Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

We turned on our flashlights and started down. There was a smel I hadn't detected on previous visits. A sweetness. It reminded me of the orange I had left in my lunch box over Christmas holidays, and it turned my stomach.

Our lights found the coach at the same time. His teeth, in particular. Bared in a comic exaggeration of mirth.

"Come closer," he said.

With his attention on Ben alone, I took the revolver out of the workbench drawer and came forward to aim it at the wal two feet off the coach's side. (It is harder than you'd ever guess to hold a gun steady on a man's chest. The snout keeps slipping off its target, resisting, like trying to press two magnets of the same charge together.) Now the coach watched me. Stil showing me those teeth of his, but with his head back, so a red throat glistened in my flashlight beam as wel.

Ben untied his hands. Offered the coach a ham sandwich, which he took but didn't eat. Instead, he stuffed it into the front pocket of his parka to join the last two sandwiches we'd brought him.

"You have to eat something," I told him.

"I've lost my taste for meat."

"We'l bring you something else, then."

"No, no, no," he said agreeably, in an I-don't-want- to-be-any-trouble voice. "This wil do fine."

That's when he bit Ben.

Launched forward without any change in expression or posture, not a twitch. He was sitting on the floor, rubbing his wrists. Then he was on his knees, snarling, clamping down on Ben's knuckles.

Ben screamed. Someone else screamed too. Not me, I don't think.

The blood startled me. Quick and forceful. The rhythmic pulses, like jumping up and down on a hose. How the coach swalowed it without letting go.

" Don't !"

It took my voice for him to spit out Ben's hand. Then he leaned back against the post. Crossed his arms over his chest, his teeth outlined in crimson.

Ben was already wrapping his hand in a rag from the floor.

"Didn't your mother ever tel you to keep your fingers out of the monkey cage, Benji? Or maybe that was your daddy's department. Wait. Wait! Your daddy did himself in, didn't he?"

"Shut up," Ben whispered.

"Checked out early. Benji's dear old dad."

Shut up, Ben's lips said again.

"Can I ask you something? Nobody actualy believes he drove into a hydro pole doing a hundred by accident, do they? So what do you think his problem was?

Didn't have the stomach to see how useless his only son turned out to be?"

None of us ever mentioned Ben's father's suicide. I was surprised the coach even knew about it. But then it occurred to me: Ben was the one who had told him.

He'd confessed this to the coach in the same way we had confessed our own secrets, and for the same reason. We thought the coach was the only adult we could wholy trust.

Yet the coach wasn't the coach anymore. And it was impossible to know whether what he was saying came from him or the vile other that was halfway to claiming him.

"But I suppose something good came out of your dad hitting the gas instead of the brake," the coach said to Ben. "That cute little group hug you and your fairy-boy friends had upstairs."

Ben's eyes widened. "I didn't tel you about that."

"I didn't say you did."

"Then how do you know?"

The coach grinned in a way that changed his face. Stopped it from being his.

"No more," I told him.

"But I like this game," he said, turning to me. "Now, let's see, what about you? Oh yes. Peeping Trevor."

"What are you talking about?"

"Our moonlight chicken-choker. Our wanking voyeur."

"I don't—"

"Hiding behind trees on the hospital grounds to look into lovely Heather's window at night."

"That's bulshit!"

"It's only what you told me."

"I never told you that because it isn't true."

"No? What do you think, Benji? You think Trev here likes to get his rocks off watching ladies changing into their nighties before lights out?"

Ben looked at me.

"He's lying," I said.

"Am I?" The coach's voice was no longer his, but the boy's. "Isn't it true that Randy dreams of graduating from class clown to great actor? Has he told you that?

'Like Pacino in The Godfather.' Pathetic, isn't it? Poor Handy Randy."

"That's enough," Ben said.

"Or Carl? You want to know his big secret? Oh, it's good. It's a real surprise."

Ben held out his good hand for the gun. When I gave it to him he walked up to the coach and swung the side of the revolver against his cheek.

"I don't want to hear any more of that," Ben said. "I only want to hear what you did."

Ben clicked on the tape recorder in his pocket. Started reciting the same questions he'd been asking al along.

Tell us the truth .

The coach's eyes roled white. A line of blood making its way to his jaw. Then he was smiling again like the madman he was, or we'd made him into.

Ben stepped away to lean against the wal. Fatigue bloomed pale and puffy over his face, a weakness that puled down at his arms as though lead weights were stitched to his sleeves.

"Why Heather?" I asked.

It was the first time any of us had asked this. And for the first time, the coach was prepared to answer.

"Why Heather ? Have you seen my wife?" he exclaimed, and it seemed he was about to folow with the punchline to some wel-worn joke, but instead, a second later, he was fighting tears.

"What about her?"

"Laura saved me."

"Saved you?"

"Before I came here, I'd done some things. But she stood by me. A beautiful woman. On the inside. Heather? She had it on the outside too." He threw us a conspiratorial leer. "I mean, that ass? I thought I was through wanting that. God was kind enough to give me a new start over here in old Grimshaw. Al I had to do was snuggle in, keep quiet, be good. And I was good. Then guess what? Heather Langham shows up."

"So you decided you had to kil her?"

"Kil her?" Those teeth again. "No. I decided I had to, I realy needed to . . . wel, let's not be crude. Let's just say that the first night after she introduces herself to al the dried mushrooms in the teachers' lounge, I'm dreaming of her. Bad, bad dreams."

"Then what?"

"Then I play Harmless Married Guy. Share some of my favourite books with her, ask what brought her to the noble profession of teaching, et cetera. 'I'm a good listener,' said I. 'We have so much in common!' said she. I knew it was over when she told me al she needed to be happy in Grimshaw was a friend. Wel, that's al I needed too!"

"You brought her here."

"My contribution was the flask of Jack Daniel's out in my car. Loosened things up considerably. 'Where do we go now?' says I. 'I know a place,' says she. A haunted house, she caled it. I just knew it as that derelict place where some of the guys on the team went to drink beer. Turns out she was more right than I was."

I remember searching for something hurtful to say to him. Something as disemboweling as his mention of Ben's dad. A way of showing how furious I was at him for talking about Heather this way.

Show him, the boy said but didn't say. Wake him up.

Before I knew what I was doing, the toe of my boot met with the coach's mouth. And it did wake him up. Eyes aflutter with liquid blinks. Spitting out blood pinked with mucus.

"You can't blame a house for what you did!"

When he focused on me, he seemed pleased that I was here. That it had been my boot.

"It was you," I said. "Not a place, not a building. It was you."

"You're right. Quite right, Trevor," now the proper English teacher, patiently expanding on a student's rudimentary observation. "Al this place gives us is a •licence to act. It's a stage, but a bare one. A theatre without sets, without a script. And most important, without an audience!"