by Andrew Pyper
"I guess we should go down there tomorrow," I say.
"I've already spoken to them," Randy answers. "They're expecting us at eleven."
"It does kind of remind you of Heather. Doesn't it?"
"So what if it does? People go missing sometimes. Even in small towns," Randy reasons. "If it's two missing persons over thirty years, Grimshaw is probably below the per capita national average."
"Not just two missing persons. Two women, early twenties, look kind of similar. Fits a profile."
"Listen to you. 'Fits a profile.' You auditioning for some crime show?" He reaches for his wineglass. "Actually, I auditioned for a crime show a few weeks ago."
"You get the part?"
"Are you trying to hurt my feelings?"
When the maître d’, who took our order, is also the one to pour the first bottle of "Ontario Bordeaux," it becomes clear that he is the only front-of-house staff on tonight—and that he is the only one needed, seeing as we're the only customers. This fact, combined with the Old London's velvety gloom, gives us the sense of cozy seclusion. Anything might be said here and it will never pass beyond these stuccoed walls. It seems that Randy shares this impression, because soon he is turning the talk toward topics we would be better off avoiding, yet here, for the moment, feel are merely intriguing, the sort of thing you light upon in reading the back pages of the paper and harmlessly ponder over the morning coffee, protected by the knowledge that it has happened to someone else, not you.
"Don't you think it's weird?"
"This is Grimshaw, Randy," I answer, employing my full concentration to guide a chunk of rib-eye past my lips. "It's all weird. And if you're talking about Tracey Flanagan and how—"
"I'm not talking about her. And I'm not talking about Grimshaw. I'm talking about how we've been here for almost two days now and we haven't even mentioned it."
"You're going to need to be—"
"The coach. The coach. The coach!"
I stop chewing. "There's good reason we haven't brought that up."
"But it's just the two of us, in the same place at the same time, for the first time in forever. Who knows when we'll be together again like this?"
"I get it." I swallow. "Seeing as we're sitting here enjoying ourselves, we might as well bust out all the bad memories for the hell of it?"
"I'm not sure I deserve the sarcasm."
"I'm just trying to understand you, Randy."
"Understand me? Okay, here's a start: I'm scared. Haven't slept a good night's sleep since before I could shave. And it's only going to get worse now that I've seen that house again and know it's still there."
"Do you want to talk about it? I mean, do you feel you need to?"
"Want to? No. Need to? Maybe. It's a lot to carry around all the time, all on your own, don't you think?"
"I've done my best to pretend it's not even there."
"And how has that worked for you?"
"Couldn't say. It's the only way I've ever known how to be."
"But that's not true," Randy says, lowering his fork to the table with an unexpected thud. "Once upon a time, you were yourself We all were. But since then, we're something else. We got so good at holding on to what we knew that even coming back here—even what Ben did to himself—won't let us bring it up."
Randy looks around to make sure no one is listening, though in the Old London's murk there could be a guy six feet away holding a boom mike over our table and we wouldn't be able to spot him.
"What we did was a crime," I say.
"You're the one blabbing about the past into a Dictaphone. So why are you talking to a machine about it and not me?"
"That's different."
"Really? Haven't you ever wondered if we all would've been in better shape if we'd just shared what we were going through instead of trying to bury it?"
"I'm not sure sharing something that could send us to prison is great therapy. I'm wondering if you forgot that part."
"I haven't forgotten."
"Good. Let's not start forgetting it now. We're supposed to give a statement to the police tomorrow about being in the bar last night. Once that's done, and so long as Betty doesn't need more help in clearing up Ben's things, I plan to get the hell out of here."
"Isn't that tidy?"
"I happen to like tidy."
We busy ourselves with our steaks. Hoping for our tempers to even, for the bad wine to bring back its initial good feelings. We just chew and swallow. Or in my case, chew and spit a mouthful out into my napkin. It turns Randy's attention my way. And I am about to explain that with the Parkinson's, grilled meat can sometimes be a challenge to choke down. But instead I say, "I saw something."
Randy continues to look at me precisely as he had a moment ago, as though I have not said anything at all.
"Back then," I go on. "And then, just yesterday, I thought I saw it again. When I was looking at the house from Ben's window."
"What was it?"
"Me. I thought it was only a reflection in a mirror the first time. And then, I guessed it was only you, or Carl, or Ben, because he was a boy about our age, looked the way we looked. Except it wasn't one of us."
Randy blinks repeatedly over the vast distance of the tabletop.
"I saw him too," he says.
"So it wasn't just Carl and me."
"Carl?"
"After we found Heather. He told me he'd seen someone. Or was it that he'd only heard someone? Anyway, he was pretty messed up about it."
"Join the club."
"I mean he was even worse than I was."
"Worse?"
"He held my hand."
"You and Carl held hands?" Randy asks, as though this fact is more shocking than both of us confessing to having seen the living dead. "I'd pay a good chunk of change to have been around to see that."
"You had more money then."
"True. Maybe I should give up this acting thing and go back to dealing weed and mowing lawns."
We both want to go back to half an hour ago. I can see it in Randy's face just as he can see it in mine. But now that we've said what we've said, the implications are rushing to catch up, and they're too numerous, too wrigglingly alive to hold on to.
"What happened in there?" I find myself saying. "What happened to us?"
"Trev. C'mon," Randy says, reaching his hand toward me, but the table is too wide.
"Was there something wrong with that place? Or something wrong with us?"
A cleared throat.
The two of us look up to see the maître d’ standing there, hands clasped over his belt buckle. A vacant smile of blue bone.
"Something sweet, gentlemen?"
* * *
MEMORY DIARY
Entry No. 10
We must have thought it would be easy.
Force a man into the cellar of an abandoned house, accuse him of murdering a female colleague in the very same location, then stick a tape recorder in his face and expect him to confess. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Except I'm not sure even this was true.
I know now that you can do terrible things without an idea. You can do them without feeling it's really you doing them.
Looking back, I'm almost convinced it was someone else occupying my skin in the cellar that night. Someone else whispering in my head, encouraging, taunting. Telling me that it was okay, that none of this counted anyway.
You've come this far already, the boy said but didn't say. You don't want to miss all the fun, do you?
For the first hour or so, the coach didn't answer any of our questions. He just repeated a question of his own.
"How do you think this is going to end?"
We had no reply to this, only more questions. Like why he brought Miss Langham here. How she ended up dead.
"Maybe it was some kind of accident," Randy suggested.
"You're some kind of accident."
"I'm trying to help."
"Help? I need Handy Randy's help?" He turned to Carl. "Ple
ase. Shoot me now."
"We're looking for an explanation, that's all."
"Why do you think I owe you that? I mean, look at yourselves."
And we did. For the first time since we'd filed down the cellar stairs and made the coach stand with his back to the wall, we let our gaze move off him and to each other. We looked at least five years younger than we pictured ourselves. Carl especially. The biggest one of us reduced to a child who needed both hands to aim the revolver an inch higher than the toes of his boots.
"How do you think this is going to end?" the coach asked again.
I think now that if Ben hadn't taken a step away at that point, if he hadn't made us focus on his scuffling movement instead of lingering on the shrunken, stilled outlines of ourselves in the dark, we might still have avoided the worst yet to come. Argued a defence based on the stupidity of teenage boys (at least we hadn't killed ourselves by driving drunk into a tree, the more common end for the worst sort of Perth County misadventure). It was the conclusion of our grim, exhilarating ride. And now, facing the coach's question, we found we had run out of ways to fill the next moment, and this gap had let the awakening light of absurdity in.
But Ben plugged the hole up again by moving. By rustling through some orange crates piled up around the worktable and returning to stand within range of Carl's flashlight beam. A length of frayed extension cord in his hand.
"We can use this to tie him up," he said.
We pulled the parka hood over the coach's head and swaddled him with rank blankets discovered in the main hall closet. (Carl wondered if we should gag him as well, but the coach told us nobody could hear him down there no matter how loudly he screamed. "And how are you so sure of that?" Ben asked.) Then we made our way up to the kitchen.
After closing the cellar door we felt the house seal shut, the air silty and still. For a time we waited there, as though there was something more to be done but we'd forgotten what it was. Standing on individual squares of the checkered linoleum like chess pieces.
"We can't leave him down there forever," Randy said.
"It's up to him." Ben started toward the back door and pushed it open an inch. "We'll take turns visiting him tomorrow. I'll come first, and we can decide on a rotation at school. When he makes a statement we can use, he can go."
"What if he doesn't?"
"He has to," Ben said, and started out.
Randy followed. I wanted nothing more than to be with them. Outside, breathing the cold-hardened air, sure of where I was. But I stayed. Not out of hesitation over leaving the coach behind. I stayed because the house wanted me to. It liked our being here, was warmed by the mischief being performed within it. I could feel the plaster ceilings and panelled walls closing toward me in a suffocating embrace, the too-long hug of a creepy uncle at the end of Thanksgiving dinner.
"Wait."
I spun around, expecting to see the unimaginable behind me. The boy.
"Fuck, man," I gasped. "We gotta go."
"Wait," Carl said.
He focused on me. A combined expression of fear and insane amusement, as though he was as likely to run crying into the night as stick his dad's gun into my mouth just to watch how my brains would slide down the wall.
"Can't you hear it?" he said, stepping closer.
"Hear what?"
"Don't lie."
And then he did raise the gun.
"Sure. I can hear it too."
"What is it?"
I surprised myself by answering instantly Honestly.
"A boy."
"What's he look like?"
"Like you. Like any of us."
"It would like you to think that."
"You've seen it?"
Carl appeared to search his memory. "Have you?"
"Yes."
"Where?"
"Upstairs. The night we found Heather. But it was only me. Me, in the mirror on the bathroom door."
"It wasn't you," Carl said, his face looming closer. "And it's not like us."
"Maybe we should—"
"It's not"
Carl backed away. He looked like he had just lost a long and exhausting argument with himself.
I took his hand. A weird thing to do. The kind of thing Carl in particular would have resisted, taken as an affront to his unshakeable Carlness. But once we were connected, he held my hand as much as I held his.
We let go only once the night opened wide around us outside. Thankful that the others had already headed home.
It should go without saying that I never mentioned the hand-holding part to anyone ever again. Until today.
* * *
[10]
By the time Randy and I walk to Ben's house from the Old London it's later than I'd thought, and my exhaustion from the evening's revelations, as well as the wine, prevents me from asking myself the one question that should have been asked before Randy disappeared around the corner of Caledonia and Church, leaving me standing on the McAuliffes' front porch, key in hand: Where am I going to sleep?
All day I'd meant to tell Mrs. McAuliffe that, while I appreciated her hospitality, I couldn't accept her invitation to stay overnight in her son's room. Her dead son's room. But whether I was distracted by my tasks as executor or couldn't bring myself to disappoint the poor woman, I hadn't gotten around to it. Now it would be plainly wrong to scuff after Randy and get my old room back at the Queen's. Betty would be expecting me for breakfast in the morning, had likely gone out earlier to buy the makings for her specialties—raisin bread French toast and fruit salad. Indeed, she may well still be awake in her darkened room, awaiting the sound of my steps up the stairs.
I open the door and swiftly close it again once I'm in. A silent oath made with myself: if I am actually going to spend the night in this place, I cannot afford even the briefest glimpse of the house across the street. In fact, it might be a better idea to not go upstairs at all, and simply crumple onto the sofa in the living room. I'm on my way toward it, checking the chairs for a blanket, when I'm stopped by a sound that comes from the kitchen.
A scratch, or the rustle of plastic. The sort of thing that could be confused with a breath from one's own chest.
From the hallway, I can see part of the kitchen. Nobody stands there, knife in hand, as I half expect. There is nothing but the play of moonlight over the cupboards, moving around the tree branches in the September photo on the calendar pinned to the wall.
I'm partway to the kitchen entrance when a chunk of shadow breaks away and tiptoes over the linoleum. A large mouse—or small rat—that, upon spotting me, races behind the fridge, its tail audibly scratching across an edge of drywall.
For a second, the silence suggests we're both working through the same thought.
What the hell was that?
The sheets in Ben's bed have been freshly washed and made even since I sat on them earlier in the day. Betty wants me to feel welcome. And I do. Or at least, I'm grateful for being able to pull the covers up to my chin so that the boy-smells of Ben's room are partially masked by fabric softener.
Sleep, I have found, is like a woman you'd like to speak to across a crowded room: the harder you wish it to come to you, the more often it turns away. So it is that I am left awake and wishing, staring up at something awful (the beam that Ben looped his rope over) in order to avoid looking at something even more awful (the Thurman house, whose roof would be clearly visible if I turned my head on the pillow). Did Ben fight this same fight himself these past years? Was he forced to consider every knot and crack in the wood that would eventually hold him thrashing in mid-air?
It is these questions that lead me into sleep. Into a dream that carries me down the stairs and across Caledonia Street to lie on the cold ground beneath the hedgerow the runs along the Thurman property line. Staring up at the side windows of the house, the glass a blackboard with fuckt finger-drawn in its dust.
It starts with a woman.
Standing up from where she had been lying on the living- room floor
out of sight below the sill. A woman who places her palms against the glass. And with this touch, I can see she is naked, and young, and not alone.
Another figure calmly approaches from behind her. Male, his identity concealed by the dark, though his form visible enough for me to see that he is naked as well. He stands there, appreciating the full display of her body. For a moment, I feel sure he is about to eat her.
His hands cup her breasts as he enters her. With a jolt, her own hands flail against the window. Fingernail screeches.
They're real.
But they're not. This is a dream. And no matter how convincing, there remains a thread that tethers their performance to the imagination. It's this understanding that allows them to continue without my trying to get in the way, or desperately swimming up toward consciousness. It is a dream, and therefore harmless.
Yet the dark figure who works away at the long-haired woman seems more than capable of harm. Harm is all there is to him. It looks like sex, this thing he's doing, but it's not. There is no explicit violence, no shouted threats—it may well be mutually voluntary what the two of them do. But for him, it has nothing to do with wanting her, or even with the pleasure of her body. He wishes only to disgrace.
I'm expecting the male figure to reveal himself to me first, but instead it's the woman. Lifting her chin and throwing her hair aside.
Not Tina Uxbridge's face, or Heather Langham's. It's Tracey Flanagan's.
Her eyes emptied of the humour they conveyed in life. But otherwise unquestionably her. Mouth open in a soundless moan. Her breasts capped by nipples turned purple in the way of freezer-burned meat.
For some reason I assume it is the coach standing behind her. It is more than an assumption—the anticipation of him showing himself to me, the ta-dah! moment that is the waking trigger to every nightmare, is so certain I am already recalling his face from memory, so that when he appears, I won't be wholly surprised. It will be the coach. Released from the cellar to carry out this perversity, this pairing of the apparently living with the probably dead.