December Park

  “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 . . . ?”

  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.
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  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.

  Outside, a sharp thunder crack of sound exploded and echoed across the valley. This was followed by maniacal laughter.

  I met Adrian’s eyes. Gun, he mouthed and I nodded.

  I ran down the basement steps two at a time.

  Midway down, I realized I was still holding the flashlight. I fumbled for the switch and clicked it on just as my right sneaker dropped into several inches of cold, shit-brown water. I trudged forward, hardly registering the mounds of debris that floated by nor the paddling of large sleek-furred rats as they fled the flashlight’s beam.

  Adrian splashed down behind me. Air wheezed out of his lungs like an accordion.

  Frantically, I swiped the cone of light around the room and saw that it was hardly a basement at all but a festering root cellar. Jungle plants plumed out of the sewer water. The helix of sturdy vines that carved up from the ground and through the rent in the flooring above looked so much like a beanstalk from a fairy tale that I momentarily wondered if I was dreaming the whole thing.

  “Here.” Adrian was maneuvering around floating garbage to hide beneath the stairs.

  I wasted no time joining him. The two of us huddled beneath the stairwell, the angled risers pressing against the tops of our heads, our necks, down our backs. I thumbed the flashlight off, dousing us in blackness. We held our breath and listened.

  Someone banged through the door at the rear of the house. Someone did a Ricky Ricardo impression—“Hey, Lucy, I’m home!”—which was followed by cackling laughter. Their heavy footfalls thundered the floorboards overhead.

  “You in here, Mazzone, you queer?” It was Keener. The sound of his voice caused my teeth to clench and my face to burn. “I got somethin’ for you.”

  “Queers like surprises,” someone else chimed in. It might have been Denny Sallis.

  Heavy feet stomped slowly across the floor, directly above our heads. Then they paused. I thought I heard whispering, though I couldn’t imagine why. My heart was thundering.

  The footfalls moved again. They came closer to the stairs. Then I heard the grinding rasp of the hinges on the basement door.

  Adrian tensed up.

  In my mind’s eye, I saw Keener descending the stairs with a rifle, catching the two of us cowering under here, and leveling the rifle first at Adrian, then at me. He would be grinning the entire time.

  “You down there, Mazzone?” It was Keener, all right. The serenity in his voice troubled me more than any aggression he had ever shown. “I got something you can sit on. Just come on up here.”

  Then silence. Was the son of a bitch actually waiting for me to respond?

  Seconds ticked by. I waited for him to say my name again or come down the stairs . . .

  But nothing happened for what seemed like an eternity. Then someone shouted and threw something to the floor. Rapid stomping commenced. All too easily I pictured those lunatics smashing mice beneath their boot heels.

  Next to me, Adrian released a shuddery breath. “I wet my pants,” he whimpered. Not that it mattered: I was pretty sure we were both crouching in raw sewage.

  There was more muffled chatter, but I could make out none of it. It wasn’t until their footfalls moved across the house did I catch the next phrase, clear as day: “Jesus fuck, look at that monster!”

  Boots hurried along the floorboards. Something fell over and broke.

  “Get back from there,” Keener said. “Those things give you rabies.”

  “The possum,” I whispered next to Adrian’s ear. The thing had indeed looked like a monster, but now I pitied it, left to defend itself against Keener and the rest of his shit-eating friends.

  “Fucker gives me rabies, I give it the clap,” someone yelled, and this was followed by more laughter.

  “Gimme your gun,” Keener said.

  I recognized Kenneth Ottawa saying, “You gotta pull back on the—”

  “I know how to work a fucking gun, you shit pipe,” Keener barked.

  “Don’t take off its face,” Eric Falconette said clearly. “I wanna keep the jawbones.”

  “Move.” It was Keener’s voice again.

  The silence that followed was filled with tension. I closed my eyes and sucked my lower lip between my teeth.

  A resounding explosion caused dirt to rain down from the floorboards into the muddy water all around us.

  Keener’s friends whooped and hollered. More dirt rained down from the boards overhead.

  When I opened my eyes, I was staring once again at absolute darkness.

  “Look at that fucker’s tail whip around,” someone shouted—a high-pitched, girly squawk. “Goddamn!”

  “You got fucking guts on my shoes,” someone else protested. It sounded like Denny Sallis.

  “Shut your mouth,” Keener said. “You’re lucky I don’t open your head for you.”

  “I’ll do it,” Falconette said. “Gimme the gun. I’ll blast that fucker’s head around backward.”

  “Fuck you,” Sallis spat, although there was no strength to his voice. In that instant I could tell Sallis was afraid of Eric Falconette.

  “Fuck me?” Falconette tittered laughter—another strangely girlish sound, though his seemed laced with some dark poison. “I’ll ram my boot up your pussy, you dipshit.”

  “Cut it out,” Keener growled. He said something else, but his voice was too low for me to make it out.

  More fumbling reverberated through the floorboards. Something else was knocked over. Their heavy footfalls retreated to the rear of the house. The door slammed as they exited. For several moments, they could be heard cackling and jeering out in the yard. Then, something like twenty minutes later
, there came another gunshot. After that, things went quiet.

  Adrian and I remained under the stairs, not moving, hardly breathing. Even when the vehicles started up in the field, I gripped one of Adrian’s knees and whispered, “Don’t move. It might be a trap. They may not really be leaving.”

  So we remained where we were even after the engines faded down the street, leaving nothing but empty silence in their wake.

  “Did they shoot that possum?” he whispered.

  “Yeah. I think so.”

  “Those guys are crazy.”

  I resisted the urge to click on the flashlight. For one thing, if it was a trap, I didn’t want Keener or whoever else to see the light come on. For another thing, I didn’t really want to see what we’d been crouching in for the better part of half an hour.

  Something moved upstairs. It was a subtle sound, like the shushing of stocking feet across the floor. I felt Adrian tense up beside me again. I tensed up, too. I was just about to convince myself that it was nothing more than a rat when footsteps moved down the hall. As they drew nearer, I held my breath.

  They stopped directly overhead. At the basement door.

  He won’t come down here, I thought, desperate to convince myself with logic. He was too chickenshit to come down here before, so he won’t come down here now. He’s trying to scare us out of hiding, but if we just wait him out, he’ll get bored and go home.

  A heavy foot came down on the first step. The whole staircase creaked.

  Sweat leaked down my forehead and stung my eyes.

  A foot on the second step. The staircase—reeeek.

  I wouldn’t sit here and watch him leer at me from behind the barrel of a rifle. If it came to it, I would jump at him, attack him, bite and claw and tear and pull. I would be a wild animal if I had to be.

  It was Charles’s voice I heard in my head: I would never let anyone hurt you, Angelo. He had always protected me.

  But now Charles was dead.

  I clenched my fists. My whole body trembled.

  The person on the stairs came down two more steps, then paused. The silence was as loud as the rifle blast had been. Louder, even.