The Killing Circle

After a couple hours punching keys on my laptop, keeping focused with the help of the Library Bar’s Manhattans, I hit Send and start the long stagger home. It’s not easy. My legs, lazy rascals, won’t do what I tell them. Pretzelling around each other, taking sudden turns toward walls or parking meters. It takes me a half-hour to get two blocks behind me. At least my arms seem to be working. One hugging a lamp-post and the other hailing a cab.

Despite the cold, I roll the window down as the driver rockets us past the Richmond Street nightclubs that, at this late hour, are only now disgorging the sweaty telemarketers, admin assistants and retail slaves who’ve come downtown to blow half their week’s pay on cover, parking and a half-dozen vodka coolers. I hang my elbow out and let the air numb my face. Sleep coils up from the bottoms of my feet.

But it’s interrupted by a news reader’s voice coming from the speaker behind my head. I roll up the window to hear him tell of a third victim in a murder spree police continue to publicly deny believing is the work of a single killer. Like Carol Ulrich and Ronald Pevencey, the body was found dismembered. A woman again, her name not yet released by investigators. The additionally puzzling twist is that she had only arrived in Toronto the day before from Vancouver. No known relation to the first two victims. Indeed, police have yet to determine if she knew anyone in town at all.

And then, right at the end of the report, come the details that chill me more than if I was being driven home tied to the roof rack.

The victim’s body was found in the playground around the corner from us. The one where I take Sam.

And not just anywhere in the playground. The sand box.

“Eight fiddy,” the driver says.

“Home. Right. I need to pay you now.”

“That’s how it works.”

I’m stretching out over the back bench, grunting to pull out my wallet when the driver informs me the whole city’s gone crazy.

“Kids got guns in the schools. Cops takin’ money on the side. And the drugs? They sellin’ shit that turn people into robots. Robots that stick a knife in your gut for pocket change.”

“I know it.”

“And now this insane motherfucker—‘scuse me—goes round and chops up three people in three weeks. Three weeks! What, he don’t take no holidays?”

I hand the driver a piece of paper that, in the dark and with my Manhattan-blurred vision, could be either a twenty-dollar bill or a dry-cleaning receipt. It seems to satisfy him, whatever it is.

“I been out here drivin’ nights for eight years,” he says as I shoulder the door open and spill out into the street. “But I never been scared before.”

“Well, you take care then.”

The driver looks me up and down. “How ‘bout this? How ‘bout you take care.”

I watch the taxi drive up Euclid until its brake lights shrink to nothing. Snow suspended under the streetlights, neither falling nor rising.

In the next moment, there is the certainty that I must not turn around. Not if I want to preserve the illusion that I am alone. So I step off the street, lurch toward my door. Only to see that this is a journey someone has already made.

Boot prints. At least two sizes larger than mine. Leading across the postage-stamp lawn and into the narrow walkway between our house and the house next door.

At least, this is the trail I think I’m following. When I look back, the prints, both mine and the boots’, are already obscured by powdery snow.

I am the ground beneath your feet…

I could pull out my keys, unlock the front door, and put this skittishness behind me. Instead, something starts me down the unlit walk between the houses. If there is a danger here, it is my job to face it. No matter how unsteady I am. No matter how frightened.

But it’s darker than night in here. A strip of sky running twenty feet over my head and no other way for the light of the city to get in. My heart accelerated to the point it hurts. Hands running over the brick on either side, making sure the walls don’t close in on me. It’s only thirty feet away, but the space at the far end that is our back yard feels like it’s triple that. Uphill.

Along with another impression. This one telling me that someone else was here only moments ago.

The man in dark alleys you don’t want to meet.

Once out, I slide my back along the rear wall. The branches of perennials reaching up from the snow like skeletal fingers. The old garden shed I keep meaning to tear down leans against the back fence to remain standing, much as I do using the wall behind me.

I side-step up on to the deck. The sliding glass door is closed. Inside, the living room is illuminated by the TV. An infomercial demonstrating the amazing utility of a slicer-and-dicer gadget. It may be the booze, or the comforting images of advertising, but something holds me here for a moment, peering into my own darkened home. Taking in the mismatched furniture, the frayed rug, the overstuffed bookshelves, as though they are someone else’s. As they could well be.

Except the room is not empty.

Sam. Asleep with a Fantastic Four comic open on his lap, his hands still gripping the cover.

Emmie has let him stay up, having retired to the spare room awaiting my return. I look at my son and see the worry in his pose, the evidence of his struggle against sleep. Nightmares. It makes my heart hurt all over again.

I pull my hands from where they were resting against the glass. Step away and search my pockets for the keys to the house. Find them at the same instant I find something else that stops me cold.

A different pair of hand prints above mine on the sliding door. Visible only now I’ve moved away from the glass and the condensation of my breath has frozen them into silver. Ten fingertips and two smudges of palm that, when I place my own hands on top of them, extend an inch further from every edge.

He was here.

Looking into my home just as I am now, gauging the ease of entering. His eyes studying my sleeping son.

This time, when I push away from the sliding door, my hands smear the glass so that the other’s prints are wiped away. Another filled-in boot print, a misguided intuition. A dubious creation of my non-creative mind.

Yet no matter how rational they sound, none of these explanations come close to being believed.

“I’m curious,” the Managing Editor says, her face approximating an expression of real curiosity. “What were you thinking when you wrote this?”

It’s the next morning. The Managing Editor has the front page of today’s National Star laid out over her desk. My by-line under the lead story. “Prodigious Pay-Off for Pedantic Prizewinner.”

“You mean the headline?” I say. “I’ve always been a sucker for alliteration.”

“I’m speaking of the piece itself.”

“I thought it needed some colour, I suppose.”

The Managing Editor looks down at the paper. Reads aloud some of the lines she has highlighted.

“‘Proceedings interrupted by coughing fits from an audience choking on air thick with hypocrisy.’ ‘The real prize should have gone to the jury for managing to read the shortlist.’ ‘There was more irony in listening to the host of an execrable TV show preach the virtues of reading than in the past dozen Dickie winners.’ And so on.”

The Managing Editor lifts her eyes from the page.

“Colour, Patrick?”