The Guardians

puled higher by the light, and then I wasn't.

This way, the voice said.

A darkness swept across the moonlit gap.

A blink of movement so swift it took shape as a human figure in my mind only after it was gone.

I leapt up the remaining steps in two strides, elbowed the door wide. The kitchen was empty. But there was the smel the boy left behind. Something mossy and fungal, like the first breath that came up from the wel behind my parents' cabin when we lifted its metal seal at the beginning of the season.

There was a scratching I assumed was the soles of my boots dragging over the floor. But I wasn't moving.

To my left was the main halway that led to the front door. And halfway along, the boy walked off, dragging his hand over the curled flaps of walpaper.

You can taste it already, can't you?

That's when I puked. An instant torrent splashing over the linoleum and burning a hole at the back of my throat.

Takes a while to find your sea legs. But you're gonna like it, Trev. Promise.

The boy reached the base of the main stairs. Paused to place a hand on the banister.

I went after him. But what was intended as a charge of attack ended up as an off-balance lunge, palms out to catch a doorframe or coat hook to keep me from faling. Speeding faster toward the boy even as I tried to pul myself to a stop.

I expected him to disappear, but he didn't. As the distance between us shortened he only became clearer, larger. He looks like me, I thought again. And then, distinctly, nonsensicaly: Me with all the hope drained out.

The streetlight that came through the stained glass over the front door coloured him in murky orange and blue. It shaded the dimples at the corners of his mouth and revealed the pimples on his forehead, each casting a tiny shadow that doubled the thickness of his skin, a leather hood fitted over the real face beneath it. A face that looked nothing like the one I swung my fist toward.

The briliant white flash of pain, flaring up my arm. My eyes open to the paint-peeled front door. My cheek against the wood I'd just delivered a punch to.

Come.

I swung around to face the boy, but he was already on his way up to the second floor, shrinking into the dark.

The party's upstairs.

Why did I folow? In a rush, dropping the flashlight as I went?

I wanted to hurt him, to kil him again and again until he stayed dead.

I wanted to see what he wanted me to see.

When the boy reached the landing I threw myself at his back, waiting to feel only the cold air of the halway, the not-thereness of the space he occupied. Instead, I felt him.

The wool of his shirt. The heat of his body. Fever sweat.

More than this was the shattering glimpse of his pain. Wordless, thoughtless, soundless. But it let me see something. An image I recognize now as a version of that Edvard Munch painting of the figure on a pier, mouth agape, the very landscape distorted by torment. Touching the boy was like touching the inside of a scream.

The boy spiled against the far wal. Hands clasped together in his lap in a schoolboy pose. Amused by the look of horror on my face. But when a door at the end of the hal squeaked open, the grin slid away. Now he mirrored me with a horror of his own.

The boy turned his head to see. So did I.

The bedroom door stood open. Beyond it, so did the bathroom door with the mirror on the inside. But now the mirror was in pieces over the floor, glinting fragments of light over the ceiling. This must have been what we heard in the celar. A draft that finaly nudged the mirror off its hook. The sound of a child's pain only shattered glass, the grunting animal only the mirror's frame clattering to the floor.

Silence. The too-quiet of having water in your ears. I looked back to the boy, expecting the same show of fear as before. But he was already facing me. And he was smiling.

I couldn't meet his eyes. So I looked at the open bedroom door.

Go on, the boy said.

I started down the hal. When I was just short of the doorframe, I stopped. Glanced back. The boy was gone.

I closed my eyes. Stepped forward into the room.

Look!

A chest of drawers against the wal. The only solid thing in an otherwise vacant room, except for a single bed in the far corner. A mattress black with mould. Painted flowers on the cracked headboard.

The rumble of a snowplow turning onto Caledonia Street. I remember the roar of the diesel engine as the driver built up speed to make it up the hil. The idea of someone behind the wheel of the plow—a city employee who probably came to my dad to complain about the deductions on his paycheque—opened my mouth. To cry out for him to stop, wait for me to run downstairs. To ask him to take me home.

Instead, I stood and watched as the blue rotating light atop the plow played over the bedroom ceiling. A false