Garfield Reeves-Stevens was born in Oakville, Ontario, and spent many years in the changing rectangle of Toronto he writes about in his story. Dubbed “Canada’s Stephen King” by some and “The Tom Clancy of Horror” by no less an authority than King himself, Gar published his first novel, Bloodshift, in 1981. Since then he has produced the techno-horror spinechillers Dreamland, Children of the Shroud, Nighteyes, and Dark Matter. With his wife Judith, he has collabourated on two bestselling Star Trek novels, the continuing fantasy adventure series, The Chronicles of Galen Sword, and the upcoming environmental thriller, Second Nature1.
Like the killing in progress within it, the house that night was unfinished. On its street it was alone in this uncertain state, a single dark spot of difference in a neighbourhood of houses forty years completed, well settled in their foundations, at home in their earth.
But on the other streets nearby, webbed like veins through the vast rectangle of Toronto that ran south from the 401, north from York Mills Road, and east and west from Yonge Street through to Leslie, there were other dark spots on the grid of house lights—altered dwellings not yet hooked up to the power lines. Taken one by one at street level, they were minor interruptions in a once orderly plan. But taken together, seen from the vantage given by wings that beat against the night, they coalesced like grains of dark silver, drawing shadows on X-rays of healthy tissue in the first warning sign of worse things to come—larger excavations, higher walls, and the sounds of things changing in a neighbourhood long since fixed in place and time.
This night, however, there were no sounds of change or construction coming from the unfinished house. From without there was only the gentle rustle of thick plastic sheets covering the unglazed windows, as if the breeze of the cool autumn night gave voice to the motion of shadows. From within there was only the sound of footsteps, deliberately pacing, unhurried, the movements of a person deep in thought, considering options.
The footsteps belonged to the killer.
The victim could not pace because her hands had been nailed to a doorframe.
“Do you mind if I smoke?” the killer asked. It was a joke of his. Not one of his victims had said yes.
After a moment’s polite pause, a lighter flared, carving the killer’s features from the darkness. His was a gentle face, kind, solicitous, and helpful. The customers at the bank where he worked smiled at that face every day as he helped them fill out their forms for loans and credit line extensions. He was not the sort of person that any of those customers would ever expect to nail-gun someone in place in an unfinished house, let alone to then carve that someone into pieces. But then, that sort never was.
In the moment of ignition the killer drew on his cigarette, eyes closed, concentrating on the pleasure of the heated smoke exploding into his lungs. He was familiar with that feeling. On the nights he worked, it seemed to define him. He did not need to see his victim to know that she still was in place where he had left her, and that she was still watching him. They always watched him.
He exhaled, then opened his eyes, searching for her silhouette exactly where he knew he would find it. Her face stayed in darkness, though the lighter’s lingering flame became two iridescent reflections in the door frame, like the eyes of a deer trapped in a hunter’s flashlight beam. Or the eyes of a wolf, not trapped at all.
“Would you like one?” the killer asked. Another joke. It brought him great amusement in the sanctity of his own house. An old house. Made the way they didn’t make them anymore, with respect for its surroundings.
“No, thank you,” the victim said. “I don’t smoke.”
The killer stopped pacing. No one had ever said that before.
He looked over to the doorframe—a rectangle of lumber set into a skeletal framework of two-by-fours not yet covered by drywall. If he looked slightly to the side, he could just make out the details of his victim in the pale blue light that filtered through the plastic-covered windows from the streetlamp outside. Each of her hands was palm out, bent up at shoulder height. The right one had two nails through its flesh, the meaty part at the base of the thumb. The left one, three. She hadn’t put up much of a struggle, almost as if she hadn’t believed what he was doing. They rarely did. She had simply stared at him, an expression in her eyes almost of wonder that such a thing as this could be happening to her.
That, he had to admit, had bothered him. No one had ever looked at him that way before, either. Fear, yes. Shock, certainly. Even a complete refusal to accept the truth. But wonder? Never. There was something not quite right about this one. Though under the skin, everyone was the same. He knew. He had looked and poked and prodded beneath enough skin to have seen it for himself.
“Tell the truth,” the killer said, searching for an explanation of this one’s behavior, “you knew I was here, didn’t you?”
She waited a few moments before replying, as though she had the luxury of thinking about her options, too. “Yes,” she finally admitted. “I knew someone was here.”
“When? As soon as you came in?” He was always careful, but he would be the first to admit that there were many lessons still to be learned about his avocation. He prided himself on learning something from each of his victims. Tonight, he hoped, would be no different.
“Yes,” she said. “As soon as I came in.”
He marvelled at how strong her voice was. The nails must hurt. Her jaw must ache from the punch he had given her even before he had nail-gunned her. But he could hear none of that pain or disorientation in her voice. He chose an explanation from his list. Shock, he decided.
“How did you know?” he asked.
She made a sound that was almost a chuckle. It made him want to hit her again. “Your cigarettes,” she said. “Their odour was very strong.”
The killer inhaled deeply the air of the house. He could smell newly cut lumber, the dampness of fresh plaster, an unidentifiable mixture of solvents and flux, and, yes, of course, the scent of cigarettes, fresh and acrid. The ones he had smoked as he had waited for her to come, as she always came, each night at midnight.
“Yet you stayed,” he said. “You knew I was here but you still stayed in the house.”
“It is my house,” she said matter-of-factly.
“You could have called the police.” She drove a 1991 metallic brown Continental—dull, inconspicuous, and without style, just like this house she was building. The car had a phone. She often arrived speaking on it. She must be very busy, he had thought as he had stalked her. And very successful, judging from the salary she earned that let her afford a place like this. She was a lawyer, he knew, specializing in trusts and inheritance laws. Lawyers worked long hours. Even, apparently, if their clients were primarily the trust funds and estates of the dead.
“I thought you might be one of the workers,” the victim said. “The tile work in the bathrooms is behind schedule.”
“I don’t think that matters anymore.”
“You never know.”
The killer drew on his cigarette again. “Oh, I know. I always know.” The words left him in a cloud of smoke.
“What do you know?”
He wasn’t used to this at all. She spoke to him as if he might really have been one of her contractors.
“I know what’s going to happen next,” he said.
“And what’s that?”
In the soft silence of the house, in a pause of wind and absence of creaking, he could hear the slow, precise drip of her blood as it fell from her hands to the plywood subfloor beneath her.
“First of all, you’re going to have to die.” He spoke the words in the same way he said, “First of all, you’re going to have to fill out this form,” to his customers at the bank.
“We all have to die sooner or later, don’t we?”
There was such a wistful tone in her voice that for a moment—but only a moment—he wondered if he should let her go. Could it be that somewhere in her short life she had suffered as he had suffered? But of course she hadn’t. Otherwise, why build this monstrosity? Those who had suffered would know better than to make others suffer, too.
“I mean,” he said, “that you’re going to have to die tonight.”
“And why is that?”
He flicked the ash from his cigarette. Leaving ash behind was all right. The police couldn’t get anything from ash. He carried a cigarette case for his filter stub, though. The police could get saliva from a filter stub and they could determine blood type from that. He had seen the technique on television once. He watched a great deal of television precisely for the purpose of learning such things. Sometimes he almost felt that things on television told him what to do. The reflections in Knowlton Nash’s eyeglasses regularly transfixed him as they strobed out their messages, telling him when it was safe to strike. He had come to rely on The National the way sailors relied on the phases of the moon.
“Are you still there?” the victim asked.
The killer, torn from his television reverie, was so angry at the flippancy in her voice that his hand shook as he took the cigarette case from his jacket pocket, making the case clink against the harness he wore with its cleavers and the blades for the scalpels and the bits for the Black & Decker cordless drill.
“You know I’m still here,” he said stonily.
“You were so quiet, I thought you might have left.”
“This isn’t a joke.”
“No, it isn’t.”
He decided he was going to enjoy this one after all. He liked his work well enough, but he always did consider it work, identifying the crime, stalking the criminal, making his plan, all the tedious preparations necessary to cover his trail. It was a laborious process. And then, when they screamed, that really got on his nerves. Exhausted him, actually. But this one, he was going to take his time with her. She wasn’t treating him seriously, and so this time she was the one who was going to learn a lesson.
As if she had read his mind, the victim asked, “Will you answer a question?”
The killer knew what was coming and pulled another cigarette from the pack. She was being more verbose than most, but right about now was when they all started to ask, “Why me?” And, professional and methodical as he was, he had always been ready and able to answer those questions. The criminal always had to be told the nature of the charges against her or him. That was one of the rules. And what was life without rules but madness?
“Go ahead,” he said, and lit another cigarette.
“How can you be sure you can get away with this?”
He blinked, staring at her in the cool pale light. What kind of question was that to ask? She should be pleading by now, telling him about her husband and her children. He always found that type of plea entertaining and had been looking forward to her making one tonight. Especially since he knew she was unmarried. He knew her whole profile from the mortgage application she had submitted.
Mortgage applications were how he found out where the crime was going to be committed, and who was the perpetrator needing punishment. There was a lot to be said about centralized banking and computer storage of mortgage applications. If he had had to rely only on the applications filed at his own branch of the bank, they would have caught him long ago.
“I always get away with it,” he said.
“Always?” She sounded skeptical and he felt another momentary flash of anger. “How many times are we talking about?”
“Thousands,” he intoned. “For I have become death and—”
“No, really.” She cut him off just like that. “How many times have you killed personally?”
He decided then that she wasn’t all that different. He had seen this sort of thing before. She was too caught up in the details of the moment to understand her overall situation. Must be her legal training, he decided.
“Eighteen,” he told her. The real figure was twenty if he counted his parents. But that had been more of a lucky accident than anything he had planned. It had certainly inspired him, though. Who would have thought a Cuisinart capable of such sustained action?
“Eighteen,” the victim repeated, though he couldn’t tell if she were impressed by it, or disappointed. “And you were never even suspected of any of them?”
She was all lawyer, all right. All the more reason for her to die. After all, it had been lawyers who had rezoned this property to make her abomination possible in the first place.
“Why are you asking so many questions?”
“You nailed me to my own house,” she said. “Don’t you think I’m entitled to know what’s up?”
“You’re not entitled to anything.”
“And that’s why you want to kill me? Because I have no rights?”
This was getting out of hand. He moved closer to her until her face was clearly visible to him. The palms of her hands were streaked black with blood in the dim light.
“I am killing you for your crime,” he explained.
At last he had said something that seemed to have an effect on her. He could see a tightness come to her face.
“Which crime?” She asked the question as if there might be hundreds from which to choose.
But only one crime mattered to him. He swept his arms around to encompass the entire half-built structure. “This house,” he said.
“This house . . . is a crime?”
They never understood this part either, but that didn’t stop him from trying one more time.
“This house,” he explained, “is an affront to everything this country stands for. Family values. The traditions and the patterns of the past. Respect for the men and women who—”
“It’s a three-storey, five-bedroom, four-and-a-half bath, single-family dwelling,” she interrupted. “Since when is that an affront to anything?”
The killer sighed. He drew on his cigarette a final time and slipped the butt into his case. He decided he wouldn’t have another until after.
“It is an affront to the home that existed here before you came in with your bulldozer and your backhoe and—”
“Was it your house I bought?” she asked suddenly.
“I don’t live in this neighbourhood.”
“Then I can’t see why you’re upset.”
The killer shook his head in frustration. “Did you see the house that was here before? Did you?”
“I bought it, didn’t I?”
“Only so you could tear it down!”
“So? It wasn’t right for my needs.”
The killer rubbed at his face. “It wasn’t right,” he muttered. “Wasn’t right . . . It was a lovely two-bedroom home, one-storey ranch style, real flagstone walk, nice deck out back looking into a graceful sweep of green lawn, mature trees, and tasteful gardens. Perennials and annuals nicely combined for colour from spring to fall.”
“I don’t have much use for gardens,” the victim said.
“Don’t you understand that that’s the whole blistering point?”
The killer’s words rocketed off the hardwood surfaces of the house as if he had fired a gun into a metal garbage can. It was a dreadful lapse of civility on his part, and he knew it at once.
“I apologize,” he said, trying to control the trembling in his voice. “This is just a job. There’s nothing personal.”
“I’d be fascinated to hear about the gardens,” the victim said.
The killer tensed, wondering if he had detected a hint of sarcasm in her voice.
“No, really,” she continued. “You sound quite . . . forceful on the subject.”
“It is an important subject,” he said. “At my own house, I have the drawings to prove it. Old plans for these neighbourhoods, showing how everything was detailed and laid out—the sidewalks, the sewers, the colours of the shingles, everything. There was a plan. People knew what was right, and they followed it. In these days of moral decay and disrespect for the monarchy, is that so hard to understand?”
The victim shifted her feet. “What about the gardens?”
“I’ve already told you,” the killer said, though he couldn’t be sure if it had been her he had told, or another of his eighteen, or twenty, or thousand victims. “There was a plan for everything. How far back the houses should be from the street. What the ratio should be between the area of the house and the size of the lot. It was all set down. The pattern was laid. And when the pattern is disturbed, black holes swallow galaxies, things go wrong. Do you understand that? Things go wrong?”
“Because I don’t like gardens?”
“Right, that’s it,” the killer said suddenly. She was taunting him, pure and simple. His hands fumbled at his harness. “There is a plan. You come in here, you tear down what’s right, you put up what’s wrong, and all of a sudden oil-slicked birds are dying caught on the spikes of winter like old men held up to the flames of lost mountains and the sun goes the wrong way in skies the wrong colour blue and it’s up to me to make everything right again but I can’t because of people like you!” He pulled the Black & Decker out of its pouch and flipped the switch on it, listening to its battery-powered gears grind to life. Off and on. Life and death. Everything was so simple when the pattern was restored. Everything was so calm.
The victim’s voice had that strange strained quality again. “What’s that supposed to mean? ‘People like me’?”
He checked the leather loops on his harness for the quarter-inch bit. He’d use that on her major joints first. Ankles, knees, elbows. Then he could chop off her hands and let her fall to the floor unsupported. She’d flop around a good bit. They all did. But she wouldn’t be able to get too far in the time it would take for him to prepare the small Tupperware sandwich containers he had brought to hold his souvenirs. He already knew which parts of her he would keep, too. And he’d make sure she was still conscious when he took them. He owed her that much for the way she was treating him.
“I asked you a question,” she said angrily.
He was so startled that she would take that tone with him that he dropped the bit to the floor before he could slip it into the drill. It clattered and rolled into the darkness. “Now look what you made me do.”
“‘People like me,’” she repeated. “What do you mean by that?”
He stopped looking for the bit. He’d have to use his lighter to find it afterwards. He marched up to her, deliberately stamping his feet so she’d know how angry he was, and stopped inches from her face.
“Yuppies and lawyers and sex perverts and people who pass on solid lines and don’t use revolving doors when the sign tells them to and never recycle. People just like you. You don’t understand the balance of the pattern. You destroy what’s right to build what’s wrong.”
“Oh,” the victim said, that hint of sarcasm returning. “People like that.”
“Go ahead,” the killer said. “You’ll be talking out of the other side of your head real soon. And I mean that literally.”
He stepped back from her and pulled the Tupperware containers from the oversized pockets on his jacket, carefully opening each one. Then he methodically laid them out on the floor in a familiar pattern so he could find them easily when speed would be necessary. Properly closed and burped to maintain an airtight seal, the little Tupperware boxes could keep the most perishable things fresh without freezing for days. He had found that they were much better than just plain plastic wrap, especially when it came to unwanted dripping. He didn’t think the Tupperware company would like a testimonial letter from him, though. He wasn’t crazy.
The victim shifted position again, almost as if she could watch him working on the floor in the shadows.
“So you don’t like this house, huh?” the victim said. “What’s so wrong with it?”
“It’s too big for the lot.” The Tupperware formed a mandala that resonated with the secret rhythms of the earth. Fill that one with blood, that one with brain, the others with organs arranged counterclockwise, and whales would never be beached again. It was all so clear when the pattern was restored, the killer knew. As simple as reading an amortization table on the green flickering screen of the computer on his desk at the bank. That screen told him things, too.
“I like the indoors,” the victim said. “What else?”
“It is not in keeping with the design ethic of the rest of the structures in the neighbourhood,” the killer said formally, as if reading off the charges for the accused. “Such big blank walls, windows so few and so small.” He pulled the rest of his tools from his harness, laying them down in the order he would need them. Scalpel first. Followed by the serrated knives for getting through the sternum. It was always a challenge to see if he could do it while the heart was still beating. He was ten for eighteen and was certain he had the hang of it now.
“I like things to look new,” the victim said. “I like things to look modern.”
The killer interleaved his hands and cracked his knuckles. His fingers were long and limber and ready to go. “What’s wrong with the old? What’s wrong with the past?” He held his hands out over the pattern he had made, feeling its warmth like the fire that burned within him. He was ready to ignite. Ready to explode. She would be as ash before the heat of his power.
“I’ve seen too much of the old,” the victim said. She shifted position again. “I’ve spent too much time in the past.”
The killer hefted his biggest cleaver. It would have to do in place of the lost drill bit. Hamstring her. Chop the hands. Then the disassembly. He was nothing if not flexible in his own plans. He stood before her, estimating where her knees were within the boundaries of her silhouette. He prepared himself for her screams.
“You’ve destroyed the past here,” the killer said, passing judgment. “Tear downs are wrong. No one needs a house like this.”
The victim stepped forward from the doorframe. “Perhaps you don’t,” she said. “But I do.”
The killer was motionless, blank like his computer resetting its internal memory. In his mind, accelerating with the onslaught of unchecked panic, he played back what he had seen. She had stepped forward, effortlessly slipping her hands from the grip of the nails as if they had been no more than smoke against her flesh. Or her flesh had been no more than smoke against the nails.
Some final instinct raced through him in that moment, something unlearned from television and the flickerings of cathode screens. His arm began its descent with the cleaver. But her hand caught his wrist with the power of the steel bars that supported the concrete foundation of this house. The cleaver fell. The killer trembled.
“Thank you for this diversion,” she said, staring at him with eyes that clearly now were closer to those of the hunter than the hunted. “So little happens these days that is new to me.” Then the victim smiled to show her fangs and she was on him.
As the killer tumbled down within all the twisted patterns of his madness, feeling his life pulse from him in slow and steady gouts, swallowed by a greater, darker pattern he had never contemplated, he claimed one last shred of pride in knowing that he had learned something more this night: He knew now why she would have no use for gardens, and why the windows of her home would be so small.
Later that night, the killing in the unfinished house was at last completed. Concrete was poured in the patio the next day and no notice was taken of the slight disturbance in the soil beneath it. In time the bathroom tiles were completed, too, and the house was finished and inspected and hooked up to the power grid. And its proud owner, seeing it from the vantage of wings that beat against the night, returned to it before each dawn with pride, settling into her hidden alcove in the foundation of her house, at home in her earth.
And as she slumbered through each day, from time to time she awoke to hear the sound of things changing in her neighbourhood, and would smile dreamily, knowing she was where she belonged in that vast rectangle of Toronto, where the sound of yet another tear down told her she would not long be lonely for her kind.
1 Note from the publisher: All biographical material in this volume is reproduced as-is from the 1992 edition of Northern Frights. As such, it may at times seem out of date to the reader.