The Killing Circle

by Andrew Pyper

  Len eyes my untouched maple syrup cheesecake. “You going to eat that?”

  “All yours.”

  I squeeze his shoulder as I get up from the table. And although Len smiles in acknowledgment of the gesture, the fact is if I hadn’t grabbed him I would have fallen face first into a passing tray of beaver-shaped shortbreads.

  After a couple hours punching keys on my laptop, keeping focused with the help of the Library Bar’s Manhattans, I hit Send and start the long stagger home. It’s not easy. My legs, lazy rascals, won’t do what I tell them. Pretzelling around each other, taking sudden turns toward walls or parking meters. It takes me a half-hour to get two blocks behind me. At least my arms seem to be working. One hugging a lamp-post and the other hailing a cab.

  Despite the cold, I roll the window down as the driver rockets us past the Richmond Street nightclubs that, at this late hour, are only now disgorging the sweaty telemarketers, admin assistants and retail slaves who’ve come downtown to blow half their week’s pay on cover, parking and a half-dozen vodka coolers. I hang my elbow out and let the air numb my face. Sleep coils up from the bottoms of my feet.

  But it’s interrupted by a news reader’s voice coming from the speaker behind my head. I roll up the window to hear him tell of a third victim in a murder spree police continue to publicly deny believing is the work of a single killer. Like Carol Ulrich and Ronald Pevencey, the body was found dismembered. A woman again, her name not yet released by investigators. The additionally puzzling twist is that she had only arrived in Toronto the day before from Vancouver. No known relation to the first two victims. Indeed, police have yet to determine if she knew anyone in town at all.

  And then, right at the end of the report, come the details that chill me more than if I was being driven home tied to the roof rack.

  The victim’s body was found in the playground around the corner from us. The one where I take Sam.

  And not just anywhere in the playground. The sand box.

  “Eight fiddy,” the driver says.

  “Home. Right. I need to pay you now.”

  “That’s how it works.”

  I’m stretching out over the back bench, grunting to pull out my wallet when the driver informs me the whole city’s gone crazy.

  “Kids got guns in the schools. Cops takin’ money on the side. And the drugs? They sellin’ shit that turn people into robots. Robots that stick a knife in your gut for pocket change.”

  “I know it.”

  “And now this insane motherfucker—’scuse me—goes round and chops up three people in three weeks. Three weeks! What, he don’t take no holidays?”

  I hand the driver a piece of paper that, in the dark and with my Manhattan-blurred vision, could be either a twenty-dollar bill or a dry-cleaning receipt. It seems to satisfy him, whatever it is.

  “I been out here drivin’ nights for eight years,” he says as I shoulder the door open and spill out into the street. “But I never been scared before.”

  “Well, you take care then.”

  The driver looks me up and down. “How ’bout this? How ’bout you take care.”

  I watch the taxi drive up Euclid until its brake lights shrink to nothing. Snow suspended under the streetlights, neither falling nor rising.

  In the next moment, there is the certainty that I must not turn around. Not if I want to preserve the illusion that I am alone. So I step off the street, lurch toward my door. Only to see that this is a journey someone has already made.

  Boot prints. At least two sizes larger than mine. Leading across the postage-stamp lawn and into the narrow walkway between our house and the house next door.

  At least, this is the trail I think I’m following. When I look back, the prints, both mine and the boots’, are already obscured by powdery snow.

  I am the ground beneath your feet…

  I could pull out my keys, unlock the front door, and put this skittishness behind me. Instead, something starts me down the unlit walk between the houses. If there is a danger here, it is my job to face it. No matter how unsteady I am. No matter how frightened.

  But it’s darker than night in here. A strip of sky running twenty feet over my head and no other way for the light of the city to get in. My heart accelerated to the point it hurts. Hands running over the brick on either side, making sure the walls don’t close in on me. It’s only thirty feet away, but the space at the far end that is our back yard feels like it’s triple that. Uphill.

  Along with another impression. This one telling me that someone else was here only moments ago.

  The man in dark alleys you don’t want to meet.

  Once out, I slide my back along the rear wall. The branches of perennials reaching up from the snow like skeletal fingers. The old garden shed I keep meaning to tear down leans against the back fence to remain standing, much as I do using the wall behind me.

  I side-step up on to the deck. The sliding glass door is closed. Inside, the living room is illuminated by the TV. An infomercial demonstrating the amazing utility of a slicer-and-dicer gadget. It may be the booze, or the comforting images of advertising, but something holds me here for a moment, peering into my own darkened home. Taking in the mismatched furniture, the frayed rug, the overstuffed bookshelves, as though they are someone else’s. As they could well be.

  Except the room is not empty.

  Sam. Asleep with a Fantastic Four comic open on his lap, his hands still gripping the cover. Emmie has let him stay up, having retired to the spare room awaiting my return. I look at my son and see the worry in his pose, the evidence of his struggle against sleep. Nightmares. It makes my heart hurt all over again.

  I pull my hands from where they were resting against the glass. Step away and search my pockets for the keys to the house. Find them at the same instant I find something else that stops me cold.

  A different pair of hand prints above mine on the sliding door. Visible only now I’ve moved away from the glass and the condensation of my breath has frozen them into silver. Ten fingertips and two smudges of palm that, when I place my own hands on top of them, extend an inch further from every edge.

  He was here.

  Looking into my home just as I am now, gauging the ease of entering. His eyes studying my sleeping son.

  This time, when I push away from the sliding door, my hands smear the glass so that the other’s prints are wiped away. Another filled-in boot print, a misguided intuition. A dubious creation of my non-creative mind.

  Yet no matter how rational they sound, none of these explanations come close to being believed.

  “I’m curious,” the Managing Editor says, her face approximating an expression of real curiosity. “What were you thinking when you wrote this?”

  It’s the next morning. The Managing Editor has the front page of today’s National Star laid out over her desk. My by-line under the lead story. “Prodigious Pay-Off for Pedantic Prizewinner.”

  “You mean the headline?” I say. “I’ve always been a sucker for alliteration.”

  “I’m speaking of the piece itself.”

  “I thought it needed some colour, I suppose.”

  The Managing Editor looks down at the paper. Reads aloud some of the lines she has highlighted.

  “‘Proceedings interrupted by coughing fits from an audience choking on air thick with hypocrisy.’ ‘The real prize should have gone to the jury for managing to read the short-list.’ ‘There was more irony in listening to the host of an execrable TV show preach the virtues of reading than in the past dozen Dickie winners.’ And so on.”

  The Managing Editor lifts her eyes from the page.

  “Colour, Patrick?”

  I search for a way to apologize. Because I am sorry. And I have a handful of excuses to back up my regret. The grief that seems to be turning into something else, something worse. Inoperable writer’s block. A ghoul circling my house.

  “I haven’t been myself lately,” I say.

  “Oh?”

 
; “It feels like I’m losing hold of things. But I can’t let myself. I have a son, he’s still little, and I’m the only one who–”

  “So this,” the Managing Editor interrupts, touching a finger to my article, “could be interpreted as a cry for help?”

  “Yes. In a way, I think it could.”

  The Managing Editor reaches for the phone.

  “Who are you calling?”

  “Security.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “I know. I just rather like the idea of having you escorted out.”

  “This is it, then?”

  “Very much so.”

  “Would it make any difference if I said I was sorry?”

  “None whatsoever.” She raises a finger to silence me. “Could you please have Patrick Rush removed from the building? That’s right, this is a permanent access denial situation. Thank you.”

  The Managing Editor hangs up. Gives me a smile that’s actually something else. The bared teeth dogs use to show their willingness to rip another’s lungs out.

  “So, Patrick. How’s the family?”

  Even with all my new free time, my final offering to the circle is no better than my previous scraps. Four whole days of wide-open unemployment and I’ve managed to produce little more than a To Do list stretched into full sentences. Patrick takes a nap. Patrick picks up long-forgotten dry cleaning. Patrick heats a can of soup for his lunch. If I’d set it during a war or the Depression and kept it up for a hundred thousand words, I’d have a shot at the Dickie.

  Still, I make my way into Kensington with a fluttery anticipation, the winter showing signs of retreat, an almost clear March afternoon doing its best to lift the temperature past zero. A double espresso along the way has offered a jolt of hope. A caffeinated reminder there are blessings to be counted.

  For one, Sam took my dismissal as well as could be expected for a four-year-old. He doesn’t understand money. Or mortgages. Or the prospects for unemployed writers. But he seems to think old Dad can pull a few rabbits out of his hat if he puts his mind to it.

  The other good news is that I’ve been doing a half decent job of talking myself out of my Sandman theories. Getting away from the newsroom and Tim Earheart’s grisly scoops has downgraded my paranoia to milder levels. My evidence of a connection between Angela’s story and the killings of Carol Ulrich, Ronald Pevencey and the unnamed woman from Vancouver amounts to little when considered in the light of day. An over-interpreted four-line poem. Bodies found on a beach and a sand box. Hand prints on glass. That’s it. Curious bits and pieces that can be strung together only through the most elastic logic, and even then, outstanding questions remain. Why would someone in the Kensington Circle be inspired to brutally murder complete strangers? Even if there is a Sandman that has walked out of the pages of Angela’s journal, what would it want from me?

  Tonight is our last meeting. Once we leave Conrad White’s drafty apartment we will go our separate ways, to dissolve back into the city and take our places among the other undeclared novelists, secret poets, closeted chroniclers. Whatever peculiarities have animated my dreams since I first heard Angela tell her tale of a haunted little girl will come to an end. And I will be glad when it does. I like a good ghost story as much as anyone. But there comes a time when one must wake up and return to the everyday, to the world in which shadows are only shadows, and dark is nothing more than the absence of light.

  We go around the circle one last time, and to my surprise, there has been some improvement from where we started. Ivan’s rat, for instance, has become a fully developed character. There’s a melancholy that comes out of the writing that I don’t remember the first go round. Even Len’s horror tales have been revised to be a little less repetitive, their author having learned that not every victim of a zombie attack need have their brains scooped out of their skulls for us to understand the undead’s motivations.

  As we proceed, I pay extra attention to Conrad White, looking for any sign that might confirm his relationship with Evelyn. Yet the old man maintains the same benign gaze on her while she reads as he does for everyone else. Perhaps the attraction only runs the other way. Evelyn doesn’t strike me as the sort for him anyway. I’d imagined the “perfect girl” in Jarvis and Wellesley as softer, waifish, an innocent (even if this innocence was feigned). Someone who thought less and felt more. Someone like Angela.

  If Conrad White shows any special attention to a circle member over the course of the meeting, it’s her. I even think I catch him at it at one point, his eyes resting on her in the middle of Len’s reading, when her head is turned in profile and she can be observed without detection. His expression isn’t lustful. There is something in Angela he has seen before, or at least imagined. It’s surprised him. And perhaps it has even frightened him a little too.

  In the next second he catches me watching him.

  That’s when I think I see it. Something I can’t be sure of, not in this light. But as his eyes pass over me, I have the idea that his world has been visited by the Sandman as well as mine.

  Angela’s turn. She apologizes that she brought nothing new with her this week. There is a moan of disappointment from the rest of us, followed by jokey complaints of how now we’ll never know how Jacob died, what really happened over the time Edra was in the hospital, who the Sandman was. Conrad White asks if she’d made any changes to her previous draft, and she admits she hadn’t found the time. Or this is what she tells us. If I were to guess, I’d say she’d never intended to make any revisions. She hasn’t come here for editorial guidance, but to share her story with others. Without an audience, the little girl, Edra and Jacob, and the terrible man who does terrible things are only dead words on the page. Now they live in us.

  Following this, we do everything we can—repeat comments we’ve already made, request a second smoke break—but there is still enough time for William to read. He has been sitting in the chair closest to the door, a few feet back from the others. It has made it almost possible to forget he is here. But now that Conrad White has called on him, he leans forward so that his eyes catch the candlelight, as though emerging from behind a velvet curtain.

  His reading is once again brutal, but mercifully short. Another page in the lost summer of a cat-skinning boy. This time, the boy has taken to watching his mother at her “day job” through her bedroom window. He observes “what the men do to her, lying on top with their pants around their ankles, and he sees how they are only animals.” The boy doesn’t feel shame or disgust, only a clarity, “the discovery of a truth. One that has been hidden by a lie told over and over.” If we are all of us animals, the boy concludes, then what difference is there between slicing the throat of a dog and doing the same to one of the men who visit his mother’s bedroom? For that matter, what difference would there be in doing such a thing to his mother?

  Soon, however, this idle contemplation demands to be tested. The boy feels like “a scientist, an astronaut, a discoverer of something no one had ever seen or thought of before.” Proceeding from the assumption that we are all creatures of equal inclinations, it would follow that this makes us worth nothing more than the ants “we step out of our way just to crunch under our shoe.” He could prove it. All he had to do was “something he had been taught was very, very wrong.” If he was still himself afterward, if nothing changed in the world, then he would be right. The prospect “fills him with an excitement he guesses is the same as the other boys in school have felt kissing girls. But this was not what he had in mind at all.”

  William leans back in his chair and the light in his eyes is extinguished again. This is as far as his story goes. It’s my turn to respond first, and though I’m usually good at coming up with empty comments, in this case I’m stumped.

  “This feels very close to the surface to me,” I manage finally.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I suppose it means that it feels real.”

  “What does real feel like?”
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br />   “Like right now.”

  “What does he do?” a female voice says, and all of us turn to face Angela. She is peering into the dark where William sits. “The boy. Does he carry out his…experiment?”

  That’s when William makes a sound all of us immediately regret ever hearing. He laughs.

  “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” he says.

  After we finish up, Conrad White suggests all of us go out to “whatever ale house may be nearby” to celebrate our accomplishments. We decide on Grossman’s Tavern, a blues bar on Spadina I haven’t been to since I was an undergrad. Little has changed. The house band working away in the corner, the red streak of streetcars passing the picture window at the front. This is where we push a couple of tables together and order pitchers, all of us a little nervous about speaking of ourselves and not our stories, which despite the similarities in most cases, is still a different matter.

  The beer helps. As well as the absence of William, who walked away in the opposite direction outside Conrad White’s apartment. It’s nearly impossible to imagine how he would act in a social setting, whether he would eat the stale popcorn the waitress brings, how he would bring the little draft glasses to find his lips in his beard. Even more difficult to guess is what he might contribute to the first topic we naturally fall upon. The murders.

  I’m giving this some consideration when my thoughts are interrupted by Len shouting at me over a note-for-note T-Bone Walker solo.

  “Tell them your theory, Patrick.”

  “Sorry?”

  “The poem. Tell them what you told me. About the Sandman.”

  The circle has turned to look at me. And there is Len, bobbing about in his chair like an ape at feeding time.

  “That’s a secret, Len.”

  “It was. Didn’t you read the paper this morning? I thought you worked there.”

  “Not any more.”

  “Oh. Wow. That’s too bad. I really liked that Couch Potato thing.”

  “I’m touched.”