by Andrew Pyper
Since we parted in her condo’s lobby, and despite her asking me not to, I have put in a handful of calls to Angela, and received some cursory excuses in return (“Work is really crazy this week,” “I don’t know, I’m just so tired.”). I tell her I need to see her. That I miss her.
“I’m not sure I can do that,” she says.
“We can just talk.”
“What would we talk about?”
“It wouldn’t have to be…bad things.”
“But that’s all there is.”
She goes on to tell me how she’s gotten a couple more signs from “him.” When I ask what these indications are, she goes silent. Her breath clicking in her throat.
“Maybe, if we stay together, we could protect each other,” I suggest.
“You don’t believe that.”
“I said maybe.”
“I think he wants us apart. For each of us to have our own course.”
“And if we don’t play along–”
“–he’ll separate us. Or worse. We’ve got to play this the way he wants.”
And look how well that’s turning out, I want to say. Along with another remark that comes to me too late: What do we think he wants anyway? If it is Patrick Rush feeling the profoundest regret for having used his name for the title of a ripped-off novel, then mission accomplished. Mea culpa. And if it’s just random lives he wants to get back to taking, then I’m certainly not the one standing in his way.
Random lives.
This is the puzzle that fills the next hour. Buried away down here in the Crypt, mapping out the few connections I can make in my journal.
Carol Ulrich.
Ronald Pevencey.
Jane Whirter.
And now Petra Dunn.
Not a thing common between them. But in his mind, there must have been. For the Sandman, there was nothing random about them at all. All that’s required is to think like a psychopath.
Well, I think. I’m a retired writer. How hard could it be?
Even in the four years since the Kensington Circle, the available venues for writers’ groups have multiplied. Libraries, bookshops, coffee houses—but also rehab clinics, synagogues, yoga ashrams, Alcoholics Anonymous. There is no limit to the Self-Writing Seminars, (Her) story Workshops, Focus Group Your Novel! round tables one might sign up for. And I sign up for them all. Or as many as I can. Not to learn, to exchange, to discover myself. But to retrace the steps that have delivered me here. The same journey all murderers of passion are obliged to make: a return to the scene of the crime.
With Sam safe at Stacey’s, I am free to skip from one circle to another over the sweltering remainder of the week. As I expresswayed and subwayed to the various gatherings uptown, crosstown, and out-of-town, I asked the same question. And a couple of times I got answers.
“Do these names mean anything to you?” I would inquire of my fellow circlers, and offer to them the first names (and surnames if I knew them) of each member of the Kensington Circle. By the end of the week I had confirmed what I’d suspected.
In a basement in Little Italy, I learned that William had been a participant for a time several years ago, and was going to be asked to leave (the boyhood tales of an animal-skinning sociopath too much to take) before he abruptly stopped showing up all on his own. I heard much the same thing in a Coffee Time in Scarborough, a public library in Lawrence Park, a gay bar on Jarvis Street: big scary man with too-real horror story joins writers’ club, then disappears.
And that’s not all.
There were other names I mentioned in the circles. Names of those I had never met, but were of increasing significance to my situation, nevertheless. Carol Ulrich. Ronald Pevencey. (I left out Jane Whirter, as she had lived in Vancouver for over twenty years prior to her death.) Names that some of the people I asked had heard of before. But not only because Ulrich and Pevencey were among the Sandman’s first round of victims. They were remembered because, at one time or another, both of them were participants in some of the city’s writing circles.
This is what I have, and what, if newspaper reports are to be believed, the police don’t: a connection between the Sandman’s “random” victims. They were writers. And somehow it got them killed.
As I walk home through the city, I take out my cell and pretend to speak to someone at the other end. It’s not the first time I’ve done this. You can be the only pedestrian not on the phone for so long before you start to feel yourself disappear. You need to text, to touch base, to screen incoming. We speed-dial, therefore we are.
This time, when I check my messages at home, I’m surprised to hear a voice I recognize. Ivan.
“I’ve had an…encounter.”
A pause so long it’s like he’s forgotten to hang up. Then he remembers.
Click.
An encounter.
I call the number he gave me as I pass a group of gigglers standing outside the sex-shop window, tapping at the glass (“What is that, Brenda?” “I dunno. Must be something you put where the sun don’t shine.”).
Ivan picks up on the first ring.
“Patrick?”
“You left a message–”
“Museum station. Tomorrow. Southbound platform. Ten a.m.”
Click.
Without looking for it, I’m now like everyone else, the millions streaming past on sidewalk and street. I’ve got plans for the weekend.
Moments after arriving home there’s a knock at the door.
“Finished your book. Very interesting,” Detective Ramsay says, once again walking past me into the living room as though the place is only nominally mine. Then, even more falsely: “Can’t wait to read whatever you’re doing next.”
“I’m retired.”
“Really?”
“Are you actually here to discuss my book?”
“It’s an investigation. We have to have something to put in the files.”
There’s a point in every conversation structured around the exchange of accusation and rebuttal—meetings with tax auditors, neighbours disgruntled over the leaves your tree sheds in their yard—where the nasty turn can be either taken or avoided. This is the point Ramsay and I have reached. And I have decided I don’t like the man.
“You know something?” I say. “I may have another book in me yet. In fact, you’re inspiring a character for me right now.”
“Oh? What’s this character like?”
“Flawed, naturally. An intrusive investigator who’s smart but not as smart as he thinks. The secret about him is that he wants to be a writer. Detective stories—the only thing he reads. He likes to think if he wasn’t so busy solving real crimes, he’d be making them up.”
To say Ramsay darkens at this would be understatement. His limbs stiffening into the vocabulary of the thug, the backstreet pub brawler. Now I can see the clear answer to my earlier question about him. Definitely more Glasgow than Edinburgh.
“A comic figure,” he says.
“I think he is.”
“You’d be wrong then.”
“You mean he’s not funny?”
“I mean you’d be wrong to laugh at him.”
He gives me a look that’s rather hard to describe. One better grasped in its effects, chief of which is to make me want to make a run for the door.
“What do you say to wish a writer luck?” he says, moving past me. “Break a leg?”
“Usually it’s just ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down.’”
“That applies to my line of work too.”
There’s the clunk of the door pulled shut. The house waits a full minute before resuming its sighs and ticks.
Later, when I ask myself why I didn’t tell Ramsay what I learned about the Sandman’s first round of victims all being circle members—not to mention William’s appearance at some of the very same meetings—I decide that it wasn’t because I don’t like the guy, or even that it might put me at greater risk. I didn’t tell him because a thought occurred to me at the s
ame moment Ramsay offered a glimpse of his darker self.
It might be him.
This suspicion was born out of nothing more than a flare of intuition, but now that he’s gone I’m able to back it up with a reasonable tallying of bits and pieces. The first of these is that he was the lead investigator on the previous Sandman killings. This would have allowed him access not only to the crime scenes and the potential manipulation of evidence, but to his fellow officers, the media. A nice way to clean up any mistakes he may have made (though these would undoubtedly have been few). Then there’s his physical aspect: as tall as the Sandman, give or take. And no doubt strong enough to carry out the business of human butchering.
Then again, this may only be my own continued inching toward madness. Suspecting the detective?
You don’t need to be hunted by a Sandman to see nothing but crime and criminals. All the things you’ve done, the decisions you made, the possibilities laid out before you—it used to be your story. Then the thieves show up to take it. And you’re left asking the question that is so compulsive, so best-sellingly popular because it belongs to a universal language. The first utterance of fear. Of failure.
Whodunit?
This isn’t the end of my Friday social calls. In fact, I end up going out for drinks with a friend—though this sounds a good deal more normal than it is. Because it’s drinks with Len. And because he has asked me to come out in order to share a “totally twisted idea” about Angela.
We decide on The Paddock, an ancient vault south of Queen. When the bartender comes by I order a bourbon sour, and am surprised to hear Len ask for the same.
“I didn’t know you started drinking.”
“I haven’t.”
“You could’ve ordered a juice or something.”
“I don’t want to call attention to myself,” he says, glancing over his shoulder. “And it’s important that I talk to you in the kind of place I wouldn’t normally go.”
“Why?”
“So she won’t see us.”
Once the drinks arrive, he tells me how Angela came to his apartment some days ago. She looked around his attic room, inspecting the bookshelves. The Sandman caught her attention, though she made no mention of it. Len couldn’t help noticing she was wearing a “nice—you know, sexy nice—perfume.” And a blouse he felt was missing a couple of buttons.
“When was this exactly?”
“Wednesday. Why?”
“No reason.”
Wednesday. Two days after Angela told me we shouldn’t see each other again. And then she’s calling on Len—prematurely balding, cardboard-smelling, man-boy Len. Only a moment’s pondering of this and my glass is empty. I knock back Len’s too and raise my hand to signal another round.
Len tells me that, at first, she just talked to him like she might have during the circle, if she ever had spoken to him during the circle. Writer stuff. Queries about what he’s working on, where he’d sent material out to, recent books they’d read.
“Did you ask her about being published under a false name?”
“There wasn’t time.”
“I thought you were just sitting around talking?”
“We were. But then it got weird.”
It got weird when she confessed to him, leaning forward to put her hand on his knee, that if she were ever to write a story about him, she knew what title she’d use.
“‘The Virgin,’” Len says. “So I say ‘Why would you call it that?’ And she says ‘Because you’ve never been with a girl, have you, Len?’ Then she kissed me.”
“Kissed you? Where?”
“On the lips.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. I resisted, I guess. Kind of pushed her away.”
“Why?”
“Because she wasn’t really kissing me. It was more like she was making fun of me.”
“How did you know?”
“That’s how it felt.”
I press Len’s glass into his hand, urge him to take a sip. And he does. A big one. Followed by a bigger one.
“Welcome to the wonderful world of alcohol therapy,” I say.
“It’s warm.”
“It only gets warmer.”
He wipes his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt. I would put a hand on his shoulder to steady him, but the truth is, even now, I don’t want to touch him. I offer him time instead. And when he’s ready, he says that once Angela was done laughing at him, she said he didn’t have to kiss her back. He didn’t have to do anything because it was too late. She already knew everything she needed to know.
“About what?”
“About me.”
“What did she want to know about you?”
“Everything she needed to write her version of me.”
“She was writing a story based on you? ‘The Virgin’?”
“I think she’s writing stories on all of us,” Len says, then drifts his face closer. “But I’m next.”
“Her subject.”
“No. The next to die.”
Len is not well. This fact is coming into sharp focus now. He’s not just another comic-book-collecting oddball, not one of the half-invisibles, the sort of mouth breather you try to ignore peering over your shoulder at a bank machine. He’s ill. Yet, now that we’re here, in a place where more cocktails are available if things get hairy, I figure there’s little harm in nudging him further.
“Then why not me? Why am I not next?”
“You were the only one without a story,” Len answers, finishing his drink and unintentionally slamming the glass down on the bar.
“She said that to you?”
“It was kind of obvious.”
Len puts his hand on my wrist, pressing it against the bar’s varnished surface, and I let him. I also let him come in close once more to whisper into my cheek.
“She isn’t what she appears to be,” he says.
I try to pull my arm away, but he’s got a stronger hold than I thought he was capable of.
“I’m not just saying she’s psychotic,” Len goes on, suddenly louder. Behind me, there’s the chair squeaks and interrupted conversations of other drinkers stopping to hear the agitated guy in the corner. “I’m saying she’s not human.”
“For God’s sake, Len.”
“In medieval legend, there is a name for a female being that incrementally consumes other beings until their eventual exhaustion or death.”
“A succubus.”
“Exactly.”
“Oh Christ.”
“A witch who appears in the form of a temptress.”
“Calm down. Here. Take another sip–”
“Usually the succubus’ purpose is to steal the semen of sleeping men—their life force. But in this case, it’s different. She steals stories.”
“Are you saying we need to put a stake through her heart? Shoot her with a silver bullet?”
“I’m serious. And the sooner you get serious about it too, the longer you might live.”
Len is serious. The whole bar can see it. And it watches him stand, the boldness that had possessed him for these past moments instantly slipping away.
“There are some desires so foul they are never satisfied,” he says, and appears to search his mind for something more. But if there was something, it’s gone now. I’m done, his drooped shoulders and hanging head say as he walks away. That’s all I can manage.
My Friday winding down to its bourbon-softened end. But even with the assurance that Len’s theories are as twisted as initially advertised, the day closes with an unsettling idea. For as the door closes behind him, I can’t help thinking I will never see Len again.
I start out to my meeting with Ivan early enough, but the sun, already high and merciless by nine, ends up making me late. Twice I have to stop and sit in the shade to get a handle on the dizziness that comes with pushing myself through air not made for walking, or for anything really, other than euthanizing the old and promoting sales of asthma inhalers fo
r the young. By the time I shuffle by the old facade of the Royal Ontario Museum I don’t really care if Ivan awaits me underground or not. What I need is to get out of the sun and wait for October to come.
But it’s not much better here. Down the stairs the air is almost as warm, the trains growling and screeching below. So what am I doing here, anyway? Why do I want to know what Ivan means by “an encounter?” The smart thing would be to turn back. And not just from my meeting with Ivan, but from everyone. Someone else can tease out the mystery of the Sandman and be rewarded as Carol Ulrich, Petra and the others were rewarded.
But I don’t do the smart thing. And it’s here, carried down on the sliding escalator stairs, that I figure why: I want to save the day. Dishonoured author, pink-slipped critic, rejected lover—yes to all. Yet there may still be an opportunity for forgiveness, a full pardon that would see me returned from observing the world to the world itself. This is how deep the faulty hopes of fiction have been engrained in me.
It’s in the next moment that I notice the man coming up the escalator opposite me.
Both hands gripping the rubber handrails, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled down so that his face is obscured. He would be tall if he were standing straight. But he’s not.
He slides past. And I continue down.
It’s not the look of him that strikes me, but the smell he leaves in the air once he’s passed. A brief taste of compost. The first whiff that meets you upon opening the door of an unplugged fridge.
I have been close enough to that skin to catch its odour before. I have tried to describe it before too.
Wood smoke. Sweat. Boiled meat.
William.
He’s already disappearing around the corner at the top of the escalator when I turn. The door to the outside squeaking open and vacuuming shut.
I make a hopeless run against the descending steps—one down for every two up—and surrender halfway when a mother with a stroller comes to stand at the top, scowling at me. Another lunatic, her organic-only face says. When is somebody going to clean this town up?
It’s at the ticket kiosk, waiting for the attendant to hand over my change, that I notice the first sign that something worse than a William appearance may be going on down here. The sound of incoherent exclamations—Don’t touch it! Somebody…somebody!—coming from the platform at the bottom of the stairs. Children bursting into hysterical, echoing cries. A woman’s scream.