A quiet way to die

A silent hour exists from 3 to four in any small town. The deafening tone of a ringing fills the ears of any passerby as not even a pin can be heard for lack of people to drop it. Some call it the witching hour and others call it magic time. There's probably life going on somewhere. The bugs that never rest or some tumescent policeman sleeping in a car in the knowledge that his computer will beep if anyone speeds by and at this hour his odds on that not happening are good. So the world is asleep.

Those who are no good are are awake in their houses. Insomniacs, drug addicts and deranged, driveling derelicts, doomed to drone on about the daft, dark alleyways of devious criminals. It is in these minds that the shadows truly come.
The writer, with his pen, kills more people than the average murderer does in his life time. c'est la vie.

In his magnum opus, one such driveler realizes the number of men he's killed off in his fantasies and reality and fantasy begin to mesh like fusion in a reactor. His world begins to implode and become the things of his stories.

The shining, silver revolver sits on his desk like a bad cliché from film Noir.

At 3:35 AM, the witching hour, the gunshot makes a whisper and nobody knows.