December Park(88)

There was a rabbit hutch—a rectangular box of unpainted two-by-fours standing on a quartet of splintered wooden legs. Wire mesh covered the front of the hutch, though its corners had been pulled away from the frame, most likely so some animal could come and go as it pleased. The floor of the hutch was a mat of sodden brown hay topped with bird feathers and graying turds roughly the size and shape of shotgun shells. In the grass sat a large rusted contraption that reminded me of the pump handle on an artesian well, like the kinds they had on the Butterfield farm.

“What are these?” Adrian asked. He was staring at a pyramid of wire cages.

“Crab pots.” I pointed out the hole on one side of the cage. “Crabs go in there, where you put the bait, but then they can’t get out.”

“I didn’t realize crabs were so stupid.”

I recalled all the times Charles and I had gone crabbing with my grandfather. Once we returned home, we dumped the crabs in the kitchen sink where my grandmother cleaned them. She cracked off their shells while they were still alive, and they tried to pinch her with their claws even with their fibrous white gills exposed and their eyes missing. Crabs might be stupid but they were fighters.

There was a back door at the top of three rickety wooden stairs. A pair of two-by-fours had been nailed in an X across it. Half an iron railing ran down one side of the stairs, bowed out at an angle. I tested the first step with one sneaker and was surprised to find that the wood was strong enough to hold my weight.

This close, I could see that the nails fixing the boards to the doorframe had come loose. I wedged a hand between one of the boards and the doorframe and pulled. The nails groaned as they came out of the wood. I let go of the board, and it swung like a pendulum from the upper left corner of the doorframe. I repeated this with the other board.

“Whose house was this?” Adrian stood on his tiptoes, trying to peer between the boards over one of the windows.

“Beats me. It’s been empty ever since I’ve known about it.”

“It’s pitch-black inside.”

I jiggled the doorknob but it didn’t budge. Yet the frame looked about as sturdy as wet cardboard, so I shoved my shoulder against it . . . and nearly sent myself sprawling face-first into the house.

“Angie!” Adrian bellowed and chugged up the stairs behind me.

“I’m okay,” I uttered, pushing myself to my knees. The palms of my hands came away speckled with sand, tiny stones, and black pellets that looked disconcertingly like mouse turds. I clapped the debris from my hands, wincing.

I’d dropped the flashlight during the fall, yet there was enough light coming through the tears in the roof to glimpse heaps of junk—washing machine parts, a pile of busted chairs that nearly touched the ceiling, automobile tires stacked against one wall. A clotted, mildewing stench seemed to register not only in my nose but way back in my throat. I could almost taste the staleness of the place.

I stood up and brushed the dirt from my jeans as Adrian came through the doorway behind me.

“Whoa,” he said. “Look at this place.”

I retrieved the flashlight from under sheaves of old plaster. There was a spiderweb suspended in one corner of the front room that looked as big as a soccer goal. When I turned the flashlight beam on it, I noticed spiders the size of peach pits vibrating in the silken strands.

“Let’s stick close together,” I said.

The floor was spongy in places. We moved carefully through the main room. Up ahead, doorways stood crookedly in the walls. One room was a kitchen. I was troubled to find the dry-rotted frame of an old wooden high chair shoved against a row of cabinets that had no countertop. Wires spooled out of gaping holes in the walls, and a single chain hung suspended from a pair of iron hooks in the center of the ceiling. Copper pipes jutted from one section of the wall at angles, attached to nothing. Beneath the pipes, the floor was stained a deep russet color. Deduction told me it was from rusty water, but it looked a whole lot like dried blood.

Adrian opened one of the cupboard doors and screamed. I whirled around in time to see him back up and knock over the high chair, which broke apart the moment it struck the floor.

Something hissed from within the cupboard. I glimpsed rows of bared teeth and the soulless black eyes of a shark. It was a possum, its back arched, the patchy black-and-white hair of its hide bristling like porcupine quills. It sat on one of the cupboard shelves, its tapered fleshy tail dangling toward the floor. It was devouring something small and furry, stringy entrails spilling to the shelf below.

Adrian backed out of the kitchen. The moment he was out of sight, the possum swung its enormous conical snout in my direction. Pinkish meat was stuck in its teeth. Slowly, I backed out of the room, too, the flashlight stuttering in my hands.

The other rooms were nondescript. The boarded-up windows cast zebra stripes of daylight on the opposite walls, and the floorboards were alternately soggy or brittle as bone. Graffiti had been spray-painted across various surfaces, including the ceiling, most of it illegible. Empty beer bottles were found in another room. An empty carton of Marlboros had been appropriated as part of some animal’s nest wedged into one corner of another room. The whole house stank of shit.

“When was the last time you think someone was in this place?” Adrian asked. He peeked down a gap in the floor into infinite space.

“I have no idea.”

“I mean . . . do you think the Piper . . . ?”