The Guardians (10 page)

    And
yet, her eyes on me—friendly, but without invitation or promise—starts an
immediate rush of desire. Not mere interest, either. Not any casual appraisal
of a stranger's form, the kind of automatic sizing-up a man performs half a
dozen times walking down a single city block. This has nothing to do with
finding
someone attractive.
I smile uncertainly back at her and there it is: the
almost forgotten clarity of lust. The only word for it. It is lust that races
my breath into audible clicks, unlocks my knees and throws my hand out to
Randy's shoulder to keep my balance.

    "Is
that Sarah?" I ask him. Randy looks over at the woman, her eyes now
averted so that she stares into the dripping trees.

    "I
believe it is."

    "Sarah.
Good
God."

    "Look
at you," Randy says. "All moony like it's grade nine all over
again."

    "It
is
," I say, and take a deep breath. "It
is
grade nine
all over again."

    I
start over to her with my hand extended, but she doesn't take it, kissing me
once on each cheek instead.

    "They
do it twice in the city, right?" she says.

    "You've
got all the bases covered."

    She
pulls back to take a full, evaluating look at me. "So this is how my first
love has turned out."

    "Must
make you glad I wasn't your last."

    "I
don't know about that. This is Grimshaw. For women over thirty, men with a
pulse who don't smack you around are objects of desire."

    There
is a whiff of divorce about her. The leeriness that comes from wondering if
every kindness is a trick, coupled with the lonely's willingness to hear out
even the most obvious lie to the end. She's tough. But it's a toughness that
has been learned, a buffer against charm and premature hope.

    "I'm
sorry," she says, and for an absurd moment I think she's apologizing for
our breaking up in grade twelve, before I realize she's speaking of Ben.

    "Thank
you. It's good that you're here."

    She
laughs. "I live three blocks from St. Andrew's. I'd say it's good that
you're
here."

    "It's
been a long time."

    "Too
bad it took something like this to bring you back."

    "I
loved the guy."

    "I
know you did. You all did."

    "We
went through ... we were best friends."

    "I
know."

    She opens
her arms and I step into them. My hands clasped around the strong trunk of her
body, her hair a veil against the grey cold.

    "You
sure you're going to be okay?" she asks, pulling away sooner than I would
like.

    "I
must look pretty wrecked."

    "Just
a little lost, that's all."

    "Can
I tell you something, Sarah?
I am a
little lost."

    A
pained smile works at the corners of her mouth. "It's strange. Hearing you
say my name."

    "I
can say it again if you'd like."

    "No,
I'll remember just fine."

    I'm
doing it before I can stop myself, though I don't think there's much in me that
wants me to stop digging in my wallet for my card.

    "I
have to help Ben's mom with some stuff," I say, clapping the card into
Sarah's palm. "Are you in a position—that is, would you like to join me
for dinner before I go? Lunch? A shot of tequila?"

    Sarah
looks down at my card as though it bears not a name and number but the false
promise of a fortune cookie. We are paused like that—her reading and thinking,
me watching her read and think—when I see the boy.

    He is
standing behind a tombstone at the crest of a rise maybe a couple of hundred
yards away. An old maple sprouts from the hill's highest point, so that the boy
is shaded from the day's already diminished light, leaving him an outline
coloured in graphite. He stares at me in the fixed way of someone who has been
staring for some time, and I have only now caught him at it.

    "You
can't be here," I whisper.

    
But
I am,
the boy whispers back.

    "Trevor?"
Sarah says, searching.

    But
I'm already starting up the rise toward him. A walk that loosens my knees into
a wobbly jog. Clenched hands held in front of me as though prepared to wrap
themselves around the boy's neck and start choking.

    
Trevor
the Brave
,
the boy laughs
.

    My
shoes skid out from under me on the wet sod, and for a second I pitch forward,
knuckles punching off the ground to keep me up.

    When
I'm propped on my elbows and able to look again, the boy is gone.

    I
scramble up to the tombstone where he was standing. Search the descending slope
on the other side for where he might be waiting for me. And instead of the boy,
I find a man. Running into the scrub that borders the cemetery.

    "Carl!"

    I
glance back to see Randy starting up the slope.

    Behind
him, her hand to her mouth, Sarah watches as though a parachute was failing to
open. An unstoppable, fatal error taking place before her eyes.

    The Thurman
house was no different in its construction than any of the other squat,
no-nonsense residences it shared Caledonia Street with, two rows of Ontario
red-brick built at the last century's turn for the town's first doctors,
solicitors and engineers. So why did it stand out for us? What made it the one
and only haunted house in Grimshaw for our generation? Its emptiness was part
of the answer. Houses can be in poor repair, ugly and overgrown, but this makes
them merely sad, not the imagined domicile of phantoms. Vacancy is an unnatural
state for a still-habitable home, a sign of disease or threat, like a pretty
girl standing alone at a dance.

    But
it hadn't always been empty. This—knowing that real people had once occupied
its cold and barren rooms—was what lent the place its sinister aura. This, and
the implication that they had left. There was something wrong about a house
people chose not to live in. Or something wrong about the last people who did.

    Not
that I recall thinking any of this as we made our way onto the Thurman property
that night. All I was thinking wasn't a thought at all but a physical aversion
that had to be fought off with each step, along with a murmur in my head that
would have said, if it could speak aloud, something like
Turn back.
Or
It's wrong that you're here.
Or
You are about to step from the world you
know into one you don't want to know.

    In
short, I was afraid.

    I
think all of us wanted to stop, to sidle no farther along the thorny hedgerow
that shielded us from the pale streetlight, the wan half moon. If one of us had
said, "I think we should go," or merely turned and headed back toward
the street, I believe the rest would have followed. But none of us said or did
anything other than proceed along the side of the house, inching closer to the
two tall windows set too close together like crossed eyes. Both fogged with
dust, through which someone on the inside had long ago dragged a finger to
spell
fuckt
against the glass.

    I'm
not sure we discussed the best way to get in. I suppose each of us assumed
there would be a window left open or gaping cellar doors that would make it
obvious. We never thought to try the front door.

    "This
is where he went," Ben whispered, and the sound of his voice reminded us
how long we had gone without saying anything. From the time we gathered at
Carl's apartment and made the three-block walk to stand opposite the McAuliffe
house, looking into its warm interiors from which we had so often safely peered
out at the Thurman place across the way, we had travelled in silence. It was a
journey that required no more than ten minutes but felt much longer than that.
The whole time all of us walking in a defeated pack, as though escaped
prisoners who had decided freedom was too much work and were returning to our
cells.

    And
then, still recovering from the sound of Ben's words, we paused to grapple with
their meaning.

    The
coach.
This is what Ben was telling us.
It was over this ice-crusted
grass that he carried Heather Langham the night before last.

    In
the dark, the backyard was impossibly enlarged, a neglected field of weeds
poking through the snow and swaying in a breeze that rushed the clouds across
the moon. A see-saw stood in one corner of the lot, the seat of the raised end
poking up from a cluster of saplings like the head of a curious animal.
Little kids used to play on that,
I remember thinking. And then:
What
kids? When would any child have run around on this ground? Who could ever laugh
into this air?

    I
wondered about that long enough to be surprised when Carl nudged me from
behind.

    "It's
not locked," he said.

    I
followed his pointed flashlight to see Ben standing in front of the open back
door.

    We
followed him inside. All of us making our way through a mud room into the
kitchen. An old gas stove stood in one corner, the face of its clock cracked,
the time frozen at a quarter to twelve. An undoored fridge. The wallpaper a
photographic mural of a country scene: a pondside with a forest beyond, and a
single deer lowering its head to drink. But then you looked again, looked
closer. The forest was cloaked in shadow that seemed to darken as you watched.
And the deer wasn't drinking but lifting its head, startled by a cry from the
woods. Something about the composition of the picture suggested that whatever
was about to emerge out of the trees meant to hunt the deer, to spill its blood
on the grass. And that the deer knew this, was frozen by the knowledge that it
was about to die.

    We were
all gazing at the wallpaper now. All of us listening. For the thing in the
woods. The thing that was here.

    And
with our listening came a count. One, two, three, four—our lungs, our
in-and-outs of air. Along with a fifth. The idea of another's breath somewhere
within the house.

    Ben
shook his head. A gesture that signified the denial of a request, although none
of us had asked anything of him. Then he walked on, and we followed, through
the archway that opened on the main-floor hallway running the length of the
house to the front. Ben pulled open the sliding doors to the living room.

    I
hadn't expected all the things left behind. Not just by previous inhabitants—a
sofa exploding its white stuffing, amputated dining-room chairs, a rug
patterned with cypress trees—but by visitors. I must have imagined the interior
of the Thurman house to have been set-decorated in the manner of a
Transylvanian castle: cobwebs thick as shredded T-shirts, a candelabra set atop
a grand piano, rooms the size of soundstages. Instead, it was merely filthy. A
heap of brown glass shards in the fireplace where a thousand beer bottles had
been smashed. You had to watch your step for the used condoms and needles on
the floor.

    Along
with the messages on the walls. Most of it what you'd expect: the graffitied
declarations ("I LUV U PENNY!!") and invitations ("Need yur cock
SUCKED
? 232 4467 ANY time") and pride ("Guardians Rule—Elmira
Eats Poo") and slander ("Jen Yarbeck is a WHORE"). The primitive
spray- painted penises and anuses, a long-haired woman with enormous breasts
and a dialogue balloon shouting "Moo!" over her head.

    Then
the strange ones. Phrases much smaller than the others. All in lowercase.
Utterances that sought the corners and baseboards of the room, that made you,
upon finding one, look for another.

    stay
with me

                      
no such thing as an empty house

                                                                     
i walk with you

    I
don't know if the others read these or not. The next thing I remember, we were
walking away from each other. We must have spoken, though I can't recall what
was said. Or maybe we separated without discussion, knowing the quickest way to
search the house, find it vacant and get out of there was to split up. In any
case, I went to the staircase by the front door knowing I was on my own.