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 stall, she discovers that it’s enough light to see by.
The girl in the stall looks like her. He’d likely chosen her because of this. She’d known the second missing girl from her class at school, but had never realized the similar colour of her hair, the round face. For a second, she thinks it may be her own body lying in pieces amongst the spattered clumps of straw. Which would make her a ghost now too.
She sets to digging before there is anything like a plan in her mind. Just beyond the edge of the forest that borders Jacob’s unyielding acreage, she goes as deep as the hard earth and time allows her. There’s not even the opportunity to be scared. Though more than once she’s certain the canvas sack she’d dragged here from the barn jostles with movement from within.
Even as she pushes the seeping bag into the hole and begins to throw spadefuls of soil back in the place it came from, it only vaguely occurs to her that she’s doing this to make sure Jacob won’t be blamed. Which of course would be the result if they ever found the second girl in his barn. The terrible man who does terrible things forced her into making this decision, which wasn’t much of a decision at all. She would rather be an accomplice to the Sandman than allow the man who is as close to a father as she’s ever known wrongly go to prison for the rest of his days.
By the time the first pencil line of dawn appears on the horizon, she is patting the mound of the second girl’s grave down firm with the back of the spade.
Later, the horror of this night will revisit her in different forms. The girl has enough experience with dreams to know this much.
What she isn’t certain of yet is what the Sandman wants from her. He has discovered where she lives. He could take her as easily as he’s taken these others any time he felt inclined. But there is a different wish he wishes from her. And though she tries to tell herself that she couldn’t possibly imagine what this might be, the truth is she has an idea.
Two days after the circle’s meeting at Petra’s house, the morning paper brings news of another missing person. A man this time. Ronald Pevencey, twenty-four. A hairdresser at one of the avantgarde salons on Queen who hadn’t shown up for work all week. When the police were finally alerted, they discovered that the door to his second-floor apartment was left ajar, though no evidence of forced entry or struggle within could be found. This led investigators to a relatively safe assumption. Whoever had come knocking, Ronald had let in.
The reason authorities are announcing suspicions of foul play at all is not only based on Ronald Pevencey’s unusual absence from work, but disturbing remarks he’d recently shared with co-workers. His belief he was being followed. Here and there over the past weeks a figure seemed to be watching him. While he didn’t say whether he knew who this stalker was, one of his colleagues suspected that Ronald had a theory, and it scared the bejesus out of him. “He wanted to talk about it, but didn’t want to talk about it,” is how his confidante put it.
The rest of the piece, which appears under the by-line of my drinking buddy Tim Earheart, has the police spokesperson bending over backwards to dismiss any speculation that there may be a serial killer at large. First off, there was nothing to indicate that either Carol Ulrich or Ronald Pevencey have been murdered. And while neither had any motive for being a runaway or suicide, there is always the possibility that they just took off for a spontaneous vacation. Postpartum depression. A crystal meth bender. It happened.
It’s further pointed out that there is no connection between the two missing persons. A hairdresser. A stay-at-home mom. Different ages, different social circle. Carol had never set foot in the salon where Ronald worked.