Holes for Faces (9 page)

The huge indifferent voice of the dark answered him—the wind. He pounded on the door until the number shivered on its loose screw, but nobody responded. The nearest glazed flame lent the digit a vague shadow that came close to transforming it into an 8, although Todd was reminded of a different symbol. It would have needed to be lying down, as he did. He thumped on the door again as a preamble to tramping back to his room. He parted his thin dry lips as he snatched the receiver off the hook and heard its empty sound. It was the wind, and the instrument was dead as a bone.

As he let the receiver drop into its cradle he heard the door in the next room. He couldn’t take a breath while he listened to the noises that ensued.  His neighbour was crawling about as blindly as before but less accurately than ever. It took them a considerable time to progress across the room. Todd would have preferred them not to find the connecting door, especially once he heard a fumbling at the bottom of it, a rudimentary attempt that sounded too undefined to involve fingers. As the door began to shake, a rage indistinguishable from panic swept away Todd’s thoughts. Grabbing the suitcase, he flung it on the bed and dragged the luggage stand aside. He heard a series of confused noises in the other room, as if somebody were floundering across it, retreating in an agony of embarrassment at their own state. The connecting door wasn’t locked, and he threw it wide open.

The next room was deserted, and it wasn’t a bedroom. By the light from his own room Todd made out two low tables strewn with open books and magazines. Against the walls stood various chairs so decrepit that they seemed to need the dimness to lend them more substance. If the room hadn’t been deserted he might not have ventured in, but he felt compelled to examine the items on the tables, like a child determined to learn a secret. He was halfway across the stained damp carpet when he wished he hadn’t left his room.

The books were textbooks, in so many pieces that they might have been dismantled by someone’s fumbling attempts to read them. There were no magazines, just scattered pages of the oversized books. Despite the dimness, Todd was able to discern more about the illustrations than he even slightly liked. All of them depicted surgical procedures he wanted to believe could never have been put into practice, certainly not on anyone alive or still living afterwards. Mixed up with the pages were sheets of blank paper on which someone had drawn with a ballpoint pen, perhaps the taped-up pen that lay among them. Its unsteadiness might explain the grotesque nature of the drawings, which looked like a child’s work or that of someone unusually crippled. In a way Todd was grateful that he couldn’t judge whether the drawings were attempts to reproduce the illustrations from the textbooks or to portray something even worse. He was struggling to breathe and to retreat from the sight of all the images, not to mention everything they conjured up, when he heard the door shut behind him.

He whirled around to find he could still see it—could see it had no handle on this side. He only had to push it open, or would have except that it was locked. He was throwing all his weight against it, the very little weight he seemed to have left, when a voice at his back said “Mr Todd.”

It was the voice he’d been hearing, as hoarse and practically as blurred as it had sounded through the wall. “You don’t want me,” he pleaded, “you want someone else,” but the silence was so eloquent that he had to turn. He still had one hope—that he could flee into the corridor—but the door to it had no handle either. The only open door was on the far side of the room.

The doorway was admitting the light, such as it was. When he trudged across the waiting-room he saw that the source of the dim glow was a solitary bare bulb on a tattered flex. It illuminated a room as cramped as a trench. The bare rough walls were the colour of earth, which might be the material of the floor. The room was empty apart from a long unlidded box. Surely the box might already contain someone, and Todd ventured forward to see. He had barely crossed the threshold when a voice behind him murmured “He’s gone at last.” They switched off the power and shut him in, and the light left him so immediately that he had no time to be sure that the room was another antechamber.

As Charlie turned away from the breakfast buffet his mother gave a frown like the first line of a sketch of disapproval. “Don’t take more than you can eat, please.”

He didn’t know how much this was meant to be. He put back one of the boiled eggs that chilled his fingers and used the tongs to replace a bread roll in its linen nest, but had to give up several round slices of meat before her look relented. “Come and sit down now, Charles,” she said as though it had been his idea to loiter.

His father met him with a grin that might have been the promise of a joke or an apology for not venturing to make one. “Who wants to go to church today, Charlie?”

It wasn’t even Sunday. Perhaps in Italy it didn’t have to be. “At least we won’t be robbed in there,” his father said.

“You’re safe in Naples, son,” the man at the next table contributed. “We’ve always been.”

“How old will you be?” his equally bulky wife said.

“I’m nearly eight.” Since the frown looked imminent, Charlie had to say “I’m seven and nine months.”

“That’s three quarters, isn’t it,” the man said as if Charlie needed to be told.

“Just you stay close to your mummy and daddy and mind what they say,” said his wife, “and you’ll come to no harm.”

It was Charlie’s mother who was fearful of the streets. When they’d arrived last night after dark she’d refused to leave the hotel, even though it didn’t serve dinner. His father had brought Charlie a sandwich in the room, and the adults had made do with some in the bar. He’d been too nervous to finish the sandwich, instead throwing it out of the window and hoping birds would carry off the evidence. Going back to the buffet might betray what he’d done, and he did his best to take his time over his plate while the adults introduced themselves. “Don’t miss the catacombs,” Bobby said as he pushed his chair back.

“Unless anything’s going to be too much for someone,” his wife Bobbie said.

“Nobody we know,” said Charlie’s father.

“Teeth,” his mother said to send Charlie up to the room, where she inspected herself in the mirror. She’d plaited her long reddish hair in a loop on either side of her face, which was almost as small and sharp as his. His father’s hair reminded Charlie of black filings drawn up by a magnet that had tugged his father’s face close to rectangular. His mother gave Charlie’s unruly curls a further thorough brush and insisted on zipping his cumbersome jacket up, all of which struck him as the last of her excuses to stay in the hotel.

The street was just as wide as it had seemed last night, and many of the buildings were as black, but shops at ground level had brought most of them to life. While the broad pavements were crowded Charlie couldn’t see any criminals, unless any if not all of the people chattering on phones were arranging a crime, since even the women sounded like gangsters in cartoons to him. Reaching the opposite pavement was akin to dodging across a racetrack—no traffic lights were to be seen. Charlie’s mother tried to hold his father back, but she was already clutching the boy’s hand with one of hers and her handbag with the other. “It’s how the locals do it,” Charlie’s father said. “We won’t get anywhere if we don’t show a bit of pluck.”

There were bus stops around the corner near the harbour, and gusts of April wind that made Charlie’s mother zip up the last inch of his jacket. On the bus she clung to her bag with both hands and sat against him. At least he was by the window, and had fun noticing how many cars were damaged in some way, bumpers crumpled, wings scraped, side mirrors splintered or wrenched off. His father looked up from consulting the Frugoguide to say “Underworld next stop.”

Wasn’t that where gangsters lived? A pedestrian crossing proved to lead across the road to a lift beside the pavement. A face peered through the little window as they reached the lift, and Charlie’s mother didn’t quite recoil. “We’ll be fine down there, won’t we?” Charlie’s father asked the attendant. “You wouldn’t be taking us otherwise.”

The man waved his hands extravagantly. “No problem.”

When the lift came to rest at the foot of the shaft the doors opened on a view like a secret the city was sharing with the visitors—a street of shops and tenements hidden from the road above. Between the tenements clothes on lines strung across the alleys flapped like pennants. “Come on, Maur,” Charlie’s father urged. “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

Charlie didn’t know if she was frowning at the prospect or at disliking the version of her name. As they followed his father out of the lift she took a firmer grip on Charlie’s hand. “Is that the church you brought us to see, Edward?”

Charlie thought his father was trying not to sound let down by her response. “I expect so.”

The stone porch under a tower that poked at the pale grey sky was at least as tall as their house. Beyond the lumbering door a marble silence held the flames of dozens of candles still. At the far end of the high wide space a staircase with carved babies perched on the ends of the banisters framed the altar. The floor looked like a puzzle someone must have taken ages to complete, and Charlie wondered what a puzzle was supposed to have to do with God. His mother released his hand and seemed content to stroll through the church, lingering over items he couldn’t see much point in. As he tried to keep his footsteps quiet his father came back from consulting a timetable. “We need to go down now,” he murmured.

A pointer that didn’t quite say
CATACOMBS
sent the family along a corridor. An old woman with a face like a string bag of wrinkles was sitting by a door. “No English,” she declared and shook her head at Charlie, who thought she was barring him and perhaps his parents too until he realised she meant they didn’t have to pay for him and couldn’t expect her to speak their language. As his father counted out some European coins a man rather more than called “Don’t go without us.”

“Well, look who it never is,” his wife Bobbie cried. “We thought we’d take our own advice.”

As soon as Bobby handed the guide the notes he was brandishing she stumped to open the door. At the bottom of a gloomy flight of steps a corridor led into darkness. “Will you look after me, son?” Bobbie said. “Don’t know if I can trust him.”

Charlie wasn’t sure whether this was one of those jokes adults made. While the corridor wasn’t as dark as it had looked from above—the round arches supporting the brick roof were lit the amber of a traffic light—the illumination didn’t reach all the way into the alcoves on both sides of the passage. “You could play hide and seek if nobody was watching,” Bobby told him.

Hiding in an alcove didn’t appeal much to Charlie. Suppose you found somebody already was? Dead people must be kept down here even if he couldn’t see them, and who did Bobby think was watching? Charlie stayed close to his parents as the old woman shuffled along the corridor, jabbing a knuckly finger at plaques and mosaics while she uttered phrases that might have been names or descriptions. The movements in the alcoves were only overlapping shadows, even if they shifted like restless limbs. “You’ve not seen the best yet, son,” Bobby said.

This sounded less like an adventure than some kind of threat, and Charlie was about to ask whether it was in the guidebook when Bobby whispered “Look for the people in the walls.” As though the words had brought it to a kind of life, Charlie saw a thin figure beyond the next arch.

It was standing up straight with its hands near its sides. He thought it was squashed like a huge insect and surrounded by a stain until he made out that it seemed to be a human fossil embedded in the plaster. There was more or rather less to it than that, and once he’d peered at the ill-defined roundish blotch above the emaciated neck he had to blurt “Where’s its head?”

The old woman emitted a dry wordless stutter, possibly expressing mirth. “Maybe it’s hiding in the hole,” Bobby said. “Maybe it’s waiting for someone to look.”

The skeletal shape implanted in the wall had indeed been deprived of its skull. Perched on the scrawny neck was a hole deep enough for a man’s head to fit in. “Don’t,” Bobbie said as if she was both delighted and appalled.

Charlie had to follow his parents under the arch as the old woman poked a finger at the gaping hole and let out a stream of words he might have taken for a curse or an equally fervent prayer. Now he saw bodies in both walls of the passage, and wished he didn’t need to ask “Who took all their heads?”

“Maybe it was someone after souvenirs,” Bobby said. “I don’t suppose this lot were too tickled with losing their noggins. Watch out they don’t think we’re the ones that did it.”

“They can’t think. They’ve got no brains left.”

“You tell him, son,” Bobbie enthused just as his mother said “Charles.”

He’d felt as if his words had robbed the figures in the walls of power until her rebuke gave it back to them. He could imagine the headless bodies peeling themselves loose from their corpse-shaped indentations and the stains that must have been part of them once, to jerk and stagger rapidly towards him. Far too soon some of them were at his back while others surrounded him, and there were surreptitious movements in the holes they had for heads—glimpses like animals retreating into their burrows to hide until people had gone by. Surely those were just the shadows of the visitors, and Charlie was making himself look closer when Bobby said “Don’t stick your hand in, son. You never know what’s waiting.”