The Killing Circle

She tells him almost everything. That there’s a terrible man who does terrible things who used to live only in her dreams, but has now taken form in the real world. That she believes this man took the two girls from town because they were the same age and general appearance as she.

What she doesn’t tell him is what she found in the barn, and what she did with it.

Jacob doesn’t speak for a long time after the girl is finished. When he finally finds the words he’s looking for, the girl expects him to explain how what she’s said could not be possible. But instead he surprises her.

“I have seen him too,” the old man says.

The girl can hardly believe it. What was he like? Where did Jacob see him?

“I could not describe him to you any more than I could say what shape the wind takes,” the old man answers. “It is something I have felt. Moving around the house as though what he seeks is within, but he cannot enter. Not yet.”

Perhaps the girl should go to him. If it’s only her that the Sandman wants, why risk him doing harm to another girl? Or worse, to Jacob or Edra.

“You mustn’t speak like that,” Jacob implores her. “Never ever. Understand? He will not have you so long as I live. And after I’m gone, you must still resist him. Promise me this.”

The girl promises. But what is left for them to do? The girl can’t imagine how they might attempt to fight him. How can you kill what may already be dead?

“I cannot say if he is alive or dead. But I believe I can say who he is.”

Jacob holds the girl firm by the shoulders as though to prevent her from falling.

“It’s your father,” he says.

After Jacob failed to pick her up, Edra returned from the hospital in a taxi on Sunday to find the farmhouse empty. The back door left wide open. If someone had come in or gone out by this point of entry there was no way of knowing. Over the last twenty-four hours, the whole county had been buried under three feet of snow. The arrival of winter announced in a November blizzard. Any tracks that might have been left now filled in and sculpted into fin-tailed drifts.

When the police arrive Edra is frantic for them to find the girl. They don’t have far to look. Huddled in the corner of the last stall in the barn. Glass-eyed, blue-skinned. Shaking from the hypothermia caused by staying outside all night when the temperature dipped as low as ten below.

They ask her where Jacob is. The girl’s only answer is to slip into unconsciousness. For a time, it’s judged to be even odds if she will survive or not. Three of her toes are removed, turned black from frostbite. Her brain monitored to determine what parts have died from lack of oxygen while she sleeps.

But the girl doesn’t die.

When she comes to the next day, she will not speak to anyone but Edra, and even then, it’s not about what happened over the preceding days. Edra buffers the girl from their queries, putting her anxieties regarding her husband second to the girl’s need for protection. The police are left to look for Jacob on their own.

After it is determined that Jacob’s truck was parked in the farmyard the entire weekend, and there is no sign of a struggle or suicide note inside the house, the forest that borders the end of his fields and carries on for five hundred miles north into the Canadian Shield becomes the prime area of concentration for the police search.

The snowfall from the blizzard, however, makes it difficult. Helicopter fly-overs can spot little more than trees sprouting up from a blanket of white. The dogs they use to track Jacob’s scent run a hundred yards into the woods only to sink up to their muzzles, and then must be carried out, whimpering, by their trainers. By the fourth day, the search’s urgency is downgraded from a rescue operation to evidence collection. If Jacob is to be found somewhere out in the endless woods, there is no expectation that he will be alive.

It takes another two weeks of mild weather for the snow to melt enough to expose Jacob’s body. Four miles from the farm. Lying face down, arms sprawled out at his sides. No injuries aside from cuts to his face and arms that came from branches slashing his skin as he ran. Just socks on his feet, and not wearing any outerwear (his boots and coat were in their usual places in the house). The cause of death determined to be exposure following a collapse from exhaustion. The coroner is amazed that a man of Jacob’s age was capable of getting as far as he did. A four-mile run through a blizzard in the night woods. Only someone in a state of mortal panic would be capable of it.

But the questions that followed from this were beyond both the coroner’s and forensic investigators’ capacity to answer. Was Jacob running from or toward something? If he had been the one in pursuit, what quarry would have driven him into the forest dressed as he was during the first big snowfall of the year? And if he was the pursued, what would have terrified him enough to run so far he let himself fall and die without anything laying a hand on him?

The police all agreed that if Jacob had been murdered, it was a perfect crime. No suspect. No witness. No tracks left after the snow had filled them in. No weapon to be found aside from the cold.

Only the girl knew—or might know—what happened over the time she and Jacob were alone in the farmhouse. But no matter how many times she was asked, she would not speak of it.

Shock, the doctors said. Extreme emotional trauma. It can cut the tongue out of a child as sure as any blade. She’s of no use now, they concluded. You’d have as good a chance asking the trees in Jacob’s forest what they saw as this poor girl.

The girl heard everything they said about her, though she acted as though she was deaf. She resolved that there are some things you cannot speak of. But she would record what she knew in a different way from speech. She would write it down. Later, when she was older and on her own, she would tell the truth, if only to herself.

Here, in the pages of this very book.

She even knows how it will begin.

There once was a girl who was haunted by a ghost…

11

“City in Fear” reads the banner headline of the next day’s National Star, and for me, at least, it’s not overstatement. The accompanying piece is one of those “man on the street”, mood-gauging surveys that only retreads what is already known of the two recent victims—unrelated, no known involvements in crime, no indication of sexual assault, nothing of value taken from their persons. Indeed, there is no reason to believe their killer to be the same person. This report is followed by interviews with people in the neighbourhood who admit they’re not planning to go out at night until “they catch whatever sick bastard that would do this”. I read the article to the end to see if there’s any mention of the poem found next to Carol Ulrich’s body, but it looks like Tim was right. The editors killed it.

And then, perhaps most troubling of all, there is an account of the various eyewitness statements and anonymous call-in tips received by police. A well-dressed, bald white man says one. Two black men are cited—one with gold teeth and a Raiders toque, the other grey-haired, nice-looking, a “Denzel Washington look-alike”. A pair of curlyhaired men who “may be twins”. An elderly Portuguese lady in mourning black.

“People are seeing killers in whoever sits next to them on the subway,” one policeman points out.

And why not? It could be them.

The morning’s walk through the City of Fear confirms that the three million hearts pounding their way to work all around me have turned a darker shade of worry. Each cluster of newspaper boxes shows that the National Star’s competition have run similarly alarmist pieces, the always hysterical tabloid putting smiling photos of Carol Ulrich and Ronald Pevencey side by side under the headline “Are You Next?” A question that’s impossible not to give some thought to. Everyone getting off the streetcars or emerging from the