The Killing Circle

by Andrew Pyper

  Angela stops. Out of the range of firelight, so that she’s a shadow that surprises with its ability to speak.

  “You’re a plagiarist, Patrick,” she says. “At least what I do is original.”

  I flinch awake at what I think at first is a sound, but it isn’t. It’s light. Two white pins pushing through the darkness outside. Growing brighter, surrounded by a widening penumbra of snow.

  Angela is here with me. Standing by the window, rolling back on her heels.

  “Who’s that?”

  “A harder question to answer than you’d guess,” she says.

  “The Sandman.”

  “But he could be anyone.”

  “Not anyone. He killed Petra and Len. The one who drove Conrad and Evelyn off the road. The hands that pushed Ivan on to the tracks.”

  “That’s not really a guess.”

  She turns from the window. Outside, the headlights swing around and point away, exposing the side of the vehicle. A black van. The one I’d seen on Queen Street. The one that drove off from where I’d found Len’s body.

  “I suppose I’ll be meeting him soon enough,” I say.

  “You’d like to?”

  “I’d enjoy nothing more than to meet the man of your dreams.”

  Angela giggles in fake embarrassment. “It’s not like that.”

  The child’s sound of her voice reminds me that, whatever she is now, happened when she was young. It’s why her age is so hard to guess, how even in her bed she was play-acting at being an adult. Part of her belongs to the past because part of her died there.

  “Whatever your father is making you do, it’s not your fault.”

  “Thank you. My burden has been lifted.”

  “If you let me go, I could help you.”

  “Help me?”

  “Show me where Sam is, and we could all go away together. Or go our separate ways. But I’d make it so that your father couldn’t touch us ever again. We’d be safe.”

  “I am safe.”

  “Angela, please. You don’t have to keep doing this. Not for him.”

  “I could be with you instead? Your replacement bride? Your co-author?”

  The van door swings shut. A workman’s vehicle’s screech of neglect. After a moment, there’s the heavy footsteps coming up on to the porch.

  I am the ground beneath your feet…

  The door opens. Snow being stomped off his boots. Then the few steps along the hallway it takes to stand in the archway, looking in.

  A giant’s shadow. The same one I’d seen coming for me before collapsing in the field outside. But somehow familiar now that it is indoors. The shape of a man I’ve seen before.

  “I’d like you to meet my brother,” she says.

  The figure steps forward to the edge of the firelight. Tentative, gloved hands crossed over his stomach. Grinning in a trembly, rubber-lipped way that suggests he’s trying not to, but can’t help himself.

  “Len?”

  “That’s how you knew him,” Angela says, sliding close to him but carefully. Without touching. “Virgin Len. But he, like me, has gone by a number of different names over the years. Different incarnations.”

  “But I saw you. In the alley.”

  “You saw what you thought you saw,” Len says, his grin widening. “We counted on that. We’ve always counted on that.”

  “Oh Christ.”

  “You alright?”

  “Oh Christ.”

  The room is swimming. No, not the room—I’m swimming. Fits of motion through the nearly solid air. A fish finning through a tank.

  “I’m going to take a look around upstairs,” Angela says to him.

  Len nods. When she moves past him into the hallway she brushes against his nylon jacket and the sound is like a knife rendering tin foil.

  “That was you,” I say. “At Michelle Carruthers’ funeral. Mull was your father too.”

  “As far as we know.”

  “And you were taken into foster care just like your sister.”

  “Shared experience can bind people in powerful ways.”

  “So you decided to take other people’s lives to replace your own.”

  “Too simple. Way too simple.”

  Len spits on the floor. The white foam of it on the hardwood holds his attention, and in his stare I can see the emptiness in him, the sterile indifference.

  “You’re a good actor.”

  “I’m not Len,” he says, taking a predatory step into the room. “If that’s what you mean.”

  “Len was somebody. It was a performance, but there was a personality there. You, on the other hand, are nobody.”

  “Are you trying to insult me?”

  “It wouldn’t work if I was. There’s nothing in you to hurt. Just like your sister.”

  “Angela is an artist.”

  “And you’re the king of the Kingdom of Not What It Seems.”

  “No.”

  “The Sandman.”

  “No.”

  “Who is?”

  “Whoever scares you most.”

  Len takes his gloves off, stuffs them in his pocket. His big hands creased with black lines.

  Dirty hands.

  “Where’s my son?”

  “That’s a secret.”

  “You’re going to hurt him, aren’t you? You already have.”

  “Now, now. You’ll only upset yourself.”

  “He’s just a child. Doesn’t that make a difference to you?”

  “We were all children once.”

  I cough back a surge of sick. My throat burning from the inside out.

  “It was you,” I say. “You took those girls in Whitley.”

  “Before my time.”

  “Then who?”

  “That was him.”

  “Mull? You sure it wasn’t you shadowing your little sister? It wasn’t you who wanted her?”

  “I protected her.”

  “How?”

  “By making Daddy go away.”

  “You killed him?”

  “We needed to make a new world,” he says, showing the ground stumps of his teeth. “And he couldn’t be in it.”

  Len watches the eyes roll back in my head.

  “I don’t feel so great,” I say.

  “It’s the dehydration.”

  “Can I have some water?”

  “That’s good. That’s funny.”

  He steps over to the fire. Picks up a branch and considers adding it to the flames. After a moment, he puts the branch back on the pile he got it from.

  Upstairs, Angela is opening doors, closing them, putting things into a bag. If I’m counting the bedrooms right, she’s almost done.

  “Who was it?” I ask. There’s the idea I’m about to throw up but there is little time left now. “The body I thought was you.”

  Len comes to stand directly in front of me. He unclasps his hands so that they swing against his hips.

  “The National Star should have a job opening pretty soon,” he says.

  And then I do throw up. A painful choking that summons a half-cup of bile on to the floor.

  Angela appears in the hallway holding a duffel bag. Black stains seeping through the canvas. She shares a look with Len.

  “I think it’s time,” she says.

  She starts away, then stops. Comes to me and slips her hand into my pocket. Pulls out the dictaphone.

  “I made other tapes,” I say.

  “We have them all now.”

  “There’s copies.”

  “No, there aren’t. And we have your journals too. Right up to you arriving here. You left that one in your car’s glove box.”

  Angela asks Len if he’s checked the kitchen, and he lowers his head slightly when he admits he hasn’t. She looks at her watch. Gives him two minutes.

  He does as he’s told. Leaving Angela leaning against the archway, looking past me out the window. Like I’m not even here. Already dead.

  “You got me wrong,” I say, and t
he unexpected laugh that comes after spills warm spit down my chin.

  “Oh?”

  “You don’t have my whole story.”

  “The voice of desperation.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “I know everything I need to know about you.”

  “No, you don’t. There’s a secret I’ve kept so long that even I don’t remember it half the time. Something that changes everything.”

  “This is sad,” she says. But she’s watching me now.

  “I’m the last character in the circle. And without this, something will be missing. Your book will have a hole in it. Because Mr. Boring is not who you think he is. He has a twist.”

  In the kitchen, Len pulls a cutlery drawer out too far and it falls to the floor. The clatter of knives and forks. A barked profanity as he bends to pick them up.

  Angela comes closer.

  “Go on then,” she says.

  “Promise me. I’ll tell you if you promise Sam will be safe.”

  “I told you. I wouldn’t–”

  “I know it’s not you. Killing isn’t your department. It’s his.”

  “Maybe it’s already been done.”

  “Maybe it has. And if it hasn’t, he’s going to. To keep Sam quiet, or to punish me, or just because it’s what he does.”

  “You think your little secret might stop him?”

  “No. I think you might.”

  “Why should I do anything for a dead man’s lie?”

  “Because it isn’t a lie.”

  “How would I know?”

  “You’ll know as soon as you hear it.”

  Down the hall, Len slides the drawer back into its slot. Claps his hands together for warmth.

  “Fine,” she says, unable to entirely hide her interest. “I’m listening.”

  So I tell her. In a rushed whisper of run-on sentences and bullet points, clipped and unadorned. It’s not what I say that proves it’s true. It’s the voice. Breaking as soon as I begin, a thin note that thins even more over the telling.

  What I tell Angela is how I killed Tamara. My wife. How what I did makes both of us murderers.

  It wasn’t an assisted suicide either, not the carrying out of a consensual plan. It was my idea alone. I must be clear on this. Yet even though she was asleep when I pressed the needle into her arm, I believe that when Tamara wakened and saw what I was doing she was thankful, that she understood it was for love. Because it was. It may have been wrong according to certain laws or gods, it may have stolen restful sleep and guiltless dreams from me for the rest of my life, it may be where the out-of-nowhere tears have been coming from these past years—it may have been done too early— but I wanted only to take her pain away, to prevent the worse pain to come. To show as much courage as she showed, working up a white-lipped smile whenever Sam was around. Cancer did most of the killing on its own. It was the villain who stole into her room without turning on the light, not me.

  These are the kind of thoughts that made what I did no easier. What I now share with another for the first time. With Angela, who watches the words drift out of me in grey puffs of steam.

  Len returns to the doorway. Takes a breath as though savouring a scent in the air.

  “Ready,” he says.

  Angela turns to him. There is nothing in her expression—nothing at all—that would suggest she has just heard something surprising. She is good at hiding things. Or maybe it is only that there is nothing for her to hide, as she’s decided that what she has heard is little more than an overplayed bluff. The hollow glance she gives me as she follows Len to the door makes it impossible to tell.

  I hear her step outside. A pause as Len takes a last look down the hall. When he leaves, he pulls the door only partway closed. The wind moaning through the house, grieving. Sorry to see them go.

  It’s been some hours since there’s been any feeling in my legs. I was hoping this was one of the benefits of dying from exposure—at least it kept the pain to a minimum. Now it seems I was wrong about that. The body doesn’t let go of feeling easily, even if the only sensation left to it is setting itself on fire. Frostbite? Sounds chilly, doesn’t it? Try gripping an ice cube tight in your palm. It’s only cold at first. Then it burns.

  The screaming helps. My voice pushing back against the darkness that draws closer as the flames diminish in the hearth. And even now there is an idea that someone might hear me. Perhaps Angela has arranged for a deus ex machina—a kindly neighbour? a local cop?—to walk in the door and give me a lift to the Sportsman for a hot shower and a stiff drink. And I will be reformed by my experiences, the one she’d chosen as the recipient of her tough love. Wasn’t The Magus her favourite book, after all?

  But this isn’t a book.

  I’m taking in a breath to let out another howl when I hear the radio.

  It must have been on for the whole time of this most recent wakening, but it doesn’t have a firm grasp on the frequency, so that the signal drops out from time to time. Now, abruptly, it has found itself again. The last fading bars of “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” crackling out of the dark.

  An old transistor unit on the floor by my feet. The antenna fully extended, wavering in the drafty crosscurrents. A dim blue light from the tuning dial that turns the floor around it into a shallow pool.

  The announcer comes on to inform me that it’s Whitley’s easy listening station (“The smoothest sounds north of Superior”). Coming up: Perry Como, Streisand, The Carpenters. “And pull your sweetheart a little closer,” the DJ says with an audible wink, “because next we’ve got a real blast from the past—with Paul Anka!”

  It makes me wonder: did Angela leave the radio with me for comfort, or further punishment? Easy listening? Maybe that was the only station she could get. Or maybe there’s a message in its selection. Milquetoast music to send off the man with no imagination.

  And they call it puppy love. But I guess they’ll never know…

  The fire nothing more than a stack of hissing embers. Red stars twinkling against the black bricks. Soon it will be cold and dead. Ditto the slumped man turning into a shadow.

  I told her.

  This comes with a stab to the chest. Followed by a shuddering fight to pull a whole breath in. A blown nose leaves a spray of blood over my pant legs.

  I told her the story. It wasn’t a dream. I told her.

  Two bits of discouraging news from the radio between the Jefferson Airship retrospective and “Careless Whisper”: it’s 3.42 a.m. and minus nineteen outside. I’d been nurturing some hope that I might make it to the morning, if only to see the patterns of frost over the glass, the stark line of trees beyond. But it seems these small consolations are to be denied me.

  Engelbert Humperdinck next. Always loved that name.

  Please release me. Let me go…

  The news comes on. The second item (after the day’s Middle Eastern death count) is a breaking story. One I only focus on halfway through the reception’s broken account.

  “The son of author…street corner in Dryden, Ontario…taken to the local hospital to be checked over for any possible…unknown at this time…appeared unharmed, though a statement has not yet been released regarding information on his kidnappers’ identity…also apparently missing, and therefore not available for…unconfirmed initial reports that the boy has offered information which may lead to his father’s whereabouts…repeated their policy of not answering questions until they have followed…In sports, Leafs lose another close one…”

  There’s to be a follow-up report a half-hour later. It gives me something to keep breathing for. Fighting sleep that isn’t sleep. Humming along to crackly patches of “Everybody Plays the Fool” and “Someday We’ll Be Together.”

  Then the news again. This time around, the reception is good enough to get the facts down.

  Sam Rush, son of the bestselling author, was discovered wandering alone on a residential street in Dryden, the next town along the Trans-Canada from Whitley.
Early reports indicate that he appeared in good health, and has made a statement to authorities that may assist them in locating the boy’s father, who has also been recently designated a Missing Person. Police are now working to locate a farmhouse where the boy was kept, and are using geographic parameters he has provided regarding its location in relation to the stars. There are currently no leads as to the identity of the boy’s abductors as he was unable or unwilling to provide detailed physical descriptions. Parents are urged to monitor their children more closely than usual over the coming days, though they can be assured that the Rush investigation is now a top priority. The police spokesperson went out of his way to emphasize that, despite the boy’s statements, there is no evidence to support the contention that Sam Rush’s abduction and his father’s missing status are related.

  There’s no mention of Ramsay. Nothing about Tim Earheart either, though the police have surely made a positive identification by this point. Soon, they’ll start pulling some of the connections together. But they’ll never find Angela and Len. I’m sure of this. They’re gone and won’t come back. With different names and faces they will slip across borders, shedding themselves as they go. Somewhere else, eventually, they will join another circle. And someone will start believing in the Sandman again.

  The radio’s reception starts to fade. The batteries mostly used up to start with. She wanted me to hear the news, to let me know. But once I had, she wanted the silence to return.

  And now, with a last rustle of static, it has.

  Outside, the wind stills to nothing. The snow drifted up against the walls like breaking waves. Even the house holds its breath.

  Sam is alive.

  It’s this fact, this pain-killing knowledge, that allows me to let go.

  I’ve been fighting harder than I knew. To be here for him. Just in case he found his way out of the storm. Instead, he is far away, in the care of others. I wish it were my arms that held him, my comfort that will send him off to sleep. No matter. We’ve had our bedtime stories. There will be my voice for him to hold on to.

  Goodnight, son. Sweet dreams.

  They may find me, of course. And maybe even before my breath has turned to crystal in my chest. The radio said they were looking for me, following the directions Sam gave them, the Norths and Wests and Easts he read from the stars. Odds are it will be too late to make any difference. And yet, even as I resign myself to the inevitable, there is a renewed struggle to stay here, in this moment, a thinking, remembering thing. Fighting for another minute, for the possibility of dawn. Of seeing Sam again.