by Andrew Pyper
There was a scratching I assumed was the soles of my boots dragging over the floor. But I wasn't moving.
To my left was the main hallway that led to the front door. And halfway along, the boy walked off, dragging his hand over the curled flaps of wallpaper.
You can taste it already, can't you?
That's when I puked. An instant torrent splashing over the linoleum and burning a hole at the back of my throat.
Takes a while to find your sea legs. But you're gonna like it, Trev. Promise.
The boy reached the base of the main stairs. Paused to place a hand on the banister.
I went after him. But what was intended as a charge of attack ended up as an off-balance lunge, palms out to catch a doorframe or coat hook to keep me from falling. Speeding faster toward the boy even as I tried to pull myself to a stop.
I expected him to disappear, but he didn't. As the distance between us shortened he only became clearer, larger. He looks like me, I thought again. And then, distinctly, nonsensically: Me with all the hope drained out.
The streetlight that came through the stained glass over the front door coloured him in murky orange and blue. It shaded the dimples at the corners of his mouth and revealed the pimples on his forehead, each casting a tiny shadow that doubled the thickness of his skin, a leather hood fitted over the real face beneath it. A face that looked nothing like the one I swung my fist toward.
The brilliant white flash of pain, flaring up my arm. My eyes open to the paint-peeled front door. My cheek against the wood I'd just delivered a punch to.
Come.
I swung around to face the boy, but he was already on his way up to the second floor, shrinking into the dark.
The party's upstairs.
Why did I follow? In a rush, dropping the flashlight as I went?
I wanted to hurt him, to kill him again and again until he stayed dead.
I wanted to see what he wanted me to see.
When the boy reached the landing I threw myself at his back, waiting to feel only the cold air of the hallway, the not-thereness of the space he occupied. Instead, I felt him.
The wool of his shirt. The heat of his body. Fever sweat.
More than this was the shattering glimpse of his pain. Wordless, thoughtless, soundless. But it let me see something. An image I recognize now as a version of that Edvard Munch painting of the figure on a pier, mouth agape, the very landscape distorted by torment. Touching the boy was like touching the inside of a scream.
The boy spilled against the far wall. Hands clasped together in his lap in a schoolboy pose. Amused by the look of horror on my face. But when a door at the end of the hall squeaked open, the grin slid away. Now he mirrored me with a horror of his own.
The boy turned his head to see. So did I.
The bedroom door stood open. Beyond it, so did the bathroom door with the mirror on the inside. But now the mirror was in pieces over the floor, glinting fragments of light over the ceiling. This must have been what we heard in the cellar. A draft that finally nudged the mirror off its hook. The sound of a child's pain only shattered glass, the grunting animal only the mirror's frame clattering to the floor.
Silence. The too-quiet of having water in your ears. I looked back to the boy, expecting the same show of fear as before. But he was already facing me. And he was smiling.
I couldn't meet his eyes. So I looked at the open bedroom door.
Go on, the boy said.
I started down the hall. When I was just short of the doorframe, I stopped. Glanced back. The boy was gone.
I closed my eyes. Stepped forward into the room.
Look!
A chest of drawers against the wall. The only solid thing in an otherwise vacant room, except for a single bed in the far corner. A mattress black with mould. Painted flowers on the cracked headboard.
The rumble of a snowplow turning onto Caledonia Street. I remember the roar of the diesel engine as the driver built up speed to make it up the hill. The idea of someone behind the wheel of the plow—a city employee who probably came to my dad to complain about the deductions on his paycheque—opened my mouth. To cry out for him to stop, wait for me to run downstairs. To ask him to take me home.
Instead, I stood and watched as the blue rotating light atop the plow played over the bedroom ceiling. A false dawn that blinked through the windows to show that it wasn't empty anymore.
The boy was there. Standing over a naked body lying face down on the bed. A young woman. White buttocks glinting. On her skin, the walls, a snaking spray of blood.
The boy raised his head to look directly at me. He looked sad. No, that's not right: his face was composed in a "sad look," but an inch past this he was hollow. He was nothing.
The boy started toward me. Two more of his long strides and I would choke on his breath. His hands squeezing the air, readying their grip.
The snowplow growled up the slope, and its blue light disappeared behind the neighbour's line of trees. It wiped away the boy, the body on the bed. Left me alone again.
I ran the length of the hall. Threw myself down the stairs, both hands riding the railings, pincushioned with slivers as I went.
Without the flashlight, I had to trust my memory of the darkness to make it down to the cellar. I remember descending in flight, a visitor to the underworld who had been discovered and now sought only to collect the living and find his way back to the light.
And there was a light. Held by the coach, who shone it at Ben on his knees before him. In the coach's other hand was the gun.
"How was it?" the coach asked without looking my way.
"Don't hurt him."
"Never mind this," he said, dismissively waving the revolver at Ben. "What did he show you? I bet it was something good."
"Ben? It's going to be okay."
"Sure, Benji. You'll go home and Mommy will tuck you in across the street from where you buried the pretty teacher, and she'll tell you how Daddy would've been proud."
"How do you know—?"
"Benji told me. Didn't you, Benji?" The coach steadied the revolver. Trained it six inches from the end of Ben's nose.
"What did you tell him, Ben?"
"Benji's not saying."
"Then you tell me."
"He pointed to that mound in the corner and said, 'That's where she is' and knelt down like a good little altar boy ready for his wafer. 'Forgive me,' he said! To me! Can you believe that? Seriously. Can you believe it?"
The coach pressed the end of the gun into Ben's cheek. It pushed his head back. Allowed the flashlight to show the broad circle over the front of Ben's jeans where he'd pissed himself.
"Let him go and I'll stay here with you."
"Trevor the Brave."
"I'll tell you what I saw upstairs."
"Tell me now."
"Let Ben go first."
"Fine. I'll stick this up both your asses."
That's when I said what I must have thought before but never spoken, or thought of speaking.
"You've never really had a friend, have you, David?"
The coach kept his eyes on me for a long time. Because the flashlight blinded me, I couldn't tell what he was thinking, if anything. But I felt that he wasn't really considering me at all. He was listening.
The flashlight grew brighter as he approached. He was going to put the gun against my head and blow it off. Then he was going to turn around and do the same thing to Ben. And then he'd walk out of here with the boy whispering ideas in his head, and he'd do as he was told.
But what he actually did was stop right in front of me. Press the handle of the revolver into my right hand, the flashlight into the left.
"I'm glad he chose you," the coach whispered.
I followed him with the light. Watched him walk, hunched, to the post we'd shackled him to. Ben rose to his feet. Blinked at the coach, then back at me, before rushing up the cellar stairs. It left me to keep the light on the coach as he slid his back down the post until he me
t the floor and stretched his arms back, offering his wrists to be tied.
"I'm tired," he said, his voice the coach's again. "Jesus H., am I tired."
There would be repeated questions among us about this later. And because Ben was already upstairs, waiting for me to join him, it was my memory that had to be counted on.
Before I left, I put the gun back in the workbench drawer. I made sure the coach didn't see me do it. Then I tied his hands tight to the post.
I swear it now as I swore it then. That's what I remember.
That's the truth.
* * *
[12]
The dawn is pink and smells of clean sheets and Play-Doh. The latter scent emanating from the human figures that Kieran had apparently made some time ago, and that his mother had refused to smush back into formless blobs. Smiling sculptures where the clock radio usually sits.
"He calls it his family," Sarah says, stroking the hair off my forehead. "But there's six of them. Aside from his dad, and my mother before she died, he's never met a blood relative, so I'm not sure who he's thinking they are." "He wants to be part of a clan." "Too late to give him that." "He's got you. It's all he needs." "Really?"
"One good person to look out for you? I'd take it." "But it doesn't stop him from wishing." "You can't stop anybody from that."
She kisses me. When my hand has trouble finding her cheek she places it against the soft skin it was aiming for.
"You can stay here," she says. "For as long as you're in town. If you want."
"What about Kieran?"
"It's not his room."
"Would it be, I don't know, confusing for him or something?"
"You can't protect kids from reality. My one piece of wisdom from my time down here in Single Mom Land."
"I might be leaving tonight. I'm not sure."
"It's an invitation, that's all."
I consider this, my hand steadied by the firm line of her jaw. I thought this was the one advantage of Parkinson's, selling Retox, withdrawing from the world's excitements: no more desire, no more crests and troughs to unsettle the ride. And now this sensible, good-looking woman—Sarah, object of my high- school lust and daydreams of death-do-us-part—is inquiring after my wants as though I had a right to them.
"Thank you," I say.
"Don't panic. I'm not asking you to be my date to the prom or anything." She taps a finger against my temple. "We're just falling forwards for a day or two, that's all."
"Falling backwards, in our case."
"Backwards, forwards," she says, rising out of the sheets. "You're saying you can tell the difference?"
I want to outline her lips with a finger but I don't trust any of them, so I remain still. As still as I can manage.
"Sarah?"
"Yeah?"
"Why are you doing this?"
"Doing what?"
"Being nice to me."
"Nice? This isn't about nice."
"I just don't want you to be here because you think you're doing me some good."
"Like a charity case?"
"Something like that."
"Okay, let's get this straight. I'm here because I want to be here. Because what we did last night felt good. And because I've thought about you a lot for a long time, since you were a boy. I'm curious about the man that boy has grown into. That's all there is to it. I'm in this for me, understand?"
My request of the night before had been honoured. I had enjoyed ten solid hours of thoughts uninterrupted by Tracey Flanagan, or the shapes that the terrible hunger that has been awakened within the Thurman house has taken. But as I watch Sarah get dressed for work, the early sun through the window tells me that all bets are now off It's how Sarah's nakedness interchanges with Tracey's, the two bodies losing their particularity, veering close to becoming a lifeless composite. This, along with the mental stop-starts that throw me from desire to fear and back again in the time it takes a bare arm to slip through the sleeve of an undershirt.
"Are you all right?" she asks when her head pops up through the collar. "You've gone all white."
"I'm nothing without my morning coffee."
"You look like you've had a bad dream or something."
"Except I'm awake."
"Yeah. Except you're awake."
I roll out of bed and do my best to pull my pants on and button my shirt without asking for help, and Sarah knows enough about male pride not to offer it.
"I need to talk to Randy," I say.
"What about?"
"We were at Jake's the night Tracey Flanagan went missing.
She was our waitress. I spoke to the police about it yesterday." "You know something?"
"No. But that hasn't stopped it from freaking me out." "Heather Langham."
My fingers spasm open. The belt they were holding clatters to the hardwood. "I don't suppose I'm the only one who's thinking about her right now."
"You'd be surprised. Even in a town this small, people forget, or half forget."
"Maybe I'm just not as good at forgetting." "It's not that. It's that you've been away." "It doesn't feel that way."
"That's sort of my point. You left after Grimshaw's last big tragedy, and now you're here for its latest one. It's like the time in between got squished together. It was another life. But for the rest of us, we've just got the one, and there's been twenty years in the same place to muddle through." "I've done my share of muddling."
"You told me. Preoccupations. But in your mind, Grimshaw is frozen in time. It's a museum."
"And I remember every inch of it."
"You feel it more than you remember it."
"Wait a second. How do you know all this better than I do?"
"I always knew it better than you did."
I bend to pick up my belt. Surprise myself by threading it through the loops on the first try.
Here's the problem. Here's why I walk through the wakening streets of Grimshaw hearing the birdsong as the nervous chatter of bad news: despite anything I might tell myself, there is a line that runs through the past, the secret history of Heather and the coach and the boy, right up to the more current events of Ben's death and Tracey Flanagan pulled out of the world. I don't know where the line started, or where it might find its end, but it's there, understandable to itself, refusing to let common sense break its hold.
Still, as I walk into the Queen's Hotel and struggle up the stairs to knock on Randy's door, I don't expect him to see this as I do. Indeed, part of me is hoping he doesn't.
"Look at you," he says, wearing only boxers and a threadbare Just Do It T-shirt. "Mr. I Got Lucky."
"You could at least make an attempt to hide your jealousy."
"Why bother?"
"Come to think of it, you always had a thing for Sarah, didn't you?"
"Of course. But I was the horniest teenager in Perth County. I had a thing for Minnie Mouse and Natalie from Facts of Life and the lady who did the weather on Channel 12."
Randy digs the sleep from his eyes. Steps closer.
"What's happened?"
"Nothing," I say.
"So what are you doing here when you should be bringing Sarah breakfast in bed?"
"Does the coffee machine in your room work?"
"It spits out brown stuff, if that's what you're asking."
A moment later I'm staring out the window, listening to the water hiss and dribble into the glass pot.
"I told you," Randy says behind me, and I turn to accept his congratulatory handshake. "I told you she was into you."
"You're acting like I just made out with somebody in a parked car."
"You did it in Sarah's car?"
"How old are you, Randy?"
"Hey now. Let's not be cruel."
Randy hands me a mug of coffee. "Did they find her?" he asks, slumping into the room's only chair. "That's it, isn't it? They found Tracey?"
"I haven't heard anything about that."
"But this has to do with her, doesn't it?"
"Yes."
"So?"
"I think she's in the house."
Randy returns the pot to the warmer, where it sizzles off the coffee that had spilled when he pulled it out. He watches it bubble for a moment as though recording the observations of a science experiment.
"What makes you say that, Trev?"
"A feeling. I've thought I've seen some things, too."
"Like what?"
"It doesn't matter."
"You're relying on your feeling, then."
"And the way there seems to be some kind of pattern. Heather and Tracey."
"Not really much of a pattern. These things just happen. I wish they didn't, but they do."
"You're forgetting Ben. He believed his watching the house was keeping something bad inside of it. And then, after he's gone, something bad happens."
Randy sits down on the edge of the bed. "I thought you got the police to go in there already."
"I don't know how hard they looked."
"How hard would they have to look?"
"You can miss places."
"You mean a secret room you can get to only if you pull on a candlestick holder and the bookshelf spins around?"
"I mean a closet, under the floorboards. The cellar."
Randy looks up at the ceiling, as though reading a message in the plaster's cracks.
"You want us to go in there," he says.
"I can't go to the police again. So that leaves us."
"Because you think Heather is inside."
"Tracey," I correct.
"Right," Randy says. "You think Tracey is in the Thurman house."
"I only know that I won't be able to live with myself if I guessed right that someone's in there and I didn't do anything about it."
My intention is to leave, but my legs aren't following orders. I'm standing by the window, arms crossed, waiting for my engine to start.
"You sound just like Ben," Randy says.
"You don't think I know that?"
"And we remember how that turned out."
"Yes. We remember," I say. "But was he wrong?"