The Killing Hour

As I pull away from the side of the road with the engine revving loudly, I’m reminded of Monday morning.

My heart was pounding so hard it sounded like I was knocking at heaven’s door. Things weren’t as sharp as they ought to have been, I was seeing the world through a haze of beer, adrenalin and fear. Not seeing the van parked outside the paddock where there was no longer a dead man was bad enough, but finding it outside Luciana’s house was far worse. It was a sign that I was too late. I pulled in behind it. If I’d left right then things could have turned out differently for Kathy, for all of us.

It was as if Cyris had come back from the dead. The boundaries of my imagination were limited by the gravity of reality, so all I needed to be scared of was reality. But I was getting way too much reality. That’s what the Real World is all about. I climbed from my car, taking the torch. It was no gun, but my tyre iron hadn’t been much of one either. I slowly approached the van and slid open the door, jumping aside in case he was in there. But he wasn’t. The van was empty. It wasn’t a moving mortuary with handcuffs and leather straps hanging from the roof and rails, no signs of blood and hair pooled into the corners and caked into the floor. Sort of like the Scooby Doo mystery van, had Fred and Shaggy moonlighted as sexual predators. For a second all of that was there and more, and then it vanished. Just faded away as my imagination slowly let it go.

I moved to the front. There wasn’t any blood on the seat. I couldn’t understand it then and still can’t understand it now. Cyris should have been dead. I felt cheated and I still do.

The keys to the van were hanging in the ignition. I bent them until they snapped. I left the shaft buried and tossed the remainder beneath the van.

I headed up the driveway. Every light was on and the door was unlocked. I slipped inside and entered the kitchen. I’d hoped to find a knife block with a selection of serial killer blades but there was nothing except empty cups, a spoon, a potato peeler and a spatula. I didn’t want to start rummaging through drawers in case he heard me, so, keeping the torch as my weapon, I started moving around the house. The lounge bisected the hallway at its halfway point. A quick glance to my right showed no movement so I went in that direction. I was sure I’d find Luciana in a bedroom but I was wrong. I didn’t even need to check. The bloody footprints coming from the bathroom told me where she was. They were the sort of prints that suggested somebody had sloshed around and stomped through a lot of blood. They were the sort of footprints you never want to see. I’d been hoping for the best but preparing for the worst. Standing outside that bathroom with bloody prints heading to the adjoining garage, I came to understand that there was no hope at all.

I opened the door and saw things that met my expectations, and others that didn’t. Luciana was in there, but not gagged and tied up and whimpering. She was gagged and tied up, but dead. Her open lifeless eyes locked onto the guilt I deserved for failing her. The gag in her mouth that held in an eternal scream was a torn strip from my T-shirt. Her recently washed hair was wrapped around the taps, stopping her body from sliding further into the bath. Her wrists were tied together, her legs hung over the end of the tub. The dark blood looked like patches of oil. It covered her. It had splashed everywhere. The stake had been driven into her chest.

The walls. The side of the bath. The floor. Patches of the ceiling. Everywhere there was blood. I made it two steps from the bathroom before doubling over and throwing up. I vomited right on top of the bloody footprints.

The bloody footprints gave me a map and a few seconds later I followed them. I knew the house was covered in evidence of my existence: my clothes, fingerprints, hair and skin, saliva on the beer bottle, footprints. I’d have needed to spend days there trying to hide it all, and even then I’d just have left more behind. I trusted that, because I had no criminal record, the police had no way of tracing me.