CHAPTER FIVE
Monday is ending and I’m as scared as hell. The air is heavy with hay fever-I can feel it crawling into the back of my nose. I’ve suffered from hay fever ever since I was a kid. In my teens I had to start getting injections to keep it under control. Things have gotten better over the years, but not better enough to travel without pills. So I pop a couple out from my pocket and toss them onto my tongue and work up enough saliva to swallow them. A light breeze is coming through the open window, but nothing is normal on this normal night because I know what’s really out there. I know about the Real World. I’ve seen some of its secrets, some of its pleasures, some of its evils. I glance at my watch and see I’ve been at Jo’s for an hour. My unfinished coffee is cold and its surface has developed a skin. The ghosts are back, and though I cannot see them I know they’re nearby. They always will be. I stand up and close the window.
Jo’s backyard begins to shimmer. The trees become Dalí’s trees. The grass grows and turns brown. The flowers disappear and become patches of stinging nettle. I’m back in that moment from last night, back to trying to find a woman I didn’t know. I close my eyes and watch it all unfolding, narrating it to Jo along the way. I was halfway to the trees when the woman I was trying to save, Kathy, screamed. I ran forward, the keys in my pocket swinging back and forth. I put my hand down to mute them.
It’s easy to see where I went wrong. My first mistake was thinking I could help. I was still living in the same world where the tiny forest of trees had been planted, but the world they had grown into was the Real World. There were no flashing bells, lights or whistles to signify my crossing over, only darkness and a small forest where Death waited and Evil waited and where I would soon wait with them.
The screaming ended and I didn’t know why. I could hardly see a thing. Twigs snapped beneath my feet. Branches scraped my arms and tried to hold me back, tried to save me. My foot wedged beneath a root and I fell. The tire iron bounced into the darkness. The stillness among the trees carried laughter to me. It reminded me of when I was a kid at school, reminded me how everybody would point and laugh at some kid’s misfortune. It took me a few seconds to realize it wasn’t directed at me. Behind the laughter came soft sounds of whimpering. It was coming from a woman. I couldn’t see her, but I knew how she looked. She would be bloody, her clothes torn, and her skin grazed and ripped. It made me angry. I got to my feet and continued on until I came to the small clearing.
A flashlight leaning on the ground pointed at her. She was fully dressed, bound to a thick tree by thick rope. Her blouse was ripped open, revealing a bra with a broken strap. Her clothes were dirty, like she’d been dragged some of the way here. She wasn’t gagged, but she wasn’t talking either.
The man had long, black, knotted hair. It covered the side of his face and looked like the kind of haircut you’d see on somebody who spent time chained to the trees they were trying to save. But he didn’t have that tan-this guy’s tan was comparable to a skeleton. He was a solid guy, a good six feet tall, or an extremely good five feet tall as my dad would have said. On the ground was a satchel. He crouched and unzipped it. He pulled out a knife. It scared the absolute shit out of me more than seeing Woman One step out in front of my car and Woman Two tied to a tree. Seeing that knife was like having a good dose of reality filled into a syringe and injected directly into the brain. Even though I knew I didn’t have my cell phone, I still patted down my pockets looking for it. That knife was a message. It was telling me I was out of my depth. It was telling me to turn away. It was telling me as bad as everything was, there was still worse to come.
The man, who I would later learn was named Cyris, tossed the knife in the air, catching it by the blade. Then he dragged it from his fist so it sliced into him. He pumped his hand so that blood ran from the cut. Then he walked his bloody fingers over her face. It was the creepiest thing I’d ever seen; it was like watching an artist toying with his canvas. He cut her remaining bra strap and it fell away, exposing the tops of her breasts. I couldn’t help myself-I spent one, perhaps two seconds staring at them. This, of course, I don’t tell Jo.
I was about to move forward when he started speaking, scratching at the side of his face. He asked how she wanted it. Instead of telling him she didn’t want it at all, she shook her head and tried pressing herself into the tree, tried to make herself invisible against the trunk. He grunted something that I couldn’t make out, then he bent down and returned the knife to the satchel. For a moment I felt better about things, but in that same moment I was worried that he was going to pull out something even worse. Which is what he did. He pulled out a metal stake and a hammer. Immediately I had visions of the police coming here tomorrow morning, of this woman somehow nailed to a tree, of me nailed to a tree next to her. I focused on Cyris’s flashlight. It looked like it might weigh about the same as the tire iron I’d lost. I could either go for it or I could stand here and watch Kathy die, or I could leave.
Cyris mumbled again before putting his hands on his hips and thrusting his pelvis forward. I felt an anger I’d never felt before building up inside of me. I wanted to hurt him. A lot. I felt like I was in some bizarre game show and up for grabs were all these prizes: heroism, fame, maybe even a movie. If I failed the fame would be unknown and short-lived, and I wouldn’t even be a dead hero. I would just be dead and the game-show host wouldn’t even pronounce my name correctly.
Then he started laughing. He told her she could scream all she wanted, that he wanted her to scream. He swore constantly. It was then that I heard his name. Cyris. It made me think of country singers and cowboy boots and bad haircuts.
“You need to go to the police,” Jo says, and Dalí’s trees disappear and Jo’s remain. I look at her reflection in the window. I’ve lost track of how many times she’s told me now. I just wish she could come up with a new angle. “You have no choice,” she adds.
I think about the way the bodies were found. I think about racing through the streets of Christchurch. I think about Cyris.
“I can’t,” I say. “They’ll think I did it.”
“Why didn’t you go last night as soon as you rescued the women?”
“Because of Benjamin Hyatt,” I tell her.
She looks at me blankly for a few seconds, and then it comes to her. “But this isn’t anything like that,” she says.
“Isn’t it?” I say. “He’s the reason we got the hell out of that bar six months ago after I hit that guy.”
She doesn’t answer because she isn’t sure. Benjamin Hyatt was in the news a year ago. He was a family lawyer. He was fifty-five years old. He had a wife and two children. He was an upstanding guy. A decent guy. People loved him. One night last year he worked late. He was walking through the parking garage close to midnight. In the car next to his a woman was being raped. Her clothes were lying in a heap on the concrete floor and she was crying. Hyatt didn’t even think about it. He reached into that car and pulled the rapist out. They fought. But the guy’s pants were down around his ankles and he didn’t have great balance. Hyatt used that to his advantage. Plus Hyatt used to box a little when he was younger. So he boxed now. He boxed at the guy and knocked him out, only the guy hit his head when he went down and slipped into a coma. The following day the police charged Hyatt. It was their view that Hyatt should have only done his best to contain the rapist, and should not have continually hit him. They said that Hyatt, in a fit of rage, decided to teach the guy a lesson. They said he had created a confrontation, when all he needed to do was call the police. Then the rapist died. The charge was upgraded to murder. Hyatt went to court. The public was on his side, but the law was not. Hyatt had overstepped his boundaries. He had used his fists as weapons, and he had killed a guy. The police wanted to make a point. You couldn’t go around acting like a superhero. Hyatt was sentenced to nine years in jail, and would be up for parole within five. The problem was Hyatt’s boxing skills that got him into jail couldn’t get him out of the many situations jail offered. He was beaten to death two days into his sentence.