Safe House

by James Heneghan

  Liam nursed his throbbing foot and sipped his tea.

  Jack Cassidy cleared his throat. “About your mum and da,” he said to Liam. “Mrs. Sheridan and Mrs. Coyne from down the street will stay with them until we can arrange to have them taken away. It would be better if we did it before any of your kinfolk see them. They’d be spared that at least.”

  Liam said nothing to Jack Cassidy, but he had no kinfolk, none he had ever met anyway. He knew his da had a much older brother who went to England when he was a teenager and never came back. He might even be dead.

  Delia Cassidy sent her husband and Rory off to bed. “There’s nothing to be done until the police come—if they come,” she said to them. To Liam she said, “I’ll make up a bed for you on the couch.” She kneeled beside the couch and reached her arms around him. “Try to get some sleep,”

  He disliked being hugged. His mum and his da were not touchy-feely people, and he wasn’t used to it. But he let Delia Cassidy hug him, feeling nothing, feeling empty.

  …the graveyard…

  The Cassidy home was dark and hushed and filled with grief.

  Over on the other side of the street Liam’s house was now a tomb. He pictured the two old women, Mrs. Sheridan and Mrs. Coyne, sitting with his mum and his da, “keeping vigil” Delia Cassidy had called it, in the bullet-wrecked, blood-soaked room. Across the hall, his own bedroom would be empty, its bedsheets and covers snarled, twisted and cold, and his circus posters—Charles Blondin crossing the Niagara Falls Gorge on a high-wire; Cirque du Soleil’s trapeze artists, aerialists and clowns; the Great Wallendas’ high-wire pyramid act; Bozo the Clown—left staring blindly into dark empty space.

  The Cassidy household had gone back upstairs to bed except for Prissy the cat, curled up in a chair.

  Liam lay restlessly on the couch. Every small noise in the house or on the street made him twitch nervously. His head still echoed with the sounds of death in his own home two hours earlier: the splintering blast of the front door as the killers launched their attack, the thump of boots on the stairs, the exploding guns, the smoke and reek of gunpowder. And the blood.

  He tried to sleep, but his nerves and sinews were wide-awake. The mournful sound of wind and rain in the street outside fell on his ears like a dirge, as though Nature were lamenting the deaths of his beloved parents. Again, the thought of his mum and his da made him want to cry, but there was a dam in his throat that resisted tears. Fists and eyes clenched shut in desperation, he thrashed about on the narrow couch, twisting and turning, throwing off the covers. Sleep was impossible.

  Sleep, like death.

  A car went by outside with a splash of tires on the wet street. The wind moaned in the eaves. Rain pelted the window. The muted scream of a faraway ambulance siren joined with the melancholy sound of the wind

  The roar of a motorcycle assaulted the silence. It stopped, down at the end of the street it sounded like. Nobody in the street owned a motorcycle, did they? He listened for the noise to start up again but there was only the wind and the rain.

  He reached down to the floor and retrieved the covers, but when they were back in place, he twisted and turned once more until they ended up back on the floor. He felt hot and clammy. He should take off the sweat suit, the bottoms anyway.

  He could hear a sound, the faintest scrape of—what? A shoe or boot? There was someone outside. Ears straining, eyes staring at the shadows and patterns caused by the streetlight through the drawn curtains, he held his breath. There it was again! The night growl of a tomcat? Or the wind blowing a sodden cardboard box down the street?

  Or maybe it was the mole man, coming for him. He waited, listening.

  Silence. Then a faint scratching sound.

  Fear skewered him. He started to tremble. Should he run upstairs and wake Jack Cassidy?

  No, he decided. Instead he rose from the couch, painfully aware of his sore foot and his aching ribs, and moved as quietly as he could to the hallway where he found a pair of trainers with the laces tied. They belonged to Rory. A boy knows his best friend’s shoes as well as he knows his own. He slipped them on, his injured foot more tender with the shoes. But he was ready to run if need be. He returned to the couch and sat on the edge, alert, listening and watching, trying to control the trembling of his shoulders.

  It was too quiet. He held his breath, listening. The wind moaned in the eaves of the house. He rose and tiptoed to the kitchen and looked out the window. Because the house was small and narrow, the light from the streetlamp shone through the curtains at the front of the house and reflected off the upper part of the kitchen window at the back, preventing him from seeing out. He ducked his head and peered through the lower part of the window where it was dark. It was this sudden move that saved his life. The kitchen window shattered as the bullet meant for his head missed by the width of a hair, drilled through the wall behind him, sped through the living room, shattered the glass in the front window, ricocheted off a lamppost and flew impotently into the street.

  Crackling with adrenaline, he turned and made a mad dash for the front door, fumbled the bolt open and sprinted out the door and down the street, away from the Cassidy house as fast as his grief-destroyed heart, lungs and legs would let him.

  That had been close. He could now be lying dead on the kitchen floor, killed in an instant. You don’t see it coming. It’s sudden. Without warning. You’re alive—then you’re dead. The end.

  Like his mum and his da.

  The Mole for sure.

  He hadn’t even felt the pain in his foot when he was running, but now it was like he was being stabbed with a knife.

  The rain had eased off. The glistening street was all puddles and gurgling drains.

  He heard the roar of a motorcycle starting up and glanced over his shoulder. The Mole on a motorcycle not far behind. He couldn’t see the man’s face, but there was no doubt in his mind that it was the Mole. Slipping and sliding in the puddles, he dodged into an alley, away from the streetlights, and kept going, sucking air. He ran out of the alley and into the next street over, heading toward Milltown Cemetery. He didn’t need to look behind; the motorcycle was still roaringly there, dangerously close. He kept going, chest hammering. He turned into the next dark alley and stopped, pressing himself into invisibility in the nearest backyard doorway. He sucked air into his aching lungs and then tried to be quiet. Bike and rider approached his hiding place slowly and puttered past. He couldn’t see the rider’s face, but it had to be the Mole. Who else would be chasing him? Who else would be trying to kill him?

  He counted to ten, took a deep breath, and ran back the way he had come, out onto the street again. Think! Think! Use your brains! Fool the killer somehow. But how? He crossed the Falls Road, plunged into another alley, and changed direction so that he was heading once again toward the cemetery. He had an idea! If he could get to the cemetery, he could hide in the Ludlow tomb, a sepulcher really, because there was no underground part. The gate on the front of the sepulcher was rusted and the padlock was broken. Inside the burying place rested several generations of the once wealthy Ludlow family who had made a fortune with their linen factory. But the sepulcher had been neglected for many years. Liam and Rory Cassidy and another boy, Sean Farrell, from St. Anthony’s, had discovered last year that there was room enough inside—it was like a tiny stone house—for them to sit and smoke. If they were careful to close the gate and hang the broken padlock on the latch then no one would ever guess they were there, sitting and smoking on the stone coffins of the Ludlow dead.

  Not that any of them were regular smokers. It was merely a bit of rebellion to buy a packet of smokes and one or two bottles of Smithwick’s once a month maybe, if they had the money, and sit around for an hour someplace, drinking and smoking and making believe they were cool and brilliant. His mum would kill him if she ever found out.

  Not anymore she wouldn’t. His mum was gone. Now he could do whatever he wanted. But who would be there to care?

  He rea
ched the high arch of the cemetery’s main entrance, the sound of the motorcycle as it coursed up and down the alleys still behind him. Sometimes it roared. Sometimes it slowed and puttered.

  To ease the pain in his foot he tried walking on his heel.

  The rain started again, thinly.

  He turned up the collar of Rory’s sweat suit and stood for a few seconds inside the gate to get his bearings. Everything looked different in the dark. The streetlights at the edge of the cemetery painted the nearest gravestones a grim yellow. He stumbled through the graveyard as quickly as he could in the rain and darkness, avoiding collision with tombs and gravestones, trying to remember the location of the Ludlow sepulcher. There was no light in this part. He had never been here at night in the dark. Fear of death from the Mole overcame his fear of ghosts. He could still hear the gun exploding in his ear. The cemetery was scary. Stone angels and Celtic crosses loomed darkly over him like monsters, many of them as tall as fifteen feet.

  At last, feeling his way, he found the place he was searching for. The sepulcher was high, like a narrow stone house. He snatched at the rusty padlock, unhooking it, swung open the gate, closed it behind him, stepped across a narrow strip of weeds and was quickly inside out of the rain. He felt his way along the wall, and when he came to the first stone coffin at ground level—most were on stone shelves—he sat. It was good to take the weight off his foot.

  He had found the hideaway only just in time. He could hear the putter-putter of the searching motorcycle in the cemetery.

  He was scared. He was alone. And he was sitting on a stone coffin.

  “It’s not a coffin; it’s a casket,” Sean Farrell had said the first time they sat inside. “That’s what they’re called these days, a casket. And this place is called a crypt. The cat crept in the crypt and crapped.” He laughed.

  “A crypt is below ground,” said Rory. Rory was a big reader. “This frightful edifice, you ignoramus, is a sepulcher.”

  Liam wished Rory and Sean were with him right now. Anyway, he was sitting on a coffin and it didn’t matter a tinker’s hoot what other names it had. A coffin is a coffin, plain and simple. With a dead body inside. And Rory and Sean were not there with him, play-acting and cracking jokes and blowing cigarette smoke into the dank gloomy air. They used to wonder if there was a wooden coffin inside the stone one. And inside the wooden coffin…? Like a set of Russian dolls, smaller and smaller, until finally a tiny box and a withered Ludlow homunculus (Rory’s word) the size of a dried raisin…

  It was cold and wet. July? Might as well live at the North Pole as live in Belfast.

  The motorcycle noise went away. After a while it came back. It stopped near Liam’s hiding place. Was the Mole coming to check the sepulcher? Why would the Mole stop at this particular one of the many sepulchers throughout the cemetery? He strained his ears listening for the sound of a hand on the padlock. Nothing. The motorcycle noise started again. Then it went away.

  Silence.

  He sat in the dark, arms folded over his shivering chest, legs pressed tight together, and waited for daylight as he tried not to think of the many Ludlow ghosts around him, lying in their cold coffins, or hovering over his head, preparing to stop his grief-destroyed heart with fright.

  …lighting a candle…

  He was too scared to sleep. Besides, it was cold in the sepulcher. The pain throbbed in his foot. It was the ankle of the same foot he had sprained the time he fell off the trapeze at YC, or Youth Circus.

  A Protestant boy named Timmy Banks is the anchor. He is holding the rope attached to Liam’s safety harness. Timmy stumbles and loses his grip. The rope races through the pulley. Liam, still twelve feet above the ring floor, drops like a bomb and twists his ankle. The pain is excruciating.

  Timmy is eleven. He cries.

  Nicole Easterbrook, another Protestant, carefully, tenderly removes Liam’s shoe while her friend Grace Newton runs for the director. Rory is there. He helps Nicole peel off Liam’s sock.

  Liam and Rory became members of the Belfast Community Youth Circus after being on their waiting list for a whole year. Catholic and Protestant kids work and train together on Saturdays, and sometimes Sundays. The circus school is under the directorship of the severe Madame Dubois and has a hundred young members with a waiting list of as many more. Started originally as a way of creating friendship and harmony between young Catholics and Protestants, it continues to encourage kids to forget their differences and work and train together. For children whose parents are unemployed, the fees are waived.

  Accidents sometimes happen. Sprained ankles and wrists are not at all unusual.

  Rory helps Liam hop to Madame Dubois’ car. Liam sits in front next to the director. Rory gets into the car and sits in the back. The two boys are stiff with shyness.

  Miss Dubois drives to the hospital and the foot is X-rayed and bandaged. Then she takes the two boys home. Not a word is exchanged between them in the ten minutes it takes for Madame Dubois to drive them home through west Belfast’s mean streets. To Liam, nursing his throbbing ankle, the journey seems to take forever, not because of the pain but because of the silent authority of the director’s straight no-nonsense back.

  Supported by Rory and escorted by the director, Liam hops into the house. Liam and Rory are still dumb from the car ride, so Madame Dubois introduces herself to Liam’s mum and da. Liam can see that they are temporarily stunned by her French accent and haughty polished manner. She does not offer her hand.

  “Mr. Fogarty? Mrs. Fogarty? I am Madame Dubois, director of the Youth Circus. Your son had a small accident, yes?” She hands Liam’s shoe and sock to Mr. Fogarty, who stares at them stupidly while Madame Dubois continues. “It is nothing to be too concerned about. A sprained ankle is all, but he will be forced to rest awhile, I’m afraid.” She speaks, without so much as a nod or a smile, with the air of an expert on sprained ankles.

  By now Liam is lying on the couch with his foot up on the arm and, though suffering from the pain of his swollen ankle, can see that his parents, like all the circus students, are awed by the director’s take-charge personality.

  Rory stands helplessly by.

  His mum fetches a bag of frozen peas, wraps it in a towel and shapes it to fit around Liam’s ankle.

  His da recovers from his astonishment. “It was remarkable kind of you to drive him to the hospital and bring him home, Madame Dubois. Will you stay for a wee cup of tea? Sure you will; I will put on the kettle.”

  His mum, holding the frozen peas to Liam’s ankle, looks up at Madame Dubois. “Please sit, won’t you?”

  Madame Dubois flutters her hands. “Thank you, no. I must be on my way.” She nods at Liam. “It was an awkward fall, but soon you will return to your training.”

  His da says, “An awkward colt often becomes a speedy horse, isn’t that right, Madame Dubois?”

  Madame Dubois stares at him blankly.

  His da smiles. “An old Irish saying.”

  His mum stands. “Thanks again for bringing him home.”

  “The boy will soon be on his feet again, don’t worry,” says his da.

  Madame Dubois leaves without another word.

  They love the circus. When they are kids, soon after Liam moves to the Ballymurphy neighborhood, he and Rory sneak into a circus in Belfast, ducking through the turnstiles after Rory’s well-aimed stink bomb diverts the ticket collector’s attention.

  Soon after that, Liam discovers Trapeze, an old 1956 film, in the video store on Springfield Street. Hollywood hero Burt Lancaster plays the part of a famous trapeze artist named Mike Ribble. Liam and Rory rent the film as often as they can afford it. They think it is brilliant.

  Black night melted into dark gray gloom.

  Liam crawled out of the sepulcher shivering and looked about him with bleary eyes. No rain. He hooked the padlock back on the gate with cold trembling fingers. When he was sure no one was watching, he started walking quickly to get his blood flowing, to shake out the cramps in
his legs and warm himself up. His sore foot felt tender inside the shoe, and his ribs ached on the left side where he had been kicked. His walking slowed and he began to limp. Motorcycle tire tracks muddied the grass and the many flat gravestones; vases and jars of flowers were shattered and scattered on the ground. He limped out the gate, pausing first to make sure the coast was clear. No motorcycle; no sign of the Mole.

  He made his way back to the Cassidy house and beat on the door with his fist.

  Delia Cassidy, in pink sweater and jeans, jerked the door open. “Ah! Thank God you’re all right, lovey. We thought you were killed. Or kidnapped. Thanks be to heaven you’re safe! Come in, for God’s sake. Come in, boy. The police were over at your house and then they came here. Two of the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s finest. They sent a car looking for you. Come in, come in.” Her husband and Rory stood behind her, wide-eyed and anxious.

  He limped into the kitchen while Delia Cassidy called the police.

  Breakfast time. Delia Cassidy had noticed him limping. She finished calling the police and sat him down. Jack Cassidy placed a hot mug of tea in his hands to warm him.

  “The police are on their way,” said Delia Cassidy.

  Liam told them what had happened and about his night in the Ludlow tomb. Delia Cassidy gathered her first-aid things together. “It’s obvious what happened here,” she said. “Didn’t we hear the gun? And see the destruction caused down here? Thanks be to God you weren’t killed like your poor mum and da, God save them both.”

  “It’s clear you can’t stay here tonight,” said Jack Cassidy.

  Rory’s eyes were wide with worry. “This Mole feller, he knows where you are, Liam. He’ll annihilate you for sure.”