Shadowplays

by W. D. Gagliani

  “It’s murderin’ types like you that keep the old ways alive and death feedin’ on our men and boys.” Her voice cut through my anger like a slap, and I had nothing to say and nothing but coldness within me.

  Because I knew it was true.

  Then she turned quickly and walked away, toward the draperies, fading through them and disappearing.

  The last look in her eyes remains emblasoned in my memory - a look of disgust, hatred, and … something else.

  Pity, I thought. That’s what it was. Pity.

  When I looked down, I saw that her platter was gone, too. Never been there at all, really.

  Devlin opened the door and strode up, unloading a real tray full of sandwiches onto the table. He glanced at me, something like worry still on his features, but said nothing. He probably wondered why I’d stood, why my hands shook in front of my chest. Why I was shaking my head.

  “Who owns this house, Devlin?”

  “The Belfast bloody Brigade, man, you know that.”

  “But who owned it before you? Before the Cause?”

  “Sara Colleen Gallagher, bless her Irish heart. Her old man and two lads was in the Movement, up in the Cork Brigade.”

  He stopped talking and bit into bread.

  “What happened to them?”

  “Meanin’?”

  “What. Fucking. Happened. To. Them.”

  “Bit jumpy, eh, Seamus?” He waved it away. “One was shot by the pommie bastards up Derry way, and the other two dangled on pommie ropes in one of the camps down South. I forget which was which. A noble old Republican family, they was.”

  He pushed the food toward me and this time, when I swiped my arm across the table, the tray did indeed sail unhindered into the wall and into a greasy heap on the floor.

  My eyes were burning, but it was the night’s vigil. I knew that. Tired and irritable. Eccentric. But a damn fine sniper. The best. It was all in Devlin’s eyes as he fought to control his temper.

  By then I was turning away.

  Later, he insisted on a straight briefing. His eyes had gone cold. We were no longer brigade pals, but I was still useful.

  I listened.

  And I killed again. And again. Because I was empty now, emptier than I’d ever been. The flames of the Cause burned cold in my veins, and I used the coldness almost as well as it used me.

  It was the pity that got to me, you see.

  And when the Army got to me as well, I was nothing but a hollowed-out husk.

  The emptiness is still with me, here in the Maze.

  But I see them all around me, every day. And it’s the pity I see in their faces that daily drives me closer to unraveling the length of fishing line I wear above my calf, and tying it to the highest crossbar of my cell door after making one tight loop around my neck.

  * * *

  KNEEL AT THE SHRINE

  Published in THE GRIMOIRE in SHADOWPLAYS (1st edition),

  and in a promotional chapbook

  That night Harry came to me.

  I was sleeping on a hard, narrow bed in one of the rooms of the Harriday safehouse, thirty miles from Derry.

  My brother Harry was a large, rugged type, with a complexion of deep red that perfectly matched his wild hair. His hands were calloused and square, like those of all the railyard labourers in our family tree. We were so unlike, Harry and I, and our arguments always accentuated the differences. He pounded walls with clenched fists, slammed doors, threw bottles, and broke mirrors. Harry was an impetuous boy, and had developed an irrepressible temper as an adult. At twenty-seven he was nearly twice my size and heavily muscled, though I was two years older.

  Now he seemed to float at the foot of the bed and spoke the angry words of our last argument.

  “It’s like buttin’ a brick wall with a bare head.” He waved a coarse hand in frustrated dismissal. “You’ll come around, someday. I swear it.” Then he thinned his lips into a brief smile.

  In the dream he stood there, watching me, after the tirade was over. In my memory of that argument, the last one we would ever have, he had turned and stalked out the door, slamming it behind him in his customary last symbol of defiance, as much a part of the ritual as his words.

  I blinked, wondering at the realistic sensation in my eye. I glanced at the foot of the bed and in the near darkness I could still see his outline, as solid as the furniture behind him.

  But Harry was dead.

  How could he stand near me and continue to berate me for my pacifist views? And how, especially, after what I’d done to Campbell earlier that very day?

  I re-entered the dream. Here was my chance to manipulate its outcome. I would grab Harry’s arm and keep him from slamming the door and from the street below, where Proddy gunmen waited with cocked Brownings for the rakish Provo to show. I would convince him to give up his beloved Cause and he would listen, and the gunmen would go away to search out a better victim, and my brother would live rather than blot the street with his blood only moments later.

  But the dream was changing, taking control of the scene I had played in my head and turning it in such a way that I was watching as from outside, perhaps from outside the second storey window. Harry still floated above the thick rug next to the bed, his hand extended in my direction.

  “You know I’m committed to this, Colin. The British out of Ulster and a united Republic. I won’t settle for anything less, ever. You’re a goddamn fool for all your pacifist crap, and

  too stupid to know it.”

  I said nothing. What could be said against such conviction? There was no other subject of conversation.

  “Ah, fuck off!” Harry stalked toward the door, took one last look at me, then opened it and slammed it in his wake, rattling the fixtures. The door swung open again from the force of the impact.

  The dream was so real, so vivid, that I rolled over and wondered if next I would hear the sounds of gunfire. Past and present entwined and held me in their grip. I slept, and I remembered.

  And still I remember.

  *

  A series of popping sounds penetrated the silence after Harry’s fiery departure. I dropped the book I’d been reading and ran to the window, struggling with the painted-over catch. I opened it with a great explosion of breath and leaned out over the street.

  The unmistakeable rattle of submachine gun fire ripped the air to shreds, and I ducked back below the sill, trembling. The burst was followed by several single shots from further down the street. The submachine gun burped again and abruptly fell silent, the echo dying among the old structures.

  Another senseless shooting, I thought. Derry had long since accepted the destiny of civil war, and who was I to question the wisdom of acceptance? My brother surely didn’t.

  I raised my head above the sill, slowly, in time to see a beetle-like army Saladin and two Land-Rovers approaching rapidly from the adjacent street. I turned my gaze directly downward and saw several shadows kneeling over three motionless bodies which lay scattered on the walk. As the scene swam into focus, I saw the brilliant red hair of one victim.

  Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.

  It was too late for prayer.

  I exploded out of the building moments later. Four rifle barrels turned toward me, death so close, but I pushed them roughly aside and ran to where Harry’s body lay. I shoved through faceless bystanders -

  sheep

  - and looked down at my brother.

  He was sprawled on his side, his coat ripped open by ragged holes and revealing his white sweater, now soaked with his blood,

  and the shoulder holster he wore.

  I fell to my knees, but God help me, I couldn’t cry.

  I saw our mother, standing bravely at yet another funeral.

  I saw a parade of hooded men in camouflage and black armbands.

  I saw a casket lying at the bottom of a jagged-edged cavern.

  A flak-jacketed soldier, standing over me. “Friend of yours?”

  I didn’t answ
er and he shrugged.

  The ambulance bell stopped its ringing abruptly as the vehicle came to a halt a few yards away. More Land-Rovers pulled up, gears crashing, and disgorged a dozen heavily-armed Fusiliers onto the damp cobblestones, who fanned out across the street with weapons at the ready. Medics knelt over the bodies and stood again. Too quickly, too quickly.

  I felt nausea at the smell of singed skin and spilt blood.

  A medic grunted as he spotted Harry’s pistol. It was an old Webley, the same one our father had carried in the Easter Rebellion.

  A young soldier ran up and took the revolver from the medic.

  “What do you know about this?” He held up the clumsy-looking Webley. A relic, surely, but symbolic. Ever so symbolic. Harry always respected tradition.

  I couldn’t speak, for a moment.

  “You know this man?”

  I shrugged. “He’s my brother.”

  “Was he IRA then?”

  “I don’t know,” I lied.

  He raised an eyebrow. “Why else carry a pistol?”

  I turned away, and his voice faded as I watched Harry’s body being wheeled toward the ambulance.

  Suddenly the rear of the van gaped open, metal jaws revealing a blood-red tongue that drooled pink saliva and accepted the body. I watched as Harry became a morsel of food - a bloody sacrifice. No one else seemed to notice. I shook my head, willing the image to change. The medics closed the ambulance gate and it was just metal again, painted blood-red.

  “Colonel Wyndham will need to see you about this matter, sir,” the soldier was saying. He took my elbow and guided me away from the ambulance, into one of the boxy Rovers.

  Shots rang out in a nearby neighbourhood. Somewhere, more sacrifices were being offered. Men with rifles ran off to watch, or perhaps to participate. A driver climbed aboard my Rover, threw it into gear, and we were off in the opposite direction. I watched blue lights revolve in the mirror.

  Twelve hours later they released me into the early morning chill.

  *

  I opened my eyes with a sudden knowledge.

  The bedroom door was open, as if someone had slammed it shut and it had recoiled and stayed open.

  I huddled under the thin blanket.

  Harry.

  *

  The day after Harry’s death I went to his flat, the one he rented with the assumed name and the false papers.

  It was evening again, with curfew in effect, but I grabbed a coat and went, keeping to the side streets. I was nervous, knowing that soldiers often took shots at moving shadows. Though I watched several patrols walk slowly past, it was as if I knew that no one could touch me. It was as if Harry stalked the streets instead of me. Confident Harry.

  The squat, bulbous bodies of Saracens were gigantic beetles guarding the intersections of streets so desolate they might as well have been constructed by the mindless work of insects. In the distance, sporadic shooting attested to the city’s state of mind. Finally, the sweat like a cold hand on my back, I let myself into Harry’s flat.

  Soldiers and coppers both would have gone over Harry’s other flat, the legit one he kept like a museum only a mile away. But they wouldn’t have found anything, because Harry had spent most of his time here, though there was nothing obvious about the flat - no pin covered maps to track IRA bombings, or tacked-up blueprints showing access to police stations and army barracks, no blurred photographs of potential targets.

  In the tiny kitchen, I took a screwdriver from Harry’s tool kit and set about removing the screws that held the countertop in place. Minutes later, I tried to lift off the long counter. It wouldn’t come loose. Then I remembered the sink - it would be held in place by a drainpipe.

  “Like buttin’ a brick wall with a ripe head.”

  Harry’s voice, coming from the darkened corner.

  I whirled about. Was that the outline of someone, standing near the door?

  “Who is it?” I approached the dark, slowly, the screwdriver in my hand like a dirk.

  There was no one there, yet the words I had heard echoed in my ears.

  I shook my head. Harry’s death had unnerved me, but I hadn’t realized just how much.

  I turned back to my task. Armed with a set of spanners also from the tool-kit, I loosened the pipe and removed the sink. The counter lifted right off, and carefully I tilted its length out of the way.

  Harry had constructed a hiding place under the counter, a long shelf with the real countertop screwed over it. The resulting four-inch gap between shelf and counter was difficult to spot unless accurate measurements were taken both outside and inside the under-sink storage space. Or unless the counter were destroyed by a hatchet.

  Inside was a number of things Harry had never specified. There’s a cubbyhole you should know about, he’d said, just in case. I had always suspected the nature of the items it contained, and here they were.

  There was a stack of a half dozen leather-bound notebooks, a plastic box of electrical circuit boards with protruding wires (bomb components? I wondered) two Browning pistols in canvas shoulder holsters and a pile of spare magazines, six plain boxes of military 9mm ammunition, a long and wicked-looking stiletto, and various odds and ends.

  The implements of death.

  I picked up a Browning pistol, its weight foreign to my soft hands.

  “Now you can avenge my death.”

  The voice - Harry’s voice - again.

  Entering the flat’s front room, I scanned the near-dark. There was an outline - a man’s outline - next to the window. I stopped, my throat suddenly constricted as if plugged by a rock too large to swallow.

  “Who are you? What are you doing in my brother’s flat?”

  “Don’t you recognize your own brother when you see him?”

  The voice was right, but the inflection somehow wrong. Yet, there was no mistaking Harry’s broad tones, the underlying cynical twist that made Harry so difficult to oppose in an argument. I don’t know how I knew, but I did.

  “Harry!” I barely felt myself fall to my knees. The Browning slipped from my open grasp. I held my palms out to him, the one whose blood had stained them only hours earlier. “H-how?”

  Inside, in the logical part of my brain, I knew that Harry was dead. I had seen his bullet-torn body, had bathed my hands in his blood, had accepted his death as a sacrifice. But here his outline stood, speaking in his voice and with his words.

  “Don’t ask how, big brother. Rather, put your considerable intellect to understanding why.”

  My tongue unfroze. “So you’re alive - I don’t pretend to understand how, but I … I’m happy to know it was all a mistake.”

  Harry laughed softly, and I realized that it both did and didn’t sound like Harry’s laughter. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it was different - colder, drier, infinitely more nasty than any laugh he had ever shared with me.

  “It was a mistake, all right.” His outline moved slightly, and for a second I thought I could see the wall and window fading behind him, but then he was just Harry again, solid and real even if barely lit in the darkness of the flat. “But now you’ve got to take up arms, Colin, because I am not allowed to any more. You must avenge my … forced retirement.”

  He laughed again and I shuddered.

  I realized that I was still on my knees. But I made no move to stand, even though the hard floor made my kneecaps ache.

  “What do you want me to do?” Though the situation seemed beyond the realm of the possible, I could not shake my role - subservient to him, the headstrong one.

  He pointed at the Browning on the floor. “Take my pistol. Look into the black leather notebook, the one with local phone numbers listed and no names. Call the very last number and identify yourself, and tell them you’d like to do something about what happened to me.”

  “What did happen?”

  “Some other time, big brother. We’ll talk again, you and I, and soon. But now I have business elsewhere.”

  He rai
sed a dark arm and pointed to the window.

  I stared at the night outside, at the lights of Derry, about

  to ask what I should look for, when there was a flash on the other side of the city. The lights flickered, just as the explosion’s low grumble reached my ears. Flames shot up into the sky, then subsided into a red glow that outlined a thick, black column of slow-moving smoke.

  I stood and approached the window, wondering what building or neighbourhood had been bombed.

  The sirens and bells were not long in coming and, on the street below, Land-Rovers sped past, armoured men sitting grim and silent as they held their rifles ready.

  This is war, not a difference of opinion, Harry had said during one of our arguments. And he had been right. I could see that, now.

  Harry’s outline spoke from behind me. “Now you understand the truth behind the lies of peace, big brother.”

  I hadn’t seen him move. He was close, his face hanging over my shoulder.

  The column of smoke still spiralled upward, the shimmering heat around it distorting the darkness until it had a fluid quality. Downstairs, a wary patrol walked in the middle of the empty street, their faces dark in the streetlights’ glare.

  “Ah, for a good old AK-47 right now, brother.” He chuckled. “What fun we would have.”

  I turned to ask him what he meant, but now he wasn’t in the room. The kitchen was empty as well, as was the dingy bath.

  How could Harry have slipped out so quietly? And just what

  could I do to help him? It was obvious he was in trouble, the way he had disappeared. I remembered the notebook, and the phone number Harry had mentioned. The task at hand was foremost in my mind. Harry’s most mysterious actions began to make sense.

  I dialed the telephone. Behind me, the sky still glowed as buildings burned in the aftermath of the explosion. Gunfire had grown less sporadic, and I could feel one of those violent nights settling in on Derry - men and children would defend barricades foot by bloody foot and homemade firebombs would streak toward lumbering targets until the streets glowed with harsh firelight.

  “Yes?” The wary male voice answered immediately.