Chapter Text
The two young boys had ridden their bikes to the east side of St. Louis. It was a sketchy part of town, even back when the kids were barely past the first decade of their lives. Ten-year-old Danny Brooks and Paul Freed hung out together by default. Neither fit in with the eager beaver miniature athletes on the baseball or soccer fields, and they weren’t Cub Scouts or budding inventors working on juvenile science fair projects. Perhaps the only thing the youngsters had in common was that they were shy outsiders without fathers, and their mothers were less than attentive. But they made it work by finding their own adventures to keep themselves occupied.
Danny was usually the planner, and he had recently stumbled across an enticing tidbit of information called urban spelunking. The more he read about it, the more he became hooked on the concept.
“It’s a name for exploring old, abandoned buildings that people seem to have forgotten about,” he had explained to his buddy. “I think we should do it because it sounds really cool.”
“Why would we want to do something like crawl through dirty old places?” a perplexed Paul asked curiously. “And maybe it’s not such a good idea because we’d be breaking some law like trespassing, and we could get arrested.”
Danny wasn’t about to let his friend rain on his parade. “If the people who owned those buildings cared about them, then they wouldn’t let them fall to pieces and remain empty. Besides, it’ll be fun to see what they left behind.”
“But it could be dangerous,” Paul insisted.
“And it could also be very rewarding,” Danny argued. “But if you’re too chicken to do it, I can do it all by myself.”
“I’m not a coward,” Paul finally caved when his courage was challenged. “Lead the way and I’m right behind you.”
So, Danny did take point, trudging through waist high weeds to a large edifice that had once been a glass factory erected on the spot way back in the 1890s. It must have been impressive in its day—a huge brick structure at least five stories high with two conical-shaped chimneys soaring several hundred feet into the air on either end of what was once probably a thriving business with a multitude of workers. The masons had done a good job over a century ago because the brickwork was still intact and hadn’t crumbled with time. Unfortunately, those stalwart old walls were now the palette for extensive graffiti, most likely decades old as well. There were large multi-paned windows set in iron grillwork mounted high up from the ground floor that allowed in copious amounts of daylight. So, once the boys meandered inside, they could see exactly what had been left behind—a mountain of empty beer bottles and discarded paper sacks and Styrofoam cartons scattered across the stained concrete.
“So, obviously we’re not the first explorers who poked around in here,” Danny’s shoulders sagged as he surveyed the terrain and the sea of garbage.
“Right, so if there was anything worth taking in this creepy old place, somebody’s already beat us to it,” Paul voiced the obvious.
“But maybe they were too lazy to check out the upper levels,” Danny said thoughtfully as he found a set of circular metal steps leading upwards. The mystery of what could be found above pulled the boys like a magnet.
“This feels like we’re climbing inside a lighthouse,” Paul remarked, finally becoming engaged with the venture.
Up and up they went until the metal grates beneath their feet straightened out into regular flights of stairs. As they peered over the railings at each level, all they saw were ominous void spaces stretching across rotted wooden flooring. Young calf muscles were starting to ache by the time the boys had reached the summit in their ascent. Up there, the panes in the top windows were long gone having fallen victim to fierce winds and storms of the past.
Danny boldly inched his way beyond one exterior brick wall to a jutting type of window ledge. Gazing outward, he took in the green vista of tree foliage stretching into a path that led off to the St. Louis Golden Arch in the distance. At that moment, Danny felt like he had climbed the steep sides of Mount Everest in the Himalayas, a faraway place that he had learned about in geography class. It was a moment of sheer enchantment for him.
Paul, however, was not so enthralled with the panoramic view. “This was all for nothing and it’s really boring,” he complained as he turned to retrace his steps.
Reluctantly, Danny pulled his eyes away from the metropolis in the distance. “We should have thought to bring markers so we could write our names up here,” he had just finished saying when the tragedy unfolded right before his eyes.
Paul was already trudging down one flight of iron steps which easily supported his weight, but the rusted handrail had been riveted into decaying cement between the bricks in the wall. The mortar began to disintegrate under the pressure from the boy’s handhold, and he started to teeter as he tried to regain his precarious balance. Unfortunately, he overcompensated, and before Danny could utter a frightened caution, Paul was suddenly disappearing over the side of the elevated walkway as the groan of metal being torn from its mooring split the air. There was a brief scream of fear, a clank of falling banister debris hitting the floor far below, and then a silence that somehow seemed louder than the sharp terrified yell from a young boy in peril.
Danny bolted down to where Paul had disappeared and dared peek over the side. He saw his young friend lying on his side in a blizzard of dust motes set in motion by a human body abruptly coming in contact with dirty concrete. Danny called out Paul’s name over and over as he hurried downward with a sense of dread in his heart. By the time he made it to the bottom, Danny was panicked and crying. He knelt down and reached out a trembling hand to touch Paul, but the broken body of his co-explorer didn’t move. Eerily, the silent boy’s eyes were open, but he didn’t see Danny. He couldn’t see anything, and he wouldn’t ever again.
~~~~~~~~~~
The funeral was heart-wrenching, as only a child’s funeral could be. Danny’s mother made him wear his one pair of dress pants and a shirt with a collar. He felt like a zombie that day and wished that he was anybody else rather than who he was. He expected that people would blame him for Paul’s death and make him a pariah, but somehow that didn’t happen. With a stalwart Midwestern sensibility, Paul’s family and the little community of relatives and friends faced their devastating loss without pointing fingers. They bravely did what was necessary to honor their dead because there was comfort in ritual and tradition. Eventually, life went on and they cherished the memories of someone who had tragically left them far too soon.
But life for Danny had changed irrevocably. Back during the days when he was growing up, schools had no grief counselors to help kids after a trauma, and parents didn’t seek out professional advice for their possibly troubled offspring. They expected their children to simply soldier on like miniature adults. So, guilt festered inside of Danny Brooks and manifested itself in a not unexpected fashion. Where a once fearless boy climbed the highest trees he could find or traipsed his way up five floors in an old, abandoned building, now that same kid would get physically sick at the state fair if he even looked up at a Ferris Wheel or stared at the first high precipice on a roller coaster track.
Maybe the sudden acrophobia was understandable, but its debilitating effects didn’t go away with time. Actually, just the opposite happened. By the time Danny was fifteen, it had reached a point where he would have a panic attack just traveling over a bridge in a car. His mother turned a blind eye to her son’s distress because she was dealing with her own problems. However, Ellen Parker chose to step in when she witnessed one of Danny’s episodes while they were out and about in the city and he couldn’t force himself to ascend an escalator.
A determined woman badgered the Marshals, insisting that a haunted youngster should be seeing a therapist who specialized in phobias. That certainly wouldn’t endanger his protected status in WitSec. After all, she argued, this new development had nothing to do with a past life in Washington DC that the kid had no memory of.
“It’s totally unrelated, and you need to approve what’s right because he is your responsibility as much as he is mine or his mother’s!” In the end, Ellen got her way.
The psychologist was kind and tenacious as he dug deep to find out the root of Danny’s problem. He soon was able to make his young patient verbalize a monstrous shame that had been weighing him down. Over the course of many months, the dedicated mental healer managed to convince Danny that accidents were something that simply happened. And yes, they could be devastating and tragic, but they were the result of unintentional mistakes in judgment. He patiently explained that sometimes young people tend to be fearless because they haven’t yet achieved the maturity to weigh the significance of their exploits. Thus, mishaps occurred with all degrees of seriousness and unforeseen consequences.
“You were just a very young boy, Danny, and it’s not unheard of for boys to be curious and reckless or to attempt foolish things. Thankfully, most impulsive kids survive their ill-thought-out stunts. Unfortunately, for your friend, Paul, that was not the case. So, my message to you is that you were not very different from any of your peers. It was not your fault, and you cannot let this consume you. Fear can be a debilitating emotion, so you have to learn to master it, or it will become your master for the rest of your life,” the doctor concluded softly.
A now older adolescent Danny thought about those words long after the therapy sessions ended. He came to the conclusion that the physician was right. He had to be the master of his own fate, and cowering in fear was a cop out. He needed to face his anxiety head on and vanquish it once and for all, and this was something he had to accomplish by himself without using Ellen or a shrink as a crutch.
So, one day at a time, Danny determinedly devised a course of action that served to challenge him just a bit more than the day before. He started by riding out into the countryside on his bike and slowly scrambling up the sides of soft haystacks in the field. Then after he was comfortable with that endeavor, it was on to trees in nearby woods just past the sapling stage of development. Carefully, one foot at a time, he scaled their branches and dared look down. After six months of dedicated preparation, it was on to train trestles spanning rushing rivers, and finally zip-lining at a local adventure park.
After a year of enduring his own type of reverse aversion therapy, Danny revisited the scene of what he considered a crime. This time, he brought accoutrements with him in the form of a grappling hook and a coil of mountain climbers’ rope. He steadfastly trudged up the same steps he and Paul had climbed a half decade ago, and Danny wondered if his friend’s ghost was lingering there in the shadows cheering him on or telling him that he was an idiot.
Nonetheless, a determined teenager reached the long-ago summit, being mindful not lean against the railings. He carefully chose a spot for the attachment of his grappling hook, not far from the huge maw of open space with nothing beneath it but hard cement. Taking a deep breath, Danny began rappelling down the inside of the building a few feet at a time. When that mission had been accomplished, he repeated the daring feat over and over until he was faster and more sure-footed. He only stopped the exhaustive exercise when his arms and legs felt like they had the consistency of limp spaghetti.
A few years later, Danny forged a driver’s license that made him of legal age to participate in other extreme endeavors. Using the money he had won over time at a pool hall, he paid for hang gliding lessons and was soon soaring solo over the countryside without the least bit of trepidation. The ultimate high was freefalling from a plane in tandem with an instructor behind him telling him when to pull the ripcord during the ride of his life.
By the time Danny Brooks left St. Louis and became Neal Caffrey, he took some impressive daredevil skills with him, and they did not go unnoticed. In New York City some years later, FBI Agent Peter Burke thought he and his team had Caffrey boxed in during a museum heist, but the elusive thief was determined to slip his pursuers.
“He’s going to go up to the roof,” Peter yelled into the com to his teammates. “It’s always up with Caffrey!”
“But Agent Burke, he’d have a better chance of escaping by heading down to the lower level of the building,” Clinton Jones yelled back. “There’s access to several subway lines down there and we’re spread too thin to cover them all.”
“Nope—he’ll go up,” Peter insisted. And the federal agent wasn’t wrong. Just as the team managed to bulldoze their way through a temporarily barricaded access door that led out onto a flat tar and gravel roof, they found themselves being buffeted by the rotors of one of the city’s weather helicopters commandeered by Caffrey’s unknown partner. The actual man of the hour was hanging by one arm off a bottom skid with an art tube tucked under his other extremity. The chopper roared off into the darkness with its human appendage dangling precariously over the city, and the next morning the stolen aircraft was located in a field in nearby New Jersey. Tire impressions in the dirt were probably from Caffrey’s next getaway vehicle.
“I think the idiot has a death wish,” Peter told Reese Hughes, who was less than happy that the obnoxious and brazen thief had been one step ahead of the FBI once again.
Little did Peter know that Neal’s high-flying preferences were the result of a death that had almost broken him years before.