The Guardians (39 page)

    "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 tell its source isn't one of the rooms up there
but is down here. It feels like it's emitting not from a walled enclosure at
all, 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 allows me to follow it to the far
corner of the cellar, 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 wall 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 all 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 all
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
pull 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 full inhalation that might
tell 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 full 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 small 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, rolling
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 yellow-stained and black- creviced as smokers' teeth.

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

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

    I
never really believed he ran away as it said in the news clippings. Some part
of me couldn't swallow 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 killed him.

    I
touch the hole in the boy's skull, 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 allowed to walk away. Roy
DeLisle was, at sixteen, well 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 well 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 filled 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 all
do our best to avoid.

    These
thoughts prevent me from realizing how close I am to a dead thing. It sends me
rolling 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 swells 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 still had over my movements and lets my
Parkinson's have its way. I am moving, though neither forward nor back. A
rolling, punching frenzy that has no intentions beyond the body's final
expression of itself. Soon it will be stilled 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 collapse into the wall on the opposite side of the crawlspace from
the boy's bones.

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

    A
woman's body. Her skin glowing dull blue. Knees scraped raw on their fronts and
backs. Hands flat against the wood, the fingertips watery as leaky ballpoints
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-small 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 shallow breaths. Emaciated, filthy, cold. But alive.

    She
has fought against every indication that she would never be found, that all
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 pull her out.

    It's
done by counting inches. One for each pull 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 pull, 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'll keep moving.

    I
don't find the door so much as fall out of it. My legs slipping over the edge,
kicking at the foundation's walls before my feet find the top of the
stepladder. With this leverage, tugging Tracey all 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 cellar's floor as a landing pad. Turn my tumble forward into a
controlled fall, 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
falling 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 smell the smoke. Followed 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 fully committed."

    "Committed
to what?"

    "The
part."