“Did you see the bad man who was there?” I asked him, but he heard in my very question the concession that what I’d just assured him didn’t exist may in fact be real, and he turned his back to me. What good were a father’s empty promises against the bogeyman? He would face any further nightmares on his own.
Blood tattooed on the curtains.
It’s on my shortcut through Chinatown that I start to feel less alone. Not because of the few others shuffling homeward on the sidewalks, heads down. It’s because I’m being followed.
Past the karaoke bars along Dundas, then the foolish turn south straight through the housing projects between here and Queen. That’s when I hear the footsteps echoing my own. There are reports in the City pages of frequent shootings on this very block, yet I’m certain that whatever shadows me isn’t interested in my wallet. It wants to see what I will do when I know it is there.
And what do I do?
I run.
A headlong sprint. I’m wearing the wrong shoes for it, so that within the first block my shins send bolts of pain up to the back of my head. Eyes stinging with wind-burned tears. Lungs crackling like a pair of plastic bags in my chest.
Courage is not a matter of will, but of the body.
I take the alley that runs behind the businesses along Queen. The shortest way to my house. But a dark alley? What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking. I was running. Past walls and fences built against the rats and crackheads. No light to see by. Just the darker outline of the buildings and the square of black that is the alley opening on to the street at the far end.
I don’t stop. I don’t look back.
Not until I stop and look back.
Standing under the block’s lone working streetlight. My house within snowball-throwing distance. The light on in my son’s room. Sam up late. Sneak reading. And all I want is to sit on the edge of his bed, close his book, turn off the light. Listen to him breathe.
He is my son.
I love my son.
I would die to protect him.
These conclusions come fast and terse as lightning. Along with one other.
The alley is empty.
Angela’s Story
Transcribed from Tape Recording No. 2
The girl doesn’t tell anyone what she knows of the Sandman and the terrible thing he’s done. In part, this is because she doesn’t actually know anything about the missing girl, not in a way she could ever prove. Not to mention that a declaration of this kind might just label her as crazy once and for all. She’d be taken away from Edra and Jacob and put in a place far worse than any foster home or orphanage. Someplace she would never come out of again.
But more frightening than even the consideration of being taken away is the idea of hurting Edra and Jacob. Her wellbeing was all they cared about. To show them that she believed in dark figures born in her dreams, a monster who had come from the darkest place to hunt her down, would break both their hearts. The girl resolved to protect them from this no matter what.
For the next few days, ignoring the fact that something was wrong seemed to work. No more children disappeared. No dark figures were spotted in town. The girl’s dreams were the same irrational puzzles that others have, free of any terrible men who do terrible things. It felt like the news of a 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 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