As soon as we got over the shock of first seeing Tannery Palace, Crutch suggested I move the company van a few streets away. The factory/mansion complex was only a long stone’s throw from (redacted) Square and our local guide Hannah K— said she had seen a couple of army cops on patrol that morning.

Normally, I would have been miffed at having to do this while Crutch got to know our appealing new co-conspirator a little better. But the night before I let on that I had attended 4th and 5th grade at the St. Catherine Primary School around the way. I was curious to see this old haunt again, especially now after what I had just seen. How could it be that I had never, until today, seen or known about the outlandish Victorian owner’s residence that sat in the middle of the tannery—especially since my grandfather had worked there and I spent two years at a school that was only two blocks away?

The shuttered but otherwise well-preserved Tannery Palace was no place to park a van whose back-door logo promised adventures in “Dark Tourism.” I hopped in and drove over to the school and tucked it under an oak tree in a corner of the disused parking lot, close by the giant brick wall that formed the back of the Church of St. Catherine Laboure.

I wasn’t particularly old, just a man of a certain age, but it felt like an indiscernible black space separated those years from where I stood now. I looked over at the tall windows of my 4th grade classroom and got a blank stare in return. That did not stop some memories from leaking back. At recess, we used to throw an oversized Super Ball against this back wall. A pack of boys in white shirts and clip-on ties would scramble for the crazy bouncing rebound. A smaller number of girls in plaid skirts would work the perimeter away from the scrum, occasionally catching the more errant sideway bounces.

I started walking back, wondering how far along Hannah and Crutch were with prying away the weak-link plywood of the basement window that was to be our entry point to the mystery mansion. First though, I had to turn back to have a look at the church’s pointy steeple, an architectural detail that had popped up in my dreams at least a couple of times a year for decades. Many of the kids in my 5th grade class would compare the steeple to a witch’s hat, thus revealing the true nature of Catholicism. We were clever little buggers back then. For sport, we would discuss this theory just barely out of earshot of the nuns as they stood in groups of three or four in their white origami-type headgear.

Each sunny school day at the noon recess, at the signal which was the tannery’s blaring lunchtime horn, we would look up at the steeple to see “the witch’s eye.” This would be a glint of sunshine off the church bell seen through the slats of the tower. I stared one last time for a glimpse of this, but it was no use. It was late afternoon already; the moon was even rising. The church, the factory and a lot else around it was closed for good. There would be no supernatural eye to look down on this broken world that had cursed itself.

A prose sample from a work-in-progress, a (graphic?) novel called “The Ministry of Dark Tourism”