Free The Killing Circle by Andrew Pyper Page A

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 thetwo 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 doorand starts into the yard, the cold