“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.”
“Don’t touch, Charles,” his mother said at once.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“And,” she said, “please don’t speak to your mother in that fashion.”
“Take no notice, son,” Bobbie advised. “He was just having a joke.”
“I’d like us to leave now, please,” Charlie’s mother said. “I think everyone’s seen enough.”
When Charlie turned to follow her he caught sight of a movement above the neck of the embedded body beside him, as if a face like a featureless stain had swung to watch. She must be causing it, there and in the cavities the other fleshless bodies had in place of heads. He tried not to look, especially back, while he trotted after her. It was only his father who was close behind him. The church was meant to be a refuge, and no footsteps other than the family’s were clattering across the stone floor to the exit, however many echoes there might be. Outside all the clothes on the lines might have been miming agitation that his mother was trying to conceal. “I think we’ve been down here long enough,” she said.
Long enough for what? Rather than ask, Charlie hurried after her to the lift, where the sight of a face peering through the small window had lost some of its appeal. As the lift creaked upwards his father consulted the guidebook. “They took the heads somewhere for safety,” he said.
As Charlie wondered who was being kept safe and from what, his mother said “I’d like to put them behind us, thank you, Edward.”
“How far?” Charlie blurted.
“I’ve been surprised at you today, Charles. I hope you won’t let us down any more.”
She strode to poke the button for the traffic lights, and his father hung back to murmur “They thought something might be catching, Charlie. That’s why they took the heads off, to protect people.”
Who might something catch, and why? As Charlie made to ask, his mother doubled her frown at them. “Come on, Charlie,” his father muttered. “We don’t want you ending up in more trouble.”
Once they’d joined the queue at the bus stop Charlie’s mother grasped her handbag every time a moped raced through the increasingly gridlocked traffic. The bicycles buzzing like wasps didn’t bother Charlie, but he could have done without the face that kept looming at the window of the lift across the road. Very eventually a bus appeared in the distance, and less than ten minutes later it arrived at the stop.
From the bus he watched cars inch past one another, their drivers reaching to pull side mirrors inwards. The ruse would have amused him more if he hadn’t seen one reflected face swell up like a worm emerging from a hole as the driver hauled at the mirror. Having leafed through the guidebook, his father said “Who’d like to go up to a park?”
“Let’s,” Charlie’s mother said at once.
The picture in the book showed a railway platform made of steps alongside an equally steep train. When the bus came to an official stop at last and his father led the way to the station, however, Charlie saw an ordinary horizontal platform leading to a tunnel, where he tried to enjoy the sight of a blank-faced train worming its way towards him out of the dark. At first there wasn’t much to see when the train moved off, though a toddler in the next carriage kept poking her head up to peer at him. Her breath on the window between the carriages blurred her face and turned it grey. He tried to focus his attention on the tunnel, where he couldn’t see any holes in the walls—nowhere that anything could creep or struggle or bulge out from.
A wind boarded the train when, having escaped into the open, it reached the stop of a hill, and Charlie’s mother tugged his zip under his chin. At a restaurant between the station and a park they had a pizza big enough for the three of them. Plastic sheets around the dining area didn’t just obscure the view but made the face of anybody who came near seem to take shape only gradually and not quite enough.
There were views from all sides of the park. The guidebook fluttered like a captured bird while Charlie’s father named buildings and piazzas and streets. The boy was more taken with Vesuvius, a hump the colour of its own dark smoke across the bay. “Would you like to use the telescope, Charles?” his mother said, but the notion of looking through a hole that brought things closer didn’t tempt him. As she pocketed the coin for the slot machine he saw a face struggling through a gap in a mass of foliage behind her. Only the leaves were active, and the statue was on the far side of the bush.
“We can take a ferry tomorrow,” Charlie’s father said on the way back to the hotel, “to somewhere your mother should like.” Charlie thought she’d heard more than was intended—perhaps a rebuke. Nobody spoke much until they were up in their room. As soon as his father started looking in the Frugoguide she said “I’d like to eat wherever’s nearest.”
“I hope that won’t be its only merit,” said his father.
“I hope some things mean more to you than your stomach.” Her glance at Charlie made it plain what should. “Time for a rest before we go out,” she said to bring all discussion to an end.
Charlie tried to lie still on his bed while his parents did on theirs beside him. He might have liked to see their faces, which were turned away from him. His father’s hand lay slack on top of the side of his mother’s waist, and Charlie had a sense that it was inhibited from moving, just like him. He struggled not to think this might be how it would feel to be embedded in a wall. You’d have to move eventually, however you could. He strained to keep his restlessness discreet, but once his bed had creaked several times his mother said wearily “We may as well go for dinner.”
The nearest restaurant was just two doors away from the hotel. It was an osteria, which sounded too much like a word for panic. Two mirrors the length of the side walls multiplied the room full of small tables. A waiter set about befriending Charlie, calling him signor and pouring him a sip of lemonade to taste as Charlie’s father sampled the wine. He told Charlie that his choice of spaghetti Bolognese was the best dish on the menu, so that the boy felt obliged to finish it, though it wasn’t much like his mother’s recipe. As his parents drank the liqueur that came with the bill she said “I’ll be happy to come here every night.”
“Seconded,” Charlie’s father said, though Charlie didn’t think she had been inviting a vote.
The boy might have shared their enthusiasm except for the word for the restaurant. It was engraved on the frosted window, and the O was a transparent oval like a hole a face would have to squash itself through. From the table at the back of the restaurant the letter resembled a hollow full of the darkness outside, and Charlie had glimpsed more than one face in it during the meal. Perhaps they’d belonged to people with an eye to dining, though they hadn’t come in. “And I’m sure you’ll want to see your friend again, Charles,” his mother said.
She hurried him back to the hotel and up to the room, where she said “Face and teeth.” Once he’d washed the one and brushed the others she dealt him a kiss so terse it was barely perceptible, and his father squeezed his shoulder. As Charlie lay under the quilt with his eyes shut he heard his mother say “I’m quite tired. You go down to the bar if you want, of course.”
“No need for that,” his father said before the low voices moved to the bathroom, where Charlie heard him murmur “Don’t keep making that face.” He imagined putting a face together like a jigsaw, a fancy preferable to the dreams he felt threatened by having. Eventually his parents finished muttering a
nd went to bed. They weren’t with him as he tried to find his way home through the town, where all the signs were as incomprehensible as the answers people gave him. In any case he didn’t like speaking to anyone he met, however expensively dressed they were; they looked too thin inside their elegant costumes, and he couldn’t make much of their faces. Perhaps there were none to be seen—not yet, at any rate. When they began to squirm up from the holes in the collars he stuffed the quilt into his mouth to mute his cries. Having to explain to his parents would be even worse than the dream.
At breakfast the English couple came over. “Bobby has something to say to you,” Bobbie said.
“I’m sorry if I caused any upset down below.”
“Don’t be saying things like that at breakfast. In the catacombs, he means,” Bobbie said as though apologising for a child. “Did he go too far, son?”
“He was joking. You said.”
“So long as you don’t forget,” Bobbie said and turned to Charlie’s mother. “We’ve been putting you down for a teacher.”
“We both are,” his father said.
At least all this helped distract them from how little the boy ate. After breakfast the family walked down to the harbour, to find the sea had grown so boisterous that the ferries had been cancelled. Now that Charlie saw all the windows in the boats he was happy to stay on land, even though he hadn’t noticed any faces at them. “There’s always Pompeii,” his father said.
Opposite the main railway terminal was a kind of market, men hoping to sell shabby items that cluttered the pavement. One peddler had a dog, presumably not for sale. Its bony piebald face poked out of a discoloured plastic cone around its neck, and it bared uneven yellow teeth in a silent snarl. On the train Charlie tried to forget it and anything it brought to mind. The clocks on the stations were some help, since every one showed a different incorrect time. “They’ve stopped time,” his father said as Charlie imagined he might have told the delinquents he taught creative writing in the unit at the school. Perhaps because modern history was her job, his mother didn’t seem to think much of the idea. Charlie wasn’t sure how to feel about the notion, but then this was true of much in his life.
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