The Killing Hour

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The ghosts are back. They’re telling me this is no dream. I find it hard to believe.

I’m with Kathy and Luciana and they’re alive again, but in this dream I don’t even know they’re supposed to be dead. Do they know? I try to ask, but the words don’t come out. Kathy is leaning into me, my arm around her as I help her leave the pasture the same way we arrived-alive and in one piece. Her other arm is around my shoulders, her hand digging into my upper arm hard enough to make a line of bruises. We leave Cyris and his tools and my tire iron behind. Kathy knows Luciana is alive because I’ve told her, and she smiles at me knowingly and without words tells me this is soon to be a lie. I don’t tell her she’s wrong.

Luciana jumps from the car the moment she sees her friend and the two lock themselves in an embrace. It’s the embrace of close friends and even though I don’t know either of these women, I wish I was part of it. They hold each other tight and I look away, choosing to stare at my car instead, this car that I’m sick of seeing, this car that I want to trade in, but at the moment is the best damn car in the world.

The two women break their embrace to include me in it, and no, they’re not ghosts, not yet-that’s still to come. For now they’re very much alive, alive and grateful and warm to touch, and when I open my mouth to warn them the words don’t come out. I try to tell them they mustn’t go back home, they mustn’t take me with them, but the dream is a memory and is deciding to stick to what is true, and therefore has only one path it can take.

We pile into the car, Luciana in the back and Kathy next to me. I start driving to the police station. I make it a few hundred yards before Luciana says she’d like to go home first. Kathy agrees. They want to go home. They want to clean up. Put on some fresh clothes.

“You can’t do that,” I tell them. “You can’t wash away the evidence.”

Kathy nods. “That’s true,” she says. “Let’s at least go back to Luciana’s house and make a plan.”

“A plan?”

“We need a lawyer,” Kathy says.

I don’t understand. “What for?”

“Her husband, Frank, is a lawyer,” Luciana says.

I feel jealous at this piece of information. It’s stupid. “I still don’t know why we need one,” I say.

“Benjamin Hyatt,” Kathy says.

The name sounds familiar. It takes a few seconds for it to filter through layers of memory. “The lawyer from the news?” I say.

“Exactly.”

I tell them it’s not the same thing. They agree, they tell me it’s different, but they also tell me the result is the same. The circumstances don’t matter as much as they should when it comes to the law. We still killed somebody, but of course it was more I than we. We debate the merits of going. We debate it for only a minute when Luciana points out we can discuss it back at her house instead. She tells me she needs a drink.

She gives me directions to her house. I try to steer us toward the police station, but the world the dream is set in is set in stone, as much as I try to save their lives now, there can be no changing it. I manage to find the words to tell them they are going to die if we stay on this course. I know this because their deaths were front-page news, and what you read in the papers is true, the dream is real, the memory is real, because we are in the Real World. Even though the words come out, neither Kathy nor Luciana can hear me. It’s like one of those movies where somebody takes you on a journey into the past to see what a dick you’ve been, and nobody can see or hear you.

We drive past thousands of shadows. The roads are empty. A few wisps of cloud float in front of the moon, which is bright white and full. My mind is buzzing. My hands are shaking. I keep being amazed that it’s blood that has been coming out of me and not pure adrenaline. We make conversation, but mostly it’s the two women talking, and mostly it’s me just listening. Parts of the evening already don’t feel like they happened. Other parts are real. Too real. About as real as you can get.

We park the car outside Luciana’s home. It is a single-storey townhouse, and through the haze of a lost day and a half, the image of the house shimmers. I saw this at night and never fully took notice of it because I was too caught up in the people, not the places, so the dream struggles to fix an image. At first the house is made from red brick, but then from white, and the roof is steel at one point, but then tiled-the blanks are being filled in by other houses I’ve seen that look similar. The roses in the garden shimmer, then turn to weed. Nothing here is real. Everything is real.

We lock the car because any neighborhood is a bad neighborhood when you’ve just fought for your life. The back door is ajar and Luciana pushes it open. The air is warm inside. The girls tell me they were abducted from their own homes. I don’t see any signs of forced entry, but maybe Cyris broke in through one of the windows, or maybe the back door.

We all sit down in the lounge, and the moment we do all the conversation dries up. We spend a few seconds looking at each other, then a few more seconds looking at the floor. I have the urge to tell Luciana she has a nice house, but manage to resist it. Kathy smiles. Luciana stands up and says she’s going to take a shower. I tell her that’s not going to make the police happy. She tells me she’s sorry, but she needs to take one. She feels dirty. If she doesn’t shower, she’s going to be sick.

Kathy disappears and comes back later with a bottle of beer that is cold in my hot hands. Tiny beads of condensation start to run down it. I flick the edge of the label with my fingernail. I look around me. The couch and two chairs are leather. Expensive. No claw holes in the furniture or fur on the cushions. The carpet is thick and soft, red one second, blue the next.

Kathy has also carried a bottle of wine in with her and two glasses. She fills each of them up and sips at one and pushes the other toward the chair where Luciana was sitting. It seems surreal to be drinking wine, and I wonder if sauvignon blanc is the wine of choice when you’ve just survived being raped and almost killed.

The dream leads me along-I can’t change it, can’t stop it, can only complete it. Kathy sits down next to me, her knee almost touching my knee, and she cups her glass in both hands and slowly sways her wrists, watching the way the wine climbs up the sides.

“He wanted to take us away so he could hear us scream. That was the only reason he gave. He was going to kill us by driving metal stakes through our hearts.”

I sip at my beer, which I drank a lifetime ago. Casual conversation. Casual drinking.

“Crazy,” I tell her.

“The world is full of crazy people,” she says, and there’s that buzzword again. “If you hadn’t come along who knows what he might have done to me.”

“I don’t want to think about it,” I tell her, but of course I don’t need to. I would see it for real very soon.

“Nor do I,” she admits.

“Does Luciana live alone?” I ask, changing the subject.

She smiles a sad smile and takes a large sip of wine. “Her husband left her for a gym instructor. Hasn’t spoken to him since.”

“Must have been some woman.” My beer is cold and smooth and I’ve never felt like I’ve earned one so much. I’m not really a beer guy. I’m more a gin-and-tonic guy. But this may just be the best beer I’ve ever had.

“Some man,” she says.

“Sorry?”

“The instructor. Some man,” she says.

“Oh.”

She laughs the laugh of somebody who doesn’t know death has looked up her address and is en route.

“So what about you?” she asks. “You’re married I see.”

“Huh?”

“You’re wearing a wedding ring.”

I look down at my hand. I smile. I nod, then I shake my head. Then I stop smiling.

“That complicated, huh?” she asks.

“Isn’t it always?”

“It’s not meant to be,” she says.

“It is in my case. We broke up six months ago.”

“And you still wear the ring,” she says.

“Yeah. I keep meaning to take it off, but you know, it just doesn’t happen.”

“I do know. My marriage is over, but we’re still married. Does that make sense?”

“It does,” I tell her.

She starts to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” I ask, and take another mouthful of beer.

“You’re going to murder me later on tonight, Charlie, and there’s nothing I can do about it-except laugh.”

I almost gag on the drink, surprised at her words, surprised that she knows death is close by, surprised she can make her laughter seem so real. That means the dream can change. That means nothing is set in stone after all.

“We have to-”

She interrupts me. “Really, it’s okay, because neither of us can change it now. I’ll be upset at first-and rightly so. You’re going to kill Luciana too. I really wish you wouldn’t.”

“I’m not going to kill either of you.”

“It’s a done deal, Charlie. Things will change. You will change. Think of it as character development. Now, where was I? That’s right, I was telling you about Luciana’s husband. Charlie? Hey? Are you still with me?”

“I’m still here,” I tell her.

“Charlie?”

The dream starts to fade and I call out to it because it has lied to me, lied about that conversation because it couldn’t have happened. Has it lied about anything else? I cry out, desperate for the dream to continue, desperate to see what I did next, but there’s nothing. I clutch my beer tightly, but can no longer feel the glass beneath my hands. The women are ghosts again, telling me to wake, to wake.

I wake as I woke yesterday, submerged in guilt and aware that the design of life is to be full of useless hopes. I feel more tired than before I fell asleep. I open my eyes and roll onto my side. Jo is staring at me.

“What’s wrong?” I ask her.

“Nothing’s wrong,” she tells me.

“You look. .”

“Look what?”

Guilty, I think, but I don’t tell her. “Nothing,” I say.

“Are you going to untie me or leave me here all day?”

I sit up a little too quickly. The world darkens and for a moment I’m back in the dream-two dead women are waiting there for me-so I grip onto this world as tightly as I can and claw myself from the blackness. I untie Jo. It isn’t dark outside yet and won’t be for another couple of hours. I check the clock and see the alarm would have been going off in twenty minutes. I figure we may as well leave now. We need to get to my house before Cyris does, and I’m assuming he won’t get there until after sunset.

I don’t bother tying Jo back up. I look outside to make sure nobody is around, then open the door and quickly load our suitcases into the car before leading Jo to the passenger seat. She doesn’t struggle or complain.

The rain that came earlier has already disappeared. There are no clouds in the sky and the earlier breeze has died away too. You’d be crazy to think it had even rained. What is remaining is the dream. I can’t shake it. The other thing that is back is the headache. I hang my arm out the window. Jo rolls her window down too. It just keeps getting warmer. At this rate we’re on track for what the old guy on the radio said this morning.

We drive through town, and for the first time I’m able to see past the Garden City postcard image and see Christchurch for what it really is. People are getting killed here every few weeks. Last year it was the Christchurch Carver, then the Burial Killer, there have been bank robberies, revenge killings, people being thrown off roofs. It’s a building statistic that everybody seems to be keeping a secret. It’s becoming a part of modern-day life just like rising gas prices and global warming and terrorism, and we just sit back and accept it because nobody is showing us an alternative.

In the distance, on the Port Hills, the sun glints off house windows. Some reflect the sun and look like they’re on fire. Others look as though a giant tub of glitter has been spilled over them. Teenagers go up there at night in their souped-up cars and pour diesel over the roads so they can do burnouts and impress their friends before killing and dying-these are the boy-racers of the world, our next generation, and sometimes that scares the shit out of me. Some of these kids I teach. Some of them you know are going to make something of their lives-they’re going to do good, they’re going to help people or change the world, provide art and love and make little people with other good people-then there are those destined to hurt, to cause pain, to end up behind bars.

Daytime and the hills are filled with mountain bikers and paragliders and the husks of incinerated stolen cars, patches of landscape cordoned off with yellow police tape where some poor kid is getting peeled off the asphalt. It happens. It happened to one of my students last year. Speeding in cars was all a bit of a laugh. His friends, other students of mine, kept saying he always wanted to die young. That he died doing what he loved. That’s one of the dumbest phrases I’ve ever heard. He may have loved speeding, but I’m sure he didn’t love his car crushing all around him, didn’t love the fireball that burned flesh from bone. He didn’t love screaming. He didn’t die doing what he loved at all.

We reach the highway I was driving down when the Sunday night Old World collided with the Monday morning New World and created the Real World. Just after the turnoff I pull the car over by the pasture with the trees and the grass and the shallow graves that were meant to be. I kill the engine. The hot sun has burnt away most signs of the rain. We have enough light for maybe another hour.

“What are we doing here?” Jo asks. It’s the first time she’s spoken since we got into the car.

I nod toward the trees in the distance. “This is where it all happened.”

“You want to go in there?”

There are only a few cars on the highway behind us. I could probably dig a grave a few yards from the road and nobody would notice. Or care. I wonder how much evidence has been washed away over the last few days. A strong heat wafts through the window and it smells like mown grass. My clothes are sticking to me. Out there is a patch of ground that may or may not be covered in blood. Pieces of clothing are out there too. I had come along the other night, I had been a savior, a knight in shining Honda. Cyris had offered me to join in on the fun, but I wanted a different sort of fun.

“I guess not,” I tell Jo. “I just wanted to show you.”

I start the car and pull away, heading for home. The conversation doesn’t start back up. I slow down a little as I get nearer my street. I head to my house and pull up the driveway.

“I want you to come in with me.”

“What for, Charlie? I thought we were going to sit outside and watch, and watching from the driveway isn’t going to work. We need to be further down the street. Plus we’re still in your car. That’s not really that useful.”

“I just want to check it out. I want to see if he’s been here.”

“Have fun.”

“You’re coming with me.”

“Fine.”

I step outside and circle the car to open her door. She climbs out and I put my hand on her shoulder. I’m expecting her to start screaming, but she doesn’t. I open the gate and the first thing we see is my back door yawning wide open-splintered pieces of wood where the lock once was have twisted away. I think back to Kathy’s door, then to Luciana’s. Neither of theirs were forced or pried open.

“Who did this?” Jo asks.

“Who do you think?”

All the curtains inside are drawn. Did I leave them like this? The air inside isn’t as stagnant as yesterday, thanks to the back door being broken open. Cyris wasn’t thoughtful enough to smash the windows to let the air circulate. Apart from the door nothing seems out of place. The living room is relatively tidy and I can’t see anything damaged.

“We should contact the police,” Jo says, and something in her voice is more convincing than anything else she’s said today, and I realize why that is-up until now she didn’t believe me. “Unless. .” she says, but doesn’t finish it.

“Unless what?”

“Nothing,” she says.

“You were going to say unless I did this myself, weren’t you?”

“No. Of course not.”

“You still don’t believe me,” I say, my voice raising.

“I didn’t say that. You said that.”

“Goddamn it,” I say, shaking my head.

I lead the way into the lounge. I’m expecting to see torn curtains, the TV tipped over, the sofa and chairs shredded, but there’s no evidence he even came in here. I move to the windows. The sun has nearly gone and so has the blue sky. The clouds from this morning are back. They’ve appeared from nowhere and in the distance they look black. Within half an hour it’s going to pour down.

“You have photos of us up on the walls,” Jo says.

“Yeah. I guess I do.”

“Probably not the best thing to do if you’re dating,” she says.

“You’re right,” I tell her. “It’d be stupid if I was dating.”

“You’re still wearing your wedding ring.”

I look down at my hand. Yeah, so I am. I shrug, feeling a little embarrassed.

“Charlie. .”

“What?”

“Nothing,” she says. “Just. . just nothing.”

We pass the bathroom and I think back to when I stood outside the bathroom door at Luciana’s. I remember opening it and seeing the most grisly thing I’d ever seen. Of course that scene would almost repeat itself fifteen minutes later.

There are no corpses behind the bathroom door and no damage either. We check the spare bedroom and once again everything’s intact. We double back and check the bedroom on the right, the room I use as a study.

And here is the evidence of vandalism I was thinking I wouldn’t find. Only this is nothing as menacing as the drains blocked with rags and the faucets turned on full so the house is flooded. This is not as vulgar as large body parts drawn on the walls with paintbrushes. This is time-consuming. It has taken effort.

The computer monitor lies on the floor. Several crevices run the length of the plastic casing and there’s a hole in the middle of it. It looks sad down there. The keyboard has fared no better: it has been twisted and bent and several of the keys have popped off from the pressure and are scattered like misshapen dice. My laser printer has been tossed aside. It has gouged out a hole in the wall and a black puddle of toner has spilled onto the carpet. Of the two bookcases the first has been tipped over so that it lies on an angle with books crushed beneath it, their pages and covers bent and torn. The second bookcase is upright, but the books have been removed and the covers ripped away. A pile of loose pages has been stacked next to it.

Straight ahead beneath the window in a black cabinet is a small stereo system. The covers have been removed from the speakers and the cones pushed in and ripped. The front of the stereo has been smashed in, damaged by the computer lying at the foot of the cabinet. The stereo is on and some of the lights work-most of the display doesn’t. Hissing comes from the speakers, but no music, and the CD player is making a soft clicking noise over and over like a metronome. The TV I have in here is lying on its front on the floor. The antenna, twisted on the floor next to it, looks like a tool somebody would break into a car with. The remote control is next to it. Each of the rubber buttons has been stretched and torn out. The batteries have been removed and crushed with what seem to have been teeth. Behind the TV my aluminum garbage bin has had the sides and lid kicked in, denting any reflection it once offered. Its contents, only paper and plastic, have been littered over the rest of this mess. My small collection of die-cast cars, all classics from the fifties and sixties, haven’t been smashed underfoot, but the doors, the bonnets, the wheels, and the trunk lids have all been removed. The cars are still on the shelves, on the drawers, on my desk, but the broken accessories are in individual piles on the floor, one for different parts, down there like confetti.

I realize I’m holding my breath. I begin to let it out as I slowly turn a complete circle in my room, spotting new damage as I do so. The DVD player beneath my TV has had the tray snapped off. The display on it has been broken and the play button pried off. A lamp is on the floor, the framework twisted and bent, the bulb shattered, the prongs on the plug wrenched sideways.

Jo waits in the hallway asking me over and over what I’ve done. All this destruction around me. This is my room. My personal space. If I snapped right now, if I lost my mind and went completely berserk, there’d be nothing left in here for me to break.

But I don’t snap. As much as I love my books, my cars, my toys, they’re nothing to what has already happened this week. In the scheme of things all this is nothing. These are just items, materials, things that can be replaced. It will cost me money, but that’s all. I can move on. I cannot say the same for Kathy. I cannot say the same for Luciana. I lean down and turn off the stereo. The CD stops clicking and the hissing disappears and the room becomes eerily silent. Even Jo stops talking. I walk through the destruction back into the hallway. It’s as if a localized earthquake hit my room.

I close the door on everything.

If only I had taken a different route home the other night.

I tell myself not to think this way. I try not to tell myself that Luciana may have found somebody who wasn’t going to help and then kill them. I try not to tell myself any of this, but it’s true. What would have happened if I hadn’t come along? Would another game-show contestant have succeeded where I failed?

“If you didn’t do this, Charlie, then it’s time to go to the police. There has to be plenty of evidence here.”

I open up the door to my bedroom. The curtains here are closed. Everything appears normal. I start to close the door. “The only evidence here is that the place has been trashed. It doesn’t show by who.”

“What’s in the box?” Jo asks.

I push the door back open and I see it now, sitting in the center of my bed, plainly in view. I can only imagine what’s inside. The box makes me uncomfortable in a way I can’t describe. I know that whatever’s inside it will rock my world and shatter what small hope I have left, but if I don’t look then I can still hold on to the hope that it’s empty. It’s the Schrödinger Paradox. Schrödinger’s severed head.

“Charlie?”

“I don’t know what’s in it.”

“The hell you don’t. You kept a souvenir, didn’t you? What is it? A head? A heart?”

“I didn’t, it’s not mine, really, I. . I. .” I bite my lower lip hard enough to draw blood. “Let’s go back to the car. He’ll be back. If he looked for me last night he’ll look for me again tonight.”

“What is it, Charlie? What have you done?”

“Nothing. I promise you. I don’t know what’s in there.”

“We have to call the police. It was already out of hand by the time you came to me, Charlie, and now look how much worse it’s gotten. Think about where we’re going to be this time tomorrow if you don’t go to the police.”

“Let’s go,” I tell her.

“To the police?”

“No. We’re sticking with the plan.”

“Charlie. .”

“You said you’d give me the day,” I tell her.

“Not all of it.”

“I just need a little more time. An hour. Two at the most. We watch the house till midnight.”

“That’s almost six hours away.”

“Then I let you go. I promise.”

“You promise?”

“I just said I promised.”

I close the house up. We head outside. Jo seems happy to leave. I’m happy to leave too. We pile into her car. I back out of the driveway. I drive fifty yards then do a U-turn and park against the curb. The shortest drive of my life. I kill the engine and we wait.