The Killing Hour

CHAPTER FIVE

Monday is ending and I’m as scared as hell. The air is heavy with hay fever-I can feel it crawling into the back of my nose. I’ve suffered from hay fever ever since I was a kid. In my teens I had to start getting injections to keep it under control. Things have gotten better over the years, but not better enough to travel without pills. So I pop a couple out from my pocket and toss them onto my tongue and work up enough saliva to swallow them. A light breeze is coming through the open window, but nothing is normal on this normal night because I know what’s really out there. I know about the Real World. I’ve seen some of its secrets, some of its pleasures, some of its evils. I glance at my watch and see I’ve been at Jo’s for an hour. My unfinished coffee is cold and its surface has developed a skin. The ghosts are back, and though I cannot see them I know they’re nearby. They always will be. I stand up and close the window.

Jo’s backyard begins to shimmer. The trees become Dalí’s trees. The grass grows and turns brown. The flowers disappear and become patches of stinging nettle. I’m back in that moment from last night, back to trying to find a woman I didn’t know. I close my eyes and watch it all unfolding, narrating it to Jo along the way. I was halfway to the trees when the woman I was trying to save, Kathy, screamed. I ran forward, the keys in my pocket swinging back and forth. I put my hand down to mute them.

It’s easy to see where I went wrong. My first mistake was thinking I could help. I was still living in the same world where the tiny forest of trees had been planted, but the world they had grown into was the Real World. There were no flashing bells, lights or whistles to signify my crossing over, only darkness and a small forest where Death waited and Evil waited and where I would soon wait with them.

The screaming ended and I didn’t know why. I could hardly see a thing. Twigs snapped beneath my feet. Branches scraped my arms and tried to hold me back, tried to save me. My foot wedged beneath a root and I fell. The tire iron bounced into the darkness. The stillness among the trees carried laughter to me. It reminded me of when I was a kid at school, reminded me how everybody would point and laugh at some kid’s misfortune. It took me a few seconds to realize it wasn’t directed at me. Behind the laughter came soft sounds of whimpering. It was coming from a woman. I couldn’t see her, but I knew how she looked. She would be bloody, her clothes torn, and her skin grazed and ripped. It made me angry. I got to my feet and continued on until I came to the small clearing.

A flashlight leaning on the ground pointed at her. She was fully dressed, bound to a thick tree by thick rope. Her blouse was ripped open, revealing a bra with a broken strap. Her clothes were dirty, like she’d been dragged some of the way here. She wasn’t gagged, but she wasn’t talking either.

The man had long, black, knotted hair. It covered the side of his face and looked like the kind of haircut you’d see on somebody who spent time chained to the trees they were trying to save. But he didn’t have that tan-this guy’s tan was comparable to a skeleton. He was a solid guy, a good six feet tall, or an extremely good five feet tall as my dad would have said. On the ground was a satchel. He crouched and unzipped it. He pulled out a knife. It scared the absolute shit out of me more than seeing Woman One step out in front of my car and Woman Two tied to a tree. Seeing that knife was like having a good dose of reality filled into a syringe and injected directly into the brain. Even though I knew I didn’t have my cell phone, I still patted down my pockets looking for it. That knife was a message. It was telling me I was out of my depth. It was telling me to turn away. It was telling me as bad as everything was, there was still worse to come.

The man, who I would later learn was named Cyris, tossed the knife in the air, catching it by the blade. Then he dragged it from his fist so it sliced into him. He pumped his hand so that blood ran from the cut. Then he walked his bloody fingers over her face. It was the creepiest thing I’d ever seen; it was like watching an artist toying with his canvas. He cut her remaining bra strap and it fell away, exposing the tops of her breasts. I couldn’t help myself-I spent one, perhaps two seconds staring at them. This, of course, I don’t tell Jo.

I was about to move forward when he started speaking, scratching at the side of his face. He asked how she wanted it. Instead of telling him she didn’t want it at all, she shook her head and tried pressing herself into the tree, tried to make herself invisible against the trunk. He grunted something that I couldn’t make out, then he bent down and returned the knife to the satchel. For a moment I felt better about things, but in that same moment I was worried that he was going to pull out something even worse. Which is what he did. He pulled out a metal stake and a hammer. Immediately I had visions of the police coming here tomorrow morning, of this woman somehow nailed to a tree, of me nailed to a tree next to her. I focused on Cyris’s flashlight. It looked like it might weigh about the same as the tire iron I’d lost. I could either go for it or I could stand here and watch Kathy die, or I could leave.

Cyris mumbled again before putting his hands on his hips and thrusting his pelvis forward. I felt an anger I’d never felt before building up inside of me. I wanted to hurt him. A lot. I felt like I was in some bizarre game show and up for grabs were all these prizes: heroism, fame, maybe even a movie. If I failed the fame would be unknown and short-lived, and I wouldn’t even be a dead hero. I would just be dead and the game-show host wouldn’t even pronounce my name correctly.

Then he started laughing. He told her she could scream all she wanted, that he wanted her to scream. He swore constantly. It was then that I heard his name. Cyris. It made me think of country singers and cowboy boots and bad haircuts.

“You need to go to the police,” Jo says, and Dalí’s trees disappear and Jo’s remain. I look at her reflection in the window. I’ve lost track of how many times she’s told me now. I just wish she could come up with a new angle. “You have no choice,” she adds.

I think about the way the bodies were found. I think about racing through the streets of Christchurch. I think about Cyris.

“I can’t,” I say. “They’ll think I did it.”

“Why didn’t you go last night as soon as you rescued the women?”

“Because of Benjamin Hyatt,” I tell her.

She looks at me blankly for a few seconds, and then it comes to her. “But this isn’t anything like that,” she says.

“Isn’t it?” I say. “He’s the reason we got the hell out of that bar six months ago after I hit that guy.”

She doesn’t answer because she isn’t sure. Benjamin Hyatt was in the news a year ago. He was a family lawyer. He was fifty-five years old. He had a wife and two children. He was an upstanding guy. A decent guy. People loved him. One night last year he worked late. He was walking through the parking garage close to midnight. In the car next to his a woman was being raped. Her clothes were lying in a heap on the concrete floor and she was crying. Hyatt didn’t even think about it. He reached into that car and pulled the rapist out. They fought. But the guy’s pants were down around his ankles and he didn’t have great balance. Hyatt used that to his advantage. Plus Hyatt used to box a little when he was younger. So he boxed now. He boxed at the guy and knocked him out, only the guy hit his head when he went down and slipped into a coma. The following day the police charged Hyatt. It was their view that Hyatt should have only done his best to contain the rapist, and should not have continually hit him. They said that Hyatt, in a fit of rage, decided to teach the guy a lesson. They said he had created a confrontation, when all he needed to do was call the police. Then the rapist died. The charge was upgraded to murder. Hyatt went to court. The public was on his side, but the law was not. Hyatt had overstepped his boundaries. He had used his fists as weapons, and he had killed a guy. The police wanted to make a point. You couldn’t go around acting like a superhero. Hyatt was sentenced to nine years in jail, and would be up for parole within five. The problem was Hyatt’s boxing skills that got him into jail couldn’t get him out of the many situations jail offered. He was beaten to death two days into his sentence.

“That’s why we didn’t go. We thought he was dead and, well, none of us was thinking straight. Did we make the wrong decision? Of course we did. But at the time Benjamin Hyatt was all I could think about. I was sure, I was so sure that if we called the police I was going to end up in jail. Or I’d be put into custody while they figured it out. And bad things happen to people in custody,” I say. “We needed to think about it. We wanted to get a lawyer first.”

“And now? Why don’t you go now?”

“Because now they’re not going to believe me.”

“They’re not going to put you in prison, Charlie. Not if you didn’t do this.”

“Won’t they? Come on, Jo, if they can’t find Cyris, then that only leaves me.”

“So what are you saying? That you want to find Cyris?”

“I’m not saying that,” I tell her, though I have been thinking that. Problem is I wouldn’t know how to go about it. “But he killed each of them in their own house, and I was in both those places too. They’re not going to believe me.”

“You think I do?”

“Don’t you?” I ask, turning toward her.

Jo looks down at her coffee cup. It’s the kind of body language only a blind person could miss. Her cup is empty, but there must be something awe-inspiring in it because she doesn’t look up at me for another minute.

“You don’t believe me,” I tell her.

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then say you believe me then.”

“A year ago I would have believed you,” she says.

“Jesus, how can you make a leap from me beating up some guy who jammed his hand up your dress to thinking I’m capable of murdering two women?”

“I’m not making that leap at all,” she says, looking angry. “I’m saying that you’re not completely the man I thought you were.”

“I. .”

“I don’t doubt you had something to do with their deaths.”

I move back to the sofa. My coffee hasn’t got any warmer. “Something to do with their deaths. I can’t believe you,” I say. “I can’t fucking believe you would say that.”

“What am I supposed to think? You’ve come here out of the blue, you’re covered in cuts and bruises, you tell me you were with two dead women. If everything happened the way you said it happened, then you’d have gone to the police,” she says, summing up problem number one. I know problem number two won’t be far away. “That’s what an innocent man would do. So if you really are that innocent, then why are you deliberately making the wrong choice?”

Ah yes, the Real World. A world full of ghosts and monsters-and choices. I can’t go to the police because they’ll think I did it. Hell, even Jo thinks I did it. Cyris drove a metal stake into Luciana’s chest and then into Kathy’s, he killed each of them in their own homes. Somewhere during the night his insanity rubbed off on me. I slam my coffee cup onto the table so that its cold contents splash me. Jo jumps. “Are you deaf? They’ll put me in prison!”

“Calm down, Charlie.”

“Calm down? I am calm!”

“If you won’t call the police, I will,” she says, getting up.

I put both hands out in front of me as if to ward off her suggestion. “I’m sorry, Jo, I’m sorry,” I say, trying my best to sound it even though I’m not. “Please, don’t call them, okay? Please, not yet. I’m just. . fuck, I don’t know. Stressed. Confused. I mean hell, everything I know I should have done I didn’t do because. . I mean. . well, people can’t know what they’re going to do until they’re in that situation, and last night was. . was about as tough a situation as it can get. Please, just let me convince you.”

“Of what, Charlie? That this Cyris of yours exists? That you killed him too?”

And there lies problem number two. There lies the biggest reason for her doubt. I killed Cyris. I killed him with my bare hands and somehow that didn’t stop him. Didn’t stop him at all. Not in the Real World because there bad things happen. In that world bad people like Cyris can come back from the dead.

Of course I’m enough of a realist to know that’s not true, because the dead stay dead and that’s the way it’s always been and that’s the way the living prefer. I didn’t kill Cyris, I only wounded him, and in the process he became unconscious. I don’t know. Maybe he just played possum. I wonder what the outcome would have been if that knife had gone a few inches higher or lower. Would I be sitting here with cold coffee on my hand? Would I be sitting with Kathy and Luciana instead?

“He was a monster,” I tell her.

“Repeat after me, Charlie. There are no such things as monsters.”

I shake my head. “I’m not saying he came back from the dead. I’m just saying he’s a monster. Not the movie kind, but the real kind. Monsters are real people, Jo.”

“I’m calling the police,” she says.

“You can’t.”

“Just watch me.” She heads toward the phone.

I stand up. “Don’t, Jo. At least just let me walk out of here.”

She turns around. Puts her hands on her hips. She stares at me, and I was married long enough to Jo to recognize when she’s making a big decision. I say nothing. It takes her a few seconds, and in that time she stares hard at me before coming to her conclusion. “Okay, Charlie, you win. Just don’t involve me any further.”

“Come with me,” I tell her.

“What? Why the hell would you suggest that?”

I go to answer, but really I don’t know. It just came out.

“Leave, Charlie. Now.”

“Coming here could have put you in danger,” I say, and I say it as a reason for her to come with me, but when the words come out I realize they’re true. “Cyris will find me, and if he finds you he’ll kill you,” I say, the words urgent now. “No matter what you think, he is a monster, Jo.”

“Then I’m no safer with you, am I?”

“Are you going to call the police?”

“You’re a mess. You’ve taken a beating, your hands are shaking, you keep shouting.”

“I’m not shouting!”

“You are. Look,” she says, “why don’t you go home and we can discuss it tomorrow, okay?”

“I’m not shouting.”

“Okay, okay. Please, I want you to leave.”

“I’ll leave, but you have to promise me you won’t call the police.”

Hands back on hips. Another decision process. “I won’t.”

“Won’t promise or won’t call them?”

She tilts her head and stares at me, tightening her lips into a thin line.

I hold my hands out in front of me, this time trying to ward off her anger. “Okay. Look, I’m sorry, I really am. I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m going to leave.”

“I think that’s best.”

Not knowing what else to say, I end up thanking her for the coffee, which, in the context of the evening, feels like an incredibly dumb thing to do. She walks me to the door. I stand on the doorstep and look back at her. Maybe she’s right. Maybe the police would understand. But I’m picking they wouldn’t. I’m picking if I walk in there and tell them what I told Jo I’ll never walk back out. Everybody knows the police have a way of making people look guilty when they’re not. Everybody knows innocent people go to jail, innocent people who think the justice system will work for them, innocent people who lose ten years of their life for something they didn’t do.

Only running away isn’t the solution either.

“Charlie?”

What I need to do is find Cyris. That’s the solution. It’s like what Jo said earlier. If I can do that, then the police will know what really happened. It makes sense. Perfect sense. But how?

“Charlie?”

Put an ad in the paper? Put up a blog online? Social media? And if I did find him, what then? Would I really go to the police? I think about what I did to the man who touched Jo. What would I do to the man who killed those two women?

“Charlie!”

“What?”

“If you’re not going to go to the police at least get checked out by a doctor, okay? Despite everything, I’m worried about you.”

Worried about me. Yeah, sure she is. Worried enough to chuck me out without helping. I rub the huge bump on my forehead and instantly regret it. I nod slowly, then, feeling incredibly alone, I walk down the driveway to my car.