Safe House Read Free Page B

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 reached 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.
    â€œIt’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.
    â€œA 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