By now the three men were under the marquee and all the way up to the double doors that opened into the lobby.
“It’s locked,” Roderick said when he tried the door.
“I’ll take care of that,” Alexander said. He took out a pocketknife, opened it, then slipped it in between the doors. It took no more than a couple of seconds for him to overcome the lock and open the doors.
“Quiet,” Malcolm whispered as he closed the doors behind them.
“What if he is already gone?” Roderick whispered.
“He hasn’t gone. There are lights on back there, see?” Alexander said. “And he’s the stage manager, which means he would be the last to leave.”
The three men moved quietly through the darkened theater until they reached the stage. Then, climbing onto the stage, they stepped through the curtains and crossed the stage before moving into the backstage area.
That was when they saw Duff working on something with a plane.
Duff leaned over to see if he had leveled the edge of the flat.
“Duff MacCallister, we have come for you,” a familiar voice said from the darkness.
The voice was familiar, because it was the voice of Alexander Somerled.
Startled at hearing Alexander’s voice here, in America, Duff turned toward the sound, but saw nothing in the darkness. He was at a disadvantage, because while Alexander was cloaked by the darkness, he was well lighted.
“Alexander Somerled,” Duff said. “Have you come alone?” Duff moved away from the flat to the properties locker. Alongside the properties locker was the light control panel.
“I am with him,” Roderick said.
“And so am I, Deputy Malcolm,” a third voice said.
“Deputy Malcolm, is it?” Duff replied. “Well, you have wasted a trip, Deputy Malcolm, for you have no jurisdiction here. You cannot arrest me.”
“It is not for to arrest you we have come, Duff MacCallister, but to kill you,” Alexander said.
Reaching his hand up to the light control panel, Duff turned off the backstage lights. As soon as the theater went dark, he grabbed the claymore sword, the same sword Andrew and Rosanna had handled onstage. And though it was used as a prop, it was a real claymore sword, fifty-five inches in overall length, with a thirteen-inch grip and a forty-two-inch blade.
“What the hell, where did he go?” Malcolm asked.
“Where is he?” Roderick asked.
“Shoot him!” Alexander shouted. “Shoot him!”
“Shoot where?” Roderick asked.
Duff picked up a vase and tossed it through the darkness to the opposite side of the room. When it hit the floor, it broke with a great crash.
“Over there! He’s trying to get away! Shoot him! Shoot him!” Alexander yelled at the top of his voice.
All three men began to shoot in the direction of the sound of the crashing vase. The flame patterns of the muzzles illuminated the room in periodic flashes, like streaks of lightning.
The flashes of light enabled Duff to come up behind them.
“Here I am, boys,” he said.
The three men turned toward him, but with a mighty swing of the great claymore sword, Duff decapitated the two Somerled brothers. Malcolm, who had managed to avoid the blade, pulled the trigger of his pistol, but the hammer fell on an empty chamber. He turned and ran.
Duff heard the side door open and close. He waited for a long moment, listening to see if Malcolm had actually left or if he had just opened and closed the door, pretending to leave. When he heard nothing, he turned the lights back on.
The two decapitated Somerled brothers lay on the floor, their heads a few feet away. Alexander’s head was looking up; Roderick’s head was facedown. There was a great deal of blood surrounding the two bodies and Duff knew that he was going to have his work cut out for him tonight.
The first thing he was going to have to do was get rid of the bodies. He did that by putting both bodies and their heads in a pushcart that had been part of the properties of a previous play. Dropping their guns in there as well, he pushed the cart down the alley for at least a full mile away from the theater before dumping the bodies behind a trash container.
Returning to the theater, he worked for the rest of the night cleaning the bloodstains from the floor and the cart. It was nearly dawn by the time he went home to change clothes and wash up.
When he returned to the theater the next day there was no sign of the grisly event that had happened the night before. The show went on as usual with the audience just as appreciative, and the players and theater company blissfully ignorant of the fact that two men had been killed in this very place.
It was not until the next day that the newspaper carried a story of the fate of Alexander and Roderick Somerled, though as yet the two men had not been identified, so the author of the story could only surmise as to who they were and what had happened.
From the
The bodies of two decapitated men were found yesterday morning in the alley behind Gimlin’s Pawn Service. The two heads were found with the bodies, but officials are uncertain as to which head belongs to which body.
