December Park(139)
“Whoa,” Adrian said.
“You guys think he’s living there?” Scott said. “The Piper, I mean.”
Hard-soled shoes squeaked behind us. We spun around in unison to see Mr. Johnson standing outside a classroom door, his short-sleeved button-down an iridescent white in the midday gloom. “Do you kids need assistance with anything?”
“No, sir,” Michael said. “We were just heading home.”
“The bus already left,” Mr. Johnson said. He sounded distrustful. “What are you guys doing with that display case?”
“Let’s split,” Peter said, and we all hustled to the fire exit. Peter slammed against the arm bar, and dazzling daylight briefly blinded us.
“Hey,” Mr. Johnson shouted after us, but I didn’t hear his squeaking shoes following.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The Pursuit
I had glimpsed it a few times in the past, mostly in the fall and winter, when the leaves dried up and fell from the trees. And even then it was more like a mirage—the dinosaur at the edge of December Park, where the woods ended at the edge of the cliff that overlooked the bay. Perhaps at one time it had been accessible by roads, but it was now firmly hidden within the lush panhandle of Satan’s Forest like a dirty secret.
The closest I had ever come to seeing it—actually looking at it, as opposed to merely glimpsing its reptilian hide through barren tree branches—had been when I was about eleven and in the midst of a short-lived fascination with model airplanes made out of balsa wood.
My journey to find the highest point in the city brought me to the cliffs that overlooked the charcoal diorama of the Chesapeake Bay. It had been a blustery fall day, and the strong winds had stripped the already withering trees bare. My balsa wood plane caught slipstream after slipstream and soared like a bird, pulling loop-the-loops in the gunmetal sky. Twice, I nearly lost it when it shot out over the cliff, carving grand arcs in the cloud-heavy sky; yet both times it boomeranged back to me, landing in a series of undisciplined cartwheels.
One final toss sent the little plane in a smooth semicircle over the cliffs yet again. The bay—whose waters were so black and turbulent they appeared ready to unleash Poseidon and all his fury—appeared to summon it. The fragile plane trembled on the slipstream and actually seemed to pause in midair, terrified. It must have caught a second current, though, because it veered left and swooped back around toward the cliff. It was suddenly no more than a crucifix-shaped pinpoint in the darkening sky, and I was amazed at the heights it reached.
When it finally descended, it did so far into the trees: it swept down and sailed through the naked, craggy arms of mummified elms before it disappeared completely. I stared through the screen of geometric branches to identify where it had landed. It was then that I realized the ruinous old building was just beyond the trees, its bone-colored fa?ade stippled in ivy and veined in a heavy system of snakelike roots.
Before I knew what I was doing, I was halfway through the woods and heading toward the structure. I found myself in awe of this strange monstrosity that appeared both imposing yet harmless. It was tremendous and nearly absurd in its novelty; however, even with all the renovations that had taken place at Stanton School over the past century, I could still discern the skeleton of its twin in this building.
As I crept closer to the building, my sneakers snagging on brambles and thorny green spirals of flora, I recognized the remnants of the horrible fire from the fifties: it had blackened the sandstone and hollowed out parts of the structure. It was possible to peer into some of the arched windows and straight out to the woods beyond. Every ghost story I’d ever heard—no matter how outlandish or silly—resurfaced in my head, causing a chill to trace down my spine and my skin to grow tingly with gooseflesh.
The balsa wood airplane, suspended in a tangle of twiggy branches perhaps ten feet off the ground, was directly ahead of me. A vision came to me then: when I jumped up to shake the branches in an attempt to free my plane, the trees would instantly come alive and drive their twisted, skeletal protuberances through my torso, spearing me over and over again like a living voodoo doll.
I stared openmouthed at the building. Overhead, the sound of thunder was like a roller coaster. The roof of my mouth adopted all the attributes of drywall. It was at that moment nature saw fit to shuttle a river of icy wind down through the trees, rattling their bony branches like percussion instruments. I thought I saw someone flit by one of the darkened windows in the face of the building. My skin rippled like rings across the surface of a pond.
The strength of the wind increased, summoning little tornadoes of dead leaves and grit, and with it came the ghostly moan of some distant and otherworldly creature crying out in mournful regret. I vibrated like a knife stuck in a plank of wood, unable to tear my eyes from the black orifice in the masonry of the building—an orifice that was no longer a glassless window but a gargantuan eye socket.
That mournful moan rose to a pitch that resonated in my molars and liberated my balsa wood airplane from its cage of branches. The plane nose-dived to the earth, and one of its cheap wings broke at a perfect ninety-degree angle.
I snatched up the plane, anticipating those trees coming alive. Only now I believed they would lift me off the ground and carry me toward the building. The stone foundation would crack open into the ragged suggestion of a mouth, and the tree branches would feed me into it, the way a blue crab brings food to its mouth with its serrated pincers.