A Dream by Noon.

CHAPTER 4

Chapter 4

The bus pulled up, stopped and Kathy let me out in front of my house. The street was quiet, and the van next door had not returned yet. I tossed my backpack onto my front steps and start the short walk to the hospital.

Crunching and falling leaves blowing through comfortable but dryer, cooler air brought with it the smell that was unescapably Fall. The smell of grape vines still hung in the air, now joined by a sweet crispness from the crabapples littering the edge of the road, an end of summer reminder gently marking the transition that was moving between the two seasons.

These were my favorite days.

High Street was quiet. No cars, which was common for this time of day. No kids yet either. I turned left into the entryway to the abandoned hospital property. The building itself had been a fixture in our backwoods playground for years. The decrepit looming structures that ate tennis ball after basketball, occasionally a hockey puck. Any object landing within 10 feet was immediately discarded from our minds and a new ball or new game began without second thought. After a few years though, the once dominant presence became merely a backdrop – just part of the landscape in this place of joy. Aside form ghost stories and rumors, mostly started by us, after playing on the property for years we had witnessed nothing scarier than a wandering animal or a couple big snakes.

One day, playing basketball on the old rickety hoops outside, my ball rolled straight down cement steps and rested in front of the basement doors. Andy ran and grabbed it, tossed it back and ran back up. And that was that. Soon the invisible barrier disappeared and we ran freely outside, forgetting about the arbitrary 10 foot barrier. The lower level windows of the property were mostly boarded up. The doors were either boarded or locked tight with chains. We never attempted to break them. Had the doors been left unlocked, I'm not sure that any of us would have tried to open them anyways at that point.

We never went there for the lure of the buildings. Lots of other kids, older teenagers even, visited the property on dares and with hopes of seeing the supernatural. At the very least, putting enough fear into their date to get them jumping into their airs that night. A group of local fourteen-year-old girls inspired by the movie, "The Craft" visited at night in hopes of conjuring up some unknown powers. Not us. I was 16 now and had been using this property as my secret garden for about 8 years. We had no desire to discover any evil here and ruin everything that it was to us.

The entire property sat on about 150 acres of land. It has been purchased from the town in 1910 to then build a large campus style hospital to treat patients with tuberculosis. Most of the hospital had stopped treating patients by 1965, but it wasn't until 1982 that the last building housed it's last patient and the closed. Our street was the only access point as the backside looked over a pond. The entrance was four houses down from my house on the opposite side of the road. The only building that could be seen by passersby was an old, dilapidated cape style house formerly used as an office, barely visible behind a long row of overgrown arborvitaes. Without knowing, a person would drive right by. Growing up, my dad explained the misplaced hospital on our rural road by saying that our street was the highest elevation in the county. Back when the hospital opened, residents feared how contagious the disease was. Doctors and other experts assured them that being at the highest point would allow the germs to 'float over the town.' I had always accepted that explanation. A short walk through the front entrance, past the old winding wooded driveway led to the main campus, within which hosted three exceptionally large buildings around a circular road. The biggest of them, a three-story building that looked like it might have housed Hugh Heffner and the bunnies in it's prime, now the old Mediterranean Style building, with it's red shingles and dirty stucco looked out of an old abandoned city in Mexico. The other two, a smaller version of the first. Tying them all together was a large cement cul-de-sac and several smaller paved paths, exiting doorways and winding around them. An old basketball court was off to the left of the main building and an old tennis court at the back; The nets long since ripped down. In view of the circular driveway, was a large field that stretched as wide as a football field through the winter and had grass taller than us through the warmer months. A paved path on the side of the field led down to the pond and traveled beside it for about half a mile. A walk through the paved path revealed flashes of the past and present at once – a large incinerator with a rusty door that had fallen off years ago exposed old hospital equipment, patient clothing, and shoes among other items. Further down, more recent fire pits and beer cans, sweatshirts and blankets lay strewn among the makeshift log seats. We never ran into the older kids drinking at night by fire, or the group of girls attempting to cast spells and awaken the dead. We stayed away from the hospital at night. Not because we were afraid, we just had no internet beyond being there in the day to explore and to play – these grounds were life to us, not death. One of our most treasured places. When the weather was nice we played basketball on the courts, hit tennis balls against the buildings, found frogs along the shore and threw bread for fish to watch them bite. We walked and rode bikes down the maze of cement paths, throughout the property, the steeps hills and old pavement leading to an injury at least once a week.