Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

I crawled out from under the hedgerow. Rose to my feet, started sidestepping back toward the sidewalk.

That was the right thing to do. Here's the wrong:

I looked back at the window. And saw a woman's

face come to the glass.

I fel back against the branches. If the hedge hadn't been there I would have colapsed, but it held me up, pinned to its nettles like a plastic bag blown against a fence.

When I looked at the window again, there was only an orb of streetlight. And the fuckt. Though wasn't the t slightly smudged from the moment before?

I started toward the back of the house, adding details to the face I'd seen. A woman. That was al I had to start with. Along with the idea that she was in desperate fear. And that she was naked. That she wasn't alone.

Tina Uxbridge.

I'd been thinking of her ever since Todd had come by our table in the cafeteria. In the back of my mind I'd been flipping through my (partly made-up) mental snapshots of Tina hip-swinging down the school's halways, Tina breastfeeding, Tina and Todd and the different ways they might have gone about conceiving their daughter. The truth is, I'd pictured her, dweled on her, before. Because she was pretty and I was sixteen. Because I was a sixteen-year-old boy.

I opened the back door.

For a time I stood in the kitchen, listening. I think I half expected to hear the coach's voice, cackling my name from the celar or pleading for release. The house's quiet should have brought relief, but didn't. I was waiting and listening. Which meant something else was too.

And then it told me it was.

We're waiting.

The faintest whisper, no louder than a midge's wings.

I didn't go down to the celar to check on the coach. He might have escaped, might have been dead, I didn't care. His fate meant nothing to me as I shuffled down the hal and came to stand just inside the living room. It was the woman I needed to see.

There was the fuckt on the window. The smudged t.

The house had wanted me to watch. And al there was to see was the way the shadow of the backlit tree limbs tried to nudge a beer can over the rug. Yet I stayed.

Wishing for the woman or any other dead thing not to appear, and impatient for it at the same time.

Within what was probably less than three minutes, I slid from the heights of fear to boredom. This is what a haunted house was: a place where nothing happens, so you have to make something up. It's the same impulse that makes us tel lies to a stranger sitting next to us on a plane, or pushes the planchette over a Ouija board to make it spel your dead cousin's name.

Yet I stayed. I told myself this was foolishness, and knew that it was.

The light outside the back deck of the house next door flicked on. It barely added any ilumination to the room, but it was enough to change its chemistry, to hasten the draft that swirled through its space. Details— stray threads over the length of the sofa's piping, moisture stains seeping through the walpaper—found more particular focus. And the messages on the wals, stay with me. i walk with you. It was enough to bring the fear back.

Along with a formless shadow moving over the floor. One that, over the course of seconds, cohered into a human form lying on the rug. "Tina?"

The shadow rose to its feet. Went to the window I'd first seen her face in. Performed the same act of pressing close to the glass, looking out. Except this time she turned.

Her eyes a pair of glistening buttons. The glint of froth on her lips. Heather.

I must have turned away. I must have found the back door, shouldered out into the cold.

But even this was already a memory. I was past Ben's house and at the top of the Caledonia Street hil, breathless but stil running, before I could say I'd seen anything at al.

When I made it home my mother had two phone messages for me. One from Ben, the other from Sarah.

I returned Ben's cal first. He asked how my session with the coach went, if I remembered to turn on the tape recorder while talking with him, if he seemed any closer to confessing. It was a question I'd prepared an answer to.

On the rest of the walk home, part of me argued that I should tel Ben what I'd seen in the window, that what was going on was out of our control, that we had awakened some long-slumbering presence with what we'd done and it would win any fight we might attempt to wage on it. It might not kil us if we went into the Thurman house again, but we wouldn't come out wholy alive either. In the end, though, I merely lied. "The bastard's stil not saying anything." "Okay . . . okay. Okay," he said. "After the game. You and me."

I caled Sarah next. Faked a girl's voice and squeaked "Wrong number" when her dad answered.

Sarah sat in the stands in her usual spot opposite the teams' benches. Offered me a good-luck wave during the pre-game warm-up, though I didn't look her way.

Didn't wave back.

When I came out of the dressing room for the start of the first period, she was gone.

We lost. Coachless, tentative, winded. 5-1. Though even that makes it sound closer than it was.

I scored our only goal. A Trev classic: an in-the-crease flip over their falen goalie's shoulder, my stick a spatula tossing a rubber burger into the net. Not pretty, but it counted.

The rest of the game is out of memory's reach now. I must have looked down the bench and locked eyes with Carl, or Randy, or Ben, but whatever their faces revealed was something I failed to take with me. It felt only like the end of things.

Which, in a sense, it was. That night's loss turned out to be the final game of the Guardians' season. As for me, I never put skates on again.

[11]

It takes some time—a minute? a half-hour?—to fuly convince myself that I had not just seen a naked Tracey Flanagan attempting to escape out the front door of the Thurman house. So what had I seen? A reimagining of what I'd read in Ben's diary, surely, except for him it was Heather—a long-dead Heather Langham—who had been puled back into the dark. It was nothing more than the power of suggestion.

Stil, I had to remind myself that Officer Barry Tate and his partner had just searched the place and found nothing. That what Ben had claimed to see was an impossibility. That halucinations are on my Parkinson's symptom list ("Not long, but often quite weird," one doctor warned).

Working my way through these arguments prevents me from caling the police. I don't do anything but have a shower, get dressed and cal a taxi to take me over to Sarah's.

But that's not to say that I don't return every five minutes or so to the image of Tracey Flanagan opening the Thurman house's front door. Or that I don't alow myself to wonder: Whose hands puled her back?

Sarah lives in a boxy, aluminum-sided place out by the fairgrounds, a structure shaped much like the house tokens in Monopoly. When I give the cab driver the address he cals it "the new part of town," which is how it was regarded even when I was growing up, even though al the properties were built in a rush immediately after the war. Aside from a few stabs at additions—a blown-out kitchen here, a carport there—it's a neighbourhood that looks about the same now as it must have in the late '40s, and serving the same purpose too: entry-level homes for the blue-colared, the secretarial and, more recently, the refugees of divorce.

Sarah's is the nicest on its block. Perennials lining the front walkway, shutters freshly painted green, a vase of cut flowers displayed in the living-room window. I wonder, as I haul myself out of the cab, if they've been put there to welcome me. Me, as razor-burned and over-cologned as a teenager, and about as nervous too.

Is this, as Randy had asked, an actual date? I'm surprised, clearing my throat and knocking at the door, how much I want it to be. Some nostalgic simulation of courtship might be just the thing, sweet and reassuring and laced with the suspense that comes with wondering if there wil be a goodnight kiss at the end. I'm thinking the question wil be answered by Sarah's choice of wardrobe, and I am hoping, as the door opens, for some show of leg or colarbone. But instead I am met by a kid.