The Guardians

'Randy?'

My friend's name sounding like a plea in my ears.

I go to where I have to go. Nudge the celar 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 ful 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 ful 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 celar'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.

'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 tel its source isn't one of the rooms up there but is down here. It feels like it's emitting not from a waled enclosure at al, 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 alows me to folow it to the far corner of the celar, 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 wal 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 al 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 al 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 pul 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 ful inhalation that might tel 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 ful 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 smal 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, roling 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?