Free The Killing Hour by Paul Cleave

looking at my car, this car that I’m sick of seeing, this car that I want to trade in, but at the moment is the best damn car in the world.
    The two women break their embrace to include me in it, and no, they’re not ghosts, they’re very much alive, alive and grateful and warm to touch, and I try to warn them, try to tell them that they mustn’t go back home, that they mustn’t take me with them, but the dream is a memory and the memory has only one place it can go.
    We pile into the car, Luciana in the back and Kathy next to me. We head to Luciana’s house, and as much as I try to steer us towards the police station, as much as I try to save their lives now, there can be no changing it. They want to go home. They want to clean up. Put on some fresh clothes. They want to reclaim some of the respect they’ve lost before walking into the police station and telling them their story.
    I tell them that’s a mistake. But they don’t listen. I know this because their deaths were front-page news, and what you read in the papers is real, the dream is real, the memory is real, because we are in the Real World.
    We drive past thousands of shadows. The roads are empty. A few wisps of cloud float in front of the moon, which is bright white and full. We park the car outside Luciana’s home. It is a single-storey townhouse, and through the haze of a lost day and a half, the image of the house shimmers. It’s made from red brick but then from white, and the roof is steel at one point but then tiled. The roses in the garden shimmer, then turn to weed. Nothing here is real. Everything is real.
    We lock the car because any neighbourhood is a bad neighbourhood when you’ve just fought for your life. The back door is ajar and Luciana pushes it open. The air is warm inside. The girls tell me they were abducted from their own homes.
    I sit in the lounge while Luciana takes a shower. I stay with Kathy and she hands me a bottle of beer that is cold in my hot hands. Tiny beads of condensation start to run down it. I flick the edge of the label with my fingernail. I look around me. The couch and two chairs are leather. Expensive. No claw holes in the furniture or fur on the cushions. The carpet is thick and soft, red one second, blue the next.
    The dream leads me along, I can’t change it, can’t stop it, can only complete it. Kathy tells me Cyris wanted to take them away so he could hear them scream. That was the only reason he gave. He was going to kill them by driving metal stakes through their hearts. I sip at my beer that I drank a lifetime ago. Casual conversation. Casual drinking.
    ‘He was going to drive those metal stakes into us,’ she says. Her voice sounds disjointed and clipped, like William Shatner on speed.
    ‘Crazy.’
    ‘The world is full of crazy people. If you hadn’t come along who knows what he might have done to me.’
    ‘I don’t want to think about it.’
    ‘Nor do I,’ she admits.

    ‘Does Luciana live alone?’ I ask, changing the subject.
    ‘Her husband left her for a gym instructor. Hasn’t spoken to him since.’
    ‘Must have been some woman.’ My beer is cold and smooth and I’ve never felt like I’ve earned one so much.
    ‘Some man.’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘The instructor. Some man .’
    ‘Oh.’
    She laughs the laugh of somebody who doesn’t know death is only a few hours away.
    ‘What’s so funny?’

    ‘You’re going to murder me later on tonight, Charlie, and there’s nothing I can do about it – except laugh.’

    ‘What?’ I ask, surprised at her words, surprised that she knows death is close by, surprised she can make her laughter seem so real.
    ‘Really, it’s okay, because neither of us can change it now. I’ll be upset at first – and rightly so. You’re going to kill Luciana too. I really wish you wouldn’t.’
    ‘I’m not going to kill you.’
    ‘It’s a done deal, Charlie. Things will change. You will change. Think of it as character development.’
    The dream