December Park(138)

He waved us inside, and my friends hopped off the steps and filed through the doorway. I brought up the rear, thankful to be out from beneath the hot sun. It was a scorcher.

We followed Michael down B Hall, and I was overwhelmed by the sheer emptiness of the school and the sense of vacancy, of dormancy. It’s asleep, I thought as we moved down the hall. The large beast hibernates in summer, dreaming of the tiny children who will traipse through its innards come fall. We are insects passing through its system while it slumbers.

Michael led us to the glass display case that held the school’s trophies, pennants, ribbons, plaques, and other such paraphernalia. It hung on the wall at the end of B Hall between a janitor’s closet and a water fountain that never worked.

“This?” Peter said. “What’s—?”

“Check it out.” Michael pointed at two framed black-and-white photos on the back wall of the display.

The photos seemed to be of the same gothic structure taken from two slightly different angles, the stone fa?ade a confusion of various architectural motifs: medieval parapets, marble arcades, Greek pillars, obelisk posts on either side of a sweeping semicircular stairway that led to a pair of massive doors with intricate iron sigils. The windows were arched and networked with iron bars. Detailed carvings were inlaid above the entranceways. Indeed, even the date on the brass plate at the bottom of each frame was engraved with the same year—1893. Yet on closer inspection I noticed the words engraved above one set of doors said Stanton School for Boys while in the other picture they said Patapsco School for Girls.

“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.”