by Неизвестный
This poster was fresh. And there they were, or some of them anyway: Timo the Dwarf, Lucia the Bearded Lady, Ferdi and Helenca the Siamese Twins, Veronese the Ring Master, Berto and Atla, the Lizard Woman, the singing bears, the deformed horse they passed off as a unicorn. Yet others she didn’t know, new blood come along after she’d been left behind. And him, the finest looking man she ever did see; oh, Gabe was older, she could tell, but he remained so muscular, his jaw so defined, his moustache waxed to such sharp points! Still the main act – the Lord of the Air.
She rounds the bend and walks to the ticket booth, pays out a few of her last coins, smiles at Billy-J, whose voice was just breaking last time she saw him. Now he’s a doughylooking young man. He doesn’t recognize her; no one would. She no longer resembles the bird-boned beauty with ebony hair and ruby lips; and she’s heavier too – not so much physically, but the time inside, the enforced grounding, it’s made her seem more affected by gravity.
Semiramis joins the flow of bodies heading towards the Big Top, her old suitcase, holes poked in the sides, thumping rhythmically against her legs. Sometimes it bumps other people but she ignores them, doesn’t see their looks or hear their grumbling. She hears the noises from the case, though, and she hushes the creatures, tender as a mother. She’s moving forward, forward, forward into the faded canvas palace that smells of sawdust and sweat, grease paint and stale perfume. She finds a seat, planting herself determinedly at the end of the row and refusing to shuffle along; others must climb over her. She pushes her case beneath the seat and promptly forgets it. The show begins and she is riveted.
The older clowns are slower in their japes, less nimble than they were; the new ones have clever quick tricks and trips, pratfalls and practical jokes. Then the flea-bitten lions, and the tigers with toothache, their fur coming out in tufts every time they jump. Next the ill-tempered elephant, she recognizes; its trainer is wary, someone she doesn’t know. Jugglers, acrobats, the girl with the unicorn are a passing, glittering parade.
Then there’s Berto as he takes centre ring. Berto wearing his tiny shorts with all his hair waxed off so there’s nothing for the fire to take hold of; his lack of eyebrows makes him look perpetually surprised. Every night, Semiramis remembers, he’s rubbed down with a secret mix (the shorts, too, are soaked in it), the stuff that will burn, burn, burn without touching him. She can see how deeply the wrinkles have cut into his face, how dry his skin is after years of this treatment. He’s decrepit, she thinks, and puts a hand to her cheeks as if for reassurance.
As she watches, his wife Atla takes a lit brand, promenades about, showing it to the audience so they can all see it, hear the crackle as it swallows oxygen. Then Atla circles back and gently touches the torch to her husband, nightly living out many a woman’s fantasy. And Berto, he goes up like a Roman candle, turning slowly in a circle, untouched by the flames, if not the heat. Semiramis looks away, examining the crowd, unnoticed; all their eyes are glued to the human torch as he makes a slow circuit of the ring, displaying himself like a saint proud of martyrdom.
Semiramis doesn’t care.
They don’t matter.
This isn’t what she came for.
You might think Berto’s what they all come to see, night after night, a man set alight, but no. Now’s the time for the grand finale. Flying beats burning hands down.
As Berto’s inferno dies down and Atla helps him shuffle away, the Ring Master directs the spectators’ attention upwards.
There he is, fine as fine can be, Gabe dressed in his long leotard, arms and chest bare. Even from here she can see the way his eyes sparkle, how they pass over the crowd, resting on all the pretty girls in their summer dresses, resting on their pearl necklaces and brooches, their bracelets and rings, assessing value and what he might get for them in the next town – and who might be the easiest mark. She wonders if he’s killed anyone else in the time they’ve been apart, if anymore heroic and unexpected husbands rounded corners as Gabe robbed a woman he thought was alone.
Beside him on the high platform is a girl, tiny, hollowlooking; staring at him like he’s god, like he’s life and death, and he is, with no net below. A man can burn on the ground to mild interest, but those who defy gravity? All the risk, all the glory. Oh yes, a catcher is gold. A flyer is replaceable as breath. That girl up there, easy to substitute one for another as the sequins on her costume.
Semiramis remembers flying – the sensation of letting go, the moment before gravity realized you were hers, and then the strong hands at your wrists, the feeling that you’d defied everything and were still alive. All things have their time, though, she knows that now. All things, all scenes, all acts. No flyer stays aloft forever.
She imagines Gabe turning to flame, imagines the rope ladder disappearing in a twist of orange and red and gold. She imagines him up there, trying to get down fast enough to escape, leaving the girl behind in his haste. She imagines the burning debris falling, falling, falling onto all those pretty summer dresses, turning their wearers into so much pulled pork. She imagines him anointed with a crown of fire.
Semiramis shakes herself. These thoughts are pointless, weightless like so much expelled air. Beneath her seat, vibrating against the back of her heels she can feel the suitcase, its contents reacting to her turmoil, linked to her as they are by blood, her tiny minions, her lovely light little demons. As inside, so it is without.
She finds she has lost time and realizes that – if he hasn’t changed the act – the girl’s part is coming to an end. Gabe always was a creature of habit and he’d not do anything that distracted a gaze from himself. The girl flies towards him and he helps her up onto the platform, gestures vaguely to indicate the crowd should clap her efforts. Before the applause has died down, he launches into his finale, taking the attention as he executes a slow swing away from the platform, just as he always did in the old days.
How many? wonders Semiramis. How many between this girl and me? How many did he fail to catch? How many got too spooked and ran? How many got left behind? How many, how many?
He waits for the swinging to stop, for the bar to steady and become static, then Gabe performs his masterstrokes, all his movements effortless. A casual clowning that has the audience laughing and gasping; he is an aerial drunk, standing, swaying, falling, catching himself at the last moment, looping himself gracefully back around the bar, refusing gravity’s demands. He dances, grandstands, feints, makes the hearts below seem to consolidate into one organ, beating in time, pounding and swooping and diving in time with his death-defying acts. Oh, Gabe is worth the money all right.
And Gabe, oh Gabe never falls. Semiramis believes this implicitly, because this is what Gabe taught her. In all their time together, he never once even slipped. He never once used a net. His concentration, he’d told her, was absolute. It might look like he’s mugging for the watchers below, but no, that’s just part of the trick. Up there nothing can distract him. Not one thing. Never. Gabe has absolute faith that he will never fall.
Semiramis pulls the suitcase out from under her seat.
She places it on her lap and sets her fingers on the tarnished brash clasps. Hunching forward, she curls her body over the battered rectangle and sighs Fly. Two light touches, two whispered snaps, and she lifts the lid as she straightens.
The dirty-white, barely fleshed doves burst upwards, red eyes burning, wings flapping, flapping, flapping as they rise unerringly. Gabe is making his last turn, his final fauxforgetful misstep, hands reaching pretending to miss the bar, the ropes, everything. The birds catch him off-guard, hitting him in the chest, the face, the eyes, unbalancing him, blinding him, defeating him utterly.
And he falls, he falls as surely as a duck shot out of the sky. He meets the ground with an astonishing sound, a sound Semiramis never thought to hear. All around her people scream and shout, cover their eyes, hold their children close as if they might protect them from the sight of poor old Gable with his bones all askew and his brain coming o
ut his ears.
Semiramis ignores them.
They don’t matter.
It was him she came to see.
RAMSEY CAMPBELL
Holes for Faces
RAMSEY CAMPBELL CELEBRATES fifty years in horror this year with the publication from PS of his latest novel, Think Yourself Lucky, along with a volume of all the author’s correspondence with August Derleth, edited by S. T. Joshi. Meanwhile, he’s currently working on the next novel, Thirteen Days at Sunset Beach.
“‘Holes for Faces’ was one of those ideas that clamour to be written and seem to come with an almost ready-made development,” explains Campbell. “Some years ago we visited Naples for a few days. I think it was on the first full day that we found the catacombs of San Gaudioso under the church of Santa Maria della Sanità, which is located as described in the tale. The corpses are indeed displayed in that fashion. Need I say more?
“I was writing notes as soon as we left the tombs. Pretty well all the excursions we made in and around Naples appear in the story, macabrely transformed. The restaurant is based on our favourite, the Osteria da Antonio on Via Depretis. Writing all this makes me want to book us the next flight back.”
A S 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.”