Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

Every day we undertook another exercise in the impossible. We slouched, listened to the Clash and tried to pretend it never happened.

We did our best to fil the widening gaps within ourselves with distractions, building bridges that might find their way to the other side. For Carl, this meant drugs.

More of the pot he'd been duling himself with even before he first went into the Thurman house, but afterward supplemented with speed, acid, coke (even then finding its way into the hinterland). He soon assumed Randy's place as our dealer, serving half the student body as wel, a job that introduced him to out-of-town distributors and mules, legitimately dangerous men we'd sometimes meet sitting at his kitchen table. To us, he looked so young compared to them as he confirmed the weight of baggies on his scales, handing over rols of cash we knew to have been earned from other kids' driveway shoveling and part-time dishwashing. We worried about him.

But I think the same things that worried us frightened us as wel, and so we watched Carl's descent from an especialy great distance.

It was Randy who seemed the least damaged among us. He went about cementing his reputation as the school's goofbal, the floppy-eared puppy who enjoyed confounding success with the ladies. He even returned to playing hockey the folowing year, doodling around the net and getting rubbed into the boards as he had before. Randy was Randy. This is what you'd say when he fel onto somebody's glass coffee table at a party or accepted a dare to run bare-assed down Huron Street on a Friday night. Randy the jester, our fool.

As for me, I committed myself to perfecting the teenage-boy cloaking device: sulenness, distance, a refusal to articulate any preferences or plans. I fel out of any clubs or hobbies, and just scuffed around. Daydreaming about al the shiny disguises money could buy.

Ben was the first of us to break, and we noticed it within days of Heather Langham's memorial service.

Whenever we'd cal him or drive by in Carl's car to pick him up he'd say he had something he had to do, a chore or family engagement that required him to stay home. After a time, he abandoned these excuses altogether and simply said he didn't feel like going outside, though he welcomed us to hang out with him in his attic bedroom, which we increasingly had to do if we wanted to see him at al. Within weeks, it took al of Ben's strength to make it to school and home again three days out of five, the other two written off as sick days with signed letters from his mom.

"Somebody has to watch," he told me once. Ben was seated in what was now his spot, a wooden, colonial- style chair with curled armrests situated so that he could look directly out the window.

"Watch what, Ben?"

"The house."

"Have you seen something?"

"Once or twice. Something in there wants out, Trev. And we can't let it."

There was Ben's we again. The trouble was, this time, he was on his own.

More and more, Ben would spend his time sitting in his chair, staring out at the Thurman house. He told us it required his ful concentration to keep its windows shut, the doors closed.

"It's like what the coach said," he told us. "There's some things you have to guard against."

"Fine," Carl said. "So why's it have to be you?"

Ben looked at the three of us. For a second, the strange intensity that had become fixed over his features was relaxed, and he managed half a smile. There was love in it. Love and madness.

"Because you're al going to leave, and I'm going to stay," he said.

For what remained of our high-school days, Ben faded from the sweetly dreamy boy we had known into a silhouette, a shadow in an attic window backlit by the forty-watt bulb in the Ken Dryden lamp by his bed. Sometimes, when I missed him but didn't want to ring the doorbel and have Mrs. McAuliffe, shivery and lost, let me in, I would stand a half block from his house and watch him up there. He rarely moved. And then, al of a sudden, he would launch forward and grip his hands to the window frame, his eyes squinting at some imagined movement within the Thurman house. How many times had he repeated this useless cal to attention over the years between then and the day he looped a rope over the support beam in his ceiling, tied the other end around his neck and stepped off one of the folding chairs we'd used for epic coffee-fueled poker games in his basement?

Even then, I wondered what particular corner of hel would turn out to be mine.

[14]

I wake up before dawn, so that it feels as though I haven't slept at al. Which perhaps I haven't. My dreams—if they were dreams—were a confusion of questions.

Carl. Tracey Flanagan's whereabouts. The boy. The missing Dictaphone. Along with Sarah, who while a source of some comfort has been tainted in my mind by merely being so close to these other mysteries. It's like those nightmares where you, say, catch your brother in the middle of taking an axe to the neighbour's dog: you know it's not true, it's impossible, it never happened. And yet, the next time you look at your brother—or the neighbour's dog-—he's been altered. A piece of him puled into the world of night thoughts.

I work myself out of bed, fighting the colected hours of stiffness. Every muscle a hardened cord that must be warmed, then stretched, then retrained.

I'm finaly standing when I see it.

A word I recognize through the hand it is written in even before I read its letters. The same tight, furious, misspeled scrawl we'd al seen drawn into the Thurman house's living- room window over two decades ago.

fuckt

A fingernailed threat cut through the dust. And written not on the outside of the glass, but on the inside.

Sleepwalking. Is this another Parkinson's symptom, one of the rarer ones to be found near the bottom of the list? How about sleepwriting?

I shuffle over to the window and wipe away the boy's graffiti with a baled-up T-shirt. When I'm done, it leaves the house across the street in greater clarity. I don't watch it for long for fear of seeing the awakened thing I can feel moving through its rooms.

To avoid any direct view of the house, I return to sit on the edge of the bed. It's stil early. The house, the town outside, everything stil. There is time to kil before Mrs. McAuliffe gets up and I can get into the shower without disturbing her, so I have another go at Ben's journal. More pages of his take on nothing.

I turn another crinkly page and come across something so unexpected I wonder if I am in fact awake at al.

A Post-it Note. On it a message dated two months before Ben died.

TREVOR—

If you have read this far, you deserve to know.

Look behind the vent under the bed. Read only if you feel the need to.

Otherwise, burn it all and don't look back.

PS. Don't go in. No matter what. Don't go in.

The grile easily puls away on the first tug. I stick my hand in and feel around the duct, sliding under the bedframe far enough to slip my arm down al the way to the elbow. I pul out a soft bundle.

It's another diary. This one bound in pliant leather, slim and easily folded into a rol, bound tight by a strip of silver Christmas ribbon. I untie it and open the cover to find not more pages of Ben's handwriting, but clippings and smudgy photocopies. No notes, no accompanying explanation.

The first is a story cut from a tea-coloured page of The Grimshaw Beacon.

GRIMSHAW YOUTH VICTIM OF GRISLY ATTACK

ELIZABETH WORTH

Born January 27, 1933. Died November 12, 1949 .

Tragedy visited the home of foster parents Paul Schantz and his wife, May, this past week when one of their charges, Elizabeth Worth, was found murdered in the home. Miss Worth was only sixteen years old.