The Guardians by Andrew Pyper Read Free Book Online Page B

come to nearly forget he was here. But now we were all looking at him. Watching his head slowly shake from side to side.
    “It didn’t happen that way,” he said. “Or not exactly that way.”
    “How would you know?”
    “Because when I saw her, she was alive.”
    That’s when we all went ape shit. Demanding to know why he hadn’t told us this sooner, how he could know anything from a dream.
    “You never said it was Heather when you told me in music class,” I said.
    “I didn’t know then.”
    “When I know something, I know it.”
    “I’m happy for you, Trev.”
    “Okay. Back up. This monster—”
    “I never called it that.”
    “Fine. This not-a-tree-but-looks-like-one has someone in its arms. Heather. And she’s trying to get away.”
    “I just said I could tell she was alive.”
    “For fuck’s sake,” Carl said.
    “I’ll second that,” Randy said.
    “Ben?
Ben?
” I moved from where I was sitting to stick my face in his line of sight. “Just tell us what you saw.”
    Ben’s nasty feet. The toes curled up, trying to hide.
    “A man—what I suppose could
only
be a man—had Miss Langham in his arms last night,” Ben said. “Her eyes were open. Like she couldn’t believe whatever was happening was actually happening.”
    He took in a breath, and we thought he was readying for more. But he just exhaled it all wordlessly out again.
    “That it?”
    “Pretty much.”
    “Is it or isn’t it?”
    “None of this matters.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because if she’s still alive, I’m not sure how much longer she’s going to be.”
    I came in even closer to him. “Where is she?”
    Ben pointed out the window. Not up into the sky where the snow was illuminated by the orange streetlight but down, at what stood across the street. We knew what was there without looking. We looked anyway.
    For a long time, none of us said anything.
    Not true. Ben was murmuring something, the same thing, the whole time.
    “I don’t know … I don’t know … I don’t know …”
    “
What
don’t you know, oh wise one? Oh great seer of visions?” I said, hoping it might come out funny. It didn’t.
    “I don’t know,” he said for the last time. “But I think it was the coach.”

[  5  ]
    R ANDY PUSHES OPEN the door to Jake’s Pool ’n’ Sports. Though I’ve never been in the place before, I immediately know I’m home. My grey overcoat and polished Oxfords might mark me as an outsider among the early-bird clientele, the hockey-jerseyed, puffy-faced men who line the bar, frowning up at the flatscreens showing highlights from last night’s game, but that’s who I would have been had I stayed. Who I am still, even after all the time away.
    We remain marked, we small-towners dressed in what, as Randy and I walk into Jake’s, feels instantly like borrowed city-slicker duds. Beneath the camouflage, all of us in this room are branded by shared experience and ritual as indelibly as members of a religion who are alone in understanding its rules and expectations. I’ve noticed over the years how we recognize each other among strangers: something draws me to those who have grown up in a Grimshaw, despite our efforts to hide every embarrassing hickdom, every clue that might give away our corn-fed, tranquilized youths.
    Part of what we share is the knowledge that every small town has a second heart, smaller and darker than the one that pumps the blood of good intentions. We alone know that the picture of home cooking and oak trees and harmlessness is false.
    This is the secret that binds us. Along with the friends who share its weight.
    We take a table in the corner and order a pitcher from a pretty girl wearing the referee’s stripes they make all the servers wear. She reminds me of someone. Or a composite of someones. There is a quality to her movements, the intelligent smile and playfully serious eyes, that I’ve seen before.
    “She looks like Heather,” Randy says.
    “Oh yeah?”
    “Not