by Andrew Pyper
“What’s this?”
“Read it.”
“You wrote this?”
“Just read it.”
It’s a sin, the church says, to do the things that I do
But how can I stop until I’ve done them to you?
Later, in hell, is where my bones will be burned
’Til then, let it be known: the Sandman’s returned.
“Where did you get this?”
“It was sent to the paper. To me, as a matter of fact.”
“You think it’s him?”
“What do you think?”
“The style certainly fits.”
“Not to mention the name.”
Tim watches me. To see how this grim revelation is sinking in. Or to take an accounting of how many years I’ve aged since he last saw me. I know I don’t look good. But having my clean-shaven, gym-going friend study me like a coroner studies a corpse—it can’t help but make a fellow a little nervous.
“Are you going to run it?” I ask.
“I’d like to.”
“But they won’t let you.”
“It’s my decision this time.”
“So?”
“So? There’s no story.”
“‘The Sandman Returns.’ Sounds like a headline to me.”
“He’s not claiming any particular homicides. Not much point in terrorizing the public if there’s nothing to terrorize them with aside from a shabby limerick.”
“It’s not a limerick.”
“You’re the expert.”
There are victims, of course. Conrad and Evelyn. Ivan an apparent suicide under what the crime hacks call “suspicious circumstances.” Not to mention Petra—and now Angela too—gone missing. But the only thing that connects all of them is the Kensington Circle, and if Tim Earheart hasn’t discovered this yet, I’m not about to tell him.
“You know, there is a context in which I’d run the poem,” Tim says, musing aloud. “It would require a reaction, naturally.”
“A reaction?”
“From you. A comment on how an internationally bestselling novelist feels to have inspired copycat psychopaths with a work of fiction. That I could I go with.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Just thought it might be fun.”
“Me taking credit for spawning a new generation of serial killers? Yes, that’s definitely amusing. That would be a giggle.”
I figure that’s about it. Tim had come for a story, not gotten it, and all that’s left is for the National Star to pick up the tab. We bring things to a close with some banter about the latest newsroom outrages and gossip. It’s just killing time. But it makes me nostalgic for the days of journalistic sniping and complaint, when it would have been me telling Tim about the photo chief’s cross-dressing weekends.
As it turns out, however, we’re not quite done with the business that Tim called me here for.
“Off the record,” he says as he raises his finger for the bill, “what do you make of the whole Sandman thing? Someone using the name of a bad guy in your novel, I mean.”
“I don’t feel responsible for anything, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“It isn’t.”
“Then what are you getting at?”
“What do you know?”
“Just what I read in the papers.”
“Has he contacted you?”
“Nope.”
“I bet you’ve got a theory.”
“You know what, Tim?” I start, slipping off the bar stool and surprised to find myself unsteady on my feet. “Here’s the thing: I wrote a book. And I regret it. I truly do.”
Tim puts his hand out to steady me but I take a step back. What I should do now is leave. But seeing how Tim Earheart, my one-time journalistic equal, looks at me with pity in his eyes, makes me stick around for a few more words.
“I’m just trying to survive. Understand? So if you receive any more third-rate verse from psychos, don’t come to me.”
“Jesus, Patrick. I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? No, that’s my department. Sorry is my thing.”
My hands are sliding into the arms of my jacket. The coat check girl, God bless her, appears out of nowhere to dress me against the evening’s chill. Giving me a commiserating look, smoothing my collar against the back of my neck. A moment that proves there is still comfort in this world, though you may not know where it will come from. I could kiss her for it. Maybe Tim Earheart already has.
I take a cab home but get the driver to drop me off a couple blocks early so I can walk the rest of the way on my own. Continue tipsily homeward feeling my way around a thought: Maybe the shouters and shooters and moon howlers on the streets down here are versions of where all of us are headed. City in Fear. Yes. We’ve been right to be more and more afraid—we’ve just been afraid of the wrong thing. It won’t be a cataclysmic nasty from Out There that will bring us down, not ozone depletion or impacting comet or dirty bomb, but the advance of madness. Why? There isn’t enough room for sanity any more. Eventually, the asylum doors will be forced open. And it will be us who walk out.
Or maybe it will only be me. Because I am once again of the opinion I am being pursued. Somewhere between the sex shop and the other sex shop I pick up the heavy, thick-soled step of someone behind me.
Past the Prague Deli (“Czech Us Out!”) and the used record shops he keeps up without changing the rhythm of his steps. I should start running now. A sudden break for it that might steal the few yards needed to give me a chance. But I’m suddenly too tired.
I round the corner on to the darker stretch of Euclid, straight to the patch of exposed tree roots that is my front yard. When I finally turn it’s with the resignation of prey that cannot retreat any further.
“Got some news,” Ramsay says, wearing a quarter-grin.
“You couldn’t use the phone?”
“People say I’m better in person.”
“Better at what?”
He takes a step forward. The streetlight can’t reach him where he stands, so that all I can see are flashes of teeth.
“Len Innes has been reported missing.”
“Missing? How?”
“That’s the point with missing. You don’t know how.”
“Christ.”
“When was the last time you spoke with him?”
“I don’t know. A while ago.”
“And what was the substance of your conversation?”
“Nothing much.”
“Just a friendly chat then?”
“You think I killed Len?”
“I thought he was only missing.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“Sure you do.”
“Is this fun for you? This droll, Columbo, cat-and-mouse bullshit?”
“Everyone’s a critic.”
“Not everyone. I’m out of the critic business.”
“Idle hands.”
“Idle would be nice. But you keep coming around accusing me of murdering people. It’s the kind of thing that can get in the way of a fellow’s retirement plans.”
“Here’s some news: I don’t give a fuck about your retirement plans.”
“I don’t think you believe I’m a killer, either.”
“You might be wrong there.”
“So arrest me. Do something. If not, get off my property.”
Something changes in Detective Ramsay’s face. Not in his expression—which remains jaw-clenched, bemused—but in his face. The skin pulled taut over the bone, showing the animal-thing beneath. Here is a creature free from the encumbrances of loyalty, of empathy, of seeing the human race as an enterprise that stands a chance over the long haul. All of which likely makes him a more than capable investigator of man’s darkest actions. It may also enable him to carry out those actions himself.
“How’s Sam?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Your son. How is he?”
“Fine.”
“Da
ddy’s out pretty late to leave a little guy like that on his own.”
“You know he’s not inside.”
“I do?”
“Sam’s safe.”
“You sure? Because it’s getting less and less safe everywhere you go.”
I turn away, expecting him to launch a final remark my way, but I unlock the front door, step inside and close it behind me without another word from him.
Not that he’s gone.
I peek out the window without turning on the lights. Ramsay stands under the dark bough of the front yard’s maple. Unmoving as a statue and yet somehow undeniably alive, the air around him passing in and out of his lungs as though to be claimed as much as breathed. He belongs to the night world. The widening chasm between what you know is there and what can’t be.
Ivan belongs to the night world too. And it is the next night that I see him in the food court of the Eaton Centre, making his way toward the entrance to the Dundas subway. All this is odd, as I hate malls, and hate mall food even more. I’m actually thinking this—It’s odd that I’m here—when Ivan strolls by my table. Which is odder still, seeing as he’s dead.
When I saw Conrad White thumbing through The Sandman in a bookstore when he was also among the no-longer-with-us, it gave me a chill. But as I watch Ivan lope through the crowd of tourists and locals like me with nowhere better to go, I’m instantly, paralytically afraid. It’s because he’s here for a purpose, and it’s clear that I’m not going to like it. That’s what Ivan tells me in his startling, unphantomly realness, the way he looks back over his shoulder at me, beckoning with hollow drill-holes for eyes. He’s here to show me something.
And I follow him. Jumping the queue at the subway ticket booth, pushing through with understandable fuck yous fired at my back. Ivan may be dead, but he moves quicker than I ever saw him move in life. Sliding past the others making their way below. Scampering on to the escalator so that I have to take the stairs down two at a time to have a hope of catching him.
Once on the platform, I’m sure I’ve lost him. That is, I’m sure he wasn’t there to begin with. This is what I try to tell myself: you haven’t been sleeping, you’re under stress, you’re seeing things.
Ivan steps forward from the crowd at the far end of the platform as the train roars into the station. I start pushing my way toward him even as I expect this moment to play out as his last seconds of life played, with him jumping on to the tracks before the driver has a chance to lock the brakes.
But he doesn’t jump. He looks my way.
His eyes find me instantly over the heads and ballcaps and turbans. An expression of the same sort he wore to all the circle meetings, but now somehow intensified. It lets me see what’s inside him, what may have been inside him all along. Longing. For someone to talk to. To be forgiven.
The train’s doors open. All of us except Ivan step aside to let the passengers off, and they move around the space he takes. It lets him be the first one on. Then the crowd follows him, squeezing in shoulder to shoulder through doors not quite wide enough to accommodate them. By the time I am freed from Ivan’s stare I’m left alone on the platform, the doors already closing. I make a dash to get on—a knocking at the glass that earns sneers from within—but I’m too late.
I step back to see if I can spot Ivan inside. And there he is, sitting face out in a window seat, finding me with a jealous glare. Except now he’s not alone.
Conrad White sits across from him, knee to knee. Petra behind them. Evelyn a couple seats back. All the Kensington Circle’s dead with their noses to the windows. Ovals of malice mixed with the indifferent passengers.
In the next second, as the train releases its brakes and picks up speed, their faces flatten and blur. The car they sit in swallowed into the tunnel’s mouth. The faces of the Kensington Circle along with those of the living commuters, good luck awaiters, furious strivers.
If I didn’t know who was who, I might say all of them were dead.
In the morning, I wake to find William sitting at the end of my bed.
His body shaped in the hunched, head-cocked posture of a concerned friend sitting vigil. Even his face—still densely bearded as an oven brush—could be mistaken for sympathetic, his eyes looking down on me with a still intensity. Yet these are only first impressions. And they are wrong.
William’s hands rise from the sheets. Fresh soil dropping off them in clumps. The nails ripped and weeping. Hands reaching for me.
I try to sit up. A weight on my legs prevents them from moving. The only action I’m capable of is watching.
His hands are going to kill me. They are about to do the most terrible things, not him. This is what his cracked lips seem to want to say. He is an instrument of death, but also dead himself.
I make a note of this—my first fright of the day—in my journal which I have taken to keeping by my bed at night. A chronicle of actual events and dream diary all in one. I should likely have kept separate notebooks for each, but so many passways have opened between my waking and sleeping worlds it doesn’t seem to make much difference.
Take the ballcap, for instance.
I’m plodding through my breakfast routine of coffee making and cereal pouring when I first see it. Even then, it takes a few seconds to understand what it means. A Yankees cap. Sitting on the coffee table in the living room.
I pick it up and bring it to my nose—Petra’s shampoo, still clinging to the cotton. The sliding glass doors are closed. But unlocked. And the curtains I was sure to have pulled closed the night before stand open.
I can see you.
Once I’ve closed the curtains and locked the doors, then gone round the basement and main floor to check the other doors and windows, I return to Petra’s cap, studying it as though a clue has been stitched into its fabric.
Petra wore it, now she’s thought to be dead. It was left with Angela, now she’s disappeared. And now it’s with me.
It could be you.
Ramsay already thinks (and with some good reason) that I’m involved in Petra’s death and perhaps the others from before. If he found out her ballcap was in my possession, it would be more than enough to arrest me. The first piece of hard evidence connecting me to one of the murders. The Sandman wants me to hold it in my hands and know how it feels. To know what can be done to me without ever touching me.
It’s a sin, the church says, to do the things that I do
But how can I stop until I’ve done them to you?
The Yankees cap is a promise of things to come, a show of power, a signature. But it’s also a game.
Tag. I’m it.
The next thing I know I’m being asked to leave the offices of the National Star. The lobby, to be precise. It’s as far as I get before I’m stopped trying to tiptoe by reception without a pass. When asked my intended business—Patrick Rush, here for a surprise visit to my old friend Tim Earheart—the guy behind the security desk punches my name into his terminal and a flag pops up. Quite a few flags, judging by his reddened cheeks and phone at his ear, a digit shy of completing his 911 call.
“Just tell Earheart I’m downstairs,” I tell the security guy, whose tortured face shows that while I’m in no position to be making deals, he might get into some serious trouble if he has to use his flashlight on me.
“Do as he says,” a female voice says behind me. I turn to find the Managing Editor smiling one of her death smiles. Except now she’s no longer the Managing Editor but the youngest Editor-in-Chief in the paper’s history. “Let him say hello and be on his way.”
She keeps smiling. If it were real, I’d be halfway to falling in love. But there’s absolutely no mistaking the Editor-in-Chief’s expression as warmth. As it is I’m backing away with every step she takes closer.
“Always nice to see an ex-employee going out the door,” she says.
I’m spinning out into the heat as I glimpse Tim Earheart rushing past the Editor-in-Chief. It won’t happen again on his lips.
“You ca
n’t get fired twice, you know. Or are you trying to get me fired?” Tim says as he takes me by the arm and hauls me away from the building. Through the glass doors I can see the Editor-in-Chief still there, her hands on her slim, tread-milled hips.
I follow Tim across Front Street to stand on the narrow edge of grass between the pavement and the fence that keeps pedestrians from the tracks leading in and out of Union station below.
“I’m working,” Tim says. “We’re not all novelists you know.”
“I’ll make this short.”
“The shorter the better.”
“Can you get access to government agency databases?”
“Depends which one.”
“Children’s Aid. Foster care. Whoever does permanent guardianships.”
He puts a cigarette in his mouth but makes no move to light it. “Who’s asking?”
“I’m looking for someone.”
“Someone you know?”
“I know her. Not well, but I know her.”
“A kid?”
“She’s grown up now.”
“So why not give her a call?”
“I don’t know where she is.”
Tim Earheart reads me closely for the first time, and I sense that what I say next will decide how the rest of this exchange is going to go. I want Tim involved, but not involved.
“Are you going to light that thing?”
He pulls the unlit cigarette out of his lips and flicks it over the fence. “What’s her name?”
“Angela Whitmore. But that might only be her adoptive parents’ surname. Or probably not. I mean, that’s the name I know her by, but it may not be real.”
“Tracking down an adoption without the kid’s name—it’s not going to happen.”
“I don’t think it was a voluntary adoption.”
“How’s that?”
“She was taken from her natural parents. State intervention. I don’t know the specifics. One of those situations where they had to.”
“That’s something.”
I tell him whatever other details I have that might be of help, which aren’t all that many. Angela’s approximate age (late twenties to early thirties), job experience (legal secretary), possible educational background (liberal arts most likely). I end up leaving out more than I give him: her fictional journal and my thieving of its essential contents, our night together and the discovery of missing toes. Maybe later, I tell myself. Maybe, if this all turns out well, I’ll fill him in on the whole thing.