Helltown (5 page)

“I know, right? No one will want us on their dissection team if we can’t hold a scalpel.”

“Yo, nerds,” Jeff told them, “check it out.” He pointed to the bridge’s piers and abutments. “That’s the foundation from the original bridge.”

“The original one?” Mandy said, pushing through the last of the ferns. Then, higher pitched: “Oh shoot! My tights!” A good-three inch tear had appeared in the yellow Spandex high on her upper right thigh, revealing white flesh beneath. “Stupid branch!”

“Are you wearing underwear?” Jeff asked.

“Jeff!”

“I can’t see any.”

“Stop it!”

“Anywho,” Jeff said, “the original bridge was an old wooden thing that washed away a while back during a flood. This one replaced it.”

“Isn’t that bad news for your ghost?” Steve said, trying to ignore Mandy, who was fussing over the tear and inadvertently making it bigger.

“What do you mean?” Jeff said.

“Ghosts haunt old places. Once something’s gone, they’re gone.”

“You’re an expert on hauntings now?”

“When was the last time you heard of a ghost haunting something new? You don’t go out and buy a new Ford and find it comes with a poltergeist in the trunk.”

“You’re blind wrong there, my dear castaway. Ghosts haunt the places where they died. The baby died here, so it haunts here. It doesn’t matter if this bridge is rebuilt a dozen times, it’s still going to haunt here.”

“What’s so scary about a baby haunting anyway?” Austin opined. “I’m telling you, I see any baby ghost waving its spectral rattler at me, I’m gonna punt it so far downriver it’ll shit its diapers before it touches down again.”

Steve ducked beneath the bridge and was surprised to find almost no fog there at all, as if the area was somehow off limits. And was it cooler? Or was that his imagination? He took a box of matches from his pocket and ignited a match off his thumb, illuminating the sandy loam before him.

“One, two, Freddy’s coming for you…” Austin sang.

Ignoring him, Steve troll-walked forward. The dried riverbed was littered with dead leaves that had blown beneath the bridge. He heard someone following him and turned to find Jenny there.

“Where are you going, mister?” she said, tucking her blonde hair behind her ears.

“Seeing what’s under here,” he said.

“I imagine we would have heard the baby by now if there was one.”

“I’m expecting a Garbage Pail-ish thing.”

“Cindy Lopper.”

“Bony Joanie.” She paused. “Hey, where’s the fog?”

“Strange, I know.”

The bridge was less than twenty feet in diameter, and Steve could make out the other side where the inky shadows gave to the mist-shrouded night once more.

He didn’t see the baby shoes until he was nearly on top of them.

They were newish, white, and so small they would only fit a newborn.

“What is it?” Jenny asked, moving up beside him. “Hey!” she exclaimed. “Baby shoes!”

“Some kids probably left them there to propagate the legend.”

Jenny studied the ground ahead of them, then turned and studied the ground behind them. “There aren’t any other footprints except for ours.”

She was right, he realized. “Guess they raked them away.”

“It doesn’t look like the sand’s been raked.”

“Well, a baby ghost didn’t leave its shoes here, Jen.”

“Doesn’t this bother you, Steve? Seriously—look at them! They’re just here, in the middle of perfectly undisturbed sand.”

“Ow!” The flame had winnowed its way down the matchstick to Steve’s fingertips. He tossed the match away. He lit another and said, “Do you believe in ghosts?”

“I’ve seen one before,” Jenny stated.

“Where?”

“In my bedroom.”

“When?”

“A long time ago. I was just a kid. I woke up in the middle of the night, and a face was staring in my window.”

“Maybe it was a neighborhood perv?”

“My bedroom was on the second floor.”

“Did your bedroom face the street?”

“It did, as a matter of fact.”

“Maybe it was the reflection of a streetlamp?”

“I don’t think there were streetlamps on my street.”

“It could have been anything, Jen. That’s the thing with ghosts and UFOs and stuff like that—just because you can’t immediately explain them doesn’t mean they’re real.”

“It doesn’t mean they’re not real either. I’m simply keeping an open mind.”

“I’ve spent the last year cutting open dead people and sorting through their insides. I’ve yet to find any evidence of a lurking spirit. Have you?”

“We share different metaphysical beliefs. Let’s leave it at that.”

“Not so fast,” Steve said. “I’m having a hard time believing an intelligent person such as yourself, a future doctor no less, believes in the boogie monster.”

“I don’t believe in the boogie monster, Steve.”

“You said you saw something peeking in your window. That’s what boogie monsters do, isn’t it?”

“I said a ghost. They’re two very different things.”

He shrugged. “Okay, a ghost, whatever. But can you tell me why a ghost would want to peek in your window? I mean, you’d have to be a borderline megalomaniac to think something made the effort to cross dimensions just to spy on you when you were sleeping.”

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.”

“Shakespeare’s not going to bail you out of this one, babe.”

Jenny cocked an eyebrow. “Babe?”

Steve frowned. “What?”

“I’m not a ‘babe,’ thank you very much.”

“Jeff calls Mandy babe.”

“Maybe Mandy likes being a babe, but I haven’t spent the last year of my life, studying eighty hours a week, to become someone’s possession.”

“Possession?”

“Calling a woman a babe diminishes her to a younger and therefore more controllable state—so, yes, a possession.”

“So what am I supposed to call you?”

“There are plenty of other terms of affection that don’t have the same degrading connotations, but I can’t help you there. It’s your job as my partner to choose one. You have to think of something that represents the complexities of my personality.”

“I’ll give it a hard think, princess.”

“And it shouldn’t be condescending.”

Steve and Jenny continued to the far side of the bridge. When Steve emerged from beneath it and was standing erect again, he stretched his back, popping a joint in the process.

Jenny, still crouching next to him, cupped her hands to her mouth, and shouted: “People! There’re some rad baby shoes under the bridge, if you’re interested!”

“We’re shaking!” Jeff called back.

“For real!” Jenny replied.

Austin said something, though Steve couldn’t hear what he said.

“Nice friend you have,” Jenny said.

“What did he say?” Steve asked.

“Not something I’d care to repeat,” she said, and started up the bank.

Steve followed, grasping shrubs and saplings for purchase, his glasses bumping against his chest on their cord. At the top, parked on the shoulder of the road, Jeff’s BMW was exactly how they’d left it: dark, empty, clearly not idling.

“So much for the legend,” he said.

The night was cold and getting colder, and Noah wished he’d brought a jacket, considering all he wore on his upper body was the shirt with the hand-drawn P. To make matters worse, an icy wind had begun to blow. It came and went in unpredictable gusts and was strong enough to tousle everyone’s hair and to rattle the skeletal branches of the nearby trees.

Shivering, Noah unfolded his arms from across his chest and produced from his pocket a joint he’d rolled earlier. He was not only cold but restless from the three-hour drive from New York City and wanted to unwind. Moreover, he had a feeling they were going to be in for one long slog of a night. Getting high would be the only way to make it remotely interesting. He wondered again why he had agreed to come. He wasn’t superstitious. In fact, ghosts and ghouls and all that jive didn’t interest him in the least. He didn’t watch horror movies, didn’t read Stephen King. Growing up, he hadn’t even liked Halloween. He’d appreciated the candy, sure, but the idea of witches on broomsticks and skeletons lurking in closets and Frankenstein monsters eating brains never did anything for him. He guessed he simply didn’t have a scary bone, the way some uptight people didn’t have a funny bone.

Noah sparked the joint, took a couple tokes, and passed it to Mandy, who was standing to his right. She took a mini puff and blew the smoke out of her mouth quickly, probably not inhaling. Noah had to make a conscious effort not to stare at her tits, which were practically bursting out of her top. He thought Jeff was crazy for not appreciating her the way he should. She was drop-dead gorgeous, a real sweetheart too, a rare combination. And she put up with Jeff’s bullshit. Someone “more on his level”—a phrase he’d been using a lot lately to describe his ideal woman—likely wouldn’t. They’d be clashing nonstop. In fact, they’d be just like Austin and Cherry, a recipe for disaster, each with one eye constantly on the big red nuke button.

Noah suspected Steve and Jenny had the best chance of sticking it out together. Even so, this was no guarantee either. They both had another two or three years of med school ahead of them, then equally long and brutal residencies. How much quality time could they possibly spend together? Then again, maybe their workloads would an advantage. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, right?

The joint did the rounds and returned to Noah, almost finished. He took a drag, then ground the roach out under his shoe just as another blast of wind swooped through the trees, whipping everyone’s hair and clothes into a frenzy. Noah turned his face out of the worst of it and found himself looking at Mandy’s breasts. Her nipples poked against the thin Spandex of her costume.

Abruptly Jenny called to them from the far side of the bridge: “People! There’re some rad baby shoes under the bridge, if you’re interested!”

Noah could just make out Jenny and Steve’s silhouettes.

“We’re shaking!” Jeff called back.

“For real!”

“Blow me!” Austin said.

Jeff slapped him on the back of the head. “Don’t be so crass.”

Austin frowned. “What’s your damage?”

“You barely know her. None of us do. Show a bit more class.”

“Why do you care?”

“It’s called respect, dickweed.” Jeff turned to the others. “So, what do you guys think? Wanna take a look under the bridge for these shoes?”

“It’s pitch black,” Cherry said.

“You’ll be fine,” Jeff told her. “You won’t even have to crouch.”

She glared at him.

Austin said, “Respect, huh?”

“Hey,” Jeff said to Cherry, “where’s your costume?”

Cherry was wearing an everyday fluorescent green blouse, denim miniskirt, and pink leg warmers.

Austin scowled. “She wouldn’t do it.”

“Do what?” Jeff asked.

“She didn’t bring a costume, so on the ride down here—”

“He told me to take off my clothes and wear my underwear around,” Cherry finished.

“Right,” Austin said. “A lingerie model.”

“Hey, that’s not a bad idea,” Jeff said, looking at Cherry with X-ray eyes.

Mandy harrumphed and Jeff pulled his eyes away and said, “Well, whatever, Mighty Mouse, if you’re too scared to come, stay here. No skin off my back. Noah, Mandy, Austin, let’s roll.” Without waiting for a response, he turned and ducked-walked into the darkness beneath the bridge.

While waiting at the BMW for the others to return from the riverbed, Steve and Jenny were playing a tongue-in-cheek game which involved one-upping the experiences they’d had thus far at med school.

“Pathology is snooze-worthy,” Steve said. He was leaning against the hood of the car, his arms folded across his chest to ward off the chill, studying the trees and thinking about those cutthroats Jeff had mentioned. Although he knew Jeff was only trying to scare them, he couldn’t help being on edge, his eyes trying to pick out anything moving in the dark that shouldn’t be moving.

“You used that last time,” Jenny said.

“Fine…don’t ask others about their grades.”

“I know! I hate gunners,” she said. “Okay. Umm…you’ll at some point walk down the street still wearing your stethoscope and people will look at you like you’re crazy.”