The Boy in the Park: A gripping psychological thriller with a shocking twist. A Grayson J

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ months ago, perhaps. Maybe twenty. I’ve been visiting my bench by the pond for at least six weeks, and I’ve started calling it that. ‘My bench’. I’ve staked my claim. Planted my flag. Clichéd my rhetoric, perhaps, but I’ve found my spot.

      I took my time settling on just which one would be called my own, back in those days. There are hundreds of benches in the park, I don’t think that’s an exaggeration, and they come in every conceivable type of setting. Open air, in the midst of large quadrangles. Tucked amongst tended flowerbeds. In stone form within the Succulent Garden, surrounded by the potent scents of rosemary and a hundred other herbs. Hidden in darkness beneath the redwoods. Alongside accessible footpaths.

      There are even more just like this one, alongside ponds, of which there are four or five in the gardens and dozens in the park as a whole. So that factor alone can’t account for my taking to this bench in the way I did. It is, like so much in life, in the mixture of things. Just the right amount of shade, without being dark. Near the water, but far enough from its edge to avoid the bugs. Blooming, colourful plants amidst the greenery below, but not so many as to feel you’re sitting in the middle of your grandmother’s flowerbed. That, and it’s a bit off the beaten path – a cliché that’s perfectly literal in this case. The path to this spot isn’t beaten down by the same amount of foot traffic as so many others. It’s still a bit raw, a touch wild.

      For a moment I think again of the stick, of the present, but memory has too powerful a hold.

      Since the day I first arrived here, since I found this perch and christened it my own (with all due respect to Margaret, whose claim is more memorialized than present) there was very little to surprise me. I cherish that as well. What sort of people are they that spend their lives chasing after surprises? Some may crave the burst-through-the-woodwork spontaneity of the unknown, but I’ve always preferred the peace that comes from comfortable regularity. Some have called me predictable. I’ve always thought them incomprehensibly daft. Is it ‘predictable’ to cherish the familiar face of a friend? Or a scene one has grown to love?

      But one surprise did, in fact, come into my otherwise unsurprising retreat. Two days ago, in the past-that’s-present, the way memories go. A Monday, so vividly clear now. I was just starting what I hoped would be one of my longer poems, an exercise in iambic pentameter (I don’t usually write in meter), and I was distracted mid-iamb by a rustling of the otherwise silent greenery.

      I didn’t know where to look, at first. There’s so much of it. Part of the appeal of this place is that the pond is completely encircled by trees and dense shrubbery, embraced by it. A flutter in the branches could have come from anywhere.

      But sight is far more precise than sound. Green everywhere, rustling leaves everywhere – but a small figure that stood only in one spot. A little landing at the edge of the water, almost immediately across the pond from my perch on the bench. The foliage reaches out nearly to touch the shore, thick and dense; but just at its edge is a foot and a half of hard-packed mud that leads into the water itself.

      And on the muddy shore stood a little boy.

      I’d never seen him before, which is part of what made his impression on me so interesting. Not being a man with children, or with any cause to be around children regularly, it could realistically be said that most boys are boys I’ve never seen before. For that matter, apart from customers in the shop, most people of any age are people I’ve never seen before. I am not the socialite that culturally advanced mothers hope their sons one day will become, climbing up civic ladders on the shoulders of fleets of ‘friends’ who bear that title after a single lunch together or chat over a Starbucks counter. I have two friends: Greg, whom I haven’t actually seen in six years, but who sends an email on most major holidays and with great faithfulness a week or two after my birthday; and Allen, a co-worker with whom I’ve grown close enough that I suppose by most standards we’ve crossed the amorphous line that distinguishes acquaintances from friends. He owes me three drinks down at the Mucky Duck bar on 9th. That’s a good measure, I should think. Only friends owe each other drinks.

      But this boy, who in the present moment is the cause of my angst, was then a complete stranger to me. I’m not even sure just how or when he appeared on the shore of my pond. When I looked up, he was there. He can’t be more than four or five, though I’m hardly the best judge of ages (I still consider Allen’s daughter, Candy, to be three, the age she was when I first met her five years ago).

      I find myself at a loss for words to describe him – a strange position to be in, for a poet. He’s a touch over half my height, scrawny, brownish hair in a fluff over his ears. His arms look a bit like wires, but dirty wires, well used. He wore a white T-shirt under his overalls on Monday, and again yesterday. I can’t say it was clean, or that it might smell too nice were one close enough to catch a whiff. But boys play, don’t they? He’s a long way off from puberty and the special reek boys develop when the hormones hit, but sweat is sweat and will stain the clothes of a boy as well as a man.

      His overalls are the lighter, rather than the more common darker, denim blue, just a little too short for him. Probably in a growth spurt.

      You’ve probably seen this kid. At least, I felt I’d seen him before, or at least the image of him. Mark Twain had him in mind when he dreamed up Tom Sawyer — this exact boy. Add a straw hat and a Mississippi steamer and you’ve got the principal casting for Huck Finn sorted. Throw in a lovable golden dog and you’ve got Travis Coates getting ready to run after Old Yeller. Put him in the Catskills and you’ve got Sam Gribley on his side of the mountain. He’s that boy, all those boys. A bit out of place for modern times, perhaps, but the traditional image in all its details.

      Yet there’s something more about him. Something as unknown as known. Something I couldn’t quite grasp, back then. Or now. I haven’t been able to get a good look at his face – not yet, not even after all these months. The shadows in this part of the park sometimes play havoc. Maybe that’s part of it. But a faceless child is a little … well, eerie.

      I was sure, though, at that first sighting, that I’d see it soon enough. Each day the boy came back. Same spot, same still posture. Playing with a stick, though barely that. He just stood there, really, but he seemed content enough.

      And I returned too, again and again. It became my habit. Nothing to do with him. Yet I would still sit on my bench, my notebook open on my knee and pencil knuckled tightly in my hand – and I would gaze out over the water. Waiting for him to appear.

       14

       Monday Afternoon

      No, the stick definitely should not be there. My comforting recollections have puffed out of existence as fast as they came and I’m bound back to the present. Here, now, I’m absolutely certain that I picked the stick up when I went looking for the boy after The Disappearance. I’m sure I walked with it into the trees. I don’t know where I left it, but I know I never returned to the boy’s spot.

      But there it is. Today. Impossible. Wrong.

      I’m already walking down that path again as the thoughts come – the familiar ring around the pond. Walking this time, though, not running. I arrive after a few moments, half expecting the vision to be gone. An illusion. The stick, though, is lying where I’d seen it, its wispier tip still in the water.

      I reach down to pick it up, and I’m momentarily taken over, again, by that stark feel of wood on skin. Rough, natural, completely earthy. But there’s more to the feel: today there is memory. The kind of memory СКАЧАТЬ