The Killing Hour

‘I didn’t kill them,’ I say. ‘I really didn’t kill them.’


Kathy is ignoring Landry because in her world he never existed and that’s the fundamental problem with homicide cops – it’s already too late when you need them. Kathy stares at me with remorse and pity. She has a drink in her hand. It’s the one she had before I showered to wash away the blood. She seems uninterested in the cabin. The cold doesn’t seem to affect her. The back of my neck is alive with goosebumps.

‘I could smell his skin. So vile. Like he hadn’t bathed in days. Strange, huh? I was choking on his odour. I was sure he had plans for me but right at that moment the smell was all I could think about.’

‘He broke into Kathy’s bedroom and abducted her,’ I say.



‘You killed her first?’

‘He moved his knife to my throat. It trapped the smell and the taste in there. I was desperate for air and was starting to black out. Then he was promising me if I made a sound he would kill me. His eyes were so dark. So intense. I knew then that this man was pure evil. Have you ever seen pure evil, Charlie?’

‘I once saw an episode of Melrose Place.’ Kathy’s ghost smiles, and Landry looks at me as if I’ve completely lost it. Maybe I have.

‘He told me his name was Cyris and I should remember it because I’d be calling it out over and over in the night. He told me to nod if I could remember that, so I nodded. I was so afraid and I thought he was going to kill me right there, but instead he backed away and tossed me some clothes. I couldn’t do anything at first except cough and spit. He ordered me to dress and I was happy to.’

‘Answer the goddamn question,’ Landry says. ‘Who’d you kill first?’

‘Cyris. He was the first one to die.’

‘Tell me about the women. Tell me why you killed them.’

‘Yes, Charlie, tell us why,’ Kathy says, surprising me because it means she knows about Landry.

I close my eyes to try and hide from her and what I see is Cyris in the trees, Cyris with the metal stake and the knife, Cyris asking me if I wanted to join him. When I open my eyes I’m expecting to see Kathy has gone but she hasn’t. She pours herself another invisible drink, then leans against a bar that is nearly two days ago and at least a hundred kilometres away. All the moments from the morning I awoke into the Real World emerge: the guilt, the headache, the nausea, the talking with ghosts.

‘They weren’t meant to die,’ I say. ‘Don’t you see? I saved them. I saved them.’

‘From Cyris. So the letter says. What happened, Feldman? Tell me about them. Tell me how you met them. Tell me what they did to make you kill them. Tell me.’

Kathy looks down at her ghostly feet. They are bare and I wonder if she can see the floor through them like I can. ‘I didn’t know he was going to take me away to hear me scream. I would have fought more had I known what my fate was going to be.’

‘He took them from their houses to torture them,’ I tell Landry. ‘He tied them to trees.’

‘In the paddock you wrote about.’

‘Things like this only happen to other people,’ Kathy tells me, and she starts to fade.

‘He forced her into a van, and when he took her to the paddock that was when she found out Luciana had been kidnapped too. She said that scared her the most.’

Kathy is nodding slowly, agreeing, fading quickly now.

‘She said she knew at that point she was going to die.’

I try to imagine the terror she must have felt as he dragged her through the trees, the horror when she saw her friend. My fear of walking through those trees in the darkness later had been nothing in comparison. What would it be like to know you were being taken to your death? How would you feel knowing the rest of your short life would be lived out in immense pain and cruelty? I shudder at the thought of putting myself into her position. This is electric chair material. Of being taken down a corridor there is no coming back from. I look at Landry’s bag and think of the Bible inside. Could anybody in these situations really find comfort from one?

‘He told her she was a mistress of evil. She said it was like being attacked by two different people. One moment he was calm, the next he was in a frenzy – only she was sure the frenzy was an act. She was positive he was calm the whole time.’

‘An act? Even if I believed another man killed them why would I believe he was acting in a frenzy just for the sake of acting? He had no audience.’

‘It makes perfect sense.’