As I walk home through the city, I take out my cell and pretend to speak to someone at the other end. It’s not the first time I’ve done this. You can be the only pedestrian
not
on the phone for so long before you start to feel yourself disappear. You need to
text
, to
touch base
, to
screen incoming.
We speed-dial, therefore we are.
This time, when I check my messages at home, I’m surprised to hear a voice I recognize. Ivan.
“I’ve had an…
encounter.
”
A pause so long it’s like he’s forgotten to hang up. Then he remembers.
Click.
An encounter.
I call the number he gave me as I pass a group of gigglers standing outside the sex-shop window, tapping at the glass (“What
is
that, Brenda?” “I dunno. Must be something you put where the sun don’t shine.”).
Ivan picks up on the first ring.
“Patrick?”
“You left a message—”
“Museum station. Tomorrow. Southbound platform. Ten a.m.”
Click.
Without looking for it, I’m now like everyone else, the millions streaming past on sidewalk and street. I’ve got plans for the weekend.
Moments after arriving home there’s a knock at the door.
“Finished your book. Very interesting,” Detective Ramsay says, once again walking past me into the living room as though the place is only nominally mine. Then, even more falsely: “Can’t wait to read whatever you’re doing next.”
“I’m retired.”
“Really?”
“Are you actually here to discuss my book?”
“It’s an investigation. We have to have
something
to put in the files.”
There’s a point in every conversation structured around the exchange of accusation and rebuttal—meetings with tax auditors, neighbours disgruntled over the leaves your tree sheds in their yard—where the nasty turn can be either taken or avoided. This is the point Ramsay and I have reached. And I have decided I don’t like the man.
“You know something?” I say. “I may have another book in me yet. In fact, you’re inspiring a character for me right now.”
“Oh? What’s this character like?”
“Flawed, naturally. An intrusive investigator who’s smart but not as smart as he thinks. The secret about him is that he wants to be a writer. Detective stories—the only thing he reads. He likes to think if he wasn’t so busy solving real crimes, he’d be making them up.”
To say Ramsay darkens at this would be understatement. His limbs stiffening into the vocabulary of the thug, the backstreet pub brawler. Now I can see the clear answer to my earlier question about him. Definitely more Glasgow than Edinburgh.
“A comic figure,” he says.
“I think he is.”
“You’d be wrong then.”
“You mean he’s not funny?”
“I mean you’d be wrong to laugh at him.”
He gives me a look that’s rather hard to describe. One better grasped in its effects, chief of which is to make me want to make a run for the door.
“What do you say to wish a writer luck?” he says, moving past me. “Break a leg?”
“Usually it’s just ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down.’”
“That applies to my line of work too.”
There’s the clunk of the door pulled shut. The house waits a full minute before resuming its sighs and ticks.
Later, when I ask myself why I didn’t tell Ramsay what I learned about the Sandman’s first
round of victims all being circle members—not to mention William’s appearance at some of the very same meetings—I decide that it wasn’t because I don’t like the guy, or even that it might put me at greater risk. I didn’t tell him because a thought occurred to me at the same moment Ramsay offered a glimpse of his darker self.
It might be him.
This suspicion was born out of nothing more than a flare of intuition, but now that he’s gone I’m able to back it up with a reasonable tallying of bits and pieces. The first of these is that he was the lead investigator on the previous Sandman killings. This would have allowed him access not only to the crime scenes and the potential manipulation of evidence, but to his fellow officers, the media. A nice way to clean up any mistakes he may have made (though these would undoubtedly have been few). Then there’s his physical aspect: as tall as the Sandman, give or take. And no doubt strong enough to carry out the business of human butchering.
Then again, this may only be my own continued inching toward madness. Suspecting the
detective
?
You don’t need to be hunted by a Sandman to see nothing but crime and criminals. All the things you’ve done, the decisions you made, the possibilities laid out before you—it used to be
your story.
Then the thieves show up to take it. And you’re left asking the question that is so compulsive, so bestsellingly popular because it belongs
to a universal language. The first utterance of fear. Of failure.
Whodunit?
This isn’t the end of my Friday social calls. In fact, I end up going out for drinks with a friend—though this sounds a good deal more normal than it is. Because it’s drinks with Len. And because he has asked me to come out in order to share a “totally twisted idea” about Angela.
We decide on The Paddock, an ancient vault south of Queen. When the bartender comes by I order a bourbon sour, and am surprised to hear Len ask for the same.
“I didn’t know you started drinking.”
“I haven’t.”
“You could’ve ordered a juice or something.”
“I don’t want to call attention to myself,” he says, glancing over his shoulder. “And it’s important that I talk to you in the kind of place I wouldn’t normally go.”
“Why?”
“So
she
won’t see us.”
Once the drinks arrive, he tells me how Angela came to his apartment some days ago. She looked around his attic room, inspecting the bookshelves.
The Sandman
caught her attention, though she made no mention of it. Len couldn’t help noticing she was wearing a “nice—you know,
sexy
nice—perfume”. And a blouse he felt was missing a couple of buttons.
“When was this exactly?”
“Wednesday. Why?”
“No reason.”
Wednesday. Two days after Angela told me we shouldn’t see each other again. And then she’s calling on
Len
—prematurely balding, cardboardsmelling, man-boy Len. Only a moment’s pondering of this and my glass is empty. I knock back Len’s too and raise my hand to signal another round.
Len tells me that, at first, she just talked to him like she might have during the circle, if she ever
had
spoken to him during the circle. Writer stuff. Queries about what he’s working on, where he’d sent material out to, recent books they’d read.
“Did you ask her about being published under a false name?”
“There wasn’t time.”
“I thought you were just sitting around talking?”
“We were. But then it got
weird.
”
It got weird when she confessed to him, leaning forward to put her hand on his knee, that if she were ever to write a story about him, she knew what title she’d use.
“’The Virgin’,” Len says. “So I say ‘Why would you call it that?’ And she says ‘Because you’ve never been with a girl, have you, Len?’ Then she kissed me.”
“Kissed you? Where?”
“On the
lips.
”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. I
resisted
, I guess. Kind of pushed her away.”
“Why?”
“Because she wasn’t really kissing me. It was more like she was making fun of me.”
“How did you know?”
“That’s how it
felt.
”
I press Len’s glass into his hand, urge him to take a sip. And he does. A big one. Followed by a bigger one.
“Welcome to the wonderful world of alcohol therapy,” I say.
“It’s warm.”
“It only gets warmer.”
He wipes his eyes with the sleeve of his shirt. I would put a hand on his shoulder to steady him, but the truth is, even now, I don’t want to touch him. I offer him time instead. And when he’s ready, he says that once Angela was done laughing at him, she said he didn’t have to kiss her back. He didn’t have to do anything because it was too late. She already knew everything she needed to know.
“About what?”
“About
me.
”
“What did she want to know about you?”
“Everything she needed to write her version of me.”
“She was writing a story based on you? ‘The Virgin’?”
“I think she’s writing stories on all of us,” Len says, then drifts his face closer. “But I’m next.”
“Her subject.”
“No. The next to die.”
Len is not well. This fact is coming into sharp focus now. He’s not just another comic-bookcollecting oddball, not one of the half-invisibles, the sort of mouth breather you try to ignore peering over your shoulder at a bank machine. He’s
ill.
Yet, now that we’re here, in a place where more cocktails are available if things get hairy, I figure there’s little harm in nudging him further.
“Then why not me? Why am I not next?”
“You were the only one without a story,” Len answers, finishing his drink and unintentionally slamming the glass down on the bar.
“She said that to you?”
“It was kind of obvious.”
Len puts his hand on my wrist, pressing it against the bar’s varnished surface, and I let him. I also let him come in close once more to whisper into my cheek.
“She isn’t what she appears to be,” he says.
I try to pull my arm away, but he’s got a stronger hold than I thought he was capable of.
“I’m not just saying she’s psychotic,” Len goes on, suddenly louder. Behind me, there’s the chair squeaks and interrupted conversations of other drinkers stopping to hear the agitated guy in the corner. “I’m saying she’s not
human.
”
“For God’s sake, Len.”
“In medieval legend, there is a name for a female being that incrementally consumes other beings until their eventual exhaustion or death.”
“A succubus.”
“Exactly.”
“Oh Christ.”
“A witch who appears in the form of a temptress.”
“Calm down. Here. Take another sip—”
“Usually the succubus’ purpose is to steal the semen of sleeping men—their life force. But in this case, it’s different. She steals stories.”
“Are you saying we need to put a stake through her heart? Shoot her with a silver bullet?”
“I’m serious. And the sooner you get serious about it too, the longer you might live.”
Len
is
serious. The whole bar can see it. And it watches him stand, the boldness that had possessed him for these past moments instantly slipping away.
“There are some desires so foul they are never satisfied,” he says, and appears to search his mind for something more. But if there was something, it’s gone now.
I’m done
, his drooped shoulders and hanging head say as he walks away.
That’s all I can manage.
My Friday winding down to its bourbonsoftened end. But even with the assurance that Len’s theories are as twisted as initially advertised, the day closes with an unsettling idea. For as the door closes behind him, I can’t help thinking I will never see Len again.
I start out to my meeting with Ivan early enough, but the sun, already high and merciless by nine, ends up making me late. Twice I have to stop and sit in the shade to get a handle on the dizziness that comes with pushing myself through air not made for walking, or for anything really, other than euthanizing the old and promoting sales of asthma inhalers for the young. By the time I shuffle by the old facade of the Royal Ontario Museum I don’t really care if Ivan awaits me underground or not. What I need is to get out of the sun and wait for October to come.
But it’s not much better here. Down the stairs the air is almost as warm, the trains growling and screeching below. So what am I doing here, anyway? Why do I want to know what Ivan means by “an encounter”? The smart thing would be to turn back. And not just from my meeting with Ivan, but from everyone. Someone else can tease out the mystery of the Sandman and be rewarded
as Carol Ulrich, Petra and the others were rewarded.
But I don’t do the smart thing. And it’s here, carried down on the sliding escalator stairs, that I figure why: I want to save the day. Dishonoured author, pink-slipped critic, rejected lover—yes to all. Yet there may still be an opportunity for forgiveness, a full pardon that would see me returned from observing the world to the world itself. This is how deep the faulty hopes of fiction have been engrained in me.
It’s in the next moment that I notice the man coming up the escalator opposite me.
Both hands gripping the rubber handrails, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled down so that his face is obscured. He would be tall if he were standing straight. But he’s not.
He slides past. And I continue down.
It’s not the look of him that strikes me, but the smell he leaves in the air once he’s passed. A brief taste of compost. The first whiff that meets you upon opening the door of an unplugged fridge.
I have been close enough to that skin to catch its odour before. I have tried to
describe
it before too.
Wood smoke. Sweat. Boiled meat.
William.
He’s already disappearing around the corner at the top of the escalator when I turn. The door to the outside squeaking open and vacuuming shut.
I make a hopeless run against the descending steps—one down for every two up—and surrender
halfway when a mother with a stroller comes to stand at the top, scowling at me.
Another lunatic
, her organic-only face says.
When is somebody going to clean this town up?
It’s at the ticket kiosk, waiting for the attendant to hand over my change, that I notice the first sign that something worse than a William appearance may be going on down here. The sound of incoherent exclamations—
Don’t touch it! Somebody…somebody!
—coming from the platform at the bottom of the stairs. Children bursting into hysterical, echoing cries. A woman’s scream.
I push my way through the turnstile at the same time the attendant picks up his phone and starts to wave me back. Ignoring him, I carry on walking backwards to see the woman with the stroller being told she can’t enter, and her demanding to know why. The attendant tells her. Whatever it is, it turns her around, her heels tapping out a distress signal on the marble floor.
On the way down to the platform the voices I’d heard earlier have grown in volume. More adult shouts have joined the wailing infants, and there’s one or two official order-givers now too—
Stand back! Straight line here, people!
—along with the increasingly panicked
Ohmygod
s of mothers who have brought their children to visit the museum, many of them, by the sounds of it, still disembarking from the train. Shoes sliding against shoes. The grunt and gasp of those jostling for position in shrinking space. Human cattle.
I reach the platform and join them. The only one coming down as everyone else takes their first frenzied steps toward the exits.
Then I see why.
The southbound train has stopped two-thirds of the way into the station. Its doors open, the cars now wholly emptied. Men in fluorescent orange vests push through the crowd to open the door to the control cabin at the front. A moment later the driver emerges, hands trembling at the sides of his face, his lips moving but nothing coming out.
An accident. One that’s just happened. Given the way some of the kids break away from their mothers to look over the side of the platform and instantly turn back, it’s obvious what sort. A jumper. And that’s not all I correctly guess before I push sideways to look over the side for myself. I know who jumped.
One of the most common ways of reckoning individual experience is through the number of times a thing has been seen or done: how many people one has slept with, foreign countries visited, diseases suffered and survived. Along with the dead. How many have you viewed outside of open caskets and TV news? Before today, my count 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 that, even here in a city of millions, is limited to only a few, the last of the storybook believers. The ones who have not only seen the Sandman standing at the edge of their lives, but invited him in.
The morning is as bad as you’d guess. Complicated not just by a hangover serious enough to share eight of the nine primary symptoms of toxic shock, nor by the afternoon trip to the emergency room to get an intern to pinch and stick and
Oh, damn, I’m sorry
his way to stitching my lip closed, but by the prevailing sense that if what has come before has been worrying, everything from here on in is going to show how justified that worry actually was. I might be paranoid. But there’s nothing that says paranoids can’t be right sometimes.
On the way back from the hospital, I stop by Angela’s building again. Still no answer. An idea strikes me all at once. Whether it was William or someone else, whoever I saw last night had come from calling on Angela too.
I try her work number, and the receptionist informs me she hasn’t been in all this week. Len’s not answering his phone. These are all the leads I have. Along with the faith that, if Angela were able to, she would have checked in with me by now, if only to tell me to stop bothering her with my sad-sack messages.