The Killing Circle

“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.