Do shadows cast shadows?
Firelight over a cracked plaster ceiling. Gradations of darkness nudging each other aside. Peeling paint lent a sinister animation. Hooked fingers reaching down for me.
Random connections, mini-hallucinations. I’m aware that this is all they are. Hospital room thoughts.
Except I’m not in a hospital.
No, don’t ask. Just leave it alone—watch the shadows make shadows. Don’t
ask
.
Where am I?
Now I’ve done it. You can’t deny a query like that once it’s out. It’s the first information we insist upon when we wake.
Which means I am awake.
Which means I’m here.
Out and in again.
There was a gap, anyway, that only blacking out can explain. While away, the timid fire in the hearth has been stoked. The blizzard quieted to the suspended feathers that follow a pillow fight. And though it was unthinkably cold before, just beyond the range of the fire’s heat—where my blue left hand rests, as opposed to the pinkish right—it has dropped a few more degrees.
For a moment or two I entertain the possibility that this could be another abandoned farmhouse altogether, another empty living room with windows that look out into a night dark and confining as a mine shaft. But there’s the broken whisky bottle at my feet. And the chair I’m seated in feels like the one I noticed when I looked into the Percys’ living room. Splintery but solid, its legs firmly planted.
And me firmly planted in it.
Chains looped around my wrists, holding both arms flat to the armrests. Tying ankle to ankle. A bruising yoke around my neck. I can’t see what fixes the chair to the floor but given how it won’t move no matter how I shift my weight, it must be screwed in.
I’m clothed but coatless. Only socks on my feet. I suppose this was done to get a good fit around my chest and legs, but the side effect is an even greater vulnerability to the cold. Without the fire I won’t last long. Even with it, I can feel the sweat turning to frost on my upper lip. The hard air stinging my eyes.
My strength is gone. I never had much to begin with. And there are the tingly black dots of unconsciousness dancing around my peripheral vision, waiting for the chance to bury me.
But I have to try. There’s nothing else to do but try.
I figure the best way to test the chains is to pull on each limb one at a time, seeing if there’s some give anywhere. The concentration required in this—turn
this
wrist, lift
that
foot, now
that
foot—proves that my mind has weakened as much as the rest of me. And while I’m able to twist some parts an inch or two, there is no indication that anything might be slid out if teased a bit more. If I’m to get out of this chair, it won’t be gently.
So I try the hard way.
A crazed spasm. Lunging forward and back, trying to topple the chair. Kicks and punches that don’t go anywhere.
When I’m done I’m still here. Except now I’ve left the door open to the black dots. A nauseous sleep rolling in like fog.
My eyes won’t open. That, or I’m blind. But there is movement somewhere within the house. The sense of vibrations more than the sounds themselves. Hearing as the deaf hear.
A heavy footfall along the upstairs hallway. And something lighter, metallic. A clattering of pots and cutlery in the kitchen.
I try to stand again. It doesn’t work. And this time it hurts.
“Who’s there?” I shout, or attempt to shout, but it’s nothing more than a dry ripple of air. The turning of a newspaper page.
Yet there’s a pause in the sounds. Was I heard? The black dots gathering round again.
Where’s my son?
This finds a way out. A broken cry that carries through the bones of the house.
A minute passes after the echo of it has faded. Nothing other than knuckles of wind against the glass.
And then it resumes. Boots clumping through the floorboards above, the noise of cooking. But no voices in reply. No recognition that there is a man freezing to death in the front room. A father whose only wish is to know if his son is here and could hear him if he could find the breath to speak his name.
A figure beyond the doorframe. Standing in the hallway holding a candle in a teacup. A frantic play of the dim light. Glimpses of fur-topped boots, a knitted toque, the ridged tendons down a white neck.
She doesn’t come forward. Holds the candle to the side so that it won’t illuminate her face directly. A pose struck by the subject of a gothic portrait.
Don’t hurt him
.
When my tongue refuses to form the words I try to send this to her through the silence. But she has
been pleaded to before. She knows the things people ask for at the end.
Don’t
.
A fight for air. And by the time I find it, the hallway is empty.
She is there again when I next wake.
In the room with me, standing in the corner. Still huddled in the deeper darkness, as though shy. But it’s not that. She simply prefers to watch than be watched.
I jump toward her—but the chains restrain the motion to a hiccup jolt.
A small fire flickering its last sparks in the hearth. Outside there is the black clarity that comes with the deepest dives below zero.
“Where is he?” My voice a dry crinkle. The peeling of an onion. “Where’s Sam?”
“Not here.”
“Bring him to me.”
“He’s not
here
.”
“Is he alive?”
The question passes through her.
I make another attempt to rise from the chair. A snake wriggle. It makes the bindings even tighter than before.
“Let me go.”
“You
know
you’re never getting out of here.”
“I wish I’d fucked you in the ass.”
“This is out of character.”
“I’m not a character.”
“Depends on the perspective.”
“Ask my perspective. You? You’re an empty, talentless bitch. You’re
nothing
.”
“That won’t do you any good either.”
“Am I hurting your feelings?”
“It’s going to be a long night. Anger takes up so much energy.”
“Then how are you still standing?”
“Me?” she says. “
I’m
not angry.”
Angela steps toward me. The floor groaning as if accommodating the weight of a giant. As she passes, the disturbance of the air creates a feathering breeze against my face.
“They’re going to find you,” I say.
“Really?”
“The police. They’ll come after me. After Ramsay. They know where we went.”
She has bent to the fire. Placing fresh logs, nothing more than thick branches really, atop one another. The flames hiss at the ice under the bark.
“No one is coming here,” she says.
The only part of her exposed from here is the back of her neck. Hair up, with just the downy strands beneath curling against the collar of her parka. I stare at this one point and will it closer. If she allowed herself just one incautious approach, I could rip through her spine from back to front with my teeth.
What is required first is for her not to leave.
“That’s how David Percy died, wasn’t it? You did to him what you did to me.”
“What did I do?”
“Had him believe that you were out there. A blind man who thought he’d lost his child. He wasn’t chased by a ghost, or a Sandman. He ran into the woods to look for
you
.”
“Maybe that’s how you should have ended your novel.”
“But it’s what happened.”
“You’re blinder than that old man ever was.”
“What part am I wrong about?”
“It’s not the killing. Not for
me
, anyway.”
“Tell me.”
Angela puts down the crowbar she was using to arrange the fire. Stands facing me.
“It’s getting into someone else’s head, right at the point when everything is laid bare,” she says.
“You think this is
research
?”
“It’s more than that. It’s material. You and I have more in common than you’d guess. Trouble making things up out of nothing, for one thing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We both wanted to write
books
. And this is mine. The life I’m living. The lives I’m taking. It’s all going into my novel. A novel that’s not
really
a novel, because, in a way, it’s all true.”
“An autobiography.”
“Not exactly. The point-of-view won’t be mine. I’m not sure whose yet. I need to find the right voice.”
“So you’re stealing your book as much as I did.”
“I’m not stealing. I’m assembling.”
“You have a title?”
“
The Killing Circle
. Like it?”
“Can’t say I do. But I suppose I’m biased. Given that you’re going to kill me just so you can end a chapter. Just like you killed the others.”
Angela comes at me with surprising speed. Instead of meeting her with whatever fury is left in me, I reflexively rear back. She grabs my hair. The fused seams of the chains audibly tearing the skin.
“
I
never killed
anyone
,” she says.
Another waking. Another recognition that my believing myself bound to a chair in a haunted house isn’t a dream.
She has Sam.
I will die after the fire goes out.
I cannot leave this place.
The hope that I will be released because I am the teller of this tale, and the teller never dies in his own tale: another falsehood.
I close my eyes. Try to let sleep return. But whatever it is that comes to smother my next breath isn’t sleep at all.
She is sitting in a chair ten feet away. It may be further. There being nothing else to look at, no furniture or picture on the wall within range of the diminishing firelight, she looms where she might otherwise shrink. I’ve never thought of her as large. But she is. She’s all there is.
She looks out the window. Taps her heels against the floor. A schoolgirl growing impatient at the bus stop.
“No wonder you’re so fucked up. Having someone like Raymond Mull for your father.”
Angela turns her eyes to me. A dull sheen of interest over the black pupils.
“What do you know about him?”
“That he hurt you. How did that make you feel?”
”How did that make you feel?”
“It would explain a lot.”
“How I was such a bad girl at such a young age? How I drove a blind old man to the point he ran into the woods in a snowstorm?”
“Why you have no self.”
“I have plenty of selves.”
She stands. Peers out at a particular point on the night’s horizon.
“You know something? I almost feel sorry for you.”
“Artists enjoy certain privileges,” she says. “They also endure certain sacrifices.”
“Sounds like something Conrad White would say.”
“I think he
did
say it.”
“Was this while he was telling you how you were his perfect girl? His dead daughter returned?”
“People see in me what they wish to see.”
“A mirror.”
“Sometimes. Or sometimes it’s someone else. A twin. A lover. Someone they lost. Or would like to be.”
“What did I see?”
“You? That’s easy. You saw your muse.”
Angela goes to the fire. Places a pair of spindly branches on to the flames.
“Not much of a wood pile,” I say.
“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.