The Killing Circle

34

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 the 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.”

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 the 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.