The Killing Circle

by Andrew Pyper

  I push my way through the turnstile at the same time the attendant picks up his phone and starts to wave me back. Ignoring him, I carry on walking backwards to see the woman with the stroller being told she can’t enter, and her demanding to know why. The attendant tells her. Whatever it is, it turns her around, her heels tapping out a distress signal on the marble floor.

  On the way down to the platform the voices I’d heard earlier have grown in volume. More adult shouts have joined the wailing infants, and there’s one or two official order-givers now too—Stand back! Straight line here, people!—along with the increasingly panicked Ohmygods of mothers who have brought their children to visit the museum, many of them, by the sounds of it, still disembarking from the train. Shoes sliding against shoes. The grunt and gasp of those jostling for position in shrinking space. Human cattle.

  I reach the platform and join them. The only one coming down as everyone else takes their first frenzied steps toward the exits.

  Then I see why.

  The southbound train has stopped two-thirds of the way into the station. Its doors open, the cars now wholly emptied. Men in fluorescent orange vests push through the crowd to open the door to the control cabin at the front. A moment later the driver emerges, hands trembling at the sides of his face, his lips moving but nothing coming out.

  An accident. One that’s just happened. Given the way some of the kids break away from their mothers to look over the side of the platform and instantly turn back, it’s obvious what sort. A jumper. And that’s not all I correctly guess before I push sideways to look over the side for myself. I know who jumped.

  One of the most common ways of reckoning individual experience is through the number of times a thing has been seen or done: how many people one has slept with, foreign countries visited, diseases suffered and survived. Along with the dead. How many have you viewed outside of open caskets and TV news? Before today, my count was childishly low: just two. Tamara, of course. And my grandmother, discovered on the floor of her retirement home kitchenette, looking up at me with the same expression of annoyance she’d worn in life.

  But I’ve made up for that now. I peer over the platform’s edge and that’s it. I’m all caught up on the death front.

  What’s unforgettable about seeing Ivan’s body on the tracks isn’t that it’s someone I know, nor that parts of him are still webbed over the front of the train, nor that his face, despite the rest of him, is remarkably untouched. It’s that he’s not dead yet. His jaw’s hinging open and half-shut.

  Ivan is saying something I can understand. Not that I can hear him. I can tell because he knows it is me standing above him. And that his gulping mouth wants me to know he was pushed.

  He stops moving before a uniformed police officer pulls me away from the edge. At first I think I’m being arrested. An exchange takes place in my head so clearly I wait for it to begin with the officer’s first words:

  –Do you know this man?

  –Yes.

  –What is your relationship to him?

  –We both wanted to be writers. And we were both being hunted.

  –Hunted? Steve! Get over here! Hunted by who?

  –He has a few names, actually. My personal favourite is The Terrible Man Who Does Terrible Things.

  But the policeman says nothing but Please step away, sir. So I do. Make a tiptoed dash for the stairs.

  Joining the other passengers on the ascending escalator, the only ones coming down are more police and a pair of paramedics whose relaxed chatter suggests they’ve already been told this call is a done deal.

  At the exit turnstiles, a pair of plainclothes detectives are asking if anyone saw what happened, and one or two from the shaken crowd stop to give a statement. I keep walking. Up the last staircase to the street, where the blazing heat is almost welcome, an awakening discomfort.

  I cut on to the university campus, into the shade of the trees along Philosopher’s Walk. Consciously refusing to think of anything but getting home. But before I get there, it will require all I have to simply keep moving.

  And I do keep moving: from the bourbon to the vodka tonics to the red wine that’s meant to rouse an appetite for dinner, but in the end turns out to be dinner itself. A full afternoon of channel surfing and heavy drinking that only partly succeeds in holding the flashes of Ivan’s final seconds at bay.

  Despite my best efforts, some stark implications of the day’s horrors batter through: if Ivan was pushed, and it was William who’d passed me going up the subway escalator, who else could have done the pushing other than him? Even if I’m wrong, and Ivan had jumped, it seems beyond coincidence that William had appeared at the scene at the same time. Then again, I had been there. Had Ivan called William to the same meeting he’d called me to? It’s possible. Yet the surest bet remains that Ivan had been followed to the Museum station by whoever he wanted to tell me about, but my lateness had allowed his stalker to reach him first. If it was the Sandman, he’d likely noticed me on the escalator. Which means he knows I’m getting closer to him. To who he is.

  The evening takes its first truly unfortunate turn, however, when I embark on a tasting tour of the single malts saved for a special occasion. Well, today has been special, hasn’t it? Seeing Ivan’s body on the rails every time I close my eyes, every time I blink. Imagining how it will feel when it’s my turn.

  What I need is some company. Which leads to my second poor decision: calling Angela. When I get her machine, I call again. A couple hours with the unpronounceable bottles of Scotch laid out over my desk, my free hand speed-dialling Angela and, each time she fails to pick up, me offering new apologies for whatever I’d done, for whatever I am.

  After the rain starts to fingertap the basement window, I decide to walk over to her place. Along Front Street and past the convention centre where a twisting line of several hundred kids sit huddled on the sidewalk, camping out overnight in order to be first in line for the morning’s Canadian MegaStar! auditions. The rain has left them shivering and hairless as chihuahua pups. I shout encouragements as I pass (“Return to your homes! Abandon hope all ye who enter here!”) and they moan back at me like injured soldiers, casualties left on the fame battlefield.

  Down past Union station, I’m sheltered from the rain as I stumble through the tunnel that runs under the tracks. By the time I make it to the far end, however, the precipitation has turned into something stronger, as though Lake Ontario had been tipped up at the opposite end to drop its contents over the city. It leaves me blind, but I keep going, possibly on the sidewalk, possibly down the middle of the street. All I know is when the downpour finally pauses long enough for me to open my eyes, the first thing I see is the shadow of the Gardiner Expressway overpass ahead. And beneath it, the figure of a man taking shelter from the rain. Staring at me.

  At first, when I start my run toward him, he doesn’t move. Just watches me come as though curious to see what I have in mind. Or perhaps he wants me to come. There is something in his posture—slouching, arms crossed—I hadn’t noticed in his previous appearances. His presence, conveying only black threat before, has softened.

  At the same time I come into shouting distance, he starts running south toward the lake. His strides longer and surer than mine, but showing a sluggish fatigue that keeps him within view.

  “It was you!”

  This is me. Screaming. A drunken madman among the other drunken madmen who live under the expressway and watch me pass.

  “It was you!”

  The figure slows. A wheeling of arms that might turn him around to attack, to speak. But he decides against it. Starts away again with fresh speed, his boots smacking against the slick pavement at a pace I couldn’t dream of matching.

  As I bring myself to a stop, coughing the evidence of a sedentary life on to my shoes, I watch him slip around the corner of a condo tower across from the harbour. Or behind a row of parked cars in the lot across from it. Or perhaps into the churning water itself.

  I
n any case, there’s only me here now. Me and the rain.

  Once I’m able to breathe and stand up straight at the same time, I carry on to Angela’s building only a couple blocks away. I keep my thumb on her condo number until the super comes out and asks me to leave. When I refuse, he executes a nifty bouncer move. The classic, in my experience: grabs the back of my shirt with one fist and the belt of my pants with the other and, kicking the door open, chucks me out on to the patch of manicured lawn like an overstuffed bag of garbage.

  It’s still raining. I can tell from the way it washes the blood off my hands when I check to see if I’ve split my lip.

  There is no more doing tonight. Now is the time to think. To determine the underlying meaning of things.

  The trouble is, for the second time today, the implications of what I’ve witnessed seem to slip away, leaving me to walk home teasing out the possibilities aloud. Even the first question gives me problems: was it William who’d run from me? Did I attribute the odour of the man on the subway escalator and posture of the figure under the expressway to him because I actually recalled these aspects, or have I been thinking it’s been William all along, and thus any presence I encountered would be seen as him?

  Next, an even more dizzying consideration: if it was William I saw tonight, was he the same person standing in my living-room window, the murderer of unknown writers, the ghost villain from Angela’s journal? Perhaps there is a different monster attached to each of these crimes. Maybe the Sandman is merely one of the names shared by all the agents of the uncanny. The Sandman, the bogeyman, the succubus, the devil.

  I tell myself to limit my thoughts to what is known. But what is known? Ivan is dead. Petra is missing. Conrad White—and Evelyn, if Angela is to be believed—dead too.

  And what connects us is the circle. Or perhaps something more fundamental than that. A shared playing field that, even here in a city of millions, is limited to only a few, the last of the storybook believers. The ones who have not only seen the Sandman standing at the edge of their lives, but invited him in.

  The morning is as bad as you’d guess. Complicated not just by a hangover serious enough to share eight of the nine primary symptoms of toxic shock, nor by the afternoon trip to the emergency room to get an intern to pinch and stick and Oh, damn, I’m sorry his way to stitching my lip closed, but by the prevailing sense that if what has come before has been worrying, everything from here on in is going to show how justified that worry actually was. I might be paranoid. But there’s nothing that says paranoids can’t be right sometimes.

  On the way back from the hospital, I stop by Angela’s building again. Still no answer. An idea strikes me all at once. Whether it was William or someone else, whoever I saw last night had come from calling on Angela too.

  I try her work number, and the receptionist informs me she hasn’t been in all this week. Len’s not answering his phone. These are all the leads I have. Along with the faith that, if Angela were able to, she would have checked in with me by now, if only to tell me to stop bothering her with my sad-sack messages.

  She is hiding. She is with him now. She is dead.

  No matter which is true, it leaves me to find her on my own.

  Later that afternoon I drive out of the city checking the rear view to see if I’m being followed. But speeding west along the QEW in a suicidal crush, every car fighting and failing to gain an inch on the competition—there is no way not to be followed. Still, there is one vehicle that seems to stick to me more doggedly than the others. A black Lincoln Continental that won’t let me steal away whenever a gap opens in the slower lane. Not that this proves anything other than he has the same ideas about getting ahead that I have. And though the slanting light of dusk won’t let me get a look at the driver’s face, the same could be said for almost every other car jostling for position behind me.

  But the Continental is still there forty-five minutes later when the first exit for St. Catharines comes up. I wait until the last moment before veering off on to the ramp. At first, it seems the black sedan tries to follow, lurching from the passing to the middle lane. But as the ramp curves into the town’s residential streets, I catch sight of the Continental already shrinking down the highway. If I was being followed, the most the driver will know is where I’ve got off, but not where I’m going.

  And where I’m going is to see Sam.

  He looks good. Tanned, knee scrapes from roughhousing. Somehow he’s aged a year in the past week.

  “Am I going back with you?” he asks when we’re on our own in the living room, a Disney movie paused on the jumbo screen.

  “Afraid not.”

  “Then when?”

  “Another week. Maybe two.”

  “A week?”

  “I thought you were having fun here.”

  “It’s okay. It’s just—I miss you.”

  “Any money says I miss you more.”

  “Then why can’t I come home?”

  “Because there’s something going on that needs to be settled first. And I want you to be safe.”

  “Are you safe?”

  “You have to trust me. Can you do that for the next little while?”

  Sam nods. Just look at him: he does trust me. And though this shouldn’t surprise me—I’m his father—the weight of it does. It’s a gift when another gives you their trust like this. A gift that can be taken back at any time, and easily too. This is what I read as clearly as the banana bruise freckles across my son’s cheeks: once it’s gone you never get it back. You might think you can. But you can’t.

  Later that evening when I’m tucking Sam into his bed, I ask if he would like me to read to him from any of the books he’d brought with him. He shakes his head.

  “You want me to get you some new stuff? Next time, we can go to the bookstore and go crazy.”

  “No.”

  “What’s the problem? You too old to be read to?”

  “I don’t read any books any more.”

  There are a thousand declarations a child can make to a parent more painful than this. But there is a seriousness, even a cruelty in what has just been uttered here in the dark of a spare room that smells of another kid’s smells.

  “Why’s that?”

  “I don’t like them.”

  “You don’t like stories?”

  “They’re what you’ve left me here for. Right?”

  I deny this. Tell him fiction can inform and influence and provoke, but can’t actually hurt anyone. But what we both know, even as I kiss him goodnight and leave the door open an inch, is that he’s right. It’s the unreal that has stepped off the page to cloud our lives. And until it can be made to go back where it belongs Sam must stay here, awake in the nightlight’s glow, preparing to keep his sleep free of all dreams but the one where his father returns to take him home.

  After nightfall, I drive back to Toronto. Down here, where the highway hugs the southern shore of the lake, you can look through the gaps between the old motels and fenced-in orchards and catch glimpses of the city’s skyline across the water. In the past, I would see it as glamorous, a sexual invitation in the embracing pillars of light. It was the suggestion of possibility, of danger that I liked, and took pride in being associated with, if only by shared address.

  Tonight, the sight of the distant towers has a different effect. They are an alien army, moon-glinting beasts rising from a dark sea. Their lights powered by desire alone. Unrequited, insatiable. A terrible wanting that feeds on anything that will submit to being possessed.

  I drive on through the winemaking villages, smaller bedroom towns, the conjoined suburbs along the north shore before the final turn into the light. This last framing of the city before you are consumed within it: there was a time I thought it was beautiful, saw in it the beautiful promise of success. And I still do. Though what I know now is that every promise can also be a lie, depending on how it’s kept.

  Tim Earheart rings me again for drinks.

  “God,
I’m sorry,” I tell him, remembering the unanswered emails and phone messages he’d left with me. “Things have been a little messed up the past while. Maybe tomorrow–”

  “This isn’t exactly a social call, Patrick.”

  “What is it then? Business?”

  “Yeah. It’s business.”

  We meet at one of the bank tower bars Tim has been favouring since he’d been given a raise following his appointment to Special Investigative Reporter (“What were you before?” “I don’t know. But definitely not special”), not to mention the income that’s been freed up since his second wife “got some other schmuck to pay for all the crap to which she’d become accustomed.” This place is the New Tim Earheart, he tells me. He likes all the leather, the halogen pot lights, the sweep of upward mobility evidenced in the twenty-dollar martinis. And then there’s the pick-up opportunities.

  “Just being here signals you as successful,” Tim tells me, seductively rolling a bill and dropping it in the coat check girl’s jar.

  “Successful at what?”

  “That’s the beauty of it. It doesn’t matter. The details can be worked out later.”

  As the first round is consumed, Tim tells me a couple tales of women from these premises with whom he has worked it out later. It’s vintage Earheart, and it makes me miss him. Companionship. Where had that disappeared to? Nestled in the same basket with a living wife, a job—all of it pushed down the stream and round the bend.

  As if to bring this illusion of two friends having a worry-free cocktail to an end, Tim clears his throat at the arrival of the second set of martinis, pulls a piece of paper out of his jacket pocket and slides it over the bar toward me.