The Van Pact

24: Stevie

We followed Jesse's blue Ford Focus across the Hillside bridge, through the South Side of Center City, and onto the winding road that wraps around South Mountain. We drove through the leafy, sharply-inclined campus of Packer College, a private research university that nobody in Linden Valley can actually afford. The frat boys there are all from New York or Connecticut- far beyond the reach of what Valerie calls "our uggo shield"- and are accordingly gorgeous. I caught Valerie checking out a six-foot-something brunette in boat shoes, and Valerie doesn't check out very many guys.

We passed the first and second guardrails on our way up the mountainside. When we got to the third, Jesse parked his car. Valerie pulled Gus into the spot behind him.

"I'm confused," I said. I looked out my window. Aside from the steep drop beside the guardrail, all that was around us was an exit onto Route 33 and forest.

"Looks like we're about to get some answers," Valerie pointed through the windshield at Jesse, getting out of his car.

***

"Is this private property?" I pushed a twiggy branch out of my way.

"Who knows?" Jesse shrugged, in the process jostling Old Grim Bones, who hung over his shoulder. Valerie carried her high heels and the rolling stand behind me. Jesse had led us across Route 33. There, amongst the densely-forested trees, was an unmarked hiking path, overgrown with grass and thorny burr bushes. The farther from the highway we got, the more the path opened. The overgrown grass turned to a boggy mud, and the mud to a coarse, rocky gravel, until we came across a blue, derelict shed, upon which a green dragon had been painted. Along its scaly tale were these lines, in loopy script.

What but a Soul could have the wit

To build me up for Sin so fit?

So Architects do square and hew

Green Trees that in the Forest grew.

I got goosebumps from that, and I still don't even understand what it's supposed to mean.

"Where the hell are we?" Valerie set down Grim Bone's stand and ran up to the shed. She pulled on its rhinestone-incrusted door knob. It was locked.

"You're looking at the wrong place," Jesse titled his head in the direction of a tree beside him. From each of the lowest branches dangled what looked to be shrunken heads. I jumped.

"Relax, Steve," Jesse chuckled. "They're plastic."

"The Alferd Packard Memorial Garden," Valerie read a corroded aluminum plaque hammered into the shrunken-head-tree's trunk. She narrowed her eyes at me. "Alferd Packer, wasn't he a serial killer?"

"A cannibal," Jesse corrected her.

I wondered then if Jesse were actually a cleverly disguised psycho, and that Valerie and I were minutes away from finding ourselves dismembered in a cooler. That would be an interesting way to prove the second O'Shaughnessy law of inevitability.

"He was first cousins with Packer College's founder," Jesse trudged forward down the path, "come on!"

Against my sense of self-preservation, I picked up Grim Bones' stand and followed Jesse and Valerie deeper into the woods. It might be worth getting hacked to bits, I thought, if it meant Jesse would touch me.

The deeper into the woods we walked, the thinner the woods became, until the trees gave way entirely to a meadow high on top a gentle-sloping hill. And was it the weirdest meadow I have seen in my life. There were three nine-or-ten foot tall statues- a Picasso cubist face with forked tongue, a grasping hand, a pentagram. A seven foot tall arch made of concrete, soda bottles, and nineteen-nineties childhood memorabilia. A sheet metal pinwheel, decorated with bits of Natty Lite cans. And in the center, elevated on three concrete steps, a throne, mosaic-tiled with pieces of rainbow ceramic and smooth mirror glass.