The Killing Hour (7 page)

At the moment he’s working on the letter. She doesn’t care whether he posts it – she suggested it in the hope that if he begins putting words on paper about what happened he may begin to realise what he’s doing. If some of the old Charlie is still in there then maybe he’ll see the decisions he’s making are insane. Hopefully he’ll take responsibility for his actions and turn himself in. Charlie’s a smart guy, and she’s hoping for some of that intelligence to come back.

So far the plan hasn’t progressed beyond watching Charlie’s house. He tied her up again at one point so he could head out and buy some stationery. Now she’s resting on the bed, not tied to it, finishing off the muffins and a chicken sandwich that he bought for her earlier. The horror movie is still on TV and she wonders if there was one on yesterday morning too because it might suggest where Charlie got some of his ideas from.

The news said the two women died violently. It mentioned ritualistic killings. Did they really die by being staked through the heart as Charlie said? If so, did Charlie do the staking? It depends. It depends on how guilty she thinks he is. The idea of betraying Charlie hurts, but hell, it isn’t as if she owes him anything. Her loyalties now lie with two dead women she’s never met. She needs to get out of here. Needs to get the police.

11

‘Stakes,’ Jo says.

I look up from my letter. It isn’t going well. I’m up to the part where Cyris had his dead fingers curled around the handle of the knife but I’m not sure whether to put that down. I don’t bother to ask Jo because she doesn’t believe I stabbed him, and looking back at it I’m starting to question it too. I didn’t want to check for a pulse because I’d seen too many horror movies and knew what would happen to me if I did.

I don’t add any atmosphere because I’m not writing them a story. The English teacher inside me says nothing of my shivering from being scared to death, because the police don’t care about character development. I remember picking up the torch and pointing it at Kathy. What was it I said? That’s right. I told her everything was going to be okay.

‘What are you talking about?’ I ask.

‘We need to make some stakes.’

In the background the TV is going. I keep glancing at it, waiting for my photograph to appear on the screen with bold words beneath it saying ‘Wanted for murder’ and ‘Do not approach’. On the table, screwed up into balls, are my first six attempts at the letter. I think I know exactly what I want to say but it’s turning out I don’t really know at all. Each rewrite makes me question more and more, makes me wonder if what I’m writing ever happened at all. I keep the newspaper on the table next to me to remind me that it did.

‘Why?’

‘Have you finished your letter?’

‘Not yet. I’m still not following you about the stakes.’

‘Finish your letter and I’ll tell you.’

‘It could take …’

‘Just wrap things up. We don’t have all day.’

I don’t mind that Jo is giving me orders because it means we’re about to do something right, and that’s going to feel good after the last few days. I spend the next ten minutes wrapping things up but don’t sign it. I tear up my other mistakes and flush them down the toilet, then fold the final copy into the envelope and attach the stamp. I grab the phone book, get the address for the police station and print it across the front. I mark it as urgent.

‘When he shows up at your house,’ Jo says, ‘we’ll be able to follow him home. That’s the plan, right?’

‘Unless you’ve changed it since we discussed it.’

‘Nothing has changed. It’s still a good plan.’

It sounds like a good idea. Almost too good, as if a part of it surely has to fail because we’re in the Real World now. Haven’t I told her this? Maybe she doesn’t get it. I run the scenario through my mind. Several faults stand out but the best we can do is narrow them down by being careful. I try to imagine the sort of place Cyris lives in and end up picturing that big old two-storey house from Hitchcock’s
Psycho
.

‘Okay, but something’s changed, right? You’re talking about stakes?’

‘Wooden stakes. Think about it. You said both the women …’

‘They have names, Jo. Kathy and Luciana.’

‘Of course, you’re right. I’m sorry. You said Kathy and Luciana were staked through the chest. Why? It’s a pretty unusual way to kill somebody, don’t you think? Outside of a movie.’

‘Maybe Cyris thought he was in a movie.’

‘That’s almost my point. Maybe Cyris thought they were vampires, or maybe he just wanted to stake them so people would think that he thought they were vampires. Either way he proved he was delusional. Or pretending to be delusional.’

‘It seems a bit of a stretch.’

‘That’s because you’re not thinking it through. It makes sense. He also showed that wooden stakes make for good weapons.’

‘Yeah, he sure did that. Only his were metal.’

‘Does it matter?’

In vampire mythology, perhaps. In the Real World, who the hell knows? ‘I guess not.’

‘And we have no weapons. Do you want to catch him, or just follow him home?’

‘I want to catch him,’ I say, but I’m not sure why. It should be enough to follow him home, but it isn’t. Catching him may not be enough either. I don’t share this with Jo.

‘Then we need weapons of our own.’

‘You want to take stakes with us?’ I ask.

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s crazy.’

‘Cyris didn’t think so.’

‘Yeah, well, Cyris didn’t think it was crazy using them on two innocent women.’

‘What do you suggest? That we go unarmed?’

‘No. We could take some knives,’ I say, and I think about my tyre iron. Maybe it doesn’t matter what we take.

‘Sure, but we’re playing on his terms, Charlie, and that means we have to fight the same way he fights. If he really is delusional then we have to get down and dirty and be just as delusional, and if we show up on his doorstep armed with stakes he’ll not only know we mean business, but he’ll freak out more.’

‘I don’t know. It doesn’t sound like a great plan. It really doesn’t.’

‘But it is a plan.’

‘I guess. Staking out my house with stakes. I dunno. It sounds like a bad joke.’

‘Come on, Charlie, it’s not like we believe we’re going to use them. All we have to do is be prepared in case it comes down to it. We take hammers and stakes to threaten him and we use wire to bind him. We need to go to a hardware store, Charlie, and we also need to swap cars. We can’t sit outside your house in your car. Think about it.’

I am thinking about it. It’s all I’ve been doing. ‘I’m still not so sure about the stake thing.’

‘I thought we’d moved past it.’

‘I wasn’t even aware we’d agreed.’

‘Well, we’d better start agreeing on something, Charlie, because we don’t have all day.’

‘Okay, okay, so assuming we do this. What happens?’

‘First of all you have to let me come with you,’ she says, even though I haven’t even said yet that I’m going. ‘We can go back to my house and get my car.’

‘I can get your car and I can get the tools. You stay here while I’m getting them.’

We discuss it some more and I feel like I’ve just agreed to do something I totally don’t want to do. I tie her back up before paying for another night’s accommodation. I tell the guy not to bother cleaning the room though I don’t think there’s much chance of it. I drive to Jo’s house. It’s surprisingly hot even though the day has been wet, and because the air-conditioning in my car is faulty I have to wind the windows partially down. The rain spits through the gaps at me. I keep my Honda below the speed limit. When I get to Jo’s house I drive past it looking for a police presence but can’t see one. I park on the road. I head inside, find her keys, back her car out and put my car in. She has a Mazda MX5, red and sporty.

The rain eases off and blue sky starts to appear. It looks like the weatherman was right. At the start of the hour I turn on the radio to listen to the news. Nothing new has developed. Disappointed but not surprised I turn the radio off and stare out at this world I’m driving through. I know this world. I live in this world. Yet it has become a stranger to me.

I pull into the carpark of a hardware store. It’s a large single-storey place made completely from concrete, the sort of one-piece slabs constructed on the spot. A line of wheelbarrows is parked out front, along with garden sheds and patio furniture. Nothing small enough to pick up and run away with. Nothing exciting enough to make an impulse buy.

In the middle of a Tuesday afternoon the large store is close to empty as I make my way up and down aisles. I’m not sure what to buy. Our aim is to catch this guy, not kill him, but I prepare for each possibility. I start in the gardening section but the garden stakes are too big and would fill our hands with splinters. I move to different sections where I buy rope, duct tape, a craft knife, a chisel, a broom handle and a small saw. The last thing I select is a large wooden mallet. It feels like I’m shopping at Vampires R Us. The guy at the counter looks like he missed his calling as an undertaker. His skin is stretched tightly on his skull with black smudges of some long-suffered or soon-to-arrive illness beneath his eyes. He says ‘Raining out there, huh?’ in a tone that suggests it’s my fault. I pay in cash and he forgets to tell me to have a nice day.

I cram everything into the boot. There’s only just enough room, and even then I have to use the small handsaw to cut the broom handle in half. I drive back to the motel and carry the purchases into the room, first making sure nobody is around. The room is stuffy. A faint taste of perfume lingers in the air. Cheap perfume. The type of perfume you find lingering in the air in cheap motels. I close the door and untie Jo, who smiles at me. She seems to have come a small way towards forgiving me. The unposted letter in the back pocket of my pants feels warm.

We pull the tools out of the plastic bag and line them up on the floor. I didn’t buy any top-of-the-line gear, just the basics. I lay the newspaper down and put the broom handle halves on top. We cut it into four pieces, and on the last cut Jo slips on the saw handle. It twists and flexes and the blade snaps into half a dozen pieces. Turns out I shopped in the wrong place.

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s not like we need it again,’ I say.

Jo holds the first stake on the ground while I chip away at the end with the chisel and mallet. I manage a sharp but not very sculptured point. I repeat the procedure on the second and get the same result. The third and fourth don’t work out any better.

The sawing and chiselling is hot work and soon the sawdust sticks to our wet faces and hands. I want to take a shower but I don’t want to leave Jo by herself.

‘Some arsenal,’ she says. ‘Can you think of anything we may be missing?’

I look at what we have. Don’t see a gun. I point this out.

‘What about garlic or holy water?’

I’m not sure if she’s joking and I start to wonder whether she’s missing the whole point here, but perhaps I’m missing it too. That’s why I’m looking at four wooden stakes and a mallet. Jo sits on the edge of her bed and watches me pack up the mess.

‘We should try and get a few hours’ sleep,’ I suggest. ‘We don’t want to fall asleep while watching my house.’

Jo silently nods. ‘That’s just what I was going to suggest.’

‘Um, I’m sorry, Jo, but I need to tie you up …’ I say, my voice trailing away.

‘I’m not going anywhere, Charlie.’

‘Yeah, I know.’

‘Then why do it? Don’t you trust me?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘Then you’re not tying me up, okay?’

If I don’t tie Jo up I won’t be sleeping either. I let her use the bathroom and then she makes it easy for me by not struggling as I tie her to the bed. I lie back on my own bed. The alarm clock looks twenty years old. I fiddle with the buttons and set it to give us three and a half hours. Assuming we can sleep.

My body moulds into the previous outline of thousands of other people who may or may not know what love is, but probably came here to experience a fifteen-minute imitation of it. I turn on the TV and am given the menu for porn or wholesome family TV. It seems every motel these days has religion and sex only a fingertip away. I flick channels looking for some news and come up with nothing.

On Sunday night I was a schoolteacher with a simple life and complicated students. My head is starting to throb and I raise a hand to the lump. It’s still the same size as yesterday. I think about untying Kathy from the tree and how grateful she was for it. I think of Cyris and how dead he looked. I never checked his pulse, because I was sure, so sure, that he was dead. Jesus, I was so stupid. We left him there, just a body of evil trapped inside human skin with a bad name and a poor haircut. We left him in the dark to come back.

And that’s exactly what he did.

12

Jo watches him for movement and, satisfied there isn’t any, sets about finding the piece of broken blade she hid in the folds of the bedspread while Charlie was cleaning up the stakes and tools. Twisting the broom handle and snapping the blade had been no accident.

She splays her fingers to cover what little distance she can on her right-hand side. When Charlie tied her up she had put her hand as close to the blade as she could. Now she’s starting to wonder if it was close enough. She pushes at the bedspread, stroking her fingers back and forth, and after a few moments of despair she finally comes across it. She slips it into her fingers and moves it to her fingertips. She twists her hand and touches the blade against the towel and begins sawing. If she doesn’t get all the way through then when he unties her he will see she tried to escape. Thinking about his reaction encourages her to saw quicker.

Her hand moves up and down, up and down, her wrist quickly tiring because of the tight angle. The cutting seems loud but not loud enough to wake anybody. She thinks about the traffic outside and is aware that any altercation out there, a car horn or the shrieking of tyres, could be enough to wake him. Or the alarm Charlie set could be faulty and go off early.

Twisting her head she can see the blade making steady progress. The cut edges of the towel become fluffy and start to loosen. Once she gets through this then she still has to get through the phone cord wrapped around her body and holding her to the bed.