The Killing Hour

The garage door was open and the handle smeared with blood. Cyris had stolen Luciana’s car. Snapping the keys in the van had been pointless. He was out there driving to Kathy’s house, pursued only by the dawn and his enthusiasm for killing. Both would catch him. I fished Kathy’s number from my pocket. The search for a phone began and ended what felt like an hour later. Each lost second fell heavily on me. Each breath I sucked in was one less for Kathy. I dialled while running outside to my car. I nearly lost control because of my sweaty hands, and the result was a beeping that told me I’d called a non-existent number. I reached the end of the driveway and had to use my teeth to pull the aerial up on the phone. This time I got the number right. The only problem was the number was engaged.

I rang the police. I got the phone up to my ear but it slipped from my wet hand. I juggled the torch trying to save it and ended up losing both. Just before the phone cracked into the driveway I heard the shrill voice of a female dispatcher, maybe the same one Jo spoke to at the opposite end of the day. The torch still worked but the phone didn’t.

I didn’t hang around. I thought of going to a neighbour’s house but what neighbour would have let me inside? My tyres screeched as I pulled away from the house. It was still dark but the edges of the sky were fading to the colour of a dark bruise. Dawn was approaching, and the early morning was beginning to wash away the night with a cold light that made everything look bleak. There were more cars on the road, and I ignored the toots and the flipping fingers of the drivers as I swerved around them, driving with all the skill of man a who has no skill but only desperation.

My short ragged breaths tasted of vomit. I had to keep wiping my sleeve across my forehead as sweat itched my skin and tickled my eyes. I slammed the car through the gears. The sky kept on lightening, the purple light filling the killing hour and, as night fell away, life was being injected into the new day around me. The trees and the plants and the lampposts; they all looked purple, and where there was light there was life, but where I had been there was only death. Somewhere on the other side of the world people were arriving to Sunday night and the early hours of Monday. Light and dark. Good and evil. The purple hour had brought me into Hell. Everything around me looked like it belonged on some foreign planet, a planet where Evil still lurked and He is a god there, and the world is full of only dark because Evil: He is dark. Then I realised I already was on that planet.

It took just under ten minutes to get to Kathy’s. There was a dark sedan parked there that hadn’t been there before. I ran up the driveway, glancing around the garden. Trees and bushes and if there was a hiding Cyris I didn’t see him.

All the lights were off. I thought about yelling out but that would only make Cyris hurry. I started with the ground floor, succeeding only in turning it into an obstacle course that chewed up more time. I reached the second floor just as the car outside started and revved loudly. I got back to the front door in time to see Cyris pulling away from the house.

I found her in the master bedroom. I found her and my fingers unrolled and the torch thumped into the carpet. I didn’t bother walking inside because I could see what I needed to from the doorway. I stepped back, crying as I stumbled down the stairs. I fell twice, each time catching hold of the banister. I tripped on the driveway and skinned my knees and hands but I felt no pain. I paused at the car, my mind empty. It was as if all thought and all fear had fallen through a trapdoor into my heart. In the passenger seat were my shorts. They were covered in blood.





50


Jo’s car is parked where I thought it would be.

The walk through the paddock is both similar to Monday, and different. The fear is there — the fear of what will happen if I fail, the fear of who will die. Last time I was trying to save a stranger. This time it’s my ex-wife. Last time I had a tyre iron and no shotgun. This time it’s the other way around.

What hasn’t changed is that I’m not the right person to be doing this. And, like last time, there’s nobody else.

I head towards Dali’s trees. The paddock doesn’t look the same as it did when I drove past with Jo earlier in the week. The trees look like they’ve been dragged from the set of some B-grade sci-fi movie, perhaps the same one I seem to be caught in. Everything is eerily silent, as if the sound guy came along earlier and packed the bugs and insects into containers and took them away.

My grip is tight on the shotgun and sweat keeps sliding into the corners of my eyes. There’s a beam of light cutting through the same clearing I stood in nearly one hundred hours earlier. Jo is tied to a tree. Her head is tilted upwards, her neck exposed to me. There’s a piece of wire wrapped around her throat and the trunk. Her eyes are bulging and her face is turning purple. Her lips are pulled back and her teeth are clenched in a grimace as she tries to pull in air.

I know it’s a trap even as I run towards her, but the alternative is watching her die. I sweep the shotgun in all directions as I approach.

‘Hold on,’ I say to her, and when I reach her I try pulling forward on the wire but it doesn’t give. I have to move out of the light and into the darkness, following the wire with my hands, knowing that any moment Cyris is going to attack me. I find where it’s twisted off, and I have to put down the shotgun to loosen it.