by Andrew Pyper
And then, still recovering from the sound of Ben's words, we paused to grapple with their meaning.
The coach. This is what Ben was telling us. It was over this ice-crusted grass that he carried Heather Langham the night before last.
In the dark, the backyard was impossibly enlarged, a neglected field of weeds poking through the snow and swaying in a breeze that rushed the clouds across the moon. A see-saw stood in one corner of the lot, the seat of the raised end poking up from a cluster of saplings like the head of a curious animal. Little kids used to play on that, I remember thinking. And then: What kids? When would any child have run around on this ground? Who could ever laugh into this air?
I wondered about that long enough to be surprised when Carl nudged me from behind.
"It's not locked," he said.
I followed his pointed flashlight to see Ben standing in front of the open back door.
We followed him inside. All of us making our way through a mud room into the kitchen. An old gas stove stood in one corner, the face of its clock cracked, the time frozen at a quarter to twelve. An undoored fridge. The wallpaper a photographic mural of a country scene: a pondside with a forest beyond, and a single deer lowering its head to drink. But then you looked again, looked closer. The forest was cloaked in shadow that seemed to darken as you watched. And the deer wasn't drinking but lifting its head, startled by a cry from the woods. Something about the composition of the picture suggested that whatever was about to emerge out of the trees meant to hunt the deer, to spill its blood on the grass. And that the deer knew this, was frozen by the knowledge that it was about to die.
We were all gazing at the wallpaper now. All of us listening. For the thing in the woods. The thing that was here.
And with our listening came a count. One, two, three, four—our lungs, our in-and-outs of air. Along with a fifth. The idea of another's breath somewhere within the house.
Ben shook his head. A gesture that signified the denial of a request, although none of us had asked anything of him. Then he walked on, and we followed, through the archway that opened on the main-floor hallway running the length of the house to the front. Ben pulled open the sliding doors to the living room.
I hadn't expected all the things left behind. Not just by previous inhabitants—a sofa exploding its white stuffing, amputated dining-room chairs, a rug patterned with cypress trees—but by visitors. I must have imagined the interior of the Thurman house to have been set-decorated in the manner of a Transylvanian castle: cobwebs thick as shredded T-shirts, a candelabra set atop a grand piano, rooms the size of soundstages. Instead, it was merely filthy. A heap of brown glass shards in the fireplace where a thousand beer bottles had been smashed. You had to watch your step for the used condoms and needles on the floor.
Along with the messages on the walls. Most of it what you'd expect: the graffitied declarations ("I LUV U PENNY!!") and invitations ("Need yur cock SUCKED? 232 4467 ANY time") and pride ("Guardians Rule—Elmira Eats Poo") and slander ("Jen Yarbeck is a WHORE"). The primitive spray- painted penises and anuses, a long-haired woman with enormous breasts and a dialogue balloon shouting "Moo!" over her head.
Then the strange ones. Phrases much smaller than the others. All in lowercase. Utterances that sought the corners and baseboards of the room, that made you, upon finding one, look for another.
stay with me
no such thing as an empty house
i walk with you
I don't know if the others read these or not. The next thing I remember, we were walking away from each other. We must have spoken, though I can't recall what was said. Or maybe we separated without discussion, knowing the quickest way to search the house, find it vacant and get out of there was to split up. In any case, I went to the staircase by the front door knowing I was on my own.
At the landing, I looked back. There was a railing over which the foyer floor lay fifteen feet below, a bulb hanging on a wire where some more elaborate fixture would once have hung. I squinted down the hallway, a spine with two doorways on each side that, if configured the same way as the second floor in my house (as it probably was, this house so much like an unloved version of the one in which I lived), opened onto three bedrooms and a bathroom at the end.
I started toward the first door on the left with shuffling, elderly steps. It had been easy for me to take the stairs up, but now my body fought against moving. My shoes tearing the old newspapers strewn over the floorboards, a carpet of Falklands War headlines and ads for used-car lots, including Randy's dad's place (Kum Kwick to Krazy Kevin's!), his clown nose and lunatic grin floating over the rows of Plymouths.
A comics page got stuck to my sole. I bent to peel it off, wondering, with a turn in my stomach, what could be gummy enough to act as glue on the floor of this place, and when I raised my eyes again he was there.
A boy.
Eyes fixed on me. I recall little else about his appearance other than the impression that we were the same age, nearly men but not quite. He could have been Carl, or Randy, or Ben—there was a millisecond flash when I assumed it was one of them—but there was a threat in the way he cocked his head that I'd never seen in them, or in anyone.
The boy said nothing. I remember no detail of his face that could be described as an expression, the outline of his body still, ungesturing. So what was it that prevented me from thinking of him as a fully living boy? How could I tell he wanted to show me something?
I remember attempting to speak to him, though what I intended to say I have no idea now. What I do remember is the panic, the claustrophobia of being bound and hooded. Buried alive.
Oh yes, the boy said but didn't say. You're going to like this.
A wet click of breath in my throat and he was gone. Not with a puff of smoke, nothing uncanny or ghostly. Simply gone in the way a thing confirms it was never there at all.
I registered the squeak a moment later. The grind of a rusty hinge.
This was what made the boy disappear, what proved he was a misreading of reality. The bathroom door at the end of the hall had been wrenched open, a full-length mirror screwed to the inside. And now, with a nudge of draft, the door moved an inch, shifting the angle of the mirror's reflection. Removing me from view.
There was the explanation for what I'd seen, rational, conclusive. It was me. Me, summoning a dark twin to return my gaze.
But even as I continued down the hall with calmed breaths, I didn't believe it. That wasn't me. A line of thinking I wrestled down but couldn't completely silence. You know it wasn't.
It strikes me as strange now—and it must have then as well—but once the boy could no longer be seen, the feelings he brought with him could no longer be felt either. I was certain that Heather Langham was not going to be discovered tied to the radiator in any of the bedrooms I leaned into, or slumped in the shower stall whose glass door I swung open to a party of skittering roaches. It smelled bad up here, but only in the way of smells I had already encountered, of piss and damp and long-discarded fast-food bags.
I had pulled the bathroom door closed and was leaning against it, suddenly winded, when I saw someone standing where I had been when I noticed the boy. Another figure of dimensions similar to my own drawn in a sharper outline of darkness.
Carl took a step closer. A dim veil of moonlight glazing his face.
"Randy found something," he said.
We descended to the main floor in silence, and I noticed that the house was silent too. Had the others already left? Carl said Randy had found something, but I remember doubting this. Not only because the house was so quiet it seemed impossible that three other breathing, heart-pounding boys could still be within it but also because of the lingering sense of change that followed the appearance of the boy. The world had been altered now that I'd seen him—the mirror me that wasn't me—and the solid grip I'd had on my perceptions before tonight was something I thought might never return. I had the idea that I could no longer count on anything as true anymore, e
very observation from here on in holding the potential of trickery. Which included my friends. Included Carl.
He led me down the front hall into the kitchen. Only once we came to stand side by side on the bubbled linoleum, listening to the stillness as though awaiting whispered instruction, did I change my mind about the house's vacancy. There was something in here with us. Not Randy or what he'd discovered. Not even the boy. But something else altogether. A presence that had yet to let itself be known, but was aware of us. Saw endless possibilities in our being here.
Carl nudged me closer to the top of the basement stairs. I wondered if he might push me. I could feel my skin ripping on the steps' nail heads, the crack of bones loud as felled trees. At the bottom, something sharp.
Carl turned on his flashlight, and a yellow circle spilled over the stairs to collect in a pool on the hard soil of the cellar floor. I expected him to start down first but he waited, looking down the stairs with the distracted expression of someone working to recollect a half-forgotten name.
His lips moved. An inaudible gulp. He turned his head and looked at me. "It's different," he said. "What? What's different?"
He gave his head a shake. Two pouches, brown and tender as used tea bags, swelled under his eyes. "You go first," he said.
And I did. My oversized shadow looming and lurching as I made my way down the narrow steps. A plumbing pipe screwed into the wall for a handrail. One that threatened to give way any time you called upon it.
At the bottom of the stairs, another flashlight found me. As it approached it blinded me to whoever stood behind it.
"We need to make a decision."
I could see Ben only after he pointed the light up into the pipes and frayed electrical cords running through the wood slats of the ceiling.
"You need to be a part of it, Trev," he said. "Okay. What's the question?" "What do we do now?" "How about we get out of here?" "No," he said, pursing his lips. "I don't think that's an option."
Ben started away into the cellar's broad darkness. I turned to Carl behind me, but he only waved his flashlight against his side like an usher impatient to show me to my seat before the show starts.
Ben stopped. Directed the light down to the floor. How to describe the scene it revealed in the cellar's far corner? I don't think I could say what it was like to take it in whole.
The elements, then:
Randy standing with the help of one hand against the stone wall, his other hand pinching wads of red snot from his nose. Blood dripping off his chin and pushing dark dots through his Human League T-shirt.
Carl staring behind us. Terrified. Not of what lay in the corner and he'd already seen, but of what he alone saw in the dark.
Blood on the floor. Not Randy's. Older-looking smears, formless as spilled paint stirred around with bedsheets, along with more recent spits and spots. Handprints, toes. Clawed trenches in the earth.
Heather Langham. Or a life-size doll of Heather Langham, her face looking away from me, knees and elbows bent at right angles the way a child draws a running stick figure. She lay on the floor, so flat it was like she was partly buried, deflated as the long-ago poisoned mice I'd once discovered behind hockey bags in the garage.
I said something. I must have, because Ben asked me to repeat it. Whatever it was I couldn't remember, then or now. So I said something else.
"We have to go."
"I told you. We can't do that now."
"The fuck we can't."
Carl's hand was on my elbow, a grip that held me within the flashlight's circle.
"Randy moved her," he said.
What's that got to do with anything?
"Randy moved her," I repeated.
"I don't know why. But he did."
"So let's move her back."
"It's not where she is that's—"
"What are you saying? What are you saying? What are you saying?"
I believe I was shouting. And I don't know how many times I asked this before Ben stepped in front of me.
"They'll know we were here," he said.
"Who?"
"The police. After they find her. And they'll find her. Somebody will."
"How will they know?"
"They'll look. And dead things—they start to stink or whatever, and—"
"Not her. Us. How will they know we were here?"
"The blood," Ben said. "Randy's blood. On her."
Past Ben's shoulder Randy was nearly doubled over, as though the mention of his name was a boot to his guts. Then I took a peek downward. Saw the new, shiny drops of crimson atop the older, brownish crust on Heather's skin.
"Our fingerprints too," Ben said, scratching his jaw. "Along with the witnesses who saw us come here."
"Nobody saw us."
"I'm not so sure about that."
"The street was empty."
"But not the houses."
I remembered us standing across from the McAuliffes' maybe a half-hour earlier and wished we were there again, outside in the night air. A wishing so strong it was a physical effort to sustain, already slipping out of my grip, like holding a medicine ball against my chest.
"Your mom," I said. "In the living-room window. Looking out between the curtains."
"I'm not sure she even saw us. But she might have."
"This is insane," I said.
"That's not stopping it from happening," Ben said.
"We have to stop it."
"How?"
"We tell."
"Tell who?"
"Our parents. The police."
"I'm not sure you're quite getting this." Ben came to stand inches from me. He looked seasick. "She was murdered."
"I can see that."
"No, you can't. Look at her."
So I did. And as I kept my eyes on Heather, Ben spoke into my ear.
"This isn't the time you threw the football through Mrs. Laidlaw's window. This isn't letting Randy drive your dad's car into a mailbox. She's dead. And they don't just forgive people for that. They need someone to pay. And that is going to be us, unless we make it go away."
I stepped back to get away from him, the sharp tang of his skin.
"How did Randy bleed all over her anyway?" I asked.
"I hit him," Carl said.
"You punched Randy?"
"A few times."
"Why?"
"For being so stupid. Moving her? I didn't know he'd bleed all over the place, though."
"We can clean it up."
"It's all over her," Ben said. "No matter what we do, if they look for it, they'll find it. And if they find somebody's blood other than Heather's down here—blood on her body—"
"They'll know who to look for," Carl finished.
Randy moaned. A childish, stomach-ache sound.
"Shut up," Carl told him.
Randy stood straight. I'd seen people in states of shock before, concussion cases who'd gone head first into the boards left to wander the rink's hallways after the game like zombies, unable to recall their phone number or the colour of their eyes. But Randy's condition was different. He knew exactly who he was, what was happening—he knew too much, and it was crushing him.
"He told me to touch her," he said. It was something less than a whisper.
"Didn't quite catch that," Carl said, and looked as though he was about to charge at him.
"He told me to," Randy said again.
"No, I didn't! Why would I do that? Tell you to drag her over the goddamned floor?" Carl looked to us. "You think I'd be that stupid?"
"Wait. Wait," Ben said, stepping closer to Randy yet not too close, as though to avoid contagion. "Who told you to?"
Randy raised his eyes. Met mine.
"Nobody. Nothing. I'm just—everything's fucked up, that's all."
"That's true," Carl said, slapping his hands together. "Fucked up? Right on the money there, Rando."
We fell into a collective silence. Remembering to breathe and little else.
I was the first to mov
e. Even though it was the last thing I wanted to do, I found myself lowering to kneel beside Heather Langham's body. I'm not sure what drew me closer to her, but it wasn't curiosity. The physical fact of her being dead was something I could grasp only at the edges, fleetingly, before forcing my thoughts to some smaller, more manageable detail, like the papery meeting of her grey lips, or her eyes, the lids slightly parted as though caught in a fight against sleep. Perhaps I needed confirmation that this was all as it appeared to be: she was dead, there wasn't any walking away now. Perhaps I was sorry that she had become a problem of ours, that everything that made her so vibrantly human had left her in this sour- smelling cellar, and now she was, for us, a logistical puzzle, a stain.
Or perhaps I had to see for myself how she had been murdered.
Part of her lay on a blanket. No, not a blanket: a canvas drop cloth of the kind used by painters. The way it was smoothed out beneath her, buffering her from the hard dirt, gave the impression of a makeshift bed. The cloth told a history of a thousand mistakes: splashes of turquoise and yellow and off-whites fallen from brushes or sloshed over the side of a kicked can. Now, as close as I was, I could see the more recent colours. Randy's bright nosebleed. Beneath it, the brown-red sprays and tracks emanating from the back of Heather Langham's skull.
Only then did I notice the screw. A fiercely bevelled four-inch screw that had been pounded through a plank, sharp point up, which lay an arm's length from Heather's splayed fingers. Nearly half of the wood's length had been discoloured by blood. Maybe Heather had managed to pull it from the wound herself and toss it to where it now rested. Maybe someone else dropped it after seeing the job was done.
I leaned over. Bent so far across her body I had to brace myself on palms laid on the floor on the other side of her. For a second, my finger was hooked on the gold chain around her neck, pulling the heart-shaped locket she was wearing to rest like an egg in the soft dimple at the base of her throat. I shook my hand free and the chain made a small, watery sound as it settled over her skin. Then I lowered my head to the floor to look at her face.
