December Park(75)

“He said anything. That’s anything.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, unraveling the plastic shopping bag and dropping the pull tab inside it.

“Stinks in here, too,” Michael went on. “It’s like walking through a giant anus.”

“Don’t make me laugh,” Peter said from the back of the line. “I might throw up.”

A few feet ahead of me in the darkness, Scott paused. I sensed him moving around, the beam of his flashlight washing across the confined walls of the pipe.

Peter asked what was going on.

“The walls,” Scott said. “Check ’em out.”

I shined my light on the wall to my left. It looked like corrugated concrete, nothing special. I kept walking, running my hand along the wall, until the concrete ended and my hand fell on jagged brown stone. “What just happened?” I muttered.

“This isn’t a pipe at all,” Scott said. “It’s like some natural tunnel under the street. The concrete was just the end cap.”

I grazed the rock with my fingertips. All of a sudden I was a little kid again in the johnboat out on the bay with Charles. Charles was pointing up to the face of the cliff and at all the openings in the rock. Holes. Tunnels.

“Just keep moving,” I urged Scott.

We pushed on. The toes of my sneakers unearthed rusted soda cans, bottle caps, and the rubber heel of a boot from the river of muck that ran down the center of the pipe. Not sure what role any of these items might play, I stowed them in my plastic shopping bag along with the pull tab.

“Shit,” Scott said. He froze, his light trained on something on the ground. With one foot, he moved the gunk around.

“What is it?” I said.

“A hypodermic needle.”

“Oh, Christ. Don’t pick that up.”

He crouched right above it, staring at it. When he looked up, he said, “Adrian? What do you think?”

“I’ll pick it up,” Adrian said.

“Dude,” Michael said to him from over my shoulder, “that thing could have hepatitis or AIDS or some shit on it.”

“I’ll be careful.” Adrian bent down in front of Scott and gingerly lifted the item out of the muck. I glimpsed the translucent tubular body and the gleam of the needle. Pinched between two fingers, Adrian studied it.

“What is he doing?” Peter said.

“Here.” Scott twisted the head off his flashlight. The bulb went dead, and he slid two chunky batteries out of the flashlight’s shaft and into the pocket of his jeans. “Put it in here,” he told Adrian.

Adrian dropped the hypodermic needle into the flashlight, and Scott twisted the cap back on.

“Great,” Michael said. “Now all we gotta do is get that sucker to the CDC and we’re golden.”

“I’ve got no light now,” Scott said to Adrian. “Go slow. I’ll stay close behind you.”

Just then, a low resonant moan resounded through the tunnel. I felt the hair on the nape of my neck prickle. Michael tightened his grip on my shirt.

“What is that?” Peter said.

“The ghosts of lost children,” Michael responded. No doubt he’d meant it to be humorous, to break the tension, but no one laughed.

“It’s just the wind,” I said, “blowing through the tunnel.”

“No,” said Adrian. “That’s the Piper’s song.”

Scott paused and said, “You guys got your knives, right?”

“For what?” Michael said. “To cut our way out of here when the whole f*cking tunnel collapses or to ward off a swarm of mutant-sized sewer rats when they come in for the kill?”

“Pleasant thoughts,” Peter commented, his voice hollow.

“Seriously,” I added. “You’re not cheering me up, Mikey.”

“Don’t call me Mikey.”

We kept moving. One thing was for certain: I wouldn’t be able to remain hunched over like this for an extended period of time. I already felt the muscles tightening in my back, and my neck was beginning to hurt. “Any light up ahead yet?”

“No,” came Adrian’s response.

I cast my flashlight’s beam on the ground as I walked. There was nothing but crumbled bits of rock covered in a mat of putrid black sludge. Whitish weeds sprouted like hair from the sludge. Rivulets of water trickled through it. The smell reminded me of the watermen’s shacks along the Cape. Also, the boys’ restrooms at school.

“What’s that?” Michael said, his arm shooting out past my head as he pointed to something on the floor of the tunnel.

I turned the flashlight on it. “An old tennis ball.” It was brown with age and slimy with blackish-green moss.

“I spotted it,” he said. “It’s mine.”

“Be my guest,” I said, stepping over the reeking tennis ball.

That ghostly moan rose up again, sounding all too human and causing my heart to beat faster.

“Boom-boom diddum daddum waddem shoo,” Michael sang in a low voice, as if in concert with the moan. “And they swam and they swam right out to the sea—”

“Shut up,” Peter told him. “You’re creeping me out.”

The windy moan eventually tapered off, but now a much deeper sound seemed to be coming from all around us. It reminded me of the hum the washing machine made when I would lie in my bed and listen to it through the floor.