The Guardians

against his side like an usher impatient to show me to my seat before the show starts.

Ben stopped. Directed the light down to the floor. How to describe the scene it revealed in the celar's far corner? I don't think I could say what it was like to take it in whole.

The elements, then:

Randy standing with the help of one hand against the stone wal, his other hand pinching wads of red snot from his nose. Blood dripping off his chin and pushing dark dots through his Human League T-shirt.

Carl staring behind us. Terrified. Not of what lay in the corner and he'd already seen, but of what he alone saw in the dark.

Blood on the floor. Not Randy's. Older-looking smears, formless as spiled paint stirred around with bedsheets, along with more recent spits and spots. Handprints, toes. Clawed trenches in the earth.

Heather Langham. Or a life-size dol of Heather Langham, her face looking away from me, knees and elbows bent at right angles the way a child draws a running stick figure. She lay on the floor, so flat it was like she was partly buried, deflated as the long-ago poisoned mice I'd once discovered behind hockey bags in the garage.

I said something. I must have, because Ben asked me to repeat it. Whatever it was I couldn't remember, then or now. So I said something else.

'We have to go.'

'I told you. We can't do that now.'

'The fuck we can't.'

Carl's hand was on my elbow, a grip that held me within the flashlight's circle.

'Randy moved her,' he said.

What's that got to do with anything?

'Randy moved her,' I repeated.

'I don't know why. But he did.'

'So let's move her back.'

'It's not where she is that's—'

'What are you saying? What are you saying? What are you saying?'

I believe I was shouting. And I don't know how many times I asked this before Ben stepped in front of me.

'They'l know we were here,' he said.

'Who?'

'The police. After they find her. And they'l find her. Somebody wil.'

'How wil they know?'

'They'l look. And dead things—they start to stink or whatever, and—'

'Not her. Us. How wil they know we were here?'

'The blood,' Ben said. 'Randy's blood. On her.'

Past Ben's shoulder Randy was nearly doubled over, as though the mention of his name was a boot to his guts. Then I took a peek downward. Saw the new, shiny drops of crimson atop the older, brownish crust on Heather's skin.

'Our fingerprints too,' Ben said, scratching his jaw. 'Along with the witnesses who saw us come here.'

'Nobody saw us.'

'I'm not so sure about that.'

'The street was empty.'

'But not the houses.'

I remembered us standing across from the McAuliffes' maybe a half-hour earlier and wished we were there again, outside in the night air. A wishing so strong it was a physical effort to sustain, already slipping out of my grip, like holding a medicine bal against my chest.

'Your mom,' I said. 'In the living-room window. Looking out between the curtains.'

'I'm not sure she even saw us. But she might have.'

'This is insane,' I said.

'That's not stopping it from happening,' Ben said.

'We have to stop it.'

'How?'

'We tel.'

'Tel who?'

'Our parents. The police.'

'I'm not sure you're quite getting this.' Ben came to stand inches from me. He looked seasick. 'She was