The Guardians

by Andrew Pyper

  "The Queen's."

  "Horrible place."

  "In the dark, it looks like any other room."

  "Perhaps you'd like to stay here?"

  It takes me a second to interpret what she's just said. Stay here? The idea causes a shudder that has nothing to do with Parkinson's.

  "Just for a night or two," she goes on. "Until you're finished looking through Ben's things."

  "It's very kind of you. But I wouldn't—"

  "Be no trouble."

  "You must be very—"

  "I'd like you to stay."

  Mrs. McAuliffe puts the teapot down on the table. Uses her now free hand to wipe the sleeve of her sweater under her chin.

  "Of course," I say. "Thanks. I'll bring my things over this evening."

  "Good. Good." She breathes, a clear in and out. "You can have Ben's room."

  That, Betty, is never going to happen.

  This is my first thought as I push open the door to Ben's attic room and look up at the splintery beam from which he'd tied the noose.

  I am never going to spend the night here.

  At the same time, even as I enter with the sound of my shoes sticking to the recently waxed floorboards (was this done after Ben died? Perhaps to clean away the blood? if there was blood?), I can already feel myself sliding between the sheets of the freshly made bed against the wall and turning out the light. A moment at once unthinkable and unstoppable.

  The room is clean, but preserved. Even if I didn't know of Ben and the wasted years he'd spent up here, I could discern the not-rightness of its former inhabitant through the teenage boy things that hadn't been replaced or stored away. So there was still the Specials poster over the dresser. Still the Batman stickers on the mirror, the neat stacks of comics and Louis L'Amour novels against the wall. Still the Ken Dryden lamp on the bedside table.

  I sit on the edge of the bed, and the wood frame barks. A sound Ben would have been so used to he'd long ago have stopped hearing it.

  The package he left for me sits on my lap. His square letters spelling my name. So carefully printed it suggests the final act in a long-planned operation. The licking of the envelope's fold a taste of finality, of poison.

  I tear it open in one pull.

  So it was you and me both, Ben. A thick, black leather journal slips out. Diary keepers.

  It's heavy. A cover worn pale through repeated openings and closings, its inner pages dense with ink.

  The entries are mostly brief, all written in chicken-scratched print, as though the paper he wrote on was the last in the world. The book opens with an unintentionally comic record of non-event:

  March 19, 1992

  Nothing.

  March 20, 1992

  Nothing.

  March 21, 1992

  Nothing.

  March 22, 1992

  Same.

  Then, after several more days of this:

  March 29, 1992

  The front door handle.

  Something on the inside. Trying to get out.

  No names, hardly any mention of the neighbours' comings or goings. Just the house. And, at certain points, the apparent sightings of characters so familiar to Ben he didn't waste the letters to name them, as in "He was at the downstairs window" or "She shouted someone's name" or "They moved together across the living room like ballroom dancers."

  May 18, 1992

  Kids coming borne from school. Stop to stare at it.

  I shout down at them, "Save yourselves! Keep moving/" They tell me to go fuck myself But they don't go in, don't go any closer.

  I flip ahead, scanning. Five hundred pages of lunatic surveillance and shouted warnings. I close it after reading only the first dozen pages, my mind aswirl. Why did Ben bother keeping such a record in the first place? How did he think his observation was protecting anyone? Why kill himself now, leaving his post vacant?

  And the kicker: Why had he left this to me?

  I attempt to read on. But a minute later, I'm struck with a rare headache. A pair of marbles growing into golf balls at the temples.

  I lay the journal down on the bedside table and sit in the chair by the window. Here it is, the full extent of Ben's world: a tar- veined Caledonia Street climbing up the hill to the right, and through the branches of the neighbour's maple, the Thurman house, colourless and unnumbered. For all the seriousness Ben brought to his role as watchdog, it doesn't look threatening from up here in the neutral daylight so much as ashamed of itself. Was there ever a day when Ben doubted himself and saw it as I see it now, weak and forsaken? Did he ever run up against the boredom of waiting to see something in a building that had nothing to show?

  I suppose he had his memories of being inside it to keep certain possibilities alive. He could look down at the Thurman house from this roost and visualize the floor plan in his head. It must have been a kind of anti-love, unrequited and undying, that kept him here. Instead of a girl, he had been altered by an experience that had left him frozen, compelled to relive the past as sentimental lovers do.

  Yet there was a girl. Maybe she is why Ben stayed. Someone had to honour her by carrying her memory, even as her name faded year by year. In recalling the sight of Heather Langham walking up Caledonia Street, indifferent to the leer of the house's darkened eyes, Ben was saving her from becoming nothing more than another Terrible Story.

  I try to summon this very image of her now, but it's beyond my reach. There is only the moan of a car accelerating up the slope, the screech of a backyard cat fight, the house. So I wait as Ben waited. The morning unmoored from time. It might be meditative if it wasn't for the accompanying fear. The growing dread that I'm not the only one watching.

  Poor Trev. First day on the job and more scared than Ben ever was.

  The boy appears at the second-floor bedroom window in the time it takes my eyes to move from the attic shutters, down to the front door and up again.

  But there's nothing to be afraid of. All you need is a rope. A chair.

  He is looking at me with the same open-mouthed, dumbfounded expression I feel on my own face, a mimicry so expert that, for the first second, I try to see him as me somehow, a telescoped reflection, some smoke-and-mirrors tomfoolery. But in the next second, I realize the gap of years between us: the boy remains sixteen, and I am forty.

  All you need to see is that none of it's worth holding on to, because it's already gone.

  I was wrong. The boy cannot be me. And the persistence of him in the window confirms his reality with each passing second he remains there. He is trapped inside, but not necessarily forever. I can see that—feel that—in the strength he gains even as he charts the depths of my weakness. There are ways out by bringing others in. And with this realization—as though hearing my thoughts just as I can hear his—the startled mask slips off, and he laughs.

  "Trevor!"

  Mrs. McAuliffe's voice, cheerfully calling up the stairs. A voice that makes the face in the window pull back into shadow.

  "Your friend is here!"

  Randy stands on the McAuliffes' front porch, arms crossed, refusing to cross the threshold.

  "Hey, Trev," he says, a little surprised to see me, even though he knew I'd be here. Maybe a part of him was expecting Ben to come down the stairs, not me, a joint-stiffened man with sweat stains the size of pie plates under his arms.

  "What's wrong?"

  Randy looks past me, at Mrs. McAuliffe, who remains standing in the hall.

  "I'll leave you boys to your business," she says finally and shuffles away through the kitchen door.

  Randy still says nothing. Wipes his nose in a slow sweep of the back of his hand.

  "Why don't you come in?"

  He glances over his shoulder. Almost turns his head far enough to take in the Thurman house, but not quite.

  "It's like it's watching us," I say.

  "Bricks and wood and glass. That's all it is."

  "I'm talking about the inside." I take a step closer, lower my voice. "Don't you
feel it?"

  "No."

  "It's a good thing you never got married. You're a lousy liar."

  "Listen, Trev. I didn't come here to talk about an empty house." Randy shakes his head. Physically jostles one line of thinking out of place to make room for another. "The waitress," he says. "Todd's kid."

  "What about her?"

  "She's missing."

  * * *

  MEMORY DIARY

  Entry No. 9

  I used to think—or at least I did before the winter of 1984—that one could read the capacity for badness in a face. The mugshots of drive-by shooters and child molesters that were reprinted in the National section of The Grimshaw Beacon revealed a similar absence, the groggy complexions that told of cigarettes and nocturnal scheming. I believed that when it came to discerning between the truly evil and the rest of us everyday sinners, you can just tell.

  But I've come to learn that evil's primary talent is for disguise: not letting you hear the cloven hooves scratching on the welcome mat is how the devil gets invited inside. It's how he can become your friend.

  I was thinking this, or something like this, when we pulled over to the curb and asked the coach if he wanted a ride home, and he stopped to look into Carl's Ford. At us.

  Carl was at the wheel and Ben in the passenger seat, with me on my own in the back. We had been driving around, arguing over the costs of doing something versus nothing in discovering the truth of the coach's role in Heather Langham's death. That is, I was arguing with Carl and Ben, and they mostly ignored me, studying the houses we cruised by as though considering buying one.

  "Where is the freckly fuck?" was all Carl would say every few minutes, referring to Randy, who wasn't home when we called.

  "We can't do anything without him," I said. "We have to be together on it."

  But Carl and Ben just kept looking at the houses. They made me feel like I was riding in a baby seat, watching the backs of their heads as though they were my parents.

  "There he is," Carl said. He took his foot off the gas and the Ford rolled on, gently as a canoe after taking the paddles in.

  "Who?"

  Because they could both see the answer to this on the street ahead, they ignored me. It forced me to slide over between them and peer out the windshield.

  The coach. Walking along the sidewalk with his back to us, a stiffening of his stride that suggested he'd heard a car slow behind him. This was his street. A street we had driven up more than any other over the last half-hour. Carl and Ben had been hoping to come across the coach making his way home. And now that they had, they drew even with him and pulled over to the curb.

  He stopped. I don't know if he knew who it was before he turned to see, but it seemed there was a half second's pause as he gathered himself.

  "What's up, guys?" he asked, glancing up the street toward his house a half block on.

  "Need a ride?" Carl asked.

  The coach squinted. We knew where he lived. Why would he need a ride? So: this was an invitation. And not necessarily a complicated one. Boys on the team came to him all the time. They told him things, sought advice. There were always Guardians wanting to hang out with him, asking if he needed a ride.

  "You think I'm that out of shape?" he said.

  "We're just driving around. Killing time before practice."

  "You want something to eat? My wife makes this baked spaghetti thing that's not half bad. I'll be eating it the rest of the week if I don't get some help."

  "Thanks." Carl glanced around the car at Ben, back at me. "We're not too hungry, I guess."

  The coach stood there. Unmoving except for his breath leaking out in feathery plumes.

  "How about it?" Ben asked.

  "I've got some time," the coach said, pulling back the sleeve of his coat to show the watch on his wrist, though he didn't look at its face. "A little spin? Why not?"

  Less than two hours before we had driven up to the coach on his walk home, we'd had another hot box meeting in the school's parking lot. It's hard to recall who said what, or the positions we started out defending (I think I changed my mind half a dozen times during each circling of Randy's joint). What was agreed on by all was that something had to be done. We alone knew Miss Langham was murdered, the where and how it was done. Maybe, if this was all we knew, we would have found a way to justify trying to forget about it. But the thing was this: along with the where and how she was killed, we now felt sure we knew the who.

  Why not go to the police? A good question. As good today as the afternoon we asked it in Carl's Ford, coughing it out through the blue haze. Why not? There were some halfway reasonable answers to this, and we voiced them at the time:

  The police would never accept our slim evidence of Ben's nighttime sighting.

  We had found and moved and bled on and buried her body, which meant the odds were greater that we had done it than anyone else.

  Pointing a finger the coach's way too early would only allow for his escape.

  But the real reason was one none of us spoke aloud.

  This was our test. Heather Langham's memory had been adopted as our responsibility.

  It was Ben who was the last to speak. Last, because he used words almost as powerful as his reminder of friendship that had led us into a haunted house. Words that have, in different contexts, ushered soldiers onto killing fields.

  "We need to find the truth," he said. "We have to. For Heather. For justice."

  Truth. Justice. These were the opened doors through which we saw a way to save Heather Langham in death as we had longed to save her in life.

  We talked about hockey at first. Or the coach did, repeating the ways we would have to exploit the weak links on Seaforth's defence. He sat next to me in the back but spoke directly to the window, as if rehearsing a speech. He reminded me of a dog who didn't like cars: sitting straight and still, but every muscle tense as he waited for the machine to stop and the doors to open so he could leap out.

  "We saw you," Ben said.

  This is how the conversation turned. Ben swivelling around in the passenger seat to face the coach. And it was "we."

  "You did?" the coach said. He looked at me, at Carl in the rearview mirror, at the toothpaste stain around Ben's mouth.

  "Last Monday. Going into the Thurman house."

  "Monday?"

  The coach looked as though he was trying to remember his mother-in-law's middle name or the capital of Bolivia.

  "Just over a week ago. Monday night."

  "Okay. Monday night. Why would I be going in there, Ben?"

  "Why would you? Why would you?"

  The coach continued to look at Ben for a moment, then turned to me. "What is this?"

  "Answer the question," I said.

  "I don't know what you're asking me."

  "Have you been inside the Thurman house at any time in the last week?"

  "No. Now you tell me. What the hell is a Thurman house? "

  He chuckled at this, and I was sure we'd got everything wrong. The coach's awkwardness had come not from secret knowledge but from us. He had detected a worrying turn in his youngest players and was trying to guess what was wrong. We were acting weird, not him.

  "The empty place on Caledonia," Carl said. "You don't know about it?"

  "Where you guys go to smoke pot or whatever? Yes, I'm aware of it."

  "Have you ever been inside?"

  "I just told you."

  "So you haven't?"

  "Hold on here. I mean, seriously, what is this shit?"

  It was an understandable question. One minute he's on his way home to his wife's spaghetti casserole and the next he's being interrogated by three kids in a car. He had every right to be impatient. But what all of us heard—what dismissed my earlier impression that we'd got everything wrong—was his shit. It was the first time any of us had heard him swear, to pop his seat forward to let the coach out, and so did the coach, who gripped his hands to the back of the headrest, ready to go. Instead, Carl roll
ed his window down. That's when I noticed Randy out front of the Erie Burger.

  "Get in," Carl said.

  Randy bent down to see me and the coach in the back. If he was surprised he didn't show it. When Carl leaned forward, Randy lined up to get into the back with us.

  "One here, one there," Carl said.

  After a second, Randy got it. He came around the other side so that the coach was sandwiched between us.

  Carl drove on, making sure to stay off the main streets. For a while nobody said anything. There wasn't much room in the Ford now, and breathing was something of an issue, particularly in the back seat.

  "Okay, so what are we doing?" Randy asked earnestly.

  "We're just talking," Carl said.

  "That's not quite true, Randy," the coach said. "Your friends want to know if I've had a hand in your music teacher's disappearance."

  Randy shifted around like something was biting his bum. "No shit?"

  "None at all," the coach said.

  "So let's hear it, then," Ben said. "What do you know about what happened to Heather?"

  "Happened? What has happened to Heather?"

  "You seem to know more than that."

  "This isn't about me."

  "No?" the coach said. "You're the ones who've seen things going on in empty houses. You're driving around with your hockey coach and won't let him go, which is a crime in itself. I'd say it's definitely about you, Benji."

  Benji. That was new too.

  "We're just asking some questions," Ben said, less certain now.

  "Okay. Here's an answer." He reached forward to tap Carl on the shoulder. "Pull over."

  "Don't think so," Carl said.

  "Give me a break! You hairless nut sacks think you're the fucking Hardy Boys or something?"

  "No need to be insulting," Randy said.

  "Insulting? This is insulting. Kidnapping is insulting. Being forced to waste an hour of my life with you pimply-faced cocksuckers is insulting."

  "Just tell us where you were last Monday night."