The Killing Circle

23

As I walk home through the city, I take out my cell and pretend to speak to someone at the other end. It’s not the first time I’ve done this. You can be the only pedestrian not on the phone for so long before you start to feel yourself disappear. You need to text, to touch base, to screen incoming. We speed-dial, therefore we are.

This time, when I check my messages at home, I’m surprised to hear a voice I recognize. Ivan.

“I’ve had an…encounter.”

A pause so long it’s like he’s forgotten to hang up. Then he remembers.

Click.

An encounter.

I call the number he gave me as I pass a group of gigglers standing outside the sex-shop window, tapping at the glass (“What is that, Brenda?” “I dunno. Must be something you put where the sun don’t shine.”).

Ivan picks up on the first ring.

“Patrick?”

“You left a message—”

“Museum station. Tomorrow. Southbound platform. Ten a.m.”

Click.

Without looking for it, I’m now like everyone else, the millions streaming past on sidewalk and street. I’ve got plans for the weekend.

Moments after arriving home there’s a knock at the door.

“Finished your book. Very interesting,” Detective Ramsay says, once again walking past me into the living room as though the place is only nominally mine. Then, even more falsely: “Can’t wait to read whatever you’re doing next.”

“I’m retired.”

“Really?”

“Are you actually here to discuss my book?”

“It’s an investigation. We have to have something to put in the files.”

There’s a point in every conversation structured around the exchange of accusation and rebuttal—meetings with tax auditors, neighbours disgruntled over the leaves your tree sheds in their yard—where the nasty turn can be either taken or avoided. This is the point Ramsay and I have reached. And I have decided I don’t like the man.

“You know something?” I say. “I may have another book in me yet. In fact, you’re inspiring a character for me right now.”

“Oh? What’s this character like?”

“Flawed, naturally. An intrusive investigator who’s smart but not as smart as he thinks. The secret about him is that he wants to be a writer. Detective stories—the only thing he reads. He likes to think if he wasn’t so busy solving real crimes, he’d be making them up.”

To say Ramsay darkens at this would be understatement. His limbs stiffening into the vocabulary of the thug, the backstreet pub brawler. Now I can see the clear answer to my earlier question about him. Definitely more Glasgow than Edinburgh.

“A comic figure,” he says.

“I think he is.”

“You’d be wrong then.”

“You mean he’s not funny?”

“I mean you’d be wrong to laugh at him.”

He gives me a look that’s rather hard to describe. One better grasped in its effects, chief of which is to make me want to make a run for the door.

“What do you say to wish a writer luck?” he says, moving past me. “Break a leg?”

“Usually it’s just ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down.’”

“That applies to my line of work too.”

There’s the clunk of the door pulled shut. The house waits a full minute before resuming its sighs and ticks.

Later, when I ask myself why I didn’t tell Ramsay what I learned about the Sandman’s first round of victims all being circle members—not to mention William’s appearance at some of the very same meetings—I decide that it wasn’t because I don’t like the guy, or even that it might put me at greater risk. I didn’t tell him because a thought occurred to me at the same moment Ramsay offered a glimpse of his darker self.

It might be him.

This suspicion was born out of nothing more than a flare of intuition, but now that he’s gone I’m able to back it up with a reasonable tallying of bits and pieces. The first of these is that he was the lead investigator on the previous Sandman killings. This would have allowed him access not only to the crime scenes and the potential manipulation of evidence, but to his fellow officers, the media. A nice way to clean up any mistakes he may have made (though these would undoubtedly have been few). Then there’s his physical aspect: as tall as the Sandman, give or take. And no doubt strong enough to carry out the business of human butchering.

Then again, this may only be my own continued inching toward madness. Suspecting the detective?

You don’t need to be hunted by a Sandman to see nothing but crime and criminals. All the things you’ve done, the decisions you made, the possibilities laid out before you—it used to be your story. Then the thieves show up to take it. And you’re left asking the question that is so compulsive, so bestsellingly popular because it belongs to a universal language. The first utterance of fear. Of failure.

Whodunit?

This isn’t the end of my Friday social calls. In fact, I end up going out for drinks with a friend—though this sounds a good deal more normal than it is. Because it’s drinks with Len. And because he has asked me to come out in order to share a “totally twisted idea” about Angela.

We decide on The Paddock, an ancient vault south of Queen. When the bartender comes by I order a bourbon sour, and am surprised to hear Len ask for the same.

“I didn’t know you started drinking.”

“I haven’t.”

“You could’ve ordered a juice or something.”

“I don’t want to call attention to myself,” he says, glancing over his shoulder. “And it’s important that I talk to you in the kind of place I wouldn’t normally go.”

“Why?”

“So she won’t see us.”

Once the drinks arrive, he tells me how Angela came to his apartment some days ago. She looked around his attic room, inspecting the bookshelves. The Sandman caught her attention, though she made no mention of it. Len couldn’t help noticing she was wearing a “nice—you know, sexy nice—perfume”. And a blouse he felt was missing a couple of buttons.

“When was this exactly?”

“Wednesday. Why?”

“No reason.”

Wednesday. Two days after Angela told me we shouldn’t see each other again. And then she’s calling on Len—prematurely balding, cardboardsmelling, man-boy Len. Only a moment’s pondering of this and my glass is empty. I knock back Len’s too and raise my hand to signal another round.

Len tells me that, at first, she just talked to him like she might have during the circle, if she ever had spoken to him during the circle. Writer stuff. Queries about what he’s working on, where he’d sent material out to, recent books they’d read.

“Did you ask her about being published under a false name?”

“There wasn’t time.”

“I thought you were just sitting around talking?”

“We were. But then it got weird.”

It got weird when she confessed to him, leaning forward to put her hand on his knee, that if she were ever to write a story about him, she knew what title she’d use.

“’The Virgin’,” Len says. “So I say ‘Why would you call it that?’ And she says ‘Because you’ve never been with a girl, have you, Len?’ Then she kissed me.”

“Kissed you? Where?”

“On the lips.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. I resisted, I guess. Kind of pushed her away.”

“Why?”

“Because she wasn’t really kissing me. It was more like she was making fun of me.”

“How did you know?”

“That’s how it felt.”

I press Len’s glass into his hand, urge him to take a sip. And he does. A big one. Followed by a bigger one.

“Welcome to the wonderful world of alcohol therapy,” I say.

“It’s warm.”

“It only gets warmer.”

He wipes his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt. I would put a hand on his shoulder to steady him, but the truth is, even now, I don’t want to touch him. I offer him time instead. And when he’s ready, he says that once Angela was done laughing at him, she said he didn’t have to kiss her back. He didn’t have to do anything because it was too late. She already knew everything she needed to know.

“About what?”

“About me.”

“What did she want to know about you?”

“Everything she needed to write her version of me.”

“She was writing a story based on you? ‘The Virgin’?”

“I think she’s writing stories on all of us,” Len says, then drifts his face closer. “But I’m next.”

“Her subject.”

“No. The next to die.”

Len is not well. This fact is coming into sharp focus now. He’s not just another comic-bookcollecting oddball, not one of the half-invisibles, the sort of mouth breather you try to ignore peering over your shoulder at a bank machine. He’s ill. Yet, now that we’re here, in a place where more cocktails are available if things get hairy, I figure there’s little harm in nudging him further.

“Then why not me? Why am I not next?”

“You were the only one without a story,” Len answers, finishing his drink and unintentionally slamming the glass down on the bar.

“She said that to you?”

“It was kind of obvious.”

Len puts his hand on my wrist, pressing it against the bar’s varnished surface, and I let him. I also let him come in close once more to whisper into my cheek.

“She isn’t what she appears to be,” he says.

I try to pull my arm away, but he’s got a stronger hold than I thought he was capable of.

“I’m not just saying she’s psychotic,” Len goes on, suddenly louder. Behind me, there’s the chair squeaks and interrupted conversations of other drinkers stopping to hear the agitated guy in the corner. “I’m saying she’s not human.”

“For God’s sake, Len.”

“In medieval legend, there is a name for a female being that incrementally consumes other beings until their eventual exhaustion or death.”

“A succubus.”

“Exactly.”

“Oh Christ.”

“A witch who appears in the form of a temptress.”

“Calm down. Here. Take another sip—”

“Usually the succubus’ purpose is to steal the semen of sleeping men—their life force. But in this case, it’s different. She steals stories.”

“Are you saying we need to put a stake through her heart? Shoot her with a silver bullet?”

“I’m serious. And the sooner you get serious about it too, the longer you might live.”

Len is serious. The whole bar can see it. And it watches him stand, the boldness that had possessed him for these past moments instantly slipping away.

“There are some desires so foul they are never satisfied,” he says, and appears to search his mind for something more. But if there was something, it’s gone now. I’m done, his drooped shoulders and hanging head say as he walks away. That’s all I can manage.

My Friday winding down to its bourbonsoftened end. But even with the assurance that Len’s theories are as twisted as initially advertised, the day closes with an unsettling idea. For as the door closes behind him, I can’t help thinking I will never see Len again.