The Killing Circle

was childishly low: just two. Tamara, of course. And my grandmother, discovered on the floor of her retirement home kitchenette, looking up at me with the same expression of annoyance she’d worn in life.

But I’ve made up for that now. I peer over the platform’s edge and that’s it. I’m all caught up on the death front.

What’s unforgettable about seeing Ivan’s body on the tracks isn’t that it’s someone I know, nor that parts of him are still webbed over the front of the train, nor that his face, despite the rest of him, is remarkably untouched. It’s that he’s not dead yet. His jaw’s hinging open and half-shut.

Ivan is saying something I can understand. Not that I can hear him. I can tell because he knows it is me standing above him. And that his gulping mouth wants me to know he was pushed.

He stops moving before a uniformed police officer pulls me away from the edge. At first I think I’m being arrested. An exchange takes place in my head so clearly I wait for it to begin with the officer’s first words:

—Do you know this man?

—Yes.

—What is your relationship to him?

—We both wanted to be writers. And we were both being hunted.

—Hunted? Steve! Get over here! Hunted by who?

—He has a few names, actually. My personal favourite is The Terrible Man Who Does Terrible Things.

But the policeman says nothing but Please step away, sir. So I do. Make a tiptoed dash for the stairs.

Joining the other passengers on the ascending escalator, the only ones coming down are more police and a pair of paramedics whose relaxed chatter suggests they’ve already been told this call is a done deal.

At the exit turnstiles, a pair of plainclothes detectives are asking if anyone saw what happened, and one or two from the shaken crowd stop to give a statement. I keep walking. Up the last staircase to the street, where the blazing heat is almost welcome, an awakening discomfort.

I cut on to the university campus, into the shade of the trees along Philosopher’s Walk. Consciously refusing to think of anything but getting home. But before I get there, it will require all I have to simply keep moving.

And I do keep moving: from the bourbon to the vodka tonics to the red wine that’s meant to rouse an appetite for dinner, but in the end turns out to be dinner itself. A full afternoon of channel surfing and heavy drinking that only partly succeeds in holding the flashes of Ivan’s final seconds at bay.

Despite my best efforts, some stark implications of the day’s horrors batter through: if Ivan was pushed, and it was William who’d passed me going up the subway escalator, who else could have done the pushing other than him? Even if I’m wrong, and Ivan had jumped, it seems beyond coincidence that William had appeared at the scene at the same time. Then again, I had been there. Had Ivan called William to the same meeting he’d called me to? It’s possible. Yet the surest bet remains that Ivan had been followed to the Museum station by whoever he wanted to tell me about, but my lateness had allowed his stalker to reach him first. If it was the Sandman, he’d likely noticed me on the escalator. Which means he knows I’m getting closer to him. To who he is.

The evening takes its first truly unfortunate turn, however, when I embark on a tasting tour of the single malts saved for a special occasion. Well, today has been special, hasn’t it? Seeing Ivan’s body on the rails every time I close my eyes, every time I blink. Imagining how it will feel when it’s my turn.

What I need is some company. Which leads to my second poor decision: calling Angela. When I get her machine, I call again. A couple hours with the unpronounceable bottles of Scotch laid out over my desk, my free hand speed-dialling Angela and, each time she fails to pick up, me offering new apologies for whatever I’d done, for whatever I am.

After the rain starts to fingertap the basement window, I decide to walk over to her place. Along Front Street and past the convention centre where a twisting line of several hundred kids sit huddled on the sidewalk, camping out overnight in order to be first in line for the morning’s Canadian MegaStar! auditions. The rain has left them shivering and hairless as chihuahua pups. I shout encouragements as I pass (“Return to your homes! Abandon hope all ye who enter here!”) and they moan back at me like injured soldiers, casualties left on the fame battlefield.

Down past Union station, I’m sheltered from the rain as I stumble through the tunnel that runs under the tracks. By the time I make it to the far end, however, the precipitation has turned into something stronger, as though Lake Ontario had been tipped up at the opposite end to drop its contents over the city. It leaves me blind, but I keep going, possibly on the sidewalk, possibly down the middle of the street. All I know is when the downpour finally pauses long enough for me to open my eyes, the first thing I see is the shadow of the Gardiner Expressway overpass ahead. And beneath it, the figure of a man taking shelter from the rain. Staring at me.

At first, when I start my run toward him, he doesn’t move. Just watches me come as though curious to see what I have in mind. Or perhaps he wants me to come. There is something in his posture—slouching, arms crossed—I hadn’t noticed in his previous appearances. His presence, conveying only black threat before, has softened.

At the same time I come into shouting distance, he starts running south toward the lake. His strides longer and surer than mine, but showing a sluggish fatigue that keeps him within view.

“It was you!”

This is me. Screaming. A drunken madman among the other drunken madmen who live under the expressway and watch me pass.

“It was you!”

The figure slows. A wheeling of arms that might turn him around to attack, to speak. But he decides against it. Starts away again with fresh speed, his boots smacking against the slick pavement at a pace I couldn’t dream of matching.

As I bring myself to a stop, coughing the evidence of a sedentary life on to my shoes, I watch him slip around the corner of a condo tower across from the harbour. Or behind a row of parked cars in the lot across from it. Or perhaps into the churning water itself.

In any case, there’s only me here now. Me and the rain.

Once I’m able to breathe and stand up straight at the same time, I carry on to Angela’s building only a couple blocks away. I keep my thumb on her condo number until the super comes out and asks me to leave. When I refuse, he executes a nifty bouncer move. The classic, in my experience: grabs the back of my shirt with one fist and the belt of my pants with the other and, kicking the door open, chucks me out on to the patch of manicured lawn like an overstuffed bag of garbage.

It’s still raining. I can tell from the way it washes the blood off my hands when I check to see if I’ve split my lip.

There is no more doing tonight. Now is the time to think. To determine the underlying meaning of things.

The trouble is, for the second time today, the implications of what I’ve witnessed seem to slip away, leaving me to walk home teasing out the possibilities aloud. Even the first question gives me problems: was it William who’d run from me? Did I attribute the odour of the man on the subway escalator and posture of the figure under the expressway to him because I actually recalled these aspects, or have I been thinking it’s been William all along, and thus any presence I encountered would be seen as him?

Next, an even more dizzying consideration: if it was William I saw tonight, was he the same person standing in my living-room window, the murderer of unknown writers, the ghost villain from Angela’s journal? Perhaps there is a different monster attached to each of these crimes. Maybe the Sandman is merely one of the names shared by all the agents of the uncanny. The Sandman, the bogeyman, the succubus, the devil.

I tell myself to limit my thoughts to what is known. But what is known? Ivan is dead. Petra is missing. Conrad White—and Evelyn, if Angela is to be believed—dead too.

And what connects us is the circle. Or perhaps something more fundamental than that. A shared playing field