I’m about to tell Len I’m going to leave when I’m stopped by the realization that half the people in the room have turned in their chairs to look my way.
“Sorry to wake you,” Len is saying, his hand on my arm. “But you were snoring.”
In my cubicle at the
National Star
the next morning, Tim Earheart stops by to deliver coffee. It will be my fourth of the day, and it’s only just turned ten. But I need all the help I can get. The many beers and only slightly fewer Wild Turkeys of the night before have left me fuzzy-headed and furrymouthed. I take a couple scalding gulps before I’m able to read Tim’s lips.
“Let’s go down for a smoke,” he’s saying for the second time, glancing over his shoulder to see if anyone’s listening.
“I don’t smoke.”
“I’ll give you one.”
“Quit. More or less. Thought you knew—” Tim raises the back of his hand and for a second I’m sure he’s going to slap me. Instead, he bends close to my ear.
“What I’ve got isn’t for general consumption,” he whispers, and walks away toward the doors to the main stairwell.
The basement of the
National Star
is the exclusive domain of two species of dinosaur: smokers and historians. It’s down here where the preelectronic database issues of the paper are stored,
as well as some archival bric-à-brac including, I have heard, the shrunken head of the newspaper’s founder. Aside from a few postgrad researchers the only people who come down here are the last of the nicotine wretches. A dwindling number, even among reporters. The kids coming out of journalism school these days are more likely to carry a yoga mat and an Evian bottle than a flask and a pack of smokes.
It leaves the Smoking Room one of the last places in the building where you can hope to have a private conversation. Sure enough, when I close the door behind me and feel my stomach clench at the carcinogenic stink, it’s only Tim Earheart in here with me.
“They’re not running it. They’re not fucking
running
it,” he says, literally fuming, grey exhaust spilling out his nose.
“What aren’t they running?”
“The note.”
I know that Tim is enough of an obsessive that if he’s this excited, he’s talking about a story. And his story right now is Carol Ulrich and Ronald Pevencey.
“Left it by her body,” he goes on. “A
part
of her body. Her head, as a matter of grotesque fact. Typed out nice and neat for whoever found her.”
“You have possession of this note?”
“Sadly, no. One of the cops on the scene told me what it said. He shouldn’t have, but he did.”
“And you brought it to the suits.”
“Expecting it to go A1. Because if this isn’t front page, what is? But the police caught wind of it, and they begged us to muzzle it. Ongoing investigation, lives at risk, an eventual arrest could be jeopardized, blah blah blah. Just throw a blanket on it for a few days. So now they’re not running it.”
“Does it say who wrote it?”
“It’s not
signed
. But I think it’s pretty damn clear.”
Tim finishes his cigarette, grinds the butt under his heel and has another in his mouth in less time than it takes me to speak.
“What did it say?”
“That’s the reason I’m telling you. I was hoping you might have some literary insight.”
“You’re talking about a serial killer’s note, not
Finnegans Wake
.”
Tim takes a step closer. Smoke rising from his hair.
“It’s a
poem,
” he says.
The Smoking Room door opens and a lifer from Sports comes in, gives us a distasteful glance and lights up. Tim makes a zipper motion across his lips. I’m about to step outside when he grabs my wrist. Presses something into my palm.
“Call me later about those Leafs tickets,” he says. Winks a secret wink.
A business card. Tim Earheart’s writing squeezed on to the back. I read it over a few times in my
cubicle, then tear it into confetti and let it fall into my recycling box.
I am the ground beneath your feet
The man in dark alleys you don’t want to meet
I live in the Kingdom of Not What It Seems
Close your eyes, you will see me—here in your dreams.
Not much, as poems go. Just a pair of rhyming couplets, a Mother Goose simplicity that gives it the sing-song of nursery doggerel. Perhaps this is the point. Given the grisly context in which the poem was found, the childish tone makes it all the more threatening. The kind of thing you need only read once and it, or some part of it, remains hooked in your mind. A poem meant not to be admired but remembered.
So what does it say about its author? First, whoever did this to Carol Ulrich also wrote these lines. One an act of assembly, the other of dismemberment. Creator and Destroyer in one.
Somebody bad,
as Tim Earheart had guessed.
Second, he wanted the poem to be read. It could have been kept to himself, but instead it was left by the victim’s corpse. A killer who—like all writers—wants an
audience
for their work. To make us feel something. To invite the kind of scrutiny I am giving his poem right now. To be understood.
Third, while it is only a four-line ditty, there are indications of some intelligence. That a poem would occur to him at all puts him at a creative level above the everyday backstreet butcher. And the composition itself offers some indication of talent. It rhymes, for one thing. A rhythm that’s not accidental. Good enough that it would likely achieve its macabre effect even if it wasn’t deposited next to a corpse.
And then there are the words themselves.
The first line sets out the poem’s purpose: the poet seeks to introduce himself. He is the ground beneath our feet. That is, he’s everywhere. The next line establishes the character of this presence as menacing, hostile, the “man in dark alleys”. Naturally, the mention of alleys rings especially loud for me, as it was only a few days ago that I ran home through one, fearing something that likely wasn’t there. But “dark alleys” are universally regarded as places to fear. He wants us to know that he is the one who waits for us there.
The third line introduces a note of dark whimsy. The “Kingdom of Not What It Seems” is where he
lives,
but he is also able to materialize in the ground beneath our feet. At once real and an illusion. A shapeshifter.
All of which is reinforced in the poem’s concluding line. If we wish to see him, we must turn not to whatever clues have been left behind, but to our dreams. And these dreams aren’t only imagined, but “here”, in the real world. We are
all part of the same dream whether we like it or not. And it’s
his
.
It’s not until my walk home that another interpretation occurs to me. “Occurs to me” might not be strong enough. In fact, it almost knocks me over. I have to sit on the curb with my head between my legs to prevent myself from blacking out.
When I’m partly recovered I speak into the dictaphone, still slouched on the curb as cars pass within inches of my feet.
TRANSCRIPT FROM TAPE
March 12, 2003
[Sounds of passing traffic]
I am the ground beneath your feet.
Literally. Whoever first read the poem would have been on Ward’s Island. Standing on a beach. On
sand
.[Aside]
Oh, shit.
[Kid in background]
Look at this pisstank! He’s gonna lose…
[Car horn]
…if he doesn’t watch it!
[Background laughter]
Close your eyes, you will see me.
Okay. To know who he is, we have to dream.
But who delivers our thoughts while we sleep?
[Singing]
Mr Sandman, bring me a dream…
Angela’s Story
Transcribed from Tape Recording No. 3
The next week, after the school was re-opened despite the second missing girl remaining missing and no leads being discovered as to the perpetrator of what the town’s Chief of Police called “these heinous crimes” (a word the girl had never heard before and spelled in her mind as “hayness”, which only reminded her of what she discovered in the barn), Edra had to go into the hospital a hundred and sixty miles down the road for surgery. Her gallbladder. Nothing to worry about, Jacob assured the girl. Edra would be just fine without it. Which, if this was true, made the girl wonder why God gave us gallbladders in the first place.
Edra is taken to the hospital on a Friday, which leaves Jacob and the girl alone in the farmhouse until Edra is brought home, all being well, on
Sunday. The old man and the girl have the weekend to themselves.
As much as the girl is delighted by the idea of exclusive attention from Jacob, part of her dreads their number being reduced from three to two. She wonders if the invisible cord that connected them as a family also acted as a spell, a force field that kept out the terrible man who does terrible things. With Edra gone, a door might be opened. For the sake of her foster parents, the girl would keep a vile secret. She would bury someone in the night and suffer the nightmares that followed. But she isn’t sure she could ever close a door to the Sandman once it was opened.
Soon her worry over all of this could be read in every look and gesture the girl makes. No matter how she tries to keep her burden hidden, she wears her trouble like a cloak. Jacob knows her too well not to notice. And when he asks the girl what’s wrong, this simple provocation triggers an explosion of tears.
She tells him almost everything. That there’s a terrible man who does terrible things who used to live only in her dreams, but has now taken form in the real world. That she believes this man took the two girls from town because they were the same age and general appearance as she.
What she doesn’t tell him is what she found in the barn, and what she did with it.
Jacob doesn’t speak for a long time after the girl is finished. When he finally finds the words
he’s looking for, the girl expects him to explain how what she’s said could not be possible. But instead he surprises her.
“I have seen him too,” the old man says.
The girl can hardly believe it. What was he like? Where did Jacob see him?
“I could not describe him to you any more than I could say what shape the wind takes,” the old man answers. “It is something I have
felt
. Moving around the house as though what he seeks is within, but he cannot enter. Not yet.”
Perhaps the girl should go to him. If it’s only her that the Sandman wants, why risk him doing harm to another girl? Or worse, to Jacob or Edra.
“You mustn’t speak like that,” Jacob implores her. “Never
ever
. Understand? He will not have you so long as I live. And after I’m gone, you must still resist him. Promise me this.”
The girl promises. But what is left for them to do? The girl can’t imagine how they might attempt to fight him. How can you kill what may already be dead?
“I cannot say if he is alive or dead. But I believe I can say who he is.”
Jacob holds the girl firm by the shoulders as though to prevent her from falling.
“It’s your father,” he says.
After Jacob failed to pick her up, Edra returned from the hospital in a taxi on Sunday to find the
farmhouse empty. The back door left wide open. If someone had come in or gone out by this point of entry there was no way of knowing. Over the last twenty-four hours, the whole county had been buried under three feet of snow. The arrival of winter announced in a November blizzard. Any tracks that might have been left now filled in and sculpted into fin-tailed drifts.
When the police arrive Edra is frantic for them to find the girl. They don’t have far to look. Huddled in the corner of the last stall in the barn. Glass-eyed, blue-skinned. Shaking from the hypothermia caused by staying outside all night when the temperature dipped as low as ten below.
They ask her where Jacob is. The girl’s only answer is to slip into unconsciousness. For a time, it’s judged to be even odds if she will survive or not. Three of her toes are removed, turned black from frostbite. Her brain monitored to determine what parts have died from lack of oxygen while she sleeps.
But the girl doesn’t die.
When she comes to the next day, she will not speak to anyone but Edra, and even then, it’s not about what happened over the preceding days. Edra buffers the girl from their queries, putting her anxieties regarding her husband second to the girl’s need for protection. The police are left to look for Jacob on their own.
After it is determined that Jacob’s truck was parked in the farmyard the entire weekend, and
there is no sign of a struggle or suicide note inside the house, the forest that borders the end of his fields and carries on for five hundred miles north into the Canadian Shield becomes the prime area of concentration for the police search.
The snowfall from the blizzard, however, makes it difficult. Helicopter fly-overs can spot little more than trees sprouting up from a blanket of white. The dogs they use to track Jacob’s scent run a hundred yards into the woods only to sink up to their muzzles, and then must be carried out, whimpering, by their trainers. By the fourth day, the search’s urgency is downgraded from a rescue operation to evidence collection. If Jacob is to be found somewhere out in the endless woods, there is no expectation that he will be alive.
It takes another two weeks of mild weather for the snow to melt enough to expose Jacob’s body. Four miles from the farm. Lying face down, arms sprawled out at his sides. No injuries aside from cuts to his face and arms that came from branches slashing his skin as he ran. Just socks on his feet, and not wearing any outerwear (his boots and coat were in their usual places in the house). The cause of death determined to be exposure following a collapse from exhaustion. The coroner is amazed that a man of Jacob’s age was capable of getting as far as he did. A four-mile run through a blizzard in the night woods. Only
someone in a state of mortal panic would be capable of it.
But the questions that followed from this were beyond both the coroner’s and forensic investigators’ capacity to answer. Was Jacob running
from
or
toward
something? If he had been the one in pursuit, what quarry would have driven him into the forest dressed as he was during the first big snowfall of the year? And if he was the pursued, what would have terrified him enough to run so far he let himself fall and die without anything laying a hand on him?
The police all agreed that if Jacob had been murdered, it was a perfect crime. No suspect. No witness. No tracks left after the snow had filled them in. No weapon to be found aside from the cold.
Only the girl knew—or might know—what happened over the time she and Jacob were alone in the farmhouse. But no matter how many times she was asked, she would not speak of it.
Shock, the doctors said. Extreme emotional trauma. It can cut the tongue out of a child as sure as any blade. She’s of no use now, they concluded. You’d have as good a chance asking the trees in Jacob’s forest what they saw as this poor girl.
The girl heard everything they said about her, though she acted as though she was deaf. She resolved that there are some things you cannot speak of. But she would record what she knew in
a different way from speech. She would write it down. Later, when she was older and on her own, she would tell the truth, if only to herself.
Here, in the pages of this very book.
She even knows how it will begin.
There once was a girl who was haunted by a ghost…