The voice at Sabella Park

Not far from my house is Sabella Park. It’s got your usual attractions: a soccer field, a baseball diamond,a creek to splash in.

Local kids lore has it that if you go to the place where the creek disappears into a pipe, the noise of the pipe sounds like someone speaking a foreign language. Stay there long enough, and it starts to become English. Stay a while longer and you’ll see a pale-faced boy.

This is your cue to leave. A 9-year-old girl last summer started talking with him. When she went home, she claimed she wasn’t feeling well. By dinner she had a temperature of 102.8.

By nine o’clock she had died.