Andrew Pyper - The Killing Circle

“It’s not that. It’s that I haven’t allowed myself to be around others.”

“Why not?”

“I was accused of something once,” he says. Looks at me straight. “Have you ever been accused of something?”

A rip of freezing wind comes out of nowhere. A furious howl that leaves me with instant headache.

What I took to be Ivan’s shyness has dropped away. He reads my face, numbed by the cold so that I have no idea what shape my features have taken. What I do know for sure is that, all at once, the fact that nobody has come in or out of the subway in the time we’ve been standing here makes me more than a little uncomfortable.

“I suppose I have,” I say.

“You suppose you have.”

“I mean, I’m not sure what context—”

“The context of being accused of harming someone.”

Ivan steps away from me. He had meant to have a normal conversation with someone who struck him as normal too, but he’d lost his balance on the home stretch. Yet it’s not embarrassment or apology that plays over his face now. It’s anger. At me, at himself. At the whole accusing world.

“Better start home,” he mumbles, leaning his back into the subway’s door. The warmer air from underground moans out through the gap. “I can get you on free if you want.”

“No, thanks. I like to walk.”

“On a night like this?”

“I’m not too far.”

“Yeah? Where?”

“Close enough.”

I could tell Ivan where I live, and I almost do. But I just wave vaguely westward instead.

Ivan nods. I can feel him wanting to ask me to keep the last part of our conversation to ourselves. But in the end, he just slips through the door and stands on the descending escalator. His head an empty cartoon thought bubble following him down.

I walk to Bloor and start west, past the funnymoney block of Gucci and Chanel and Cartier, then left at the museum. Entering the university campus at Harbord, the traffic is hushed. I’m alone on the street, which invites the return of a habit I’ve indulged since childhood. Talking to myself. Back then, it was whole conversations carried on with characters from the books I was reading. Now I restrict myself to certain phrases that catch in my mind. Tonight, it’s some things from Angela’s reading.

Dirty hands .

These two words alone frighten me.

Fear made them see the town, the world, in a way they’d never seen it before .

I try to leave these incantations behind in the dissolving fog of my breath. Work to turn my mind to real concerns. No progress on my writing to speak of. The thinning thread that connects me to my job. Dark feelings that have me wondering: Is this it? Is it days like this that start the slide into a hole you can’t climb out of?

A smell that soldiers and surgeons would recognize .

Last night Sam awoke from a nightmare. I went to him. Stroked the damp hair back from his forehead.

Once I’d settled him down, I asked what his dream was about.

“A man,” he said.

“What kind of man?”

“A bad man.”

“There’s no bad man in here. I wouldn’t let anyone bad in this house.”

“He’s not in this house. He’s in that house.”

With his that, Sam sat straight and pointed out he window. His finger lined up with the neighbour’s house across the street. The window where the shadow had stood a few nights back. Looking out.

“Did you see the bad man who was there?” I asked him, but he heard in my very question the concession that what I’d just assured him didn’t exist may in fact be real, and he turned his back to me. What good were a father’s empty promises against the bogeyman? He would face any further nightmares on his own.

Blood tattooed on the curtains .

It’s on my shortcut through Chinatown that I start to feel less alone. Not because of the few others shuffling homeward on the sidewalks, heads down. It’s because I’m being followed.

Past the karaoke bars along Dundas, then the foolish turn south straight through the housing projects between here and Queen. That’s when I hear the footsteps echoing my own. There are reports in the City pages of frequent shootings on this very block, yet I’m certain that whatever shadows me isn’t interested in my wallet. It wants to see what I will do when I know it is there.

And what do I do?

I run.

A headlong sprint. I’m wearing the wrong shoes for it, so that within the first block my shins send bolts of pain up to the back of my head. Eyes stinging with wind-burned tears. Lungs crackling like a pair of plastic bags in my chest.

Courage is not a matter of will, but of the body .

I take the alley that runs behind the businesses along Queen. The shortest way to my house. But a dark alley ? What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking. I was running. Past walls and fences built against the rats and crackheads. No light to see by. Just the darker outline of the buildings and the square of black that is the alley opening on to the street at the far end.

I don’t stop. I don’t look back.

Not until I stop and look back.

Standing under the block’s lone working streetlight. My house within snowball-throwing distance. The light on in my son’s room. Sam up late. Sneak reading. And all I want is to sit on the edge of his bed, close his book, turn off the light. Listen to him breathe.

He is my son.

I love my son.

I would die to protect him.

These conclusions come fast and terse as lightning. Along with one other.

The alley is empty.

Angela’s Story

Transcribed from Tape Recording No. 2

The girl doesn’t tell anyone what she knows of the Sandman and the terrible thing he’s done. In part, this is because she doesn’t actually know anything about the missing girl, not in a way she could ever prove. Not to mention that a declaration of this kind might just label her as crazy once and for all. She’d be taken away from Edra and Jacob and put in a place far worse than any foster home or orphanage. Someplace she would never come out of again.

But more frightening than even the consideration of being taken away is the idea of hurting Edra and Jacob. Her wellbeing was all they cared about. To show them that she believed in dark figures born in her dreams, a monster who had come from the darkest place to hunt her down, would break both their hearts. The girl resolved to protect them from this no matter what.

For the next few days, ignoring the fact that something was wrong seemed to work. No more children disappeared. No dark figures were spotted in town. The girl’s dreams were the same irrational puzzles that others have, free of any terrible men who do terrible things. It felt like the news of a stranger with no face escaping from the confines of a nightmare was itself a nightmare, and no more real than that.

Then the girl sees him.

Not in a dream, but through the window of her classroom at school. She has been sitting at her desk, working through a math quiz. Multiplying fractions. At one equation more difficult than the others, she raises her head to clear her mind of the numbers atop numbers collapsing into a confused pile. She sees him right away. Standing in the shade of the schoolyard’s solitary elm. As tall as the lowest limb that, the girl knows from trying, is too high to reach, even when one of the boys offered her a boost. The Sandman’s face is obscured by the leaves’ latticework of shadow, though the girl has the impression he is staring directly at her. And that he’s smiling.

She bends over her quiz again. The fractions have doubled in the time she’d taken her eyes from the page, so that the numbers are now a mocking jumble.