Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

So I pul myself up, my mid-air kicks doing as much work as the wobbly arms fighting to lift me over the edge. And before even the first ful inhalation that might tel me if there's something living or otherwise within, I scramble inside.

A crawlspace. Where we kept the Monopoly and the slide projector in our house, but here appears to be empty. A two- foot-high gap that runs the ful length of the kitchen, though it might be even bigger than this, as I can't see where it ends in the dark. It forces me to feel for whatever might be here. My hands stroking the cushions of insulation laid over the rib cage of two- by-fours that, each time I touch them, make me think of hair.

I'm not good in smal spaces at the best of times. But this is worse than any discomfort I felt in the snow fort tunnels of my youth or the sweats that come upon entering crowded elevators. This is a coffin. It brings a new panic to every movement forward. Two wars are now raging inside me, both hopeless: one forcing my knees and hands to take the next prod farther into the dark, the other holding back the scream in my throat.

And now the arrival of a thought that instantly clouds over even these struggles. The growing certainty that, even if there's nothing to be found, I'm never getting out of here. This is a trap. Even as this occurs to me I think I can hear the crawlspace door being eased shut, a weight tugging it firmly into place.

The scratching again. In here. Close enough that I hear the slivers tear away from the wood.

Back. I've got to go back now. And I'm starting my wriggling retreat, roling to the side, fighting to figure how to make my elbows do the opposite of what brought me this far, when I find the bones.

Up close, they are visible even in the near-darkness. I look over the remains and, before the spasm of revulsion, try to summon the names of the parts once learned for biology class. The flaring hips—that's the pelvis, right? The shoulder blades sound like a kitchen utensil. The scapula. But the shin?

Bones aren't white. This is my next thought. They're not the ivory of high-school skeletons but yelow-stained and black- creviced as smokers' teeth.

Al at once, I'm throwing up the Old London's prime rib onto the boards.

Because the brief veil of shock has been puled away. And because I realize the bones are Roy's.

I never realy believed he ran away as it said in the news clippings. Some part of me couldn't swalow what old Paul Schantz told the reporter for the Beacon , that he didn't know where Roy was. Of course he knew. He took care of children. He was one of the good guys, watching over the lost, their guardian. If one of them had run away he would have looked for him, and kept looking until he was found.

But old Paul didn't look for Roy DeLisle because he knew the boy was already dead. Because he was the one who kiled him.

I touch the hole in the boy's skul, where Paul Schantz delivered a blow that brought an end to Roy's bad imaginings. The back teeth of a hammer would be my guess. Something he could get his hands on in a hurry.

There's bad. Then there's worse .

After what Roy did to Elizabeth Worth, he could not be alowed to walk away. Roy DeLisle was, at sixteen, wel on his way to building a career of ruining and murdering and running. The clippings mentioned his troubled history; Paul Schantz would have been aware of it too. But Paul would have extended the benefit of the doubt to the boy, offered a Christian second chance. It gave Roy the time to take Elizabeth Worth's life. And he would do it again to someone else, and someone else after that, something Paul Schantz knew as wel as Roy did. People like the boy, the ones with the most terrible kind of "restless ways," had to be stopped, because there would always be those like Elizabeth— like Heather—who couldn't see them for what they were.

Paul Schantz was Grimshaw's original Guardian. A position later filed by Ben. And now me. Because old Paul had been right the afternoon we visited him. There's always something worse than you think. Closer than you think. Ben had known this from the day his mother told him his dad had driven into a hydro pole, and it's a knowledge that I've been doing my best to avoid. That we al do our best to avoid.

These thoughts prevent me from realizing how close I am to a dead thing. It sends me roling back from the bones, suddenly frantic, my head slamming against wood below and above. The sharp end of a nail stabs the back of my hand. A metal bracket cracks against the brow over my eye, and it instantly swels into a throbbing egg.

Something is moaning in here with me. When it turns into a scream, I hear the voice as my own.

It strips away whatever control I stil had over my movements and lets my Parkinson's have its way. I am moving, though neither forward nor back. A roling, punching frenzy that has no intentions beyond the body's final expression of itself. Soon it wil be stiled forever. But for now, like a beetle turned onto its back, there is only the writhing of limbs, a hysterical foreknowledge.

I stop when I colapse into the wal on the opposite side of the crawlspace from the boy's bones.

Except it's not a wal. A long mound of cloth and skin laid out over the insulation. At once yielding and hard. A concave bely. A shoulder knob.

A woman's body. Her skin glowing dul blue. Knees scraped raw on their fronts and backs. Hands flat against the wood, the fingertips watery as leaky balpoints from trying to claw through. The palms resting on the lines of blood carved on either side of her.

"Tracey?"

I could touch her, but I don't want to. Because she's dead.

Maybe I was meant to come here to save her, to be the one to do what Ben only imagined doing, but I'm too late. Now I'm sharing a too-smal space with the dead daughter of a friend, someone I could be said to know and to whom something terrible was done, and every part of me wants out, is shrieking its demand to scrabble back through this ratshit grave and get out.

She gasps. A single intake of air that comes with such effort she spasms, her limbs flailing before settling once more.

" Tracey ."

There is no reply other than her shalow breaths. Emaciated, filthy, cold. But alive.

She has fought against every indication that she would never be found, that al that remained for her was a prolonged, solitary death, and now I am here with her.

The man with the disease that makes lifting anything heavier than a pint of beer an Olympic event.

But if she has managed to survive three days in here with only the boy's bones for company, I can try to pul her out.

It's done by counting inches. One for each pul on Tracey's ankles, my knees digging in and sliding the two of us back. There are moments I'm convinced that our movement is only me, attempting a directed retreat but merely shifting uselessly about. Clinging to Tracey as though she is my passed-out partner in a dance marathon.

But then, with another pul, I feel that we are moving. And as long as no part of us catches on another nail, as long as my heart keeps banging away, we'l keep moving.

I don't find the door so much as fal out of it. My legs slipping over the edge, kicking at the foundation's wals before my feet find the top of the stepladder. With this leverage, tugging Tracey al the way out is relatively easy.

Easier, that is, than holding her in my arms once we're both on the steps. And it is hot. A new heat I take to be a sudden spike of fever, or the blood rush that comes before blacking out.

After one step down, when it's clear I'm not going to make it, I use the relative softness of the celar's floor as a landing pad. Turn my tumble forward into a controled fal, so that when we make it to the earth floor it is as though I intended to lay Tracey there.