December Park

by Ronald Malfi

  “Wow. That’s Stanton,” Scott said, leaning so close to the display case that the bill of his Orioles cap touched the glass. “That must have been what it looked like when it was first built.”

  “It looks like Castle Dracula,” said Peter.

  Below those two photos were several smaller ones, which, like the Evolution of Man chart in our biology textbooks, depicted the gradual modernization of our dark and drafty Stanton School from an archaic and sprawling mausoleum to an oblong, square-windowed institution with peppermint-colored walls and black-and-blue checked tiles, surrounded by elms and fronted by a two-lane road. The final photograph was of a sepia-toned cowboy with a Ulysses S. Grant beard, circular John Lennon glasses, and a double-breasted suit. The name at the bottom of the photo read L. John Stanton.

  “Yeah,” Michael said, “that’s Stanton. And the other one’s the girls’ school, the one that later became the Patapsco Institute.”

  “Where all those people died in that fire,” Scott added.

  “What’s the Patapsco Institute?” Adrian asked.

  “It was one of two schools built in the late 1800s at the far end of December Park,” I said. “Stanton stayed but they turned the girls’ school into a convalescent hospital after World War II.”

  “What’s convalescent?”

  “It’s like wounded soldiers and stuff. People who can’t take care of themselves.”

  Adrian moved in beside Scott for a better look at the photos.

  “There was a fire back in the fifties that killed a bunch of people,” I went on. “The place was shut down and pretty much forgotten since then.”

  “Creepy,” Adrian said.

  “It is,” I agreed, “but I don’t see what it has to do with—”

  “Holy shit!” Scott cried. “It’s—”

  “I see them!” Adrian broke in. Both he and Scott leaned even closer to the glass.

  Michael laughed and looked instantly proud. “Ha! You see ’em, huh? You get it?”

  “Get what?” Shaking his head, Peter leaned toward the display, too.

  “The statues,” Scott said. “Second picture from the bottom.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Peter said. “Angie, come take a look at this.”

  Michael grabbed my shoulders and propelled me forward, wedging me between Peter and Scott. “I told you I found something,” Michael said into my ear and not without a trace of vindication.

  One of the photographs was of the east flank of Stanton School—I could tell by the rows of windows in the stonework, which, despite years of renovations, had remained unaltered (and I could even see the iron smoking door that also appeared unchanged). In the photograph, a group of construction workers removed sections of the masonry and loaded the giant blocks onto open carts. Along the foundation, in rank and file like a militia, the concrete statutes that now lay scattered in broken headless heaps in the Dead Woods stood proud and tall, their heads still intact.

  “Well, shit,” I said. “I guess that mystery’s solved.”

  “So they wound up tearing down those statues and just dumping them in the woods by the park?” Peter said.

  “It probably wasn’t a park back then,” Michael said. “They could have used the woods as a landfill for all we know.”

  “These pictures have been here for like a billion years,” said Scott, “and none of us noticed until now.”

  “We didn’t need to until now,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Michael said, “but that’s not all. I mean, look how similar the two schools are from the front. The other photos are just of Stanton and the renovations and stuff, so we can’t see for sure, but I bet Patapsco had those same statues, too.” He turned and looked at us. “I’ll bet that’s where the statue head came from.”

  “Whoa,” Adrian said.

  “You guys think he’s living there?” Scott said. “The Piper, I mean.”

  Hard-soled shoes squeaked behind us. We spun around in unison to see Mr. Johnson standing outside a classroom door, his short-sleeved button-down an iridescent white in the midday gloom. “Do you kids need assistance with anything?”

  “No, sir,” Michael said. “We were just heading home.”

  “The bus already left,” Mr. Johnson said. He sounded distrustful. “What are you guys doing with that display case?”

  “Let’s split,” Peter said, and we all hustled to the fire exit. Peter slammed against the arm bar, and dazzling daylight briefly blinded us.

  “Hey,” Mr. Johnson shouted after us, but I didn’t hear his squeaking shoes following.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The Pursuit

  I had glimpsed it a few times in the past, mostly in the fall and winter, when the leaves dried up and fell from the trees. And even then it was more like a mirage—the dinosaur at the edge of December Park, where the woods ended at the edge of the cliff that overlooked the bay. Perhaps at one time it had been accessible by roads, but it was now firmly hidden within the lush panhandle of Satan’s Forest like a dirty secret.

  The closest I had ever come to seeing it—actually looking at it, as opposed to merely glimpsing its reptilian hide through barren tree branches—had been when I was about eleven and in the midst of a short-lived fascination with model airplanes made out of balsa wood.

  My journey to find the highest point in the city brought me to the cliffs that overlooked the charcoal diorama of the Chesapeake Bay. It had been a blustery fall day, and the strong winds had stripped the already withering trees bare. My balsa wood plane caught slipstream after slipstream and soared like a bird, pulling loop-the-loops in the gunmetal sky. Twice, I nearly lost it when it shot out over the cliff, carving grand arcs in the cloud-heavy sky; yet both times it boomeranged back to me, landing in a series of undisciplined cartwheels.

  One final toss sent the little plane in a smooth semicircle over the cliffs yet again. The bay—whose waters were so black and turbulent they appeared ready to unleash Poseidon and all his fury—appeared to summon it. The fragile plane trembled on the slipstream and actually seemed to pause in midair, terrified. It must have caught a second current, though, because it veered left and swooped back around toward the cliff. It was suddenly no more than a crucifix-shaped pinpoint in the darkening sky, and I was amazed at the heights it reached.

  When it finally descended, it did so far into the trees: it swept down and sailed through the naked, craggy arms of mummified elms before it disappeared completely. I stared through the screen of geometric branches to identify where it had landed. It was then that I realized the ruinous old building was just beyond the trees, its bone-colored façade stippled in ivy and veined in a heavy system of snakelike roots.

  Before I knew what I was doing, I was halfway through the woods and heading toward the structure. I found myself in awe of this strange monstrosity that appeared both imposing yet harmless. It was tremendous and nearly absurd in its novelty; however, even with all the renovations that had taken place at Stanton School over the past century, I could still discern the skeleton of its twin in this building.

  As I crept closer to the building, my sneakers snagging on brambles and thorny green spirals of flora, I recognized the remnants of the horrible fire from the fifties: it had blackened the sandstone and hollowed out parts of the structure. It was possible to peer into some of the arched windows and straight out to the woods beyond. Every ghost story I’d ever heard—no matter how outlandish or silly—resurfaced in my head, causing a chill to trace down my spine and my skin to grow tingly with gooseflesh.

  The balsa wood airplane, suspended in a tangle of twiggy branches perhaps ten feet off the ground, was directly ahead of me. A vision came to me then: when I jumped up to shake the branches in an attempt to free my plane, the trees would instantly come alive and drive their twisted, skeletal protuberances through my torso, spearing me over and over again like a living voodoo doll.

  I stared openmouthed at the building. Overhead, the sound of thunder was like a roller co
aster. The roof of my mouth adopted all the attributes of drywall. It was at that moment nature saw fit to shuttle a river of icy wind down through the trees, rattling their bony branches like percussion instruments. I thought I saw someone flit by one of the darkened windows in the face of the building. My skin rippled like rings across the surface of a pond.

  The strength of the wind increased, summoning little tornadoes of dead leaves and grit, and with it came the ghostly moan of some distant and otherworldly creature crying out in mournful regret. I vibrated like a knife stuck in a plank of wood, unable to tear my eyes from the black orifice in the masonry of the building—an orifice that was no longer a glassless window but a gargantuan eye socket.

  That mournful moan rose to a pitch that resonated in my molars and liberated my balsa wood airplane from its cage of branches. The plane nose-dived to the earth, and one of its cheap wings broke at a perfect ninety-degree angle.

  I snatched up the plane, anticipating those trees coming alive. Only now I believed they would lift me off the ground and carry me toward the building. The stone foundation would crack open into the ragged suggestion of a mouth, and the tree branches would feed me into it, the way a blue crab brings food to its mouth with its serrated pincers.

  But nothing happened. With my airplane in tow, I turned and kicked up clods of dirt as I ran toward the slope of green lawn that trailed to the edge of the cliff.

  Later around the dinner table, when my father asked what I’d done all afternoon, I told him about flying the plane over the cliffs. “Did you know there’s a building back there?” I asked him.

  “Stay away from it,” he told me flatly. He looked at Charles, who had been listening to my story with uncharacteristic interest. “You and your friends go in there to play, you could get hurt. Or worse.”

  In bed that night, I thought about the shape I’d seen—or thought I’d seen—passing behind one of the eye-socket–shaped windows, and it only brought my father’s voice back to me: you could get hurt. Or worse . . .

  @

  Back in the school’s rear parking lot and still shaken by the prospect of what we’d seen in the B Hall display case, we all agreed that we needed to go to the old building and see for ourselves if there were statues up there, too.

  As expected, Adrian and Scott wanted to head out right away, but I had to finish my shift at the store. Also, Michael had homework, and Peter complained that he had chores to do at home. Reluctantly, Adrian and Scott agreed to wait until seven to meet at our rendezvous point.

  Back at Secondhand Thrift, I shambled through the rest of my day in a fog, my mind on things other than used clothing that needed price stickers, old Perry Como LPs, and the model of a Spanish warship Callibaugh was piecing together in the office.

  It was around ten after four when someone entered. I looked up from behind the cash register, where I was stapling receipts, and felt disbelief wash over me. It was the police officer who had been watching my friends and me in Market Square on the Fourth of July. The same cop who had been first on the scene the night Aaron Ransom was taken by the Piper and had been digging through our stuff at Echo Base.

  Since the disappearance of Howie Holt in June, it was common to see uniformed officers patrolling the streets and going in and out of local shops. But I found it impossible to convince myself that this was merely a coincidence. I hoped grouchy old Callibaugh would emerge from his office and help disperse the atmospheric tension.

  The cop approached the counter and leveled a hard gaze at me. His face looked too young. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-one. “They got you here alone tonight, kid?”

  “The owner’s in the back.”

  The cop surveyed the counter, and I could tell he was just casually taking it all in and not looking for something in particular. Eventually, he dropped a pack of cinnamon Dentyne onto the counter, along with some change. “I’ll just take this.”

  That’s not all, I thought. You’re here for a reason. I can smell it on you. You’ve been following us around for quite a while now, haven’t you?

  I rang up the gum and gave the cop his change, anxious to be rid of him.

  “Have a good night and be safe,” he said, moving toward the door. He slipped the pack of gum in his pocket. “Don’t forget the curfew,” he added before stepping outside.

  Through the storefront windows, I watched him continue down the block, roving like an alley cat at a casual, disinterested pace.

  I slipped out from behind the counter and went to the front windows. It looked like the cop was heading toward the Wet Dog Pub, which already had its happy hour sign glowing in the window, but then he cut down an alley between the pub and Patty’s Laundromat. I was at too much of an angle to see into the alleyway.

  I went back behind the counter, grabbed a blank envelope, then paused as I listened for any indication that Callibaugh might come out of his office anytime soon. All was quiet. The old guy might have fallen asleep. He’d done it before, waking up at his desk with pieces of a model ship glued to his face.

  I went outside, hurried up the block to the mailbox that stood on the corner of Second and Children Street, and dropped the envelope inside . . . then looked across the street and straight down the mouth of the alley.

  I had expected the alley to be empty but it was not. There was a police car tucked away in there, its front grille facing the street. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought the cop was sitting behind the wheel.

  This did not make me feel better.

  Trying to keep a casual pace, I walked back to the store. Once inside, I pressed my forehead against the window to see if the cop might emerge from the alley. He didn’t.

  “You,” said Callibaugh, coming up behind me and nearly sending me straight through the roof, “are like a pathetic little puppy in the window of a pet store. Do tell. What is it you find so fascinating on the corner? Or is it just the concept that it’s summer and you’re in here while others are enjoying the last remaining hours of daylight?”

  “That must be it,” I said. “Can I use the phone again?”

  “Why not? Say, would you like to borrow my car, too?”

  “I’m sorry. I could use the pay phone across the street.”

  His face softened and he winked at me. “I’m joking with you. How’s your grandpa?”

  “He’s great.”

  “Wonderful. He owes me thirty dollars from a night of poker.”

  “I didn’t realize he still played poker.”

  “He doesn’t. He’s owed me since 1985. Go on. Use the phone.”

  In the office, I punched in Scott’s phone number and prayed that he’d answer.

  “Yeah?” It was his sister, sounding irritated and snapping gum.

  “Is Scott there?”

  An exasperated sigh. Kristy shouted Scott’s name, then stayed on the line chewing her gum until Scott picked up the extension. Without a word, she hung up.

  “It’s me. Are you busy? I need your help.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “You’ve got the walkie-talkies?”

  “They’re charging upstairs in my room.”

  “They’ve got enough juice to put ’em to work?”

  “I guess so. What’s up?”

  I told him about the cop. “And now he’s sitting in his car in the alley across the street. He’s been watching us. I think he’s waiting for me to leave work.”

  “Holy shit. Angie, this is some serious shit. You want me to get ahold of your dad?”

  “That won’t do any good. Can you get out here and bring those walkie-talkies?”

  “Yeah. What are you thinking?”

  “If he follows me home, you follow him.”

  “That’s great. All right, I’m in.”

  “But don’t come alone. Go get Michael or Peter.”

  “Michael’s finishing his homework and Peter’s doing chores.”

  “Then get Adrian.”

  “Adrian doesn’t have a bike, and I’m not w
obbling around with him on my handlebars. I’ll just come by myself.”

  “Okay. But be careful.”

  “I wish I had a bazooka,” he said and hung up.

  Scott arrived at the store at a quarter to five. He had a backpack slung over his shoulder and his Orioles hat pulled down over his eyes.

  Callibaugh, who was counting inventory on one of the shelves, glanced at him with frank suspicion. For the past twenty minutes, Callibaugh had been telling me I could go home early. I said that I wanted to finish up some work before I left, which amounted to me scrubbing the hardened gobbets of model glue off the countertop.

  “I saw the police car in the alley when I rode by,” Scott said, setting his backpack on the counter. “It’s still there. Are you sure it’s the same cop?”

  “Of course.”

  Scott unzipped the backpack, slid out one of the walkie-talkies, and handed it to me.

  “You hang out at the opposite end of the block,” I told him. “When I come out and if the cop car follows, get behind him. But keep some distance, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “We can keep in contact with each other on these,” I said, holding up the walkie-talkie.

  “How are you gonna ride your bike home and talk on that thing at the same time without this cop wondering what the heck is going on?”

  It was a good question. I hadn’t thought of that. “Give me your hat,” I said.

  Scott took his hat off, his wiry brown hair popping up like mattress springs, and passed it to me.

  I wrapped it around the walkie-talkie. It concealed the body of the handheld; only the antenna poked out.

  “I guess that’s good enough,” he said.

  “Just be careful and don’t get caught,” I warned him.

  “This guy’s gotta be the Piper, right?”