Except the room is not empty.
Sam. Asleep with a
Fantastic Four
comic open on his lap, his hands still gripping the cover.
Emmie has let him stay up, having retired to the spare room awaiting my return. I look at my son and see the worry in his pose, the evidence of his struggle against sleep. Nightmares. It makes my heart hurt all over again.
I pull my hands from where they were resting against the glass. Step away and search my pockets for the keys to the house. Find them at the same instant I find something else that stops me cold.
A different pair of hand prints above mine on the sliding door. Visible only now I’ve moved away from the glass and the condensation of my breath has frozen them into silver. Ten fingertips and two smudges of palm that, when I place my own hands on top of them, extend an inch further from every edge.
He was here.
Looking into my home just as I am now, gauging the ease of entering. His eyes studying my sleeping son.
This time, when I push away from the sliding door, my hands smear the glass so that the other’s prints are wiped away. Another filled-in boot print, a misguided intuition. A dubious creation of my non-creative mind.
Yet no matter how rational they sound, none of these explanations come close to being believed.
“I’m curious,” the Managing Editor says, her face approximating an expression of real curiosity. “What were you thinking when you wrote this?”
It’s the next morning. The Managing Editor has the front page of today’s
National Star
laid out over her desk. My by-line under the lead story. “Prodigious Pay-Off for Pedantic Prizewinner.”
“You mean the headline?” I say. “I’ve always been a sucker for alliteration.”
“I’m speaking of the piece itself.”
“I thought it needed some colour, I suppose.”
The Managing Editor looks down at the paper. Reads aloud some of the lines she has highlighted.
“‘Proceedings interrupted by coughing fits from an audience choking on air thick with hypocrisy.’ ‘The real prize should have gone to the jury for managing to read the shortlist.’ ‘There was more irony in listening to the host of an execrable TV show preach the virtues of reading than in the past dozen Dickie winners.’ And so on.”
The Managing Editor lifts her eyes from the page.
“
Colour,
Patrick?”
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?”
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 was very, very wrong”. If he was still himself afterward, if nothing changed in the world,
then he would be right. The prospect “fills him with an excitement he guesses is the same as the other boys in school have felt kissing girls. But this was not what he had in mind at all.”
William leans back in his chair and the light in his eyes is extinguished again. This is as far as his story goes. It’s my turn to respond first, and though I’m usually good at coming up with empty comments, in this case I’m stumped.
“This feels very close to the surface to me,” I manage finally.
“What does that mean?”
“I suppose it means that it feels real.”
“What does real feel like?”
“Like right now.”
“What does he do?” a female voice says, and all of us turn to face Angela. She is peering into the dark where William sits. “The boy. Does he carry out his…experiment?”
That’s when William makes a sound all of us immediately regret ever hearing. He laughs.
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” he says.
After we finish up, Conrad White suggests all of us go out to “whatever ale house may be nearby” to celebrate our accomplishments. We decide on Grossman’s Tavern, a blues bar on Spadina I haven’t been to since I was an undergrad. Little has changed. The house band working away in the corner, the red streak of streetcars passing the picture window at
the front. This is where we push a couple of tables together and order pitchers, all of us a little nervous about speaking of ourselves and not our stories, which despite the similarities in most cases, is still a different matter.
The beer helps. As well as the absence of William, who walked away in the opposite direction outside Conrad White’s apartment. It’s nearly impossible to imagine how he would act in a social setting, whether he would eat the stale popcorn the waitress brings, how he would bring the little draft glasses to find his lips in his beard. Even more difficult to guess is what he might contribute to the first topic we naturally fall upon. The murders.
I’m giving this some consideration when my thoughts are interrupted by Len shouting at me over a note-for-note T-Bone Walker solo.
“Tell them your theory, Patrick.”
“Sorry?”
“The
poem
. Tell them what you told me. About the Sandman.”
The circle has turned to look at me. And there is Len, bobbing about in his chair like an ape at feeding time.
“That’s a secret, Len.”
“It
was
. Didn’t you read the paper this morning? I thought you
worked
there.”
“Not any more.”
“Oh. Wow. That’s too bad. I really liked that Couch Potato thing.”
“I’m touched.”
“That poem? The one they found by the Ulrich woman’s body? They published it today.”
I haven’t looked at the
National Star
since being given the heave-ho, so I hadn’t noticed Tim Earheart’s triumph. It means two things are quite certain. First, my friend is out there somewhere, getting drunk as a donkey in celebration of his exclusive. Second, the police are no closer to finding the killer than they were when they asked the paper to hold off on running the poem.
“So? What’s your Sandman theory?” Petra asks, looking first to me, then Angela, who has been watching me with an unsettling steadiness.
“It’s nothing.”
“C’mon! It’s
good
!” Len says.
I continue to refuse. And then Angela leans forward, places an upturned hand on the table as though inviting me to place mine in hers.
“Please, Patrick,” she says. “We’d be very interested.”
So I tell her. Tell them.
My Sandman interpretation sounds even more ridiculous when shouted aloud in a bar, the circle leaning forward to hear, an almost comically incongruous bunch who, if you were to walk in right now, you’d wonder what they could possibly have in common. The absurdity makes it easier to make my case, on account of it’s an argument that knows it has little chance of being right.
Trouble is, the others take it seriously. I can see I’m convincing them even as I try to laugh it off. What is clear in each of their faces is that they have had similar thoughts these past weeks. They came here believing in the Sandman as much as I do.
Once I’m finished, I excuse myself to call Sam and catch him as Emmie is putting him to bed. (I wish him sweet dreams, and he requests pancakes in the morning.) When I return to our table, the conversation has moved on to domestic complaint (Petra unable to believe how much she had to pay a plumber to replace the faucet on her jacuzzi) and sports (Ivan pleading the case for the Leafs to trade that big Russian kid who can’t skate). More pitchers, cigarettes on the sidewalk. Me eventually ordering a round of shots for everyone, and having to down Angela’s and Len’s when she’d pushed hers aside and he’d reminded me he doesn’t drink (I’d remembered, of course, and figured it was an easy way to double up).
Yet even through the increasingly fuzzy proceedings, there are some moments that demand mention.
At one point, there is only myself and Len at one end of the table and Conrad White and Evelyn at the other. The two of them almost cheek to cheek, whispering. Perhaps Len was right after all. Lovers would behave this way after a few drinks, wouldn’t they? And yet there is something grave in the secrets they share, a seriousness that doesn’t
match any form of flirtation I’m familiar with. Not that I’m an expert.
I’m pouring myself another, studying the two of them, when Len leans over with a secret whisper of his own.
“I was followed last night. I think it was You Know Who.”
“You
saw
him?”
“More like I felt him. His…
hunger
. You know what I mean?”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“No? Well, let me tell you what I believe. You’re taking my read on that poem too seriously. It’s bullshit. I was just kidding around.”
“No you weren’t. And I know what I felt. It was him.”
“Him?”
“The bogeyman.”
“Look at me, Len. I’m not laughing.”
“Whatever it was, it wasn’t like you or me.”
“I take it that you’re talking about William.”
“I might have
thought
it was William, but only because it can take different shapes. It’s why there haven’t been any witnesses. Think about it. Who knows what the bogeyman looks like? Nobody. Because it’s whatever scares you the most.”
I have to admit this last bit unsettles me enough that I’m not sure I manage to keep it hidden. But it’s what Len says next that makes my calm act fall away completely.
“I’m not the only one.”
“You told the others what you’re telling me?”
“They’ve told
me
.”
“And?”
“Petra saw someone out in her back yard two nights ago,” he goes on, sliding even closer, so that now Evelyn and Conrad White are watching. “And last week, Ivan was taking his subway train into the yards at the end of the night, all the stations closed. He’s just whizzing through, nobody’s supposed to be there. And at one of the stops he sees someone right at the edge of the platform, all alone, like he’s going to jump. Except he
can’t
be there, right? All the stations are locked up for the night. And this guy, he’s not security, he isn’t wearing one of those fluorescent maintenance vests. So when Ivan goes by he tries to see his face. And you know what Ivan said?
He didn’t have one
.”
“You’ve got to take a little time away from those
Tales from the Crypt
comics,” I say, forcing out a laugh as the others join us from outside. Len wants to say more, but I steal a cigarette from the pack Evelyn left on the table and head outside before he has the chance.