December Park(149)

We all agreed.

Peter hit Play on the Walkman. Springsteen crackled through the headphones, belting out his immortal line—“Born down in a dead man’s town . . .”

“Well,” Michael said with a roll of his shoulders, “that can’t be a good sign, can it?”

Scott took off his Orioles hat and tossed it onto the ground. “Catch you guys on the flip side.”

“See you later, alligator,” Peter said.

“After a while, pedophile,” Scott said, and he began to climb.

We took a few steps back and watched him go. He was athletic and moved quickly, steadily, yet I wasn’t too comfortable with the way the ladder shook as he climbed. The rest of us weren’t nearly as lithe.

Scott reached the top without incident. He peered into the window, shining his flashlight inside.

“What do you see?” Adrian called up at him.

“It’s a mess. It looks like part of the ceiling collapsed.”

“Wonderful,” Peter muttered.

Scott swung one leg into the window and sat straddling it. “I don’t need the ladder to get down. There’s enough stuff for me to climb on.”

“Just don’t break your neck,” I shouted.

And just like that, Scott disappeared inside the building.

Peter patted Michael on the back and said, “You’re next.”

Michael took his switchblade from his pocket, popped it open, then held it between clenched teeth, pirate-style, as he climbed the ladder. He paused when he reached the top, peering into the black hole in the building. He said something to Scott, but I couldn’t hear Scott’s reply. Then he went inside.

Peter clicked off his Walkman, unhooked it from his waistband, and wound the headphones around it before setting it on the ground. His forehead was beaded with sweat, his reddish hair damp at the temples. “Give me a boost.”

I threw my shoulders against his buttocks and heaved him up so he was able to stand on the first rung. Bits of rock and broken pieces of mortar crumbled to the ground as the ladder thudded against the building. Peter ascended slowly, methodically.

“I wonder what we’ll find in there,” Adrian said.

“Only one way to find out,” I said, lacing my hands together so Adrian could step on them. I boosted him—he was much lighter than Peter—and he proceeded to scramble up the ladder more quickly than I would have thought him capable. At the top, he stared into the darkened window for perhaps a second. Then he climbed inside.

I was alone. Before joining my friends, I surveyed all our stuff strewn about the ground: Adrian’s backpack, the peanut butter crackers wrapper, Scott’s Orioles baseball cap, Peter’s Walkman and headphones. It struck me as a sort of portent. Like Adrian, Howie Holt had left his backpack behind. Tori Brubaker’s shoe had been found by the river. And of course there was Courtney Cole’s heart-shaped locket, dropped and forgotten in a culvert. Echoes of recent horrors.

I slipped the flashlight into the pocket of my shorts and climbed the ladder. It felt sturdier than it looked, which brought me some relief. When I got to the top, I gazed into the darkened aperture that had once been a window and waited for my eyes to adjust.

It was a large room with a high ceiling. There were zigzag rents in the ceiling through which daylight bled, casting zebra stripes along a floor so full of crumbled stone, heaps of grayish powder, and debris that it looked almost deliberately arranged. There were other windows around the perimeter of the ceiling, each one crisscrossed with iron bars. Vegetation nearly prehistoric in its appearance climbed the walls and looped around the ironwork over the crumbling window frames.

Flashlights moved around below. Someone shouted my name, but the echo distorted the voice, and I couldn’t tell who it was. Glancing over the sill, I saw a pyramid of crumbled stone arranged almost like a staircase leading from the window’s ledge straight down to the floor. I swung one leg over the ledge and stepped on the heap of stone. It was solid. I dragged my other leg in behind me and descended the sloping stairwell.

“You made it,” Adrian said, clapping me on the shoulder. His pale face was a checkerboard of light and shadow from the chutes of daylight that spilled down from the high windows. The lenses of his glasses glinted blue like the light cast by a black-and-white television set in a dark room.

It was oppressively hot and stank like sewage. Even the air felt corrupted by our trespass, and I was suddenly certain that no one—not even the Piper—had set foot inside this place in a long, long time.

“I was right, wasn’t I?” Peter said. “This would have been the gymnasium.”

Only its size alluded to that fact; otherwise, the room was a mausoleum, an Egyptian tomb deep beneath the desert, and looked nothing like Stanton School’s gymnasium.

“Check this out,” Scott said, waving me over. He trained his flashlight on a giant crater in the floor, large enough to swallow a compact car.

I approached the crater and peered down. Its walls looked to be made of stone, much like the interior of the drainage tunnel that ran under the highway, and it appeared ten or fifteen feet deep.

“That’s just like at the train depot,” Scott said. “Remember how Peter put his foot through the floor and it was hollow underneath?”

“I hope this whole place doesn’t come crumbling down while we’re in it,” I said.