Free The Guardians by Andrew Pyper Page A

apologizing for our breaking up in grade twelve, before I realize she’s speaking of Ben.
    “Thank you. It’s good that you’re here.”
    She laughs. “I live three blocks from St. Andrew’s. I’d say it’s good that
you’re
here.”
    “It’s been a long time.”
    “Too bad it took something like this to bring you back.”
    “I loved the guy.”
    “I know you did. You all did.”
    “We went through … we were best friends.”
    “I know.”
    She opens her arms and I step into them. My hands clasped around the strong trunk of her body, her hair a veil against the grey cold.
    “You sure you’re going to be okay?” she asks, pulling away sooner than I would like.
    “I must look pretty wrecked.”
    “Just a little lost, that’s all.”
    “Can I tell you something, Sarah? I
am
a little lost.”
    A pained smile works at the corners of her mouth. “It’s strange. Hearing you say my name.”
    “I can say it again if you’d like.”
    “No, I’ll remember just fine.”
    I’m doing it before I can stop myself, though I don’t think there’s much in me that wants me to stop digging in my wallet for my card.
    “I have to help Ben’s mom with some stuff,” I say, clapping the card into Sarah’s palm. “Are you in a position—that is, would you like to join me for dinner before I go? Lunch? A shot of tequila?”
    Sarah looks down at my card as though it bears not a name and number but the false promise of a fortune cookie. We are paused like that—her reading and thinking, me watching her read and think—when I see the boy.
    He is standing behind a tombstone at the crest of a rise maybe a couple of hundred yards away. An old maple sprouts from the hill’s highest point, so that the boy is shaded from the day’s already diminished light, leaving him an outline coloured in graphite. He stares at me in the fixed way of someone who has been staring for some time, and I have only now caught him at it.
    “You can’t be here,” I whisper.
    But I am
, the boy whispers back.
    “Trevor?” Sarah says, searching.
    But I’m already starting up the rise toward him. A walk that loosens my knees into a wobbly jog. Clenched hands held in front of me as though prepared to wrap themselves around the boy’s neck and start choking.
    Trevor the Brave,
the boy laughs.
    My shoes skid out from under me on the wet sod, and for a second I pitch forward, knuckles punching off the ground to keep me up.
    When I’m propped on my elbows and able to look again, the boy is gone.
    I scramble up to the tombstone where he was standing. Searchthe descending slope on the other side for where he might be waiting for me. And instead of the boy, I find a man. Running into the scrub that borders the cemetery.
    “Carl!”
    I glance back to see Randy starting up the slope.
    Behind him, her hand to her mouth, Sarah watches as though a parachute was failing to open. An unstoppable, fatal error taking place before her eyes.

MEMORY DIARY
Entry No. 7
    The Thurman house was no different in its construction than any of the other squat, no-nonsense residences it shared Caledonia Street with, two rows of Ontario red-brick built at the last century’s turn for the town’s first doctors, solicitors and engineers. So why did it stand out for us? What made it the one and only haunted house in Grimshaw for our generation? Its emptiness was part of the answer. Houses can be in poor repair, ugly and overgrown, but this makes them merely sad, not the imagined domicile of phantoms. Vacancy is an unnatural state for a still-habitable home, a sign of disease or threat, like a pretty girl standing alone at a dance.
    But it hadn’t always been empty. This—knowing that real people had once occupied its cold and barrenrooms—was what lent the place its sinister aura. This, and the implication that they had left. There was something wrong about a house people chose not to live in. Or something wrong about the last people who did.
    Not that I recall