The Guardians

"You mean unless the boy talked one of us into it," Randy says.

Carl lurches back in his chair and straightens his back, the gesture of a man fighting a sudden attack of heartburn. "What are we saying here?"

"More went on in that celar than we thought," Randy says. "Which is saying something."

"Here's my question," I say. "Why didn't Ben ask which one of us did it?"

"Maybe he knew and kept it secret," Randy says. "Or maybe he didn't want to know."

"Or maybe he was the one who did the digging," Carl says.

Another silence. After a moment, I pick the locket up and return it to my walet. We sip our coffee. Do a lousy job of pretending the last two minutes hadn't just happened.

Once the waitress has come and gone, filing our cups, I tel them about seeing Gary Pulinger standing outside the house this morning.

"Sounds like they have their man," Randy says.

"He's under arrest?"

"Not yet. But they've had him in and out of the cop shop, putting the screws to him."

"If he's stil walking around, it shows they don't have enough," Carl says, draining his coffee.

"What would they need?"

"A body."

Once more, our thoughts steal our voices away.

"I caled the police," I say after a while. "Left a message with Barry Tate. He's on the force here now."

"Hairy Barry?" Carl says.

"The very same."

"You sure that was a good idea?"

"It didn't feel like I had a choice."

"There's always a choice."

"I just want to pass along what I know."

"And what's that?"

"That Tracey's boyfriend stopped to look at the house where I thought I saw suspicious activity."

"Suspicious activity? C'mon, Trev," Randy says. "They already looked in there."

"Okay. So what should I do?"

"You should do what we're going to do," Carl says. "Get the fuck out of Dodge."

"There's a train at a quarter after five," Randy says. "You ought to come with us."

Carl places his hand on my arm. I can't tel if it's meant as reassurance or to stop it from shaking. "There's nothing here, Trev. There never realy was."

"You think I like it here? Everything is teling me to go, just the same as it's teling you. But there's something else that knows we're meant to stay."

"Why? Why are we 'meant to stay'?" Randy asks.

"Ben was the guardian of this town, whether the town knew it or not. We owe it to him."

"Oh Christ."

"Think about it. He kept an eye on that house for twenty years. And then, after he can't handle it anymore, Todd's daughter goes missing."

"You need to see someone. Seriously."

"If we walk away, we're putting some other Tracey or Heather or Elizabeth at risk sometime down the line. We've already got a lot we're trying to live with. You want more?"

Randy rubs the freckles at his temples as though at the onset of sudden headache. "Okay, you crazy, shaky arsehole," he says. "I'l stay until tomorrow."

"You believe this?" Carl asks.

"I don't have to believe it. I'm staying because Trev asked us to."

I'm prevented from walking around the table and putting my arms around Randy by my cel phone, which comes alive in my jacket pocket, screaming its Beastie Boys ringtone. By the time my hand reaches in and grabs it, it's already switched over to my voice mail. I check the caler ID.

"It was Barry Tate."

"What are you going to do?" Carl asks.

"Cal him back."

Then I'm up and wobbling for the doors.

Outside on Ontario Street I curse my hands. Fluttery as moths, the fingers swimming over the dial pad of my phone. Some hitting the right numbers, others forcing me to start al over again.

After I manage to record a message, I catch myself reflected in the glass of the Queen's picture window. With the spotted brick of the Edwardian storefronts behind me, I appear to be not holding a cel phone but nursing a smal animal cupped in my hands.

And then it comes alive. The Beastie Boys holering "Sabotage" into my palm.

"Helo?"

"Trevor? How you doing?"

"Thanks for caling back."

"My job."

It's immediately clear that Barry Tate is not prepared to be as patient with me as he was the first time around.

"I saw something this morning," I start. "Oh?"

"Gary Pulinger."

"What about him?"

"He was outside the Thurman place."

"What time was this?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe six, six thirty."

"Was he attempting to enter the property?"

"He wasn't on the property, just the sidewalk."

"Walking on the sidewalk?"

"Standing."

"So you want me to arrest him for loitering?"

"I'm not teling you to do anything, Barry. I just thought it was worth reporting. Given he's a suspect in the Tracey Flanagan business."

"Who said that?"

"It's what I heard."

"Oh yeah? Wel, you know what my supervisor heard yesterday? That me and my partner searched private property without a warrant. It wasn't a pleasant meeting, I can tel you."

"Sorry to hear that."

"And I'm sorry to hear you're caling me with more of this 'I saw something' news. What did you see? A kid walking along looking at houses?"

"He wasn't walking. And it wasn't any house, it was—"

"Your dad ever tel you about that kid who cried wolf?"

"Listen, Barry, you can be pissed off at me al you want. But I've got a feeling that Tracey Flanagan was in that place at some point, or maybe she—"

"You know something? You seem to have a lot of feelings about that girl. Now that could be an avenue I'd be wiling to explore if you have something you want to get off your chest."

"This doesn't have anything to do with me."

"So let's not make it have something to do with you. Sound good?"

"Sure."

"Thanks for the cal."

"And sorry about—" I start, but Hairy Barry is already gone.

By the time I'm back inside, the breakfast table is unoccupied and the waitress is clearing the plates. I cal up to each of their rooms, but either they have agreed to ignore my cal or they aren't up there. I leave a note for Randy at the front desk with my cel phone number and make my way outside once more.

It's my legs—kicking and side-swinging worse than at any other point since my arrival in Grimshaw—that seem to know I'm going to Sarah's before I do. I must now appear, as one of my doctors said I would eventualy, as a "top-heavy drunk," leaving my shoe prints on dew-sodden lawns. You'd think, in my condition, presenting myself before a woman I like would be a bad idea. But the thing is, I don't have time to wait for good ideas anymore.

An hour after starting off from the Queen's I reach Sarah's place, thirsty and tingled with sweat. Pass my fingers through my hair. Rub a finger over my teeth.

"Trevor," she announces when she opens the door, as if looking out at the day and declaring "Rain" or "Snow."

"Gosh," I say, moronicaly, for the third time today, "I wasn't realy expecting you to be here."

"Why wouldn't I be?"

"Figured you'd be at work."

"It's Saturday."

"Of course. Saturday."

She backs into the house, and I step inside and push the door closed behind me. Blink against the muted indoor light until Sarah's details return.

"You don't look wel," she says.

"I'm not."

"Are you sick?"

"No more than usual."

"Then what's going on?"

"It's not something I could explain."

Sarah turns away and settles on the sofa in the living room. I folow her inside and sit next to her. I fight against leaning over and puling her to me. Then I fight against laying my head in her lap.

"Damn" she says, suddenly shaking her head hard. "It's like old times, isn't it?"

"You mean you and me?"

"I mean you thinking you can't trust me."

"Sarah, it's got nothing to do with trust. I just don't want you to get damaged."

"Damaged? Like china? A box you'd write 'Fragile' on on moving day?"

"I don't see you like that."

"But you don't see me being able to handle anything either."

"It's just what men do."

"How's that?"

"We protect. Even if it means being alone."

"This conversation could have been one we had when we were sixteen."

"Maybe so."

"It makes me think that whatever was troubling you then is the same thing that's troubling you now. Am I right?"

"You're not wrong."

"So if it's been around that long, it's time you took care of it."

"Yes."

"Because you don't have a chance—and I'l tel you this, you don't have a chance with me—if you've got this secret thing floating around for the rest of your life."

She slides closer and kisses me. Then we kiss some more. When we finaly pul apart, Kieran is standing in the doorway.

"I'm hungry," he announces. And then, with a grin my way, "Hey, Trevor."

"Hey."

"Want to come up to my room and check out my PlayStation?"

I look to Sarah, who shrugs. "You guys like griled cheese?" "And bacon, please," Kieran says. "How about you, Trevor?"

"I think everything's better with bacon," I say, which happens to be the truth.

After lunch, and after declining Sarah's offer (seconded by Kieran) to stay for dinner, I ask if I can get a lift back to the McAuliffes'. But once the two of them have driven off and left me looking up at Ben's attic window, the paint of its frame scabby and puke- green in the midday light, I decide I can't go inside. So I start walking again. Working out the kinks, I tel myself, though the truth is, I'm nothing but kinks these days. If I didn't have my body's spasms and jerks, I wouldn't be able to move at al.

The Beastie Boys scream.

"Helo?"

"Hey."

"Randy? Stil here?"

"Unfortunately, yes."

"What about Carl?"

"Gone."

"So it's just us."

"The gruesome twosome."

In the sky above, a passenger jet draws a line of smoke at thirty thousand feet. A border that marks Grimshaw apart from the rest of the world.

"What are we going to do, Randy?"

"I've got an idea."

"Yeah?"

"Let's just say I've done a little shopping."

[16]

Randy and I decide to meet for an early dinner at the Old London. He's already there when I lurch in. Sitting at the same circular table we'd occupied only two nights ago, a stretch of time that feels as distant now as the memory of summer camp.

"A cocktail, sir?" the maître d’ asks as I take my seat.

"What're you having?" I ask Randy.

"Soda water. Got to keep the mind clear."

"Right. Orange juice, please. And coffee."

"And a couple of rare prime ribs."

The maître d’ slips away, leaving the two of us facing each other across the ridiculous space of the table (I would have sat next to Randy, but that would have been even weirder).

"I know that keeping us here one more night was my idea," I admit after my drinks are delivered. "But maybe you could help me with something."

"Hit me."

"What the hel are we planning to do?"

Randy looks at me with dead seriousness. "We have to do something to put this place behind us."

"You think that's possible?"

"Who knows? We have to try. I think that's the key. If we do our best, maybe we won't have to think about Grimshaw every other second until we drop dead."

"Okay," I say, and sip my coffee. "So we try. Try what?"

"To face it. No more tiptoeing around."

"Ben watched for half his life and it didn't do any good."

"But Ben stayed outside."

The maître d’ arrives with our meals, the bloody slices of beef set before us steaming and thick as novels.

"Are you saying we have to go in and stay there?" I ask.

"Not us. But we'l have eyes and ears on the inside al the same."

"How?"

"Baby monitors! Go on, say it. It's briliant."

"It's briliant. If we had a baby to monitor."

Randy sighs, savouring the rare moment of appearing smarter than someone else. "They've come a long way, let me tel you. Now they come with video cameras and motion detectors. You can pay me your half when you have a chance."

"And how exactly do these help us?"

"We do what Ben did—watch the house," Randy says, beaming now. "But tonight, we'l watch it from the inside.'"

"On the monitor."

"It's got a range of five hundred feet. And we'l be in Ben's room. But hidden. No faces in the window, in case someone looks."

"And where's the sensor?"

"Where would you least want to sit around al night in that place?"

"The celar."

"Agreed."

"Agreed on what? Sorry, man, but I'm sure as hel not going down there to plant that thing."

"Already done. By me. Today. During daylight hours."

I watch Randy slice off a dripping chunk of meat and drive it into his mouth, his appetite the first giveaway that what we're going to do together this evening isn't a real stakeout, it's therapy. What's important, what gives the voodoo a chance of working, isn't the recitation of the right words or spraying of holy water, but that we believe the process might actualy work. And so we are reinforcing our courage as we once did in the Guardians' dressing room before a game. Pretend warriors.

I can see as he chews and swalows and grins over the white linen that Randy doesn't realy expect any confrontation to take place tonight. He's only acting as though it might for my sake.

"You're a good man, Randy."

"I'm glad you can see that. I just wish you had long hair and smeled a little better and looked great in a bikini."

"When was the last time you saw me in a bikini?"

"Please. I'm eating."

After dinner and several coffees, Randy and I start back toward Ben's house. It's night now, but a fog has darkened the air even further, rubbing out the details of Grimshaw's chimney stacks and the lights from its windows like a blindness. Cars nose through the slick streets. In the fog, Grimshaw feels at once familiar and altered, drained of some fundamental aspect that had previously marked it as a place for the living, so that I am left with the sensation of stroling into the afterlife.

At Caledonia, we don't immediately cross over to the McAuliffes' as we normaly would. Instead, we stop at the spot where I'd seen Gary Pulinger standing, hands in our pockets, studying the islands of concrete that were once the front walk, before taking in the house itself. Given the finality of the evening—the last night in Grimshaw by the last of the Guardians who have come for the last time to brave the scrutiny of its windowed eyes—I am expecting to feel something different about the house. But it appears emptier and less consequential tonight than it ever has, unfairly scorned, even pitiable. The fog that passes between us and its door seems to erase its particulars, sweeping it away into a past that wil soon claim what's left of it and leave an anonymous lot behind.

I can feel Randy wanting to say something along the lines of my own thoughts, a comment at how unbelievable it is that the four wals and buckling roof before us could be mistaken for a living thing. But I don't want the house to hear him.

"It's getting cold," I say, elbowing him in the side. As best I can, I start back across the street.

Randy passes me in the front hal and is already halfway up the stairs when Mrs. McAuliffe steps out from the living room's shadows.

"There's lamb stew in the pot if you boys are hungry," she says.

"Thanks, Mrs. A.," Randy shouts down the stairs. "Already ate."

It leaves me alone with the old woman. In the hal, she appears more frail than she did this morning and, at the same time, seems to be fighting this frailty by way of a bulky knit sweater (Ben's?) and corduroy gardening pants.

"What are you two planning on tonight?" she asks, stepping closer. "Painting the town red?"

"Nothing like that."

"You're welcome to use the TV in the basement."

"Thank you. But we're just, you know, hanging around."

"Playing records."

"Sorry?"

Betty giggles. "It's what Ben would say to me when you were al boys, spending hours up in his room, and I would ask what you were up to," she says. '"Playing records, Mom!' 'Nothing, Mom! We're just playing records!' But half the time I couldn't hear any music. Only you boys, talking and talking."

"Did you hear what we were saying?"

"No," she says, shaking her head. "But that didn't stop me from understanding things some of the time."

"A mother's intuition."

"Intuition, yes. But that's not al."

She knows. That is, she knows something, as we always suspected she did. How much she has guessed it's impossible to say, and I'm not about to ask. But what she is teling me now is that we were party to a crime of a most serious sort, and she has never shared this knowledge with another, not even her son.

Studying her now, I'm certain Betty McAuliffe was the only witness who watched us enter the Thurman house the evening we discovered Heather Langham in the celar. What connections had she made once the coach went missing and then, soon after, was wheeled out of the house across the street along with the woman—only a girl realy, rosy and unmarried and childless? It would have been impossible not to speculate. Not to conclude.

And yet, even with this knowledge, she had remained sweet Mrs. McAuliffe. Lonely Mrs. McAuliffe, baker of shortbread and pincher of cheeks and minder of her own business. This was love too.

"We'l be out of your way tomorrow," I say. "Randy's already checked out of the Queen's, so if it's al right by you, he'l be bunking on the pulout in Ben's room."

"No trouble. You'l find extra sheets and—"

"The linen closet. I remember."

She turns away, as if at the return of a TV program she had been engrossed in. "I'm off to bed myself," she says, beginning to turn off the lights one by one.

"See you in the morning, Betty."

"The morning," she repeats. Now in the dark, whispering it again, like a lover's remembered name. "The morning."

I find Randy stretched out on the bed, adjusting the dials on what looks at first to be an ancient cel phone, one of those banana-sized ones with the rubbery antennae that came out in the '80s.

"You gotta check out the picture on this thing," he says. "I rented a plasma screen to watch the finals last year and it wasn't any better than this."

I sit next him to see that he's right. A square screen that shows a wide view of the Thurman house's earth-floored celar and, in the background, the bottom of the stairs leading up to the kitchen. An empty space except for a couple of crippled workbenches along the wals, random garbage baled up from where it was tossed down from the top of the stairs. The air greened by the night lens, so that the scene appears to be set on a cold lake bottom.

"They have these things for babies?" I say. "What for? To count the kid's eyelashes as it sleeps?"

Randy turns up the volume. A moment of microphoned vacancy washes out from the speakers.

"Something farts down there and we'l hear it," he says.

"With this thing? Probably smel it too."

For the first time, I notice it's dark in the room. The only ilumination coming from the monitor's screen and what orange street light finds its way through the window.

But as I reach to switch on Ben's Ken Dryden lamp, Randy grabs my wrist.

"We're not here. Remember?" he says.

"So we're just going to sit in the dark?"

"I'l hold your hand if you want."

"You are holding my hand." "Oh."

I slide down to the floor and crawl over to the beanbag chair in the corner. From here, I can see the Thurman house's chimney, but little else. The fog has thinned somewhat over the last hour, and has turned to an indecisive drizzle, its droplets swaying and looping in their descent and, at times, even returning skyward.

"I saw Todd Flanagan today," Randy says.

"Yeah?"

"At the Wal-Mart."

"And you pushing a shopping cart with a baby monitor in it?"

"As a matter of fact, yes."

"How was he?"

"Not good. He was two minutes into our conversation in the vacuum cleaner aisle before he figured out who the hel I was."

"Poor bastard."

"He asked after you."

"What'd he say?"

"Can't remember exactly."

"Bulshit."

"Okay. He said it was realy sad to see you al shaky and Parkinson's and whatnot, especialy when you could have been the best winger the Guardians ever had."

"It's not half as sad as what he's going through."

Does fog make a sound? If it does, it whispers against Ben's window.

"Randy?"

"Yo."

"You think she could stil be alive?"

"I dunno, boss."

"But what do you think?"

"Wel, let me ask you this: Do the missing ever come back?"

"Sometimes. If they just ran away. Or if they wanted to be lost."

"Then those ones weren't realy missing to begin with."

Over the next couple of hours the night grows stil, both outside the McAuliffe house and within it. Betty must be asleep, as we haven't heard any creaks from the floorboards below since shortly after I came up. She has the right idea. It is only sporadic conversation between Randy and me—as wel as changing shifts watching the monitor screen—that keeps the two of us awake.

"Coffee?" Randy asks at one point.

"Is that what you carried up here an hour ago?"

"I got a Thermos at Wal-Mart today too. State of the art."

"Am I going splits on that with you too?"

"If you wouldn't mind."

Randy pours us each coffee in the little plastic camping cups that came with the Thermos. The steam rising and reshaping itself like a phantom against his face.

"I have this theory," he says, sipping his coffee and grimacing at his instantly burnt tongue. "I may have told you about it already. I cal it the Asshole Quotient.

Remember?"

"Vaguely," I lie.

"It's kind of a natural law of human behaviour. A way of explaining why people just do shit things to other people for no reason. Unpredictable things."

"Assholes."

"Exactly. And I used to believe that no matter where you go, 20 per cent of the people you come in contact with are going to turn out to be assholes. You wouldn't know that's what they are, not at first, but they would always appear in a ratio of one to five."

"Sounds about right."

"No, it's not right. I was off"

"Twenty per cent is too high?"

"Too low. Over the last few years I've come to realize the number's closer to something like 30 or 40 per cent. Maybe it's an even fifty-fifty."

"You think things are getting that bad?"

"They were always that bad. It just takes until you're our age to see it."

"What evidence are you working from here?"

"Okay. Consider how most people have fewer friends the older they get. Why? You learn that the numbers are against you, that life isn't just going to be this hilarious succession of new and fascinating people to share whatever new and fascinating stage of your journey you find yourself at. It's why guys like us always end up looking back al the time. It's the only way you've got of beating the odds."

"Old friends."

"You got it."

"I have a question," I say, burning my tongue on my coffee just as Randy had a minute ago. "How do you know you haven't been wrong the whole time?"

"Wrong how?"

"About me, say. I'm as old a friend as you've got. But what if I'm not one of the good 50 per cent, but the bad 50 per cent?"

"I don't know, Trev," he says, saddened by the question itself. "I guess if I'm wrong about you, it's quittin' time."

Randy leans his elbows on his knees, sits forward in his chair to bring himself within whisper distance of me. "You think he would have done it? If it wasn't for us?"

"Who?"

"The coach. Do you think he would have kiled himself if we hadn't—?"

"Yes," I interrupt. "It's what he deserved."

"What about us? What do we deserve?"

"This."

"A night in Ben's room?"

"Along with al the other nights of the past twenty-four years."

I'm wondering if this is remotely true, if we've even begun to understand the nature of the cruel and unusual punishments stil to come our way, when the baby monitor bleats. An animal's cry of warning.

"The fuck was that?" Randy says.

"Your machine."

"Realy? The motion sensor?"

"What other part of it would make a sound like that?"

"You think I actualy read the owner's manual?" Randy stands and appears about to approach, but doesn't. "Anything?"

I stare at the screen. "Nothing."

"I'm not hearing anything on the mike either."

"Might he a glitch," I say. "Like when you put a new battery in a smoke detector and it beeps before you press the test button."

"That's never happened to me."

"Have you ever lived anywhere long enough that you had to replace a smoke detector battery?"

"Tel you the truth, I'm not sure I've ever lived somewhere that had a smoke detector."

Randy sits next to me on the edge of the bed. Between us, the monitor rests on top of the sheets, showing only the dark celar, a hissing stilness coming out of the speaker. I turn the volume up ful. A louder nothing.

After a time, Randy goes to the window. Peers down at the street. Places his forehead against the glass. "Ben thought he was looking for ghosts up here, didn't he?"

"I suppose he did."

"You ever wonder if he was the one who was dead al that time?"

"Ben only died last week, Randy."

"No. It was a long time before that. He died the first time he went in there."

Something in Randy's tone tels me he's referring not to the day we discovered Heather Langham but to the time when we were eight. When Ben learned of his father's accident that wasn't an accident and ran to the darkest place he knew.

"People can get over things," I say. "It just happens that Ben wasn't able to."

"You think he's the only one?"

It seems that Randy may be about to cry. Or maybe it's me. Either way, they are sounds I realy don't want to hear. But just as I'm searching my memory for the distraction of a filthy joke, the one Randy likes about the midget pianist going into a bar, he slaps his hands against the window.

"The fuck?" he says.

"What is it?"

"Someone's there."

Randy starts down the attic stairs.

"Randy! Wait!"

"Stay here. Watch the monitor. Trust me, I'm not planning on going inside."

Then he's gone. I hobble to the window in time to see him cross the street and disappear into the shadows at the side of the house.

I have little choice but to do as I'm told and watch the screen. Five minutes—ten? twenty-five?—of studying the greenish empty celar.

And then something's happening. Or it has been happening since the motion sensor was triggered, and I am only noticing it now.

Breathing.

Long intakes and exhalations, wet clicks in the throat. Something alive yet invisible. The screen reveals nothing. Nothing except the outline of shadow that slides over the floor. A human shape elongated by the angle of available light, so that it appears gaunt and long-fingered.

The house moves.

A tremor that turns into an earthquake, the wals and floor and staircase pitching. It makes me look around Ben's room to see if I'm being tossed the same way. But the earthquake hasn't reached the fifty yards to the other side of Caledonia Street.

"Somebody's picked it up," I say aloud, a statement I don't understand until I look at the screen again and see it bringing the ceiling beams into focus, the frayed wires veiled by cobweb lace.

A pause. Then the monitor is thrown to the floor.

The screen breaks into deafening static at impact. Just before it goes dead altogether, what could be the shattering fracture of the camera's casing, or feedback on the microphone—or a female scream.

Then I'm up. Fighting against my body's wish to find Ben's bed and lie face down, gripping the edges until morning. Past Betty McAuliffe's door and down the next flight, clinging to the handrail. Shouldering open the screen door to plow into the night.

I use my arms to keep balance, a breaststroke through air, until one hand freezes, a finger pointing at the house across the street. No, not the house. At the figure standing in the living- room window, indistinct but unmistakably there. Watching me just as I watch it.

[17]

I make it through the darkness of the mud room by feeling the air like a blind man. For the first several seconds there are no wals, no ceilings, no visible markings that might tel me where I am. Yet my memory of the space betrays me, and I slam headlong into the half-closed kitchen door, its hard edge cutting a fold of skin from my cheek.

"Fuck!"

The sound of my voice alows me to see, the widening aperture that turns the darkness into interior dusk.

I decide to check the living room first.

No, not "decide," not "check"—I simply drift past the door down to the celar and find myself on the soiled rug, pretending I am being thorough when in fact I am merely afraid. I take the time to study the room, looking for signs of recent activity, but what I'm realy doing is listening. For a footfal, a creaking door, a breath. For the boy to tel me it was him.

On my return to the kitchen, I notice the odours I hadn't the first time through. The slow rot of wood exposed to moisture finding its way through the wals, the cardboard stuffiness of uncirculated space. Along with something sugary. It makes me think of the dousings of perfume old ladies apply before colecting in coffee shops or church basements. It brings on the same gag reflex I have fought at every funeral I have ever attended: my mother's, my father's, the coach's, Heather's, Ben's.

I stand over the sink and turn the taps, though nothing but a holow gurgle finds its way out. Through the window, the backyard looks limitless and wild in the dark, a habitat for prowling creatures. There is a sense that something is about to happen out there, the performance of violence. But when I turn away from the glass and lean my back against the counter, now looking into the house instead of out, I have the same sensation, only stronger.

On the kitchen wals, a similar scene to the one outside: the walpaper mural of a pond, a background of forest, a drinking deer. A picture of terrible expectation.

The hunter, when it comes, wil walk out of those trees, not the real ones in the backyard. It wil start with the frozen deer, then put its hands on the frozen me.

"Randy?"

My friend's name sounding like a plea in my ears.

I go to where I have to go. Nudge the celar door wider with the toe of my shoe.

For a moment, the Parkinson's and I are united: both refuse to go down there. We are rigid, mind and body alike. Finding our ful balance before attempting the turnaround, the first step of retreat, the shuffling getaway. Because there is a nightmare-in- progress awaiting me at the bottom, and I don't want to know how it ends.

I'm a boy again. A sixteen-year-old boy. Or even younger, for the whimper that escapes my lips is the sound an abandoned toddler makes in a supermarket aisle, a child just beginning to realize the potential depths of aloneness.

And then—before my eyes try to read something in the nothing, before fear takes ful hold of what my body does next—I start down the stairs like the man of the house.

At the bottom, my feet sink a quarter-inch in the damp earth floor. It slows every step, cushioning the normal impact of forward and stop, so that moving through the celar's space takes on the sludgy distortions of a dream. I wish it were a dream, though not nearly hard enough. Because now there's something you don't feel while lying in your bed: the sharp crunch of plastic underfoot that pierces the sole of your shoe.

It's a piece of the baby monitor's casing. Looking down, I can see more of its smashed anatomy over the floor. The lens splintered like ice chips.

I mean to say "Randy" but instead whisper "Please."

And with the sound of my voice I hear the scratching. So brief I do my best to interpret it as the creation of my own imagination. Then it comes again: the scrape of claws against wood. A mouse or a rat. This is what it must be. Just the kind of sound you would expect in an abandoned house.

Except unlike a rat's, the scratches are neither swift nor light. This is a single sound, deliberate and heavy. The slow slide of a clenched hand.

"Randy? That you?"

It's impossible to know how loud I say this, other than it is loud enough to not try again. In other houses, a spoken word can instantly humanize a space. Here it turns your own voice into a stranger's, a hostile impersonation.

I start for the stairs, as the sound seems to be coming from overhead. But when there is another scratch, I can tel its source isn't one of the rooms up there but is down here. It feels like it's emitting not from a waled enclosure at al, not from anything sharing this space with me, but from the space—from the house— itself. It's like hearing music and looking for the hidden speakers, only to realize it's a tune being played in your own head.

The scratching again. Weaker this time. But it alows me to folow it to the far corner of the celar, no more than five feet from where we buried Heather Langham.

Scratch, s-c-r-a-t-c-h. Coming from the spot directly over where I stand.

In the house I grew up in, there was a seldom-used storage area in our basement, a kind of loft tucked between the ceiling and the kitchen floor, designed to keep chosen items dry in case of flooding. The Thurman house is no different. Because there in the corner, visible by the outside light that comes in through a previously boarded window, is the trap door I can almost touch. Square, made of plywood, not much bigger than the drawer of a filing cabinet. And there against the wal is the folded wooden stepladder used to reach it.

I kick its legs open and start up. Try pushing the door open, but its wood has warped over time so its edges have cut into the frame, holding it in place. I step down and search the worktables. A hammer would be the best thing, but al I can find that might help is a rusted wrench.

Up again, and I'm knocking the wrench's round head against the door, whacking around its edges, working it up from its resting spot in a dozen hard-fought squeaks. And then, with a final, two-handed upswing, it pops open an inch and stays that way. A foul breath of air swirls down on me.

Why pocket the wrench, swing the door onto its back and step up the ladder to poke my head through and peer down the loft's dark length? Whatever lies in here is either storage for old

Grimshaw Beacons or squirrels' nests or the place we have been looking for al along, the home to something worse than the boy. Why look inside when no good could possibly come of it? Because the time for looking away has come to an end.

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.

"Trevor the Brave."

Randy steps out of the dark. The words that come out of his mouth aren't his, but the boy's.

"Look at you, Mr. Shaky," he says. "But an old Guardian could never let down a damsel in distress, could he?"

My arms rise in front of me. A reflex. The limbs seeking counterbalance against faling backwards. It makes me feel like the Frankenstein monster from the after-school movies of my youth.

But Randy's attack doesn't come. He stands ten feet from where I stand over Tracey. Arms at his sides. His face falsely animated, as if he's trying to appear engaged by an anecdote he'd long stopped listening to.

A choking at the back of my throat, and I smel the smoke. Folowed by the first tendrils of grey reaching down the stairs from the kitchen.

"We have to get out of here, Randy."

"I'd like you to stay."

"There's a fire"

"I know. I started it."

"Jesus Christ."

"Stay where you are," he says, though I'm not moving.

"You took her."

"You couldn't understand."

"Try me."

"It was apart."

"Part of what?"

"I told you you couldn't understand."

Through the veils of smoke, Randy's freckles appear enlarged. Spreading over his face like a hundred darkening bruises.

"How did she end up down here?"

"I wasn't fuly committed."

"Committed to what?"

"The part."

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

"It was a performance. For once I had an audience that was realy watching. And you know what I did? I messed it up. Mailed it in."

"Are you saying you were acting?"

"It's al I've ever wanted to do. And the boy knew that. The house knew it. And it asked me to show everything I had. To do one remarkable thing once in my life."

"To kil her."

"But I didn't. There was too much of me getting in the way of the character. Too much interference."

"Who did you think you were playing?"

"The lead."

"Roy."

"Who else?"

I've had rooms spin on me before. Boozy carousels or sickbed see-saws. But what's happening now is of a different order altogether. The celar spinning, along with the house, the earth loosed from its axis and wobbling off into space.

"When did it start?" I manage.

"Sometime after Ben's funeral, I guess. That's when I heard his voice. First time in twenty-four years. Then it got so loud it was al I could hear."

"That night. You went back to Jake's after we left?"

"It was closed, so I waited. And when she came out I offered her a joint. I'm an old friend of her dad's. She said sure."

"She trusted you."

"I'm fun, remember?"

"So you decided to have a party."

"I asked her if kids stil went to the old Thurman place. She couldn't believe I knew about it, that this freckly, balding guy used to get up to no good in here the same way she and her friends did. So she figured it couldn't hurt to smoke another joint for shits and giggles before heading home."

"Except you didn't smoke another joint."

"No. We didn't."

From upstairs, the fire is a voice that joins the two of ours. Wet and gulping, like a dog swalowing something it's found in the mud.

"What did you do instead?"

"Talked. I don't have a clue about what," Randy says, now grinning widely like his father, the loony salesman caricature they used in those Krazy Kevin! car lot ads.

"Her boyfriend, maybe. How she couldn't wait to get out of this shithole. The future. I wasn't listening to her. I was listening to him. And when I was doing the talking, I was concentrating on seling my lines. And you know something? I was good."

"What did he tel you to do?"

"Make her stop."

"Stop what?"

"Laughing. Smiling. Breathing'

I'm having trouble standing. The smoke has thickened, shrouding the large space so that, for moments at a time, Randy is the only thing I can see.

"I dragged her down here," he goes on, scratching an elbow. "Tied her to the same post where we tied the coach. Oh man, she wanted out of here—and part of me, the pussy Randy part, wanted to let her out. But there was his voice again. Teach her a lesson. Leave her down in the dark until she shuts up. So I left. Went for a walk, sobered up a little. It was cold. I was Randy again, give or take. And then I thought to myself, You've got a coat on, but that poor girl doesn't. So I ran back, came down here to find her quiet, eyes closed. Not dead, but pretty close. I saw that I couldn't let her go. I'd nearly kiled her, and nearly kiling someone is as bad as kiling her, when you think of it. It's worse— because you can't bury a body that's stroling around, teling people what it knows."

"Randy, please. We have to—"

"I remembered how my house had a crawlspace under the kitchen floor. Yours did too, right?"

"You left her alone to die."

" It's just another secret. That's what he kept saying . You're good with secrets. You all are."

Randy puls something out of his pocket and tosses it at me. Somehow my hand grabs it out of the air. My Dictaphone.

"You broke the rule, Trev."

"I wasn't going to give this to anyone. I did it for myself."

"Which is the same reason I just told you the truth. To see if it changed anything."

"Has it?"

Randy appears about to work this through aloud, his finger partly raised in the manner of a courtroom clarification of fine points. Yet he says nothing. His mouth agape.

"Let us go."

My voice conveys none of the desperation I feel. It sounds as though I'm offering to take his place on the next shift in a Guardians game.

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"I've been alone a long time," he says, suddenly not himself at al. The boy's tone, lifeless and flat. "And I don't want to be alone anymore."

He grins again. Not Randy this time, not Krazy Kevin!, but the boy. And it's a glimpse of the afterlife. An eternity in here, waiting at the windows with Roy DeLisle.

Watching the girls go by.

I make a move to get past him. Not a run, nothing so orchestrated as to be understood as an intention. A grasping of' legs and arms and head in the direction of the stairs. Hut Randy pushes me back with one hand, his palm slapping my shoulder as if in greeting.

"Give me the locket," he says, and holds his hand out. Opens his fist to show a platinum band with a piece of emerald in it. I glance down at Tracey and spot the white circle below one of her knuckles.

"That was you? You dug Heather up?"

"Right there where you're standing," he points, and I take an involuntary step backwards. "But once I moved away I didn't want it anymore. I was just goofy Handy Randy again, and I couldn't bear it. Mailed it to Ben, no return address."

"Why Ben?"

"He stayed. And it belonged here." He takes a ful stride closer. "It wanted to be here."

"You mean the boy wanted it to be here."

"And now he'd like it back."

So I give it to him. I step over Tracey Flanagan's unconscious body and pul Heather's gold heart from my walet. Let its chain pour into Randy's hand.

As Randy unfastens the clasp and raises both arms to hook it up at the back of his neck, I slide the wrench out of my other pocket. He blinks down at it, amazed, as though it is a talking bird. I swing the wrench wide and strike it square against the side of his head.

He fals in two distinct motions: slow to his knees, then a formless slump onto his back. I fal to my knees too, bending at his side to feel his stil-beating heart, his stale breath a whisper in my ear. I'd seen hockey players in this state before, unlucky puck chasers who'd gone headfirst into the boards. Unconscious, but not necessarily for long.

I scramble over to Tracey on al fours, slip my arms under her and forklift her up. Using the wals to keep her cradled in place, I get to my feet and swing around.

Shuffle past Randy to the bottom of the celar stairs. There is only my own breath. And the fire working its way through the house. Licking and swalowing.

You won't make it.

I hear this so clearly I assume at first it is the boy. But it belongs instead to someone who wishes only to point out some salient facts that might be escaping my attention.

If you think you're carrying this girl up those stairs, you're crazier than Ben ever was.

So I'm crazy. Ben would have long known what I've come to recently learn, and have confirmed as I take the first step up. Sometimes, crazy helps.

It gets me al the way up to the kitchen, where I'm forced to lay Tracey down again. There's the serious heat now, doubling itself, cooking the air so that each breath is like swalowing oil. Through the archway I can see that the fire has already claimed most of the living room. A widening throat of orange and black. The plaster wals colapsing. A carbon skin it is halfway to shedding.

A cold finger touches the back of my neck.

I spin around expecting to see the boy. And for a second it is the boy. Glaring at me, flushed and threatening tears.

"Stay with me," Randy says.

I charge at him.

My legs fluid, powerful. The fist that aims at Randy's head and lands a solid blow feeling swift and Parkinson's-free, breaking the line of his jaw with a tidy, audible pop. I'm a Guardian again. Young and fuly armoured, meeting some Sugar King or Winterhawk thug with unhesitating violence.

Stay with me.

I can't hear Randy anymore, but those are the words his already sweling lips are working around. It's not the fire that frightens him; it's not even death. It is the immensity of his loneliness opening wide inside of him.

I charge again. Driving my palms into Randy's throat. It pushes him over the linoleum edge and down the celar stairs. For a moment he is a writhing outline against the dark. And then, without any sound of impact, he's gone.

I stand over Tracey, staring down at her as though trying to understand what she is.

Go!

I bend and lift Tracey over my shoulder. Hold her there, caught in an Atlas pose. Unable to step forward or back, disoriented by the smoke, the dizziness that came with lifting her.

NOW!

My knees start to fold, but I lean into it, turning their failure into a hopscotch march. The back door frame has already colapsed, forcing me through the kitchen, then into the halway. The wals busy with fire. There is nowhere to turn where the heat doesn't take burning swipes at our skin. Tracey's hair swaying over my back.

Halfway down the halway I stop. It's the cramping muscles, what feels like some kind of cardiac episode. It makes it impossible to carry her another foot, but in fact it is only the sort of thing that would be difficult for me even under the most uncomplicated circumstances.

But I got Tracey out of the crawlspace. Somehow I managed that. I got her out.

And if I did that, why can't I do this?

So I jerk ahead, waist first, a statue with one last, unhardened part. Lurch toward the front door.

This is me. I'm doing this. And with this thought comes a dangerous elation. Not yet. If I get out of here, I can sit on the curb and laugh my guts out. Just not yet.

I open the door with a single twist of the knob. A rectangle of smooth night appears. Then the cool air on my face, the porch steps groaning under my weight as I make my way down and tumble onto the lawn. Tracey Flanagan roling off my back to lie on the grass, face up, eyes open and blinking. She looks as surprised by the stars as by the fact she is alive.

Then she turns my way. A shared recognition between us, as though we have known each other for uncountable years.

Randy.

I'm already working my way to my feet, crawling back up onto the porch.

The heat again. A line between the autumn night and the fire so defined it feels like passing into a different world altogether. Walking through something as solid as brick or stone.

The fire has encircled me now. I'm not sure if I'm in the halway, the kitchen, or if I took a wrong turn into the living room. There is nowhere to go even if I had the capacity to move, which I don't. The brief reprieve from symptoms has already passed, leaving me rigid and faint.

He is only an outline in the smoke at first, unmoving and featureless. But with a single step forward he is more real than he has ever appeared to me. Oblivious to the fire, the lick of hair caught in his eyelashes and jumping with every blink. Coming to stand so close that even through the sulphurous air I can smel the rank, burnt-sugar sweetness of him.

Stay with us.

The boy holds my hand. On his face an expression of mock relief, a mimicry of Carl's features when we held hands in the Thurman kitchen the first night we left the coach alone in the celar. But unlike Carl's, the boy's hand is cold, and his grip is meant not to comfort but to hold me in place. To keep me in the fire forever.

I fight him. Or I tel myself I must try to fight him, to wrench myself free. To not listen. But al my body alows is a brief spasm, just another of the symptoms that have no purpose or strength. So tired now the disease is al that's left. That, and the boy.

Stay.

And I wil. Perhaps I never had a choice. If home is the place you spend most of your grown-up life working to forget, then this is mine.

Overhead, the sound of timber giving way. I look up in time to see a sheet of plaster breaking free of the ceiling before it crashes onto me, pinning me flat to the floor.

I had felt the heat before this—had been thickly swimming in it, drowning in it—yet only now do I lend it my ful attention. It's because I'm burning. Trapped beneath what might be half a ton of century-old debris, the original nails and mouldings and support beams of the Thurman house. Stil conscious, stil within the reach of pain, but al of it to disappear soon.

The fire breaks a window. The high tinkle of glass atop the low growl of flames.

Then the boy is tugging at my arms. Apparently it's not enough for me to slowly burn to death. He wants to dislocate both of my shoulders too. When I don't move, he tugs again, and again.

Some part of me shifts. Yet other parts feel as though they are being left behind. Limbs torn from their sockets.

I open my eyes and work to turn my head to an angle where I might see who has put his hands on me, but the smoke has left me blind. If I am expecting to see any living thing it is Randy, horrificaly burned. Randy, who seeks to pul me against him so that the two of us might be fused by fire.

The hands lift me up, throwing me onto narrow but strong shoulders that carry me through the haze before tossing me into the air. There is a new pain to go along with the previous ones. Sharp teeth biting my skin in too many places to count, like being attacked by a swarm of yelowjackets.

And then the ground. Sudden and cool, and me roling through the grass, clothes smoking and, if I'm not hearing things, some part of me sizzling. I keep tumbling in order to extinguish any live flames I've lost the ability to feel.

Now when I open my eyes there is the sky, the stars distinct, hovering close. Licks of flame reach out from the upper floor, as though the house is claiming the night for itself. It draws my sight to the shattered living-room window. The same window where fuckt had once been drawn in dust. The window I'd been thrown out of.

What felt like stings in fact the cuts of glass teeth.

Then, through smoke so dense it is like another part of the wal, the boy leaps out. Landing on the ground with a thud, his body crumpling. His clothes, his hair, his skin blackened by smoke. His eyes the only colour—worn denim blue—that he lets me see.

"Trevor?" the boy says, but not in the boy's voice.

Carl grabs me by the ankles and, leaning back, drags me through the grass and away from the house. Al of it ablaze now, the fire elbowing windows and bringing the ceilings down with oddly gentle crashes, as though the floors and wals have been cushioned by the heat.

When we make it to the sidewalk Carl lets go and sits next to me, the two of us able to do nothing more than watch the Thurman house flare and spit. I have a dim awareness of others around us—a clutch of bathrobed neighbours, a dog barking with the excitement of being outside, leashless, in the night.

No firetrucks or police yet, though their sirens join the undercurrents of sound. The murmuring witnesses, the yielding wood frame, the hissing voices rising up out of the smoke.

An ambulance arrives first. Stopping in front of the McAuliffe house, where we watch as the paramedics tend to someone lying under blankets on the front porch.

Tracey Flanagan, who is able to sit up and tel them who she is.

Then Carl is puling me close to him. His face appears freshly washed, streaks of white cut into the ash down to his jaw. But as he kneels with me I see that they are tears. Abundant, unstoppable.

There is nothing to do but what we have done al our lives, whether in our dreams or in our Grimshaw days. We watch the Thurman house and wait for it to show us how it is unlike other houses, how it is alive. The fire towering over its roof like a crown. The headless rooster stil, as though, after decades of indecision, northeast was its final determination.

I suppose it's possible that someone else sees him other than us, though I hear no shriek from the onlookers behind us. So maybe it is only Carl and me who see Randy in the upstairs window. The bedroom where the coach died. Where Roy DeLisle stood over Elizabeth Worth's body, excited and proud, wanting to show someone the remarkable thing he'd done.

Randy is staring down at us with the false calm of someone trying to hide his fear. A soldier doing his best not to worry his family as the train puls away, taking him off to war.

He takes a half step closer to the window frame and he isn't Randy anymore. He is the boy. Roy DeLisle as we have had to imagine him—a kid like us, looking like us. A kid expert at playing the same normal act we have played al our lives.

For a moment, Randy's face and the boy's face switch like traded masks, so that, behind the curtain of smoke, their differences are slight, almost imperceptible.

Randy.

The boy.

Randy.

The boy.

They could be the same person, except one is terrified by whatever is to come, and the other is oblivious to the fire that swalows him. In fact, he may even be smiling.

[18]

Where do hospitals buy their paint? Is it wherever the leftover stock goes, the tints that the buying public have deemed too depressing or nauseating to use in homes where people actualy live? Or is there thought to be therapeutic value to heartbreaking palettes, a motivation for patients to fake welness enough to be discharged early if only to escape the pukey turquoises and hork-spit yelows?

These are among the deep considerations I ponder over my days in a semi-private suite in Grimshaw General. The bad news—aside from the wals, the institutional wafts of bleach and vegetable soup—is that the fire touched me in a number of spots, which has left me counting down the last minutes to my every-four-hours pain meds. The good news is that I know my roommate.

That it is Carl and not a stranger I have to hear stifling farts and watching Friends reruns and moaning as the nurses change his dressings on the other side of the curtain makes the time pass less awkwardly, if no less slowly. And of course, when we're alone, we pul the curtains back to talk.

Carl had taken a cab to the train station but not boarded the 5:14 when it puled in. He couldn't say exactly why he decided to stay, other than "Something felt wrong, or was about to go that way." So he had gone to the place where wrong things were most likely to occur, keeping his eye on the back door of the Thurman house from his vantage point behind the see-saw. He had seen Randy enter in the late afternoon and then, some hours later, come running around from the side. He hadn't wanted to get any more involved than that, only to see who came out and when.

But then he had noticed the smoke. Soon afterward, going around to the front of the house, he had found Tracey Flanagan on the lawn and carried her to the McAuliffes' porch, banging on the door and teling Betty to cal an ambulance. When he asked Tracey how she'd got out of there, she said my name.

"It's like each of us had a job to do," I tel Carl. "I went in to find Tracey, and you went in for me."

Carl fluffs his pilow, sits up straight, turns on Jeopardy! " Wel, that's just the way it turned out. I see only what's right in front of me, you know what I'm saying?"

But of course he could see more than that. It's why he'd spent the cash I'd given him on cigarettes instead of a train ticket, why he'd smoked the lot of them while keeping his eye on an empty house. I didn't need to hear Carl admit to his belief in fate. It was more than enough to know that an absence of over twenty years and al the damage he had endured in that time had not slowed his run from the safe side of Caledonia Street to the other, to me.

We have no shortage of visitors.

On the less pleasant side, there are the police, who want to know everything and are frustrated by how little we offer them.

Carl and I stick to similarly vague stories. That is, the truth— minus the boy. We were just old pals who were concerned for Randy's emotional state folowing the suicide of a mutual friend, and figured he might try to harm himself.

"Why there?" each questioner asks. "Why that house?"

"Because it's haunted," we tel them.

In the end, their curiosity could take them only so far, as Tracey Flanagan's life had been saved, after al. The only crimes that were known to have been committed were done by Randy, and he was gone now. Other than the suspicion that we knew more than we were saying, the police had no charge they needed to lay, so they moved on, wishing us swift recoveries in ironic tones.

Betty McAuliffe brings us corn muffins and homemade raspberry jam, which save Carl and me from the frightening "scrambled eggs" and "oatmeal" that would have otherwise had to pass for breakfast. She tels us of her plans to sel the house. It's too big for her alone, and she doesn't relish the prospect of months of noisy buldozers and nail guns across the street. There are some one-bedroom apartments she fancies over on Erie Street, overlooking the river. It is al she needs.

"So long as you boys drop in sometimes," she says, enticing us with ham sandwiches and a Thermos of good coffee, though she doesn't have to sweeten the deal to elicit promises from us.

Todd Flanagan comes by to say helo, but within seconds his rehearsed words abandon him, his gratitude and relief leaving him mute. So I do the talking for both of us. I tel him that it was an honour to be able to get Tracey out of there, that it was likely to turn out to be the most proud moment of my life. Then I tel Todd that his daughter struck me as smart enough and brave enough to recover from this, that my money is on her turning out fine.

He embraces me. Pins me against my pilow for a long hug I'm sure Todd has never given another man in his life, just as I am unused to receiving one.

It's not the only love I receive from the Flanagan family during my stay. Tracey opens her arms to me when the doctors deem her wel enough to permit select visitors, and when I bend down to her, I am rewarded with cheek kisses.

"My dad was right," she says.

"About what?"

"He always said you were good."

She smiles at me, and I recal her teling me how Todd thought I was a pretty decent hockey player back in the day. I'm not sure I could stand on blades today, let alone skate around the rink. But I puled this girl out. Me, the disease guy, Mr. Shakes. I pulled her out.

"I can see you're starting to like this hero stuff," Carl says when I return to our room. "Don't bother denying it."

Why would I deny it? A guy whose only boasts up until now were owning a disco for a while and having a decent wrist shot when he was sixteen?

So I'l take it. You're goddamn right I'l take it.

I look forward to Sarah and Kieran coming by more than just about anyone else. They're twice-a-dayers, bringers of chocolate and celebrity magazines ("It's al they've got down in that crappy store") and flowers.

The kid finds the whole bandages-and-IV business pretty interesting, and I can feel my stock rising in his estimation, my banged- up condition helping him to see me as an aging but furious warrior from one of his video games, rather than a middle-aged guy who used to date his mom in the unimaginable depths of history

"I stil owe you that car you lent me," I tel him when his mom has stepped out of the room. "The Ferrari."

"You remember that?"

"A promise is a promise."

Kieran nods his mother's nod. Tels me I can keep it.

Carl is here the whole time, of course. We don't talk in detail about the big questions, about Randy and how he'd falen prey to the boy's invitations. I tel him about finding Roy DeLisle's bones in the crawlspace, how they were likely turned to ash in the fire, which would leave us the only holders of the last chapter of his regrettable biography. I also share my theory that it was Paul Schantz who put him there, and his quiet is answer enough.

Believe it or not, we spend most of the time laughing. Not gales of barroom hilarity, but the chuckles that come from old jokes retold, stories of childhood embarrassments and foolishness.

The doctors say Carl and I wil be out of here soon. I offer Carl the use of my condo, tel him he can stay as long as he wants. Which is when he tels me that his boyfriend, Adam, is arriving in Toronto in a couple of days. That they're planning to get a place of their own in the city.

"Boyfriend?"

"It's been twenty-four years, Trev."

"I guess people change over that much time."

"No, they don't," Carl says, and rises onto an elbow to whip his pilow at my head. "They just become more of what they always were."

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 16

I have to believe that we weren't alone.

I have to believe that some of the things al of us did when we were young were strange. So strange that in recolection they strike us as the products of distorted dreams. Later, we may work to untangle these dreams, dismiss them, grapple with their meanings so that we might "move on." Or, more usualy, we do our best to ignore them, to discount them as that-which-never- actualy-happened. But they did. The bulying and being bulied, the greater or lesser perversities, the violence done to others and to us—al of it real.

And why did they happen at al? The imagination, The boundless possibility that goes with being a child, the brief period of ignorance before coming to understand that everything we do comes with a coat.

This wil be my final entry. Not only because my memory of what happened to us over the winter of 1984 has found its end but because I wil soon be unable to manage what I am doing now: sitting alone in a room, turning a recorder on and off, speaking aloud in a voice that anyone other than me might understand.

Right now, for instance, I'm in Sarah's room, sitting on the edge of her bed. It's where I slept last night, huddled against her warmth, my limbs calmed by the happy exertions of our keep-it-simple lovemaking. Why would I ever leave? Because there are only so many more days of my being capable of returning another's embrace, of being a man as most of us understand it. Soon I wil be reduced to a human to-do list and little more. Sarah says that I'm welcome to stay, that Kieran would be thriled if I did, that the three of us can face whatever's coming our way together if we're honest enough about it. She's a tough nut, as my mother used to say. Yet toughness might not be enough in my case. I'm losing myself, piece by piece, and there's no getting it back. It's likely to be the kind of process best left to me and professionals and Carl visiting now and again.

But you never know. You realy don't.

I should stop now. Such considerations are getting close to overstepping the bounds of a memory diary, and I should colour within the lines I started out with.

So what's left to remember? Everything and nothing, if you know what I mean (and if you have piled on enough years to feel like your life is coming in for a landing rather than taking off, then I'm wiling to bet you do). Anyway, I'm done with al that now. If the keeping of this diary has taught me anything, it's that the past is an anvil, or maybe a grand piano, the kind of thing that, in the cartoons of my youth, drops from the sky to flatten you into a pancake. And I'm too tired to try to stand up again after it does.

Except for this:

I seem to recal saying, sometime back near the beginning, that every town has a haunted house. But what do I know of every town? What I realy meant, I think, is that there is a haunted house in every boy's life. A place where al the wants he is not yet old enough to act upon or even understand can be rehearsed or hidden away.

A place he fears because he can sense its endlessness, how it reaches back into the pasts of other boys before him, as wel as his own.

When I started this I thought I was recording a secret history, or maybe a kind of ghost story. I was wrong. It is a confession. I entered the Thurman house each time believing I was trying to do good, whether it was rescuing Heather Langham, or finding Tracey Flanagan, or saving Grimshaw from the darkest aspect of itself. But like the fireman who runs into the burning building upon hearing a baby's cry within, I realy entered the red-brick shel on Caledonia Street not because of Heather or Tracey, or to protect future innocents from the likes of the boy, but because if it wasn't me, it would be one of the men next to me, my friends. I did it for love, in other words.

But if this remains a story of hauntings, has it ended, as such stories are supposed to end, with the restless spirits at peace? What lesson is to be drawn from a cautionary tale where the maimed survivor wouldn't alter any of the steps that led him into the one place he was forbidden to go? What kind of confession does this make when, even as I'm sorry for so much of what I've done, I stil feel lucky to have been with my brothers in the doing of it?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Maya Mavjee, Kristin Cochrane, Susan Burns, Nita Pronovost, Nicola Makoway, Shaun Oakey, Anne McDermid, Monica Pacheco, Martha Magor, Saly Riley, Dan Levine, Peter Robinson, Kate Mils, Chris Herschdorfer—

Thank you.