The Killing Hour

I head home. Last time I saw it the cardboard box had been taped closed. Now the sides have been hooked beneath each other. I don’t look inside. Kathy deserves to be buried in one piece but I can’t return whatever is in the box. I can’t walk into the crime scene and place it on her bed. Can’t take it to the morgue. Can’t put a stamp on it and mail it in.

These thoughts disgust me, but what can I do? Kathy is dead and for her to rest in peace her death needs to be avenged. That’s all. It doesn’t matter where her body ends up. I find a plastic bag and put the box inside. I drop the bag with my bloody shorts in there too. Then, turning the lights off, I stumble through the house and into the garage. I find a shovel.

My house is on the corner of a cul-de-sac. My backyard borders another house but behind that are huge paddocks. To get there I have to walk into the street and to a dirt driveway angled up between two homes. It’s nearly five o’clock in the morning, but I still pause to scan the neighbourhood. No people. No lights. Nobody to care what’s happening to me. I head up the driveway. The wet ground sucks at my shoes.

The paddock is broken up into sections, different vegetables growing in each. Wire fences run between them as if the owners are worried the cabbages are going to get up and mingle with the potatoes. Long dirt roads trail off into the distance. Dozens of irrigation pipes create a maze that leads to the nearby river. Iron sheds with spots of rust on them house farm equipment. The puddles in ruts I’m walking over are deep, but there’s enough light for me to avoid them.

I decide not to bury the box anywhere in the paddock. The dirt is turned over all the time. Crops are planted then reaped. Tractors dragging large ploughs bite into the ground. One day it’s pulling up carrots. The next it’s decomposing flesh.

The dirt road I’m following keeps the paddocks to my right. To my left the land is bordered by a long ditch with a small creek running through it. A dozen or so trees space out the distance. I walk for ten minutes, the rain no longer feeling cold against my skin. I’m numb inside but not because of the weather. I pass more trees, and I wonder what could be buried beneath them. Just before the creek sweeps into the river, where the road turns right to move along the top end of the paddock, there’s a small bank. I climb down and stand a metre from the creek. I figure this is as good a place as any.

I start digging. My cold fingers send slivers of pain up my arms, but I like the pain – I deserve it. I try to concentrate as the hole starts to grow. I dig down half a metre before taking a break, standing in the hole up to my knees, leaning on the spade, sweating and shivering. The rain is becoming heavier again. I carry on digging as a brown swimming pool appears at my feet. I try shovelling faster.

A shaft of lightning hums across the sky. It lights up the hole and the creek and the plastic bag beside me, and it lights up my body. I’m covered in dirt and I’m digging a grave. I must be insane. I’ve come into the night only an hour or two before dawn, carrying a body part and a tool with which to hide it.

I lean on the shovel and look into the creek as the following thunder chases the lightning. I suddenly realise that I’m not alone. I can sense her watching, but she says nothing as I slowly push back off my shovel and continue to dig. I last less than a minute before I sit down on the edge of the hole, close to tears.

‘I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.’

‘What are you doing, Charlie?’ Kathy asks.

‘I’ve no idea. Things have got out of hand. I’m even seeing ghosts.’

‘Is that what I am?’

I shake the water from my hair and wipe a muddy palm back through it. ‘I don’t know. Are you?’

‘Don’t bury me, Charlie. Go to the police.’

I stand up again and dig some more. All I’m doing is throwing mud to one side while more mud runs back in.

‘Charlie?’

More lightning, more thunder, and it sounds like I have angered some vengeful god. As the sound rolls across the paddock the walls to my hole – and my sanity – start to cave in. At a metre, my arm muscles exhausted, I decide the hole is deep enough. I struggle out. Kathy takes a step back as I pick up the bag.

‘Is this really the way to go?’ she asks.

‘You’re not really here,’ I say, and she isn’t. She’s only in my decaying mind. Ghosts aren’t real, they don’t exist, and I don’t need Kathy to deny this. In this moment, in the Real World, I’m suddenly unsure of what is real. God, life, death, misery – does any of it matter? Of course it does. Sometimes it’s just difficult to see how.

Tears dissolve on my face like acid rain. I wipe them away with muddy fingers, then turn my face to the hole and throw the plastic bag in.

‘Why did you let us die?’

‘You don’t believe that,’ I say.

‘What do you believe, Charlie?’

‘I believe that bad things happen for no reason. I really tried to save you.’