Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

But something else altogether. A presence that had yet to let itself be known, but was aware of us. Saw endless possibilities in our being here.

Carl nudged me closer to the top of the basement stairs. I wondered if he might push me. I could feel my skin ripping on the steps' nail heads, the crack of bones loud as feled trees. At the bottom, something sharp.

Carl turned on his flashlight, and a yelow circle spiled over the stairs to colect in a pool on the hard soil of the celar floor. I expected him to start down first but he waited, looking down the stairs with the distracted expression of someone working to recolect a half-forgotten name.

His lips moved. An inaudible gulp. He turned his head and looked at me. "It's different," he said. "What? What's different?"

He gave his head a shake. Two pouches, brown and tender as used tea bags, sweled under his eyes. "You go first," he said.

And I did. My oversized shadow looming and lurching as I made my way down the narrow steps. A plumbing pipe screwed into the wal for a handrail. One that threatened to give way any time you caled upon it.

At the bottom of the stairs, another flashlight found me. As it approached it blinded me to whoever stood behind it.

"We need to make a decision."

I could see Ben only after he pointed the light up into the pipes and frayed electrical cords running through the wood slats of the ceiling.

"You need to be a part of it, Trev," he said. "Okay. What's the question?" "What do we do now?" "How about we get out of here?" "No," he said, pursing his lips.

"I don't think that's an option."

Ben started away into the celar's broad darkness. I turned to Carl behind me, but he only waved his flashlight against his side like an usher impatient to show me to my seat before the show starts.

Ben stopped. Directed the light down to the floor. How to describe the scene it revealed in the celar's far corner? I don't think I could say what it was like to take it in whole.

The elements, then:

Randy standing with the help of one hand against the stone wal, his other hand pinching wads of red snot from his nose. Blood dripping off his chin and pushing dark dots through his Human League T-shirt.

Carl staring behind us. Terrified. Not of what lay in the corner and he'd already seen, but of what he alone saw in the dark.

Blood on the floor. Not Randy's. Older-looking smears, formless as spiled paint stirred around with bedsheets, along with more recent spits and spots. Handprints, toes. Clawed trenches in the earth.

Heather Langham. Or a life-size dol of Heather Langham, her face looking away from me, knees and elbows bent at right angles the way a child draws a running stick figure. She lay on the floor, so flat it was like she was partly buried, deflated as the long-ago poisoned mice I'd once discovered behind hockey bags in the garage.

I said something. I must have, because Ben asked me to repeat it. Whatever it was I couldn't remember, then or now. So I said something else.

"We have to go."

"I told you. We can't do that now."

"The fuck we can't."

Carl's hand was on my elbow, a grip that held me within the flashlight's circle.

"Randy moved her," he said.

What's that got to do with anything ?

"Randy moved her," I repeated.

"I don't know why. But he did."

"So let's move her back."

"It's not where she is that's—"

"What are you saying? What are you saying? What are you saying?"

I believe I was shouting. And I don't know how many times I asked this before Ben stepped in front of me.

"They'l know we were here," he said.

"Who?"

"The police. After they find her. And they'l find her. Somebody wil."

"How wil they know?"

"They'l look. And dead things—they start to stink or whatever, and—"

"Not her. Us. How wil they know we were here?"

"The blood," Ben said. "Randy's blood. On her."

Past Ben's shoulder Randy was nearly doubled over, as though the mention of his name was a boot to his guts. Then I took a peek downward. Saw the new, shiny drops of crimson atop the older, brownish crust on Heather's skin.

"Our fingerprints too," Ben said, scratching his jaw. "Along with the witnesses who saw us come here."

"Nobody saw us."

"I'm not so sure about that."

"The street was empty."

"But not the houses."

I remembered us standing across from the McAuliffes' maybe a half-hour earlier and wished we were there again, outside in the night air. A wishing so strong it was a physical effort to sustain, already slipping out of my grip, like holding a medicine bal against my chest.

"Your mom," I said. "In the living-room window. Looking out between the curtains."

"I'm not sure she even saw us. But she might have."

"This is insane," I said.

"That's not stopping it from happening," Ben said.

"We have to stop it."

"How?"

"We tel."

"Tel who?"

"Our parents. The police."

"I'm not sure you're quite getting this." Ben came to stand inches from me. He looked seasick. "She was murdered."

"I can see that."

"No, you can't. Look at her."

So I did. And as I kept my eyes on Heather, Ben spoke into my ear.

"This isn't the time you threw the footbal through Mrs. Laidlaw's window. This isn't letting Randy drive your dad's car into a mailbox. She's dead. And they don't just forgive people for that. They need someone to pay. And that is going to be us, unless we make it go away."

I stepped back to get away from him, the sharp tang of his skin.

"How did Randy bleed al over her anyway?" I asked.

"I hit him," Carl said.

"You punched Randy?"

"A few times."

"Why?"

"For being so stupid. Moving her? I didn't know he'd bleed al over the place, though."

"We can clean it up."

"It's al over her," Ben said. "No matter what we do, if they look for it, they'l find it. And if they find somebody's blood other than Heather's down here—blood on her body—"

"They'l know who to look for," Carl finished.

Randy moaned. A childish, stomach-ache sound.

"Shut up," Carl told him.

Randy stood straight. I'd seen people in states of shock before, concussion cases who'd gone head first into the boards left to wander the rink's halways after the game like zombies, unable to recal their phone number or the colour of their eyes. But Randy's condition was different. He knew exactly who he was, what was happening—he knew too much, and it was crushing him.

"He told me to touch her," he said. It was something less than a whisper.

"Didn't quite catch that," Carl said, and looked as though he was about to charge at him.

"He told me to," Randy said again.

"No, I didn't! Why would I do that? Tel you to drag her over the goddamned floor?" Carl looked to us. "You think I'd be that stupid?"

"Wait. Wait," Ben said, stepping closer to Randy yet not too close, as though to avoid contagion. "Who told you to?"

Randy raised his eyes. Met mine.

"Nobody. Nothing. I'm just—everything's fucked up, that's al."

"That's true," Carl said, slapping his hands together. "Fucked up? Right on the money there, Rando."

We fel into a colective silence. Remembering to breathe and little else.

I was the first to move. Even though it was the last thing I wanted to do, I found myself lowering to kneel beside Heather Langham's body. I'm not sure what drew me closer to her, but it wasn't curiosity. The physical fact of her being dead was something I could grasp only at the edges, fleetingly, before forcing my thoughts to some smaler, more manageable detail, like the papery meeting of her grey lips, or her eyes, the lids slightly parted as though caught in a fight against sleep. Perhaps I needed confirmation that this was al as it appeared to be: she was dead, there wasn't any walking away now. Perhaps I was sorry that she had become a problem of ours, that everything that made her so vibrantly human had left her in this sour- smeling celar, and now she was, for us, a logistical puzzle, a stain.