I have this thing about not putting my hands where I can’t see them. Sometimes this is kind of obvious, like if it’s a hole in a tree that might have an animal living in it, or a piece of machinery that might have moving pieces in there, but it’s gotten so bad I can’t even pick up a plastic packing box if the handles have an indentation underneath, or pull jammed paper out of the copy machine at work. I can’t climb up through the trap door of our attic any more and I certainly can’t do that thing in Rome where you put your hand in a statue’s mouth and tell a lie. I’ll tell you why, but it’s kind of a long story.
There used to be a playground near my church, a place called Treasure Island. We only went there for special occasions, like picnics or birthday parties — it wasn’t one of those colorful modern metal playgrounds with artificial-fiber netting to catch you if you fell off of anything, it was a huge castle of sturdy wood that seemed so much better. When I was a kid it seemed ancient, but it was probably only built there in the late seventies, at the absolute latest. Still, it was enormous, and not like a weakass little plastic thing for babies. (Though there was a tiny corner of it with swings and plasticky little-kid toys that looked like it was added later.) There was wood mulch and pieces of chopped-up tire carpeting the ground so if you jumped off you wouldn’t totally wreck your knees, but that was the only real concession to safety. There were towers, turrets, monkeybars, secret passageways, ladders, a couple of slides and lots of hiding places, safely boxed in by wood so no one would see you.
One gross thing about playing on Treasure Island was that the wood was always wet, soggy dark brown and a little slimy. It soaked up the rain and melting snow like crazy, but it was never bad enough to be too slippery to climb on. Looking back on it, the whole place was kind of weird and sleazy, and neighborhood kids probably snuck out there to get blazed as soon as the streetlights went on. I was dimly aware of that even back then; the park nearest to our house had ugly burns on its orange plastic slides from people stubbing out their cigarettes and joints. But I never found any cigarette butts or beer bottles climbing around on that thing. And we explored it thoroughly. I don’t think they make ‘em like that any more, probably for obvious reasons. Going through the tunnels was always kind of risky, because some kid might be coming in the opposite way, and sometimes one of the younger kids would be afraid of the dark and throw a fit. You can still skin your knees pretty good on wet wood. I’ve never been good at monkey bars, so one false move and you’d be on the ground with the wind knocked out of you with wood chips permanently embedded in your knees. The wood for the main construction wasn’t hard enough to break off into splinters, but even as a little kid I was hella paranoid that I’d get a huge one jammed under my fingernail or something.
This place had been played hard and bashed up to shit. There was no spray-paint grafitti (also thrillingly unlike the playground by my house at home) but some places whole panels would be taken up with kids scratching signs and symbols — their names, lopsided elementary-school anarchy A’s, “Sam loves Zoe”, swears, and from some of the older kids, swastikas. In some places there were visible huge dents in the wood from kids kicking walls or jumping down off of higher platforms and landing. Kids loved that thing, me included. But there was always something a little uncomfortable about it, being chased around and playing tag. I’d never been anywhere like that, anywhere kids really had the run of the place. Adults didn’t get anywhere near it; if they were watching us it was from the grass on the other side of a sidewalk and in a lawn chair, with a beer. It wasn’t all built on an adult scale, and some of the young teenagers even had trouble fitting on it, let alone in the places we hid for hide-and-seek. That meant that when it was time to go, no one could come get you. Finally, one place in my life that wasn’t for grown-ups. Treasure Island was built for kids. It was a great place, for a high-strung kid from the city.
The last time I went to Treasure Island was when I was in fourth or maybe fifth grade. Memory has a way of dimming these things. That must have been around 2003. All the games and the fun went without event; I was happy, but exhausted and bashed around from play that was starting to seem way less fun the older I got. I was too old to really play hide and seek like we used to (I was just starting to get tall, not to mention a little heavy) but way too young to keep up with the teenagers. There were only a handful of other kids my age, and no girls. One of the boys, Zach R., had introduced the Yu-Gi-Oh craze to our Sunday school. The cards were forbidden at my (very Catholic) elementary school, but somehow just having them, not even playing them, became a major status symbol. And (as he helpfully informed us just when we were all cranky, hungry and about ready to hit the road) he had lost his deck somewhere inside the structure. It had rained a day or two prior, and it looked like it was about to rain again, so there was a frantic search to find the little drama queen’s precious deck of cards so we could all hit the road. And like a cavalcade of little geniuses, we split up. Nine or ten kids all scattered and hunting.
I checked in the tunnels. There was never a map or anything, and some of the tunnels reached wooden dead ends, but most of the kids didn’t have any trouble and were whipping in and out of there like nobody’s business. I was getting kind of big, so maybe if I’d had brains I woud have climbed up to check the towers or under the slide.
Here were the cigarette packets and candy wrappers. Nothing as bad as like, broken glass, but still gross. I was already starting to spring up in height, and so I couldn’t creep through crouched like I used to without banging my head — I had to get down on my hands and knees and crawl. I’d only gotten maybe two or three feet in when I heard a voice behind me and something began blocking the light. It was another older girl, Kendall, from my church. I don’t know how she expected to find anything other than I did, but she started in after me, and wouldnt’ turn around. That was it. I was trapped. Kendall was skinnier than I was (and blonde and generally seeming perfect to a dumpy and angry me) but we were really truly stuck. All or nothing, sink or swim.
About halfway through the tunnel as far as I could tell, something started to smell, really badly. Like some kind of sealant was soaking out of the wood. I was already having to crawl through a little bit of mud and my knees and hands were filthy, I could just tell, but the smell was terrible. I remember thinking at the time, with great displeasure, that one of the littler kids must have had an accident down there. But it didn’t smell like that, either, worse than that, like garbage. I kept crawling without stopping, because of the girl behind me and because suddenly Treasure Island wasn’t fun. It was gross, and sleazy, and I didn’t know why I’d ever liked it. Nothing would ever be fun that way again, now that I saw how dirty it was, rank and filled up with trash. Finally, we reached the end of the tunnel, an exit into the sunlight. There was still the whole structure over my head, and so without looking I reached up into the alcove to steady myself. Bad idea.
There was another hidden storage place there. My hands touched cloth, and at first I thought I’d found something wet. But then on my fingertips I felt wet. When I’d gripped onto the ledge to hoist myself up, I’d put my hands directly in something, and it smelled foul. I drew myself up, having a little more sunlight to take a look from the exit to the tunnel, and…
You probably guessed this from the moment I mentioned the bad smell in the tunnel. There was a dead body up there, mutilated in ways I couldn’t even see through the worms covering the face. Just masses and masses of white worms squirming in red flesh and yellow fat. The body — I can’t call it “his” body or “her” body, it was just the body, a thing, was in pieces, or folded up somehow, grotesquely bent and twisted so that it’d fit in the tiny space. The liquid on the ground was leaking from it. It was wearing a blue and white windbreaker and blue jeans, I remember that. The windbreaker was slick with something oily and brown, that was what I had touched, and the legs of the jeans were all that was sticking out right next to the head. There were no feet on the ends of the legs. Someone had literally stuffed that body in there, they had tried so hard to get it to fit. It wasn’t a child’s body. Treasure Island wasn’t for grown-ups. Treasure Island was for kids.
I didn’t have time to take a look around, but this image is just so… it’s burned on my memory, it won’t let go, like my mind took a photograph just at that instant. I feel pretty sick just typing this out. I couldn’t scream or the stench would fill my mouth. I dropped to my knees, crawled out, and vomited. I’m not much for throwing up, but I remember that almost as vividly as the thing in the tunnel, the bile searing my mouth. I could hear Kendall shouting from still in the tunnel, echoing a little, “What’d you do? What’d you do?” and making an understandable fuss.
As soon as my mouth was clear, I screamed at her to turn around. But she didn’t. She crawled right out, didn’t try to stand up, didn’t look up, didn’t see. I remember how she came out of the little alcove with her nose still wrinkled from the awful smell and how her expression just got nastier once she saw me on the ground in a puddle of puke. I didn’t have a lot to say for myself, I just cried and cried, and she ran off to tell on me for daring to be sick. There wasn’t any follow-up after this. I never told anyone. I repressed the fuck out of what happened and went on my merry, traumatized way. The thing from the trap door didn’t emerge from beneath my pillow some night or show up in the rear view mirror on the drive home. It didn’t even show up in my dreams except in flashes, the blue and white windbreaker and the slick soggy wood and the worms.
Zach found his Yu-Gi-Oh cards in his brother’s sweatshirt pocket, wonder how those got there. I haven’t been back to Treasure Island since 2004. And I don’t like tight spaces, or putting my hands where I can’t see them.
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Grabbed from Horror/creepy short stories
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