The Guardians

by Andrew Pyper

  Sarah could see this too, but also other things. She could see a past.

  * * *

  MEMORY DIARY

  Entry No. 12

  Funny what the memory holds and what it decides it can do without. Like a drunk fisherman, it guts some of the least edible fish and tosses its prize catches back into the deep.

  For instance, I can distinctly remember the smell of the pay phone receiver I put to my lips in the mezzanine of the arena after our second and final playoff loss to Seaforth, but not why I said nothing when a voice at the other end told me I'd reached Grimshaw Police dispatch and asked, "What is the nature of your emergency?" I didn't speak, didn't move. Just breathed in the receiver's ingrained traces of mustard, Old Spice and whisky sweat.

  Perhaps the question posed too great a challenge. What was the nature of my emergency? A kidnapped coach? ("Who kidnapped him?" "We did.") A missing teacher's buried body? ("Who buried her?" "We did.")

  But no matter which of these crimes I had rushed from the dressing-room showers to confess, it was over for me. And I was surprised. I thought it was more likely to be the clownish Randy, the volatile Carl or— before his recent transformation—the meditative Ben who would break first. In fact, I was counting on one of them to tell.

  Here's the thing: I wasn't a bad kid. I was a good kid. We were all good kids. And now it was time for our essential natures to take control again. So I got dressed before everyone else, pulled a dime from the pocket of my jeans and dialled the cavalry.

  I remember that perfectly well. Just not why it didn't end there.

  But the memory can lie too. Hide things away. Occasionally, it can lie and hide even better than you.

  Because there's Ben. Eyeing me through the crowd of disappointed fans lingering beside the trophy cases.

  We can't, his look said. I want this to end too. But right now, you have to put the phone down.

  I opened my mouth to speak to the dispatcher. To put words to the nature of my emergency.

  They'll send us to jail. Ben started toward me, his face growing in detail as he approached. A grown-up biker-gang-and-rapist jail. We'll be their girlfriends in there. For years. And when we get out, we'll be fucked all over again.

  I returned the receiver to its cradle.

  "Sarah not home?" Ben said, lying for us both.

  I remember dropping my equipment off after the game, telling my parents I was going over to Ben's house and walking along to the McAuliffes' with a bad feeling. I'd had bad feelings about what was going on since our first hot-box meeting, when it was decided something had to be done. But that night, the ragged nerves took a turn into full-blown illness. Light-headed, tingly-toed. I had the idea that the Thurman house wasn't haunted as much as it carried contagion, and I was showing the first signs of infection.

  This idea was followed by another. A premonition of the life ahead that turned out to be largely true. Feeling sick, worrying about becoming sick, fighting and carrying sickness: this is what it meant to grow up, grow old.

  By the look of Ben's blotched cheeks when I met him under the railway trellis, he'd caught the virus too.

  "It has to happen tonight," he said.

  When Ben opened the door to the cellar, I couldn't tell if he heard the voices down there or if it was only me. A whispered conversation (too soft to make out any words) between the coach and someone else. No, not a conversation—it was too one-sided to be called that. The coach murmuring with excitement, and his audience offering only a hissed Yes in response.

  But how could I have heard all that within the few seconds between Ben's opening the cellar door and placing his boot onto the first step, its protesting creak instantly silencing whoever was down there? Because I'd been hearing them before the door was opened. Whatever the coach was saying had been growing louder in my head from the moment we'd stepped onto the Thurman house's lot. A few seconds more and I might have clearly made out the words.

  We turned on our flashlights and started down. There was a smell I hadn't detected on previous visits. A sweetness. It reminded me of the orange I had left in my lunch box over Christmas holidays, and it turned my stomach.

  Our lights found the coach at the same time. His teeth, in particular. Bared in a comic exaggeration of mirth.

  "Come closer," he said.

  With his attention on Ben alone, I took the revolver out of the workbench drawer and came forward to aim it at the wall two feet off the coach's side. (It is harder than you'd ever guess to hold a gun steady on a man's chest. The snout keeps slipping off its target, resisting, like trying to press two magnets of the same charge together.) Now the coach watched me. Still showing me those teeth of his, but with his head back, so a red throat glistened in my flashlight beam as well.

  Ben untied his hands. Offered the coach a ham sandwich, which he took but didn't eat. Instead, he stuffed it into the front pocket of his parka to join the last two sandwiches we'd brought him.

  "You have to eat something," I told him.

  "I've lost my taste for meat."

  "We'll bring you something else, then."

  "No, no, no," he said agreeably, in an I-don't-want- to-be-any-trouble voice. "This will do fine."

  That's when he bit Ben.

  Launched forward without any change in expression or posture, not a twitch. He was sitting on the floor, rubbing his wrists. Then he was on his knees, snarling, clamping down on Ben's knuckles.

  Ben screamed. Someone else screamed too. Not me, I don't think.

  The blood startled me. Quick and forceful. The rhythmic pulses, like jumping up and down on a hose. How the coach swallowed it without letting go.

  "Don't!"

  It took my voice for him to spit out Ben's hand. Then he leaned back against the post. Crossed his arms over his chest, his teeth outlined in crimson.

  Ben was already wrapping his hand in a rag from the floor.

  "Didn't your mother ever tell you to keep your fingers out of the monkey cage, Benji? Or maybe that was your daddy's department. Wait. Wait! Your daddy did himself in, didn't he?"

  "Shut up," Ben whispered.

  "Checked out early. Benji's dear old dad."

  Shut up, Ben's lips said again.

  "Can I ask you something? Nobody actually believes he drove into a hydro pole doing a hundred by accident, do they? So what do you think his problem was? Didn't have the stomach to see how useless his only son turned out to be?"

  None of us ever mentioned Ben's father's suicide. I was surprised the coach even knew about it. But then it occurred to me: Ben was the one who had told him. He'd confessed this to the coach in the same way we had confessed our own secrets, and for the same reason. We thought the coach was the only adult we could wholly trust.

  Yet the coach wasn't the coach anymore. And it was impossible to know whether what he was saying came from him or the vile other that was halfway to claiming him.

  "But I suppose something good came out of your dad hitting the gas instead of the brake," the coach said to Ben. "That cute little group hug you and your fairy-boy friends had upstairs."

  Ben's eyes widened. "I didn't tell you about that."

  "I didn't say you did."

  "Then how do you know?"

  The coach grinned in a way that changed his face. Stopped it from being his.

  "No more," I told him.

  "But I like this game," he said, turning to me. "Now, let's see, what about you? Oh yes. Peeping Trevor."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Our moonlight chicken-choker. Our wanking voyeur."

  "I don't—"

  "Hiding behind trees on the hospital grounds to look into lovely Heather's window at night."

  "That's bullshit!"

  "It's only what you told me."

  "I never told you that because it isn't true."

  "No? What do you think, Benji? You think Trev here likes to get his rocks off watching ladies changing into their nighties before lights out?"

  Ben lo
oked at me.

  "He's lying," I said.

  "Am I?" The coach's voice was no longer his, but the boy's. "Isn't it true that Randy dreams of graduating from class clown to great actor? Has he told you that? 'Like Pacino in The Godfather.' Pathetic, isn't it? Poor Handy Randy."

  "That's enough," Ben said.

  "Or Carl? You want to know his big secret? Oh, it's good. It's a real surprise."

  Ben held out his good hand for the gun. When I gave it to him he walked up to the coach and swung the side of the revolver against his cheek.

  "I don't want to hear any more of that," Ben said. "I only want to hear what you did."

  Ben clicked on the tape recorder in his pocket. Started reciting the same questions he'd been asking all along.

  Tell us the truth.

  The coach's eyes rolled white. A line of blood making its way to his jaw. Then he was smiling again like the madman he was, or we'd made him into.

  Ben stepped away to lean against the wall. Fatigue bloomed pale and puffy over his face, a weakness that pulled down at his arms as though lead weights were stitched to his sleeves.

  "Why Heather?" I asked.

  It was the first time any of us had asked this. And for the first time, the coach was prepared to answer.

  "Why Heather? Have you seen my wife?" he exclaimed, and it seemed he was about to follow with the punchline to some well-worn joke, but instead, a second later, he was fighting tears.

  "What about her?"

  "Laura saved me."

  "Saved you?"

  "Before I came here, I'd done some things. But she stood by me. A beautiful woman. On the inside. Heather? She had it on the outside too." He threw us a conspiratorial leer. "I mean, that ass? I thought I was through wanting that. God was kind enough to give me a new start over here in old Grimshaw. All I had to do was snuggle in, keep quiet, be good. And I was good. Then guess what? Heather Langham shows up."

  "So you decided you had to kill her?"

  "Kill her?" Those teeth again. "No. I decided I had to, I really needed to . . . well, let's not be crude. Let's just say that the first night after she introduces herself to all the dried mushrooms in the teachers' lounge, I'm dreaming of her. Bad, bad dreams."

  "Then what?"

  "Then I play Harmless Married Guy. Share some of my favourite books with her, ask what brought her to the noble profession of teaching, et cetera. 'I'm a good listener,' said I. 'We have so much in common!' said she. I knew it was over when she told me all she needed to be happy in Grimshaw was a friend. Well, that's all I needed too!"

  "You brought her here."

  "My contribution was the flask of Jack Daniel's out in my car. Loosened things up considerably. 'Where do we go now?' says I. 'I know a place,' says she. A haunted house, she called it. I just knew it as that derelict place where some of the guys on the team went to drink beer. Turns out she was more right than I was."

  I remember searching for something hurtful to say to him. Something as disembowelling as his mention of Ben's dad. A way of showing how furious I was at him for talking about Heather this way.

  Show him, the boy said but didn't say. Wake him up.

  Before I knew what I was doing, the toe of my boot met with the coach's mouth. And it did wake him up. Eyes aflutter with liquid blinks. Spitting out blood pinked with mucus.

  "You can't blame a house for what you did!"

  When he focused on me, he seemed pleased that I was here. That it had been my boot.

  "It was you," I said. "Not a place, not a building. It was you."

  "You're right. Quite right, Trevor," now the proper English teacher, patiently expanding on a student's rudimentary observation. "All this place gives us is a •licence to act. It's a stage, but a bare one. A theatre without sets, without a script. And most important, without an audience!"

  He laughed. Not the coach's laugh. Not a living sound at all.

  "You hurt her here because you could? Is that it?"

  "Here? Here?" The coach swung his head around, peering into every corner. "There's no here here!"

  "What did you do?"

  We'd asked him this perhaps a hundred times since he slipped into Carl's Ford half a block from his house. But now the coach looked up at me as though it was a fresh and intriguing query.

  "What did I do?"

  "Just tell us and it'll be over."

  "You don't get to decide that."

  "We'll let you go."

  "Every time you come down here, I leave when you go, piece by piece," he said, his voice flattening. "I'll get out whether you open the door for me or not."

  "Who are you?"

  "I'm the coach."

  "You were him. Who are you now?"

  "Whoever I need to be."

  "To do what?"

  "Keep you here."

  I took the gun out of Ben's hand. I must have, because there it was, pointed at the coach's forehead.

  "I'd like to know what you did to Heather. Right now."

  "I brought her here to do what all of you would have liked to do," he said, the voice dead as a dial tone. "To fuck her pretty pink behind."

  Pretty. The word my father had used. More than this, it was like he knew that it was.

  "Where?"

  "In the living room. Standing up, because she thought the carpet was too dirty."

  "Were you alone?"

  "Alone as two people can be. Our coitus was interruptus, though. Something heavy falling onto the floor above us. And maybe a voice too. No ... a breath. Who cared what it was?"

  "You didn't go upstairs to check?"

  "I did. Nervous Heather asked me to make sure nothing was amiss. So up I went. Nobody there. But by the time I came back down, she was gone. I figured she'd changed her mind and left. On my way out, though, I noticed the door to the cellar was open, and it definitely wasn't when we first came in. Down I go. And there's Heather. Had time to put her panties on, but that's about all."

  The coach grinned fondly now, shook his head as though at an amusing turn in a practised anecdote.

  "'Hey, doll,' I said. Never called a woman that before. But she looked like a doll. Those big glass eyes staring at me but not seeing anything. I didn't want to touch her. She was soiled. I was having a good old time with pretty Heather, and now she disgusted me. Trembling lips, chin all folded up. So scared she was sickening. These were the kind of thoughts I had. But they weren't my thoughts."

  "Whose were they?"

  The coach rubbed his chin in a stage gesture of deep thought.

  "You're both men, give or take, right? You know those naughty little whispers that you hear all the time, but that you're able to hold down, hold in place? Well, those naughty whispers became all I could hear."

  "And they told you to bash her head in."

  "They told me nothing really counted. Not here."

  "So?"

  "There was a piece of wood on the ground. I didn't notice it before. A long piece of wood with a screw in it. I think Heather knew what I was going to do before I did."

  "You hit her."

  "Once. Maybe twice."

  "It was enough to kill her."

  "No, it wasn't. Because the next thing I knew—next thing I saw—the wood was on the ground and Heather was alive."

  "How did you know?"

  "Because she was speaking."

  "What did she say?"

  "I have to go home. I have to go home. I have to go home."

  "Then?"

  "I hit her again."

  At that, the coach glanced over to the spot we'd buried her. It must have been a lucky guess, because you couldn't tell what we'd done just by looking. Unless you could hear her struggling to get out from beneath the soil. For a moment, maybe we all heard it.

  "It's like I told Benji. You have to guard against places like this. Against people like me," he said, and turned away from Heather's grave to face us. He was, as far as I could tell, the real coach again. "That's what's really dangerous, what'll surpris
e you. The things that have nothing inside."

  A noise from upstairs. Heavy thuds, as though someone was kicking the mud off his shoes. I remember the coach closing his eyes, chin raised, as though in anticipation of the first strains of a musical performance.

  It is impossible to describe what came next.

  Not music. Music's opposite. A noise in which I could discern the slide of a heavy piece of furniture slamming up against a doorframe. An animal grunt. A child's howl of pain.

  Then silence again. The cellar's perfect, entombed darkness.

  "Nobody knows we're here," I said.

  The coach grinned. "Too late for that."

  "Keep him quiet," I said to Ben. "I'll go up and see."

  I started away, but Ben's flashlight spilled through my legs. When I turned, he was right behind me.

  "Don't go."

  "I'm not leaving you behind, Ben. I'm just going to see what's up there."

  "Maybe we should leave."

  "We will."

  "So let's do it now."

  "Not yet."

  "Why?"

  And then I said something I don't remember thinking, though once it was past my lips it had the familiarity of a long-held belief.

  "Because there might be something in here we can't let out."

  I started up the cellar stairs, the flashlight held at arm's length in front of me as though its beam was a rope I clung to, pulling me higher. Ahead, the door I thought we'd closed was ajar, a half-foot band of moonlight running from the kitchen floor up the doorframe to the ceiling. It felt like it had taken me a full minute—and maybe it had—to travel the thirty feet from where I'd stood with Ben to where I was now, partway up the narrow steps. I was being pulled higher by the light, and then I wasn't.

  This way, the voice said.

  A darkness swept across the moonlit gap.

  A blink of movement so swift it took shape as a human figure in my mind only after it was gone.

  I leapt up the remaining steps in two strides, elbowed the door wide. The kitchen was empty. But there was the smell the boy left behind. Something mossy and fungal, like the first breath that came up from the well behind my parents' cabin when we lifted its metal seal at the beginning of the season.