The Killing Hour (17 page)

I roll onto my back. The rain drums against my eyelids. I think about my warm bed – lying in it with a hot water bottle between my feet and another behind my back. All I want to do now is go to sleep. I start thinking of a Friday or a Saturday night, so I can sleep all day and then the next. I close my eyes.

Something touches my face. It’s frightening away my sleep. I open my eyes to see Jo slapping me. Only I can’t feel it. I can see it, but that’s all.

‘Come on, Charlie, wake up.’

I am awake. Can’t she see that? I try to tell her but it’s hard since my lips and tongue no longer work.

‘Charlie!’

She slaps me hard and again I open my eyes. Does she really think this kind of tough love is going to work? I brace my elbows against the ground and try to tilt my body upwards.

‘Charlie!’ Jo’s slapping me again and I open my eyes again. I’m no longer propped up. She needs to save herself and forget about me.

I explain this in careful detail. ‘Juss wev’m ere.’

‘You got me into this mess, Charlie. You can help get us out of it.’

She stands and grabs the front of my wet shirt. My body bows forward as she pulls. I reach up weakly and grab hold of her arms. My mind is still a maze of confusion. My right eye is aching – it feels as though somebody has stapled it directly into the socket, only backwards. The inside of my head is pounding, over and over, over and over. I manage to sit up and with more of Jo’s encouragement I force myself onto my knees, then onto my feet. I hang onto the nearest tree to get balanced and then onto Jo as we make the first steps. And I’m exhausted. We rest against a tree. Now we have to pick a direction.

‘How far do you think we’ve travelled?’ I ask. I stutter the sentence out. My teeth keep chattering.

Jo shrugs. ‘What time does your watch say? Mine isn’t waterproof.’

I look at my watch but can’t make anything out. I hold it up to my eyes and try to focus but it’s no good – it’s just a blur of hands and dashes. Jo seizes my wrist and holds it in front of her face.

‘It’s two-sixteen,’ she says.

‘Late.’

‘My watch says two-ten.’

‘It’s a cheap watch.’

‘Exactly. It would have stopped when we dived in the water. We’ve been on the bank for probably four minutes. That means two minutes in the water.’

Two minutes in the water. The river was close to the cabin, but so what? There was a track we took that was barely a track and we walked it for maybe ten minutes. Easy to find if you know where it is. And when it’s daylight. And dry. I think harder, then realise some of what she’s trying to get at. We’ve come downstream towards the cabin. We’ve crossed the distance much quicker than if we’d walked.

‘How far can you go?’ she asks.

‘Further than you.’

We both doubt it but say nothing.

We carry on but it’s barely a minute before we’re hit with a gradual slope. We struggle against it, often supporting ourselves against trees and each other. Some feeling begins to return to my legs and arms but not my feet or hands. The slope becomes steeper as we walk further. I’m hoping, when the slope levels out, that we’ll be near the makeshift track. Then all we have to do is turn right and we’ll find the cabin. Or left.

My feet have gone but my toes remain – ten individual spears of pain ready to be snapped off. This little piggy went to market. This little piggy drowned. And this little piggy caught pneumonia and died. I remember Landry telling me the cabin was a minute from the river but I don’t know how much that’s going to help. The trees form a tent that keeps the rain off our faces but not the wind. If we don’t get out of our wet clothes and find somewhere warm we’re going to die. It’s that simple. With each passing second we’re slowing down. Jo’s wrist tells us time has stopped. My watch suggests differently. I don’t know which one to believe. My jeans are so wet I can hardly bend my legs.

I quickly explain what Landry told me.

‘Then we follow the river,’ she says.

‘Yeah, but which way?’

‘Which way do you think?’

‘I don’t know. If we go left we might end up where we started. We should go right first at least for a bit. We can always turn back.’

She looks at me long and hard, knowing we don’t have the energy to turn back if we go the wrong way, and in the end decides to follow my advice. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I’ve fucked up everything I’ve done this week so I’m due for some decent luck. We turn right and start moving, doing our best to stay parallel to the water, using only its sound as a guide. The trees get thinner and closer together. I want to turn them into firewood, want to burn down the whole lot. We stumble between them, breaking our way forward. It looks similar to the track we’re looking for. Lots of black. Lots of trees. Lots of roots. We carry on in silence, watched by the night and the small wet unhelpful creatures living in it. Kathy and Luciana are watching me too. I can feel them, but that’s all.

My foot snags on a root, and as in the early minutes of Monday morning I fall onto my hands and knees. I roll onto my back and look up at the trees. Jo kneels down next to me. She rests her head on my chest and I can hear her laboured breathing. I want to put my arms around her and think back to better times, but those times have gone, they are gone and the forest is here replacing them and the killing hour has arrived.

I close my eyes and look for Kathy and Luciana and hope Landry isn’t there too.

30

You’re shooting at nothing, Cyris, shooting at nothing.

The boulders he hits are laughing at him, and inside the laughter he can hear them telling him things he doesn’t want to hear. He shuts them up by firing the gun again and again, and his fingers feel heavy against the trigger.

Charlie and his girlfriend have gone, gone into the river and gone from sight, and maybe for ever. He’s left out here in the darkness. Oh God, it’s so dark. The moon is up there but it’s covered by cloud, and all he can see is absolutely nothing. He hates the black moon. He wants to kick it but has to settle for screaming.

He moves away from the river. The handcuff is still attached to his ankle, and the policeman is dragged along by his handcuffed hand. He points the shotgun down at the policeman’s wrist and pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. He goes through the motion of chambering another shell, but he’s used them all up.

‘Where’s the key?’ he asks, but he already knows the answer. He crouches next to the cop but he isn’t answering, no, uh uh, ‘cause the cop isn’t living no more. He runs his hands over the ground but can’t find it. It’s vanished into the forest somewhere.

His stomach aches so he digs his heavy fingers into his wet pocket and pulls out the bottle with the twist-off cap but the cap won’t move, not at first, but in the end it does, and he swallows two pills, maybe three – he loses count.

He searches the policeman for a torch but finds only a packet of matches. He lights the first match and the rain puts it out, and the second, and the third, and suddenly he’s out of matches, just like that. He goes to walk in the direction he thinks he came from, but the weight of the dead policeman holds him back. No key. No ammunition. He has handcuff keys in his car but he can’t make it to his car, not like this. He bashes the stock of the shotgun into the policeman’s cuffed wrist and hand, over and over, shattering the bones inside until the hand is flexible enough to slip through the bracelet. The bracelet dangles from his ankle as he walks.

He tries to remember how long he walked earlier. He looks for a track, but the black moon keeps it hidden. He wishes he had a torch, then remembers that he does. It’s only a small one but it will do the job so he pulls it from his pocket and turns it on. He walks further from the cave and river, and he keeps on walking, following the sound of the water because he seems to remember hearing it on the way here, but this time he keeps it on his right. His stomach hurts. Hurts like a bitch.

A moment later vomit erupts from him, and his thoughts seem to focus for a few seconds as the drugs leave his stomach, but surely they’re in his system by now, aren’t they? He wishes he knew. For a few seconds things are clear and he knows the painkillers are killing much more than the pain. They’re killing his ability to think. He knows the shotgun is empty and knows there has to be more to all of this than just killing.

He continues to walk. Suddenly there’s a lull in the storm and another flash of clarity comes to him, and he knows what’s happening. He reaches into his pocket for the painkillers, then throws them as far as he can into the trees. He hears them rattling as they fly through the air then are gone for ever, and already he misses them. He pushes ahead. He can see shapes, no light, but shapes, and he realises that some of the branches here are pushed back so perhaps this is a track, a track after all. He smiles and laughs, then stops and rests a hand across his throbbing stomach. He sucks in a deep breath and the duct tape holding the wound closed feels hard beneath his fingers. He reaches into his pocket for the painkillers but can’t find them, then searches his other pockets but they’re not there either. Must have left them at home. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

He carries on walking, yeah, yeah, and his body is cold, so cold, but at least he’s wearing a jacket, and at least he’s wearing more than his partner. He wonders if good old Charles is dead yet. He scratches a hand across his face and buries his fingers beneath his beard, then flicks the nails over his skin and draws blood. He needs to think. Thinking and walking, that’s all he has to do, and he does this as he moves deeper into the darkness, hoping he won’t be lost for ever, and for ever started around nine o’clock the previous night.

‘Into the realm of dark never he travelled,’ he says, wondering what he’s talking about, if he’s even spoken.

31

Darkness and death aren’t as scary as I thought. No heaven, no hell, just a place with no feeling or time or emotion. A dark place with a soft sound and cool air and, best of all, it doesn’t hurt.

‘Wake up, Charlie.’

I was wrong to be frightened. Wrong to think that death was going to be an eternity of torture and mayhem. Wrong to think that I wasn’t going to like it. Hell, it isn’t even boring. Had I known this before, I never would have struggled.

‘Charlie.’

I roll over. Jo is next to me. This isn’t death. I can’t tell if she’s on her knees or not. Pine needles have created a blanket for us to rest on but not one to crawl under and get warm. Branches rustle and leaves tear from their stems above us. Cones fall to the earth and pine needles fly through the wind.

‘I’m awake.’

‘And shivering,’ she says.

‘I can’t stop.’

‘It’s a good thing,’ she says. ‘It means hypothermia hasn’t started.’

It doesn’t feel good.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t believe you about any of this.’

‘I’m sorry I hurt you. It was the last thing I wanted, Jo. You have to believe me.’

She forces herself up, pressing against my stomach to raise herself. ‘I think there’s a light in the distance, perhaps only thirty metres away. If we can make it, promise me we’ll go to the police.’

‘I promise,’ I say, and it’s easy because I left my optimism in my other pants. I don’t want her help in getting up but I need it. When I’m on my feet we stagger forward.

Head towards the light
.

If this is the trail we took earlier and the cabin is ahead of us, then that makes Cyris … where? Anywhere? Lost? Or here? We break through the trees into the clearing. Seeing Landry’s car is awful. It makes me realise that life goes on, no matter who is no longer in it. In ten years the car will still be here. The paintwork will have cracked in the heat, the metal will have rusted in the rain. The tyres will be flat, the rims of the wheels will have cut through them and made impressions in the ground. The whole thing will be covered in mould. The car is a slice of life waiting for the return of its owner, but it will never happen.

The cabin looks like a palace. Limping forward, I reach the porch. I can’t climb up onto it so I sit on the edge and roll myself on. Jo does the same.

I can’t clutch the door with my frozen hands, but Jo has more movement so she nudges me aside. The cabin was cold before but it’s warmer and drier than outside. The wind ushers us inside and we close the door behind us.

‘We can’t stay here,’ I say.

‘I know, I know,’ she answers. ‘But I know I can’t drive either. What about you?’

‘Not yet. Jesus, what are we going to do?’

‘Stay here,’ she says.

‘But we can’t.’

‘Just a bit. Just long enough to warm up.’

‘We can warm up in the cars.’

‘This will be quicker. Look, we have to take the chance that Cyris is lost.’

‘Yeah, but he may not be. He might be right outside.’

‘If we try driving we’re going to crash. Then what? Start walking back to the city?’

‘So what do you want to do?’

‘Two minutes,’ she says. ‘We spend two minutes warming up and then we leave.’

She moves over to one of the lanterns. Of the three that were lit two are still going. She picks it up and I pick up the second one, hooking it over my hand as though I have a claw. Plenty of dry kindling has been set in lots of old newspaper. Jo tries removing the glass top of the lantern but her hands are too cold. I have a more practical way. I throw my lantern into the fireplace. The glass breaks. A flame is released. The brittle paper lights up like an inferno.

We lower ourselves to the fire. The wood crackles but gives off little warmth. It doesn’t take long for smoke to start flooding back into the cabin. The chimney must be partially blocked by a bird’s nest or leaves. My lungs are too full of water to make room for the smoke. Jo strips down. I can hardly move but I manage to kick my shoes off. Nothing else.

Jo takes my shirt and helps me with my jeans. I look down at my body. It’s grey and covered in bruises and lumps and scrapes.

Side by side we sit, clutching each other for warmth though we’re so cold that hugging achieves nothing. Cyris could burst in and kill us, but if we step back outside, the cold will do the same thing. Only fire can help us.