The last dregs of sunlight had long since fled from the grim faces assembled on the punters of the Leaky Weasel, they could do no good here, and it hurt their cheerful little souls to be squinted at in the manner these morsels of civilisation were wont to. The pub seemed to have reached a rather pleasant, familiar sort of sway to one such customer as he turned to the fellow beside him and slurred “so waddaya make of all this, then?” He motioned to nothing, or perhaps everything in particular as he spoke the question, and gave a meaningful sort of leer that suggested to Reg, said fellow of geographical import, that a meaningful conversation had just snuck up on him.
“I... er...” answered Reg, an auspicious beginning if ever there were one.
Reg was not accustomed to meaningful conversation grasping at him. Indeed, simple conversation such as “where’s the bog roll?” often skittered away and hid in the corner near his tubby, garden gnome-esque self. To have a potentially life-shattering piece of chitter-chatter not only glance his way, but to most definitely peek at him hopefully was a new experience, and he launched himself back into the fray with daring, nay, cunning.
“Well, you’ve gotta laugh, don’t ya?”
The bloke to his right seemed to believe this perfectly acceptable as an answer, and began on the rant that many a man on his seventh pint had before, when the lights around him dimmed moodily and the wallpaper beyond took on a particularly celestial shade of hospital green.
“Well... y’see, it’s all this approxilypse nonsense.”
“Approxilypse?” Reg queried, beginning to get the hang of this conversing lark.
“Aye, approxilypse. The science of approximating the apocalypse. No one ever seems to really get it, do they? There was that 2YK... K2Y... KY.... Y2K! Nonsense a few years back, this Mayan calendar j**z-jazz, and all the doodily whatsit about that Nostradiddle bloke what predicted everything. But no one really gets it.”
Reg, not getting it himself, signalled to the barman for another pint. He suspected that beer was the key to this approxilypse science, and he was willing to conduct a science experiment or two if the need was there. He shrugged with great meaning at the stranger beside him, a sure clue to continue in the tried and true language of the drunk.
“Right, so. I figure that the way around it is horses.”
Reg nodded. It made bugger all sense, but perhaps that was the logic of it. After all, women’s magazines made no sense, and they ruled the world.
“If you count the horses, the horsemen can’t slip by ya!” came the triumphant crow from the man Reg was now mentally naming, if not all too coherently, Approxididdle.
Approxididdle seemed to want a response to this, judging by the vast distance that had just closed between the two men’s faces, and the frantic wiggling of the nose now scarily close to Reg’s own.
“Right. Yeah. The horsemen.”
“The riders!” Approxididdle elaborated. “Them riders what ride out and do the... apocalypting. Death, Pestilence, Wife... something.”
The mention tickled a nerve in Reg’s brain, and so he, too, waggled his nose appreciatively as alcohol fumes mingled in the fraction of space between the pair.
“Count the horses!” Approxididdle repeated, and Reg echoed him happily.
And with that, the moment passed. Approxididdle returned to a happy daze that needed no partner, and Reg returned to a contemplation of the bra of a woman sat a fair distance from him. And in the corner four ghastly ghouls stood, fresh from their horses. The horsemen were out, and they were waiting for the pool table.
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Naita
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I'm on a mission from Glod.