December Park(150)

Just then, Michael belted out, “Is anybody home?” at the top of his lungs, causing us all to jump. His voice resonated throughout the room and funneled down the adjoining corridors, loud enough to cause bits of pulverized stone to rain down from the ceiling.

I expected a tornado of bats to come flurrying out from one of the adjoining corridors, but nothing happened.

Peter slapped him on the back of the head and told him not to do that again.

The tumbling of rocks caused me to look across the ill-lit room where I saw Adrian’s flashlight wavering through the smoky dust-clouded atmosphere. “Hey,” I said. The enormity of the room amplified my voice and made it sound as if it were coming from many directions at once.

“The acoustics are funny in here,” Scott said, reading my mind.

I held up one arm to shield my eyes. “Where do we go? There’s a doorway over here.” I pointed.

“This way, too,” Scott said, pointing in the opposite direction.

They weren’t doorways, exactly—meaning, they were not geometric rectangles inlaid in the walls—but more like hasty cavities punched in the stone walls to accommodate passage. Tendrils of leafy vines hung over some of them.

Stomping over fallen rocks and mounds of crumbling white powder, we went over to one of the doorways. Ominous black sludge was packed against the walls where they met the floor, and it reeked as it baked in the humid, motionless air.

“Careful,” Peter said, gesturing to a spot on the floor directly in front of me.

I paused and, peering through the darkness and the settling dust, made out a second hole in the floor, this one a bit narrower than the one Scott had found but still wide enough to accommodate a particularly careless person.

“They’re all over.” He pointed out two more cracks in the foundation farther ahead.

My father’s voice surfaced in my head: Stay away from it. You and your friends go in there to play, you could get hurt. Or worse.

A vast labyrinthine corridor stretched out before us. Windows high up in the walls on one side painted white squares of light on the opposite wall. Many of the marble tiles buckled as if something large had disturbed them while tunneling beneath the floor.

To the right of the corridor, doorways with no doors stood every twenty or so feet. A shadow moved in one of the doorways, and I held my breath. The others must have seen it, too, because I could no longer hear them breathing, either. Scott flicked off his flashlight; I hadn’t even taken mine out of my pocket yet.

“Wait,” Peter said, taking a few hesitant steps forward. “It’s a tree moving in the breeze, that’s all.”

“A tree inside?” Michael said.

“Yeah. Come look. It’s growing right out of the floor.”

We approached the doorway, the loose and buckled tiles of the corridor shifting and sliding beneath our feet, and stared into the adjacent room. It was almost as large as the one Peter thought was the gymnasium and in similar disarray. Indeed, a spindly, unidentifiable tree sprouted through a chasm in the floor. It was leafless, and its bark was the pale whitish pink of a clam. The only sunlight that reached it came in through a fist-sized hole in the ceiling that was crisscrossed by a screen of vines.

Scott pointed his flashlight into the room. Adrian did likewise. There was nothing but forgotten emptiness in there.

I took my flashlight out of my pocket but in my nervousness dropped it. The sound it made when it struck the floor was akin to a dry branch cracking off a tree. I heard it roll away. “Shit.”

Scott tried to locate it with his flashlight, but the darkness had swallowed it whole.

Back in the corridor, the five of us went slowly down it, glancing in every ancient tomb-like room we passed.

“This is C Hall,” Peter said, pausing . . . then walking in a tight little circle so he could survey the corridor in its entirety. “See it? Structurally, it’s set up just like Stanton.”

“You’re right.” Scott directed his flashlight down the hall where another corridor crossed it. “That’s B Hall. Turn right and you go to the display case, the janitors’ closet, the classrooms that look out on the rear parking lot. Turn left, and you head toward the cafeteria, the lobby, Principal Unglesbee’s office.”

I turned around and looked at the opposite end of the corridor. “Then the library and the A Hall classrooms would be down there.”

“It’s so big,” Adrian said. There was a vein of defeat in his voice. “It’ll take us days to search this whole place. Weeks, maybe.”

At the end of the institute’s counterpart of C Hall, we crossed into a series of rooms that were joined by narrow chambers that weren’t exactly hallways but almost secretive passageways. They didn’t currently exist at our high school, though it was possible they had at one time but had been walled over during the renovation. If my bearings were correct, this was approximately where the science hall should be—Mr. Johnson’s classroom and lab and the rest. The ceiling was ribbed with iron struts, the material behind it resembling corrugated tin. What looked like blackened bits of cloth hung from some of the rafters.

I entered the room, beckoning the others to follow because I needed their flashlights even though bands of daylight filtered in through the barred and boarded-over windows. Massive oak desks had all been pushed against the farthest wall. They were terminal with rot and riddled with termite burrows. At the center of the room, undulating stone burst up from the tile like rocky hillocks on the surface of the moon.