Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

We folowed him inside. Al 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 walpaper 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 spil its blood on the grass. And that the deer knew this, was frozen by the knowledge that it was about to die.

We were al gazing at the walpaper now. Al 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 folowed, through the archway that opened on the main-floor halway running the length of the house to the front. Ben puled open the sliding doors to the living room.

I hadn't expected al 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 wals. 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 baloon shouting "Moo!" over her head.

Then the strange ones. Phrases much smaler than the others. Al 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 recal 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.

At the landing, I looked back. There was a railing over which the foyer floor lay fifteen feet below, a bulb hanging on a wire where some more elaborate fixture would once have hung. I squinted down the halway, a spine with two doorways on each side that, if configured the same way as the second floor in my house (as it probably was, this house so much like an unloved version of the one in which I lived), opened onto three bedrooms and a bathroom at the end.

I started toward the first door on the left with shuffling, elderly steps. It had been easy for me to take the stairs up, but now my body fought against moving. My shoes tearing the old newspapers strewn over the floorboards, a carpet of Falklands War headlines and ads for used-car lots, including Randy's dad's place (Kum Kwick to Krazy Kevin's!), his clown nose and lunatic grin floating over the rows of Plymouths.

A comics page got stuck to my sole. I bent to peel it off, wondering, with a turn in my stomach, what could be gummy enough to act as glue on the floor of this place, and when I raised my eyes again he was there.

A boy.

Eyes fixed on me. I recal little else about his appearance other than the impression that we were the same age, nearly men but not quite. He could have been Carl, or Randy, or Ben—there was a milisecond flash when I assumed it was one of them—but there was a threat in the way he cocked his head that I'd never seen in them, or in anyone.

The boy said nothing. I remember no detail of his face that could be described as an expression, the outline of his body stil, ungesturing. So what was it that prevented me from thinking of him as a fuly living boy? How could I tel he wanted to show me something?

I remember attempting to speak to him, though what I intended to say I have no idea now. What I do remember is the panic, the claustrophobia of being bound and hooded. Buried alive.

Oh yes , the boy said but didn't say . You're going to like this .

A wet click of breath in my throat and he was gone. Not with a puff of smoke, nothing uncanny or ghostly. Simply gone in the way a thing confirms it was never there at al.

I registered the squeak a moment later. The grind of a rusty hinge.

This was what made the boy disappear, what proved he was a misreading of reality. The bathroom door at the end of the hal had been wrenched open, a ful-length mirror screwed to the inside. And now, with a nudge of draft, the door moved an inch, shifting the angle of the mirror's reflection. Removing me from view.

There was the explanation for what I'd seen, rational, conclusive. It was me. Me, summoning a dark twin to return my gaze.

But even as I continued down the hal with calmed breaths, I didn't believe it. That wasn't me. A line of thinking I wrestled down but couldn't completely silence.

You know it wasn't.

It strikes me as strange now—and it must have then as wel—but once the boy could no longer be seen, the feelings he brought with him could no longer be felt either. I was certain that Heather Langham was not going to be discovered tied to the radiator in any of the bedrooms I leaned into, or slumped in the shower stal whose glass door I swung open to a party of skittering roaches. It smeled bad up here, but only in the way of smels I had already encountered, of piss and damp and long-discarded fast-food bags.

I had puled the bathroom door closed and was leaning against it, suddenly winded, when I saw someone standing where I had been when I noticed the boy.

Another figure of dimensions similar to my own drawn in a sharper outline of darkness.

Carl took a step closer. A dim veil of moonlight glazing his face.

"Randy found something," he said.

We descended to the main floor in silence, and I noticed that the house was silent too. Had the others already left? Carl said Randy had found something, but I remember doubting this. Not only because the house was so quiet it seemed impossible that three other breathing, heart-pounding boys could stil be within it but also because of the lingering sense of change that folowed the appearance of the boy. The world had been altered now that I'd seen him—the mirror me that wasn't me—

and the solid grip I'd had on my perceptions before tonight was something I thought might never return. I had the idea that I could no longer count on anything as true anymore, every observation from here on in holding the potential of trickery. Which included my friends. Included Carl.

He led me down the front hal into the kitchen. Only once we came to stand side by side on the bubbled linoleum, listening to the stilness as though awaiting whispered instruction, did I change my mind about the house's vacancy. There was something in here with us. Not Randy or what he'd discovered. Not even the boy.