December Park(120)
“Let me see.” I grabbed his hand and examined it. “We need a pair of tweezers or a sewing needle or something.”
Peter looked down at the Metallica patch pinned to his T-shirt sleeve. With his good hand he undid the safety pin that held it, stuffing the patch into his pocket and holding the pin up to his face as if to scrutinize it. Then he thrust it at me. “You do it.”
I took the pin, then fished my cigarette lighter from the pocket of my shorts. After sterilizing the head of the pin, I hunched over Peter’s hand and prodded the edge of the splinter to the surface of his flesh. A dollop of blood came with it.
“I’m gonna need shots,” he groaned.
“Hold still,” I cautioned him. It took a couple of minutes, but I managed to remove the splinter. I held the culprit up between us, pinched between my thumb and forefinger, as if we were two homicide detectives who had just located a missing shell casing. It was roughly the size and shape of a pencil point. Peter wrinkled his nose at it, and I tossed it onto the ground.
Peter stared at the depot’s darkened windows. They looked like vortexes into other dimensions. “Man, we really saw that, didn’t we?”
I nodded.
“Should we break in?”
“I guess we could. Though if you got a splinter that bad just from trying to open a window, I can only imagine what we might do to ourselves crawling through a busted window.” Because this place is haunted, I thought. Because it will do what it can to keep us out. In much the same way the Werewolf House lured us in, this place is telling us to leave. We are trespassers. We do not belong.
I didn’t necessarily believe in ghosts, but I did believe in the power a place could hold, could retain, and how the land resonated with echoes of its past. Charles had once told me that sometimes the places where bad things happened would suck up that badness like a sponge sucks up water. The badness gets stuck and rots and becomes like a stain, even if you couldn’t see anything. An invisible stain, like on cop shows on TV, and how even after blood is cleaned up you can still find it with a black light.
Admittedly, the old railway depot projected an aura of badness. I didn’t know what evil had transpired here all those years ago when the station was in use, but it wasn’t hard to imagine a horrific industrial accident or a passenger getting struck by the train. It could have been anything.
It also occurred to me that this was one of the places my father specifically told me to keep away from back in October, the night Courtney Cole’s body was pulled out of the Dead Woods. Stay away from those empty cabins along the Cape and the Shallows and the old railway station at the end of Farrington Road.
Peter nodded, though he still stared at the depot with a determined expression. His forehead and cheeks were becoming sunburned. He winced when he looked at me, the setting sun catching his eyes. “Let’s come back tomorrow with Michael. He could open that lock.”
“We’ll come back with everyone,” I added, thinking there would be safety in numbers. Safety from what? Ghosts? Again, my father’s voice floated through my brain: When you go out, stay with your friends in populated areas, preferably at their houses.
Rustling noises beyond the nearby tree line caused us to freeze. I thought it might be the deer, but when I looked toward the tracks they were already gone. As we listened, it sounded like something big moving around just beyond our line of sight. Very close. An animal?
A person?
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Abandoned Railway Depot (Part Two)
The following day, after I got out of work and Michael got out of summer school, the five of us departed for the abandoned railway depot. We didn’t have much time to waste if we were to make it back home before curfew.
We picked up Farrington Road by cutting through the bike trail behind St. Nonnatus, but we still had a good hour-long bike ride ahead of us. Michael had his army helmet on, and Peter had secured the dynamo-powered radio to his handlebars with bungee cords, so we enjoyed some tunes as we rode. The alternative rock station, still mourning the April suicide of Kurt Cobain, played a block of Nirvana without commercial interruptions.
On my handlebars, Adrian had assumed his rightful position—a masthead tucked into a ball, his head down to allow for better aerodynamics, his hands balled into white fists as they gripped the handlebars.
Halfway down Farrington we stopped to smoke cigarettes while Michael urinated into a thicket of holly bushes. Around us the woods had grown greener seemingly overnight, and the air smelled like sandalwood and pine sap and honeysuckle.
“Whew,” Michael said, coming back out from the trees and shaking one urine-speckled leg of his shorts. “My back teeth were floating.”
Everyone mounted their bikes except me.
“What?” Adrian said.
“Your turn to drive,” I told him.
“Huh?”
“You know how, right?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, good. Just try not to kill me.”
It had been a joke, but I quickly prayed for my safety once I mounted the handlebars and Adrian started to pedal. He wove like a drunkard and jerked the handlebars back and forth so much I could have sworn he was trying to shake me loose. He seemed timid about going very fast, so he hung back from the others, content in our plodding but safer pace.