by Aaron Polson
“Nick? We don’t have a Nick here.”
Isaac slumped into his old rust-red recliner. “A security guy—Nick?”
“I’m sorry. Our security guy quit yesterday, but I don’t remember his name. Moving out of town, I guess.”
“Thanks,” Isaac muttered.
“Sorry buddy.”
“Look, calm down Mr. Bauer,” the sergeant, a ruddy-faced man with bushy moustache and eyebrows, placed one hand on Isaac’s thin shoulder, urging him to sit in a nearby chair. “We looked at the video. It must be a hoax.”
“Hoax?” Isaac’s voice was distant and disbelieving.
“Look, you get some two-bit hooligan who knows a little about digital video, and you can come up with all sorts of odd mash-ups.” The sergeant leaned on the edge of his desk. “You’ve been posting these flyers all over town, right?”
“Yeah,” Isaac said. He took the seat as the police officer suggested.
“Some wacko does a little doctoring with a surveillance video, and wham. They know they’ve got you.” He grabbed the flash drive from his desk. “We’re going to keep this, if you don’t mind. Evidence and all. But I wouldn’t worry about it. I’m sorry some jerk had to yank your chain like that.”
Isaac’s face was pale, lost in thought. “Yeah,” he said, “yeah. Kind of a raw deal.”
He drove to the playground after leaving the police station. The concrete slab stretched away from the sidewalk, looking pale an insignificant in the late afternoon light. Isaac stepped from his car, looked across the street at Larry’s, and noticed the high lamppost that was home to the small, seeing eye of a security camera.
He stepped away from his car, and shivered because of the cold fingers in the air. Isaac’s shoes whispered through the grass and then tapped lightly on concrete as he stepped onto the court. The breeze faded, leaving the playground in silence. A dog barked in the distance.
“It’s not a goddamn hoax,” Isaac said aloud, kicking at the edge of the grey concrete. The wind jumped at him again, and he thought a voice whispered Anne’s name.
Isaac hadn’t been in the Springdale Public Library since high school, and that had only been because his art teacher required a journal entry detailing the interior architecture of the Carnegie building. When he asked if he could read old articles from the Sentinel online, a friendly librarian laughed and ferried him into a dark room lined with shelves full of musty folios containing the last thirty years of the local paper. He was looking for anything about that playground.
After an hour of old, yellowed newsprint, Isaac found what he was looking for: on the front page of a Sentinel from last year, a picture of five men in hard hats stood in the center of a vast expanse of grey concrete. The caption read, “Conco Pours Slab for Donated Playground.” As the Sentinel was a small paper, the picture was only accompanied by a brief article, but Isaac had what he needed. An old buddy from high school, Jarrod, started working for Conco after dropping out of college.
He left the dusty interior of the library after saying a cursory thank you to the librarian. Outside of the dark building, the day was cold but clear with a bright sun hanging in a brilliant blue. As he walked to his car parked on the street, Isaac flipped open his cell phone, dialed for information, and requested the listing for Jarrod Wagner in Springdale.
After three rings, a voice muttered “hi” on the other end of the call.
Isaac, now sitting in his car as a shelter from the cold outside, said, “Hey, this is Isaac, Isaac Bauer. Am I talking to Jarrod?”
“Isaac. Holy shit. Meg—you know the curly brunette down at the Tasty Pastry—she said she saw you the other day. How long have you been back in town?”
“A few months, sort of. I still commute.” Isaac felt dizzy and awkward, talking to someone from whom he had grown apart after college and starting a career. “Look, Jarrod. I don’t know if you’ve seen my flyers.”
The line was silent for a moment. “Yeah. Yeah, hell of a deal,” Jarrod muttered. “Look, I’m sorry buddy, I should have called, just to send some sympathy, you know. I didn’t know what to say.”
Isaac closed his eyes. “Can you help me now? Do you still work for Conco?”
More silence. “No. Not anymore.”
“I see. Were you working for them when they poured the playground last year.”
“Yeah. Look, if you want to know about that playground, I can’t tell you much,” Jarrod’s voice shook slightly and he rushed his words. “Conco was just a subcontractor. Evergreen Development, they donated everything, part of a deal they had with the city. That’s all I know.”
Isaac paused this time, thinking about the nervousness in his friend’s voice, trying to make sense of his apparent anxiety. “Evergreen Development? Didn’t they build those condos, The Legends, out west of town?”
“Look, that’s all I can say. We should get together some time, okay?” The phone went silent as Jarrod ended the conversation.
Isaac drove home and watched Anne disappear on his computer. The police possessed the original, but he had copied the file onto his hard drive. He watched at regular speed, he watched in slow motion, and he watched frame-by-frame as she vanished into the concrete. He watched Anne disappear every night.
Over the next few days, Isaac called Evergreen Development’s corporate offices at least five times. No one who ranked higher than receptionist would speak with him. He walked around Springdale a great deal over that time, passing the playground, and tearing down every flyer he found. Jarrod called after a few anxious and frustrating days, and he arranged to meet Isaac after sundown at the playground.
Isaac walked, trying to push Anne’s memory aside and forget the strange video that lived in his computer. He didn’t have the courage to delete the file—something about that short clip was sinister and unreal, but it somehow told Anne’s story.
Jarrod stood on the sidewalk adjacent to the basketball court. He paced slightly while smoking a cigarette. When he saw Isaac approach, Jarrod dropped the butt and ground it with the heel of his shoe.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” Isaac said when he was in range.
“I haven’t seen you in a few years. A lot has happened since then.”
Isaac pointed a large manila envelope that Jarrod clutched under one arm. “What’s that?”
“Evidence. Something for you, after we talk.” Jarrod looked at Isaac and shook his head slightly. “Anne wasn’t the first one you know.”
“First one? What are you talking about?”
“The first one to vanish here.” Jarrod looked at the slab.
“I never said she vanished here. How did you know?”
Jarrod patted the envelope. “I know. You called, asked about the playground job. Anne was gone. Cops probably just told you she just left, adults do that kind of thing, right?”
Isaac nearly staggered back, away from his old friend. “Yeah...”
“Don’t you think it’s a little weird that no one is out here after the sun goes down? Hell, not that many people use the playground during the day.” Jarrod watched Isaac for a moment, reading his face. “Two other people disappeared here. One was a kid, a little girl about nine. Her folks were on a walk, pushing a stroller with her little sister around the corner.” Jarrod pointed to a nearby intersection. “She ran away, started to cross the playground, cut the corner. Poof, gone.”
“Gone?”
“Gone. They took their eyes off her, and she vanished. Whole town went nuts for months. That was about a year ago.”
Isaac looked at the playground and scrutinized the slab. “I saw something about it in an old paper at the library. I didn’t make any connection.”
“Yeah, well, who really would? I learned the town doesn’t get so excited when an adult vanishes. It happened about six months after the girl. She was a nurse up at the county hospital, not from around here. Nick showed me the video. He was kind of a perv. Always watched the women from the security room after they left the store.” Ja
rrod stopped for a moment and brought one hand to his mouth. His voice cracked as he said, “she just vanished—right there—in the middle of that goddamn court.”
“Did you know her?”
Jarrod’s shoulders slumped as he nodded. “We were sort of dating. Nobody said anything. The cops wouldn’t believe the video, called it a hoax.”
Isaac took a few steps onto the slab. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either, man. But I know what’s under that slab. Goddamn Evergreen.”
Isaac turned and looked at his old friend.
“Do you remember that creepy spot out west—we called it Diphtheria Hill or whatever?”
“Yeah, the legend. Kid’s stuff. We scared our girlfriends in high school, brought them out there to make out. The story was that a bunch of pioneer kids were buried out there. They all died of diphtheria. A sort of mass grave on top of the hill. Nobody ever found anything, like gravestones.”
Jarrod took the envelope in one hand. “Where do you think The Legends was built, huh? And the graves weren’t on top of the hill, Isaac. They found them, all these little bones—dozens of bodies, maybe hundreds—right where Evergreen was digging foundations for the condos.”
Isaac frowned, looked back at the court. “I still don’t—”
“Look, what would happen if somebody found out? Evergreen would lose the land—historic location and all that. Red tape out the ass, Isaac. They had to do something with those bones, and they found a lot of them. They pledged a new playground to the city council that week.”
Isaac’s face bleached white.
“I was there, man. I helped pour the cement over those bones, no questions asked.” Jarrod’s voice broke, and he stopped for a moment, wiping the tears from his eyes with the back of his hand. “I don’t know how, there’s a lot of crazy shit in this world I don’t understand, but three disappearances in one year—something is not right about what we did. Something isn’t right about this goddamn playground.”
Isaac backed onto the sidewalk.
Jarrod handed him the envelope. “Here. You take a look. Do what you want with this shit. I’ve had enough of it.” He turned and walked into the darkness.
When Isaac tore open the envelope, a pile of papers and even a few photos slipped out in a pile on his kitchen table. Most of the papers were copies of emails sent from executives at Evergreen to a foreman at Conco—Jarrod. The text of the emails verified Jarrod’s tale about the bones. The pictures looked like they could have come from an archeology site, not the ground work for condos. Isaac collapsed on his bed, trying to understand anything and pushing any wild thoughts of what could have happened to Anne from his mind. He lay in bed until dawn forced through his blinds.
In the morning, he reviewed the video again, pausing on the frame just before Anne seemed to sink into the concrete. Jarrod’s story stabbed at his brain. Isaac squinted at the monitor, studying the strange blurs at Anne’s feet. The realization hit like cold needles jabbed into his neck. Those small blurs looked a little like hands. Something—Isaac shuddered to think what—had pulled Anne into the solid concrete slab.
Isaac called in sick to work and composed a letter to the Kansas City Star. He wanted the story told, wanted people to know about Evergreen’s destruction of a historical site and the attempted cover up. He wanted somehow to tell the world about the impossibility of what happened to Anne, the nurse, and that little girl. No one would believe that story, but he could at least blow the whistle on Evergreen’s fraud. After packing the letter, Jarrod’s emails, and the pictures in a large envelope, Isaac walked to the post office and sent it all away.
But he couldn’t send Anne away. She was out there, yanked down by those tiny fingers. Anne. Isaac sat at his computer and watched the video one last time before deleting the file. He leaned on his hands and cried until his body ached. Utterly spent, he floated to his bed like a ghost, collapsed, and fell asleep.
He slept most of the afternoon. As the sun slipped beyond the horizon and his room darkened, Isaac rose, put on his shoes, and grabbed his jacket and the small jewelry box resting in a desk drawer. He left the apartment, not bothering to lock the door, and walked into the night.
The playground looked the same as it had on other evenings: a wide, pale expanse washed with an odd orange light under the streetlamps. Isaac stood on the sidewalk for a minute, opened the little jewelry box, and pulled out the ring. He turned it over in his naked fingers, the cold air biting at his skin. Isaac walked out into the middle of the concrete slab, sat down approximately where he watched Anne slip under the surface, and waited for the little fingers to find him and pull him down.
Snow
Ryan Jergens, reluctant road-tripper but avid skier, stared at the gathering mass of swirling, white snow through the stained convenience store window. Small flakes twisted in the wind and ignited like flash fires under the bright fluorescent lights above the gas pumps. He shoved his hands in his pockets and fingered his car keys. Behind him, Trevor paced snack aisle while the clerk hunched on a stool, picking bits of dirt from underneath her fingernails. In the back of the store, tucked away next to the microwave, rotating hot dog warmer, and stacks of empty boxes, an old man bent over his coffee like a lump of pink clay.
“Hey, you guys have Zero?” Trevor looked at the clerk.
“Should have. Bottom row.” She shrugged and didn’t even move her crinkled eyes from her self-grooming.
“Got it.” He dropped the candy bar on the counter and dug into his pocket for change, dropping a few tinkling coins on the counter. The clerk quickly scooped up the pile of money and nodded slightly before returning to her fingernails.
“You boys headed far?” The voice, deep and growl-like, came from the lump of clay in the corner.
“Trying to make Denver before the storm gets too bad,” Trevor said.
“Good luck,” the old man said, pointing his pinched eyes at Trevor. “Snow can be dangerous. Strange things happen in the snow.” He slowly sipped his coffee. “Storms like this usually claim a couple people each year.”
Trevor rolled his eyes, tore into the candy bar wrapper, and started munching.
Ryan looked at the man, out the window, and then faced Trevor. “Let’s go T. This stuff is really coming down.” Ryan waved his hand at the window, gesturing toward the snow.
“Yeah, sure—I gotta take a leak first.” Trevor swallowed the last bite of candy and disappeared in a small hallway at the back of the store.
A blast of cold air brought Ryan’s attention to the front of the small building. With a sweeping gust of snow, a thin woman, dark-haired and dressed with a long, white coat blew into the store. The clerk straightened on her stool and looked at the old man sipping his coffee.
A quick wave of ice washed over Ryan as he watched the woman in white. She slowly turned toward him, revealing empty, black eyes on a snowfield face—a smooth, porcelain face. He shivered, not from the quick burst of winter air, but something about the black depth of those eyes made him squirm. She continued to look at him as she drifted through the store, like an invisible wire connected from her pupils to his face. He forced his gaze away, looking instead at the counter and recognizing that the clerk’s features had become pale—the whole place seemed awash with the same blue-white light.
“Dude, you ready?” Trevor stepped out of the small hallway, shaking water from his hands. The woman in white transferred her gaze from Ryan to Trevor, and her lips bent in a small smile. At that moment, the snow seemed to fall into Ryan’s veins. Outside, the graying sky continued its onslaught of snow that glowed blue-white in little piles, seemingly emitting its own light.
“What the hell has got you all tripped out?” Trevor bent over the wheel, squinting into the slush ahead of them, trying to hold the car on the disappearing ribbon of highway. They crept toward Denver at a fraction of the posted speed limit.
“Nothing.”
“Bullshit.”
“Really, nothing.”
Ryan blinked heavily against the growing pain in his head. He consciously fought the memory of the woman’s black stare, but some lingering flicker of her smile left Ryan’s mouth dry. Coupled with the treacherous weather in which they drove, Ryan’s thoughts boiled in his stomach.
“You were looking kind of pale back at the gas station.”
“That old dude just creeping me out, that’s all. And that woman...” Ryan glanced quickly at his friend, but too late brought his gaze forward again. A woman stood in front of the car, burning white in their headlights.
“Shit!” Trevor’s foot crushed the brake pedal. The car spun and broke free of the highway ribbon, fishtailing across the road into a growing pile of heavy snow.
Ryan opened his eyes to a face full of white, almost swallowing the passenger airbag. He leaned back, feeling slightly stiff, and looked to his left. Trevor’s head lolled back, from his nose a crimson streak that dotted the front of his shirt. He held his nose with one hand.
“I tink my node id broke.”
“Here,” Ryan said, reaching into his pocket and drawing out a cell phone. “I’ll call 911 or road assistance or something.” He flipped the phone open, waited for signal, but found none.
“Damn boonies, I’ve got no bars. I don’t even get a digital roam. I should get digital roam.” He looked out the window and remembered the woman. “Oh shit, T.”
Ryan opened the door against the swirling wind and stepped into a calf-high drift. He shuffled toward the back of the car, peered over the trunk, and saw her lying about twenty yards away, back on the road. Her body was splayed in the highway slush—her arms and legs akimbo making some sort of unnatural snow angel. Her face glowed as white and smooth as milk, revealing the snow as dirty ash by comparison, and a tangled bramble of dark hair stretched out in all directions from her head. Ryan stumbled to her body.