Paul Cleave - The Killing Hour

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.