On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 258, of 266 so far.

Chibber

There were only about twenty people at the funeral, which was fewer than Jim Mackie had expected. But upon reflection, maybe it was understandable.

Mackie was seventy-three years old, and had retired from the police force more than a decade earlier. He could feel the cold of this Autumn day in Glasgow right down to his bones, and he wished he’d brought gloves with him.

At least it’s dry, he thought.

Only two of the small group were under the age of forty, and one of them was the bright-eyed minister who had given an eloquent if carefully generic eulogy a few minutes ago. The other was a man in a coat of a modern cut, and a red scarf that was a little flamboyant for the occasion, but Mackie didn’t grudge him it. Funerals could do with a bit of cheering up, he always said.

The coffin moved slowly down into the earth, lowered by a motor rather than human hands, in deference to the advanced average age of those in attendance. It reached the bottom in under a minute, but it felt like an hour.

Mackie shifted his feet to keep them warm, and patiently waited for the end of the service. It was only a few minutes later when the minister thanked everyone, and relayed an invitation from the deceased’s extended family to convene for a buffet lunch at a restaurant about a mile away. Mackie certainly wasn’t going to be there, but he nodded and smiled when the young minister’s gaze happened to rest upon him for a moment.

The crowd — if it could be called that — was breaking up now, but Mackie stayed in place, looking thoughtfully at the gravestone that stood at the head of the hole in the ground, just beside the mound of exhumed earth that was ludicrously covered in a green blanket so it looked like the world’s smallest grassy hill.

Barry Alexander Gillespie, the inscription at the top of the stone said. Beloved father and son.

Mackie suppressed a snort, and not just at the question of to whom, exactly, the dead man had been beloved. The additional word husband was conspicuous in its absence, but the corpse had indeed held that title for a time. His ex-wife hadn’t been present at the gravesite — in body, at least — because she’d been buried in a similar hole in the ground some thirty years earlier, after being murdered by the man himself.

There was another word that wasn’t carved upon the stone, but it was known to every single person who’d stood and watched the coffin go down. It was known to half the town, too, and to almost everyone back in Gillespie’s heyday. It didn’t make for good tombstone copy, but it certainly stuck in Mackie’s memory.

Chibber.

Gillespie’s favourite pastime was mutilating the face of anyone he disliked with a Stanley knife. He was a career criminal, arrested for aggravated assault with intent to kill when he was only thirteen years old — and then quickly released when his real age came to light. His record was the size of a phonebook.

Mackie had been responsible for putting him away no fewer than four times, and he had the old scars to prove it. For all of his insanity, though, Chibber Gillespie had known to steer clear of the outright murder of Glasgow coppers. It was why Mackie was still alive. It was why he’d lived long enough to take early retirement.

And to outlive you, you rabid mutt, he thought to himself. He would have spat on the coffin, and impropriety wouldn’t have stopped him. Unfortunately, the chemotherapy for throat cancer was making it difficult for Mackie to summon a good gob of spit these days. A cosmic injustice, if you asked him.

Chibber’s mother had been there, almost ninety years old and as fragile as a little baby bird. Half senile, to hear the gossip around town, but there had been a heavy and knowing shame in her eyes besides a mother’s grief. Mackie thought that when her mind finally crumbled all the way, it would probably be a relief to her.

The one saving grace of the day, besides the mere fact of a monster’s death, was that his old gang had completely died out years before — and not just figuratively. Chibber was the de facto leader of the Summerhill Fleetos, a tawdry hive of lawless filth who owned the streets of their twin housing estates by day as well as night. Half of them were heroin addicts, and the rest would have had a better life if they’d been in the same category.

Good fucking riddance to every one of them, Mackie thought, again cursing whatever lay up above the sky for a lack of phlegm to punctuate the sentiment. Bastards that they all were.

He wasn’t a man to easily startle, but Mackie flinched when he felt a hand touch his shoulder.

“Sorry,” the man in the red scarf said. “You were lost in thought there. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

Mackie felt his heart thudding in his chest, and willed himself to calm down.

“Not to worry,” Mackie replied, and after a moment he extended his hand. “Jim Mackie.”

“Alan Sneddon,” the other man replied, shaking Mackie’s hand enthusiastically but with a weak grip. “How did you know old Barry?”

Mackie was getting towards the mid-way point of his seventh decade, but there was nothing wrong with his observation and intuition. He knew two things immediately: that Chibber had apparently had a quiet life during his twilight years, during which he’d met this young man, and that Sneddon had absolutely no idea what kind of person they’d all just lowered into the cold ground.

“For quite a few years, son, aye,” Mackie replied. “And yourself?”

Sneddon shrugged, and there was something childishly and guilelessly defensive about it. “I’ve been his neighbour for the last two years,” he replied. “Helped him a bit, with the shopping and all that. Taking his bins out. He had a good sense of humour.”

Christ up the arse, Mackie thought. A good sense of humour, he says.

“You might say that, right enough,” he replied nonetheless. Some conversations were for warmer days and younger men. He wasn’t about to tell this man that his late neighbour had cut a nine-year-old girl’s ear off because she squealed too loud while out playing hopscotch with her friends. Mackie had seen the red blood and yellow chalk mingled on the pavement on a blistering June morning, and the consistency of the mixture still made him sick twenty-seven years later.

“It’s a shame,” Sneddon said. “He was a character. Product of his time. Maybe a bit like yourself.”

It was a throwaway comment, delivered with an open and innocent smile. He was just making polite conversation; being friendly. Mackie knew that. He wasn’t offended. Those days were long in the past. So he just shrugged, then made a show of checking his watch.

“Well, I’d best be getting on,” Mackie said. “Nice to meet you.”

“You’re not going to the lunch?” Sneddon asked, and Mackie shook his head.

I just wanted to make sure he was gone, he thought, but he didn’t say it, and he didn’t offer any further explanation either. After a moment, Sneddon just nodded and smiled again.

“Well, take care,” the younger man said. “Nice to meet you too.”

Now it was Mackie’s turn to smile. He waited the requisite second or two, then turned away. His right knee was starting to hurt, as it always did on these cold days. He made it all of three metres towards the iron gates of the cemetery when he heard Sneddon’s voice again from behind him at the graveside.

“Do you know how he died?”

Mackie came to a stop. It was a question he’d been asked hundreds of times during his career, always during a private little nightmare for some family or other. It always came before the punchline to the worst joke in the world, and whenever he had to answer it, he knew that he was drawing a line in the minds of those who were asking — forever dividing their lives into before and after. A smeared line, uneven and organic. Like blood mixed with chalk.

He half-turned, and he met Sneddon’s eyes — so young still, impossibly so, and as innocent as the damned green grass — and he nodded slowly.

“He died peacefully in his bed, son,” Mackie said. “But he stopped a lot of other people from dying in theirs.”

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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