The Killing Circle. Andrew Pyper

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СКАЧАТЬ the lawnmower’s blades cutting into her side, halving her. Turning her into a fraction.

      Later, sitting in the back row of the schoolbus on the ride home, the girl tries to remember what the Sandman looked like. How could she see him smile without seeing his face? Was this a detail she’d added after the moment had passed? Was she making him up, just as she sometimes thought she’d been made up? Was she the author of the terrible man who does terrible things?

      As if in answer to all of these questions, the girl looks out the schoolbus window and he is there. Sitting on a swing in the playground. His legs held out straight before him, his boots touching the grass border around the sand. A sloped-shouldered man out of scale on the children’s swing set, so that he looks even more enormous.

      The girl turns to the other students on the bus, but none of them are looking out their windows. All of them laughing and blowing goobered paper out of straws. For a moment, the girl is knocked breathless by the recognition of how little these other children know. Of what awaits them, watches them. If not the Sandman then some other reshaped darkness.

      The bus grinds into gear and lurches forward. Still sitting on the swing, the Sandman turns to watch them go. Even from this distance the girl notices his hands. The fingers swollen and thick as sausages, gripped round the chain. Dirty hands.

      Before the bus turns a corner on to the road out of town, the girl squints hard and sees that she was wrong.

      It’s not dirt that fills the creases and sticks to the hair on the backs of the Sandman’s hands. It’s blood.

      They find the missing girl the next day. Her remains. Down in the trees by the river beyond the graveyard. A place the older kids call the Old Grove, famous for bush parties. Now and forever to be known as the place where a girl, too young for bush parties, was found in pieces, buried in a layer of scattered leaves, as though her murderer had grown bored at the end and cast a handful of deadfall over her just to be done with it.

      Because of where they found her, the police turned their suspicions toward the older boys at school who’d gotten in trouble in the past. Perhaps one of them had been in contact with the girl? Had a crush on her, been following her around? But even the most trouble-prone boys at the school had done nothing worse than pocket candy bars or egg windows on Halloween. It was near impossible to imagine any of them had graduated from such crimes to the one in question.

      After they found the missing girl, the talk in town shifted from suspicion to fear. It mattered less who had done this terrible thing, and more that a terrible thing not be visited on anyone else. An unofficial curfew was put in place. Lights burned in the houses through the night. Groups of townsmen—doctors and shop owners and tradesmen and drunks, a strange mix that would otherwise be unlikely to associate with each other—patrolled the streets with flashlights and, it was said, shotguns hidden beneath some of their long coats. They had no idea what they might be looking for. Fear made them see the town, the world, in a way they’d never seen it before.

      The second girl went missing the same night the first was found. As the men cast their flashlights over lawns and cellar doors and shrub rows, as the lights burned in all the homes, as most stayed up late, unable to sleep, another girl, the same age as the other, was snatched directly out of her bed before dawn. Her ground-floor window left open. Boot prints in the soil by the trampled rose bush. Sheets on the floor. Blood tattooed on the curtains.

      They closed the school for the day. Not that the students would be any safer at home. The decision came by way of the instinct to stop whatever had been considered normal, if for no other reason than to match the abnormality of what was happening around them. Edra and Jacob were glad, nevertheless. It was late enough in the season that the crops (however meagre) were already in. There were no church services on Tuesday. And now they’d closed the school. Which meant that the two of them could afford to stay indoors with their adopted daughter, whom they now wanted to protect as much as love.

      It was an odd sort of holiday. They baked candied apples. Played cards. Built a fire they didn’t really need just to smell the cherry smoke through the house. The girl’s thoughts turned to the terrible man who does terrible things only a few times over the course of the entire day. She would sneak long looks at Jacob and Edra, and ventured to think the word family as an invisible cord connecting the three of them.

      That night she is awakened by the tap of stones against her bedroom window. She hears the first, but only opens her eyes on the second. There is a rule the girl has arrived at through her experience of being haunted. Once could be anything. Two times makes it real.

      She’s aware that she’s making a mistake even as she rises from her bed and goes to the window. What compels her isn’t curiosity but duty. She must keep whatever darkness she has brought to this place from touching Edra or Jacob. It isn’t their fault that the girl they’ve shown such kindness to has let her worst dreams free from her head. They mustn’t see what she is about to see.

      The girl slides her feet over the bare floorboards and the whole house seems to groan a warning at her movement. Her room is small. But the effort it takes to reach the window exhausts her. Courage, she realizes, is not a matter of will but of the body.

      When she reaches the window she has to grip the frame with both hands for balance. There is the sickening stillness that precedes a fainting spell. She makes herself take a breath. As she looks outside, she wonders if her heart has stopped.

      The Sandman stands in the yard below. When he sees her, he tosses another stone up at the glass. It is a gesture the girl has seen in old movies. A suitor signalling his arrival for a midnight tryst.

      Once he’s sure that she’s watching, he turns and walks toward the barn. There is a scuffing slowness to his gait that one might mistake for regret. But the girl sees it instead as an expression of his self-certainty, the ease with which he sets about his actions. It’s what makes his kind of badness so unpredictable.

      He reaches the barn doors and pauses. There’s an opening wide enough for him to enter, but he doesn’t. He only wants her to see that he’s been in there.

      The man turns, keeping his back to her. Steps around the side of the barn and is gone.

      The girl knows what she must do. That is, what he wants her to do.

      She carries her boots down the stairs to quiet her descent. In her haste, she forgets to put her coat on, so that when she steps out the back door and starts into the yard, the cold bites straight through her cotton pajamas. A wind dances dried leaves in figure eights over the dirt. The paper shuffle sound covers her footfall, so that she’s able to half-run to the barn.

      A step inside the doors and the thicker darkness stops her. She comes into the barn almost every day (it’s where she’s assigned most of her after-school chores) so she could navigate her way around its stalls and tools hanging on hooks without light. But there is something different about the space she cannot identify at first. It’s because it isn’t something she can see, but something she can smell.

      A trace of the Sandman’s scent left hanging in the air. Stronger than the hay and mouldy wood and cow manure, even without him here. It makes her cough. The cough turns into a gag. A smell that soldiers and surgeons would recognize, but that a girl like her would have no reason to have encountered before.

      She fights her revulsion and starts toward the stall at the far end. This is where he wants her to go. She knows this as well as if he’d taken her by the hand to lead her there.

      As her eyes become used to the dark, faint threads of moonlight find their way in through the slats. When she opens the gate to the СКАЧАТЬ