Free The Killing Circle by Andrew Pyper Page B

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 thesecond 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.

8
    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