November 2008

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Available for order from Comet Press

DEADLINES: AN ANTHOLOGY OF HORROR AND DARK FICTION, will be released in November of 2008! Visit www.cometpress.us

The Postman
by Josh Hancock

“Who’s Vicky?” my wife asked after we had packed the last of the boxes. We stood next to each other in the foyer, waiting for the moving truck to arrive, and Liz held the crumpled note in her fist.

“I’ve never seen that before in my life.”

“It’s written to you, Richard. And she signed it with her name.”

Ignoring the sudden pain in my stomach, I knelt down by one of the boxes and began to fuss with its label.

She doesn’t need to know, right? You promised yourself you would never—

“The boxes are fine,” she said. “Christ, will you turn around and look at me?”

I did. Her face was pallid and exhausted. We were moving out of the house we had lived in for nine years; the house that, as we grew apart in our grief, seemed to shrink in size; moving out because our daughter had died here; moving because even the air, with its lingering traces of freshly laundered pajama wool, held memories as tangible as the photographs of Katie we removed from the walls.

“Is she someone you worked with?” Liz asked.

“No,” I said, realizing that I had finally grown tired of lying.

Neither of us spoke for several minutes, but the old house creaked and shifted and graoned, and reminded us of what we had lost.

“I think, when we get to San Diego,” Liz said finally, “I’m going to call that lawyer we talked about.”

You’ll lose her. You’re already losing her.

“It happened after Katie died,” I said suddenly.

Liz tried to speak, but her voice seemed strangled in her throat.

So tell her, then. Convince her.

“Do you remember the Postman, Liz?”

“The what?”

“The Postman. He killed prostitutes in their motel rooms.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what—”

And she must have remembered then, for her eyes widened with terror.

She asked huskily, “What does…what does he have to do with this?”

She’s your wife. Trust her for once.

“I received that letter six months ago,” I said. “On the night after Katie’s funeral.”

Liz glued her eyes to the floor, her face frozen in stunned silence.

“The laundry room had flooded, remember? I put towels on the floor to soak up the water from the busted washing machine and you came in and…and you said ‘Not those towels, Richard,’ because I had put the expensive ones down…and I remember thinking, ‘I just buried my daughter. Who gives a shit about the towels?’”

“You don’t need to remind me. I was there.”

I leaned against the banister and took a deep breath.

“After our fight, I drove all over the city, just trying to clear my head. I couldn’t stop thinking about Katie—you know the funny faces she would make with her string beans? I couldn’t stop thinking about that. And her laugh. Her infectious laugh. And her cancer…Jesus, that cancer just ate away at her, didn’t it? As I drove the city became a blur of traffic lights and fast food restaurants. I found myself in the Tenderloin, just drifting down the street and circling back again, imagining a different life for myself.”

“I don’t think I want to hear any more of this.”

“Maybe you need to, Liz. And maybe I finally need to say it.”

“Can I at least sit down?”

I followed her into the living room. Liz gripped the letter in her hand as she sank into an old wicker chair we were leaving behind for the new owners.

“I did not have a single drink that night,” I said as I sat down on the bare floor. “I want you to know that, Liz. I haven’t had a drink since the day Katie was diagnosed.

“But understand—it seemed like I was drunk. People on the street moved robotically. Colors were fuzzy. I realize now that I was in an intense state of grieving. I missed my daughter, Liz. I missed our baby Katie.

“When I stopped at the red light, the girl appeared—no, that’s not right—she materialized, leaning into the passenger window. She was slender, blonde, no more than thirteen or fourteen years old.”

“The infamous Vicky,” my wife said bitterly.

I closed my eyes, recalling the details of that night like still frames from a film. “She asked me if I wanted some company—she had a really squeaky voice, a doll’s voice. When I told her no, it seemed she drifted away, like a child ghost, back into the neon glare of the porno arcades. The stoplight turned green and I stepped hard on the gas, deciding that I would return home and try to reconcile with you.”

“You didn’t come home until two in the morning, Richard.”

“I know.” I hesitated, drawing in a raw breath that hurt my throat. “Something horrible happened that night, Liz.”

“What? Her pimp beat her up? She forgot to do her homework?”

“I circled the block three times before picking her up. I don’t know why I did it. I think maybe…maybe it was because she reminded me of Katie. My god, that sounds terrible. I just mean the tender look about her. She had Katie’s smile.”

Liz remained silent, her eyes welling with tears.

“It was never my intention to do anything with her. Please believe me.”

“I suppose now you’re going to tell me that you took her out for a slice of pizza and a Coke,” she said roughly.

I shook my head. “She asked me what I wanted. I told her I had no idea. She described her… areas of expertise… and told me how much each one would cost. I just nodded my head and continued to drive. She directed me to a motel and told me to park in the back.”

My wife shook her head in disbelief, balling her hands into fists.

“I wasn’t myself that night, Liz,” I insisted. “I was crazy. I kept seeing Katie in that awful hospital bed…she was only seven years old, for God’s sake. And that fucking Dr. Russek! Did he ever try to get to know Katie? Did he even care?”

“You blame Katie’s cancer. You blame Dr. Russek. You blame the fucking washing machine. But it was you who left that night, Richard. I thought you needed to be alone. Now I find out you were driving around skid row with a fucking prostitute.”

My face tightened. “It wasn’t like that,” I said.

Liz glared at me, her expression a mask of rage.

“In the motel room she told me her name was Vicky. I gave her my real name. It didn’t even strike me to make something up. She started to roll up her skirt. ‘I’ll take care of you,’ she said in her baby voice. And that’s when my mind cleared. I told her I had a daughter who died, and I told her I was married. She asked about money. I gave her all the cash I had in my wallet. I was crying by this point, and Vicky was standing by the door. She looked at me, and her eyes were this sad, pale blue, just like Katie’s right before she died, and she said ‘Don’t cry, Richard.’ Then she walked out of the room. I never saw her again.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Liz snapped. “How do you explain this letter then?”

“I left the motel and drove to a bar. My plan was to drink myself to death. If I couldn’t have Katie back, then what was the point of living? But I couldn’t bring myself to go inside. I started to think about all that you and I had been through and I decided that we had already suffered enough. I started up the car and began to drive home.

“I passed the same motel. The place was surrounded by police cars. Red and blue lights were flashing everywhere. I slowed down as I passed and I think I saw…I think I saw paramedics wheel out Vicky’s body.”

With a tremble in her voice, my wife asked, “How did you know it was her?”

“Do you remember some men who came to the house? About two or three days after Katie’s funeral?” I asked.

“No, I—wait. Maybe. You said they were…Jehovah’s Witnesses?”

“They were homicide detectives.”

“Jesus—”

“They asked me if I was married and if my wife was home. I told them yes. Then they asked me to step outside to have a little chat.”

“What did they want?”

I stood up and began pacing the floor. “When I asked you earlier if you remembered the Postman, you looked afraid. Why?”

“Because he killed people, Richard. He was a fucking serial killer.”

“Do you know why they called him the Postman?”

“I can’t remember. Do we have to talk about this?”

“He dismembered his victims and tried to mail the body parts to their relatives.”

“Christ almighty—”

But that’s not all he did, Liz.”

“I don’t want to hear this!”

“You need to if you want to understand the purpose of that note.”

Liz lowered her gaze in reluctant surrender.

“The Postman spent hours with his victims, sexually assaulting and torturing them,” I continued. “But before he killed them, he asked them to write a farewell letter to someone they loved. He even provided the expensive stationery and Mont Blanc pens for the victims to write with. At the crime scene, he would often display the letters in grotesque ways. Sometimes he would insert them in—”

“Stop talking, Richard.”

“The Postman found Vicky that night, and she wrote her letter to me, Liz. I don’t know why she did but I think it was Katie, her lifeforce or something—”

“Stop talking!”

I returned to my seat on the floor and spent the next several minutes listening to her labored breathing.

“The police,” she said as the room darkened. “How did they find you?"

“I think they were staking out Tenderloin motels and recorded my license plate. They wouldn’t tell me.”

“And they let you keep this note?”

“No,” I said. “The detectives read it to me—probably to gauge my reaction, to see if I had anything to do with Vicky’s murder—and I reproduced it later that day, emulating her handwriting as best I could. I felt the need to preserve her words in some significant way, like an artifact in a museum.

“A week or so later, Bobby Meeks, also known as the Postman, was captured by police in the same motel. He had just killed another girl and was busy disemboweling her in the bathtub when the cops arrived.”

Quietly, Liz stood up and dropped the crumpled reproduction into my lap.

“Let me know when the truck gets here,” she said, walking out of the room.

I picked up the note and held it gently, as I had done so many times before. In a moment I would try to convince Liz to stay married to me, convince her that San Diego could be a fresh start for us; I would try to hold her and kiss her and make her believe my story, but not before reading those words again, the sound of each syllable beating in tune with my grieving heart.

Dear Richard,

I was sorry to hear about your daughter that died. Don’t feel too bad. I never really had one myself, but you seem like you would make a real good daddy.

Vicky

Sometimes, when I hold the reproduction of Vicky’s note close to my face, I can almost smell Katie in the room. But not tonight.