The Killing Circle

by Andrew Pyper

  “I suppose someone should look that son of hers up if his sister’s passed on.”

  “I’ll let him know.”

  “So you know him? We was right? He was Michelle’s boy?”

  “You know families,” I say vaguely, but the woman seems to understand. She gives me a nod that takes in her own children, Angela’s mother’s trailer, the blazing sun, all of Hilly Haven.

  “Oh yeah,” she says. “Full of surprises.”

  When I get home there’s a message from Tim Earheart. He wants to get together, see how I am. But I know even as I return his call and arrange to meet at a bar near his new house in Cabbagetown that he’s heard about William’s arrest and wants to find out what I know about it. This has been Tim’s assignment from the start. And now that the final act is beginning—the public cleansing ritual that is every high-profile criminal proceeding—he wants to milk every advantage he has over the competition.

  Tim thinks I know something. And unless something juicier presents itself, he’ll keep asking what it is. And yet I still cling to the possibility that I can escape disclosure. It’s true that if William does end up going to a full trial, I’ll be called as a witness. But if the prosecution ends up not having to probe that far, or, better yet, if William pleads guilty, no one need ever know that the author of The Sandman was once in a writing class with the Sandman. I still have a chance. So long as Tim can be discouraged from digging further into the Patrick Rush angle.

  “How’re you liking the new place?” I ask him as the first round arrives.

  “It’s an investment. Besides, I’m thinking of settling down pretty soon.”

  “Stop it. You’re killing me.”

  “I just need to meet someone.”

  “Haven’t you met enough someones?”

  “She’s out there. Just like your Angela person.”

  I nod, trying to read Tim to see if he knows something about Angela’s disappearance that I don’t.

  “Must be strange,” Tim muses. “Being so close to this William Feld business.”

  “I wasn’t so close to it.”

  “Your book could have been the guy’s biography.”

  “That’s an exaggeration.”

  “The whole title thing. It’s kind of hard to accept as coincidence.”

  “The police didn’t think it was so hard.”

  “They’ve talked to you?”

  “A detective came round to ask some questions.”

  “Ramsay.”

  “I think that’s the guy.”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “What I’m telling you. It’s a novel. It’s all made up. I’m just glad it’s over.”

  Tim chokes on the sip he’s taking from his bottle. “Over? Not for me. This is my story. I’m going to be filing on Mr. Feld’s trial for the next several months. Which could turn out to be a real bitch if I can’t come at it through a side door.”

  He looks at me straight now, hands flat on the bar.

  “I wish I could help you,” I say, blowing him back an inch with an exhaled belch. “But there’s not a goddamn thing I know about William Feld that anybody who read your story in today’s paper doesn’t know.”

  I’ll never know if Tim believes me or not. But whether out of a sense that what I’ve said is true, or some last tug of friendship, he lets me go.

  “Working on anything new?”

  “I was thinking of returning to newspapering. I’d be prepared to try something new. The horoscopes, classifieds, crossword puzzles,” I say. “You think the Editor-in-Chief would have me back?”

  Oh yes. We both have a good laugh over that one.

  In the morning I drive down to St. Catharines. I’ve brought all sorts of presents with me (a plasma screen TV for Stacey and her husband, iPods and a Tolkien collector’s set for their kids) but nothing, intentionally, for Sam. Our gift to each other is the reunion itself. It will be up to Sam how he wants to spend the rest of the summer. We will work our way back to what we used to be at our own pace, and with only ourselves to tell us how it is to be done.

  On the drive home I make a point of not overdoing how difficult the last weeks have been without him. And for the first hour or so, he offers anecdotes involving his numbskulled cousins, how good a swimmer he’s become. He’s going easy on me, too.

  Then, somewhere around Oakville, flying past the low-rise head offices and steakhouse franchises, Sam decides I’m able to take his coming to the point.

  “You have to tell me, Dad.”

  “I know.”

  “It doesn’t have to be now.”

  “Okay.”

  “But sometime.”

  “I owe you that much.”

  “It’s not about owing.”

  Sam turns in his seat. And there’s not an eight-year-old looking back at me but a young man who is surprised at how his father can’t appreciate what should be obvious.

  “If you don’t tell me, you’ll be the only one who knows,” he says.

  August decides to behave, with afternoon breezes off the lake nudging the smog northward to reveal the city it had shrouded in orange for the month before. To honour this change, Sam and I go for long walks. Lunching out in T-shirts and flipflops, biking along the trails in the Don Valley, sliding our hands over the Henry Moore sculptures at the gallery when the security guards aren’t looking. We’ve even started reading again. Bookish picnics in Trinity-Bellwoods swallowing Robinson Crusoe (Sam) and Atonement (me) in the shade.

  But even these happy days are not free of ghosts.

  The first arrives in the form of a voice. A phone call near midnight that sounds like it’s coming from a bar.

  “Patrick?”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Len.”

  “Where are you?”

  “The Fukhouse.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not too sure. I guess it’s got some sentimental value.”

  “This is going to sound stupid, but I have to ask,” I say, squeezing my eyes shut against the bedside lamp I click on. “You’re not dead, are you?”

  “No,” Len says after a moment’s thought. “I don’t think so.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “I just kind of left everything behind and rented places all over town. It was pretty screwed up for a while there.”

  “It was.”

  “They got him now though.”

  “Yeah. They got him.”

  He sighs into the receiver. A wet-lipped whistle that tells me that until I just confirmed it for him, Len wasn’t sure if it was over or not.

  “You know what’s funny?” he goes on. “I was about to say that maybe I can go home now, but I don’t have a clue where that is. My old landlord threw all my books and comics out at my old place.”

  “You can always start again.”

  “Start what?”

  “Collecting.”

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  In the background, someone smashes what sounds like a shot glass against the wall.

  “Busy night down there?”

  “It’s okay,” Len says nervously. “Hey, you doing anything right now?”

  “I was getting ready for bed, actually.”

  “Is it that late? I was going to ask if you wanted to come out and meet me. To celebrate.”

  “Not tonight.”

  “Another time.”

  This seems to be it. But Len lingers, the loneliness travelling down the line like an invisible weight.

  “I guess we’re the only ones left,” he says finally.

  “What about Angela?”

  “You think she could still be alive?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “Well, here’s to us, Len. To the living.”

  “To the living,” Len says, sounding less than certain about who that might be.

  The other phantom of August isn’t dead either, but might as well be.

  I see him walkin
g back from the corner store one afternoon, Sam gripping my thumb with one hand, and screwing a popsicle into his mouth with the other. A father and son holding hands on a neighbourhood street in summertime. One version of freedom.

  We’re passing by the punky hair salon on the corner—the place where Ronald Pevencey once cut and coloured—when a black panel van pulls over against the curb twenty feet ahead of us. Although this part of Queen Street has delivery trucks stopping and starting outside throughout the day, something about it draws my attention. Not any detail, but its utter lack of detail: no business name painted on the doors, no stickers, no rear licence plate. Even the black paint is of an age that has dulled its finish to an old chalkboard.

  I slow our pace as the distance between us and the van shrinks to a couple of strides. Neither driver nor passenger doors have opened, and the angle of the side mirrors doesn’t let me see who sits up front. But it’s the back of the van that radiates trouble. The two rear windows webbed with dust, along with streaks of something else. Dried smears running from the top of the glass to the bottom. Rain. Or solvent rubbed off of work gloves. Or bare hands split open in an effort to scratch through the glass.

  “Why are we stopping, Dad?”

  I’m thinking of an answer—It’s such a nice day, I just want to turn around and go home the long way—when I see him. William’s face against the van’s back window.

  I pull Sam against me. His popsicle drops to the sidewalk.

  Nobody sees William but me.

  And even I’m not seeing William. He’s in a solitary confinement cell somewhere, awaiting sentencing. Because there will be no trial. Not now. Not after he pleaded guilty and agreed to sign a written confession just days ago. All that’s left to be determined is how many consecutive life sentences he will serve.

  So it’s not William whose lips are stretched into an oval, his tongue pressed white against the glass in a silent scream. But this doesn’t stop me from scuffling backwards to slam my shoulders against the hair salon windows.

  This is what terrifies me about the van: not William, but what horrors have taken place within it. The sort of things that would frighten even William. And there’s his face to prove it. Never before showing anything but veiled threat—coal-eyed, beard-shrouded—yet now stretched with panic.

  The van spews exhaust. When it clears, William isn’t there. But the wet circle his tongue cleared on the glass still is. Was there to begin with.

  With a lurch, the van re-enters the lane of moving traffic. A half-block on, it makes a turn and is gone.

  Sam kicks the melted pool of popsicle goo against the wall. Takes my hand to lead me home. He doesn’t ask what I think I saw. He doesn’t have to. As with the bad man who lives in the bedroom closet, if you can just hold on to what you know is real, he can’t hurt you.

  The summer ends with a string of identically perfect days, as though in apology for its earlier abuses. A lulling, blue-skied week of becalmed downtown traffic and evenings of clear air flavoured by barbecue smoke. All the uncertainties and worries of what has come before—not just for the especially beleaguered Rushes, but for all who wander, grinning, down the city’s streets—are put into more manageable perspectives. Everyone wishing for this to go on forever.

  And then, abruptly, it’s Labour Day weekend. Overnight, there’s an autumnal coolness in the air, the leaves trade half their green for gold. Now’s the time. The chalky taste of Back to School days tells us this. If there’s something fun you’ve been meaning to get around to, do it now.

  It’s how Sam and I decide to go to the Mustang Drive-in dusk-’til-dawn. The last show of the season at a place Tamara and I used to make the trip to, sneaking in a bottle of white wine under the seat and making out like teenagers. For Sam, the attraction is seeing what he, despite my repeated corrections, calls “My dad’s movie.”

  “North,” Sam says, his nose to the glass, as I turn off the concession road and join the line of traffic inching toward the admission booth.

  I didn’t know my son could tell directions from the stars.

  “Look,” I tell him, pointing to the back of the screen up the slope. The cowboy riding the bucking bronco atop the marquee, the fields of harvest corn beyond. Sam reads aloud the lettering announcing tonight’s feature presentation.

  “The Sandman,” he says.

  I’ve already seen it. Sam may not be old enough to handle some of the more “mature” subject matter (this is the opinion of the censor board, whose rating fussily warns of “Violence, and Suggestions of Improper Sexual Interest”). But if the guy in the ticket booth is prepared to take my money for two adults, then for tonight, that’s what we are.

  We park off to the side in front of the concession stand, haul folding chairs out of the Toyota’s trunk. Throw a sleeping bag over our knees to guard against the chill.

  Although The Sandman is based on my novel, my involvement in its being made has been limited to the guilty acceptance of a production-fee cheque. I was invited to the premiere in Los Angeles a couple weeks ago but declined. The studio publicists called to plead their case that my non-attendance might be misconstrued as my having “creative reservations about the project.” I assured them I had no creativity with which to hold reservations. In return for my assurance of silence, they sent me champagne and an advance copy of the DVD.

  Just the other day I popped it in, uncorked the bubbly, and for the next hour and a half sat myself down in the Crypt and drank straight from the bottle. It wasn’t bad. The champagne, I mean. As for the movie, I suppose it possesses a certain propulsiveness, fuelled mainly by chop-chop editing and a techno soundtrack that makes the city in which the film was shot (Toronto, as a matter of fact, though Toronto as intended to look like New York) feel jacked on meth.

  What’s funny about the movie, what slightly bothers me about it, isn’t its quality one way or the other, but how divergent it is from the real thing. From Angela. Her voice. That’s what is utterly missing from the Hollywood version, through no fault of its screenwriters and actors and producers. How could they know what it was like to sit in Conrad White’s candlelit apartment, the snow scratching at the windows, and listen to Angela reading from the doodle-margined pages of her journal? Even if they had been there, would it have changed anything? A movie tells a story, but its world is static. Every set and gesture and image carefully determined, the narrative hermetically sealed. A movie doesn’t let you create what you see within yourself. But that’s what Angela’s voice did. It invited you inside.

  “It’s starting!” Sam announces as the floodlights cut out.

  The rest you know.

  You know from where all this started, deep in the middle of things. The story of the Man Who Lost His Son at the Movies. I say “lost” because that’s how the police and newspapers referred to it, as though Sam was a dropped wallet. The media releases are careful to point out that no evidence of foul play was found at the scene. I don’t know whether they said this as a matter of general policy or whether they simply didn’t accept my account of chasing a shadow through the corn rows.

  You already know how this Labour Day turns out for me. But when you start in the middle, there are certain angles that are left out, shades of meaning that wouldn’t have made sense the first time around. Consider, for instance, the troubling effect that watching The Sandman on a towering screen under the night’s stars had on me. How something in the oversized action tried to tell me to Take your son and leave. Tried to warn me.

  What are you talking about?

  The thing that lives under your bed. The eyes in your closet at night, watching you. The dark. Whatever frightens you the most…

  I can only watch the screen for a few seconds at a time. The actors delivering their lines directly to me, their faces looking down with ironic masks of “fear,” “determination,” “worry.” I was wrong about movies being fixed worlds. These characters, the action on this screen—all of it wants out.

  “You want anyt
hing?” I ask Sam. “Tater tots?”

  And he takes my hand. Lets it go only when the cashier takes too long to ring us in.

  Then I’m running between the lines of parked cars, trying to tell myself what I know is happening isn’t happening. It doesn’t work. Because the Sandman is here. Not William, who is miles away, sitting in a cell. Not Ramsay. Not Len or Conrad White. Not Raymond Mull.

  It’s the Sandman who runs into the corn field, letting me catch a glimpse of him so I can follow. This is what he wanted me to do. It gave him the time he needed to disappear, to ensure I was headed in the opposite direction from where Sam was being kept in the trunk of one of the back row cars. Or maybe my son was in the car next to mine the whole time.

  I was chasing the Sandman. But he never had Sam to begin with.

  By the time I reach the abandoned farmhouse on the far side of the field it’s over. I can only stand there, staring back at the Mustang’s screen in the distance.

  The terrible man who does terrible things isn’t William. It isn’t even a man. It’s a girl. The one whose face is on the drive-in screen, the one who read from her journal in Conrad White’s apartment, the one with toes missing from frostbite. A girl who has grown up to assume different names. Steal different lives.

  My mistake was to assume that the villain of my story was the same as the villain in hers. But the monster who has taken the only thing left to me isn’t the Sandman. It’s the one who created him.

  Part Four

  The Terrible Man Who Does Terrible Things

  There is a search. You can imagine. A father loses his son at the movies, the boy snatched away in the time it takes to buy hot dogs and onion rings—it’s a summer weekend news editor’s dream come true. In the early morning of that Sunday—before the dawn of the cancelled dusk-’til-dawn—one of the networks awakens a “missing person expert” and tapes an interview in which we are reminded that “The first twelve hours are crucial in cases of this kind.” Even the police supervisors behind the microphones at the first news conference of the day aren’t immune to the excitement of a race against time, especially where there’s a kid involved. It’s like something on TV. It is on TV.