December Park(89)

He didn’t need to finish the thought, and I didn’t need to answer him.

In the front hall the remnants of a faded floral-patterned wallpaper peeled away from the walls. The front door and windows were boarded up from the inside, too. One section of the hall floor was buckled and broken, and strange leafless vines spooled out of the opening and trailed snakelike across the floor. I crept to the edge of the opening and shined the flashlight down into it. The vines, thick as telephone cables at their bases, spiraled down farther than I would have thought.

“There’s a basement,” I said.

Adrian went over to a closed hallway door. The doorknob was gone, but he found a stick on the floor, which he used to pry the door open a few inches. The grinding sound suggested its hinges had been rusted to stone. A dark well appeared on the other side of the door. Warped stairs descended into a black pit.

“Forget it,” I told him. A smell came up those stairs—a reeking odor like shit fermenting in an outhouse. “I don’t care what we might find. I’m not going down there.”

To my relief, he toed the door shut and said, “Me, either. Yuck.”

I peered into an adjoining room. What must have once been sofa cushions were strewn about the floor, their fabric glistening with black mildew. Intestinal cables of wet stuffing spilled out of torn stitching in the fabric. As I stared, I noticed a small gray mouse, carrying a hunk of something red in its jowls, scurry along the baseboard and disappear into a knothole at the far end of the room.

“Did you hear that?” Adrian said from the opposite end of the front hall. He stepped over trash to one of the windows, bent down, and tried to look out the slatted boards.

“What was it?”

“Sounded like voices.”

“Outside?”

“I-I don’t know,” he stammered.

I glanced up at the ceiling. Brown stains were eating away at the plaster. More wires spooled out of ragged holes.

“Hey,” I said, coming back down the hall. “Let’s get out of here, okay?”

Adrian nodded. His glasses had fogged up, so he removed them, wiped them with his shirt, and put them back on.

We retreated through the house, careful to leave a wide berth between us and the kitchen where the possum was presumably still enjoying its breakfast.

Adrian went through the back door, sighing once he touched the grass. He stepped around the side of the house as I came out, breathing the fresh air. Despite the chill in the morning air, my armpits were swampy with perspiration. I clicked off the flashlight and was about to shove it into my backpack when Adrian said, “Hey, Angie. There’s people here.”

I joined him at the side of the house to find Nathan Keener’s pickup and Eric Falconette’s Fiero parked in the front field. They were laughing loudly, and Falconette was lounging on the hood of the Fiero. I counted seven of them, including Nathan Keener, before Falconette sat up, shielded the sun from his eyes, then pointed at us.

“Hey!” one of the others screeched.

Adrian, the ignoramus, smiled and waved at them.

I grabbed one of his backpack straps and yanked him backward. “Come on. We gotta get out of here.”

Falconette jumped off the hood of his car. The others ambled in our direction. Like jackals, they wouldn’t run until we did.

Instead of running, I dragged Adrian toward the rear of the house.

“Let go,” he said, trying to shake me loose.

“Remember those guys who banged up my face?”

“Yeah . . .”

“That’s them.”

Proving my theory wrong, Keener and his friends started running in our direction.

“Come on!” I shouted, shoving him around the side of the house. Adrian staggered and would have probably lost his footing had I not let go of his backpack strap and snared him around the forearm.

Instinct told me to bolt for the woods and try to lose them among the trees on the way back to Worth Street, just as I had done in October. But now I had Adrian to worry about. He was not as fast or as agile as me, and he would get lost too easily. Not to mention we were both weighed down with backpacks. So instead of running for the woods, I spun around and dragged Adrian into the Werewolf House.

“They had . . . I think . . . one of them had a gun,” Adrian blurted.

“I didn’t see a gun.”

“It was like a rifle or a shotgun,” he said. “A long gun.”

“You’re imagining things.”

I headed toward the kitchen, then paused. My hope was that Keener and the others would assume we had run off into the woods and would pursue us accordingly. However, if they came in here, Adrian and I would be sitting ducks unless we found the best place to hide.

I released Adrian’s arm, moved swiftly down the hall to the front of the house, and peeked through the cracks in the boards over the windows. I could hear their shouts through the flimsy walls. In another few seconds I would see them streaming past.

I turned and saw that the basement door was still slightly ajar. Taking a deep breath, I yanked it open. A twisted white stairwell disappeared into lightlessness. I could see nothing beyond those stairs—not even the bottom of the staircase—but I could certainly smell whatever was down there: a foul concoction of rotting vegetation, fecal matter, and decaying corpses.

Adrian appeared beside me. His eyes looked like flashbulbs, and panic colored his cheeks red.