The Killing Circle

Better.

I press Send. Lean back in my chair, confident therealsandman will shrink at this direct challenge. But my reply comes within seconds.

You don’t know what afraid is yet.

Looking back on it, I wasn’t all that surprised when Angela showed up at my book signing table, even though, being deceased, her appearance was an impossibility. Maybe this came from writing about a ghost so much over the preceding years. I’ve simply gotten used to seeing the dead.

Or maybe not.

This afternoon, while Sam is at his Summer Art Camp in Trinity-Bellwoods fingerpainting or rehearsing a play or writing a poem, I walk up to Bloor Street to buy a book. I may not be able to write any more, but that shouldn’t stop me from reading. I’m thinking something non-fictional, a dinner-party talking point (in case I’m ever invited to a dinner party). The melting of the polar ice caps, say, or the emergence of nuclear rogue states. Something light.

I head into Book City with the idea that my earlier efforts at living a normal day may not have been entirely derailed by my encounter with therealsandman. The sheer hopefulness in the stacks of new releases and the customers opening the covers to taste the prose within fills me with a sense of fellowship. It is here, among the anonymous browsers, that I belong. And where I might be allowed to return, once I can slip back into being another bespectacled shuffler, instead of someone, like Angela, who believes they are being hunted.

I’m halfway to convincing myself when I see him.

I have side-stepped my way past New Fiction and headed straight for the Non-Fiction Everyone’s Talking About! table at the back. When I pick up my first selection, I hide behind the cover and allow myself a furtive scan of the shop. Right away I notice a man with my book in his hands. In profile, backlit by a sun-bleached Bloor Street through the display windows. The Sandman open a hundred pages in, the man’s face showing a grimace of disapproval. Conrad White. My writing instructor. Not at all happy with the published results of his worst student.

He turns his head.

An abrupt twist of the neck that allows his hollow eyes to find me instantly. His features shifting, forming deep creases over his ashen skin. A look of reproach so fierce it gives the impression of a snarling animal.

It takes a second to remember he’s dead.

That’s when my free hand pushes the books to the floor. A pile of travel guides tumbling over the table’s edge. A flailing collapse that leaves me sprawled out, trying to push myself up from the slippery paperbacks.

“My God, are you okay?” a clerk asks, rushing out from behind the cash register.

“I’m fine. I just…sorry about…I’ll pay if there’s any…” I stammer, looking to where Conrad White was standing.

But there’s nobody there now. The book he’d been reading left at a crooked angle atop its stack.

Once, having been recognized, I’ve declined the clerk’s invitation to read his own novel-in-progress (“What I really need are connections, y’know?”) I skulk out of the bookstore into the foul heat. The foreign students and Chardonnay hippies of the Annex pass me by as I stand there, disoriented, trying to figure my east from my west. In my hand, a bag carrying my guilt purchase: the first book I grabbed off the check-out counter, which turned out to be empty and untitled. A journal that the clerk guessed was meant to help with my next book.

“There won’t be another book,” I blurted.

Now, on the walk downtown to pick up Sam, I wonder again if my seeing ghosts is a symptom of a more serious condition. Untended sorrow allowed to turn into a full-blown psychotic break. Acute post-traumatic stress, perhaps (what is the loss of your wife, your career, and the defilement of your sole ambition, if not trauma?) Maybe I need help. Maybe it’s too late.

Yet the old man had looked so real, just fifteen feet away, with none of the foggy edges or spectral floating attributed to most apparitions. It was Conrad White, dead and looking dead. But there nevertheless.

Once I’ve entered the relative cool of the trees in Trinity-Bellwoods, I’ve decided that if my sanity has to go, it’s my job to keep its absence to myself. Sam has already lost one parent. He’s got to be better off with a mad father looking over him than none at all.

I come to stand on the other side of the temporary fence the playground has put up around the kids’ Art Camp, watching Sam read a book in the pilot’s seat of a plane made of scrap wood. He raises his eyes from the page and looks my way. I wave, but he doesn’t wave back. I’m sure he’s seen me, and for a moment I wonder if I’m confused as to whether that’s Sam in there or not. And then I remember: my son is entering the age when your parents are embarrassing. He doesn’t want the other kids to see that’s his dad over there, waving, clutching a goofy book bag.

But on the walk home he offers an alternative explanation. Sam hadn’t waved because there was a strange man staring at him from the other side of the fence.

“That was me.”

“Not you, Daddy. I saw you. The other man. Behind you.”

“There wasn’t anyone behind me.”

“Did you look?”

“What do you want for dinner?”

“Did you? Did you see—”

“We’ve got chicken, lasagne, those tacos-ina-box thingies. C’mon. Name your poison.”

“Okay. Burgers. Take-out burgers.”

“But we bought all those groceries this morning.”

“You asked.”

After dinner, I check the phone for messages. Three telemarketers, a hang-up, two complete strangers asking if I’d forward their manuscripts to my agent, and Tim Earheart wondering if the “great novelist” wanted to “come out and get shitfaced sometime”. As well as Petra Dunn, the Rosedale divorcee from the circle. Saying she’s sorry, she doesn’t want to impose, but she thinks it’s important we talk.

I take down her number but decide not to call back tonight. A retreat to bed is my best bet. Tuck Sam in, scan a few paragraphs of something and, if precedent holds, I’ll be sent off to a dreamless nothing. Trouble is, I didn’t end up buying a book to read this afternoon, but a book to write in.

This may be breaking a promise I’ve made to myself, but I figure there can’t be much harm in just making notes. I take a pen and the journal under the sheets with me and start scribbling. Jotted points covering the events since Angela showed up at my book signing, and then jumping back to the beginning of the circle, my first encounter with the Sandman’s story, and here and there over the period of time of the killings four years ago. Not really writing at all, but a compiling of facts, impressions. If I have angered the gods for being a story thief, surely there can be no offence in this, the unadorned chronicling of my own life.

Even in this I’m wrong.

A sound from downstairs.

Something that awakens me from that inbetween state of nodding off without being aware that this is what you’re doing. A bang. Followed by a millisecond of reverberation, which confirms that whatever it was, it’s of sufficient weight to rule out the usual bump-in-the-night suspects, a creak of the