“Wait. Just
wait
a second. Who’s ’he’?”
“Do you really think you’re the only one?”
“What are you saying?”
“The Sandman,” she says, and disappears behind her sunglasses once more. “He’s come back.”
The next morning I refuse to let my thoughts return to my lunch with Angela other than to remind myself that she has no apparent plans to sue me. This is
a good thing
. As for the other stuff—I do my best not to go there.
What’s needed are rituals. New habits Sam and I can set about repeating so that they will blaze a trail to follow over the days to come. Starting with food. Instead of the improvised meals we have been surviving on—willy-nilly take-out, tins of corner-store glop, Fruit Loops—I set out with Sam to lay in proper stock.
We drive down to the supermarket by the harbour, where the warehouses and piers are being turned into nightclubs and condominiums. This is where we shop, or used to shop. It’s been a while.
Yet here it all is, the pyramids of selected produce, the microwavable entrées, the aisles of
sustenance for those who needn’t look at price tags. Sam and I drop items in our basket as they glide by. The outrageous bounty of North American choice.
“This is why the rest of the world hates us,” I tell Sam. He looks up at me and nods, as though he were having precisely the same thought.
Later, down in the Crypt, our purchases stocked away, I sit at my desk and realize that I have no work to do. No freelance assignment, no novel-inprogress, no review deadline. There’s still an hour to kill before lunch, and I click on the computer to indulge in a moment of virtual masturbation: I Google myself.
As always, the entry at the top of the list is my official website. The creation of my publisher’s marketing department, www.patrick.rush.com features a Comment section I sometimes visit. The correspondents generally represent one of two extremes: gushing fan or crap-taking critic. The latter favours the sort of spluttering, all-lowercase tirade that soils the screen for a few hours before the Webmaster gets around to striking it from the record. This morning, however, there’s something waiting there of an altogether more disturbing nature.
Not an incoherent screed, not a copyedit nitpick, not a demand for money back. Just a single word of accusation.
Thief
.
The correspondent’s name is nowhere to be seen. There’s only his or her
nom-de-blog
:
therealsandman
.
It could be only coincidence—the specificity of the allegation, the timing of Angela’s belief that the Sandman has returned, the identity implied by the name—but I’m certain it’s someone who
knows
.
I immediately write back in reply. This requires the creation of a blog identity of my own:
braindead29
.
Why are you afraid to use your real name?
Reading the question over, I see how it’s too clear and benign for blogspeak. I make a go at translation.
why r assholes like u 2 afraid to use your reel name?????
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 divorcée 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 floorboards
or
mice between the walls
. My first thought is it’s a bird that’s mistaken the clear surface of the sliding back doors for night. And it might have been a bird, if it weren’t for the sound that follows. The cry of fingernails scraped over glass.
I slip on the boxers and T-shirt left in a pile next to the bed and check on Sam. Still asleep. I pull his door shut and shuffle to the top of the stairs. Only the usual peeps and sighs of an old house. Miles off, a low rumble of thunder.
Downstairs, there’s no sign of disturbance. But why would there be? If someone has forced their way into our home with an intent to do us harm, there’d be little point in overturning a side table or shattering the hall mirror along the way. Still, there’s a comfort in seeing Sam’s playground sneakers sitting side by side on the mat, the stack of envelopes on the bottom step ready to be tossed in the mailbox in the morning. What evil could possibly be strong enough to pass these talismans?
At the base of the stairs, I move as quietly as I can toward the living room at the rear of the house. From here, I can see a sliver of the sliding glass doors that open on to the deck. The rain has started, slow and dense as oil. A soft drumming on the roof.
Then the rain turns to silver.
The motion-sensor lights I had put in last week activated by something in the yard. Not the rain (they’re designed to ignore it), or moving branches
(there is no wind). Something large enough to be spotted. Moving from one part of the property to the other. Something I can’t see.
I run to the kitchen and pull a pair of scissors from the butcher’s block, hold them out in front of me as I dash to the glass doors. The lights flick off before I get there. Just three seconds of brightness. Why had I told the guy who installed them to set the timer for
three seconds
? Not long enough to catch a raccoon’s attention, let alone thwart a break-in. But I remember now: I hadn’t wanted it to wake up the neighbours. That this is the very point of such devices must have been lost on me at the time.
I unlock the door and slide it open. Thrust the scissors out first, as though to sink the blades into the body of rain.
Once outside, the downpour instantly seals my T-shirt to my skin. I keep moving on to the deck. At its edge, I come into range of the motion sensors and the floodlights come on. The back yard suddenly ablaze, so that everything—the thirsty lawn, weed-ridden flower beds running along the fence, the leaning garden shed in the back corner—is translated from grey outlines to harsh specifics. Nothing else. Nothing out of place.
Three seconds later, the lights are off. The yard expanded by darkness.
Waving my arm over my head, I activate the sensor again. Everything as it was. The curtain of rainfall. The dim shape of neighbouring houses.
I have done my duty. Two a.m. and all’s well. Time to go back inside, grab a towel and count sheep.
But I don’t.
Absently this time, I lift my arm high, the scissors held skyward. And once more the lights come on.
To show someone standing in the yard.
A man with his back against the far fence, next to the garden shed. His face shielded by the overhanging branches of the neighbour’s willow. Arms loose at his sides. And at the end of those arms, the creased gloves of his hands.
The lights flick off.
There is no way I could swing my arm up again if it weren’t for Sam. My son, asleep in his bed upstairs. Counting on me to keep the bogeyman away. It’s the thought of Sam that turns the lights on.
But the yard is empty. It’s only the same sad square of real estate as before, a neglected garden and shed with cobwebs sprayed over its window. And no one standing by the back fence. If he was here at all, the terrible man who does terrible things is gone.