Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

Barry Tate and his roly-poly partner step out of the car and stand on the sidewalk. For a time they stare up at the Thurman house with their hands on their hips, speaking to each other in words I can't make out, though their tone seems doubtful, as if wondering aloud if they have come to the right address.

Barry makes his way to the front door first, tries the handle and, finding it locked, starts around toward the rear, his partner folowing. After five minutes, they have yet to reappear.

I slip down and let my back rest against the wal. Open Ben's diary again. For another dozen pages there is his continued notation of wasted hours and days. Over time, it becomes so repetitious I play the game of scanning for the flavours of soups he heats for his lunches. A prisoner's menu of split peas, minestrones and chicken noodles.

Among the banal details, there are occasional episodes of Ben making sure that none entered the house. Shouting down at kids making bets over who had the guts to open the front door and place both feet over the threshold. Threatening to phone their parents, pretending he knew their names. Another entry told of a "half-drunk girl" being led by her boyfriend around the side of the house at night. Ben rushed downstairs, ran across the street to the back door in time to haul the girl out of the kitchen, teling her she didn't know how bad a place it was, how much danger she was in just being there. She ran away crying, whereupon the boyfriend suckerpunched Ben in the mouth.

Sometimes, when older high-schoolers had slipped inside, Ben caled the cops. The diary would note how many trespassers were hustled out by the officers, who seemed to arrive later and later with each report Ben caled in; the police would have let the Thurman house go unmonitored were it not for the McAuliffe head case who was conducting a permanent stakeout on it. Not that Ben cared what they thought. His duty was to keep the empty house empty.

Then there's a longer entry. June 22, 2002. The date underlined in red ink.

Something today.

Just after noon the door handle turned. I have seen it rattle before. But this time it turned: a slow circle, like the person doing the turning was figuring out how it worked. Or didn't want to be seen doing it.

Then the door swung open. It was Heather.

Blinded by the daylight, terrified. Filthy. No clothes.

Then the door slammed shut again. Slammed. If anyone had been listening—anyone other than me—they would have heard the wood cracking the frame.

The click of the lock . . .

Voices from the street pul me from the page. It's Barry Tate and his partner, the former finishing up an anecdote that brings a chortle from the latter's chest. Before they reach the cruiser Barry looks up to the window. He doesn't seem surprised to see me here, my chin resting on the sil. In fact he waves. And I wave back.

"Nothing," he says, or at least shapes his mouth around the word without speaking it. Then he shrugs.

I watch the two of them take their time getting into the car, enjoying being out of the office. Even once the engine's started they linger, taking notes. Then, having run out of excuses to let the clock run on, Barry shifts into drive, rols up Caledonia and out of sight.

I'm watching the front door by coincidence. Or I'm watching it because I was directed to, just as Ben was on the twenty- second of June, 2002. Either way, within a heartbeat of Barry Tate's cruiser roling away, the doorknob turns.

The motion is tentative. And there is part of me even in this moment that recognizes that this is merely an echo of Ben's halucination, my own imagining of an earlier imagining. It's why I let the doorknob turn a ful circle without looking away.

A click.

And then, before I can turn away, the door swings open.

A young woman. Naked and shaking, her hair a nest of sweat- glued clumps. She tries to run, to attach the motion of puling the door to her first step of escape into the daylight, but her limbs are too unsteady, and she wavers dizzily on the threshold.

It isn't Heather. It's the woman from the photos Randy showed me, the one I tried not to let myself see, to memorize, though I was too late in that. Just as I am too late to close my eyes against the dirt-blackened hands that come down on Tracey's shoulders and pul her back into the house before the door slams shut.

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 11

The morning after we left the coach overnight in the Thurman house, we waited for Ben at our table in the cafeteria, drinking the watery hot chocolate spat out of a machine that made even worse tea and chicken soup. There was little talk. We were boys of an age when sleep came easy, and were new to the emptiness that folowed a night spent troubled and awake.

When we saw Ben through the window making his way across the footbal field we knew that he had found no more sleep than the rest of us, and that his visit to the coach had not gone wel. He looked like he was reprising his role as one of Grimshaw's founding fathers in the annual school play: stooped, bent at the knees, arms rigid at his sides.

"You think he's dead?" Randy asked, and for a moment I thought the question concerned Ben himself. But of course Randy was asking about the coach. Whether he had survived the night's cold.

And then, as Ben entered the cafeteria and started our way, a second interpretation of Randy's question arrived. Had Ben going alone to see the coach had a purpose other than eliciting a confession? Was he now the coach's kiler, just as the coach had been Heather Langham's?

Ben sat, reached for my hot chocolate. As he swalowed, he raised his brow as though impressed by its wretchedness.

"We should bring the coach some of this," he said. "If he figures it's the only breakfast he's going to get, he'd say anything."

It took what felt like five ful minutes before any of us realized Ben had just told a joke.

Eventualy, Ben told us he'd gone into the house just before dawn. The coach was "okay, physicaly." He wasn't admitting to any crimes, though. In fact, the only things he was saying weren't making much sense at al.

"How do you mean?" I asked.

"I don't know. It might be an act."

"Is he pissed off?"

"More like he's scared."

Ben noticed some other kids, a bunch of grade niners, looking our way. He directed a stare back at them so intense it made them scuttle off to mind their own business.

"He kept saying he'd had an interesting conversation last night. Then he's looking over his shoulder, like I'm not even there."

"What else?"

Ben thought for a moment. "He said we would have to be guardians."

"We are."

"I don't think he meant the team. He kind of switched personalities again—not a scared kid anymore, but himself, more or less. He got, I don't know, fatherly on me."

"What'd he say?"

"Some bulshit."

"What bulshit?"

'"You have to keep watch.'"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You're asking me?"

"Sounds like he's losing it," Randy said.

"It's pretty cold in there," I said. "Maybe he's hypothermic."

"Or possessed," Randy said, and mock-barfed, Linda Blair-style.

Carl was the only one who laughed. A sharp snort that reminded us he was there.

"Don't you get it?" he said. "It's a warning."

"About what?"

Carl looked around the table. He's going to tel them, I thought. He's going to say there's a boy in the house who can talk inside your head if you give him half a chance.

"Us," he said. "He's saying we have to guard against ourselves."

Now it was Randy's turn to snort. "Ooooh. That's deep, Carl. You've just blown my mind."

Carl just kept grinning. Trying to look like he was stil able to kid around with Randy as he always had. Sitting there, aware of our eyes on him, we saw how our hockey brawler, our square-jawed tough who was alone among us in being able to fool liquor store clerks about his age, had lost twenty pounds overnight. Chiled and frail, hugging his arms across his chest like one of the wheelchaired ladies who lined the hals of Cedarfield Seniors Home.