December Park

by Ronald Malfi

  I expected further protest from my friends as I proceeded through the room, but no one said a word. Their shuffling footfalls behind me confirmed that they were following me, though I assumed it had little to do with bravery and mostly to do with the fact that they didn’t want to be left alone.

  When I went through the doorway, the stink of decay slapped me across the face. I skidded to a stop, my sneakers grinding across the gravelly surface of the floor. The room was long and slender, like a closet that went on forever, and I saw Adrian’s light bobbing in the smoky gloom at the other end. I called his name. The sound of my voice channeled down the passage, then ricocheted back at me.

  I cast the flashlight’s beam along the wall to my right. There were coffin-sized inserts inlaid in the mold-blackened drywall, hastily cut with a dull blade by the looks of them. Random items—tattered blankets, metal pails, spools of black electrical wire that at first glance looked like coiled snakes—were piled within. Rickety wooden struts bowed beneath the weight of shelves bracketed into the walls on either side. Stacked on the shelves were big square things that could have been suitcases or cinder blocks; it was impossible to tell in the dark.

  Up ahead, Adrian’s flashlight dipped out of view once again.

  I ran my light along the floor, spotlighting his footprints in the inch-thick soot. “Adrian!”

  Something moved under the floor.

  My body seized up like an old lawn mower engine. I heard my friends’ feet scuff to a stop behind me. I let my flashlight’s cone of light hang in the air, illuminating clouds of dust that roiled slowly like the eyes of hurricanes.

  “That’s just the building creaking,” Peter whispered. “There’s no one beneath us. This place makes the noises sound like they’re coming from different spots.”

  “Okay,” I managed, though, at the moment, I wasn’t sure what I believed.

  Michael and Scott sidestepped ruptured potholes in the concrete floor. Michael nearly lost his balance and grabbed one of the bowing struts for support. This was followed by a dry crack as the strut snapped in half, causing Michael to fall forward. Above, the unsupported side of the shelf pitched down like a slide, and the large, square items it had been holding began tumbling down.

  “Scott!” Peter cried, his voice cracking.

  Scott backed up against the wall as the items crashed down. The sound was like artillery fire. Bits of masonry cracked against the concrete floor. Metal rods tumbled down after them, hammering across the floor and striking Scott, who was covering his head and face with his arms. The rods were sharp and rusted, and they drew blood from Scott’s arms as they rebounded off him.

  Peter and I rushed over to Scott, stepping over the metal rods as they rolled across the floor. We had to pry his arms away from his face. His eyes were squeezed shut.

  “You could have been killed,” Peter breathed into his face.

  Scott nodded.

  I turned his lacerated arm up to examine it. His injuries looked superficial, but there were enough of them to cause me to wince. In my mind’s eye, I was still watching the slabs of masonry sliding down the shelf toward Scott’s head.

  “I’m okay,” he said, gently tugging his wrist free of my grasp. “Just . . . just freaked out.”

  Michael was facedown on the floor beneath the canted shelf, which had turned into a makeshift lean-to over him as it broke.

  “Mikey,” I called, “you okay?”

  “Yeah.” He didn’t look up and his voice was muffled.

  Peter grabbed my wrist and turned me to face him. “We’re gonna get killed in here.”

  At the far end of the room, Adrian’s flashlight crossed the open doorway only to disappear again.

  I opened my mouth to shout at him, but I couldn’t find my voice. My tongue felt like a gym sock stuffed with sawdust. Instead, I started down the length of the room.

  “Angie,” Peter called.

  I held up one finger and continued walking.

  This time, my friends did not follow.

  When I entered the adjoining room, I walked through what felt like a web of string. It caught in my eyelashes and my hair. Swatting one hand out before me, I realized it wasn’t a web of string but a massive cloud of flies. They rebounded off my face and neck, thumped against the damp fabric of my T-shirt like pellets fired from a toy gun. The ones that got tangled in my hair bit my scalp. I shuddered and nearly dropped the flashlight when one blew into my mouth.

  As I coughed and spat wads of phlegm onto the floor, Adrian coalesced beside me like a ghost through the murk. When I looked up, bleary-eyed and nauseated, his goofy trademark grin radiated in our flashlights’ beams. “Look,” he said, directing his light at an angle toward the ceiling.

  I blinked and saw that we were in another large room, only this one had no windows. Stone columns ran from floor to ceiling at random intervals. Industrial chains hung from the rafters. I counted seven, and each one concluded in an angry iron hook. The chains were affixed to pulleys bolted to the beams, which would allow them to swing. They looked no different than the chains on the construction barges at the Shallows, and perhaps these had even been scavenged from them.

  “They must weigh a thousand pounds each,” Adrian mused.

  “Why are they here?”

  “You know,” Adrian said, his voice adopting an overly casual tone that set me on edge. “Like at a slaughterhouse.”

  Adrian repositioned his flashlight to illuminate a stack of sodden mattresses, the different color fabric resembling the alternating bands of minerals in a wall of stone, on the floor beneath the chains. There was mold growing on them, and even from this distance, I noticed massive black beetles creeping along the stinking mound. More flies choked the air, so many of them I could hear their miniature chain saw buzzing.

  Adrian went over to the mattresses, then immediately pulled a face. “They stink.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Like, bad.”

  I walked up beside him while small hard things thumped against my shins. I aimed my beam down and saw enormous striped crickets with legs like pistons catapulting off the floor. One the size of a silver dollar clung to my left kneecap. Repulsed, I swiped it off and actually heard it strike the floor.

  The mattresses were stacked too high for us to see the top of the pile. The beetles scuttled away to avoid our flashlights.

  Something caught Adrian’s eye, for he brought his face close to one mattress corner and inhaled. Even in the poor lighting, I saw the spores of mold filtering into his nostrils. Then he pinched the bottom corner of the mattress between two fingers—

  “Don’t do that,” I warned him.

  Ignoring me, he lifted it an inch or two. I could actually see the weight of the thing in the way it hardly yielded, except in the very spot where he lifted. Adrian examined the section of mattress he had revealed. Wrinkling his nose, he held the flashlight right up to it. “That’s blood.”

  I gazed over his shoulder. Coagulated brownish sludge unstuck like caramel. It felt like the back of my throat was being tickled with a feather.

  “It’s here, too,” he said, moving around the mattresses and scrutinizing another corner.

  At my feet, a two-by-four seemed to summon me. I snatched it up, those horrible crickets vaulting off the floor toward my eyes. Brandishing it like a sword, I poked the tapered tip into the mattress at eye level. With a sickening digestive gurgle, the two-by-four sank into the fabric with little resistance. Disgusted, I dropped it.

  My sneakers grew wet. Looking down, I saw a puddle of rusty water spreading from beneath the mattresses and across the floor. I was standing right in it.

  “It isn’t blood. It looks like rusty water and sewage. Like the basement of the Werewolf House. The sewer lines are so old, they probably burst.” Even as I said this, I thought I could hear the faint trickling of water somewhere in the room.

  Stumbling backward, I sent a stack of wooden crates crashing to the floor. The sound couldn’t have
been louder had the crates been loaded with dynamite.

  Adrian, who had transferred halfway across the room, afforded me only the briefest of glances. He was looking at various items bolted to a cinder-block wall.

  I toed one crate over and saw that someone had tied strips of cloth to one of the slats. The strips were each a different color, though so filthy it was difficult to discern exactly what color each strip was.

  “I don’t know what these are for,” Adrian said, pointing, “but they look dangerous.”

  What resembled a piece of modern art—a neurotic confusion of metal angles welded together—had been bolted to the wall.

  “They come apart,” he said, gripping one section of the sculpture that looked like the blunted blade of a wood chisel and removing it from the rest of the chaos. “It’s heavy. It’s like some kind of weapon.”

  “Let’s stop touching this stuff,” I said. I glanced at the hall and saw a single silhouette framed in the doorway.

  “What the hell are you guys doing?” It was Peter.

  “Come see this stuff,” Adrian said.

  “No.” He didn’t budge from the doorway.

  “Go put it back,” I told Adrian. I was sweating profusely, and the smell in this room was making me sick to my stomach. I suddenly wanted nothing more than to be out in the fresh summer air. “Scott was almost killed back there, man. We should get out of here.”

  “But we’re here,” he said.

  Just then, that low creaking noise emanated up from the floor again. We all looked around.

  “It’s just the building settling,” Peter repeated, though I could tell he was struggling to keep his voice calm.

  “This building should have settled a hundred years ago,” I said, then turned to Adrian. “Let’s leave.”

  Adrian said nothing. He was busy examining some of the other strange implements hanging on the wall.

  Peter wavered in the doorway, mouthing something I couldn’t quite see in the darkness.

  “I want to leave,” I said to Adrian again.

  This time, when Adrian didn’t respond, I tramped across the creaking floor and joined Peter. Whether subconsciously or not, I kept my flashlight trained on the floor so as not to bring into relief any of the other insane horrors that may have been in that room.

  Back in the passageway, Scott stood with his bloodied arms folded across his chest while Michael paced back and forth. At the sound of our approach, Michael looked up and said, “Are we leaving yet?”

  “I think it’s time we talk to your dad,” Peter said to me. “Let’s let the cops take over. We keep stumbling around in these condemned places, we’re all gonna wind up dead.”

  I looked to Scott and Michael. “You guys feel this way, too?”

  “No,” said Michael. “I mean, I don’t think we should say anything to anyone. We’ve had that dead girl’s locket since last October. That shit’s evidence. We might even go to jail.”

  “We won’t go to jail,” Peter said.

  “Well, we ain’t gonna get medals; that’s for sure.”

  I looked at Scott. “And what about you?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Peter and Michael both have good points. What more can we do? There’s nothing here. It’s a dead end. It might be time to turn the clues over to the cops and see what they can do with them.”

  “Don’t I have a say in any of this?” Michael met my eyes. “It’s my life, too. I don’t want to fucking go to jail.”

  “Nobody’s going to jail,” Peter reiterated, his voice slightly raised.

  “If I tell my dad what we’ve been up to, he’s going to kill me,” I said. Everyplace we had been—everything we had done—had gone against his directives. No matter if they caught the Piper or not, I was bound to be grounded until the turn of the century. And was there a chance that Michael was right? Could something worse happen to us? Had we unwittingly made ourselves criminally liable in some fashion? “Just let me think of what to do. Give me some time. In the meantime, yeah, we should get out of here.”

  Adrian shuffled out into the hall.

  “Adrian,” Peter said, “we’re leaving. Are you coming?” There was a firmness in his voice I’d never heard before.

  Adrian muttered, “Yeah, okay. Let’s go.”

  Together, we backtracked through the Patapsco Institute until we returned to the expansive, crumbling room where we’d begun our tour. One by one, we ascended the pyramid of stone and climbed out the window into the bright summer sun.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  The Disbanding

  There was a noticeable change in our group the moment we were back on solid ground.

  Scott collected his hat off the ground and tugged it on. The cuts on his arms had dried in brownish-red streamers along his forearms. Peter gathered his Walkman and headphones. Adrian systematically replaced the flashlights into his backpack, then zipped it shut. Michael, who was usually jovial and beaming, now looked either saddened or frightened. There were streaks of grease smeared on his face—on all our faces, really—and his eyebrows seemed permanently knitted together, as if he were doomed to contemplate a difficult mathematical equation for the rest of his life.

  Dusk was creeping up from the east, so we wasted no time heading back through the woods. We walked mostly in silence. Peter wore his headphones and hummed along to his tunes. Scott examined his wounds and commented that he might need stitches. Uncharacteristically silent, Michael carried the compact ladder in the box with the oddly smiling family on the lid. Adrian just stared straight ahead, seemingly lost in his own world. It looked as if a part of him had been left behind in that old building—some vein had been tapped, some vital fluid had been drained.

  Something inside that building had poisoned us. Scott had nearly died and it wasn’t a game anymore. It was over; we were done searching for the Piper.

  When we reached the road behind the Superstore, my friends peeled off and went their separate ways. We had walked our bikes the entire time, but now I thumped the handlebars and said, “Come on. You want a ride?”

  Adrian shrugged. “Not really in the mood.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m just thinking about that place. He probably lives there.”

  “There was no one there.”

  “What about the blood on those mattresses?”

  “I told you, it wasn’t blood.”

  He slid his thumbs beneath the shoulder straps of his backpack. “What are you saying? You don’t want to do this anymore?”

  “Me and the guys have been thinking that maybe it’s time to talk to my dad, tell the police what we know.”

  His pace slowed. “I thought we were gonna see this to the end?”

  “There is no end. We’re not detectives. We don’t know what we’re doing. That building was empty. No one’s living in there.”

  “But you promised,” he said. The word dripped with accusation. I had wounded him with betrayal.

  “Adrian—,” I began.

  “You promised you wouldn’t say anything to anybody, and now you’re going back on your word!”

  “I think we—”

  Adrian took off down the street, his backpack jostling from side to side. I climbed on my bike and rode up to him, but he cut right and veered across someone’s front lawn. I skidded to a stop and shouted after him, but he wouldn’t stop. He kept running and eventually disappeared around the back of someone’s house.

  Another nightmare that evening had me running with my father through a rain forest toward the circular clearing of a grass hut village. Again, some tremendous beast pursued us, rattling the earth with its Goliath footfalls. When we reached the clearing, my father—who had now transmogrified into my grandfather, though he retained much of his youthful appearance—gave me a shove. I stumbled forward, the rucksack on my back causing me to lose my balance, and slid through a pile of bleached skulls and femurs. Phalanges scattered like dice across a craps table.

  As bef
ore, I quickly ditched into the nearest hut to hide from the great beast that destroyed the rain forest in its furious campaign. This time, however, the walls of the hut were braced with confusing metal sculptures of intricate (and suspiciously deadly) design. I knew that just touching one would summon blood to the surface of my skin.

  There was someone else in the hut with me. I glimpsed the figure in my peripheral vision, but each time I turned to face the intruder (or was I the intruder?), he seemed to flit just out of sight.

  Then his hands fell on my shoulders. I glanced down and saw fingernails like hooked talons stained brown as if by Mercurochrome. When the figure pushed his face against mine, I smelled the sweat and anger and years of seclusion on his unwashed flesh.

  —Let the world hold you down, the Piper whispered in my ear. His breath was that of an animal that subsisted solely on roadkill. Then he tightened his grip on my shoulders. It’s just pretending. You can be me and I can be you.

  I told him I didn’t understand.

  —It’s just pretending.

  I repeated that I didn’t understand.

  —Don’t you? he said. Don’t you, Angelo? It’s easy. I become you and you become me and us become us and we become we.

  I told him I wanted to wake up.

  The Piper laughed. It was a sound like dragging the tines of a garden rake across pavement. When you wake up, he told me, one of us will be the other, and neither of us will be the same ever again.

  But it was real-life noise that yanked me from the nightmare. I jumped out of bed and peered out one open window at the moonlit sea that was our backyard. I had made it there just in time to see a figure pass from the pin oaks at one end of the house into shadows behind the shed. I distinctly heard the figure drag something along the wooden framework of the shed while tromping down broken branches in the underbrush.