The Guardians (38 page)

    "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 call 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
all 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 killed 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 all 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 still to come our way, when the
baby monitor bleats. An animal's cry of warning.

    "The
fuck was that?" Randy says.

    "Your
machine."

    "Really?
The motion sensor?"

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

    "You
think I actually 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?"

    "Tell
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 cellar, a hissing stillness coming out of the
speaker. I turn the volume up full. 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 all 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 tells 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 really 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 cellar.

    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 walls 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.

    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 walls, no ceilings, no visible
markings that might tell 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 allows 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 cellar 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 really doing is listening. For a
footfall, a creaking door, a breath. For the boy to tell 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 walls, the cardboard stuffiness of uncirculated space. Along
with something sugary. It makes me think of the dousings of perfume old ladies
apply before collecting 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 hollow 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 walls, a similar scene to the one outside: the wallpaper mural of a
pond, a background of forest, a drinking deer. A picture of terrible
expectation. The hunter, when it comes, will walk out of
those
trees,
not the real ones in the backyard. It will 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 cellar 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 full 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
full 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 cellar'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.