The Killing Circle

by Andrew Pyper

  “There’s published, and then there’s published,” I say.

  I’m thinking that’s about it. Politeness has been maintained, my beer almost guzzled. I’m about to throw my coat on and steel myself for the cold walk home when Len ventures a question of his own.

  “That guy’s pretty weird, don’t you think?”

  He could be speaking of Conrad White, or Ivan, or the bartender with a lizard inked into his cheek, or the leader of the free world warning of nerve gas delivered in briefcases on the TV over the bar, but he isn’t.

  “William’s quite a character, alright.”

  “I bet he’s done time. Prison, I mean.”

  “Looks like the sort.”

  “He scares me a bit.” Len shifts his gaze from his orange juice to me. “What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Doesn’t he give you the creeps?”

  I could admit the truth. And with another man, one I knew better or longer, I would. But Len is a little too openly eager for company to be dealt any favours just yet.

  “You should use him as material.” I flatten a bill on to the bar sufficient to cover both our drinks. “I thought you liked horror stories.”

  “Definitely. But there’s a difference between imagining bad things and doing bad things.”

  “I hope you’re right. Or some of us would be in real trouble,” I say, and give Len a comradely pat on the shoulder as I go. The big kid smiles. And damn if I don’t feel a smile of my own doing its thing too.

  Angela’s Story

  Transcribed from Tape Recording No. 1

  There once was a girl who was haunted by a ghost. A terrible man who does terrible things who would visit her in her dreams. The girl had never had a friend, but she knew enough to know this wasn’t what he was. No matter how much she prayed or how good she was or how she tried to believe it was true when others would tell her there was no such thing as ghosts, the terrible man would come and prove that all the wishing and prayers in the world could never wish or pray him away. This was why the girl had to keep her ghost to herself.

  The only connection, the only intimacy she would allow herself with him was to give him a name.

  The Sandman.

  Everyone has parents. Knowing this is like knowing that, one day, all of us will die. Two things common to every person in the world.

  But there were times when the girl thought she was the singular exception to this supposedly inescapable rule. Times she felt certain she was the only person who’d ever lived who had neither a mother nor a father. She simply appeared in the middle of her own story, just as the terrible man who does terrible things walked into the middle of her dreams. The girl is real, but only in the way that a character in a story is real. If she were a character in a story, it would explain how she had no parents, as characters aren’t born but just are, brought into being on the whim of their authors.

  What troubled the girl almost as much as being haunted by the terrible man who does terrible things was that she had no idea who her author might be. If she knew that, she’d at least know who to blame.

  Even characters have a past, though they may not have lived it as the living do. The girl, for instance, was an orphan. People never spoke of where she came from, and the girl never asked, and in this way it was never known. She was a mystery to others as much as to herself. She was a problem that needed solving.

  There were books the girl had read where orphans such as herself lived in homes with other orphans. And although these homes were often places of longing and cruelty, the girl wished she could live in one, so that she was not the only one like herself. Instead, she was sent to live in foster homes, which are not like the orphanages in books, but just regular homes with people who are paid to look after someone like the girl. When she was ten, she moved four times. When she was eleven, twice more. When she was twelve, she moved once a month for a year. And all along the Sandman followed her. Showing her the things he would do if he were real, and continued to do in her dreams.

  And then, when she was thirteen, she was sent to live in an old farmhouse in the dark forests to the north, further north than most farms were ever meant to be. Her foster parents there were the oldest she’d had yet. Edra was the wife’s name, and Jacob the husband’s. They had no children of their own, only their hardscrabble farm, which yielded just enough to feed them through the long winters. Perhaps it was their childlessness that made them so happy when the girl came to them. She was still a mystery, still a problem. But Edra and Jacob loved her before they had any reason to, loved her more than if they’d had a child of their own. It was the suffering the girl had seen that prompted their love, for they were farmers of land that fought them over everything they took from it. Edra and Jacob knew suffering, and had some idea of what it could do to a girl, alone.

  For a time, the girl was as happy—or as close to happy—as she’d ever been. There was comfort in the kindness her elderly foster parents showed her. She had a home in which she might live for years instead of weeks. There was a school in the town down the road she took the bus to every day, and where there were books for her to read, and fellow students she dreamed of one day making friends of. It was, for a time, what she’d imagined normal might be like.

  Her contentment had been so great and without precedent that she’d almost forgotten about the terrible man who does terrible things. It had been a while since her night thoughts had been interrupted by his appearance. So it is with the most awful kind of surprise when she comes home from school one afternoon in late autumn to overhear Edra and Jacob talking about a little girl who’d disappeared from town.

  Thirteen years old. The same age as her. Playing outside in the yard one minute, gone the next. The police and volunteer search parties had looked everywhere for her, but for three days the missing girl remained missing. The authorities were forced to presume foul play. They had no suspect in mind. Their only lead was that some in town had lately noticed a stranger walking the cracked sidewalks at night. A tall, sloped-shouldered man, a figure who kept to the shadows. “A man with no face,” was how one witness put it. Another said it seemed the man was searching for something, though this was an impression and nothing more. Aside from this, no details were known of him.

  But they were known to the girl. For she knew who the dark figure was even though she wasn’t there to see him. She knew who had taken a girl in town the same age as her. The Sandman. Except now he’d escaped the constraints of her dream world and entered the real, where he could do all the terrible things he desired to do.

  The girl was certain of all this, along with something else. She knew what the Sandman searched for as he walked in the night shadows.

  He searched for her.

  Write What You Know.

  This is one of the primary Writers’ Rules, though an unnecessary one, as the initial inclination of most is toward autobiography anyway. The imagination comes later, if it comes at all, after all the pages of the family photo album have been turned, love affairs autopsied, coming-of-age revelations and domestic tragedies rehashed on the page. Usually, people find their own lives sufficiently fascinating to never have to confront the problem of making things up. The Kensington Circle is no exception. Evelyn’s campus sexcapade, Petra’s marital breakdown, Ivan’s sewer-rat metamorphosis. I’m jealous of them. It would make writing so much easier if I never tired of seeing the same face in the mirror.

  But what if you don’t particularly find the life you know all that interesting? Real, yes. And marked by its share of loss, redeemed by the love of a son with eyes the colour of his mother’s. It’s just that I don’t see my life as satisfactory material to present as fiction. I find it challenge enough just muddling along as who I am, never mind casting myself as hero.

  This is the reasoning I call on when, as now, I try to squeeze out a paragraph to be read at the next circle meeting, and nothing comes. I’m taking lunch at my desk, gnawing on a cafeteria ham-and-cheese, randomly pe
cking at the keys of my computer. Tim Earheart, who finds my literary aspirations perplexing (“Why do you think anybody would pay to read the shit you’re pulling out of your ass?” is how he put it to me, unanswerably, when I told him of my attendance at a fiction-writing circle), comes by to read over my shoulder.

  “I’m no judge,” he says, “but I’m not sure you’re going anywhere with this.”

  He’s right. Over the next hour and a half, only a few sentences remain on the screen.

  Here’s what good Write What You Know has done for me today:

  After my wife died I started hearing voices. Just hers at first. And then others I’ve never heard before. Strangers. I can’t know this for sure but I have the feeling that all of them are dead.

  They come to me before I go to sleep. This is what frightens me. Not that they’re dead, or that I can hear them. But that I’m awake when I do.

  Once this passage of luminous prose has been accomplished, I turn my mind to my Couch Potato column for the weekend edition. This week it’s a gloves-off attack on the Canadian franchise of American MegaStar!, a talent show that is the top-rated program in this country, as well as the fourteen others it has colonized. An entire, worldwide generation being led to believe they are entitled to be famous. It’s toxic. A lie. It’s wrong. And it’s also how my frustration with Writing What I Know opens the gates to Writing How the World Has Gone to Crap, which has never been much of a problem for me.

  Even though I know that Canadian MegaStar! is owned by the same multinational media behemoth that owns the paper I work for, and even though there have been ominous hints from the section editor to “go easy” on “content” which is produced by said behemoth, I let slip the dogs of war on MegaStar! as if it is single-handedly responsible for carrying out a cultural atrocity. In fact, this last phrase makes it into the lede. From this measured opening, the column goes on to be brutal, hyperbolic and libellous, all leading to the kind of hysterical finish where you’re actually a little concerned about the mental health of the column’s author. It’s personal.

  I stay at work late (Thursdays keep me at the office at least until midnight copyediting the Best on the Box listings) and walk home wondering if today will prove to be my last in my current position. Or, come to think of it, my last in any position. It’s almost amusing to wonder what else I might be qualified to do. I’ve always rather liked the idea of running my own business. Something very hands off. Automated, preferably. A laundromat. A spray-it-yourself car wash.

  I round the corner on to my street speculating over what kind of pay cut, if any, would be involved in delivering newspapers instead of writing for them, when I notice the yellow police tape around the house across from mine. It is the neighbouring family at 147, and not my own family at 146 that the four police cruisers are parked in front of. But I still run the half-block up Euclid, ring the bell at my front door after twice dropping the keys, and confirm my son is safe with Emmie before going back out to ask the cop turning traffic back toward Queen what’s going on.

  “Break and enter,” he says, chewing the inside of his cheek.

  “What’d they take?”

  “Didn’t touch a thing. The kid was the only one who saw him.”

  “Joseph. My boy plays with him sometimes.”

  “Yeah? Well, when Joseph woke up tonight some son of a bitch was standing over his bed.”

  “Was he able to give a description?”

  “All he can say is the guy’s a shadow.”

  “A shadow?”

  “Went downstairs to the living room with the kid following behind him. Just stood at the front window, staring out at the street. Then, after a while, he walked out the front door as if he owned the place. Turn it around, buddy! Yeah, you!”

  The cop steps away to have a word with whoever’s behind the wheel of the SUV that refuses to head back to Queen. It gives me a chance to walk up on to the neighbour’s patch of lawn and stand with my back to their front window. The same view the shadow would have had, standing behind the glass.

  Staring at my place.

  Where Sam is now. Standing next to Emmie on the porch, squinting over at me.

  I read the nanny’s lips—Wave to Daddy!—and Sam raises his chubby arm in salute. And as I wave back I wonder if he can see how bad Daddy’s shaking.

  The next circle meeting is at Petra’s house. She had kindly offered to host all of us the week before, though as I step out of my cab at her Rosedale address, I see she was being modest to the point of insult when she described her digs as “Nothing too fancy.” The place is a mansion. Copper roof, terraced landscaping that looks expensive even under a couple inches of snow, matching Mercedes coupés (one red, one black) docked in the carport. It makes me wonder how much the husband had before the divorce if this is Petra’s cut.

  Inside the door, my coat is taken by a silver-haired man wearing a better suit than any I have ever owned. A man who serves not only a different class, but a different century. My first honest-to-God butler.

  “The group is assembling in the Rose Room,” he says, and leads me over marble floors to a sunken lounge of leather chairs, each with their own side table, and a snapping fire in the hearth. At the door, the butler discreetly inquires as to whether I would like a drink. He says it in a way that makes it clear real drinks are included in the offer.

  “Scotch?” I say, and he nods, as though my choice had confirmed a suspicion he’d had on first sight.

  Most of the other members are already here. Conrad White has chosen a chair near the fire, its orange flickers lending him a devilish air which is only enhanced by the smirk he barely manages to conceal as he notes the room’s incoherent collection of Inuit sculptures, garish abstracts and bookshelves lined with leather-bound “classics.” In this context of stage-set wealth, the rest of us look like hired help sneaking a break, holding our crystal goblets with both hands so nothing might spill on the rug.

  Len in particular seems out of place. Or perhaps this is because he’s the only one talking.

  “You should come. You all should. How about you, Patrick?”

  “How about me what?”

  “The open mic. There’s a launch party for a new litmag, and then afterwards they open the floor to anyone who wants to read.”

  “I don’t know, Len.”

  “C’mon. You can check out what’s going on out there.”

  “They have a bar?”

  “Half-price beer if you buy the zine.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  All of us are here now except for William and Petra, the latter clipping back and forth to the kitchen on high heels, touchingly anxious about burning the shrimp skewers. When our hostess finally sits, Conrad White decides to go ahead without William. There’s a subtle easing in all of our postures at this. I would be surprised if any of us didn’t hope that William has moved on to other creative endeavours, if not a different area code altogether.

  I’m first, which is something of a relief, as the sooner I can get through the miserable couple of paragraphs I’ve brought along, the sooner I can get to work on the quadruple single malt Jeeves has poured for me.

  Besides, I’m only here for one reason anyway.

  Angela.

  She doesn’t disappoint. I say this even though I’m not really listening. After I click my dictaphone on, I pay less attention to her words than how she speaks them. I have assumed all along that Angela was using a voice distinct from her own in her readings. Now I realize that I have virtually no idea what her “real” voice is like, or whether it would be different from the one I listen to now. She has said so little in the circle (her responses to the other readers little more than a murmured “I liked it a lot”) that it may be the at once innocent and debauched little girl tone she uses is the same as her everyday speech.

  When she’s finished, no one says anything for what may be a minute. The fire hissing like a punctured tire. An ice cube cracks in Len’s tumbler of apple juice.
And from the moment Angela closes the cover of her journal to the moment Conrad White invites the circle to comment on what we’ve just heard, she looks at me.

  More active than staring. A taking in. Every blink marking some new observation. And I do the same. Or try to. To see inside, sort her truth from the make believe. Figure out whether she can spot anything worthwhile in me. Anything she might like.

  “Wonderful, Angela. Truly wonderful,” Conrad White says.

  Everyone raises their heads. No one had noticed our silent exchange except for Conrad himself. And Ivan. Both men shifting in their chairs to find relief from an affliction I immediately recognize. A thought that, for the lonely like us, passes more than any other.

  Why not me?

  After the meeting, we step out into the cold night, none of us knowing which way will lead us out of the enclave’s curving streets and cul-de-sacs that discourage entry or exit. I look around for Angela, but she must have grabbed her coat before us. In any case, there’s no sign of her now.

  “So, Patrick, we’re on for Tuesday?” Len asks. I look at him like I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about. Which I don’t. “The open mic?”

  “Right. Yes. Absolutely.”

  “’Night then,” he says, and scuffs off in the opposite direction I would guess to be the way out of here. Leaving just me and Ivan standing there.

  “I know the way,” Ivan says.

  “You’re familiar with this neighbourhood?”

  “No,” he says, exhaling a long, yogic breath. “I can hear the trains.”

  Ivan tilts his head back, eyes squeezed shut, as though savouring the melody of a violin concerto, when all there is to hear is the clacking of the subway train emerging out of the tunnel somewhere in the ravine below.