December Park(23)

“What did the elephant say to the naked man?” Peter said as we crossed Tarmouth Road. A blackened hillside of farmland rose to our right, studded with a few ramshackle farmhouses with tallow lights on in the windows. We were on the outskirts of Harting Farms.

“Oh, please,” Michael groaned.

“How do you breathe with that thing?” Peter said, springing the punch line on us.

The rest of us lowed like pained cattle.

Then Scott shouted, “Car!”

We all rushed onto the shoulder of the road and ducked behind the overgrown grass of the embankment.

A station wagon with a headlamp out rolled past, its muffler rattling like a party favor.

After it had gone, we stood and swatted the dirt off our clothes. I glanced back and saw all the lights gathered in the distance. It looked like I could scoop up the whole town in my hands and carry it with me.

“Come on,” Michael urged, climbing back up the embankment.

This part of town was nearly desolate. The premature winter had stripped the trees naked, and the wind, strong and unforgiving, came in off the bay. The sky was clear and unending, speckled with a thousand stars of varying brilliance, and the air was thin enough to make our footfalls on the pavement echo down the well of streets at every intersection. There was sustained electricity in the air, too, which usually preceded a summer thunderstorm, building all around us an awareness of impending calamity. As we walked I was alerted to the instinctual way each of my friends glanced skyward at different times, as if expecting to witness some rare celestial event.

Peter began singing a John Mellencamp song, his voice hollow and off-key. One by one, we all chimed in—even Scott, who had no interest in the down-home rockabilly anthems of Mellencamp.

A black Cadillac eased past us, its headlamps cleaving through the darkness. It seemed to slow as it went by, but then it kept going and turned at the next stop sign.

We crossed the street and continued north, the streetlights dotting Point Lane up ahead like Chinese lanterns. In this part of town the houses were spaced farther apart. We took Point to Counterpoint and headed for the edge of town.

To our right, the dark screen of woods rose over the embankment like a black shroud that separated us from the sloping moonlit field of December Park. It was a large swath of land flanked by Satan’s Forest, which was nearly as expansive as an actual forest, and the imposing, medieval remains of the Patapsco School for Girls.

Back in the 1890s, L. John Stanton, an illustrious entrepreneur, erected two schools—the Patapsco School for Girls, named for the river it overlooked from its perch atop a wooded bluff, and the Stanton School for Boys, named after Stanton himself—at opposite ends of the town. This was an act of sheer immodesty on Stanton’s part, as the then unincorporated wilds of Harting Farms did not boast enough of a head count to validate two monstrous, castle-like high schools, let alone segregate its population by gender. Moreover, half the city’s adolescent population did not advance beyond ninth grade back then.

So the Stanton School for Boys became Stanton School, and it eventually incorporated the remaining student body from Patapsco. The girls’ school was shut down and not reopened until after World War II when it became a convalescent home for soldiers returning from overseas with severe mental and physical handicaps. Despite the burgeoning city’s displeasure at having mentally unstable war veterans housed adjacent to a neighborhood park, the school turned hospital remained open and functional for a number of years until faulty wiring caused a devastating fire in 1958. The inferno left nothing behind but the hollow stone shell that remained to this day, a miniature version of the Colosseum.

Several people had been killed in that fire, the story went, and their ghosts not only haunted the remnants of the former girls’ school but the park and surrounding woods, too. There were many other ghosts that were said to haunt the park, those of children who had accidentally died when falling out of trees or drowned in one of the many rivers and tributaries that veined the land on the outskirts of the city. (The stories sounded mostly fake to me.) I had never witnessed anything unusual in the park or the neighboring woods firsthand, though on occasion, after the day had grown old and the sky had begun to darken, there was an undeniable sense of apprehension that would overtake me. It seemed to emanate straight up out of the land itself. This feeling may have been only in my head, fueled by the power of suggestion from all the stories I had heard, but when it grabbed me, its grip was indeed strong and its fingers dug in deep.

Also, the fact that they had found Courtney Cole’s body down there didn’t help settle my nerves any. I supposed she would become yet another bit of the folklore surrounding December Park and the nearby woods, another ghost story to tell on chilly autumn nights as the wind moaned through the trees and dead leaves scraped along the asphalt.

“Christ,” Peter huffed beside me. I had slowed my walk to accommodate his pace. “We should have taken our bikes.”

“There is no bike riding on Mischief Night,” Michael chided from the front of the line. “How many times do I gotta say it?”

“Where’d that stupid rule come from?” Peter said.

“Not sure,” said Michael. “It’s in the Bible, I think.”

“And what if we need to make a quick getaway?”

“From what?”

“From . . . whatever,” Peter said, though he no doubt got us all thinking now.