The Killing Circle

by Andrew Pyper

  Daddy!

  Daddy, not Dad. His name for me when he was little, the second syllable dropped a couple years ago in favour of the more grown-up short form. The reversion only happens now when he’s been hurt. Or when he’s scared.

  The trees close in. Nightfall arrives at the same time as the bare limbs overhead deny what little moonlight there might be. The relatively even earth allows me greater speed here than over the furrows, but there is also more to hold me back. Interlocked branches. Stumps rising out of the gathering snow to crack my shins. Buried stones.

  A hand swiped across my eyes comes away wet. Cut.

  The weather forecast was right. Not just about the squall, but the cold. The temperature has dropped to whatever level it is that freezes your nostrils closed. Tightens the skin over your cheeks until it feels like the bone could rip through.

  I stop and try to tell myself I’m determining which course to take, that it’s not the cold and the panic that has freeze-dried all oxygen out of the air. Which way is north? If Sam is out here, this is where he’d be. And only Sam would know how to get out again. He could read the stars. Through momentary pauses of the snowfall I can make out some of the brightest constellations, but I didn’t listen when Sam tried to explain how they could show you the way. The thought that I may never have the chance to let my son teach me this doubles me over. Puking a stain into a creamy drift.

  Sam’s shouted name is lost in the blizzard. A new inch of snow on the ground with every count to twenty in my head. In the creek beds it’s already up past my knees.

  The struggle now isn’t against the cold but my desire to lean against the nearest pine and go to sleep. Forty winks. It would be a nap of the forever kind, I know. But it’s how David Percy exited the world. Who’s to say I have any greater reason to live than he had? A pair of fools who thought good intentions alone might find them a way through.

  I’m bending down to curl into a nice spot when I see him. A human form against a tree in a clearing ahead.

  “Sam.”

  A whisper this time. Louder than any of my shouts.

  But as I get closer I see that the figure is too large to be Sam. And that whoever it is, he has long since frozen. Not that freezing was how he died. Iced blood pooled in his lap. Stiff hands plugging the wounds. Lashed to the trunk with wire that has sliced deep through his last struggles to free himself.

  The man’s chin slumped against his chest. I lift his head so that his lifeless eyes, still open, look up.

  It’s strange to see Ramsay’s face showing anything but his wry cockiness. There is nothing of the kind about it now. A mask of terror waxed over the self-certainty he maintained over all the preceding years of his life.

  Whatever was done to him in Angela’s room took some time. And then he was brought out here. Aware of what was coming, but clinging to the possibility of escape nevertheless. Isn’t that what the detectives in his detective novels did? Wait for a last-minute opportunity just when things looked their worst?

  I regain my feet. Ramsay already halfway to buried. In half an hour, you would never know he’s here.

  There isn’t a reason I keep walking but I do. Sam isn’t out here, if he ever was. It’s more probable that what I heard came from within my own head, or was Ramsay himself, instructed to find the right pitch with the assistance of the wire around his throat. It doesn’t matter. The point is what it’s always been: the determination of beginnings, middles and ends. Stories like symmetry, and my fate is to act out David Percy’s concluding moments. I carry on now only to see the place they’ll find me whenever they do.

  Maybe it will be here. Out in the open of the Percys’ field. An unintended circling back to where I started.

  A single light appears through the snow. The bulb over the farmhouse porch.

  Someone’s home.

  I fall to my knees. Across the field, a looming shadow takes its time coming to me. A darkness on its way to swallow me whole. Behind it, emerging from the house, what may be a smaller figure looking on.

  Something about the two of them suggests they have always been here. Not just today, but forever. They have all the time in the world.

  Do shadows cast shadows?

  Firelight over a cracked plaster ceiling. Gradations of darkness nudging each other aside. Peeling paint lent a sinister animation. Hooked fingers reaching down for me.

  Random connections, mini-hallucinations. I’m aware that this is all they are. Hospital room thoughts.

  Except I’m not in a hospital.

  No, don’t ask. Just leave it alone—watch the shadows make shadows. Don’t ask.

  Where am I?

  Now I’ve done it. You can’t deny a query like that once it’s out. It’s the first information we insist upon when we wake.

  Which means I am awake.

  Which means I’m here.

  Out and in again.

  There was a gap, anyway, that only blacking out can explain. While away, the timid fire in the hearth has been stoked. The blizzard quieted to the suspended feathers that follow a pillow fight. And though it was unthinkably cold before, just beyond the range of the fire’s heat—where my blue left hand rests, as opposed to the pinkish right—it has dropped a few more degrees.

  For a moment or two I entertain the possibility that this could be another abandoned farmhouse altogether, another empty living room with windows that look out into a night dark and confining as a mine shaft. But there’s the broken whisky bottle at my feet. And the chair I’m seated in feels like the one I noticed when I looked into the Percys’ living room. Splintery but solid, its legs firmly planted.

  And me firmly planted in it.

  Chains looped around my wrists, holding both arms flat to the armrests. Tying ankle to ankle. A bruising yoke around my neck. I can’t see what fixes the chair to the floor but given how it won’t move no matter how I shift my weight, it must be screwed in.

  I’m clothed but coatless. Only socks on my feet. I suppose this was done to get a good fit around my chest and legs, but the side effect is an even greater vulnerability to the cold. Without the fire I won’t last long. Even with it, I can feel the sweat turning to frost on my upper lip. The hard air stinging my eyes.

  My strength is gone. I never had much to begin with. And there are the tingly black dots of unconsciousness dancing around my peripheral vision, waiting for the chance to bury me.

  But I have to try. There’s nothing else to do but try.

  I figure the best way to test the chains is to pull on each limb one at a time, seeing if there’s some give anywhere. The concentration required in this—turn this wrist, lift that foot, now that foot—proves that my mind has weakened as much as the rest of me. And while I’m able to twist some parts an inch or two, there is no indication that anything might be slid out if teased a bit more. If I’m to get out of this chair, it won’t be gently.

  So I try the hard way.

  A crazed spasm. Lunging forward and back, trying to topple the chair. Kicks and punches that don’t go anywhere.

  When I’m done I’m still here. Except now I’ve left the door open to the black dots. A nauseous sleep rolling in like fog.

  My eyes won’t open. That, or I’m blind. But there is movement somewhere within the house. The sense of vibrations more than the sounds themselves. Hearing as the deaf hear.

  A heavy footfall along the upstairs hallway. And something lighter, metallic. A clattering of pots and cutlery in the kitchen.

  I try to stand again. It doesn’t work. And this time it hurts.

  “Who’s there?” I shout, or attempt to shout, but it’s nothing more than a dry ripple of air. The turning of a newspaper page.

  Yet there’s a pause in the sounds. Was I heard? The black dots gathering round again.

  Where’s my son?

  This finds a way out. A broken cry that carries through the bones of the house.

  A minute passes after the echo of it has faded. Nothing other than knuckles of
wind against the glass.

  And then it resumes. Boots clumping through the floorboards above, the noise of cooking. But no voices in reply. No recognition that there is a man freezing to death in the front room. A father whose only wish is to know if his son is here and could hear him if he could find the breath to speak his name.

  A figure beyond the doorframe. Standing in the hallway holding a candle in a teacup. A frantic play of the dim light. Glimpses of fur-topped boots, a knitted toque, the ridged tendons down a white neck.

  She doesn’t come forward. Holds the candle to the side so that it won’t illuminate her face directly. A pose struck by the subject of a gothic portrait.

  Don’t hurt him.

  When my tongue refuses to form the words I try to send this to her through the silence. But she has been pleaded to before. She knows the things people ask for at the end.

  Don’t.

  A fight for air. And by the time I find it, the hallway is empty.

  She is there again when I next wake.

  In the room with me, standing in the corner. Still huddled in the deeper darkness, as though shy. But it’s not that. She simply prefers to watch than be watched.

  I jump toward her—but the chains restrain the motion to a hiccup jolt.

  A small fire flickering its last sparks in the hearth. Outside there is the black clarity that comes with the deepest dives below zero.

  “Where is he?” My voice a dry crinkle. The peeling of an onion. “Where’s Sam?”

  “Not here.”

  “Bring him to me.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Is he alive?”

  The question passes through her.

  I make another attempt to rise from the chair. A snake wriggle. It makes the bindings even tighter than before.

  “Let me go.”

  “You know you’re never getting out of here.”

  “I wish I’d fucked you in the ass.”

  “This is out of character.”

  “I’m not a character.”

  “Depends on the perspective.”

  “Ask my perspective. You? You’re an empty, talentless bitch. You’re nothing.”

  “That won’t do you any good either.”

  “Am I hurting your feelings?”

  “It’s going to be a long night. Anger takes up so much energy.”

  “Then how are you still standing?”

  “Me?” she says. “I’m not angry.”

  Angela steps toward me. The floor groaning as if accommodating the weight of a giant. As she passes, the disturbance of the air creates a feathering breeze against my face.

  “They’re going to find you,” I say.

  “Really?”

  “The police. They’ll come after me. After Ramsay. They know where we went.”

  She has bent to the fire. Placing fresh logs, nothing more than thick branches really, atop one another. The flames hiss at the ice under the bark.

  “No one is coming here,” she says.

  The only part of her exposed from here is the back of her neck. Hair up, with just the downy strands beneath curling against the collar of her parka. I stare at this one point and will it closer. If she allowed herself just one incautious approach, I could rip through her spine from back to front with my teeth.

  What is required first is for her not to leave.

  “That’s how David Percy died, wasn’t it? You did to him what you did to me.”

  “What did I do?”

  “Had him believe that you were out there. A blind man who thought he’d lost his child. He wasn’t chased by a ghost, or a Sandman. He ran into the woods to look for you.”

  “Maybe that’s how you should have ended your novel.”

  “But it’s what happened.”

  “You’re blinder than that old man ever was.”

  “What part am I wrong about?”

  “It’s not the killing. Not for me, anyway.”

  “Tell me.”

  Angela puts down the crowbar she was using to arrange the fire. Stands facing me.

  “It’s getting into someone else’s head, right at the point when everything is laid bare,” she says.

  “You think this is research?”

  “It’s more than that. It’s material. You and I have more in common than you’d guess. Trouble making things up out of nothing, for one thing.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We both wanted to write books. And this is mine. The life I’m living. The lives I’m taking. It’s all going into my novel. A novel that’s not really a novel, because, in a way, it’s all true.”

  “An autobiography.”

  “Not exactly. The point-of-view won’t be mine. I’m not sure whose yet. I need to find the right voice.”

  “So you’re stealing your book as much as I did.”

  “I’m not stealing. I’m assembling.”

  “You have a title?”

  “The Killing Circle. Like it?”

  “Can’t say I do. But I suppose I’m biased. Given that you’re going to kill me just so you can end a chapter. Just like you killed the others.”

  Angela comes at me with surprising speed. Instead of meeting her with whatever fury is left in me, I reflexively rear back. She grabs my hair. The fused seams of the chains audibly tearing the skin.

  “I never killed anyone,” she says.

  Another waking. Another recognition that my believing myself bound to a chair in a haunted house isn’t a dream.

  She has Sam.

  I will die after the fire goes out.

  I cannot leave this place.

  The hope that I will be released because I am the teller of this tale, and the teller never dies in his own tale: another falsehood.

  I close my eyes. Try to let sleep return. But whatever it is that comes to smother my next breath isn’t sleep at all.

  She is sitting in a chair ten feet away. It may be further. There being nothing else to look at, no furniture or picture on the wall within range of the diminishing firelight, she looms where she might otherwise shrink. I’ve never thought of her as large. But she is. She’s all there is.

  She looks out the window. Taps her heels against the floor. A schoolgirl growing impatient at the bus stop.

  “No wonder you’re so fucked up. Having someone like Raymond Mull for your father.”

  Angela turns her eyes to me. A dull sheen of interest over the black pupils.

  “What do you know about him?”

  “That he hurt you. How did that make you feel?”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  “It would explain a lot.”

  “How I was such a bad girl at such a young age? How I drove a blind old man to the point he ran into the woods in a snowstorm?”

  “Why you have no self.”

  “I have plenty of selves.”

  She stands. Peers out at a particular point on the night’s horizon.

  “You know something? I almost feel sorry for you.”

  “Artists enjoy certain privileges,” she says. “They also endure certain sacrifices.”

  “Sounds like something Conrad White would say.”

  “I think he did say it.”

  “Was this while he was telling you how you were his perfect girl? His dead daughter returned?”

  “People see in me what they wish to see.”

  “A mirror.”

  “Sometimes. Or sometimes it’s someone else. A twin. A lover. Someone they lost. Or would like to be.”

  “What did I see?”

  “You? That’s easy. You saw your muse.”

  Angela goes to the fire. Places a pair of spindly branches on to the flames.

  “Not much of a wood pile,” I say.

  “It’s enough.”

  “Not staying long?”

  She ignores this.

  “How did you do it on your own?” I try again.

  “Do what?”

  “What was done to some of t
he bodies—that’s some heavy lifting.”

  “You’d know.”

  I work to push aside the images of Petra in the shed as best I can. “You were watching me?”

  “I was always watching. But that—that was unexpected.”

  “Was it William? Did you convince him to help you?”

  “I urged him to study his fellow man.”

  “But he didn’t kill the people from the circle. Or Carol Ulrich, Pevencey. The earlier ones.”

  “You forgot Jane Whirter.”

  “Yes. Why did she come to Toronto?”

  “I invited her. She had suspicions. So I told her I did as well.”

  My chin falls against my chest. It awakens me with a gasp.

  “You put the bloody tools in his apartment,” I say. “William’s.”

  “The police needed to catch a monster. Now they have one.”

  “Not the right one.”

  “Do you hear him protesting his innocence?”

  “Why isn’t he?”

  “I convinced him otherwise.”

  Angela backs away from the fire and walks to the far side of the room. Her shoulders folded in, her hair greasy from a few days without water. The girl has been busy. And she is a girl again. Through her fatigue, the years that had been added since she first opened her journal in Conrad White’s apartment have fallen away to reveal someone a little lost, uncertain of where she is and what has brought her here. It’s an illusion, of course. Another mistake that leads to more mistakes. This is what she is as much as anything else: a collection of misreadings.

  “Why Ramsay?” I say, and she half turns.

  “What I do—it requires improvisation.”

  “They’ll come looking for him.”

  “They won’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I spoke to him. And he—he assured me that he came here on his own time. No one knew where he was headed, because he was tracking you.”

  “You don’t think he was bullshitting you?”

  “He was in a position where lying would be unlikely.”

  “You’re not clever, you know,” I find myself coughing as she drifts toward the hallway. “You might think you’re some kind of artist. But you’re not. You’re shit.”