by Andrew Pyper
"What are you two planning on tonight?" she asks, stepping closer. "Painting the town red?"
"Nothing like that."
"You're welcome to use the TV in the basement."
"Thank you. But we're just, you know, hanging around."
"Playing records."
"Sorry?"
Betty giggles. "It's what Ben would say to me when you were all boys, spending hours up in his room, and I would ask what you were up to," she says. '"Playing records, Mom!' 'Nothing, Mom! We're just playing records!' But half the time I couldn't hear any music. Only you boys, talking and talking."
"Did you hear what we were saying?"
"No," she says, shaking her head. "But that didn't stop me from understanding things some of the time."
"A mother's intuition."
"Intuition, yes. But that's not all."
She knows. That is, she knows something, as we always suspected she did. How much she has guessed it's impossible to say, and I'm not about to ask. But what she is telling me now is that we were party to a crime of a most serious sort, and she has never shared this knowledge with another, not even her son.
Studying her now, I'm certain Betty McAuliffe was the only witness who watched us enter the Thurman house the evening we discovered Heather Langham in the cellar. What connections had she made once the coach went missing and then, soon after, was wheeled out of the house across the street along with the woman—only a girl really, rosy and unmarried and childless? It would have been impossible not to speculate. Not to conclude.
And yet, even with this knowledge, she had remained sweet Mrs. McAuliffe. Lonely Mrs. McAuliffe, baker of shortbread and pincher of cheeks and minder of her own business. This was love too.
"We'll be out of your way tomorrow," I say. "Randy's already checked out of the Queen's, so if it's all right by you, he'll be bunking on the pullout in Ben's room."
"No trouble. You'll find extra sheets and—"
"The linen closet. I remember."
She turns away, as if at the return of a TV program she had been engrossed in. "I'm off to bed myself," she says, beginning to turn off the lights one by one.
"See you in the morning, Betty."
"The morning," she repeats. Now in the dark, whispering it again, like a lover's remembered name. "The morning."
I find Randy stretched out on the bed, adjusting the dials on what looks at first to be an ancient cell phone, one of those banana-sized ones with the rubbery antennae that came out in the '80s.
"You gotta check out the picture on this thing," he says. "I rented a plasma screen to watch the finals last year and it wasn't any better than this."
I sit next him to see that he's right. A square screen that shows a wide view of the Thurman house's earth-floored cellar and, in the background, the bottom of the stairs leading up to the kitchen. An empty space except for a couple of crippled workbenches along the walls, random garbage balled up from where it was tossed down from the top of the stairs. The air greened by the night lens, so that the scene appears to be set on a cold lake bottom.
"They have these things for babies?" I say. "What for? To count the kid's eyelashes as it sleeps?"
Randy turns up the volume. A moment of microphoned vacancy washes out from the speakers.
"Something farts down there and we'll hear it," he says.
"With this thing? Probably smell it too."
For the first time, I notice it's dark in the room. The only illumination coming from the monitor's screen and what orange street light finds its way through the window. But as I reach to switch on Ben's Ken Dryden lamp, Randy grabs my wrist.
"We're not here. Remember?" he says.
"So we're just going to sit in the dark?"
"I'll hold your hand if you want."
"You are holding my hand." "Oh."
I slide down to the floor and crawl over to the beanbag chair in the corner. From here, I can see the Thurman house's chimney, but little else. The fog has thinned somewhat over the last hour, and has turned to an indecisive drizzle, its droplets swaying and looping in their descent and, at times, even returning skyward.
"I saw Todd Flanagan today," Randy says.
"Yeah?"
"At the Wal-Mart."
"And you pushing a shopping cart with a baby monitor in it?"
"As a matter of fact, yes."
"How was he?"
"Not good. He was two minutes into our conversation in the vacuum cleaner aisle before he figured out who the hell I was."
"Poor bastard."
"He asked after you."
"What'd he say?"
"Can't remember exactly."
"Bullshit."
"Okay. He said it was really sad to see you all shaky and Parkinson's and whatnot, especially when you could have been the best winger the Guardians ever had."
"It's not half as sad as what he's going through."
Does fog make a sound? If it does, it whispers against Ben's window.
"Randy?"
"Yo."
"You think she could still be alive?"
"I dunno, boss."
"But what do you think?"
"Well, let me ask you this: Do the missing ever come back?"
"Sometimes. If they just ran away. Or if they wanted to be lost."
"Then those ones weren't really missing to begin with."
Over the next couple of hours the night grows still, both outside the McAuliffe house and within it. Betty must be asleep, as we haven't heard any creaks from the floorboards below since shortly after I came up. She has the right idea. It is only sporadic conversation between Randy and me—as well as changing shifts watching the monitor screen—that keeps the two of us awake.
"Coffee?" Randy asks at one point.
"Is that what you carried up here an hour ago?"
"I got a Thermos at Wal-Mart today too. State of the art."
"Am I going splits on that with you too?"
"If you wouldn't mind."
Randy pours us each coffee in the little plastic camping cups that came with the Thermos. The steam rising and reshaping itself like a phantom against his face.
"I have this theory," he says, sipping his coffee and grimacing at his instantly burnt tongue. "I may have told you about it already. I call it the Asshole Quotient. Remember?"
"Vaguely," I lie.
"It's kind of a natural law of human behaviour. A way of explaining why people just do shit things to other people for no reason. Unpredictable things."
"Assholes."
"Exactly. And I used to believe that no matter where you go, 20 per cent of the people you come in contact with are going to turn out to be assholes. You wouldn't know that's what they are, not at first, but they would always appear in a ratio of one to five."
"Sounds about right."
"No, it's not right. I was off"
"Twenty per cent is too high?"
"Too low. Over the last few years I've come to realize the number's closer to something like 30 or 40 per cent. Maybe it's an even fifty-fifty."
"You think things are getting that bad?"
"They were always that bad. It just takes until you're our age to see it."
"What evidence are you working from here?"
"Okay. Consider how most people have fewer friends the older they get. Why? You learn that the numbers are against you, that life isn't just going to be this hilarious succession of new and fascinating people to share whatever new and fascinating stage of your journey you find yourself at. It's why guys like us always end up looking back all the time. It's the only way you've got of beating the odds."
"Old friends."
"You got it."
"I have a question," I say, burning my tongue on my coffee just as Randy had a minute ago. "How do you know you haven't been wrong the whole time?"
"Wrong how?"
"About me, say. I'm as old a friend as you've got. But what if I'm not one of the good 50 per cent, but the bad 50 per cent?"
&
nbsp; "I don't know, Trev," he says, saddened by the question itself. "I guess if I'm wrong about you, it's quittin' time."
Randy leans his elbows on his knees, sits forward in his chair to bring himself within whisper distance of me. "You think he would have done it? If it wasn't for us?"
"Who?"
"The coach. Do you think he would have killed himself if we hadn't—?"
"Yes," I interrupt. "It's what he deserved."
"What about us? What do we deserve?"
"This."
"A night in Ben's room?"
"Along with all the other nights of the past twenty-four years."
I'm wondering if this is remotely true, if we've even begun to understand the nature of the cruel and unusual punishments still to come our way, when the baby monitor bleats. An animal's cry of warning.
"The fuck was that?" Randy says.
"Your machine."
"Really? The motion sensor?"
"What other part of it would make a sound like that?"
"You think I actually read the owner's manual?" Randy stands and appears about to approach, but doesn't. "Anything?"
I stare at the screen. "Nothing."
"I'm not hearing anything on the mike either."
"Might he a glitch," I say. "Like when you put a new battery in a smoke detector and it beeps before you press the test button."
"That's never happened to me."
"Have you ever lived anywhere long enough that you had to replace a smoke detector battery?"
"Tell you the truth, I'm not sure I've ever lived somewhere that had a smoke detector."
Randy sits next to me on the edge of the bed. Between us, the monitor rests on top of the sheets, showing only the dark cellar, a hissing stillness coming out of the speaker. I turn the volume up full. A louder nothing.
After a time, Randy goes to the window. Peers down at the street. Places his forehead against the glass. "Ben thought he was looking for ghosts up here, didn't he?"
"I suppose he did."
"You ever wonder if he was the one who was dead all that time?"
"Ben only died last week, Randy."
"No. It was a long time before that. He died the first time he went in there."
Something in Randy's tone tells me he's referring not to the day we discovered Heather Langham but to the time when we were eight. When Ben learned of his father's accident that wasn't an accident and ran to the darkest place he knew.
"People can get over things," I say. "It just happens that Ben wasn't able to."
"You think he's the only one?"
It seems that Randy may be about to cry. Or maybe it's me. Either way, they are sounds I really don't want to hear. But just as I'm searching my memory for the distraction of a filthy joke, the one Randy likes about the midget pianist going into a bar, he slaps his hands against the window.
"The fuck?" he says.
"What is it?"
"Someone's there."
Randy starts down the attic stairs.
"Randy! Wait!"
"Stay here. Watch the monitor. Trust me, I'm not planning on going inside."
Then he's gone. I hobble to the window in time to see him cross the street and disappear into the shadows at the side of the house.
I have little choice but to do as I'm told and watch the screen. Five minutes—ten? twenty-five?—of studying the greenish empty cellar.
And then something's happening. Or it has been happening since the motion sensor was triggered, and I am only noticing it now.
Breathing.
Long intakes and exhalations, wet clicks in the throat. Something alive yet invisible. The screen reveals nothing. Nothing except the outline of shadow that slides over the floor. A human shape elongated by the angle of available light, so that it appears gaunt and long-fingered.
The house moves.
A tremor that turns into an earthquake, the walls and floor and staircase pitching. It makes me look around Ben's room to see if I'm being tossed the same way. But the earthquake hasn't reached the fifty yards to the other side of Caledonia Street.
"Somebody's picked it up," I say aloud, a statement I don't understand until I look at the screen again and see it bringing the ceiling beams into focus, the frayed wires veiled by cobweb lace.
A pause. Then the monitor is thrown to the floor.
The screen breaks into deafening static at impact. Just before it goes dead altogether, what could be the shattering fracture of the camera's casing, or feedback on the microphone—or a female scream.
Then I'm up. Fighting against my body's wish to find Ben's bed and lie face down, gripping the edges until morning. Past Betty McAuliffe's door and down the next flight, clinging to the handrail. Shouldering open the screen door to plow into the night.
I use my arms to keep balance, a breaststroke through air, until one hand freezes, a finger pointing at the house across the street. No, not the house. At the figure standing in the living- room window, indistinct but unmistakably there. Watching me just as I watch it.
* * *
[17]
I make it through the darkness of the mud room by feeling the air like a blind man. For the first several seconds there are no walls, no ceilings, no visible markings that might tell me where I am. Yet my memory of the space betrays me, and I slam headlong into the half-closed kitchen door, its hard edge cutting a fold of skin from my cheek.
"Fuck!"
The sound of my voice allows me to see, the widening aperture that turns the darkness into interior dusk.
I decide to check the living room first.
No, not "decide," not "check"—I simply drift past the door down to the cellar and find myself on the soiled rug, pretending I am being thorough when in fact I am merely afraid. I take the time to study the room, looking for signs of recent activity, but what I'm really doing is listening. For a footfall, a creaking door, a breath. For the boy to tell me it was him.
On my return to the kitchen, I notice the odours I hadn't the first time through. The slow rot of wood exposed to moisture finding its way through the walls, the cardboard stuffiness of uncirculated space. Along with something sugary. It makes me think of the dousings of perfume old ladies apply before collecting in coffee shops or church basements. It brings on the same gag reflex I have fought at every funeral I have ever attended: my mother's, my father's, the coach's, Heather's, Ben's.
I stand over the sink and turn the taps, though nothing but a hollow gurgle finds its way out. Through the window, the backyard looks limitless and wild in the dark, a habitat for prowling creatures. There is a sense that something is about to happen out there, the performance of violence. But when I turn away from the glass and lean my back against the counter, now looking into the house instead of out, I have the same sensation, only stronger.
On the kitchen walls, a similar scene to the one outside: the wallpaper mural of a pond, a background of forest, a drinking deer. A picture of terrible expectation. The hunter, when it comes, will walk out of those trees, not the real ones in the backyard. It will start with the frozen deer, then put its hands on the frozen me.
"Randy?"
My friend's name sounding like a plea in my ears.
I go to where I have to go. Nudge the cellar door wider with the toe of my shoe.
For a moment, the Parkinson's and I are united: both refuse to go down there. We are rigid, mind and body alike. Finding our full balance before attempting the turnaround, the first step of retreat, the shuffling getaway. Because there is a nightmare-in- progress awaiting me at the bottom, and I don't want to know how it ends.
I'm a boy again. A sixteen-year-old boy. Or even younger, for the whimper that escapes my lips is the sound an abandoned toddler makes in a supermarket aisle, a child just beginning to realize the potential depths of aloneness.
And then—before my eyes try to read something in the nothing, before fear takes full hold of what my body does next—I start down the stairs like the man of the house.
At the bottom, my feet sink a quarter-inch in the damp earth floor. It slows every step, cushioning the normal impact of forward and stop, so that moving through the cellar's space takes on the sludgy distortions of a dream. I wish it were a dream, though not nearly hard enough. Because now there's something you don't feel while lying in your bed: the sharp crunch of plastic underfoot that pierces the sole of your shoe.
It's a piece of the baby monitor's casing. Looking down, I can see more of its smashed anatomy over the floor. The lens splintered like ice chips.
I mean to say "Randy" but instead whisper "Please."
And with the sound of my voice I hear the scratching. So brief I do my best to interpret it as the creation of my own imagination. Then it comes again: the scrape of claws against wood. A mouse or a rat. This is what it must be. Just the kind of sound you would expect in an abandoned house.
Except unlike a rat's, the scratches are neither swift nor light. This is a single sound, deliberate and heavy. The slow slide of a clenched hand.
"Randy? That you?"
It's impossible to know how loud I say this, other than it is loud enough to not try again. In other houses, a spoken word can instantly humanize a space. Here it turns your own voice into a stranger's, a hostile impersonation.
I start for the stairs, as the sound seems to be coming from overhead. But when there is another scratch, I can tell its source isn't one of the rooms up there but is down here. It feels like it's emitting not from a walled enclosure at all, not from anything sharing this space with me, but from the space—from the house— itself. It's like hearing music and looking for the hidden speakers, only to realize it's a tune being played in your own head.
The scratching again. Weaker this time. But it allows me to follow it to the far corner of the cellar, no more than five feet from where we buried Heather Langham. Scratch, s-c-r-a-t-c-h. Coming from the spot directly over where I stand.
In the house I grew up in, there was a seldom-used storage area in our basement, a kind of loft tucked between the ceiling and the kitchen floor, designed to keep chosen items dry in case of flooding. The Thurman house is no different. Because there in the corner, visible by the outside light that comes in through a previously boarded window, is the trap door I can almost touch. Square, made of plywood, not much bigger than the drawer of a filing cabinet. And there against the wall is the folded wooden stepladder used to reach it.
