December Park

by Ronald Malfi

  Flying away from the window, I snatched my shorts off my desk chair and climbed into them. Downstairs, I unlocked the door to the back porch and peeled it open on squealing hinges. I traced the wall, found the outdoor light switch, flipped it on. The porch lit up, but the yard beyond remained as black as the deepest parts of the Chesapeake.

  Standing in the open doorway, I held my breath and willed my heart to stop beating as I surveyed the property. A vision came to me: of creeping up on the trespasser behind the shed while brandishing my grandfather’s samurai sword. It was both ridiculous and wholly probable and my limbs began to tremble.

  A hand fell on my shoulder, and I cried out like a little girl.

  “What are you doing?” It was my father, half-asleep and wearing nothing but his threadbare briefs.

  “I . . . thought I heard . . . someone . . .” And I wished I hadn’t said thought, as it inevitably brought my certainty into question. “I mean, I heard someone. I saw someone go behind the shed.”

  But it was too late. My father was unconvinced. “There’s no one there. Go to bed.” He turned me around with the hand that was still on my shoulder.

  Without protest, I reentered the house while he closed and locked the door. Then he shut off the porch light but remained lingering at the door, gazing out at the yard.

  I paused in the hallway and stared at the matted hair on the back of his head.

  “Go to bed,” he repeated without turning to me.

  Silently, I went upstairs.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Adrian Gardiner

  Sunday morning, I awoke with a dagger of guilt in my chest. I hadn’t seen Adrian since he ran off Thursday evening as we were walking home after our search of the Patapsco Institute. The day after, I had knocked on his front door. His mother’s car wasn’t in the driveway and no one answered, so I surmised Adrian was ignoring me.

  His disappointment wasn’t totally alien to me. After all this time, my preoccupation with the Piper had only strengthened. In a way, my friends and I had become a part of the Piper. And the Piper had become a part of us all.

  After breakfast, I got dressed and summoned the courage to return to the Gardiner house. I knocked on the front door and waited for several minutes.

  Just when I thought no one would answer, Doreen Gardiner peeked out. Her eyes were dead headlamps, and her skin was the color and texture of uncooked pie crust. When she spoke, I caught a whiff of alcohol on her breath. “Adrian isn’t here.”

  This time, I didn’t bother asking where he went. Instead, I thanked her and bounded off the porch.

  During Mass at St. Nonnatus, I glanced at Michael who was bookended by his parents in one of the pews. His eyes met mine. I just shook my head. When Father Evangeline had everyone come up to receive the Eucharist, I made sure to slide into line right behind Michael.

  “Still no word from Poindexter?” he whispered over his shoulder.

  “No. I went to his house this morning, but his mom said he wasn’t home.”

  “Maybe she shipped him off to see those head doctors again.”

  “Maybe.” Yet it didn’t help calm my nerves, nor did it dispel the sense of guilt I carried with me for betraying him.

  “Have you thought about what you’re gonna tell your dad?”

  “No.”

  “We’re gonna get in big trouble.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Scott wants to catch a movie at the Juniper later. You in?”

  “Sure.”

  Behind me in line, my grandmother squeezed my shoulder, which was my cue that I needed to stop talking.

  When I got home from church, I changed out of my good clothes, then retrieved my bike from the wall of ivy at the side of the house. It promised to be another scorcher. The sun was high and full in the sky, the horizon a startling red that looked as serious as an arterial wound beyond the trees and houses on Worth Street.

  At the intersection, I hooked a right onto Haven, then felt my legs go rubbery as I spied a familiar pickup on the shoulder of the road. Instinct caused me to squeeze the hand brakes and let up on the pedals. Nathan Keener . . .

  I slowed as I passed it. No one was in the cab, though the interior dome light was on. It was parked at a hasty angle, the passenger side tires over the curb. I surveyed the surrounding yards, not putting it past Keener to use his truck as a decoy while he sprung out at me from behind a parked car or a bristling hedgerow. The strange part was, following our fight on July Fourth, I had come to believe that all bets had been settled between us. Had I miscalculated? That seemed the most disconcerting of all.

  My hackles still raised, I continued up the street. When the bells of St. Nonnatus chimed noon, I nearly rocketed out of my bike seat and blasted off into the atmosphere. Even when I made it to the highway and the Superstore plaza, I was still certain I was the unwitting fool in the middle of an elaborate trap set by Nathan Keener. Was I being followed even now?

  Yet nothing happened.

  At December Park, kids played baseball on the diamond, and others ran in undisciplined circles playing a game of tag. I barreled past them all. At the edge of the woods, I leaned my bike against one of the metal trash cans, then hopped the fence.

  The woods were hot and buggy. I forged my way through the dense trees, fanning clouds of gnats away from my eyes. When I came upon the clearing, all that remained were the headless statues. The trash bags of stuff we had collected all year were gone. So was the beer cooler where we’d kept the fleur-de-lis, the walkie-talkies, the flashlights. Either the cop had returned and taken our stuff . . . or Adrian had come by and cleaned us out.

  I climbed out of the woods and retrieved my bike. Out across the park, the ballplayers cheered.

  I biked up the pathway to Solomon’s Bend Road, leaning over my handlebars and racing through the Point-Counterpoint intersection. On foot, the shortest way to the Patapsco Institute was to cut through the woods. Since I had my bike, I could take the longer—and easier—way around.

  At the edge of the park, I veered off the main road and followed the curve of the woods along a nameless gangway of packed dirt. The trail pitched at a gradual incline as it rose out of the residential streets and joined the cliffs at the edge of the bay. Soon I was pedaling along a narrow strip of dirt with the woods to my right and the yawning still grayness of the Chesapeake Bay far below on my left. Against the horizon, the Bay Bridge was a ghostly mirage simmering in the midsummer haze.

  When I reached the plateau where years earlier I had sailed a balsa wood airplane through the air, I coasted to a stop, then dropped my bike in the tall grass. I stood at the edge of the cliff, peering down at the triangles of sailboats carving white foam on the surface of the bay. I closed my eyes and inhaled, remembering that day Charles and I had taken the johnboat out. A sepia-toned filmstrip of memories flickered across the underside of my eyelids.

  I turned away from the cliff’s edge and headed for the woods. This close to the water, the foliage was of a different breed. I swiped through the huge sweeping ferns, ducked the jungle-like vines garlanding the trees, and stepped over the colorful bouquets of wildflowers.

  After a time, the Patapsco Institute reared out of the trees like a living giant dressed in ivy and stone.

  There was the window we had gone through, only now there were two thick tree branches trailing up from the ground and leaning against the sill. They looked like rails, like handholds. The sight of them caused my body to grow cold.

  Despite my mounting discomfort, I trekked up to the building and stared at its ugly, empty eye-socket window. The darkness beyond was infinite. “Adrian!”

  Birds exploded from the underbrush.

  I shouted his name a second time, my voice echoing over the chasm of cliffs. Things moved in the trees all around me.

  A fine sweat dampening my brow, I trudged around the side of the building and repeated the call. This time, my voice shook the treetops. I moved around to the front, where the great
twin doors stood like steel palates beneath the stone arcade, and repeated my call once more—“Adrian!”

  . . . rian . . .rian . . . rian: my voice crystallized in the air.

  The only response came in the form of that familiar, inhuman yowl of the wind transmitting through the stone walls and pouring out of all the broken spaces in the masonry.

  When I arrived at the Juniper, my friends were already in the theater waiting for the show to start. The double bill was Village of the Damned and House of Wax with Vincent Price. I sidestepped down the aisle and sat next to Peter, who had a tub of buttered popcorn on his lap. On the other side of Scott, Michael leaned into the aisle and chucked a Jujube at me.

  As the previews crackled onto the screen, I told them about finding the two tree branches propped up against the window at the institute. “I think Adrian went back in there.”

  Peter shook his head. “No way he went in there alone.”

  “But those tree branches,” I said.

  “And even if he did,” Peter said, “he’s probably home by now.”

  “He’s probably still pissed,” Michael said. I had previously told them about Adrian getting upset with me and running away. “Quit worrying about it. He’ll get over it.”

  Someone shushed us from two rows back. Michael threw Jujubes at them.

  Then the first movie started, and I attempted to lose myself for a few hours.

  Keener’s truck was still parked on the curb at Haven Street.

  Against my better judgment, I braked, got off my bike, and went to the driver’s side window. The interior light was dimming, draining the battery, but I could make out the refurbished upholstery, no doubt redone after Michael Sugarland deposited his little gift on the front seat. There was a pack of Camels on the dashboard, a container of Skoal that looked like a hockey puck wedged in the console, and a few empty Budweiser bottles on the floorboard of the passenger side. The dome light was on, because the driver’s door had not been shut all the way.

  It made me nervous. The whole damn thing.

  I hurried home.

  Midway through a meal of oven-roasted chicken, artichokes, mashed potatoes, and elbow macaroni simmering in a soup of melted butter, someone knocked on our front door. My grandmother made an attempt to get up, but my father rose more quickly and moved out of the kitchen and into the vestibule. My grandparents exchanged a look. It was unusual to be disturbed during dinner.

  Muffled conversation could be heard through the wall. A woman’s voice—not necessarily panicked but there was a definite note of apprehension to it.

  “Angelo,” my father called after a moment, “could you come here, please?”

  I dropped my fork and shoved my chair away from the table. Down in the vestibule, I was rendered speechless to find Doreen Gardiner standing in our doorway. She looked just as she always did—a scarecrow whose eyes were made of dull plastic buttons. She wore a sleeveless blouse and a pair of beige slacks that were so threadbare I could see the dark outline of her underwear through them. Her hair was a nest of snakes.

  “Ms. Gardiner says Adrian never came home this afternoon,” said my dad. There was an accusatory inflection in his tone that made me feel like I was being interrogated. “She wants to know where he is.”

  “I didn’t see Adrian today.”

  “Adrian said he was going to the park in the morning, then to the movies with you and his other friends,” Doreen said, the palsied temperament of her speech suggestive of someone under the influence of sedatives. It was the most I’d ever heard the woman speak at once.

  “Do you know where Adrian is?” my father asked me.

  “No.”

  “Did you see him at all today?”

  “No, sir.” I was trembling.

  “They play in the park,” Doreen blurted, and it was like she was ratting me out.

  I felt paralyzed. “Sometimes. We didn’t today. I haven’t seen Adrian since Thursday. Neither have my friends.”

  To Doreen, my father said, “I’ll go out and have a look around for him. You should stay home in case he comes back. I’m sure he’s just out playing somewhere.”

  She nodded as if her head were spring-loaded.

  “Go get my shoes from the closet,” my father instructed me.

  It took me a second or two before his words made sense. Then I hurried upstairs where I dug his worn cordovan shoes from his bedroom closet. When I returned, he was jingling his car keys and telling my grandparents that he was going out to look for the boy next door.

  I set his shoes down by the front door and said, “I want to come with you.”

  I expected a protest but he just nodded. He looked extremely tired, and despite the tension between us for the past several weeks, I suddenly felt immense sadness for him.

  After we pulled out of the driveway and turned slowly up the street, I saw Doreen Gardiner framed in one of the front windows of her house, a blue strobe of television light behind her.

  When my dad took a right onto Haven Street, I noticed Keener’s truck still there. The truck’s interior light was nearly dead now: it gave off only a pathetic little glint in the ceiling of the cab.

  “If you have any idea where he might be,” said my father, looking straight out the windshield, “now’s the time to tell me.”

  I thought of those two thick tree branches leaning against the window of the Patapsco Institute. But I couldn’t tell my father. If Adrian had gone in there, it was only a matter of time before he came out. It was best I kept my mouth shut and waited for him to return.

  Unless something happened to him in there, said a voice in my head. It chilled me to realize it was the voice of the Piper from my nightmares. Unless I became him and he became me and us became us and we became we.

  “The park, maybe,” I said. There was a chance that we might catch him coming out of the woods on his way home for the night.

  “December Park?”

  “Yes.”

  I felt rather than saw his gaze swivel in my direction, then dart back out through the windshield.

  (we became we)

  It was a Sunday evening, and the streets were almost preternaturally quiet. Only a few vehicles drove past us on our way to the highway interchange. Except for the lampposts and the twenty-four-hour pharmacy, all the lights were out in the Superstore plaza.

  My dad took the Point-Counterpoint intersection, which was a desolate crucifix of blacktop, straight out to December Park. I had anticipated driving the circumference of the park, but my father hopped on the shoulder of the road and drove on the grass until he reached a break in the guardrail and spun the wheel sharply to the left. The sedan eased down the grassy slope toward the dark pool that was the park grounds below.

  “I told you to stay out of this park,” said my father.

  I looked down at my hands that were twisting in my lap.

  We coasted along the field, every bump and groove and rut amplified by the vehicle’s lousy shocks, and slowed as we came to the cusp of the baseball diamond. Moonlight dripped blue honey off the metal backstop.

  My father clicked on the spotlight that was fixed beside his mirror—the light that looked like a small snare drum—and directed its beam across the baseball diamond. Shadows canted as he swept the light from left to right. The swings beyond the diamond swayed minutely in the soft, warm breeze. December Park looked like the dark side of the moon.

  Spinning the steering wheel, my father took the car to the perimeter of the field and motored next to the plywood fence that separated this section of December Park from the Dead Woods. He drove slowly, shining his spotlight into the trees. “Any specific place you boys play down here?”

  I had been dreading the question. “Just around,” I said.

  My father continued along the perimeter of the park. As we approached the mouth of the underpass, he slowed down again and repositioned the spotlight to shine directly into the tunnel.

  My heart thundered in my chest.

  H
e leaned over my lap and opened the glove box. A small flashlight rolled out into his palm. When he stepped from the car, I said, “I want to come, too.” He didn’t respond, so I climbed across his seat and out the door.

  A step or two behind him, we approached the underpass. The darkness looked tangible, like a heavy black curtain. The night around us was hot and humming with mosquitoes. I thought of the clot of flies in the institute and felt queasy.

  My father stopped at the mouth of the underpass. The flashlight’s beam barely cracked the black curtain. I sidled up beside him, shivering despite the humidity.

  The beam of light played along the stone walls, the tufts of ivy that veined the archway, the cobblestone path that ran from December Park to Solomon’s Field on the other side. One of the posted signs—Park Closes at Dusk—glowed in the flashlight’s glare.

  “There’s nothing here,” my father said. There was a clicking sound at the back of his throat. He turned and walked to the car and I followed.

  We wended through the dark streets of Harting Farms, the sedan’s searchlight prying into black crevices and burning down haunted brick alleyways that ran between storefronts. When we approached the turnoff onto Farrington Road, I thought I might scream if he took it and headed to the old train station. But we went past it, opting instead for circling the church parking lot, then out onto Augustine Avenue.

  My father took the long way to the Cape, and we cruised along the upraised band of roadway that overlooked the Shallows. Tea lights twinkled in the windows of the houses at the far end of the beach.

  “He has no bike,” I said. “He wouldn’t have come out this far.”

  Again, my dad made that odd clicking noise at the back of his throat. When he ignored me, I realized he wasn’t looking for a boy who had gone out playing in the neighborhood anymore. He was looking for what he feared most—another victim of the Piper.