December Park(71)
I stood and prepared to run, but just as I took that first step, something gripped my right ankle and yanked. The force sent me sprawling forward while my ears echoed with the horrific sound of my bones not only breaking but actually coming apart—a sound like rubber bands snapping overlaid with the crunching of gravel beneath heavy truck tires.
On my stomach and pawing at the ground, I managed to look behind me in time to see my entire foot and lower half of my leg pulled through the fog and into a gaping wound in the earth. The serrated maw at the end of my severed thigh trailed ribbons of flesh and the wormlike, rubbery tubes of my arteries. A whitish knob of bone protruded from the center of the mess.
And that was when the earth opened up beneath me.
Chapter Twelve
The Ghosts of Lost Children
We spent the remainder of that winter among the headless concrete statues of the Dead Woods. On the coldest days, some sparkling with snow or raining icy pellets onto the dull pavement of the city streets, one of us would bring a thermos of hot chocolate to share, and once I brought some of my grandmother’s escarole soup. (My friends examined the seaweed-like ribbons of escarole with skepticism bordering on distrust, but then they tasted the soup, and their eyes lit up.) A heavy snowfall buried the city near the end of February. We got a few days off from school, a rare event, and since there was no searching that could be done, we went sledding in December Park, had snowball fights with Sasha Tamblin and the Lambeth twins at Solomon’s Field, and Michael peed Nathan Keener’s name in the snow in front of Principal Unglesbee’s house.
By mid-March, we met in the woods by early morning on the weekends. On the days we had school, we walked to the woods after classes and hung out at Echo Base until the sky darkened and we had to depart for our homes.
We continued to hunt for clues, alternating our locations throughout the woods, forging our way through all the far places where human feet rarely—if ever—traversed. Per my suggestion, we searched the length of the culvert on the opposite side of Counterpoint Lane, too, since that was where Adrian had found the locket. We didn’t limit ourselves to that specific area, either, but instead we went all the way down to Point Lane (where the culvert became a muddy swamp) and all the way up to Solomon’s Bend Road (where the culvert was eventually paved over and elevated as part of the walkway that flanked the overpass above Solomon’s Field).
Several times I caught Adrian staring at the open mouth of the drainage tunnel that ran under Counterpoint Lane, a disquieting look of detachment on his face. Once, I nudged him on the shoulder and asked if he was okay. He turned and smiled at me, but there was no feeling behind that smile. I thought I could see the gears and wheels and cogs moving about inside his head.
All this searching, yet we still hadn’t found any clues. The treasures we uncovered included an old Star Trek lunch box, scores of hubcaps, heaps of busted bottles and beer cans crushed like accordions, the maggot-riddled corpse of a house cat with a name tag that read Dillinger, a single gold hoop earring, an outboard motor for a johnboat, plenty of moss-slickened sneakers, the deflated wind socks of used condoms, and even a discarded toilet.
We found countless articles of clothing, too—mostly moldy and in tattered ribbons, which we supposed could have belonged to any of the missing teenagers, but most likely had been dumped in the woods by vandals or homeless people. Nonetheless, Adrian didn’t want to uniformly dismiss these bits of clothing, so he stowed the clothes in garbage bags for later inspection, if it ever came to that. We stored the garbage bags at Echo Base, among the statues.
Peter managed to steal his sister’s Little Mermaid walkie—talkies. There were two of them, plus a headset that worked just as well, so now we had five radios—one for each of us. The headset remained at Echo Base, and the radios were divvied up between the four doing the searching. We rotated the radios, so the same people didn’t always get stuck with the embarrassing Little Mermaid ones.
Somewhere along the line, Scott, Peter, Michael, and I lost interest in searching for clues that were not there—clues to a murder that had happened over five months ago. Hours spent peeking beneath bushes, under rocks, or digging through the softening muck that flanked the creek dwindled. As spring marched on, we spent most of our time sprawled out in the statue-laden clearing listening to music, reading horror novels and comic books, climbing trees, telling stories. Sometimes we slipped out onto the brownish lawn of December Park and tossed a football around.
But Adrian’s dedication to the cause did not falter. He continued exploring the surrounding woods. Throughout the day he returned to Echo Base, sweating through his clothes and looking grim, to chart his progress on Michael’s map. If it was around lunchtime, we passed out cheeseburgers from the McDonald’s on Second Avenue, and Adrian ate and laughed along with us, his obsession seemingly in remission for the time being. Yet as soon as he finished eating, he shouldered his backpack, tightened his shoelaces, and stomped through the foliage. Never in my life had I witnessed such determination. It would have been admirable if it hadn’t been so unsettling.
Adrian didn’t become irritated by our lack of commitment to the search because, for the most part, we all continued doing the jobs he’d assigned to us.
Scott showed up one Saturday morning with dulled and rusted switchblades he’d gotten at a discount from Toddy Surplus. They weren’t as cool or fearsome as his butterfly knife, and mine often jammed when the release lever was depressed, but there was an undeniable ceremonial air that overtook us when, among the headless statues in the clearing, Scott distributed them to us.