Free The Guardians by Andrew Pyper Page B

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. Search the 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 barren rooms—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 thinking any of this as we made our way onto the Thurman property
that night. All I was thinking wasn't a thought at all but a physical aversion
that had to be fought off with each step, along with a murmur in my head that
would have said, if it could speak aloud, something like Turn back. Or It's wrong that you're here. Or You are about to step from the world you
know into one you don't want to know.
        In
short, I was afraid.
        I
think all of us wanted to stop, to sidle no farther along the thorny hedgerow
that shielded us from the pale streetlight, the wan half moon. If one of us had
said, "I think we should go," or merely turned and headed back toward
the street, I believe the rest would have followed. But none of us said or did
anything other than proceed along the side of the house, inching closer to the
two tall windows set too close together like crossed eyes. Both fogged with
dust, through which someone on the inside had