The Killing Circle

“It’s enough.”

“Not staying long?”

She ignores this.

“How did you do it on your own?” I try again.

“Do what?”

“What was done to some of the bodies—that’s some heavy lifting.”

“You’d know.”

I work to push aside the images of Petra in the shed as best I can. “You were watching me?”

“I was always watching. But that—that was unexpected.”

“Was it William? Did you convince him to help you?”

“I urged him to study his fellow man.”

“But he didn’t kill the people from the circle. Or Carol Ulrich, Pevencey. The earlier ones.”

“You forgot Jane Whirter.”

“Yes. Why did she come to Toronto?”

“I invited her. She had suspicions. So I told her I did as well.”

My chin falls against my chest. It awakens me with a gasp.

“You put the bloody tools in his apartment,” I say. “William’s.”

“The police needed to catch a monster. Now they have one.”

“Not the right one.”

“Do you hear him protesting his innocence?”

“Why isn’t he?”

“I convinced him otherwise.”

Angela backs away from the fire and walks to the far side of the room. Her shoulders folded in, her hair greasy from a few days without water. The girl has been busy. And she is a girl again. Through her fatigue, the years that had been added since she first opened her journal in Conrad White’s apartment have fallen away to reveal someone a little lost, uncertain of where she is and what has brought her here. It’s an illusion, of course. Another mistake that leads to more mistakes. This is what she is as much as anything else: a collection of misreadings.

“Why Ramsay?” I say, and she half turns.

“What I do—it requires improvisation.”

“They’ll come looking for him.”

“They won’t.”

“Why?”

“I spoke to him. And he—he assured me that he came here on his own time. No one knew where he was headed, because he was tracking you.”

“You don’t think he was bullshitting you?”

“He was in a position where lying would be unlikely.”

“You’re not clever, you know,” I find myself coughing as she drifts toward the hallway. “You might think you’re some kind of artist. But you’re not. You’re shit.”

Angela stops. Out of the range of firelight, so that she’s a shadow that surprises with its ability to speak.

“You’re a plagiarist, Patrick,” she says. “At least what I do is original.”

I flinch awake at what I think at first is a sound, but it isn’t. It’s light. Two white pins pushing through the darkness outside. Growing brighter, surrounded by a widening penumbra of snow.

Angela is here with me. Standing by the window, rolling back on her heels.

“Who’s that?”

“A harder question to answer than you’d guess,” she says.

“The Sandman.”

“But he could be anyone.”

“Not anyone. He killed Petra and Len. The one who drove Conrad and Evelyn off the road. The hands that pushed Ivan on to the tracks.”

“That’s not really a guess.”

She turns from the window. Outside, the headlights swing around and point away, exposing the side of the vehicle. A black van. The one I’d seen on Queen Street. The one that drove off from where I’d found Len’s body.

“I suppose I’ll be meeting him soon enough,” I say.

“You’d like to?”

“I’d enjoy nothing more than to meet the man of your dreams.”

Angela giggles in fake embarrassment. “It’s not like that.”

The child’s sound of her voice reminds me that, whatever she is now, happened when she was young. It’s why her age is so hard to guess, how even in her bed she was play-acting at being an adult. Part of her belongs to the past because part of her died there.

“Whatever your father is making you do, it’s not your fault.”

“Thank you. My burden has been lifted.”

“If you let me go, I could help you.”

“Help me?”

“Show me where Sam is, and we could all go away together. Or go our separate ways. But I’d make it so that your father couldn’t touch us ever again. We’d be safe.”

“I am safe.”

“Angela, please. You don’t have to keep doing this. Not for him.”

“I could be with you instead? Your replacement bride? Your co-author?”

The van door swings shut. A workman’s vehicle’s screech of neglect. After a moment, there’s the heavy footsteps coming up on to the porch.

I am the ground beneath your feet…

The door opens. Snow being stomped off his boots. Then the few steps along the hallway it takes to stand in the archway, looking in.

A giant’s shadow. The same one I’d seen coming for me before collapsing in the field outside. But somehow familiar now that it is indoors. The shape of a man I’ve seen before.

“I’d like you to meet my brother,” she says.

The figure steps forward to the edge of the firelight. Tentative, gloved hands crossed over his stomach. Grinning in a trembly, rubber-lipped way that suggests he’s trying not to, but can’t help himself.

“Len?”

“That’s how you knew him,” Angela says, sliding close to him but carefully. Without touching. “Virgin Len. But he, like me, has gone by a number of different names over the years. Different incarnations.”

“But I saw you. In the alley.”

“You saw what you thought you saw,” Len says, his grin widening. “We counted on that. We’ve always counted on that.”

“Oh Christ.”

“You alright?”

“Oh Christ.”

The room is swimming. No, not the room—I’m swimming. Fits of motion through the nearly solid air. A fish finning through a tank.

“I’m going to take a look around upstairs,” Angela says to him.

Len nods. When she moves past him into the hallway she brushes against his nylon jacket and the sound is like a knife rendering tin foil.

“That was you,” I say. “At Michelle Carruthers’ funeral. Mull was your father too.”