Guardian

The summer was dying and families with their sticky kids were oozing across the boardwalk. I could hear them from over the wall with their wind-up dolls, their muted screams, and the sudden slams of the waves in the distance. They continued carefree through their late afternoon, nothing to worry about as long as they didn't come where I was.

Me, I was hiding on the side of the wall that faced the street and the town while I stared down a monster.

It had been a whole summer on this investigation, talking to the useless townsfolk, trying to pinpoint a source of the abnormality. A lesser investigator, I knew, would have thrown in the towel long before. But I hadn’t left a job unfinished yet, and I wasn’t about to start now, even if this one brought me to the brink.

I was squeezed into a corner, behind where the brick wall jutted into the street like an outstretched ghoul. The sun was low, nearly but not entirely departed. My legs cast long parallel shadows along the wall behind me. I kept my face plastered to that wall, one eye looking along it to the right, one behind the edge of the protrusion. With that one eye, at this perfect time of day, I had an unencumbered view of the guardian.

Over my weeks investigating this place, people had continually talked about the boardwalk as the locus of strong feelings in the town. It was the beach and the boardwalk where everyone spent their free time, but something unidentifiable about the boardwalk itself made people a bit uneasy. I’d gone up and down that boardwalk, tried every ride, ate every snack, all at different times of the day, ultimately without much success.

It had been halfway into the summer when I was sitting on the sand, staring away from the ocean and toward the boardwalk that I noticed something odd. There were vast crowds of people on this weekend day, but they were not distributed normally. The sparsest part of the boardwalk was actually its dead center. It was odd. No one ever stopped or paused in that center area of the boardwalk. There were no attractions there. No rides. No food stands. No games. Not even any wandering entertainers that lingered.

The number of people increased gradually on either side, but people never stopped in the middle. They gave it a wide berth, rushing to the gates on the edges that had become the de facto entrances and exits, even though there was a perfectly serviceable gateway right in that middle zone. Better than serviceable. It opened out onto a path that led straight into town. Even I had been using those side gates, and not for any reason I was aware of. It just seemed simpler.

I tried to go close myself and observe any others nearby. I spent days on this. The odd effect became clear almost immediately, once I forced myself to focus on it.

You could see it on the poor teenagers who needed to lock up the boardwalk after hours. I’d watched them from across the street, pretending to read a newspaper against a building. They’d come to this area, usually walking hunched over, as if they were trying to avoid being seen. They’d prepare ahead of time, pulling out a keyring and grasping the correct key with one hand. They’d grab a chain hooked on one side of the gate and, without stopping, would quickly dash to the other end of the gate, lock the padlock in a smooth motion and rapidly turn away from the gate, into town.

They’d walk across the street, over to the coffee shop I was leaning against, and I could always see their eyes. Bright white and glazed over. Scared and… distracted, somehow. By the time they walked up to the door of the coffee house, some would shake themselves out of it, stop, and just return back to the main entrance to clock out. Others, already halfway toward the coffee shop, let their bodies carry them in before they bought themselves a drink they couldn’t afford and made their way back out, studiously avoiding eye contact with the gate or the path through it.

The closer you got to this gate, the more you felt repelled. Psychologically repelled. Not disgusted, exactly, but sent away, as if suddenly the spot next to you was cold and icy and menacing, and every other direction in the world posed a light, bright, glorious alternative.

I still break out in a cold sweat every time I try to get within a few feet of the gate. It took days of me trying it and constantly buying extra coffees to bolster my cool before I eventually became somewhat comfortable with staying a few feet away for minutes at a time. It took double as long to get an actual strategy in place, and that long again before I discovered this one-eye, before-sunset technique. Maybe it was something about the loss of perspective, plus the rays of light shining through the gate?

Who knew? Bottom line was that when I worked the angle like this, the guardian would appear.

She had the shape of a young girl, maybe 10 or 11, wearing a dark hoodie with thick bright hair streaming down to her shoulders. In the shimmering light her hair looked almost purple. She was always licking a creamy paleta made of psychedelic colors that spilled down over her clutched, golden-brown fingers. The paleta never ran out, and it never entirely melted either.

I don’t know why I thought of her as a guardian. Probably her face. And of course, her face wasn’t human. It was a caricature of a demon’s face or a dragon’s face, red and gold with curved teeth coming up at the ends of her mouth, bulging eyes, sharp ears. If a guardian, then a monstrous one, to be sure.

Each time I managed to catch sight of her, she was facing forward, head bobbing slowly up and down. She’d stick out a long and thin tongue—far longer than any human’s—and wrap it around the paleta. She’d leave her tongue there for a moment, with an audible sizzle in the air and a puff of steam, before she sucked it back into her mouth, cutting through the paleta in a concave stripe that seemed to grow back the more I looked at it.

(unfinished)