December Park(162)

Peter picked the backpack up and turned it over in his hands. The zipper was busted, and all the contents must have fallen out, because it was empty. Peter’s mouth narrowed to a lipless gash when he saw that one of the shoulder straps had been torn loose. When he looked at me, his eyes were terrible.

“Adrian?” I called, my voice a weak tremolo in the vast cavern of the room. “Are you here?”

“This place is enormous,” Peter said in a low voice. He let Adrian’s backpack fall to the floor. “He could be anywhere.”

Adrian would have wanted to pick up where we’d left off Thursday evening: that horrible room past the showers, the one with the meat hooks hanging from the rafters and the stack of soggy mattresses that smelled like death. “Follow me. I think I know where he went.”

We walked through the nearest door, absently stepping over Adrian’s backpack, and into the corridor. The floor and walls seemed to twist like a hallway in a fun house. There were no open windows, but rain somehow found a way in, filtering down on us as we traversed the long corridor while creating swampy black pools in the dug-out hollows of the floor.

When I thought I caught movement at the opposite end of the hall, I called out, “Adrian!” in a pathetic croak.

“What did you see?” Peter whispered.

“I’m not sure. Maybe nothing.”

The shadows all had false fronts and paper bottoms. Rattling noises behind some fallen boards turned out to be more water spilling through seams in the foundation. Other slithery sounds were certainly snakes; I glimpsed the tail of one as it vanished into a hole the size of a baseball in the floor.

“Scott said Adrian could have broken a leg in here,” I said, partially to Peter but also to convince myself that the only dangers we might face were the broken floorboards and the falling debris.

“Yeah,” Peter said, though I could tell he was thinking worse things, too.

“We don’t know anything beyond that.”

“His backpack. Adrian came in here and hasn’t come out. Something happened. Something bad.”

“Please stop,” I whispered. “Please.”

At the end of the corridor, we crossed into the passageway of interconnected chambers—crooked, buckling rooms that defied the constraints of construction and sanity. Pools of water spread across the floor, setting detritus afloat like garbage jettisoned from a barge. Rats piled atop the flotsam and reared up on their hind legs when I drew my flashlight upon them. Ancient hospital implements gleamed in the flashlight’s beam.

Peter and I waded through the shin-high water. Leafy tongues of flora undulated in the heightening soup. Some of the vegetation looked like human hair fanning in the tributaries of running water. I froze, the beam of light angled on some particularly troubling strands that looked like longish waves of dark hair. Peter saw it, too, and stopped moving. I prodded something solid just beneath the surface of the pool with the toe of my sneaker. A skull, I thought.

But it wasn’t a skull—it was a stone on which the black hairlike plant grew.

In the adjoining room, water the color of beef gravy poured from ventilated grates in the concrete walls. A flash of lightning exploded through the breaks in the ceiling, and countless shadows jumped out from various hiding places. My sanity balanced on a vertiginous ledge.

“I’m getting turned around,” I muttered. “I’m getting lost.”

“It’s Stanton School. The hallways are set up the same,” Peter said, his voice blessedly calm. “We’re in the science rooms right now.”

In yet another room, a grumbling, belching sound caused us both to freeze in midstride. The height of the water had lessened as the floor sloped toward a crater bursting through the tiles. A muddy whirlpool swirled into the crater like bathwater going down an enormous drain. As we watched, a greasy red baseball cap bobbed toward the hole, was embraced by the whirlpool, and was summarily dispatched into the opening.

“Like flushing dead goldfish down the toilet,” Peter said.

“Whose hat do you think that was?”

Peter said nothing.

As we crossed into the antechamber of shower stalls and toilets, I was struck again by the putrid reek of decay. It clotted up the humid air and created a film at the back of my throat. The storm rattled the pipes, causing the ancient shower heads to squeal as they rocked in their housings. A cacophony of frogs provided the musical score to our trespass.

There was a scraping followed by what sounded like metal pipes clattering to the floor. A cloud of dust settled around a jumble of black iron bars that had apparently been leaning against the wall before being knocked to the floor. The culprit was a large black rat, its fur wet and matted. Its eyes glistened like two drops of India ink.

I took a few steps toward the fallen iron bars.

Peter came up alongside me, peering over my shoulder as I shined a light on them. “Those—”

“Yes,” I said, cutting him off. “Yes.”

They were the iron staves from the fence that surrounded the Werewolf House. Some of them were still capped with a decorative fleur-de-lis.

“No way,” Peter murmured. “No way those things are in here.”

I bent down to pick one up.

Peter kicked my hand away. “Don’t touch ’em.”

We kept moving. At the other end of the room we entered the narrow passage with the gouges in the walls, fire-retardant blankets, and spools of electrical wire spilling from hastily carved cavities. Opposite us, another doorway stood at a slant. I stepped over some fallen debris, the flashlight jittering in my hand, and nearly screamed when Peter snatched a fistful of my shirt.