The Killing Circle

by Andrew Pyper

  All of which is reinforced in the poem’s concluding line. If we wish to see him, we must turn not to whatever clues have been left behind, but to our dreams. And these dreams aren’t only imagined, but “here,” in the real world. We are all part of the same dream whether we like it or not. And it’s his.

  It’s not until my walk home that another interpretation occurs to me. “Occurs to me” might not be strong enough. In fact, it almost knocks me over. I have to sit on the curb with my head between my legs to prevent myself from blacking out.

  When I’m partly recovered I speak into the dictaphone, still slouched on the curb as cars pass within inches of my feet.

  TRANSCRIPT FROM TAPE

  March 12, 2003

  [Sounds of passing traffic]

  I am the ground beneath your feet.

  Literally. Whoever first read the poem would have been on Ward’s Island. Standing on a beach. On sand.

  [Aside]

  Oh, shit.

  [Kid in background]

  Look at this pisstank! He’s gonna lose…

  [Car horn]

  …if he doesn’t watch it!

  [Background laughter]

  Close your eyes, you will see me.

  Okay. To know who he is, we have to dream. But who delivers our thoughts while we sleep?

  [Singing]

  Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream…

  Angela’s Story

  Transcribed from Tape Recording No. 3

  The next week, after the school was re-opened despite the second missing girl remaining missing and no leads being discovered as to the perpetrator of what the town’s Chief of Police called “these heinous crimes” (a word the girl had never heard before and spelled in her mind as “hayness,” which only reminded her of what she discovered in the barn), Edra had to go into the hospital a hundred and sixty miles down the road for surgery. Her gallbladder. Nothing to worry about, Jacob assured the girl. Edra would be just fine without it. Which, if this was true, made the girl wonder why God gave us gallbladders in the first place.

  Edra is taken to the hospital on a Friday, which leaves Jacob and the girl alone in the farmhouse until Edra is brought home, all being well, on Sunday. The old man and the girl have the weekend to themselves.

  As much as the girl is delighted by the idea of exclusive attention from Jacob, part of her dreads their number being reduced from three to two. She wonders if the invisible cord that connected them as a family also acted as a spell, a force field that kept out the terrible man who does terrible things. With Edra gone, a door might be opened. For the sake of her foster parents, the girl would keep a vile secret. She would bury someone in the night and suffer the nightmares that followed. But she isn’t sure she could ever close a door to the Sandman once it was opened.

  Soon her worry over all of this could be read in every look and gesture the girl makes. No matter how she tries to keep her burden hidden, she wears her trouble like a cloak. Jacob knows her too well not to notice. And when he asks the girl what’s wrong, this simple provocation triggers an explosion of tears.

  She tells him almost everything. That there’s a terrible man who does terrible things who used to live only in her dreams, but has now taken form in the real world. That she believes this man took the two girls from town because they were the same age and general appearance as she.

  What she doesn’t tell him is what she found in the barn, and what she did with it.

  Jacob doesn’t speak for a long time after the girl is finished. When he finally finds the words he’s looking for, the girl expects him to explain how what she’s said could not be possible. But instead he surprises her.

  “I have seen him too,” the old man says.

  The girl can hardly believe it. What was he like? Where did Jacob see him?

  “I could not describe him to you any more than I could say what shape the wind takes,” the old man answers. “It is something I have felt. Moving around the house as though what he seeks is within, but he cannot enter. Not yet.”

  Perhaps the girl should go to him. If it’s only her that the Sandman wants, why risk him doing harm to another girl? Or worse, to Jacob or Edra.

  “You mustn’t speak like that,” Jacob implores her. “Never ever. Understand? He will not have you so long as I live. And after I’m gone, you must still resist him. Promise me this.”

  The girl promises. But what is left for them to do? The girl can’t imagine how they might attempt to fight him. How can you kill what may already be dead?

  “I cannot say if he is alive or dead. But I believe I can say who he is.”

  Jacob holds the girl firm by the shoulders as though to prevent her from falling.

  “It’s your father,” he says.

  After Jacob failed to pick her up, Edra returned from the hospital in a taxi on Sunday to find the farmhouse empty. The back door left wide open. If someone had come in or gone out by this point of entry there was no way of knowing. Over the last twenty-four hours, the whole county had been buried under three feet of snow. The arrival of winter announced in a November blizzard. Any tracks that might have been left now filled in and sculpted into fin-tailed drifts.

  When the police arrive Edra is frantic for them to find the girl. They don’t have far to look. Huddled in the corner of the last stall in the barn. Glass-eyed, blue-skinned. Shaking from the hypothermia caused by staying outside all night when the temperature dipped as low as ten below.

  They ask her where Jacob is. The girl’s only answer is to slip into unconsciousness. For a time, it’s judged to be even odds if she will survive or not. Three of her toes are removed, turned black from frostbite. Her brain monitored to determine what parts have died from lack of oxygen while she sleeps.

  But the girl doesn’t die.

  When she comes to the next day, she will not speak to anyone but Edra, and even then, it’s not about what happened over the preceding days. Edra buffers the girl from their queries, putting her anxieties regarding her husband second to the girl’s need for protection. The police are left to look for Jacob on their own.

  After it is determined that Jacob’s truck was parked in the farmyard the entire weekend, and there is no sign of a struggle or suicide note inside the house, the forest that borders the end of his fields and carries on for five hundred miles north into the Canadian Shield becomes the prime area of concentration for the police search.

  The snowfall from the blizzard, however, makes it difficult. Helicopter fly-overs can spot little more than trees sprouting up from a blanket of white. The dogs they use to track Jacob’s scent run a hundred yards into the woods only to sink up to their muzzles, and then must be carried out, whimpering, by their trainers. By the fourth day, the search’s urgency is downgraded from a rescue operation to evidence collection. If Jacob is to be found somewhere out in the endless woods, there is no expectation that he will be alive.

  It takes another two weeks of mild weather for the snow to melt enough to expose Jacob’s body. Four miles from the farm. Lying face down, arms sprawled out at his sides. No injuries aside from cuts to his face and arms that came from branches slashing his skin as he ran. Just socks on his feet, and not wearing any outerwear (his boots and coat were in their usual places in the house). The cause of death determined to be exposure following a collapse from exhaustion. The coroner is amazed that a man of Jacob’s age was capable of getting as far as he did. A four-mile run through a blizzard in the night woods. Only someone in a state of mortal panic would be capable of it.

  But the questions that followed from this were beyond both the coroner’s and forensic investigators’ capacity to answer. Was Jacob running from or toward something? If he had been the one in pursuit, what quarry would have driven him into the forest dressed as he was during the first big snowfall of the year? And if he was the pursued, what would have terrified him enough to run so far he let himself fall and die without anything laying a hand on him?

  The police all agreed that if J
acob had been murdered, it was a perfect crime. No suspect. No witness. No tracks left after the snow had filled them in. No weapon to be found aside from the cold.

  Only the girl knew—or might know—what happened over the time she and Jacob were alone in the farmhouse. But no matter how many times she was asked, she would not speak of it.

  Shock, the doctors said. Extreme emotional trauma. It can cut the tongue out of a child as sure as any blade. She’s of no use now, they concluded. You’d have as good a chance asking the trees in Jacob’s forest what they saw as this poor girl.

  The girl heard everything they said about her, though she acted as though she was deaf. She resolved that there are some things you cannot speak of. But she would record what she knew in a different way from speech. She would write it down. Later, when she was older and on her own, she would tell the truth, if only to herself.

  Here, in the pages of this very book.

  She even knows how it will begin.

  There once was a girl who was haunted by a ghost…

  “City in Fear” reads the banner headline of the next day’s National Star, and for me, at least, it’s not overstatement. The accompanying piece is one of those “man on the street,” mood-gauging surveys that only retreads what is already known of the two recent victims—unrelated, no known involvements in crime, no indication of sexual assault, nothing of value taken from their persons. Indeed, there is no reason to believe their killer to be the same person. This report is followed by interviews with people in the neighbourhood who admit they’re not planning to go out at night until “they catch whatever sick bastard that would do this.” I read the article to the end to see if there’s any mention of the poem found next to Carol Ulrich’s body, but it looks like Tim was right. The editors killed it.

  And then, perhaps most troubling of all, there is an account of the various eyewitness statements and anonymous call-in tips received by police. A well-dressed, bald white man says one. Two black men are cited—one with gold teeth and a Raiders toque, the other grey-haired, nice-looking, a “Denzel Washington look-alike.” A pair of curly-haired men who “may be twins.” An elderly Portuguese lady in mourning black.

  “People are seeing killers in whoever sits next to them on the subway,” one policeman points out.

  And why not? It could be them.

  The morning’s walk through the City of Fear confirms that the three million hearts pounding their way to work all around me have turned a darker shade of worry. Each cluster of newspaper boxes shows that the National Star’s competition have run similarly alarmist pieces, the always hysterical tabloid putting smiling photos of Carol Ulrich and Ronald Pevencey side by side under the headline “Are You Next?” A question that’s impossible not to give some thought to. Everyone getting off the streetcars or emerging from the mouths of subway entrances sees these front-page faces and, through them, sees themselves. Not stony-faced mobsters or gangland hoods (the kinds who had it coming), but the faces of those whose primary goal was the avoidance of trouble. That’s the security most of us count on: we belong to the majority who never go looking for it. Yet all of us know at the same time that this is an increasingly hollow assurance. Fear is always there, looking for a way to the surface.

  No matter how we might keep to ourselves, sometimes the Sandman finds us anyway.

  The Quotidian Award, affectionately known as the Dickie, is the nation’s second-richest literary prize. The honour was established by Richard “Dickie” Barnham, a Presbyterian minister who, in his retirement, became an enthusiastic memoirist, recounting the mild eccentricities of his quaint Ontario parsonage. He was also, in the year before his death, the purchaser of a $12-million-winning lottery ticket. The Dickie is today awarded to the work of fiction that “best reflects the domestic heritage of Canadian family life,” which has led to a series of hushed, defiantly uneventful winners. A rainy-day parade of stolid farmers and fishermen’s widows.

  It also happens to be one of the gala events of the season. A ticket to the Dickie marks one’s membership in the nation’s elite, a Who’s Who of country club philanthropists, TV talking heads, corporate barons. The National Star’s publisher has never missed it. It’s in part why, each year, a photo of the winner and a hyperventilating description of the menu and ladies’ gowns appear on the front page.

  It’s the sort of assignment I’m no longer considered for. Even when I was the literary columnist, the paper preferred to send one of the party girls from the Style section who could recognize not only the celebrities in attendance, but the designers who did their outfits. This year, however, the reporter they had in mind called in sick four hours before the event. The Managing Editor was out of town at one of her executive retreats, so the task of choosing a last-minute alternative came down to the News Editor who asked if I could do it for him. I accepted.

  The press pass allows me to take a guest. The wise course would be to go alone, write the story they’re looking for, and be in bed by midnight. Instead, I call Len.

  “You could slip someone your manuscript,” I tell him.

  “You think?”

  “Every editor in town is going to be there.”

  “Maybe just a couple short stories,” he decides after a moment. “Something that could fit under my jacket.”

  By the time I rent a tux and spin by in a cab to pick up Len (who has also been fitted in black tie, though for someone a foot shorter and thirty pounds lighter than he) we arrive at the Royal York just in time to catch the last half of the cocktail hour.

  “Look!” Len whispers on our way into the Imperial Room. “There’s Grant Duguay!”

  I follow Len’s pointing finger and find the emcee of tonight’s proceedings. The same waxy catalogue model with a used car salesman grin who acts as host of Canadian MegaStar!

  “That’s him alright.”

  “And there! That’s Rosalind Canon!”

  “Who?”

  Len looks at me to make sure I’m being serious. “At the Brain Pudding launch. The one who got half a million for her first novel.”

  I get Len to point Rosalind out to me. And there she is, the mousy girl who is now shaking hands with every culturecrat and society wife who make their way to her. Even from across the room I can lip-read the same earnest Thank you in reply to the congratulations, over and over. It makes me want to say the same thing to someone. A passing waiter will have to do.

  “Thank you,” I say, plucking a pair of martinis, one for each hand, from his tray.

  We settle at the press table before the other hacks arrive. It allows me to stick one of the two bottles of wine on the table between my feet, just in case the steward is unavailable at a crisis point later on. Then the MegaStar! guy is up at the lectern saying something about how reading made him what he is today, which seems reasonably true, given that managing a teleprompter would be tricky for an illiterate. Following this, as the dinner begins to be served, each of the nominated authors take the stage to talk about the genesis of their work. The bottle between my feet is empty before the caribou tartare is cleared.

  It’s absurd and I know it. It’s shallow and unfounded and generally reflects poorly on my character. Because I haven’t published a book. Haven’t written a book. I don’t have anything in mind to one day turn into a book. But in the spirit of full and honest disclosure, I’ll tell you what I’m thinking as I sit in the Imperial Room in my itchy tux watching the night’s honourees bow into the waves of applause.

  Why not me?

  Luck. Pulled strings. Marketability. Maybe they have this on their side. Though there is always something else, too. A compelling order to things, a story’s beginning, middle and end. Me? All I have is all most of us have. The messy garble of a life-in-progress.

  To turn my mind from such thoughts, I lean over and share with Len the killer’s secret poem. It leaves him goggle-eyed. Encouraged, I go on to outline my interpretation of the poem’s meanings, including the unlikely hint at the author’s ident
ity.

  “You think there’s a connection?” he asks, wiping the sweat from his lip.

  “I think it’s a coincidence.”

  “Hold on, hold on.” Len fusses with the cutlery set out in front of him as though it represents the thoughts in his head. “If you’re right, then it means whoever’s been doing those things is either in our writing circle, or has read Angela’s story.”

  “No, it doesn’t. Anyone can call themselves the Sandman. And he doesn’t call himself anything in the poem. It’s just a theory.”

  “And my theory is it’s William.”

  “Slow down. It’s not–”

  “Hello! A kid who disembowels cats and horses for fun? He’s basically telling us what he’s capable of.”

  “It’s a story, Len.”

  “Some stories are true.”

  “If writing fiction about serial killers makes you a murder suspect, there’d be a hundred freaks within ten blocks of here the police would want to talk to.”

  “Still. Still,” Len says, chewing his lip. “I wonder what Angela would think if she–”

  “You can’t tell anyone.”

  Len is crestfallen. A real horror story dropped in his lap, and he’s not allowed to run with it.

  “I mean it, Len. I only told you because–”

  Why did I tell Len? The martinis helped. And I suppose I wanted him to be impressed. I’m a journalist at a real newspaper. I know things. But more than this, I think I wanted to entertain the big geek.

  “Because I believe you can be trusted,” I say finally, finishing the sentence Len has been waiting for. And he looks away, visibly touched by the compliment.

  After dessert, Mr. MegaStar! announces the winner. And once I’ve jotted the name down, I’m out of there.

  “I’m off, Len. Got to write this thing up lickety-split.”