Allan Leverone: Postcards from the Apocalypse

Barely concealed terror was now plainly evident in the body language of my sister’s boyfriend. It was obvious he didn’t want to look, but he really had no choice. After all, his girlfriend had done it. He reluctantly knelt down in front of the grave of Mary and Josiah Wentworth, long-dead and long-since returned to dust, and when he did I smashed the grapefruit-sized rock I had been holding into the back of his skull with all the force I could muster.

Wade Collins’s crushed skull imploded with a crack! as his body dropped to the damp ground. He groaned once and was still. There was very little blood, surprisingly. While my sister watched closely, I bent behind the Wentworth crypt and lifted up the iron pry bar I had placed there earlier in the day. I used it to force open the door of the crypt—it was heavy and resisted the movement at first, but eventually opened wide enough to permit entrance—and dragged her dead boyfriend’s body into the cold and clammy space. I knew no one would ever think to look for the bastard here; he would never be found.

After tossing him face-down on the ground next to Mary or Josiah—there was no bridal veil to be seen, that part of the tale was completely false, so I couldn’t tell who was who—I hustled back outside and Cassie helped me force the heavy door closed again. When we finished, the ancient crypt looked exactly the same as it had for hundreds of years. Then Cassie and I retraced our steps out of Whispering Pines for the last time.

Sure, that stupid myth about Mary Wentworth and the bridal veil was nothing more than a bunch of crap, but it made for the perfect excuse to lure Collins to his date with destiny. He had been beating Cassie regularly and lately the abuse had begun escalating out of control until she was certain he would soon kill her. After she had come to me, half-crazed with fear and pain, we developed the plan we executed tonight. As it turned out, the only part of the silly Wentworth legend that turned out to be true was the part about someone dying a violent death.

Ironic, I know.

I felt kind of bad about forcing Josiah Wentworth to share his eternal resting place with a scumbag like Wade Collins, but, hey—it’s not like he was about to complain. He’s been dead for two hundred years, and there was plenty of room inside that gigantic crypt anyway. What difference would one more body make, really?

Fiction publications, especially online magazines, come and go with an unfortunate regularity that would make a Swiss watch-maker proud. One of the shortest-lived efforts was called TREI Literary Magazine. A grand total of one issue was published before the ‘zine died. “Regrets, I’ve Had a Few” was accepted for the inaugural and final edition of TREI, in September, 2008. In this story, a man haunted by a decades-old tragedy meets a stranger in a bar with a tale frighteningly similar to his own. I’m proud to say this tale was selected as one of five finalists for the 2009 Derringer Award for Best Short Story.

The man sat at the bar, downing ice-cold Budweiser. It was always Budweiser, although it was not always ice cold. That part depended upon how busy the Lucky Leprechaun was on any particular day and how often the bar’s owner, Ted, was able to rotate the stock.

The man wasn’t sure why he always ordered Budweiser, other than the fact that you could get it just about anywhere. Availability was an important consideration when you drank as much and as often as the man did. After all, he wasn’t always going to be near the Lucky Leprechaun when he felt the compulsion to slam down a beer or twenty. The man felt the King of Beers was about as close to a sure thing as you were liable to get in this world, so he stuck with it whenever he could.

He did, however, try to do his drinking at the Lucky Leprechaun when possible. He knew the lay of the land, so to speak, and since his one-room efficiency apartment was only half a block away, it was almost impossible to get lost, no matter how much he drank or how late at night he stumbled home.

Also an important consideration.

Plus which, the man liked it here, at least as much as he was capable of liking anything anywhere anymore. The regulars all knew him, and Ted wasn’t averse to opening up early for the man if he happened to be there anyway, cleaning and stocking and whatnot.

Today was a pretty typical day for the man. He had slept late and woken up hung over. His morning had consisted of dry toast and black coffee with a thin coating of grounds settling to the bottom of the cup, then quiz shows and soap operas on television while waiting for the postman to get around to delivering his welfare check.

Three o’clock found the man glued to his usual barstool, drinking the usual ice-cold Budweiser and doing the usual pensive thinking. That was the major drawback to drinking—all the goddamned thinking that went along with it. Drinking and thinking. Sounded like a game show, one that he’d probably be pretty good at, come to think of it.

On the jukebox, Frank Sinatra serenaded the nearly-empty bar, bragging to anyone who would listen about doing it his way. The man made sure to bring extra money for the juke when he was going to be at the Lucky Leprechaun, and Sinatra was the man’s artist of choice. Every day was the same for him, Bud and Sinatra; a natural combination as far as he was concerned.

It hadn’t always been like this for the man. Once upon a time, a long time ago, the man had been a sober, law-abiding, nine-to-five regular guy. An actuary, actually. In fact, that was how he used to introduce himself at parties and corporate functions in his old life. “I’m Jim Robertson, insurance guy. An actuary, actually.” This little exercise in witty wordplay would invariably earn Jim those polite chuckles total strangers reserved for other total strangers when an honest reaction would be considered inappropriate.

The man, Jim Robertson, had also had a family once upon a time: a wife, Elizabeth, not beautiful or ugly but stunningly average, and one child—a daughter named Jenny. Jenny, once upon a time, had been the apple of her father’s eye. She was bright, beautiful and athletic; incredibly, inexplicably, world-class athletic.

But all of this, of course, had been a long time ago, and in a different life. Because more than twenty years ago, a lifetime ago, the incident that Jim Robertson had come to think of as “The Thing” had happened. Robertson knew it was stupid to compartmentalize a life-changing event with its own snappy little title, like it was some Grade B horror movie or something, but it was the only way he had ever found to deal with it, that’s all. Well, that and the Budweiser, of course.

Anyway, after “The Thing,” Jim Robertson had simply ceased to exist. With astonishing quickness, Jim lost everything: job, money, family, self-respect. It all disappeared down a toilet flushed clean with Budweiser.

No longer an actuary, actually, Jim Robertson became simply the man who lived in a one-room apartment on the questionable side of the tracks, the side he would never even have considered visiting in his previous incarnation, slowly drinking himself to death at the Lucky Leprechaun. He was alone, utterly and completely alone, unless of course you included Frank Sinatra in the equation, which Jim certainly did.

One thing that made the man’s life just the tiniest bit bearable, the only thing if he was going to be honest with himself, was chatting up strangers who entered the Lucky Leprechaun and comparing miseries with them. Jim had discovered long ago that just about everyone drinking at the time of day he drank had miseries of their own. Some of them even rivaled his.

Today he had struck up a conversation with one such stranger. He was probably older than Jim but looked younger. Years of constant drinking will age you, Jim Robertson could testify to that, but the bright side was that the more you drank the less you cared about things like how you looked, anyway.