STORYTIME IN CELL BLOCK 12

Roy Dorman

     Whadda ya in for, newbie?

     Yeah? Me too. How many?

     One? Just one? I’m doin’ life without parole for five of ‘em.

     Huh? Oh, I guess I just got careless and got caught.

     Wanna year a story about one of ‘em? It’s a story about a woman and her basement. I knew this woman and what was in her basement.

     It’s an interesting story, but a little complicated. I like complicated stories, but not stories that are so complicated you can’t tell what’s goin’ on. Ya know what I mean?

     Maybe you’ll find the story not that complicated, just my tellin’ of it. I’ve been told my stories are sometimes a little overdone. Or underdone. Whatever.

     This is the start of the story. I’ll tell most of it so that you’ll feel like you and I are actually there. 

***

     Alice Byrnes (that’s the woman’s name) opens her basement door and ushers her guest through it.

     “Go ahead,” she says cheerily. “I’m right behind you.”

     Like the others before him, she’d told him about her deceased husband’s basement rec room. A man cave is what he’d called it.

     Alice had never been allowed in the man cave except to clean it once a week. After all these years, that still irked her. Alice had anger issues. Oh, yeah.

     When she’d found that pair of pink lacy underwear under his single bed in the man cave with “Tuesday” stenciled on the crotch, she’d taken her revenge. 

     Her husband, Lenny, had fallen down the stairs the very next day. Since everyone in the neighborhood had known him to be a drunk, there wasn’t much of an investigation.

    She’d been tellin’ men the same story about the guns and other collectibles Lenny’d left behind after his “accident.” To get ‘em to come home with her from the bars, ya see.

     This new visitor, Harvey, he’d said his name was, is the fourth guy to start down those stairs in the last three years.

     None of the earlier three had made it to the bottom under their own power. A good shove from Alice had sent ‘em down the stairs to land in a heap in varyin’ degrees of consciousness. A paring knife to the heart had finished them off.

     The first one, her neighbor, Bill, had come on to her at Lenny’s funeral and then again, a couple of days later over the backyard fence. Creepy, huh?

     Bill was good lookin’, not over-bearing like Lenny had been, but he’d been married to Alice’s best friend, Claudia.

     Certainly cause for termination as far as Alice was concerned.

     It hadn’t taken much to lure Bill to the top of those basement stairs, and not much of a shove to get ‘em to the bottom of ‘em.

     Now, what nobody in the neighborhood knew was that years ago Lenny had built what had been called a fallout shelter back in the fifties.

     It opened from one of the walls in the man cave into an eight by ten low-ceilinged room that Lenny had done all of the work on himself. He’d never supplied it with anything other than his guns and ammo, but once while drunk he’d told Alice it had a small gas generator, a small refrigerator, and could hold enough supplies to last them a couple of months if circumstances told them they should stock it.

     Now all it contained was bodies doused with lime, wrapped in plastic sheeting.

     Only Bill had been from the neighborhood. There had been a long, thorough investigation, but after a number of years, Bill’s disappearance had meandered its way into the Cold Case Files.

     The other two men, like Harvey, had been chance meetings at one of the small bars in a city a half hour from Alice’s neighborhood.

     Alice had met the men, brought ‘em home with her and killed ‘em. She had her own set of criteria as to what sort of men needed killin’, and there were a number of men over the last few years who had no idea how close they’d come to bein’ dead.

     Harvey had taken his second step, with Alice right behind him, when Alice’s cat, Mister Whiskers, ran between the two of them, causing Alice to lose her balance.

     When Alice bumped Harvey, he grabbed the railing with both hands and Alice tumbled down the stairs ahead of him.

     When Harvey got to Alice at the bottom of the stairs, he noticed she was clutching a paring knife in her right hand.

“What the hell,” Harvey had muttered.

     Alice’s head was in a position that heads are hardly ever in.  Her neck was broken. Harvey was no doctor, he was a steamfitter, but even he could see that Alice was a goner.

     Harvey had his faults or Alice wouldn’t have brought him home for termination.  And even though his buddies may have said he was a good guy, Harvey’d had quite a few tumblers of Tullamore Dew Irish Whiskey while at the bar with Alice. And drink sometimes makes us do what we may not do if we hadn’t been drinkin’, right? 

    That’s just me givin’ my view on the human condition.

     So Harvey decided to step around Alice and go take a look at the man cave and all the goodies Alice had told him about. Maybe take some, ya know?

     Here’s where if you’re watchin’ a movie that the scary music starts and you say to yourself, “What’s he thinkin’ goin’ in there?” 

    That’s more me again. I love horror movies.

     The shelter door was wide open and plastic sheeting was spread out on the floor near the other three bodies. Alice had just had the feelin’ that tonight she’d be bringin’ somebody home.

     Harvey stopped and stared at the entrance to the shelter. I come runnin’ out of the shelter, just like in the movies, and with one swing of a machete Lenny had purchased on eBay, I lop off Harvey’s head.

     Alice had taken me in a few months before all of this. And because I was homeless and a nice guy, so she thought, she let me live in Lenny’s man cave. Hell, he wasn’t usin’ it anymore.

     After we’d become acquainted — nod, nod, wink, wink — Alice also told me about her little “hobby.” I thought it was just nuts, but, hey, I’ve got issues of my own. We all do, right?

     I left that night. Couldn’t stay around and answer the questions this type of investigation was gonna throw at me. Wow! What a mess, right?

     So that’s the story of a woman named Alice and her basement.

     Hey, there’s still a little time until Lights Out. Wanna hear another one?

THE END