The Killing Circle

I search for a way to apologize. Because I am sorry. And I have a handful of excuses to back up my regret. The grief that seems to be turning into something else, something worse. Inoperable writer’s block. A ghoul circling my house.

“I haven’t been myself lately,” I say.

“Oh?”

“It feels like I’m losing hold of things. But I can’t let myself. I have a son, he’s still little, and I’m the only one who—”

“So this,” the Managing Editor interrupts, touching a finger to my article, “could be interpreted as a cry for help?”

“Yes. In a way, I think it could.”

The Managing Editor reaches for the phone.

“Who are you calling?”

“Security.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

“I know. I just rather like the idea of having you escorted out.”

“This is it, then?”

“Very much so.”

“Would it make any difference if I said I was sorry?”

“None whatsoever.” She raises a finger to silence me. “Could you please have Patrick Rush removed from the building? That’s right, this is a permanent access denial situation. Thank you.”

The Managing Editor hangs up. Gives me a smile that’s actually something else. The bared teeth dogs use to show their willingness to rip another’s lungs out.

“So, Patrick. How’s the family?”

12

Even with all my new free time, my final offering to the circle is no better than my previous scraps. Four whole days of wide-open unemployment and I’ve managed to produce little more than a To Do list stretched into full sentences. Patrick takes a nap. Patrick picks up long-forgotten dry cleaning. Patrick heats a can of soup for his lunch. If I’d set it during a war or the Depression and kept it up for a hundred thousand words, I’d have a shot at the Dickie.

Still, I make my way into Kensington with a fluttery anticipation, the winter showing signs of retreat, an almost clear March afternoon doing its best to lift the temperature past zero. A double espresso along the way has offered a jolt of hope. A caffeinated reminder there are blessings to be counted.

For one, Sam took my dismissal as well as could be expected for a four-year-old. He doesn’t understand money. Or mortgages. Or the prospects for unemployed writers. But he seems to think old Dad can pull a few rabbits out of his hat if he puts his mind to it.

The other good news is that I’ve been doing a half decent job of talking myself out of my Sandman theories. Getting away from the newsroom and Tim Earheart’s grisly scoops has downgraded my paranoia to milder levels. My evidence of a connection between Angela’s story and the killings of Carol Ulrich, Ronald Pevencey and the unnamed woman from Vancouver amounts to little when considered in the light of day. An over-interpreted four-line poem. Bodies found on a beach and a sand box. Hand prints on glass. That’s it. Curious bits and pieces that can be strung together only through the most elastic logic, and even then, outstanding questions remain. Why would someone in the Kensington Circle be inspired to brutally murder complete strangers? Even if there is a Sandman that has walked out of the pages of Angela’s journal, what would it want from me?

Tonight is our last meeting. Once we leave Conrad White’s drafty apartment we will go our separate ways, to dissolve back into the city and take our places among the other undeclared novelists, secret poets, closeted chroniclers. Whatever peculiarities have animated my dreams since I first heard Angela tell her tale of a haunted little girl will come to an end. And I will be glad when it does. I like a good ghost story as much as anyone. But there comes a time when one must wake up and return to the everyday, to the world in which shadows are only shadows, and dark is nothing more than the absence of light.

We go around the circle one last time, and to my surprise, there has been some improvement from where we started. Ivan’s rat, for instance, has become a fully developed character. There’s a melancholy that comes out of the writing that I don’t remember the first go round. Even Len’s horror tales have been revised to be a little less repetitive, their author having learned that not every victim of a zombie attack need have their brains scooped out of their skulls for us to understand the undead’s motivations.

As we proceed, I pay extra attention to Conrad White, looking for any sign that might confirm his relationship with Evelyn. Yet the old man maintains the same benign gaze on her while she reads as he does for everyone else. Perhaps the attraction only runs the other way. Evelyn doesn’t strike me as the sort for him anyway. I’d imagined the “perfect girl” in Jarvis and Wellesley as softer, waifish, an innocent (even if this innocence was feigned). Someone who thought less and felt more. Someone like Angela.

If Conrad White shows any special attention to a circle member over the course of the meeting, it’s her. I even think I catch him at it at one point, his eyes resting on her in the middle of Len’s reading, when her head is turned in profile and she can be observed without detection. His expression isn’t lustful. There is something in Angela he has seen before, or at least imagined. It’s surprised him. And perhaps it has even frightened him a little too.

In the next second he catches me watching him.

That’s when I think I see it. Something I can’t be sure of, not in this light. But as his eyes pass over me, I have the idea that his world has been visited by the Sandman as well as mine.

Angela’s turn. She apologizes that she brought nothing new with her this week. There is a moan of disappointment from the rest of us, followed by jokey complaints of how now we’ll never know how Jacob died, what really happened over the time Edra was in the hospital, who the Sandman was. Conrad White asks if she’d made any changes to her previous draft, and she admits she hadn’t found the time. Or this is what she tells us. If I were to guess, I’d say she’d never intended to make any revisions. She hasn’t come here for editorial guidance, but to share her story with others. Without an audience, the little girl, Edra and Jacob, and the terrible man who does terrible things are only dead words on the page. Now they live in us.

Following this, we do everything we can—repeat comments we’ve already made, request a second smoke break—but there is still enough time for William to read. He has been sitting in the chair closest to the door, a few feet back from the others. It has made it almost possible to forget he is here. But now that Conrad White has called on him, he leans forward so that his eyes catch the candlelight, as though emerging from behind a velvet curtain.

His reading is once again brutal, but mercifully short. Another page in the lost summer of a catskinning boy. This time, the boy has taken to watching his mother at her “day job” through her bedroom window. He observes “what the men do to her, lying on top with their pants around their ankles, and he sees how they are only animals”. The boy doesn’t feel shame or disgust, only a clarity, “the discovery of a truth. One that has been hidden by a lie told over and over.” If we are all of us animals, the boy concludes, then what difference is there between slicing the throat of a dog and doing the same to one of the men who visit his mother’s bedroom? For that matter, what difference would there be in doing such a thing to his mother?

Soon, however, this idle contemplation demands to be tested. The boy feels like “a scientist, an astronaut, a discoverer of something no one had ever seen or thought of before”. Proceeding from the assumption that we are all creatures of equal inclinations, it would follow that this makes us worth nothing more than the ants “we step out of our way just to crunch under our shoe”. He could prove it. All he had to do was “something he had been taught