Forgive me for the typing errors; I'm just getting the hang of typing. - RG
Ryan Gaerity sat before the back wall of his cell, visualizing what lay beyond. The cricket field, of course. And then the high fence. A guard tower stood at the seaward corner. Its searchlight would be probing the night, raindrops shimmering through the beam like strands of Christmas tree tinsel. That Belfast radio had been predicting the strm for days. It'd come in off the North atlantic shortly after supper. Gaerity hadn't seen any of this with his own eyes, for he didn't have the run of the place--as did the trusties, the quislings who brownnosed the guards. Still, he could see through the grimy, ancient stones of his wall and watch the waves smashing to mist against the rocky headland, the fog wreathing around the castle. Tourists, if Northern Ireland still had tourists, might be struck by the medieval charm of Castle Gleigh. Until the noticed the towers and the fence line strung with concertina wire.
Gaerity checked the small clock on his bookshelf. Quarter to ten.
Years of planning came down to tonight.
Everything depended on his cellmate being returned to him from solitary, where Kevin Daidy had spent the last two weeks, contemplating the Irish "troubles" from a different point of view. The former laborer was rather stuck on one idea. He wanted the British out of Erin, dead or alive, and tended to smack anyone who disagreed with him.
If the guardds brought him back to the bloack tonight, it would be done only minustes before the lights went out. An added cruelty in that. Naturally, a fellow who'd just spent a fortnight on his lonesome might appreciate a bit of chat to reassure himself that he hadn't gone out of his mind. But no talking was allowed five minutes after lights-out.
Gaerity concentrated on gazing through the wall again.
At that moment, he could see the small fishing boat threading through the dark mountains of water toward the castle. He only hoped that the spring storm wasn't so violent that the skipper had turned back for his home port, Buncrana on the Republic of Ireland side of the border. Money could rent pluck, but seldom could it buy genuine courage. And in all his years, over all his adventures, Gaerity could count only one man who'd had such courage. Natural. Elemental. He'd been no more than a boy, really. But he'd had grit.
Gaerity checked the clock again.
Three minutes had elapsed.
He resisted scratching his neck. From his collar line to his feet he'd coated himself with a thick layer of petroleum jelly. It made sitting rather uncomfortable, but hte insulation would be welcome during his swim out to the boat.
Finally, he could hear footfalls coming down the corridor.
Smiling, Gaerity listened to the block stir, taunts being hurled through the bars at the Protestant guards.
A County Tyrone accent asked, "How's soli, Daidy?"
"Now I know what the ass end of nowhere looks like," Gaerity's cellmate answered, his voice cracking from disuse.
"Didn't touch yourself in there, did you?"
"Why d'you think I'm havin' such a hard time seein'?"
"You're a bloody caution, Kev."
Keys rattled in the barred door behind Gaerity. Slowly, he half-turned in his chair. Kevin, one side of his face covered with a brown stain of dried blood, was already shuffling stiff-legged inside the cell, but the guard decided to hurry him along with a blow along the kidneys.
Kevin collapsed to a knee, groaning, fighting for breath.
The guard was rearing back for another strike when Gaerity rose from his chair and said coldly, "It's a fine stick you have there, Orangeman."
The man checked his swing and met Gaerity's gaze After a few seconds, he lowered his baton and went out, slamming the door behind him.
Gaerity chuckled under his breath.
It was all right for the zookeeper to tap the glass of the king cobra's cage--but not too often and never too hard. The cobra has eyes that remember. And who knows? One lovely morning years hence, the keeper's wife sets off to Londonderry in ther old English Ford to visit Mum--and she's bitten as soon as she turns the key in the ignition. A fat little Presbyterian woman is transformed into a dazzling burst of orange light. Poetry in plastique.
"Ah, Ryan," Kevin said, trying to smile with swolen lips, "I'm done with bein' tossed in the hole."
"No, you're not." Gaerity helped him to his cot. "It's your nature to fight, and it's their nature to lock fellows up for fighting."
Kevin blinked up in confusion from his pillow. "How's that?"
"We're all prisoners of our own natures. It's useless to resist."
"Useless?"
"We are all what we are."
"Ah." Kevin nodded, although he was still thoroughly in the dark over what Gaerity was getting at. he turned philosophical only after several pints of black porter, and then his choice of dialectic was how best to stick it to the Brits. "Thanks for waitin', Ryan."
Gaerity's eyes clickd in warning toward the corridor, where he could still sense the guard hovering close by, eavesdropping. He could finger a guard the way a psychic could feel a ghost. Then he siad in hushed Gaelic, "Coudn't do it without you, Kevin."
The footfalls clipped off toward his desk near the steel door at the far end of the corridor.
"Let's make you presentable for your public," Gaerity said. lapsing back into English. He went to the sink in the corner and wet his washcloth. Coming back to Kevin's cot, he knelt and began softening the dried blood on the man's face, gently wiping it away.
"How've you done it?' Kevin asked.
"Done what?"
"survived seventeen bloody years here. All the times in soli for not goin' along with 'em. I done just eighteen months so far, and I'm goin' out of me head."
Gaerity smiled warmly at the man. "I fixed heart and mind on the one thing that'll make me free."
"No, these old stones could tumble into the sea and we'd still be prisoners here." Gaerity tapped his temple with a knuckle.
"Don't understand."
Of course not. He was a simple Provo. Scarcely two inches of forehead separated his eyebrows and his hairline. "Why're you here?" Gaerity asked.
"That's easy enough--some bastard sang on me just as I set out to do a lovely little snipe on the Brits down in Armagh."
"Betrayal, then?"
Kevin nodded groggily.
But Gaerity pressed, "Someone close to you?"
"Yes... Haggerty. Loved him like a brother."
"Did you think of him in soli?"
Kevin's bruised face hardened. "All the time. I had to scream now and again. Not for bein' alone. But for wantin' to kill him so fierce."
"Why?"
"For puttin' me in the dark."
Gaerity wrung the cloth. A trickle of pinkish drops fell to the tiled floor and drained down a joint from with the grout had been chipped way. "Then you do understand, boy-o. That's the demon. You must kill it before you can go on with your life. Otherwise, it remains a running score inside your guts."
"You're on to something there, Ryan. You have a fine mind, and sometimes you lose me. But I get this."
"I'm glad."
The overhead fixture bumped off twice.
Gaerity said, "Here we go now..." All the lights in the block except one went out. A faint green blush from the guard's desk lamp shone down the corridor and filtered through the bars. Gaerity stood, still clutching the washcloth. "Get yourself some sleep. I'll wake you when I'm ready."
He eased down onto his cot and waited. The petroleum jelly made him feel as if he'd been basted for the spit. A fire of icy salt water.
After a minute, Kevin asked sleepily, "But if you get free of that demon, Ryan--what then?"
"You become a bloody god. Sleep."
"Wake me for sure."
"I will, don't worry."
Gaerity slipped his toothbrush from his shirt pocket. The bristled end had been snapped off, then sharpened to a point on the rough stone wall behind his cot.
The guard started down the corridor on one of his periodic strolls. He probably fancied that he kept to no schedule on his rounds. But he did. He now glided past the bars, phantomlike in the dimness, made his turn in front of the last two cells, and began ambling back for his desk.
Gaerity waited for him to go by again, then crept across tghe floor to Kevin's cot, the toothbrush shank clenched between his teeth.
The man had fallen into his usual irritating nasal snore. What did he dream of? Certainly not the old world destroyed and a new one rising from the ashes. No, not Kevin Daidy. Glasses of porter and dead Brits were more like it.
Swiftly, Gaerity stuffed the cloth into Kevin's mouth with his left hand and felt for the bottom of the man's rib cage with his right. Finding it, he followed the sternum up to the location over the heart--just as Kevin startled awake and made a muffled cry.
Gaerity brought the shank down. Not with all his strength, for that would have only shattered the plastic toothbrush handle against bone. Instead, he jiggled the sank on impact, allowing the blade to slide between tow ribs and angle into the heart.
Immediately, Kevin's body went limp.
Gaerity plucked out his shank and rushed to the sink. Leaning over it, he thrust two fingers down his throat, sucking in his abdomen to strengthen the gag reflex. He vomited, then fished in the remnants of a potato cake for the condom. The cake had been a gift from his "uncle," who'd come all the way from Carrickfergus that morning to wish his nephew a happy May Day. It had been X-rayed but only lightly prodded by Protestant fingers. Lucky no one had given it a good shake.
Gaerity would have heard the blast clear across the castle. The condom was filled with nitroglycerin. For the moment, he set it in his water glass.
Turning, dizzy from his lingering nausea, Gaerity ripped open his mattress cover with the shank and dumped the cotton stuffing onto the floor. A few kicks heaped it up while he went on rummaging inside the mattress. He came out with a cricket ball, careful not to dislodge the spoon that was jammed into it's center.
Kevin had stolen it for him. Before his temper had gottenthe better of him, Daidy had worked on the cricket field maintenance gang. This had given him access to the garden shed and machine shop. Gaeirty himself got out of the cell only for an occasional interrogation.
He was wrenching off one of the iron posts to his cot when the distant groan of a wooden chair stopped him.
The guard had leaned forward to listen. No doubt he'd heard something--but was trying to decide if it was worth a jaunt all the way down the long corridor.
Gaerity waited ten seconds, then finished freeing the bedpost.
It was a lazy man's work: watching the Queen's prisoners. The oppressors become as sluggish as the oppressed. Time to wake them up.
He removed the bedpost cap with the heel of his hand, then poured the grainy liquid inside on his mattress stuffing. A mixture of ammonia nitrate fertilizer from the garden shed and hydraulic fluid from the machine shop. Kevin had nicked both in miniscule increments over months. Gaerity had then added a dash of "uncle's" nitroglycerin to give the blast more bite. A trademark of his.
He covered the pile with his blanket to keep the smell from wafting down the corridor, then squatted with the empty post across his lap. His hands groped over the floor for the loose tile. It popped free under pressure from the shank, revealing a small space he'd cobbed out of the damp-rotted cement.
He kept a bandanna there.
Wrapped in it were nearly a pound sterling of the coin of the realm, possession of which was forbidden in Castle Gleigh, and a vinyl-encased photograph, which he now pocketed. It was burned in his memory--his teenaged self and an even younger boy, angel-faced, clinging as one to a schoolyard "shuggey shoe," a rope for swinging. Almost a quarter century ago. They had parted company on another May Day, so this was something of an anniversary.
Covering the sound with a hacking cough, Gaerity dumped the coins down the open end of the bedpost. Then he snugly packed them with the oil and fertilizer-soaked stuffing, seated the cap back on with a quiet slap.
He laid the post atop his savaged mattress and went to his next task.
Curiously, he felt as if he were only imagining each step, so endlessly had he rehearsed this all in his mind. He'd awaken soon, and another day of waiting would stretch before him like a still, gray sea. Prison was not a square of walls and abrs. It was a flat plain of empty hours.
He scooped an armful of stuffing and filled the toilet bowl with it. Tamping and then more packing. He tamped again.
Taking care not to grunt as he strained, he hoisted the stool off the floor--the nuts had already been taken off of the bolts--and leaned the mouth of the bowl against the outer wall of the cell.
Yes, this feels like a dream. It is unfolding with that queer, colorless ease.
He took a thin cord from his toruser pocket and tied it around the neck of the condom. It was a flame fuse he'd fashioned from Daidy's rosary bead string and soaked in a solution of pulverized matchheads.
Gingerly, he nested the bulging rubber on the stuffing in the bowl, then threaded the string through the toilet's crookneck and across six feet of tile flooring.
Now, at long last, it all came down to the flaring of a single match.
After all these wasted years...
Gaerity lit the fuse, then lay down between the two cots and pointed his shoes toward the toilet. As the sputtering flame inched up into the bowl, he pulled Kevin's corpse down on top of him.
The blast came.
He felt the concussion as a caress rippling over his body. For a breathless split second he was suspended in the primal light, moving outward through black space on a wave of searing heat. Expanding with the newborn universe.
Then he rolled Kevin off him and stood up into the swirling smoke.
A hole had opened his cell to the rain and the glare of the searchbeam. Not an enormous gap in the stones, but certainly big enough for a quick squeeze through. Months ago, he had imagined his toilet to be a cannon, and it had become one. He felt powerful once again, not helpless. Not at the mercy of his enemies. He could do anything he could visualize.
Kevin's backside was peppered with chips of porcelain.
Am I hit too? Gaerity rubbed his face, his legs, then his hands together. Just to make sure that he wan't bleeding. Nothing. Not even a scratch, as near as he could tell.
He grabbed the cricket ball and stepped over Kevin's corpse to approach the bars.
As expected, the guard had hit the alarm button on the wall behind him. An electronic buzzer was rasping with an annoying pulse that reverberated throughout the entire castle. Over the jubilant shouts of his fellow inmates, Gaerity could hear the steel door boom open and then several pairs of shoes scuffling down the corridor.
He plucked the spoon from the cricket ball with his teeth, thrust his arm between two bars, and bowled. The hand grenade he'd fashioned was a crude device, but it detonated with a roar that quieted the block.
Gaerity ran for the hole, snatching up the bedpost along the way.
But he hesitated at the windy opening.
The sea was a dark blur beyond the phosporescence of the surf. No sign of the boat, but he expected to hear the murmur of its diesels before he ever glimpsed the blacked-out trawler. The searchlight was still sweepeing up and down the length of the fence, the guard in the tower somehow convinced that the explosion had been set off along the perimeter to breach the chainlink.
Gaerity braced to jump.
"Hold, mick!" a voice cried behind him.
He froze, then dropped his chin to chest. There was always one who survived the blast. Always. He smiled to himself.
"I have a fine Sten gun," the guard said deliberately, "and if you have any wit you'll turn around as slow as--"
Gaerity whirled and slammed the capped end of the bedpost against the inside wall. The shower of coins caught the guard at the midriff, and he went down with a clatter of keys and gunmetal.
Gaerity flew to the bars and, straining, reached for the Sten. Just beyond his grasp. Had to have it. The tower had finally trained the light on the jagged hole.
He tried with his leg next and managed to scoot it back to the bars with the toe of his shoe.
"It is indeed a lovely Sten," Gaerity muttered, then tumbled through the hole and out into the squall. Rain stung his face. He plummeted fifteen feet onto the edge of the soggy cricket field, rolled, and came up firing a burst at the tower. A tinkle of shattered glass followed, and the beam winked out.
In darkness, he started climbing the fence. He could hear the boat, the low grumble of it's engines.
"Crossmaglen!" he bawled to urge himself on.
Fourteen months later...
The Moroccan freighter had stopped out in Massachusetts Bay, engines idling. The captain was waiting for the harbor pilot to show up. No sign of any approaching small craft yet. Gaerity was standing on the ship's prow, hands braced on the lifelines. There wasn't a hint of a breeze. Under the declining sun, the sea was a sheet of copper, barely a swell on its surface. To the west lay Boston's skyline, jutting out of a sulfurous-looking mist. He rather liked that vaporous quality to the dusk--as if the entire Boston metropolitan area were smoldering on the verge of ignition.
It was hard for him to believe that Castle Gleigh was already almost fourteen months behind him. That it'd taken him this long to stand were he did now, no more than two hours away from setting foot in Boston. Yet the breakout, the rental of the fishing boat from Donegal, had exhausted the resources he'd set aside before imprisonment. Booty from robbing Ulster banks in the early seventies. This was an interprise he coudn't fall back upon in the nineties, not with his face plastered all over the United Kingdom.
So Gaerity had looked up old friends for temporary employment. The Libyans. They indeed had a thing or two for him to do. The bombing of a moderate Egyptian politician in Cairo. A Lear jet belonging to an American oil company, which mysteriously vanished off eht radar screen over Chad. Nothing more than a few jobs to provide him with a grubstake for Amerikay.
"Mr. Cawton--"
Instantly, Gaerity spun around. A trick he'd learned. Show no hesitation with an alias. "Yes?"
The captain, a Libyan national, was approaching. Lovely people, Libyans. Individually. "My dear Mr. Cawton..." He grinned, touching his fingers to the bill of his salt-stained cap. Brilliantly white teeth. Either that or it was the contrast with his dark sepia complexion. "Sir, I must beg you to stay off the weatherdecks as we dock."
"Of course, Captain," Gaerity said. "I was just enjoying the view. Do you mind if I take just a few minutes more?"
"Please do. I didn't mean to order you about." Libyans make lousy disciplinarians: too naturally ingratiating. "Is this your first time to Boston?"
"No. Unfortunately, I've reached the unenviable time in life with one has done everything at least twice."
"I know precicely what you mean, Mr. Cawton."
No, he didn't. Not one bit. It was high time to smash the old world and create a new one from the debris, that's what he meant.
"You seem very eager to reach land," the captain went on.
Gaerity glanced up from the water. Filthy. Garlands of half-dissolved toilet paper floating past. "I am, Captain. I mean to get well here."
"The hospitals are excellent. I have heard that."
Gaerity just smiled. There was but one person in all the world he could open himself up to. One equally tortured soul who might understand. He hoped that there would be time for a meeting before he killed that man.
"I turst you're not feeling poorly, Mr. Cawton."
"Oh, no, I feel wonderful. And I mean to enjoy every minute of my therapy..." Originally, it had been prescribed by a radical psychiatrist in Heidelberg to his patients, mostly members of the Red Army Faction, but also Gaerity, who'd been hiding out on the continent. They were all encouraged to cure their personal compulsions and obsessions by making therapeutic attacks on their tormentors. Don't learn to cope with the source of your distrubance. Attack it. Destroy it. On that though, Gaeirty inhaled deeply. "Freedom, Captain. I smell freedom in the air."
"I'm afraid I don't subscribe to the myth of American freedom, Mr. Cawton." Resolute but also afraid of giving offense. Bloody Libyans.
"Neither do I, sir."
"I thought not." The captain's grin was short lived. "We must sail again on July fifth--with or without you, my dear Mr. Cawton."
Window Blind Treatment Ideas
| Baby Girl Shower Invitations
| Free Flash Games
| Illinois Bank Foreclosures
| Funny T-Shirts