The Guardians

door, the light from her bedside lamp retreats into shadow.

Just as we crossed Caledonia Street with the intention of entering the Thurman house when we were sixteen, we don't even try the front door, and instead prowl along the hedgerow to the back. On our way, I measure the side windows that look into the living room, half expecting to stil see the fuckt drawn into the dust. But there is no message there at al now except for the streaks of condensation that have left lines over the glass like tear stains.

The backyard is the same as I remember it, if smaler. The rusted swing set and see-saw built for dwarves, the fence around the lot that looks like even I could heave myself over it if I came at it with a little speed.

And then we look up at the back of the house, and it seems to have grown over the second we took our eyes off it. The brick arse of the place looming over where we stand, the windows unshuttered and lightless. The headless rooster weather vane spinning left, then right, then back again, as though trying to decide which way offers the best route for escape.

'It's just the same as every other place along this street,' Randy whispers. 'So why is it the only one that's so friggin' ugly?'

'Because it's not the same as every other place,' I answer, and start toward the back door.

Start, then stop. Wait for Randy to take my arm for a few steps when my legs refuse to carry me any closer.

'You okay?' he asks, and with my nod, he goes in.

Which leaves me on my own. And I'm turning around. Ready to get as far from the bad smel that exhales from the open doorway as my feet are prepared to take me.

Hold on, Trev, the boy says . You don't want Handy Randy to see the show without you, do you?

No. I want to see the show too.

From the kitchen, Randy asks where I've got to. Then I'm in too. The sound of Randy's steps pacing over the curled linoleum. Along with the internal cold that signals the arrival of a virus. A sensation located more in the mind than the body. A degradation. The unshakeable idea that, in merely being here, I have shamed myself.

'How do you want to do this?' Randy asks once I feel my way to where he is.

I don't know. But let's stay together, I want to say, but instead say, 'I'l take the celar. You look around on this floor and upstairs.'

'Better you than me.'

Then he's gone.

It could be courage that has me shuffle over to the celar door and push it open, staring down into the dark, but it doesn't feel like it. It is merely a surrender to the next moment.

What's suddenly clear is that it wasn't Tracey Flanagan who brought me here. I am here because the house was lonely for me. And in a way I can't possibly explain, I am lonely for it too.

I turn on the flashlight, and an orb of yelow plays over the stairwel's plaster wals.

But there is nothing to see. I'l have to go down there to find whatever might be found. And it's not something I am able to do without someone else going down first.

Or being pushed.

Pushed. The last time I stood here I'd wondered the same thing. Wondered if Carl, who stood behind me, was someone else entirely. Someone wearing a convincing Carl suit.

But it was Carl, only changed in the way al of us had been changed.

'It's different,' he had said at the time, and I hadn't known what he'd meant. Though I do now.

I'm three steps down when I hear Randy's voice. Speaking my name from the other end of the hal. Careful not to shout, as though trying not to disturb another's sleep.

I backstep up the celar stairs and scuff to the hal. Randy is standing against the front door, so that at first I think he's trying to prevent it from opening. But as I get closer I see that his back isn't touching the door at al.

'Up there,' he whispers.

Now the two of us stand at the bottom of the stairs. Nervous suitors waiting for our prom dates to come down.

But when someone appears at the top of the stairs it's not a girl in a chiffon dress. It isn't Tracey Flanagan, and it isn't the boy. It's one of us, unshaven and hunched.

Alive but with al the years of regret and negligence written over him like a useless map.

This is what frightens Randy and me, what we can see clearly for the first time:

There is the unreal.

And then there is the real, which can sometimes be the more surprising of the two.

MEMORY DIARY

Entry No. 13

I didn't ask Ben how the coach had managed to get untied and take the gun from him. We walked out the back door together without talking of the boy, or the scene the blue light of the passing snowplow had revealed to me upstairs. Ben just crossed Caledonia Street and shuffled up the front steps of his house, kicked his boots against the wal to knock off the snow and slipped inside. I looked back at the Thurman house, half expecting some new display in one of its windows, but each pane of glass was a holow iris, taking in me, the street, the slumbering homes of Grimshaw, giving nothing in return.