Rocket Park.

Rocket Park

Taylor Nickles and Hank James heard the woman screaming as they left the stadium. They were usually last to leave, having baseball business and regular business to take care of that didn’t involve the rest of the team. Most of the other players milled about the clubhouse for a bit, letting the fans trickle out before heading home. The last of them, two of whom were on the list of players to watch, had left half an hour ago.

Both men jogged over to the side of the girl with the jet black hair, who was wearing combat boots and a baby-doll dress. She was very pretty, but her two friends behind her clearly lived in her shadow. One dressed too conservatively, almost boyishly, and was losing a battle to acne. The other was rail thin, curveless, and pale as moonlight.

“You saw him, right?” the pale girl asked. The girl with the jet-black hair just looked to the ground.

“Saw who?” Taylor asked. Hank almost expected a man his age to be a little bit winded after their jog over, but Taylor had kept himself in almost military shape.

“That guy, over in the trees,” the girl with jet-black hair said. She kept pulling down at the hem of her dress, and Hank felt very uncomfortable. He scanned around, and there was no one else in the parking lot. Or in the trees.

“We were just talking, you know?” the pale girl said, and the girl with the jet-black hair blushed. “Didn’t feel like going home right away, couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.”

Taylor nodded, but both he and Hank knew what this was. They were high school girls, and they really didn’t have anything better to do in the Cedar Valley except sit in the all-night restaurants for hours drinking coffee with too much cream and sugar. They were hanging out in the parking lot because the ballplayers were still coming out. They were too young to meet them in bars, but they didn’t mind hanging out and getting a peek at the players. It was the most normal thing in the world to do, and they didn’t deserve to be harassed for it.

“Anyway,” the pale girl continued, “we look over into the woods and see some guy is in there. We can just see his foot. At first, we thought it was just a shoe, but then it moved a couple of times. All right. Weird. Then we hear something drop and roll out of the trees. When we go to look at it, this guy just runs as fast as he can away and we don’t know where he went. It’s getting pretty dark.”

The girl who hadn’t spoken, with the acne, held up what they had found like it was something pulled from a drain. It was a roll of athletic tape, the kind the HooseCows order in bulk.

“He was looking at me,” the pretty girl said. “I know he was.”

“We’ll call the cops. You kids need to get home,” Taylor said. He was gruff, but reassuring. He looked over their car — in the trunk, the backseat, underneath of it — and they all got in.

“Drive straight home,” he said. “Anyone tries to stop you, you just run ‘em right over if you have to. I don’t think anyone will. We’re going to call the cops, but you two gotta be safe, first. I’m sorry. This wasn’t right. Call tomorrow and we’ll give you free tickets and everything, if you’re still willing to come out.”

The girls smiled and drove away. Taylor and Hank watched.

“We’re not calling the police, are we?” Hank asked.

“You know it’s one of ours,” he said. “Look at the tape. I bet he’s still out there waiting.”

“So what do we do?” Hank asked.

“Building door locked behind us,” Taylor explained. Both men we’re peering into the dark, nearly moonless night. They could see very little. “I figure he’s either in the cemetery or in the park, so we check them out ourselves.”

Hank nodded and looked into the night. Taylor’s note of players to watch, in case one of them had killed Leigh Palmer, the girl they had found dead outside the stadium. On the list were: “Bunk” Edwards, Drew Harrold, Rick Newton, and Danny Marks. The last two names didn’t concern him, but the first two made him suspicious enough to keep playing boy detective with Taylor. He turned to Taylor to speak, and was abruptly cut off.

“I saw you thinking over there. I’m old, but my nerves are still tougher than yours. I’ll take the cemetery.”

“What if we find someone?” Hank asked. He would’ve felt perfectly comfortable in the cemetery, considering all the time he had spent in them doing his photography, but he knew better than to threaten the old man’s ego.

Splitting up, he was glad he didn’t have to walk past the darkened stadium any more than he had to. Lately, when he was alone in the darkened stadium, he couldn’t help but hear the frantic, frightened music of the Rochester organist. He heard it enough in his nightmares, as if to berate himself for not feeling guilty enough during the day for what his foul ball had done to the man.

Ahead of him was a giant piece of children’s playground equipment shaped like a giant rocket. The rocket rose up to be over ten feet tall, and it must’ve seemed like a skyscraper to the children who played here. There were slides and staircases all over the rocket, which you reached by walking by crossing a bouncing bridge and going up several stages of gradual ramps. Hank walked over to inspect the thing, if for no other reason than to imagine playing in it when he himself was a child.

After leaning on the strong central pole of the playground, Hank was almost ready to move on to looking other places when he heard a slow creaking noise, followed by the unmistakable sound of pea gravel sliding across metal. Someone was in the rocket. Hank felt his heart stop, then start again and race to twice its normal rate. It could just be some kid, he reasoned. He still had no idea what he’d do if one of his teammates came out of the structure and stood face to face with him. Would it be enough to really know the truth?

The next sound he heard was the sound of sand and rock being scraped against the floor of the rocket. Someone was squatting inside of the metal, perhaps standing and preparing to rush out. Hank worked at keeping control of his breath. Should he say something, or should he just be prepared to run and maybe even fight. He was ready to tackle someone, but he didn’t really want it to come to that. He worried that, if he tried to run, he would weave about as if in a drunken stupor.

Hank stepped back to take in the situation, and at that exact moment he heard another scraping noise. He looked up and saw what was above him in the giant rocket. His heart reacted immediately, pushing itself even faster within his chest. His hand reached up to cover his eyes, and he finally was able to pry it free and cover his mouth instead.

Sitting in the biggest portion of the rocket was one of the small, ghostly boys he and Mickey Danz had been seeing around. The boy had moved to sit at the edge of the platform, with his legs barefoot and dangling from between the safety bars. Hank could see there was writing on his shirt, but once again he could not read it. The boy’s eyes were dark, and he wasn’t sure they were even in his skull at all. The boy’s right hand was also outside of the barred-in platform, and as Hank watched, it released something. As Hank watched, it fell to the ground. He looked down for just long enough to see the boy had dropped a baseball, and when he looked back up, the boy was gone.

Later, Hank was proud he didn’t scream at that moment. He managed to hold on just long enough to reach up and pick up the baseball, which was somehow real enough to hold in his hand.

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