December Park(145)

“So what do we do?”

I shook my head.

“Does this mean he’s the Piper?” Michael said.

“I don’t know what it means,” I said, “but it’s definitely suspicious, right?”

“It sure would make it easier to abduct those kids if the Piper were walking around in a police uniform,” Michael said.

“That’s scary,” said Adrian.

Michael nodded. “Heck, yeah, it’s scary.”

“But what do we do about it?” I asked.

Peter scratched his chin. “Could you say something to your dad?”

“What would I tell him? That a cop he obviously knows has been following us around? That Scott and Michael caught him going through our stuff in the woods—the woods where, by the way, I’m not even supposed to be hanging around?”

“Come on,” Michael said, marching past Adrian. “We’ve only got two hours before curfew. We came here to check out the Patapsco Institute, so let’s do it.”

It was like stepping into a rain forest. The late afternoon was muggy, and mosquitoes dive-bombed us with keen accuracy and devilish hunger. We trampled through kudzu and passed between curtains of reddish-green palms. Black-eyed Susans scrutinized us in their Cyclopean fashion, and, far above us in the treetops, birds and squirrels announced our trespass.

Our little band continued through the woods just as the reality of what we were doing firmly seated itself in my chest like an iron spike. It had all started out as a game for us—Adrian had found a heart-shaped locket and we were going to find the Harting Farms child killer. But this was no longer a game. The Piper had continued snatching his victims, and we had continued pursuing him. Now, a heart-shaped locket, an iron fleur-de-lis, and the decapitated head of a concrete statue later, we were seeking out a half-sunken building among the cliffs at the edge of the woods. I was terribly certain that we were heading toward some ultimate showdown. The notion made me tremble.

The trees soon parted, and then there it was: the old girls’ school, the abandoned institute. It looked every bit as intimidating and malignant as it had when I’d approached it as a little boy chasing after a balsa wood airplane. It still radiated that same dread and sense of premonitory danger I had gotten from it back then, too. As I stared at it, I felt my palms go clammy and my mouth go dry.

On the most basic level, it hinted at a skeletal similarity to our high school. But beyond that it was its own prehistoric creature, its limestone skin the color of rotting pistachios intersected with jungle vines and bristling with hawks’ nests. Semicircular stone risers fronted the building, unruly tufts of sea grass and wildflowers burst through cracks in its foundation, and the ancient front doors—twin hubs made of cast iron and shrouded in the shade of a stone arcade—faced us. There were words engraved in the stone above the entranceway, but time and weather had dulled them to illegibility. On either side of the arcade, large holes had been punched into the masonry only to be sealed up by metal latticework and poured concrete. It took me a moment to realize these rough holes had been windows.

It was as hideous and as powerful as the face of God staring at us.

“Whoa,” Scott said, stopping in his tracks.

“That’s one ugly f*cking building,” Michael whispered.

I pressed one hand against its dinosaur hide. The stone was cold and solid. There were striations resembling black ribbon that indicated where the fire had run rampant, and even all these years later, I thought I could still smell the smoke and smoldering timber, the charred flesh.

“Guys!” Adrian shouted. He had disappeared around the side of the building. “Come look!”

We followed his voice around one corner to find him staring at a stone ledge no more than three feet off the ground. On the ledge stood replicas of the stone statues that were in the Dead Woods clearing. Most of the heads were intact, the faces as stoic and expressionless as Greek busts. Farther down the ledge, the statues had fallen to the ground where they had broken to pieces and then been covered by underbrush. Some of their heads were missing.

“This must be where that head came from,” Adrian said, walking around. “The one we found in the Werewolf House.”

“What I’d really like to know is where that head is now,” Peter said.

Scott studied the building. “Do you think there’s a way in?”

“Not through those windows, that’s for sure,” Peter commented, gesturing at the series of barred portholes filled with concrete that ran the length of the building.

“What about the doors?” Adrian suggested.

We all went back around to the front of the building and down the short arcade to the doors. They were massive bestial things that reminded me of a medieval drawbridge. Each metal rivet in the frame was nearly the size of my fist. An industrial chain had been wound through the handles several times and was held tightly in place by a padlock. The keyhole in the lock’s faceplate looked large enough to accommodate a key roughly the size of a dinner fork.

“Shoot,” Michael muttered. “If it had been a combo lock, I could have tried to pop the sucker.”

The wind picked up and channeled through the rents and cavities and cracks in the frame of the building, and an eerie howl emanated around us. The sound caused the hairs on my arms to stand at attention. It was the same sonorous moan I’d heard when my airplane had gotten tangled in the trees. Back then, I had attributed the sound to a faceless ghost I had seen—or thought I had seen—flitting past a window. Older and wiser, I knew this sound was the wind fluting through the openings in the rock, yet this knowledge did little to assuage my discomfort.