through the trees.

Ratty would wake up in the middle of the night and see a dead boy sitting on his dirty laundry. A boy who had killed himself in Ratty’s room about thirty years prior, swinging from a necktie in at the top of the closet and his mom said that he came back here because this was the place he loved so much. He loved it so much that he hung himself and came back to sit in the closet that he died in at the school that no doubt drove him to his end.
Craig Hupp and I heard the choppy and distended laughs of faraway little girls come ringing up and out of our radiator one night in a cadence akin to cicadas. We listened and joked about it. Neither of us fell asleep, we just listened in the dark until the laughs turned into voices asking us why, over and over, why? They sang songs and it went from a cottony sweeping voice into something metallic and harsh and close. Craig, on the bottom bunk, started to swear into the radiator, whispering profanity and I pulled the blanket up around my chin and turned away from the noise and that was when I saw it in the far corner above a dresser. Craig saw it too and he was out of the bed and to the light switch and there, for a razor thin moment in time, everything hung still and serene around us and with no sound at all, every poster came down off the wall and fell still as death in between us.
We never put the posters back up. I don’t think we wanted to see them fall again like that, unnatural.
Kirk Golden sat studying by a lamp well after lights out, his face buried in a Spanish work book and Spence Dylan sat up in his bed pulling hair out of his chest when, with a light pop, the lamp went dark. Spencer with his long frame, his arms where almost three inches longer than they needed to be, a swimmers body more or less and with one long swing of one of those arms he flicked the wall switch on almost as soon as the lamp had gone off. Kirk sat there at his desk still, the Spanish book spread out on the floor and his eyes fixed on the light bulb that now stood on it’s end, the glass cut neatly around the end so that it now resembled a milky clear piece of fruit. The cap, the contact and the tungsten filament where still inside of the desk lamp. It sat there on its end, right side up, before it gently fell onto its side, but that’s not how it looked. It looked like someone or something gentle laid it on its side and it rolled off the table where Kirk caught it in his open hand.
Then there is that dog with his cold and sincere nose pressed to your arm, but no dog, really.
The man who sits at the foot of your bed, his weight keeping your blankets down.
There was the time I saw my first dead body. An electrical worker out in the woods, his collapsed cherry picker laid out across the concrete and dead body two hundred feet out and into the woods and collapsed over a fallen tree, his helmet a hundred feet further. It had just started to get cold for that year. Dead leaves spread out across his back like shavings of the season.
The Dead Hall with the walls cool like wet slate and up above the chandelier the dead whisper down on you.
The three boys walking back from the rink and through the upper school campus that sat between them and the lower school where the younger kids went, ninth grade and below. They were so out of breath when they got back that you couldn’t tell they were going into shock until Joey’s eyes rolled back and his head clicked off of the hallway tile. Drew said they saw a man sitting on top of the chapel, at the highest point of the roof. He was in overalls and as they approached he turned his back to them. Drew said, to the doctor, that they had carried on walking, their highlighted heads all turned up at what was there. Drew said they walked past and it, and it, he, slid off the roof and down behind them.
That was when they started into a run.
That one night though, that bad one, when Chad Mayberry heard that woman out in the woods, when it had started to get warm and he walked out of his room scratching his head and looking around. The entire north face of the building heard it next.
A woman yelling for help. Again and again and no one knew what to do. Pat Porter and his brother Zach yelled out of their window and Ernest Giovani shined a flashlight meagerly into the dark. Casey Carlisle put his hands over his ears and Mr. Seibel called 911 with his study hall clipboard shielding his eyes while he pressed them into the screen of a window.
The police came and we looked down at them in the still bare woods as their dogs barked and their flashlights cut thin swaths through the trees and rested for seconds of recognition on every tree stump or body size pile of leaves. They had walked out for a short distance when we heard it again.
We all did. The cops and us. In the basement this time though. The sound rifled out from the stairwell, three stories up, strident and grating, sharply bouncing off the concrete and throwing the words hard through the hallway.
Help me.
They all came running back towards the building, their lights bobbing back towards us, throwing shadows against the building. The dogs off the leash and tearing through the leaves, leaping at the rusted basement door with their teeth gnashing.
We watched as the cops went in the door and we looked down the stair well as the dogs ran back and forth, quieter now but sniffing hard.
Down there in that basement there are tunnels to connect all of the buildings in the winter. Old tunnels, older than some of the buildings they were connected too and older still than the connections they made no longer. Giant locked doors that you dare not put your palm too went off all over the city. Hollow and empty tunnels full of cold air and history.
The cops came out of the basement and looked around at all of us, looking for a smile or a laugh to give away the joke. There was none, no laugh or smile or joke. Just scared boys, miles from home.