Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

He laughed. Not the coach's laugh. Not a living sound at al.

"You hurt her here because you could? Is that it?"

"Here? Here?" The coach swung his head around, peering into every corner. "There's no here here!"

"What did you do?"

We'd asked him this perhaps a hundred times since he slipped into Carl's Ford half a block from his house. But now the coach looked up at me as though it was a fresh and intriguing query.

"What did I do?"

"Just tel us and it'l be over."

"You don't get to decide that."

"We'l let you go."

"Every time you come down here, I leave when you go, piece by piece," he said, his voice flattening. "I'l get out whether you open the door for me or not."

"Who are you?"

"I'm the coach."

"You were him. Who are you now?"

"Whoever I need to be."

"To do what?"

"Keep you here."

I took the gun out of Ben's hand. I must have, because there it was, pointed at the coach's forehead.

"I'd like to know what you did to Heather. Right now."

"I brought her here to do what al of you would have liked to do," he said, the voice dead as a dial tone. "To fuck her pretty pink behind."

Pretty. The word my father had used. More than this, it was like he knew that it was.

"Where?"

"In the living room. Standing up, because she thought the carpet was too dirty."

"Were you alone?"

"Alone as two people can be. Our coitus was interruptus, though. Something heavy faling onto the floor above us. And maybe a voice too. No ... a breath. Who cared what it was?"

"You didn't go upstairs to check?"

"I did. Nervous Heather asked me to make sure nothing was amiss. So up I went. Nobody there. But by the time I came back down, she was gone. I figured she'd changed her mind and left. On my way out, though, I noticed the door to the celar was open, and it definitely wasn't when we first came in. Down I go. And there's Heather. Had time to put her panties on, but that's about al."

The coach grinned fondly now, shook his head as though at an amusing turn in a practised anecdote.

"'Hey, dol,' I said. Never caled a woman that before. But she looked like a dol. Those big glass eyes staring at me but not seeing anything. I didn't want to touch her. She was soiled. I was having a good old time with pretty Heather, and now she disgusted me. Trembling lips, chin al folded up. So scared she was sickening.

These were the kind of thoughts I had. But they weren't my thoughts."

"Whose were they?"

The coach rubbed his chin in a stage gesture of deep thought.

"You're both men, give or take, right? You know those naughty little whispers that you hear al the time, but that you're able to hold down, hold in place? Wel, those naughty whispers became al I could hear."

"And they told you to bash her head in."

"They told me nothing realy counted. Not here."

"So?"

"There was a piece of wood on the ground. I didn't notice it before. A long piece of wood with a screw in it. I think Heather knew what I was going to do before I did."

"You hit her."

"Once. Maybe twice."

"It was enough to kil her."

"No, it wasn't. Because the next thing I knew—next thing I saw—the wood was on the ground and Heather was alive."

"How did you know?"

"Because she was speaking."

"What did she say?"

" I have to go home. I have to go home. I have to go home ."

"Then?"

"I hit her again."

At that, the coach glanced over to the spot we'd buried her. It must have been a lucky guess, because you couldn't tel what we'd done just by looking. Unless you could hear her struggling to get out from beneath the soil. For a moment, maybe we al heard it.

"It's like I told Benji. You have to guard against places like this. Against people like me," he said, and turned away from Heather's grave to face us. He was, as far as I could tel, the real coach again. "That's what's realy dangerous, what'l surprise you. The things that have nothing inside."

A noise from upstairs. Heavy thuds, as though someone was kicking the mud off his shoes. I remember the coach closing his eyes, chin raised, as though in anticipation of the first strains of a musical performance.

It is impossible to describe what came next.

Not music. Music's opposite. A noise in which I could discern the slide of a heavy piece of furniture slamming up against a doorframe. An animal grunt. A child's howl of pain.

Then silence again. The celar's perfect, entombed darkness.

"Nobody knows we're here," I said.

The coach grinned. "Too late for that."

"Keep him quiet," I said to Ben. "I'l go up and see."

I started away, but Ben's flashlight spiled through my legs. When I turned, he was right behind me.

"Don't go."

"I'm not leaving you behind, Ben. I'm just going to see what's up there."

"Maybe we should leave."

"We wil."

"So let's do it now."

"Not yet."

"Why?"

And then I said something I don't remember thinking, though once it was past my lips it had the familiarity of a long-held belief.

"Because there might be something in here we can't let out."

I started up the celar stairs, the flashlight held at arm's length in front of me as though its beam was a rope I clung to, puling me higher. Ahead, the door I thought we'd closed was ajar, a half-foot band of moonlight running from the kitchen floor up the doorframe to the ceiling. It felt like it had taken me a ful minute—and maybe it had—to travel the thirty feet from where I'd stood with Ben to where I was now, partway up the narrow steps. I was being puled higher by the light, and then I wasn't.

This way, the voice said.

A darkness swept across the moonlit gap.

A blink of movement so swift it took shape as a human figure in my mind only after it was gone.

I leapt up the remaining steps in two strides, elbowed the door wide. The kitchen was empty. But there was the smel the boy left behind. Something mossy and fungal, like the first breath that came up from the wel behind my parents' cabin when we lifted its metal seal at the beginning of the season.

There was a scratching I assumed was the soles of my boots dragging over the floor. But I wasn't moving.

To my left was the main halway that led to the front door. And halfway along, the boy walked off, dragging his hand over the curled flaps of walpaper.

You can taste it already, can't you ?

That's when I puked. An instant torrent splashing over the linoleum and burning a hole at the back of my throat.

Takes a while to find your sea legs. But you're gonna like it, Trev. Promise .

The boy reached the base of the main stairs. Paused to place a hand on the banister.

I went after him. But what was intended as a charge of attack ended up as an off-balance lunge, palms out to catch a doorframe or coat hook to keep me from faling. Speeding faster toward the boy even as I tried to pul myself to a stop.

I expected him to disappear, but he didn't. As the distance between us shortened he only became clearer, larger. He looks like me, I thought again. And then, distinctly, nonsensicaly: Me with all the hope drained out.

The streetlight that came through the stained glass over the front door coloured him in murky orange and blue. It shaded the dimples at the corners of his mouth and revealed the pimples on his forehead, each casting a tiny shadow that doubled the thickness of his skin, a leather hood fitted over the real face beneath it. A face that looked nothing like the one I swung my fist toward.

The briliant white flash of pain, flaring up my arm. My eyes open to the paint-peeled front door. My cheek against the wood I'd just delivered a punch to.