Free The Killing Circle by Andrew Pyper

stranger with no face escaping from the confines of a nightmare was itself a nightmare, and no more real than that.
    Then the girl sees him.
    Not in a dream, but through the window of her classroom at school. She has been sitting at her desk, working through a math quiz. Multiplying fractions. At one equation more difficult than the others, she raises her head to clear her mind of the numbers atop numbers collapsing into a confused pile. She sees him right away. Standing in the shade of the schoolyard’s solitary elm. As tall as the lowest limb that, the girl knows from trying, is too high to reach, even when one of the boys offered her a boost. The Sandman’s face is obscured by the leaves’ latticework of shadow, though the girl has the impression he is staring directly at her. And that he’s smiling.
    She bends over her quiz again. The fractions have doubled in the time she’d taken her eyes from the page, so that the numbers are now a mocking jumble.
    He would still be there if she looked. She doesn’t look.
    Outside, a lawnmower roars to life. The sound makes the girl gasp. A flare of pain. She feels 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 girlnotices 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 morethat 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