The Killing Circle

shouldering it wide enough for me to slip through. The new air rolls dead leaves and vermin droppings over the floor. It’s still not enough to hold back the rank odour of the place. Backed-up plumbing. Along with something sweeter, animal.

A smell that soldiers and surgeons would recognize.

“Sam?”

My voice silences the house. It was quiet as I came in, but now some previously unnoticed activity has been stopped. The plaster and floorboards held in the tension of a held breath.

I try to leave the front door open but the angle of the frame eases it almost shut each time. Although it is not yet dark outside and the curtains that remain are limp ribbons over the glass, the interior holds pockets of shadow in the corners, around every door and down the length of its hall. It is hard to imagine as a building that sunlight ever freely passed through. Bad things happened here because they were always meant to.

The main floor is arranged as rooms that open off a narrow central hallway that leads straight into the kitchen at the rear. A few feet in, the living room opens on the left, the dining room on the right. Both slightly too small for their functions, even now, unpeopled and with most of the furniture missing. In the living room, signs of a stayover: a trio of wooden chairs, a broken whisky bottle on the floor between them. The fireplace and the brick around it black with soot, charred logs too big for its hearth still teepeed on the grate. I bend to touch them. Cold as the snow collecting on the sill.

The house has darkened further still when I return to the hallway, so that I proceed half-blind down its length, hands sliding over the walls. David Percy must have negotiated this route in much the same way on the last night of his life. Old, his sight gone. Tormented by what he believed to be some demonic intruder.

I turn to see the front door standing open. As the gust from outside loses its force, the door retracts once more. Only the wind. But David Percy would have had such thoughts too. Explanations that didn’t quite hold all of his mind together.

The smell is stronger on the way upstairs. Warmer, humid. It makes each step a fight against being sick.

Something happened here.

And not just eighteen years ago.

Something happened here today.

At the landing I see that I’m right.

Blood. A line of dime-sized circles leading to the room at the front of the house. Angela’s room.

And a book.

Lying face down on the landing, its spine broken as though to bookmark the page. I know the title before I’m close enough to read the text on the cover. I know what it means before I lift the brittle paper to my eyes and see that it is a paperback from my own bookshelf, a hand-me-down that Sam had chosen for his nightstand pile. Robinson Crusoe. The book he brought with him to the Mustang Drive-in the night he disappeared.

“Sam?” I try again, and will his voice to answer. But there’s only the squeak of the floor as it makes note of the book dropped from my hands, my shuffled steps toward the front room’s partly open door.

My boot kicks the door open wide. It lets the smell out.

A single bed with Beatrix Potter rabbits painted on the headboard. A wooden school desk. Animal stickers—a smirking skunk, a giggling giraffe—on the cracked dresser mirror. And blood on all of it. Thin lines crosshatched over the room, as though squeezed from a condiment bottle. Not so much that it is evidence of a butchering, but of a struggle. Something half-done and then interrupted. Or halfdone to be finished elsewhere.

And then I notice the chains laid out on the mattress. Four links attached to each of the bedposts with metal loops at the end. Shackles.

I’m not sure what I do in these next moments. They may not be moments at all. All I know is that I’m tracing the lines of blood and looping a finger through a rusted link of chain. Everything still. Everything falling away.

That’s when I hear it.

Faint but unmistakable in the distance. From somewhere within the woods beyond the fields.

A voice calling for me.

The snow has gained weight over the last hour. The wind throwing it into my eyes. Dusk a black umbrella opened against the sky. My legs seem to know where to go. Out of the farmhouse yard and into the frozen ruts of the abandoned field.

Sam doesn’t call out for me again as I make my way toward the woods. It doesn’t stop me from hearing him.

Daddy!

Daddy, not Dad. His name for me when he was little, the second syllable dropped a couple years ago in favour of the more grown-up short form. The reversion only happens now when he’s been hurt. Or when he’s scared.

The trees close in. Nightfall arrives at the same time as the bare limbs overhead deny what little moonlight there might be. The relatively even earth allows me greater speed here than over the furrows, but there is also more to hold me back. Interlocked branches. Stumps rising out of the gathering snow to crack my shins. Buried stones.

A hand swiped across my eyes comes away wet. Cut.

The weather forecast was right. Not just about the squall, but the cold. The temperature has dropped to whatever level it is that freezes your nostrils closed. Tightens the skin over your cheeks until it feels like the bone could rip through.

I stop and try to tell myself I’m determining which course to take, that it’s not the cold and the panic that has freeze-dried all oxygen out of the air. Which way is north? If Sam is out here, this is where he’d be. And only Sam would know how to get out again. He could read the stars. Through momentary pauses of the snowfall I can make out some of the brightest constellations, but I didn’t listen when Sam tried to explain how they could show you the way. The thought that I may never have the chance to let my son teach me this doubles me over. Puking a stain into a creamy drift.

Sam’s shouted name is lost in the blizzard. A new inch of snow on the ground with every count to twenty in my head. In the creek beds it’s already up past my knees.

The struggle now isn’t against the cold but my desire to lean against the nearest pine and go to sleep. Forty winks. It would be a nap of the forever kind, I know. But it’s how David Percy exited the world. Who’s to say I have any greater reason to live than he had? A pair of fools who thought good intentions alone might find them a way through.

I’m bending down to curl into a nice spot when I see him. A human form against a tree in a clearing ahead.

“Sam.”

A whisper this time. Louder than any of my shouts.

But as I get closer I see that the figure is too large to be Sam. And that whoever it is, he has long since frozen. Not that freezing was how he died. Iced blood pooled in his lap. Stiff hands plugging the wounds. Lashed to the trunk with wire that has sliced deep through his last struggles to free himself.

The man’s chin slumped against his chest. I lift his head so that his lifeless eyes, still open, look up.

It’s strange to see Ramsay’s face showing anything but his wry cockiness. There is nothing of the kind about it now. A mask of terror waxed over the self-certainty he maintained over all the preceding years of his life.

Whatever was done to him in Angela’s room took some time. And then he was brought out here. Aware of what was coming, but clinging to the possibility of escape nevertheless. Isn’t that what the detectives in his detective novels did? Wait for a lastminute opportunity just when things looked their worst?

I regain my feet. Ramsay already halfway to buried. In half an hour, you would never know he’s here.

There isn’t a reason I keep walking but I do. Sam isn’t out here, if he ever was. It’s more probable that what I heard came from within my own head, or was Ramsay himself, instructed to find the right pitch with the assistance of the wire around his throat. It doesn’t matter. The point is what it’s always been: the determination of beginnings, middles and ends. Stories like symmetry, and my fate is to act out David Percy’s concluding moments. I