The Guardians

by Andrew Pyper

  I kick its legs open and start up. Try pushing the door open, but its wood has warped over time so its edges have cut into the frame, holding it in place. I step down and search the worktables. A hammer would be the best thing, but all I can find that might help is a rusted wrench.

  Up again, and I'm knocking the wrench's round head against the door, whacking around its edges, working it up from its resting spot in a dozen hard-fought squeaks. And then, with a final, two-handed upswing, it pops open an inch and stays that way. A foul breath of air swirls down on me.

  Why pocket the wrench, swing the door onto its back and step up the ladder to poke my head through and peer down the loft's dark length? Whatever lies in here is either storage for old

  Grimshaw Beacons or squirrels' nests or the place we have been looking for all along, the home to something worse than the boy. Why look inside when no good could possibly come of it? Because the time for looking away has come to an end.

  So I pull myself up, my mid-air kicks doing as much work as the wobbly arms fighting to lift me over the edge. And before even the first full inhalation that might tell me if there's something living or otherwise within, I scramble inside.

  A crawlspace. Where we kept the Monopoly and the slide projector in our house, but here appears to be empty. A two- foot-high gap that runs the full length of the kitchen, though it might be even bigger than this, as I can't see where it ends in the dark. It forces me to feel for whatever might be here. My hands stroking the cushions of insulation laid over the rib cage of two- by-fours that, each time I touch them, make me think of hair.

  I'm not good in small spaces at the best of times. But this is worse than any discomfort I felt in the snow fort tunnels of my youth or the sweats that come upon entering crowded elevators. This is a coffin. It brings a new panic to every movement forward. Two wars are now raging inside me, both hopeless: one forcing my knees and hands to take the next prod farther into the dark, the other holding back the scream in my throat.

  And now the arrival of a thought that instantly clouds over even these struggles. The growing certainty that, even if there's nothing to be found, I'm never getting out of here. This is a trap. Even as this occurs to me I think I can hear the crawlspace door being eased shut, a weight tugging it firmly into place.

  The scratching again. In here. Close enough that I hear the slivers tear away from the wood.

  Back. I've got to go back now. And I'm starting my wriggling retreat, rolling to the side, fighting to figure how to make my elbows do the opposite of what brought me this far, when I find the bones.

  Up close, they are visible even in the near-darkness. I look over the remains and, before the spasm of revulsion, try to summon the names of the parts once learned for biology class. The flaring hips—that's the pelvis, right? The shoulder blades sound like a kitchen utensil. The scapula. But the shin?

  Bones aren't white. This is my next thought. They're not the ivory of high-school skeletons but yellow-stained and black- creviced as smokers' teeth.

  All at once, I'm throwing up the Old London's prime rib onto the boards.

  Because the brief veil of shock has been pulled away. And because I realize the bones are Roy's.

  I never really believed he ran away as it said in the news clippings. Some part of me couldn't swallow what old Paul Schantz told the reporter for the Beacon, that he didn't know where Roy was. Of course he knew. He took care of children. He was one of the good guys, watching over the lost, their guardian. If one of them had run away he would have looked for him, and kept looking until he was found.

  But old Paul didn't look for Roy DeLisle because he knew the boy was already dead. Because he was the one who killed him.

  I touch the hole in the boy's skull, where Paul Schantz delivered a blow that brought an end to Roy's bad imaginings. The back teeth of a hammer would be my guess. Something he could get his hands on in a hurry.

  There's bad. Then there's worse.

  After what Roy did to Elizabeth Worth, he could not be allowed to walk away. Roy DeLisle was, at sixteen, well on his way to building a career of ruining and murdering and running. The clippings mentioned his troubled history; Paul Schantz would have been aware of it too. But Paul would have extended the benefit of the doubt to the boy, offered a Christian second chance. It gave Roy the time to take Elizabeth Worth's life. And he would do it again to someone else, and someone else after that, something Paul Schantz knew as well as Roy did. People like the boy, the ones with the most terrible kind of "restless ways," had to be stopped, because there would always be those like Elizabeth— like Heather—who couldn't see them for what they were.

  Paul Schantz was Grimshaw's original Guardian. A position later filled by Ben. And now me. Because old Paul had been right the afternoon we visited him. There's always something worse than you think. Closer than you think. Ben had known this from the day his mother told him his dad had driven into a hydro pole, and it's a knowledge that I've been doing my best to avoid. That we all do our best to avoid.

  These thoughts prevent me from realizing how close I am to a dead thing. It sends me rolling back from the bones, suddenly frantic, my head slamming against wood below and above. The sharp end of a nail stabs the back of my hand. A metal bracket cracks against the brow over my eye, and it instantly swells into a throbbing egg.

  Something is moaning in here with me. When it turns into a scream, I hear the voice as my own.

  It strips away whatever control I still had over my movements and lets my Parkinson's have its way. I am moving, though neither forward nor back. A rolling, punching frenzy that has no intentions beyond the body's final expression of itself. Soon it will be stilled forever. But for now, like a beetle turned onto its back, there is only the writhing of limbs, a hysterical foreknowledge.

  I stop when I collapse into the wall on the opposite side of the crawlspace from the boy's bones.

  Except it's not a wall. A long mound of cloth and skin laid out over the insulation. At once yielding and hard. A concave belly. A shoulder knob.

  A woman's body. Her skin glowing dull blue. Knees scraped raw on their fronts and backs. Hands flat against the wood, the fingertips watery as leaky ballpoints from trying to claw through. The palms resting on the lines of blood carved on either side of her.

  "Tracey?"

  I could touch her, but I don't want to. Because she's dead.

  Maybe I was meant to come here to save her, to be the one to do what Ben only imagined doing, but I'm too late. Now I'm sharing a too-small space with the dead daughter of a friend, someone I could be said to know and to whom something terrible was done, and every part of me wants out, is shrieking its demand to scrabble back through this ratshit grave and get out.

  She gasps. A single intake of air that comes with such effort she spasms, her limbs flailing before settling once more.

  "Tracey."

  There is no reply other than her shallow breaths. Emaciated, filthy, cold. But alive.

  She has fought against every indication that she would never be found, that all that remained for her was a prolonged, solitary death, and now I am here with her. The man with the disease that makes lifting anything heavier than a pint of beer an Olympic event.

  But if she has managed to survive three days in here with only the boy's bones for company, I can try to pull her out.

  It's done by counting inches. One for each pull on Tracey's ankles, my knees digging in and sliding the two of us back. There are moments I'm convinced that our movement is only me, attempting a directed retreat but merely shifting uselessly about. Clinging to Tracey as though she is my passed-out partner in a dance marathon.

  But then, with another pull, I feel that we are moving. And as long as no part of us catches on another nail, as long as my heart keeps banging away, we'll keep moving.

  I don't find the door so much as fall out of it. My legs slipping over the edge, kicking at the foundation's walls before my feet find the top of the stepladder. With this le
verage, tugging Tracey all the way out is relatively easy.

  Easier, that is, than holding her in my arms once we're both on the steps. And it is hot. A new heat I take to be a sudden spike of fever, or the blood rush that comes before blacking out.

  After one step down, when it's clear I'm not going to make it, I use the relative softness of the cellar's floor as a landing pad. Turn my tumble forward into a controlled fall, so that when we make it to the earth floor it is as though I intended to lay Tracey there.

  "Trevor the Brave."

  Randy steps out of the dark. The words that come out of his mouth aren't his, but the boy's.

  "Look at you, Mr. Shaky," he says. "But an old Guardian could never let down a damsel in distress, could he?"

  My arms rise in front of me. A reflex. The limbs seeking counterbalance against falling backwards. It makes me feel like the Frankenstein monster from the after-school movies of my youth.

  But Randy's attack doesn't come. He stands ten feet from where I stand over Tracey. Arms at his sides. His face falsely animated, as if he's trying to appear engaged by an anecdote he'd long stopped listening to.

  A choking at the back of my throat, and I smell the smoke. Followed by the first tendrils of grey reaching down the stairs from the kitchen.

  "We have to get out of here, Randy."

  "I'd like you to stay."

  "There's a fire"

  "I know. I started it."

  "Jesus Christ."

  "Stay where you are," he says, though I'm not moving.

  "You took her."

  "You couldn't understand."

  "Try me."

  "It was apart."

  "Part of what?"

  "I told you you couldn't understand."

  Through the veils of smoke, Randy's freckles appear enlarged. Spreading over his face like a hundred darkening bruises.

  "How did she end up down here?"

  "I wasn't fully committed."

  "Committed to what?"

  "The part."

  "What the fuck are you talking about?"

  "It was a performance. For once I had an audience that was really watching. And you know what I did? I messed it up. Mailed it in."

  "Are you saying you were acting?"

  "It's all I've ever wanted to do. And the boy knew that. The house knew it. And it asked me to show everything I had. To do one remarkable thing once in my life."

  "To kill her."

  "But I didn't. There was too much of me getting in the way of the character. Too much interference."

  "Who did you think you were playing?"

  "The lead."

  "Roy."

  "Who else?"

  I've had rooms spin on me before. Boozy carousels or sickbed see-saws. But what's happening now is of a different order altogether. The cellar spinning, along with the house, the earth loosed from its axis and wobbling off into space.

  "When did it start?" I manage.

  "Sometime after Ben's funeral, I guess. That's when I heard his voice. First time in twenty-four years. Then it got so loud it was all I could hear."

  "That night. You went back to Jake's after we left?"

  "It was closed, so I waited. And when she came out I offered her a joint. I'm an old friend of her dad's. She said sure."

  "She trusted you."

  "I'm fun, remember?"

  "So you decided to have a party."

  "I asked her if kids still went to the old Thurman place. She couldn't believe I knew about it, that this freckly, balding guy used to get up to no good in here the same way she and her friends did. So she figured it couldn't hurt to smoke another joint for shits and giggles before heading home."

  "Except you didn't smoke another joint."

  "No. We didn't."

  From upstairs, the fire is a voice that joins the two of ours. Wet and gulping, like a dog swallowing something it's found in the mud.

  "What did you do instead?"

  "Talked. I don't have a clue about what," Randy says, now grinning widely like his father, the loony salesman caricature they used in those Krazy Kevin! car lot ads. "Her boyfriend, maybe. How she couldn't wait to get out of this shithole. The future. I wasn't listening to her. I was listening to him. And when I was doing the talking, I was concentrating on selling my lines. And you know something? I was good."

  "What did he tell you to do?"

  "Make her stop."

  "Stop what?"

  "Laughing. Smiling. Breathing''

  I'm having trouble standing. The smoke has thickened, shrouding the large space so that, for moments at a time, Randy is the only thing I can see.

  "I dragged her down here," he goes on, scratching an elbow. "Tied her to the same post where we tied the coach. Oh man, she wanted out of here—and part of me, the pussy Randy part, wanted to let her out. But there was his voice again. Teach her a lesson. Leave her down in the dark until she shuts up. So I left. Went for a walk, sobered up a little. It was cold. I was Randy again, give or take. And then I thought to myself, You've got a coat on, but that poor girl doesn't. So I ran back, came down here to find her quiet, eyes closed. Not dead, but pretty close. I saw that I couldn't let her go. I'd nearly killed her, and nearly killing someone is as bad as killing her, when you think of it. It's worse— because you can't bury a body that's strolling around, telling people what it knows."

  "Randy, please. We have to—"

  "I remembered how my house had a crawlspace under the kitchen floor. Yours did too, right?"

  "You left her alone to die."

  "It's just another secret. That's what he kept saying. You're good with secrets. You all are."

  Randy pulls something out of his pocket and tosses it at me. Somehow my hand grabs it out of the air. My Dictaphone.

  "You broke the rule, Trev."

  "I wasn't going to give this to anyone. I did it for myself."

  "Which is the same reason I just told you the truth. To see if it changed anything."

  "Has it?"

  Randy appears about to work this through aloud, his finger partly raised in the manner of a courtroom clarification of fine points. Yet he says nothing. His mouth agape.

  "Let us go."

  My voice conveys none of the desperation I feel. It sounds as though I'm offering to take his place on the next shift in a Guardians game.

  "I can't."

  "Why not?"

  "I've been alone a long time," he says, suddenly not himself at all. The boy's tone, lifeless and flat. "And I don't want to be alone anymore."

  He grins again. Not Randy this time, not Krazy Kevin!, but the boy. And it's a glimpse of the afterlife. An eternity in here, waiting at the windows with Roy DeLisle. Watching the girls go by.

  I make a move to get past him. Not a run, nothing so orchestrated as to be understood as an intention. A grasping of' legs and arms and head in the direction of the stairs. Hut Randy pushes me back with one hand, his palm slapping my shoulder as if in greeting.

  "Give me the locket," he says, and holds his hand out. Opens his fist to show a platinum band with a piece of emerald in it. I glance down at Tracey and spot the white circle below one of her knuckles.

  "That was you? You dug Heather up?"

  "Right there where you're standing," he points, and I take an involuntary step backwards. "But once I moved away I didn't want it anymore. I was just goofy Handy Randy again, and I couldn't bear it. Mailed it to Ben, no return address."

  "Why Ben?"

  "He stayed. And it belonged here." He takes a full stride closer. "It wanted to be here."

  "You mean the boy wanted it to be here."

  "And now he'd like it back."

  So I give it to him. I step over Tracey Flanagan's unconscious body and pull Heather's gold heart from my wallet. Let its chain pour into Randy's hand.

  As Randy unfastens the clasp and raises both arms to hook it up at the back of his neck, I slide the wrench out of my other pocket. He blinks down at it, amazed, as though it is a talking bi
rd. I swing the wrench wide and strike it square against the side of his head.

  He falls in two distinct motions: slow to his knees, then a formless slump onto his back. I fall to my knees too, bending at his side to feel his still-beating heart, his stale breath a whisper in my ear. I'd seen hockey players in this state before, unlucky puck chasers who'd gone headfirst into the boards. Unconscious, but not necessarily for long.

  I scramble over to Tracey on all fours, slip my arms under her and forklift her up. Using the walls to keep her cradled in place, I get to my feet and swing around. Shuffle past Randy to the bottom of the cellar stairs. There is only my own breath. And the fire working its way through the house. Licking and swallowing.

  You won't make it.

  I hear this so clearly I assume at first it is the boy. But it belongs instead to someone who wishes only to point out some salient facts that might be escaping my attention.

  If you think you're carrying this girl up those stairs, you're crazier than Ben ever was.

  So I'm crazy. Ben would have long known what I've come to recently learn, and have confirmed as I take the first step up. Sometimes, crazy helps.

  It gets me all the way up to the kitchen, where I'm forced to lay Tracey down again. There's the serious heat now, doubling itself, cooking the air so that each breath is like swallowing oil. Through the archway I can see that the fire has already claimed most of the living room. A widening throat of orange and black. The plaster walls collapsing. A carbon skin it is halfway to shedding.

  A cold finger touches the back of my neck.

  I spin around expecting to see the boy. And for a second it is the boy. Glaring at me, flushed and threatening tears.

  "Stay with me," Randy says.

  I charge at him.

  My legs fluid, powerful. The fist that aims at Randy's head and lands a solid blow feeling swift and Parkinson's-free, breaking the line of his jaw with a tidy, audible pop. I'm a Guardian again. Young and fully armoured, meeting some Sugar King or Winterhawk thug with unhesitating violence.

  Stay with me.