on the sidewalk, the Fiero fishtailed, leaving streaks of black rubber on the pavement. The burning scent of the car’s tires flooded my nostrils.

  The rear of the car swung far enough to one side that I could easily see it slamming into one of the shop fronts. Yet somehow Falconette regained control, and the Fiero slowed and thumped like a crippled racehorse alongside the curb. Then I heard the distinct report of a blown tire.

  Michael cried out in triumph.

  “Here,” Peter yelled and cut sharply down an alleyway.

  One by one, we all followed him.

  By the time we reached December Park, we were all giddy and high-strung. We hid our bikes in the woods, then trudged through it to the clearing and Echo Base. It was June, and the floor of the clearing was lush with new grass. Ivy had sprouted out of the ground and snaked around the headless statues, keeping them well hidden and protected.

  Scott went to the trash bag concealing the nylon beer cooler packed with our gear and untied it while Peter and I stood around and shared a cigarette.

  Michael grabbed the concrete head with the pipe jutting from its neck and held it up to his face. “Where do you belong, big fella?” he said in a creepy singsong voice, as if he were talking to an infant or a small animal. Then he proceeded to croon a few bars of “I Ain’t Got Nobody.”

  “Let’s stick together in pairs,” Scott said. He took the two big walkie-talkies from the beer cooler and handed one to Peter.

  Peter glanced at Michael, who was now pretending to French kiss the decapitated concrete head, then turned to Scott. “I’ll go with Angie; you go with Mikey.”

  “Wonderful.” Scott rolled his eyes and clipped the walkie-talkie to his waistband. He rifled around inside the beer cooler until he found one of Michael’s maps of Harting Farms. He unfolded the map and spread it out on the trunk of one of the statues.

  Scott traced a line down the center of town. “You guys take this side. Michael and I will take the other. We don’t have to go far. Adrian doesn’t have a bike, so if he went anywhere, it’s probably within walking distance. When we’re done for the day, let’s meet back here.” He clicked on his walkie-talkie. “Keep these on the whole time. If we don’t go too far we shouldn’t be out of range.”