December Park(169)

“Thanks.” His face was bruised and swollen, his lips split and crusted with blood. When he reached out and pulled the comic books into his lap, I saw striated bruises running the length of his arms. He rifled through them, grinning.

“They’re just some old ones I found packed away in my closet,” I told him. “I don’t know if they’re any good.”

“They’re great. Thanks.”

“Can you even read them without your glasses? Did you lose them in . . . uh, that place?”

“I guess so. I don’t remember a whole lot.” He gestured toward a small television set mounted on brackets above his bed. “Did you see me on the news?”

“No. Dad took our TV away.”

“Oh. Cops came and interviewed me. A psychologist, too.”

“Neat,” I said.

“You killed him.”

“Yeah.”

His gaze hung on me. “Is it true? About . . . about who he was?”

“Yeah,” I said and looked away from him. My eyes filled with tears, and I didn’t want him to see.

“It’s okay if you need to cry,” Adrian said. On the wall behind him, machines beeped. “I won’t tell anybody.”

“What were you doing in there?” I said, whirling around. “If you hadn’t gone in there . . .” I couldn’t finish the thought.

“I’m sorry.”

“I would have never had . . . had to . . .”

A tear traced down his bruised cheek. Slowly, he nodded. “I’m sorry. Don’t be mad at me. I’m sorry, Angie.”

“You went in there alone. It was stupid.”

“I know.” Adrian wiped his single tear away.

I exhaled a shuddery breath. “I’m not . . . I’m not mad . . . at you . . .”

He was still nodding.

“I’m not mad at you,” I repeated, my voice steadier.

“Good. Because you’re my best friend.”

My anger suddenly gone, I smiled at him. I mopped tears from my eyes and regained some composure.

“You know, the guys stopped by the other day,” Adrian said once I’d dragged a folding chair over and sat down.

“You’ve seen them?”

“Yeah.” He motioned to a stainless steel table across the room where a bunch of plastic army men had been set up. There was a deck of Uno cards there, too. “They brought me some stuff and hung out awhile.”

“I haven’t seen them.”

“Not at all?”

“No.” I thought of the mob outside our house and how Mr. Matherson had been among them. My greatest fear was that my friends had backed away from me.

“Oh,” Adrian said. He sounded strangely disappointed.

“Are you . . . like . . . in a lot of pain?” I asked.

“No, not really. Not now.”

“Do you have to stay here much longer?”

“I’m not sure. They’ve been taking pictures of my brain in some big machine. They’re worried about swelling.”

“Michael’s already got the swelled head in our group,” I joked. “We don’t need another.”

Adrian laughed.

“What happened to you in that place?” I asked.

“I don’t really remember. A lot of it’s a blur. But I heard they found the bodies.”

I nodded. My brother had hidden them beneath the Patapsco Institute in the network of small caves and tunnels that ran beneath it and out toward the cliffs. He had gained access to the institute via one of these tunnels, too—a narrow crawl space in the ground that came up through a broken floor. When I had heard this, I recalled those large craters in the institute’s floor and the cliff face dotted with tunnels. They weren’t tunnels anymore. They were catacombs.

“What do you call it when you dream about something that’s gonna happen?” he asked out of nowhere.

“A prophecy?”

“Yeah, that’s it. You ever have one of those dreams? A prophecy dream?”

“I don’t know,” I said slowly, recalling the nightmare that had me running through some rain forest while a giant prehistoric creature chased me and ultimately hiding in some grass hut only to find a whole other kind of creature waiting for me inside.

“After my dad killed himself, I used to have the same dream over and over again about an underground city. Only it really wasn’t just underground but sort of hidden behind and within the other city, the real city. Every building had a secret counterpart, and every street had another street just like it but with a slightly different name, and they led to slightly different places. Even the people in the dream had twins that lived in this city.”

“They’re called doppelgangers,” I said.

“Yeah. In the dream, this whole other city goes on existing right alongside the real one. Thing is, I’m the only person who knows the hidden city exists. I’m the only one who knows the bad things that hurt the people of the real city come from the hidden city at night. That’s why no one ever knows how to stop the bad things or how to fight them or even find them.

“So I go underground and leave bits of string tied to the entrances that are like these big golden arches, which is weird, right, because you’d think everyone else would be able to see them too and figure out there’s a city under the city.” His eyes grew wide. “But it’s not just a city. Turns out it’s a whole world under there—a world beneath a world and within a world but also somehow occupying the same space as the real world.”