December Park(86)

And then there was the Werewolf House. Beneath a full moon and wreathed in ground fog, it looked even more like its namesake than it ever had in the past. It sat a distance away from the road on a weedy patch of land that shone silver in the moonlight. My dad slowed the car, hobbled over the shoulder, and drove onto the lawn. There were No Trespassing signs staked in the ground and more of them posted on the boarded-up windows of the house.

“Should we be coming out here?” I said.

“The place is abandoned. No one owns it. The police department put those signs up to keep kids out.” He pointed to a mud-streaked placard nailed to the peeling front door that read Beware of Dog. “That one was my idea.”

“Oh. Cool.”

My dad stopped the car in front of a four-foot wrought iron fence that surrounded the house. There was a hinged gate in the front of the fence, but it was ajar and hung at an angle that suggested it was no longer properly attached to the post. Expulsions of weeds sagged over the fence and burst through the rickety front porch. The boarded-up windows looked like the mouths of mine shafts that had been deemed too dangerous for entry. The siding peeled in great curled shavings of wood, and the roof was a patchwork quilt of rot, missing shingles, and leprous holes. Half a stone chimney stood against one side of the house, its other half scattered amongst the weeds in ruinous crumbles of mortar and stone.

“Wait here.” My dad grabbed his flashlight and opened the door. “I’ll be right back.”

He shut the door on me, probably thinking I had really been cold earlier, and went through the busted gate. As he approached the house, something dark and fairly large loped fluidly through the underbrush. It looked a little bigger than a fox, and I wondered if there were wolves out here.

My dad walked around the side of the house. He shone his flashlight on the porch balustrades, casting vertical shadows against the rotted siding. When he disappeared from my view, I held my breath. I followed the beam of his flashlight until that, too, disappeared behind the house.

In the glare of the sedan’s high beams, the house looked fake, like a movie prop. Straw-colored grass rippled in the wind. With the driver’s side window open a crack, I heard an owl hollering forlornly from a nearby tree.

And then I saw them—the fence posts, the wrought iron staves twined with stiffened brown vines. The spear-shaped heads of each post . . .

My father came around the other side of the house. His flashlight swept back and forth along the overgrown grass. Shielding his eyes against the glare of the headlights, he stepped over tangles of kudzu and crabgrass, opened the car door, and climbed inside. He clicked the flashlight off and tucked it between the door and his seat.

“You okay?” he said, looking at me. His eyebrows knitted together with concern. “Something wrong, bud?”

The release of my pent-up breath fogged the windshield. “I’m okay.” It was all I could do to pull my gaze from the fence and offer him a smile.

My dad nodded and patted my knee. Then he proceeded to back down the lawn toward the street. Shadows swarmed across the front of the Werewolf House as the headlights pulled away from it. It was like watching a curtain of darkness close on a stage.

As we headed home, he looked at me one more time. “You sure you’re okay?”

I felt amphibious with sweat. “Yeah,” I lied. “I’m fine.” But my heart was running a marathon, my breath coming in hard-to-stifle shudders.

“You and your friends should never play by that house,” he said. “It’s dangerous. The thing should be torn down.”

“Yeah,” I said, glancing into the rearview mirror where the Werewolf House retreated into the darkness. “No problem.”





Chapter Sixteen


The Werewolf House





The following morning, Adrian was sitting on the curb between our two houses, waiting for me so we could walk to school together. It was twilight and the air was cool. The lampposts were still on, and the world was as silent as a distant star.

“Hey.” Adrian stood as I came down my driveway. “I was wondering if you were gonna show. We’re gonna be late for class.”

“We’re not going to school today,” I told him.

“How come?”

“There’s something I gotta show you.”

We crossed the street and cut through the Mathersons’ yard. I had my headphones around my neck, and I maxed out the volume on my Walkman so we could both hear Mellencamp singing “Small Town.”

“Where are we going?” Adrian asked as we went through the trees and out onto the bike path.

“The Werewolf House,” I said.

“Whoa. What’s that?”

“It’s a run-down old house on the other side of the woods. We call it the Werewolf House because it looks like the house from a werewolf movie we saw. But there’s something there I gotta show you.”

“You guys know all the secret ways to get to places.” He looked up through the canopy of trees. Daylight in the form of pink and orange striations had begun to rib the sky. “Have you lived here your whole life?”

“Mostly. We moved here when I was around three. After my mom died.”

“Oh. I didn’t know your mom died.”

“Yeah. She got cancer. I sometimes think that maybe I remember her—like, I can see these blurry images of her in my head—but then I wonder if that’s just my brain making stuff up, you know?”