Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

Come.

I swung around to face the boy, but he was already on his way up to the second floor, shrinking into the dark.

The party's upstairs.

Why did I folow? In a rush, dropping the flashlight as I went?

I wanted to hurt him, to kil him again and again until he stayed dead.

I wanted to see what he wanted me to see.

When the boy reached the landing I threw myself at his back, waiting to feel only the cold air of the halway, the not-thereness of the space he occupied. Instead, I felt him.

The wool of his shirt. The heat of his body. Fever sweat.

More than this was the shattering glimpse of his pain. Wordless, thoughtless, soundless. But it let me see something. An image I recognize now as a version of that Edvard Munch painting of the figure on a pier, mouth agape, the very landscape distorted by torment. Touching the boy was like touching the inside of a scream.

The boy spiled against the far wal. Hands clasped together in his lap in a schoolboy pose. Amused by the look of horror on my face. But when a door at the end of the hal squeaked open, the grin slid away. Now he mirrored me with a horror of his own.

The boy turned his head to see. So did I.

The bedroom door stood open. Beyond it, so did the bathroom door with the mirror on the inside. But now the mirror was in pieces over the floor, glinting fragments of light over the ceiling. This must have been what we heard in the celar. A draft that finaly nudged the mirror off its hook. The sound of a child's pain only shattered glass, the grunting animal only the mirror's frame clattering to the floor.

Silence. The too-quiet of having water in your ears. I looked back to the boy, expecting the same show of fear as before. But he was already facing me. And he was smiling.

I couldn't meet his eyes. So I looked at the open bedroom door.

Go on, the boy said.

I started down the hal. When I was just short of the doorframe, I stopped. Glanced back. The boy was gone.

I closed my eyes. Stepped forward into the room.

Look !

A chest of drawers against the wal. The only solid thing in an otherwise vacant room, except for a single bed in the far corner. A mattress black with mould. Painted flowers on the cracked headboard.

The rumble of a snowplow turning onto Caledonia Street. I remember the roar of the diesel engine as the driver built up speed to make it up the hil. The idea of someone behind the wheel of the plow—a city employee who probably came to my dad to complain about the deductions on his paycheque—opened my mouth. To cry out for him to stop, wait for me to run downstairs. To ask him to take me home.

Instead, I stood and watched as the blue rotating light atop the plow played over the bedroom ceiling. A false dawn that blinked through the windows to show that it wasn't empty anymore.

The boy was there. Standing over a naked body lying face down on the bed. A young woman. White buttocks glinting. On her skin, the wals, a snaking spray of blood.

The boy raised his head to look directly at me. He looked sad. No, that's not right: his face was composed in a "sad look," but an inch past this he was holow. He was nothing.

The boy started toward me. Two more of his long strides and I would choke on his breath. His hands squeezing the air, readying their grip.

The snowplow growled up the slope, and its blue light disappeared behind the neighbour's line of trees. It wiped away the boy, the body on the bed. Left me alone again.

I ran the length of the hal. Threw myself down the stairs, both hands riding the railings, pincushioned with slivers as I went.

Without the flashlight, I had to trust my memory of the darkness to make it down to the celar. I remember descending in flight, a visitor to the underworld who had been discovered and now sought only to colect the living and find his way back to the light.

And there was a light. Held by the coach, who shone it at Ben on his knees before him. In the coach's other hand was the gun.

"How was it?" the coach asked without looking my way.

"Don't hurt him."

"Never mind this," he said, dismissively waving the revolver at Ben. "What did he show you? I bet it was something good."

"Ben? It's going to be okay."

"Sure, Benji. You'l go home and Mommy wil tuck you in across the street from where you buried the pretty teacher, and she'l tel you how Daddy would've been proud."

"How do you know—?"

"Benji told me. Didn't you, Benji?" The coach steadied the revolver. Trained it six inches from the end of Ben's nose.

"What did you tel him, Ben?"

"Benji's not saying."

"Then you tel me."

"He pointed to that mound in the corner and said, 'That's where she is' and knelt down like a good little altar boy ready for his wafer. 'Forgive me,' he said! To me!

Can you believe that? Seriously. Can you believe it?"

The coach pressed the end of the gun into Ben's cheek. It pushed his head back. Alowed the flashlight to show the broad circle over the front of Ben's jeans where he'd pissed himself.

"Let him go and I'l stay here with you."

"Trevor the Brave."

"I'l tel you what I saw upstairs."

"Tel me now."

"Let Ben go first."

"Fine. I'l stick this up both your asses."

That's when I said what I must have thought before but never spoken, or thought of speaking.

"You've never realy had a friend, have you, David?"

The coach kept his eyes on me for a long time. Because the flashlight blinded me, I couldn't tel what he was thinking, if anything. But I felt that he wasn't realy considering me at al. He was listening.

The flashlight grew brighter as he approached. He was going to put the gun against my head and blow it off. Then he was going to turn around and do the same thing to Ben. And then he'd walk out of here with the boy whispering ideas in his head, and he'd do as he was told.

But what he actualy did was stop right in front of me. Press the handle of the revolver into my right hand, the flashlight into the left.

"I'm glad he chose you," the coach whispered.

I folowed him with the light. Watched him walk, hunched, to the post we'd shackled him to. Ben rose to his feet. Blinked at the coach, then back at me, before rushing up the celar stairs. It left me to keep the light on the coach as he slid his back down the post until he met the floor and stretched his arms back, offering his wrists to be tied.

"I'm tired," he said, his voice the coach's again. "Jesus H., am I tired."

There would be repeated questions among us about this later. And because Ben was already upstairs, waiting for me to join him, it was my memory that had to be counted on.

Before I left, I put the gun back in the workbench drawer. I made sure the coach didn't see me do it. Then I tied his hands tight to the post.

I swear it now as I swore it then. That's what I remember.

That's the truth.

[12]

The dawn is pink and smels of clean sheets and Play-Doh. The latter scent emanating from the human figures that Kieran had apparently made some time ago, and that his mother had refused to smush back into formless blobs. Smiling sculptures where the clock radio usualy sits.

"He cals it his family," Sarah says, stroking the hair off my forehead. "But there's six of them. Aside from his dad, and my mother before she died, he's never met a blood relative, so I'm not sure who he's thinking they are." "He wants to be part of a clan." "Too late to give him that." "He's got you. It's al he needs." "Realy?"

"One good person to look out for you? I'd take it." "But it doesn't stop him from wishing." "You can't stop anybody from that."

She kisses me. When my hand has trouble finding her cheek she places it against the soft skin it was aiming for.