We were not allowed to ride our bikes all the way out to the park. Not so close to dark, and not just the three of us by ourselves. We had our own reasons to avoid it, too. But we went anyway, carefully skirting the town’s main street, where we could be spotted by a nosy neighbor, or—worst of all—one of our parents driving home from work.
It was a dare to test our fear, a game to push boundaries. Less than a month into the new school year, the glorious, carefree summer was already behind us. Leaves were turning and the days growing shorter, the pleasant smell of bonfires rising on the crisp, cool evening air. The thought of the coming winter was making us restless, even if neither of us could put a finger on the exact reason.
Back then, I was too young to name the sense of emptiness and loss that came over me when the skies turned dreary and cold. When there was nothing to look forward to but school and rain and slogging through slush-filled streets. It’s a feeling I’ve gotten to know intimately over the years.
But all that was still in the future, like a wreck waiting for you on the other side of an approaching curve, and the three of us—Joey, Danny, and I—were speeding blithely around it with our eyes closed. We whooped and shouted and pedaled our bikes faster down the back lanes of the town. Here the houses were older and grubbier and fallen leaves clogged the gutters. Here rusted jalopies squatted like dead beasts in unkempt front yards. Here lived the kids who wore hand-me-down clothes and who often showed up to class with black eyes, or took unexplained sick days, or who dropped out of school altogether.
I knew it was getting late and that I’d be in trouble if I wasn’t home when my dad came back from the mill. I’d be the only one. Joey’s parents barely noticed him, and Danny lived with his mom, who would already be three sheets to the wind by this time. But my dad saw everything, and he wasn’t one to spare the rod. Still, the threat of punishment didn’t deter me in the least.
We redoubled our efforts until we passed the Congregational church and turned left at the hardware store. This was the town center, or what passed for a center in our forgotten, forgettable hometown. Getting off our bikes, we pushed them to the edge of the park.
It wasn’t much of a park. Now that seems obvious to me, but at the time it was the only park any of us knew about. Built during our town’s brief heyday in the fifties, the years had buried its lawns under successive layers of neglect. Many of the lights no longer worked, the grass was yellow and straggly, and local hooligans had demolished the benches, which no one had bothered to replace.
Teenagers would gather there after dark to smoke and neck and drink. But most kids my age hated it on sight. There were frights in its depths that a young boy’s imagination could run away with. Like the pond in its middle, where a fountain had once spouted, was a murky puddle that smelled bad in the summer, afloat with candy bar wrappers and beer cans. Like the thicket on the side facing the movie theater parking lot, where drunks and drifters snuck in to spend the nights.
But the bandstand—the bandstand was the worst of all, a focal point from which all the other terrible things seemed to radiate. Its wood was flaked and rotted, its roof sagging from corrosion and dead leaves and the memory of many winters of uncleared snow. Under the warped floorboards of its base, blackness yawned through a broken wooden lattice. Homeless folks would sometimes bed down beneath it, or junkies looking for a fix—if rumors were to be believed.
For the three of us, childish fear had evolved into fascinated horror because of something that had happened the summer before. I didn’t know then what force compelled me to dare my friends to visit the park after dusk. I still don’t know, and I don’t care to guess. They accepted it, and that was all.
We stopped a good distance from the bandstand, and I realized I’d miscalculated. Above the unruly trees, the light was already dimming; the heat evaporating quickly, like it does on warm fall days. But it wasn’t just the temperature that raised goosebumps along my arms and neck. The park was empty, utterly empty, which somehow made the shadows lurking in its corners all the more ominous.
“What now?” Danny said, his voice thin and reedy.
A glance at Joey showed me he was just as afraid as I felt. Last year, I would have suggested that we head home as fast as we could. But this year was different. This year I’d grown up and filled out, and I was ready to challenge Joey for the unofficial leader spot of our little group. If I chickened out, I’d lose the upper hand I momentarily had on him. It was a perverse feeling, at once giddy and sickening, and getting stronger as my own fear grew.
“We should check out the bandstand,” I said, forcing a casual expression onto my face and doing my best to sound dismissive. “There could be a bum down there. Or a wino. Maybe they got themselves a little booze stashed away.”
Joey didn’t take the bait. “It’s getting pretty dark,” he said. “Maybe we should head back.”
He looked at Danny for support, but Danny was silent, his gaze fixed on the tops of his dirty sneakers.
Triumph bubbled inside me, but I managed to hide it. I shrugged, made as if to swing my front wheel back toward the street.
“I get it,” I said to Joey with a mocking smirk. “It’s okay to be scared. Maybe next time, when it’s still light.”
“I’m not scared,” Joey said, his voice cracking on the last word. Embarrassed anger colored his cheeks. “You go ahead and do it, if you’re so tough.”
But it was a weak comeback, and all three of us knew it. The last of the sun had faded and darkness was advancing across the common. A similar darkness was spreading from some secret well inside me. Part of me wanted to stop whatever I’d set into motion. But a different part, the one with the sweet, poisonous voice, was now in charge.
“It’s cool,” I said, my insides swimming with giddy terror. “I got this. I’m not a baby, afraid of a little dark.”
Could I have anticipated what was about to happen? I’d like to think I was innocent and clueless. That I would have done it, walked my talk. No big deal, nothing to it. But to this day, part of me suspects otherwise. I knew, because no sooner had I said it than I wanted to take it all back.
Except it doesn’t work that way with words.
Joey and I both felt it. We shivered and backed away from each other. I glanced around and realized that Danny was no longer standing next to us. He was walking toward the old bandstand, his back stiff, his movements almost robotic with fear.
I wanted to stop him, to say it was all a joke. Maybe I did shout after him. But Danny kept going, across the blighted lawn, bending down to peer through the broken siding. He hesitated for a moment, terror evident in every inch of his stance.
Darkness swallowed his feet. Was he trying to crawl inside, or being pulled under? I couldn’t tell, because the shadows converged on him suddenly and it was hard to see. Next to me, Joey was saying something—stop, or look, or don’t—but his voice was a whisper that barely left his lips.
Danny was staring at us now, his face white as a sheet. Something moved under the stand. A sack, or an old coat, fluttering even though there was no wind. Fluttering, because no person could have been inside it, moving like they had no bones in their body. Our friend’s mouth was opening, shaping a cry, or a plea, but a vast dislocation had fallen over the park, or filled my head, and I couldn’t hear a sound.
Then he was gone.
Say what you will about our town, but almost every household turned out for the search. Everyone but the very young and the decrepit. The cops searched under the bandstand, combed the park over and over, but found no trace of Danny. Drifters and petty offenders in a ten-mile radius were detained and questioned, to no avail. The old pond was dredged several times. Nothing in it except knee-deep, mucky water, broken bottles, and used condoms.
There was no way a kidnapper could have subdued and made off with a struggling twelve-year-old boy without being seen. Danny had not run away from home, nor could he have gotten lost on the few streets between the park and his house. None of it made sense, but it didn’t make him any less gone. The case went cold after a while and remains unsolved to this day. Danny’s mom moved away shortly afterwards. I have no idea what became of her, and I never asked.
No one ever pointed the finger at Joey and me. They didn’t have to. People avoided us, whispered behind our backs. Parents would pull their children closer when they saw us in the street. Small towns can be like cauldrons, boiling you to death before you noticed what was happening. Invisible walls hemming you in and shutting you out at the same time.
Joey never spoke to me again, and after a few months, his family picked up and left too. I guess those invisible walls finally got to be too much for them. I stuck through it for high school, then let life take me away. First to one coast for college, then the other for work. Never settled long in one place, never started a family. I suppose I could say I wanted to do the responsible thing, but really, I was just scared shitless.
Because there was another reason we avoided the park. One that neither Joey nor I would admit to the cops, or to our parents, or to anyone else. Even to ourselves.
That summer we’d been loitering on the edge of the park, embroiled in a hot argument I could never remember afterward. With an inhuman howl, an apparition had risen from the bushes and charged at us, bellowing in incoherent fury. That was what it looked like, at least. Almost pissing myself in panic, I hopped on my bike and started pedaling. Joey was already twenty feet ahead of me, knees pumping like he was setting a world record.
But Danny, stocky, slow Danny, had frozen for a moment. As the shambling figure came for him, he reacted in panic, turning, stumbling, throwing his arms out.
Pushing the wino right into the street, into the path of an approaching car.
I’d heard a car brake, that awful meaty thump, a woman screaming like she was never going to stop. Then the engine roaring as the driver raced away. The first thought in my horror-stricken brain was Danny, and it made me turn back. But he was fine, if a little pale, standing on the sidewalk like he’d grown roots. On the road lay the bulky body of an elderly man, made even bulkier by the layers of filthy clothing he was wearing.
I remember his eyes were open, glassy under his long, greasy hair. I remember a bottle of White Lightning, miraculously intact, rolling on the asphalt until it came to a stop in the gutter. There was a bit of blood, but the man was alive. He was making noises in the back of his throat, and I thought of getting help. Then I thought about the trouble I would get in. Apparently, all three of us thought the same, because we picked up our bikes and snuck away.
Without a word, we let the wino bleed to death in the street.
None of us ever told. None of us ever mentioned it to the others. Because what was there to talk about, really?
“Just one of those things,” Lee Sobchak, the police chief, told me many years later. I was in town for a visit, and he was long retired, killing time in one of the few remaining bars. “Your buddy prob’ly just got spooked and wandered off. Got lost. It happens. Wasn’t no one’s fault.”
“Maybe it was,” I said. I was a little drunk, and a lot depressed, and feeling more than a little sorry for myself. “Maybe we asked for it. Brought it down upon ourselves.”
Lee’s gaze remained fixed on his beer glass, and his face was empty, hollow, like he’d aged a decade between two blinks of an eye. “What’s done is done,” he said, his voice old and quavering. “Ain’t no use digging up the past. Better to forget.”
But I can’t forget. Even if I wanted to, they won’t let me.
It doesn’t happen every evening, or even at the same time each year. But it usually happens as the days grow shorter. When they’re still warm, but that ineffable chill has started to creep in, and you know winter will be here soon. I’ll sense the light dimming, like a shadow has fallen over the sky, and I’ll look around.
Sometimes it takes me a minute, sometimes more. But eventually they’ll be there. Two figures, one tall and shapeless, the other smaller. Holding hands, outlined against the dying day. Too far away to make out their faces, but I’ll know they’re staring directly at me. Danny is still wearing the same clothes he wore when he disappeared, and over the decades that have grown ratty and threadbare. But it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t need clothes where he is now. Those are for my benefit, a reminder.
I know this, just like I know there will come a day when I’ll tire of running. Or when they will no longer be content with watching from a distance. On that day, I’ll raise my head and see them right there next to me, unspeakable things reflected in what passes for their eyes. They will hold their hands out to me, and I’ll follow them into whatever space they now inhabit. Either because I won’t be able to say no, or because they won’t take it for an answer.
It’s getting harder and harder to wait.
