We’re in the alleyway behind the theatre, hurrying towards its rear door.  Hurrying because in the minute since we got out of our vehicles there’ve been crackles of machine-gun fire coming from a few streets away.  I hear someone say, “Better get inside quick, Mr Gilchrist.  Sounds like the end o’ history out here tonight.”
 
“End o’ history,” muses Mr Gilchrist.  “That’s appropriate.  Seein’ as I’m the end o’ history too.  Blues history.”
 
Then from behind a Dumpster full of garbage bags steps a young fellow holding a camera-phone in front of him.  At the sight of the phone my hands twitch but I don’t have my tools assembled.
 
Evan responds instead.  He reaches forward and clamps a hand round the fellow’s wrist.  His other hand closes into a fist and his arm folds and levers back.  It’s a thick arm.  It makes me think of a battering ram about to crash against a castle door.
 
Mr Gilchrist speaks.  “Now Evan.  I’m sure the young gentleman ain’t intendin’ trouble.  Just wants to take a picture o’ me.  Which is understandable, me bein’ who I am.”
 
Evan’s arm is capable of knocking the fellow’s face through the back of his head.  But there’s no question of that happening, now that Mr Gilchrist has forbidden it.  Slowly, he lowers his fist.  Then his other hand springs open and releases the fellow’s wrist.
 
“Why don’t you escort the gentleman inside?  And when I’m presentable he can take all the pictures he want.”
 
Mr Gilchrist smiles as he says that.  You could almost mistake him for a sweet old man. 
 
*
 
Later in the rehearsing room behind the stage the fellow gets his chance.  In a chair Mr Gilchrist poses with his guitar and the fellow levels the camera-phone.  Evan stands behind him, studying the phone’s tiny screen.
 
“How d’ I look?” Mr Gilchrist asks.
 
“I believe immaculate is the word, Mr G.”  The old man has changed out of his travelling clothes and is wearing a crimson shirt, a tie speckled with gold stars, a blue double-breasted jacket with peaked lapels.  A Homburg hat covers his remaining hair and wraparound sunglasses mask his eyes.   Just now it’s difficult to believe he’s in his eighties.  When he makes himself look, as he says, presentable, he could almost pass for someone half his age.
 
“I ain’t no spring chicken,” he explains as he poses.  “I ain’t young, nobody stays young, but it’s important to me that I look the best I can.  And it’s important too that nobody takes my picture when I ain’t lookin’ 100 percent.  That’s strikes me as disrespectful.  You take some picture o’ me when I’m lookin’ lousy, that shows you ain’t got respect for an ole man and his pride.  That’s why my employees have orders to stop people takin’ pictures o’ me unawares.”
 
More gunfire sounds outside.  With the whole world going to hell I find Mr Gilchrist’s pride reassuring.  The pride of this old man is one thing at least that shows stability.
 
*
 
It’s an hour since the announcement went up in the auditorium: “Ladies and gentlemen, we proudly give you the final aristocrat of the blues, Mr… Thomas…  Roosevelt…  Gilchrist!”
 
I’m lying on my stomach on a catwalk just above the level of the front lights.  Illuminated by the beams slanting down from those lights, my employer sits on the stage.  His fingers work at his guitar while his body leans forward from his chair, making sure all his voice goes into the microphone.  He still loves live performances but at his age they take their toll on him.  Now he doesn’t look as presentable as he did in the rehearsing room.  His face is creased with effort.  Sweat runs down it in lines and also blotches his shirt.
 
Then, looking at the audience below me, I see the thing that Mr Gilchrist hates.  A guy pushes towards the stage and raises a camera-phone above the heads in front of him.
 
I sigh.  What possesses these people – so eager to see the last living legend of the blues and yet so stupid?  After the contracts they signed when they bought their tickets?  After the body searches they underwent at the doors?  And they still smuggle in camera-phones?  Somehow not understanding that Mr Gilchrist does not want to have his picture taken?
 
Beside me lie my tools, a pair of shears attached to telescopic shafts.  I take hold of the shafts and lower them and the shears from the catwalk.  I feel no pity.  The guy signed the contract drawn up by Mr Gilchrist’s lawyers.  And in today’s anarchic world, with the cops and the courts so beleaguered, a sharp team of lawyers can sanction any punishment for breaking a contract.
 
I manoeuvre the shears until the camera-phone and the guy’s hand are positioned between them.  As hard as I can, I drive the shafts together, which in turn slams together the shears.  There’s resistance – the blades close on the ends of the bones in the forearm rather than on the wrist – and I have to twist and tug at the shafts until the camera-phone, and the hand in which it’s grasped, finally spring into the air and fall.  Not to the floor, because a last intact tendon or strand of skin leaves them dangling from the wrist-stump.  The guy brings the stump down to his face.  He sees the blood well from it and down the sides of his arm, like champagne frothing from an uncorked bottle.  Then he keels over.  The surrounding crowd are oblivious to his plight because they’re so enraptured by Mr Gilchrist’s music.  Probably they’ll trample him to a pulp.
 
I look towards the stage again and notice at its edge several red blots of blood from the guy’s wrist.  The furthest blot is a few inches short of Mr Gilchrist’s right shoe.
 
I shudder.
 
Blood on his shoe?  Hell, Mr Gilchrist would not have liked that.

________________________

©2010 Jim Mountfield

Jim Mountfield is mostly based in Scotland these days although he has lived and worked in several African and Asian countries.  He has trained as a magazine journalist and has written articles and stories for a number of publications on topics ranging from vampires to amateur-league Scottish football teams.

She sat and stared at the dried out husk of what had once been a man. A small bead of moisture squeezed into the corner of her eye. She wiped away the tears with the heel of her palm – sniffing back the emotion – and with it, the last clinging vapours of corruption from the desiccated corpse. How long she had watched him she couldn’t say.  With breaks for the natural functions and needs of life it had been perhaps six months, maybe more.

At first the smell had been miasmic, as the waxy-taught skin had split, softly yielding to the ingression of blowfly, then the outpouring of their ravenous progeny.

Perhaps two months after his last rasped breath, his right eyeball had rolled out of the socket to hang, forlornly on the caved cheek. She pushed it back into its proper home, then, when it simply fell out again, she found a pair of sunglasses and put them on him. The gristle of the ears still seemed capable of holding up the arms of the cheap plastic frames – at least for the time being.

‘There,’ she had said, ‘all neat and tidy again.’ She half expected him to thank her. Perhaps he was sulking.

As the body had finally dried out she had found it necessary to tie it to the chair.  Sticky fluids no longer glued it in its final death position. She needed to give it a little help.

Every day, at least three or four times she told him how sorry she was, how much she needed his forgiveness. He was resolute, up to the point his head fell off of course. She had raided the cupboard and improvised with scotch tape. Remounting the cranium at a slightly jauntier angle than it had been. 

Of course he’d known about her little problem when they married.  He’d said it was nothing, some women snored, some abused their husband’s credit cards, nobody was perfect. He loved her just the way she was he said. Okay she liked a little drink now and then … well perhaps a tiny bit more often than now and then, but she never let it show in front of their friends. It never was an issue.

‘Well okay, it wasn’t an issue until that night,’ she thought. The argument was stupid; they’d both been bloody minded, unwilling to back down.

‘I thought you understood,’ she said, ‘I thought you knew sometimes I need it, to help me cope.’

‘But you could have stayed here with me – I’d have helped you, like before.’

‘But it’s not the same. You can’t satisfy … all my needs.’

‘Once, you said I was all you needed…’ he stared into her eyes, searching.

‘I fucking lied’ she’d screamed. He was just like all the rest. They’d seen her shell but not what was at her core, what made her tick.

She looked at the stained, reflective lenses now taped in place and realised he’d been right. He should have been all she needed but lust got in the way.

She’d left him earlier that evening, crossing to the suited businessman sat alone at the far end of the bar. ‘He’s my brother,’ she’d lied, ‘I often go out with him … he’ll be alright, make his own way home.’ Their eyes met for a split second as she walked out with the stranger. There was regret, fear, love and weakness in them. She hated weakness in a man.

And so the row had started. It was three when she got home, still with the other man’s scent on her. He’d been sitting alone in the darkened kitchen. Taking off her heels for stealth had been pointless.

‘We need to talk,’ he’d said as she put on the light.

 ‘What’s to talk about?’

 ‘Letting me help you.’

‘I’m beyond that,’ she said smiling. ‘I’m going to make myself a drink, do you want one?’ She walked to one of the cupboards and took out a bottle of vodka and a tumbler.

‘Haven’t you had enough … of everything? It won’t help.’

‘Not enough alcohol,’ she said, ‘It makes it easier.’

There was a silence, one of his long, smug silences.

She felt her temper flare. ‘I try to keep you out of it,’ she said.

‘Don’t you bloody understand,’ he’d said.  ‘I want to be part of it – I want you to let me in.’

‘You arrogant little bastard,’ she’d screamed, ‘what makes you think that someone like you could ever get close to me.’

Another tear welled in her eye, and this time she let it roll down her cheek. She’d not meant to let the anger rise that night – after all she was no longer hungry – not meant to turn on his unprotected back, to sink her teeth into the soft, yielding neck, to find the carotid artery pounding under its flimsy coating of flesh. Yes, she liked a drink now and then – it was in her nature.

Now she would sit in that room until only his bones remained, it was the least she could do. Something always happened to them, they were too fragile, too fleeting. Still, patience to wallow in remorse was a luxury immortality gave her. There had to be an up-side to balance all her years of applying lipstick by guesswork.

______________________

@2010 Ash Scott-Lockyer

Ash Scott-Lockyer lives in the English countryside, rides horses and writes horror and dark fiction. His work can be found on Flashes in the Dark and several other webzines. A short story of his will appear in the April edition of Necrotic Tissue magazine. His website is http://www.shadowtales.co.uk