Once I step outside, cool, moist air curtains me, creeping down my neck, burrowing under my shirt. Settling on my skin.
I enter the park from the southwest gate, the opposite corner from my old house. The park is nearly a hundred acres in size. I walk briskly, not caring to linger though I have nothing for which to be late. My path is lit by the occasional security light, and a CCTV camera is mounted next to every one of them. I have forgotten about the British obsession with monitoring. All the more reason to suspect Mr. Interested is a product of England. He comes from this culture of surveillance, one that watches every move. Records every breath.
As far as I can see, I am alone, which doesn’t at all mean I am. All I hear are my own hurried footsteps on the path and the distant hum of light traffic on nearby streets. I stop once and look directly behind me. Nothing.
There is a haunting nostalgia here, a childhood familiarity layered with seconds of sheer terror. I used to play in this park. I nearly died in this park. I chased young boys in this park. Over three pints of my blood spilled in this park.
Ahead are the trees I remember so well. They had been planted in such a way that the park seems to turn into a dense forest without warning. Thomas and I used to call this section Hundred Acre Wood, and I would always play Christopher Robin. Thomas would always be Tigger, bounding and bounding about, both reckless and delighted with himself. Sometimes a whole day would pass here, though we’d hardly be aware of more than a few minutes going by. I suppose that’s really the definition of childhood. As you age, the day eventually seems as long as it actually is, and toward the end of one’s life, I imagine a single day can feel like a lifetime.
I enter Hundred Acre Wood, and immediately I’m swallowed inside the dense covering of trees. The path snakes next to a small creek. The trees loom over me, like a million predators frozen in mid-pounce. Streetlights shine small pools of light on the ground, and it’s all I can do to convince myself to make it to the next one. One step after the other, though, these steps are slowing. Getting smaller. Less certain in their purpose.
There. Up ahead. There’s the bridge.
What am I doing here?
Closure, perhaps, whatever that really means. The truth is, ever since the moment I chose to come to England, I knew I would come here. To the place it all happened.
It happened, in fact, right there.
Up ahead, a small wooden pedestrian bridge crosses the creek, park benches bookending each side. In the fall, we would drop leaves off the bridge and watch them softly float away. Sometimes we’d follow them all the way to the edge of the park, where they would bunch against a grated culvert. I always wondered what was inside that culvert, where it led, and what sorts of things might call that dark, wet place home.
Sylvia and Melinda Glassin once said that was where Mister Tender lived. That he’d rise from the depths of the culvert at night and go to the pub, holding court until the last customer went home. Then he’d slither back home, turning his body into a kind of rubber so he could squeeze through the narrow bars of the grate. Of course I knew this wasn’t true. My father invented Mister Tender, after all, and he never wrote about where he lived. As far as anyone could tell, Mister Tender’s existence began and ended in a bar, and he never slithered anywhere else in between.
My pace slows as I step onto the bridge. I can hardly see the creek in the faded light of the streetlamps, but I can hear it. The slow-moving water trickling over rocks sounds ghostly in the moment. Empty. Lonely, almost.
At the top of the small bridge, I stop and then crouch to one knee. My fingertips brush the coarse wood planks by my foot, and if I squint in the dark, I can almost picture the blood. But surely it’s not here anymore. It’s been cleaned up, and perhaps these planks have been replaced altogether.
But here, right here, is where it happened.
Melinda took me by the hand, while Sylvia walked behind us. I remember thinking how odd it was that she wanted to hold my hand, or even that the twins had shown recent interest in me at all, considering I was seen as more of a freak than anything as my father’s books sold more and more. Mine was otherwise a quiet existence, so when the Glassin twins came over one night and asked if I wanted to “hang out,” I could hardly protest.
We’d spent the evening at their house, a few blocks off the south side of Gladstone Park. My parents weren’t thrilled with the idea of me spending time with the Glassin twins, going so far as saying the Glassins weren’t “their type of people.” They never explained what they meant by that. But I was fourteen and desperate for any kind of attention, so I protested loudly enough that my parents buckled beneath the weight of my teenage angst.
At dinner with the Glassins that night, the twins’ father asked me about my dad, about where he got all his ideas. I don’t know, I had replied. It was the truth. How his mind worked was always a beautiful and maddening puzzle.
“Surely you must know,” Mr. Glassin had insisted. “Surely he tells you such things. Tells you his inner thoughts.”
“No,” I had replied. “I don’t know anyone’s inner thoughts. That’s what makes them inner.”
Mrs. Glassin told me they used to be social with my parents, long ago. Before I was born, even. But that they’d grown apart once the babies started to come along. “That’s to be expected,” she’d said. “Hard to find time for anyone else once you pour your life into your children.”
This was a surprise to me.
I remember thinking I wanted to ask my parents about their long-ago friendship with the Glassins. I never did.
After dinner, I spent the next few hours in the twins’ shared bedroom, where the girls proudly displayed each issue of my father’s graphic novels. The books exhibited the battle wounds of well-read volumes. Sylvia and Melinda peppered me with question after question about Mister Tender. Were there things about him I knew that no one else did? What was going to happen in the next issue?
But the question I remember most:
What would you do for him, Alice?
“Nothing,” I had said. “Because he’s not real.”
Oh, the look of disappointment. Anger even, especially on Sylvia’s face. Then Melinda calmly said, Of course he’s not real, Alice. But that’s not the game we’re playing, is it?
After that, there were no more questions.
We settled into a movie that we watched on a small television in their room. Lights off. I sat on the floor, the twins propped side by side on their bed behind me. I don’t remember the movie exactly, but it was scary. Scarier than I was accustomed to, but they had insisted on it, being near Halloween and all. I wasn’t very familiar with the concept of Halloween, but I sat there and watched a movie and tried not to close my eyes in fear, all because I wanted these girls to like me.
I could hear them whispering during the moments of silence.
She’s scared.
It’s okay.
Does she know?
Of course not.
I thought maybe they were planning a prank, something innocent like reaching out and grabbing me during a particularly jolting scene. But in the bedroom, they never touched me.
After the movie, they offered me mushrooms. I didn’t understand why we would be eating mushrooms after we’d already had dinner, until they explained these were magic mushrooms. Horrible tasting, but mind altering. Illegal mushrooms.
You’ll see everything differently, Alice. Everything will be beautiful, and nothing will hurt.
I remember Melinda’s words so clearly, because we’d just read Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five in school, and that sentence had stuck with me. The little hand-drawn image of the tombstone with the inscription EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL, AND NOTHING HURT. So curious.
Melinda reached out her hand, and I saw little dried-up brown things shriveled in her palm, like the ears of small creatures. I knew some kids at school had access to drugs, or at least claimed to. Pot, mostly. But this was the first time I’d ever seen actual illegal drugs, and it made me feel completely out of my element. I felt older than I wanted to be and had a sudden longing for childhood.
I could smell the mushrooms from two feet away, and the aroma was powerfully bad. My need to be accepted by these girls was overruled by my fear of the unknown. What if the mushrooms made me crazy? What if my parents found out? Could I get addicted?
I declined. Melinda and Sylvia each popped one in their mouths, giggling in their communion.
I always wonder what I would have felt that night had I taken the mushroom. I don’t think any drug would have made what happened beautiful, or would have anesthetized the pain.
I recall their energy as we sat in their dark bedroom—energy that, as the drugs took effect, shifted from nervous to confident. They kept laughing over a joke never shared with me, and after a couple of hours, I no longer felt a part of anything, and I wanted to go home. It was nearly eleven at night, and I was supposed to be home by ten thirty.
They insisted they walk me home. Said I shouldn’t walk alone through the park at night.
Melinda and I walked out of the house; Sylvia said she’d be right there. This was the moment, according to testimony at the trial, she went into the kitchen and removed the eight-inch chef knife from the butcher block on the kitchen counter. Sylvia emerged moments later. Melinda took me by the hand, while Sylvia followed behind. I was distracted by Melinda’s hand on mine—Why is this girl holding my hand?—which I think was the whole point of it. At a normal walking pace, it would have taken less than ten minutes to navigate through the park to my house, but Melinda walked slowly, weaving me around the path, and any time I picked up my pace, she pulled on my arm with just the slightest pressure, easing me back. What’s the rush? she asked. Everything is beautiful. The mushrooms were taking hold of her.
She asked me about my father, echoing her own dad’s line of questioning from dinner. What he was like? Where did he come up with his ideas?
I told her I did not know. That I wasn’t even allowed to read the books.
She squeezed my hand and turned to me. In the streetlight, her eyes blazed. You haven’t even read the books?
No, I told her. Which was a bit of a lie. I had read some, but they disturbed me.
Do you even understand who Mister Tender is?
Yes, I said.
I could hear the trickle of the creek. We had stopped just short of the footbridge. In the far distance came the sound of men laughing. Mates walking home after the pub.
So you know he can make your dreams come true, right? If you do what he says, he’ll give you what you want.
He’s just a character, I told Melinda. Ink on paper. A cartoon.
But what if he wasn’t?
What do you mean?
Sylvia stopped close behind me. She said nothing, but I could feel her presence. Close. Blocking.
What if he was real? Melinda asked.
I don’t understand, I told her.
Melinda squeezed my hand hard. At the time, I took it as a sudden burst of affection, maybe a reaction to the drugs. Later, I realized it was meant to keep me from running.
She leaned in. She wore cheap perfume, and Sylvia didn’t, which sometimes was the only way I could tell them apart. He writes to us, she said. He told us to become friends with you. You don’t think we’d otherwise care about someone like you, do you?
Now Sylvia giggled. I could feel her close behind me, but I didn’t turn. I should have turned.
Alice, you know what we want? We want to become famous. Look at us. We deserve to be noticed.
I think you’re high, I told Melinda.
She grabbed my free hand, and I just let her. She looked at me with so much interest, like I was a newly discovered life form. She leaned in and said, He can give us fame. We just have to give him what he wants.
I don’t think I ever actually asked the question, but it formed in my head. I think I was too scared to ask, because she might tell me.
But she did anyway.
He told us we had to make a sacrifice. That everything comes with a price, and our price was you.
What?
Melinda looked over my shoulder, and as both of her hands clamped tighter on mine, she nodded. Just the faintest bob of her head, and she held me fast in place. Then she mouthed the word NOW.
I turned to look, but Melinda held my hands fast, so the best I could manage was a half turn. But it was enough for me to see the knife high above Sylvia’s head—silhouetted in lamplight—its grip held in both her hands. I didn’t even see her face. All I could see was that knife, and it seemed suspended above me for an eternity. But in truth, it was there for maybe two seconds. Perhaps there was the slightest hesitation on her part, a millisecond of second-guessing, the briefest splash of reality on her insanity. But that lasted only as long as it took Melinda to shout:
DO IT!
Just as she screamed, I have the vaguest notion of another voice. A man, somewhere in the distance, deep in the trees, screaming one word:
Stop!
This could have been a voice in my own head, or perhaps it was the man who found me bleeding and called for help. Whoever that voice was attached to, it has remained a mystery.
The knife came down in a swift, tight arc. Worse than being stabbed is that instant when you see it about to happen, and you imagine how the cold steel will so easily penetrate your skin, your muscle, even your bones. The inevitability of it all. That’s what I still dream about. Not the moment I was actually stabbed, but that breath of time immediately before.
Sylvia stabbed me three times before she handed the knife to her sister. When it was Melinda’s turn, I was on the ground at the edge of the bridge, just off the path, with my head in the grass. I remember the burning, sucking pain of that moment, but also the cool of the wet grass on the back of my head. It was soothing, like a cold compress. Melinda stood over me, and there was no doubt in her expression. No second-guessing. And before she plunged the blade five more times into my body, all she said was:
We’ll have everything we ever wanted.
I didn’t try to move after they left me to die. I couldn’t even if I had wanted to. My body had nothing left in it, no energy to expel. Shock settled over me like a heavy lead blanket, a sensation I still feel on the onset of my panic attacks to this day. Now when I feel it coming on, it’s terrifying, but at the time, in the moment, my body at the foot of the little pedestrian bridge, that lead blanket kept me safe. Told me everything would be over soon.
The creek kept trickling as I bled to death in the softness of the night. I remembered thinking the sound of the moving water would be the last thing I would ever hear, and in that moment, that was quite all right. There was an eternal element to that sound. Music to carry me away.
I don’t remember being found by the man in the park. Whoever he was, he called 999 and left before help arrived. I barely remember the blaring sirens, the police, the ambulance ride, the paramedics desperately giving me fluids and trying to stanch the bleeding. The next thing I recall was regaining consciousness in a gray-and-white hospital room, and my very first thought was an illogical one: I must be someone’s captive. Maybe it was because I was hooked up to so many machines and tubes, but I couldn’t help feeling that I was someone’s prisoner, their science experiment. A keepsake.
And now, all these years later, I feel the exact same way.
Tonight, in Gladstone Park, I look down and see a few leaves on the top of the bridge, and then I bend and pick one up. I drop it over the edge of the bridge into the small creek below, and though it’s too dark to follow its path, I picture it heading downstream, down toward the grate, to the deep, dark tunnel where the unknown creatures live.