The Killing Hour

by Paul Cleave

  I pick up the cigarette and flick it toward the fireplace. I pause, trying to think of an action or a word that will help me, but he pushes me onto the small porch by jabbing me with the shotgun. I put one foot forward and start walking. When I step down onto the mud it feels like I’m being acupunctured with needles that have been kept in the freezer overnight. The cold wind drives those needles deep into my flesh. My wet clothes flap against my skin. It’s the coldest I’ve ever been in my life, and the realization I will never be warm again makes me want to cry, but I hang on to those tears. I don’t want Landry to see them. Fuck him.

  He orders me forward by prodding me again then turns on the flashlight and tosses it to me. I miss the catch, and have to stoop down to pick it up. I think of it as a weapon. A useless one, but a weapon all the same. He directs me into the belt of trees. Damn trees. I’ve seen more trees this week than in my entire life. I can’t see exactly where I’m supposed to be heading.

  “Stop stalling, Feldman, I’m sure you can find a path in there.”

  I point the flashlight into the inky blackness, spotlighting branches and leaves, but not a whole lot more-certainly no dirt path. I head forward anyway, figuring Landry will stop me if I’m too far off the track. I step between a couple of birch trees, struggling to cover my face from the branches that claw at me like dirty fingers. I manage two steps before becoming lost. Can’t see the forest for the trees. Well, in this case I can’t see the forest for the dark. The ground turns from mud to hard-packed dirt and roots. I move the flashlight around and start to walk slower, not to preserve time, but in order to concentrate on each footstep.

  “You’ve got the wrong man, Landry.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Shouldn’t you at least hold off killing me?”

  “I’m a busy man.”

  “You could just tie me up. At least until you have a few more facts.”

  “I’ve all the facts I need.”

  “You’re wrong. Tie me up and when you find you’re wrong I promise not to tell anybody.” I really do promise it. The river nearby is getting louder. “Think about what you’re doing.”

  “I am thinking. I’m thinking about your next victim.”

  I don’t know how far we’ve come. Obviously Landry doesn’t want my body found near the cabin. I’m thinking he has a nice location out here for me. Maybe a big hole. The colder I get the more I lose any comprehension of time. It could have been ten minutes now. Or fifteen. We could have walked a couple of miles. Kathy told me that time and distance slip away when you’re being marched through a bunch of trees toward your death. Well, she was right.

  “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 be
am 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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  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.

  Or someone.

  I dig my feet and hands into the slippery ground and push upward. I stand and run as hard as I can at Landry. He sees me, raises the gun, and pulls the trigger. My eyes flare red as the blood I’m about to lose surges past my brain, but the gun only clicks because it hasn’t followed the sound of a double crunch. That means even though there’s still ammo in the shotgun there’s no shell in the chamber-I’ve seen enough movies to know this. So nothing happens except this small clicking noise, which is the sweetest sound in the whole world. I hit him at full speed, first lowering my head and shoulder to make the most of the impact. I connect with his chest; the flashlight pops from my hands as the gun pops from his. My momentum drives him into a tree. His head snaps back into it.

  I push myself away. The flashlight shines in my eyes for a few seconds before moving over to Landry. He looks totally out of it. If he’s really lucky I won’t turn the shotgun on him. If he’s really lucky we won’t leave him out here to freeze to death.

  “I’ve never been so happy to see you,” I say, turning toward Jo.

  “Don’t get happy yet,” she says, crunching the shotgun and pointing it at me. It wobbles in the air as she tries to control it. She’s never held a shotgun before, but the mechanics are simple enough to figure out-pump, point, and shoot. She bends down and picks up the flashlight, which was sitting next to the rock she hit Landry with. She moves the beam onto my face, making it difficult for me to see her. I want to hug her, but I can’t because of the handcuffs. And she’d probably shoot me.

  She turns the flashlight back to Landry. Blood is running down the side of his neck and down the left side of his forehead. He’s trying to lift a hand up to his head, but it keeps flopping back down to his side.

  “We need to help him,” she says.

  “Do we?”

  “Who is he?” she asks.

  “His name is Detective Inspector Landry,” I say, “and Detective Inspector is a man who has finally seen too much in this world and wanted to put it right. Except in this case he got it all wrong.”

  Landry sags a little more, tips onto his side, and ends up with his face in the dirt. I don’t know how calm I’m sounding, but Jo is looking at me as if I’m the one who’s got it all wrong. Perhaps I sound flippant, even dismissive. Yeah, just another trip into the woods. Yeah, just another psycho.

  “He must have been really sure you did it to have brought you out here,” she says.

  “Is there something you want to ask me?”

  “Tell me again that you’re innocent.”

  “I’m innocent.”

  “Tell me why Detective Inspector Landry didn’t think so.”

  “Because he’s a madman,” I say. I look down at him. He looks blankly back at me, still trying to hold on to consciousness. Water and mud are splashing over his cheeks.

  “Thanks for following,” I say, looking back to Jo. “And thanks for saving my life. How did you get free?”

  “Does it matter? You’re just lucky I decided to follow you to the police station.”

  “Some police station,” I say, looking around.

  “Lucky I followed anyway, huh? You’d be dead right now if I hadn’t. It was pretty obvious what was going on. Problem is I didn’t have my phone. I had no choice but to follow.”

  “You had a choice,” I tell her.

  “Don’t make me regret it. Come on, let’s get him onto his feet before he ends up dying out here and then I’m in the same situation you thought you were in.”

  The gun moves around in her hands; she’s either shaking from the cold or from the shock of saving my life. I check Landry’s pocket where I saw him put the keys. So far he’s had nothing to say since being struck twice in the head. I like him this way.

  The lock seems smaller than the key as I try to work the handcuffs. My hands are shaking so much that the tip of the key keeps chattering against the bracelet. Jo isn’t offering to help. I slide the key around until finally it fits into place. Then I go through the same drama with the second bracelet. When I’m free I snap them onto Landry’s wrists. He doesn’t complain. He’s starting to groan. He folds his hands over the top of his head. He seems to have forgotten where he is, either that or he doesn’t care anymore. He stares past me at the cave where it took a team of people two days to find a dead girl. I put the keys into my pocket.

  “We need to get him some help,” Jo says.

  “This guy just tried to kill me. I’m not taking him anywhere.”

  “We’re taking him to a hospital, Charlie, and then we’re going to the police.”

  I look at her face and then at the gun and I like this combination a hell of a lot better than the last one. “I’ll be charged with murder.”

  “If you’re innocent you won’t be. Anyway what sort of murderer would bring a policeman to a hospital under these circumstances?”

  “So you believe me.”

  “Let’s just say I’m more open to strange things happening.”

  “Glad you’re on my side,” I say.

  “I’m not, but if we leave him here he’ll die.”

  Then we should leave him here. I start to help him to his feet, but his legs are like jel
ly. He can’t take any of his own weight and I can’t take all of it. I’m weak from the cold and it’s going to be hell carrying him back to the cabin. If he dies on the way I’ll dump him where he lands and hope Jo doesn’t shoot me for it.

  “You’re sure you don’t want to carry him?” I ask.

  Jo doesn’t answer.

  “Jo?” I hoist Landry onto my shoulders. I stagger at first, trying not to slip across the wet ground. My thighs start to burn. Landry has to be at least ninety kilograms. If lifting him is this hard, carrying him will be impossible. It’s time to revisit this whole idea. Landry made his bed, he can sleep in it. It’s not my fault the sleeping will be in the middle of the woods.

  “I’m not sure I can do this,” I say, speaking louder as I turn around.

  “You’ve got that right, partner,” the tall figure says. He’s wearing black clothing, has dirty skin, long black hair, a scraggly beard, bushy sideburns, and he’s standing next to Jo.

  This is the man who I thought I had killed.

  This is the monster in a world that, according to Jo, doesn’t have monsters.

  Jo doesn’t have the gun anymore. Instead now it’s pointing at her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Watching, watching, Cyris is waiting and watching, yeah, yeah, things are working out well, really well, and the rain keeps on falling in the forest, but he doesn’t mind the rain, he loves the rain, the rain is very cool, except for when it’s not. He thinks of a time when he went swimming and saw a dog drown, his dog, the damn thing was old and couldn’t swim worth a damn, but she sure could sink like a motherfucker. Thinking of the wet fur makes him start to itch. He can’t stop wondering what color the inside of his soul would be-then wonders if he has one at all. Would it be blue or gray?

  He thinks about how that wet dog felt beneath his fingers as he held it down. If the dog could talk it would tell him to look out for other dogs because sometimes they can be rabid, sometimes they can really tear you apart. Thinking of the wet dog reminds him that it’s raining. He hates the rain. He’s wet and he’s hungry, but this doesn’t worry him because he’s entertained, yeah, yeah, entertained by this hilarity, because all of this is nothing but funny. It wasn’t supposed to be, it was supposed to be simple, nice and easy, and it has become nothing but. People say if you don’t laugh you’d cry. In his case he likes to laugh and make other people cry. Then he likes to do worse to them. The shotgun is in his hands and it has a nice weight too, what he used to think of back in the army as a life-ending weight. Whether he uses it or not is up to the weatherman. Everything is up to the weatherman and that makes Cyris jealous. It makes him angry because the ability to choose who lives and dies should be up to him.