December Park(151)

We passed into the adjoining room. The silvery eyes of a possum were caught in the beam of my flashlight. It was a tremendous and beastly thing with fur like a matted old carpet, and it hissed at us with such venom I could see flicks of spittle spray out of its pointy, multi-toothed maw. Unlike the one Adrian and I had come across at the Werewolf House, this one turned and trundled through bits of fallen debris until it vanished into a hole in the wall. When I looked up, I spotted more bits of dark, oily cloth hanging from the ceiling joists.

In the next room, the walls had been blackened by the historic fire of 1958. One wall had been reduced to blackened rubble, and there were moist and reeking heaps of charred wood collected into Quonset-shaped dunes. Damage to the ceiling resulted in jagged cuts in the roof through which golden sunlight, intersected by a meshwork of tree branches and vines, spilled in sporadic fashion. Birds flitted in and out of the cracks and roosted in the ceiling struts. The pungent aroma of burned wood layered with the reek of decay was all I could smell: the memory of that fire was still in the walls.

As we went deeper into the connecting rooms, the damage done by the fire became more and more apparent. As did the ghostly aroma of smoke. That the smell of charred things could still haunt this place after almost fifty years was astounding. In another room, metal bed frames had been stacked against one wall. At first, the floor appeared to be covered by heaps of grayish snow, yet on closer scrutiny, I saw that it was actually soggy clumps of mattress stuffing that had been blackened by mold and left to rot. The smell made my stomach clench.

Adrian adjusted his glasses and cast his flashlight around the room, cracking open the dark and hidden places with the light. But there was nothing here so we kept moving.

At the end of the corridor, where a second hallway crossed it like a T, we glanced to the right. The floor was creased down the middle as if by an earthquake, the crease filled with all the debris that had slid into it from either side of the angled floor. Wires sprung like strange tropical plants from gaping wounds in the plaster.

To the left, I made out segmented indentations in the ceiling where light fixtures had probably once been. It looked like someone went berserk with a sledgehammer on the floor, and mounds of some whitish chalky substance had been spilled on it.

“Those are bats, dude,” Michael said, craning his neck.

What looked like greasy pods were hanging from the high rafters, some of them nearly a foot long. There must have been two hundred of them.

“Holy shit,” Peter breathed.

Adrian tiptoed down the hallway. He aimed his flashlight on the floor, though he stared into the soupy black abyss that was the other end of the hallway. I moved to follow him.

Peter snagged a handful of my shirt. “This is stupid,” he whispered. “There’s no one here. We’re gonna get killed jerking around in this place.”

I watched Adrian disappear into one of the rooms. In an instant, the light from his flashlight was gone.

I looked at Scott and Michael. Scott appeared apprehensive; Michael was still staring at the bats hanging from the ceiling. “I don’t want rabies, man,” he intoned.

“There’s no one here,” Peter said again.

I turned and shouted down the hall, “Adrian!” My voice boomed like a cannon blast.

Adrian neither reappeared nor responded.

I shouted again, and some of the bats above our heads tittered and flexed their wings. The sound of their bodies rubbing together was like the crinkling of newspaper.

“Well, we can’t just leave him here.” I took the flashlight from Scott, then plodded down the hall. The fault line in the middle of the floor made walking difficult; I had to straddle the slanting tiles on either side of the crease to maintain my balance.

When I reached the room Adrian had disappeared into, it was pitch-black and, as far as I could tell, empty. For whatever stupid reason, I made a hissing sound, perhaps in an effort to call to him. I listened for movement but heard nothing.

I swiped Scott’s flashlight back and forth around the room. Showers. The tiles were black and the spigots looked grotesquely phallic. Opposite the shower stalls were rows of toilets, each one filthier than the next. Rats wove between exposed pipes, and a raccoon perched on a brick partition rose on its hind legs like a bear and released a high-pitched machine gun sound. At the opposite end of the room I discerned the black-on-black rectangular impression of another doorway and figured Adrian must have gone that way.

I expected further protest from my friends as I proceeded through the room, but no one said a word. Their shuffling footfalls behind me confirmed that they were following me, though I assumed it had little to do with bravery and mostly to do with the fact that they didn’t want to be left alone.

When I went through the doorway, the stink of decay slapped me across the face. I skidded to a stop, my sneakers grinding across the gravelly surface of the floor. The room was long and slender, like a closet that went on forever, and I saw Adrian’s light bobbing in the smoky gloom at the other end. I called his name. The sound of my voice channeled down the passage, then ricocheted back at me.

I cast the flashlight’s beam along the wall to my right. There were coffin-sized inserts inlaid in the mold-blackened drywall, hastily cut with a dull blade by the looks of them. Random items—tattered blankets, metal pails, spools of black electrical wire that at first glance looked like coiled snakes—were piled within. Rickety wooden struts bowed beneath the weight of shelves bracketed into the walls on either side. Stacked on the shelves were big square things that could have been suitcases or cinder blocks; it was impossible to tell in the dark.