Paul Cleave - The Killing Hour

“I was right about a lot of things, wasn’t I, Charlie?” Kathy asks, and she’s walking along with me now, gliding easily through the trees. She’s wearing shoes that stay clean. It’s a neat trick.

“You were right,” I admit, keeping my voice low so Landry doesn’t hear me. She starts to nod.

“Do you remember what I told you?” she asks.

I remember. “You told me you owed me everything. We were heading away from Luciana’s house. It couldn’t have been long before she died.”

“Oh, it wasn’t that quick, Charlie. You dropped me off home before she died. Do you remember what we were discussing?”

“We were heading toward your house, we were talking about going to the police. I remember driving past the pasture and you pointing out the black van parked opposite. Seeing it gave me the creeps. We both looked toward the trees as we went by.”

“Dalí’s trees,” she says.

“Dalí’s trees.”

“What the hell are you on about?” Landry asks, but I don’t answer. I keep walking, scraping my hands and arms on the branches, shivering hard.

My mind tries drifting to a time where the world was safe and we didn’t know that Evil was a time bomb waiting for us. Then it drifts far enough so I’m no longer walking through the trees, but turning left into Tranquility Drive and Kathy is no longer a ghost, but flesh and blood that was warm to touch. Flesh and blood that wore the same clothes she was attacked in, flesh and blood that hadn’t showered. All I knew about Tranquility Drive was I couldn’t afford to live there.

Looking at her house, I knew Kathy was rich. That was fine by me. The house was a two-storey place, a tad more mansion than town house. Maybe ten years old. Dozens of shrubs dotted the front section and because of the lingering summer there were still lots of flowers in bloom. At that time of night they were black flowers. The trees were black too. Like the birds sitting in them.

This is the house I wanted to live in, with Kathy. All my life I had imagined backing out of my driveway into a neighborhood where Mercedes cars littered the street like cheap Toyotas. Kathy was the woman I wanted to be kissing goodbye as I left for work in the morning on my way to being a brain surgeon or an astronaut instead of an underpaid high school teacher who is the enemy of dysfunctional teenagers. Only it wasn’t really Kathy I wanted to be kissing goodbye to, it was Jo, but Jo was no longer around.

I walked her inside. She never did get hold of her husband.

“He was off screwing some bimbo,” her ghost says, “and I told you he would be back at some point for some fresh clothes before work. You were glad to hear I was having marital difficulties.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” I say, but something about it bugs me. The same something that bugged me when I read the newspaper this morning.

“It wasn’t your fault. You helped me check the house and it was nearly five o’clock when I walked you outside. I wrote your name and number down. You left then, and I was dead.”

“You weren’t dead.”

“And you’re splitting hairs.”

I walked backward down the driveway to my car, watching her watching me. We waved then she stepped inside. I heard the door lock and I would never again see her alive. I climbed into my car. I was yawning and dozing, just driving along with the windows down and the breeze coming through, and I had this feeling of normality that made me feel ill. When I drove past the pasture I already had an expectation of what I would see-Cyris stalking through the grass toward the road.

What I saw was worse. When I drove past the pasture. .

“The van was gone,” Kathy finishes, and then she’s gone too.

I break between two trees and see the flashing movement of the river flowing quickly over and around large round boulders, the water white and violent. The rain is hard here, unsheltered by the trees. Huge drops pluck the dirt next to the river, sending out small splashes of mud. It hammers on my head and shoulders and drives those angry needles of ice deeper into my soul. Landry’s footsteps are loud behind me, and each time I wonder if I will hear another. It would have been warmer had he just shot me back at the cabin. All this would be over and I wouldn’t have to be scared or talk to ghosts.

“Hold it there,” Landry says. I stop walking and study the landscape. Black trees, black ground, black water, black sky. This is what color the end must be. “Turn around slowly.”

I turn. The rain lands on his Kiss the Cook cap and runs off the brim. Does he have the apron to match? I can’t stop shaking. Water runs down my face. I don’t bother wiping it from my eyes. “Nice place,” I say, quietly. Too cold to be loud. Too scared to be funny.

He comes forward. “We’re nearly there, you know?”

“Where?”

“The end of the line. You want to know how I know about this place? Not about the cabin, you already know that, but about this place right here.”

“You walked the crime scene?”

“Yeah, but we wouldn’t have come this far. Only we had to. Because the girl in the bathtub wasn’t our man’s first victim. She was his second. He’d killed his first years ago. This land had been in his family for generations. He led us here. We found his first in the caves behind you.”

I don’t like the idea of taking my eyes off the weapon, but I follow his gaze and aim the flashlight where he’s pointing. The beam is swallowed up by the mouth of a cave that’s been there forever.

“Holes in there are so deep you can drop a stone and never hear it land.”

“And a body?” I ask.

“It took us two days to find her and that was only because we were looking. Nobody will ever look for you. Not out here. Right now you have a choice. Do you want to meet your maker with a clear conscience or a guilty one?”

He takes aim. I can hear my heart beating, my stomach rumbling. My jaw throbs. My neck aches. I can hear the river and the rain. My bowels are clenching. My bladder is trying to let itself go. I feel like I want to yawn, scream, run, do a thousand push-ups. I suddenly have all this energy that deserves to have a chance of release. I deserve the chance to be a better person, to be somebody who will be missed.

And even though I knew he was bringing me out here to die, I never knew it, not really, I always thought something would happen. Some kind of intervention, divine or otherwise. I picture my cold, dead body lying on this cold, dead ground, and that’s exactly what’s going to happen in five or ten seconds. Jo will go to the police and maybe they’ll figure out what happened to me, or maybe they won’t. In which case I’ll have a funeral with an empty coffin. I want people to say they miss me. I want a community in shock. I want the kids I teach to be disappointed I can teach them no more.

I think about my parents. About my friends. This is going to be hard on them.

I think of Jo and wish I could tell her how I feel about her. I wish I could say I regret what happened last night, that I regret what happened six months ago.

I’m standing in the rain beneath a storm-clouded sky, among the trees and the mud and the rocks, and this is no place to die.

I point the flashlight at his face, but the bright light doesn’t blind him.

“Goddamn you, Feldman. And God forgive me.”

I close my eyes. “Go to hell,” I tell him. I can feel my legs giving way. It’ll be a race between me collapsing and him shooting me.

He pulls the trigger and the gunshot is like thunder and I start to scream.

The wet ground vibrates waves of cold into my spine as I lie on my back, looking up at the dark clouds as water flicks into my eyes. Death has chilled me. I can hear myself screaming. I clutch my hands to my chest and can feel the blood soaking upward, warm blood. It oozes between my fingers like water and slips down the sides of my chest like water, and several seconds later I realize it actually is water, and at the same moment I realize it isn’t me screaming. I sit up and point the flashlight ahead of me. Landry is swaying back and forth, trying to keep his balance. The shotgun is in his right hand, the barrel pointing to the ground. His left hand is reaching around to the back of his head. Something moves behind him.