December Park(153)

Ignoring me, he lifted it an inch or two. I could actually see the weight of the thing in the way it hardly yielded, except in the very spot where he lifted. Adrian examined the section of mattress he had revealed. Wrinkling his nose, he held the flashlight right up to it. “That’s blood.”

I gazed over his shoulder. Coagulated brownish sludge unstuck like caramel. It felt like the back of my throat was being tickled with a feather.

“It’s here, too,” he said, moving around the mattresses and scrutinizing another corner.

At my feet, a two-by-four seemed to summon me. I snatched it up, those horrible crickets vaulting off the floor toward my eyes. Brandishing it like a sword, I poked the tapered tip into the mattress at eye level. With a sickening digestive gurgle, the two-by-four sank into the fabric with little resistance. Disgusted, I dropped it.

My sneakers grew wet. Looking down, I saw a puddle of rusty water spreading from beneath the mattresses and across the floor. I was standing right in it.

“It isn’t blood. It looks like rusty water and sewage. Like the basement of the Werewolf House. The sewer lines are so old, they probably burst.” Even as I said this, I thought I could hear the faint trickling of water somewhere in the room.

Stumbling backward, I sent a stack of wooden crates crashing to the floor. The sound couldn’t have been louder had the crates been loaded with dynamite.

Adrian, who had transferred halfway across the room, afforded me only the briefest of glances. He was looking at various items bolted to a cinder-block wall.

I toed one crate over and saw that someone had tied strips of cloth to one of the slats. The strips were each a different color, though so filthy it was difficult to discern exactly what color each strip was.

“I don’t know what these are for,” Adrian said, pointing, “but they look dangerous.”

What resembled a piece of modern art—a neurotic confusion of metal angles welded together—had been bolted to the wall.

“They come apart,” he said, gripping one section of the sculpture that looked like the blunted blade of a wood chisel and removing it from the rest of the chaos. “It’s heavy. It’s like some kind of weapon.”

“Let’s stop touching this stuff,” I said. I glanced at the hall and saw a single silhouette framed in the doorway.

“What the hell are you guys doing?” It was Peter.

“Come see this stuff,” Adrian said.

“No.” He didn’t budge from the doorway.

“Go put it back,” I told Adrian. I was sweating profusely, and the smell in this room was making me sick to my stomach. I suddenly wanted nothing more than to be out in the fresh summer air. “Scott was almost killed back there, man. We should get out of here.”

“But we’re here,” he said.

Just then, that low creaking noise emanated up from the floor again. We all looked around.

“It’s just the building settling,” Peter repeated, though I could tell he was struggling to keep his voice calm.

“This building should have settled a hundred years ago,” I said, then turned to Adrian. “Let’s leave.”

Adrian said nothing. He was busy examining some of the other strange implements hanging on the wall.

Peter wavered in the doorway, mouthing something I couldn’t quite see in the darkness.

“I want to leave,” I said to Adrian again.

This time, when Adrian didn’t respond, I tramped across the creaking floor and joined Peter. Whether subconsciously or not, I kept my flashlight trained on the floor so as not to bring into relief any of the other insane horrors that may have been in that room.

Back in the passageway, Scott stood with his bloodied arms folded across his chest while Michael paced back and forth. At the sound of our approach, Michael looked up and said, “Are we leaving yet?”

“I think it’s time we talk to your dad,” Peter said to me. “Let’s let the cops take over. We keep stumbling around in these condemned places, we’re all gonna wind up dead.”

I looked to Scott and Michael. “You guys feel this way, too?”

“No,” said Michael. “I mean, I don’t think we should say anything to anyone. We’ve had that dead girl’s locket since last October. That shit’s evidence. We might even go to jail.”

“We won’t go to jail,” Peter said.

“Well, we ain’t gonna get medals; that’s for sure.”

I looked at Scott. “And what about you?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Peter and Michael both have good points. What more can we do? There’s nothing here. It’s a dead end. It might be time to turn the clues over to the cops and see what they can do with them.”

“Don’t I have a say in any of this?” Michael met my eyes. “It’s my life, too. I don’t want to f*cking go to jail.”

“Nobody’s going to jail,” Peter reiterated, his voice slightly raised.

“If I tell my dad what we’ve been up to, he’s going to kill me,” I said. Everyplace we had been—everything we had done—had gone against his directives. No matter if they caught the Piper or not, I was bound to be grounded until the turn of the century. And was there a chance that Michael was right? Could something worse happen to us? Had we unwittingly made ourselves criminally liable in some fashion? “Just let me think of what to do. Give me some time. In the meantime, yeah, we should get out of here.”