December Park(63)

We coasted down the street toward the highway, the spires of St. Nonnatus jutting up beyond the skyline like a medieval parapet. The binoculars thumped weightily against my breastbone.

At Augustine Avenue, Peter and Scott began singing Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Run through the Jungle” off-key. Peter was wrapped in a neon green ski jacket and had headphones on. He pedaled hard, his ass off the seat of his bike, his strong legs working like the wheel arms of a locomotive. Despite the chill in the air, Scott wore only a flimsy Orioles Windbreaker over a tattered T-shirt. He had headphones around his neck, and his shoulders were burdened with the weight of his JanSport backpack.

We didn’t need words between us. We rode, our little quintet, and in that moment we were the only living creatures traversing the streets of Harting Farms.

When we hit the road behind the Generous Superstore plaza, Scott motioned toward the ravine on the side of the road. We fell into a straight line and veered one by one off the road and down the embankment into the rocky ravine. On my handlebars, Adrian jolted like someone being pumped full of electricity. At one point, just as we struck a particularly aggressive rock, he shouted something that sounded perplexingly like, “My coolie!”

As we approached the highway intersection, I shouted, “Hang on!” and didn’t slow down a bit. Neither did my friends. Scott, who was leading the charge, knew the highway’s traffic lights better than the county workers who repaired them; he had timed our arrival so the lights changed in our favor just as we hit the intersection. We blasted through it at top speed to the accompaniment of bleating car horns and shouts from open windows.

On the opposite side of the highway, we dipped down a second small embankment, whipping through scraggly underbrush and cattails that rose like tiny minarets from the muck. Scott and Peter launched up the embankment toward Counterpoint Lane, and Adrian and I followed. Close at my back, Michael whooped like a loon. Our bike tires printed wet streaks on the asphalt as we cruised toward the intersection of Point and Counterpoint.

When we reached the busted section of guardrail, we all skidded to a stop. The intersection was eerily clear of cars. Adrian dropped off my handlebars and, his legs wobbly, walked to the middle of our circle of bikes. His backpack looked like it weighed two hundred pounds easy.

“I’m vibrating like a live wire,” Michael said.

“What was it you said when we went down that first ravine?” I asked Adrian.

“Coolie,” Adrian said.

“What’s a coolie?”

“It’s my butt,” he said, reddening.

I laughed.

“So where exactly do we start looking?” Peter asked, peeling the headphones from his ears and dropping them around his neck. I heard the tinny resonant drone of John Lennon issuing through the orange foam earpieces.

“They took her out of the woods here.” Scott wheeled his bike to the cusp of woods and peered over the guardrail.

“Okay,” Michael said, “so let’s get down there first.”

We rolled our bikes through the twisted rent in the guardrail and carefully descended toward the bottom of the woods, where the tree trunks grew thickest and the kudzu, even in winter, was a Gordian tangle of brownish vines. This time, Adrian led the charge.

“The Dead Woods,” Peter marveled, suddenly right beside me. He was breathing heavily. “Satan’s Forest.”

When we reached the bottom and the ground leveled out, we simply dropped our bikes into the foliage and continued following Adrian deeper into the woods.

My friends and I were no strangers to Satan’s Forest, of course. We had spent much of our summers here, smoking on tree stumps and catching brine shrimp in the shallow rust-orange water of the creek. By midsummer, the trees were so thick and full it was impossible to see to the bottom from the streets above, and sometimes we secreted ourselves down there from early morning until dusk when the mosquitoes and black flies finally drove us home.

In all that time, none of us had ever ascribed to these woods the preternatural sense of power I felt in being here now. It was as though we’d crossed a great and secret threshold, and things—important things—were finally being set into motion. I wondered if the others felt it, too.

“We should set up camp.” Adrian paused beside an oak tree. “Like a home base or something. You know, a place where we can set up our base of operations.”

“The statues,” Peter and I said at the same time.

Adrian grinned. “Right.”

We walked deeper into the woods toward the clearing with the statues, the spot I had taken Adrian on that first evening.

“What about an ambush?” Michael said from the rear of the line.

“What do you mean?” Peter said.

“Like, what if he’s still down here? What if this is his home?”

“The Piper?”

“Yeah. If you were a crazed serial murderer, where else would you hide?” Michael glanced up at the treetops, his army helmet sliding back on his head. “You ever hear of nut bags living in the forests in camouflaged tree houses and things like that?”

My father’s voice from so many months ago resonated in my head: You stay away from remote places—the woods, the locks down at the poorer end of town, the bike path, and all the parks after dark. Stay away from those empty cabins along the Cape and the Shallows and the old railway station at the end of Farrington Road. And that bridge by Deaver’s Pond where the homeless go in the winter. I don’t want you hanging around by that underpass, not with your friends and certainly not alone.