Holes for Faces Read online

  Beyond the gates to Pompeii, where a woman’s face nodded forward in the ticket booth, was an entire ruined town. Sightseers clustered like flies around the nearest buildings, where the open fronts were covered with wire mesh as if to cage the occupants—figures that Charlie wished he could mistake for statues lying on shelves. “Not more mummies,” his mother protested.

  “They aren’t, Charlie. They’re just casts.”

  Weren’t those the husks worms left behind where they crawled out of the earth? “What does that mean?” Charlie had to ask.

  “They’re plaster.” This seemed reassuring until his father added “They’re the shape of whoever was there when the volcano caught them. All that was left were hollows where they’d been, and that’s what the plaster was put in.”

  Too many if not all of the contorted figures looked about to writhe and creep towards their audience, and the idea of dead shapes that had grown in holes didn’t appeal to Charlie either. He followed his parents into the town, where the streets were the colour of bone—of the shapes in the cages. The face that poked out of an unglazed window belonged to a girl somebody was photographing. After that Charlie kept alert for cameras, which often brought faces out of holes in the walls. He was glad his parents had forgotten to bring their cameras because of disagreeing over what to pack.

  Lunch was no excuse to leave, since they’d bought sandwiches and drinks on the way from the station. They picnicked in the amphitheatre, where Charlie’s father attempted to entertain him with a speech about someone called Spartacus who’d lived in Vesuvius and set people free. The passing spectators seemed more amused than Charlie’s mother did, and Charlie didn’t know which of his parents to side with. “Sorry if that was too much like school,” his father eventually said.

  “Perhaps Charles thinks it hasn’t anything to do with him.”

  “All history does, Charlie. It isn’t just behind us, it’s part of us.”

  Charlie didn’t care for either of his father’s notions, which stayed with him as he trudged through the crumbling skeleton of a town. His father wanted to show him and especially his mother frescoes and mosaics recommended by the Frugoguide, but the boy was distracted by more faces at windows than there were amateur photographers. He wished he’d thought sooner to unzip his jacket, since as soon as he did his mother said “I think that’s the best of the day.”

  He hoped that didn’t mean worse was to come. He felt as if the clocks on the stations were holding time back. He couldn’t see the dog in the market opposite the terminal, but if it was about, what else might he have overlooked? Despite the gathering dusk, his father made a detour on the way to the hotel.

  The inside of this church was high and pallid, with pillars like polished bones. As the twilight blurred the figures outlined in the windows, their blotchy faces seemed poised to nod forward. Did he glimpse a face beyond the door of a confessional? The box made him think of an upright coffin in one of the kinds of film he wasn’t allowed to watch. When he peered towards it the face was snatched into the gloom, and he heard a bony rattle. “Have you had enough for one day, Charlie?” his father said.

  In a number of ways the boy had, but he confined himself to admitting “I’m a bit tired.”

  In the hotel room he felt as if his parents were waiting to catch him not just being tired, and he turned his back so that they couldn’t see his face. At the restaurant the waiter gave them the same table and asked if the signor wanted his favourite. Charlie thought it safest to say yes, along with please when his mother’s frown began to gather. A different dish might have been even harder to finish while he was aware of the O on the window. He kept thinking a face was about to peer in at him, and far too often faces did, retreating into the dark before he could distinguish any features they might have. When he tried to ignore the gaping oval he began to fancy that one face too many was hidden in the repetitive reflections on both sides of him.

  “Face and teeth,” his mother said upstairs with a toothy grin as a demonstration if not a joke. As well as the mirror on the bathroom wall a round one stood on a shelf above the sink. It magnified Charlie’s reflection, and when he lurched to turn it away he saw his face swell up like a balloon, baring its teeth. He couldn’t help taking the sight to bed, where he was visited by faces that grew bloated, parts of them bulging out of proportion as the heads struggled to emerge from their lairs. Each time he woke he had to jam the quilt into his mouth.

  He might have left his plate at breakfast empty if his parents wouldn’t have wanted to know why. When he returned to the table four people were watching him. “Were you disappointed you couldn’t go on your boat?” Bobbie said.

  He wasn’t sure how much of a lie to tell. “A bit,” he said.

  “It’s your last day, Charles.” Perhaps his mother didn’t mean this to sound ominous, because she added “Would you rather not spend five hours on a ferry? Tell the truth.”

  “Don’t mind.”

  It was rather that he couldn’t think what he would prefer. When his mother raised her hands like a weary victim of a hold-up his father said “Would you like a surprise for your last day, Charlie?”

  The boy wished they wouldn’t keep using the phrase. “If you like,” he couldn’t avoid saying.

  “Aren’t I allowed to know either, Edward?”

  “We don’t want to give it away, do we, Maur?” Charlie’s father covered the side of his face while he mouthed at her, and Charlie hoped she’d winced only at his dropping half of her name. “That’ll be a thrill for him,” Bobbie said.

  Surely the surprise wasn’t more of Pompeii, though the family boarded that train. The clocks on the stations made Charlie feel as if time had abandoned him. His father stood up when the train reached Herculaneum. Weren’t there supposed to be mummies there too? It was only when his father bought bus tickets from a bar outside the station that Charlie realised his treat was Vesuvius.

  As the bus climbed out of the town he saw a fair beside the road and felt guilty for wanting to be there instead. The nearer the volcano came, the less of an adventure it seemed likely to be. It loomed above the road like a storm rendered solid while his father read out from the guidebook that the Romans used to believe volcanoes were entrances to hell. Why would he take Charlie anywhere like that? Did the boy deserve it somehow?

  Beyond a ticket booth a man was handing out sticks at the foot of the route to the crater. Much of the track consisted of loose flat stones, which made footsteps sound bony and thin, especially all those at Charlie’s back. The path kept promising and failing to grow less steep, and whenever he tried to take more of a breath the wind assailed him with the stench of the volcano. It smelled as if the earth were farting, and if he’d been with other boys he might have been able to laugh.

  Near the summit the path led between souvenir stalls. Among the trinkets Charlie noticed skulls, which gave him the unwelcome notion that someone might have brought the heads up from the catacomb to sell. The crater wasn’t reassuring—a vast hollow in which fumes crept out of the black earth, he couldn’t see exactly where, to crawl about as though groping for their own shapes. Charlie didn’t like to wonder what kind of creature Spartacus had been to live here, never mind what he’d set free.

  He did his utmost to look pleased with the treat for his father’s sake and to give his parents one less reason to disagree. At last his father asked if he’d seen enough. As they passed between the stalls again a cloud like an emanation of the crater massed overhead. Charlie felt walled in by skulls, which were no less ominous for being plainly manufactured. When a wind followed him down from the summit he could have thought more than the stench of rot was after him. Some of the people toiling uphill had tugged hoods around their faces against the wind, which yanked at the material so that their features thrust up at Charlie. More than one of them bared their teeth, surely only at the wind.

  The bus had almost reached the station when Charlie’s father turned to him. “I know something else you�
�ll like.”

  He meant the fair. It had a roundabout Charlie went on twice, and a dog with a ruff around its neck, prancing on two legs while its front legs clawed at the air. There was a target gallery where neither Charlie nor his parents could shoot quite straight enough, and a stall where you flung wooden balls to knock grinning faces backwards, leaving dark holes. He didn’t want to try that, and he hurried past to an attraction screened by trees. At once he wished he hadn’t seen it, but his parents already had.

  Two life-size figures were painted on a board taller than his father. No doubt they were meant to be comical. The man sported a clownish costume so baggy it made him look puffed up by gas, while his partner wore a spangled dress that bared her bony hirsute legs. They had no faces, only holes for them, filled just now by the dark swollen sky. Charlie was about to thank his parents for the treat and flee towards the road when a man bustled over, gesticulating with a camera. “Go on, Charles,” his mother said. “Put your head through, then at least we’ll have one photograph.”

  The surge of dread was worse for being undefinable. The prospect of causing an argument between his parents dismayed him as well. “You and dad first,” he said in desperation.

  As soon as they stepped behind the board he felt he’d risked them to save himself. They seemed unconcerned when they put their faces through; they even produced grins, though his mother’s resembled her habitual patient expression, while his father’s looked hopeful. The boy was able to respond, having thought of an excuse not to go near. “I won’t reach.”

  “Of course you will,” his mother said, letting her grin subside now that the camera had whirred twice. “Lift him up, Edward.”

  She pulled her face out of the hole to watch until he had to venture behind the board, to see only his parents and its unadorned back. His father took Charlie’s waist in both hands and raised him like an offering to the hole in front of them. “Gosh, there isn’t much of you,” he murmured. “We’ll have to feed you up.”

  Charlie saw his mother give them both a resentful look. He kept his head back until the photographer motioned vigorously for him to bring it forward. As the edges of the skull-sized orifice loomed around his face he saw the blurred misshapen body he’d acquired. The camera whirred and whirred again, and he thought the ordeal was over until his mother said “I’ll take him, Edward. You deserve a turn.”

  He couldn’t let her see him hesitate to go to her. “You aren’t so skinny,” she said as she hoisted him with her arms under his armpits, so that he wondered if she’d just wanted an excuse to weigh him. When his head came level with the hole she said “Don’t do what you did with your face.”

  Had she noticed his reluctance? He jerked his head forward and did his best to grin. As he realised that his body had become the scrawny thing in a dress, the camera went off. He struggled to hold his face still while the shutter sounded once more, and then he made himself heavy so that his mother put him down. The photographer beckoned them all to a caravan, where he indicated a printer and moved his hands apart to specify the size of photograph. The machine quivered and rattled and eventually disgorged six large prints. Only the pictures of Charlie’s parents were clear. In the rest, presumably because nervousness had made him move without realising, the boy’s face was an indistinct bulge with a bony slit for a mouth.

  “I think that’s quite enough expense,” his mother said when the photographer flourished the camera. His father paid and was handed the pictures in an envelope. The way out of the fair led past the painted board, and Charlie almost managed not to look, but couldn’t resist glancing over his shoulder. Although nobody had been behind or even near the board, two swollen blotchy faces were dangling through the holes. They looked as if the process of emerging had come close to pulling them apart, given how much of them drooped over the edge of the holes. In the instant before he succeeded in wrenching his gaze away, Charlie saw that the effort had bared not just their teeth.

  He clutched both his parents by the hands, apparently to their surprise, and dragged them towards the road. On the train he sat next to his father, away from the window, and couldn’t tell where it was safe to look. The walk to the hotel felt like an omen of worse—the pavement market where the dog with its head in a hole might be lurking, the church with the box for faces to peer from, the restaurant where a head ducked towards the O of the engraved sign to grin out at him. He just managed to suppress his cry, having recognised the waiter who’d befriended him.

  As his father unlocked the room Bobbie looked out of the one across the corridor. “Having a good last day?”

  “I’d say so,” Charlie’s father said.

  “We’ve an early start tomorrow. If you two want some time to yourselves after dinner we’ll be in our room.”

  “You can ring us if there’s any problem, son,” Bobby said.

  “You don’t mind, do you, Charlie?” said his father.

  Admitting his fears out loud seemed likely to make them more real. Perhaps only his silence about them was keeping them away. Besides, he felt responsible for the tension between his parents, especially since they couldn’t discuss it in front of him. “I’ll be all right,” he prayed aloud.

  “He’ll behave himself, don’t worry.” He gathered Bobbie meant her husband. To Charlie’s parents she said “We’ll keep an eye.”

  He was unwillingly reminded that the faces in the holes hadn’t been too good at keeping theirs. Once he was in the room he knew he wouldn’t be able to lie still; trying would only make him shiver. “Can I read?” he pleaded.

  “I said he ought to have brought some of his books, Edward.”

  “Can’t I read the one about here?”

  “I certainly don’t see why not,” his father said not even mainly to him, and passed him the guidebook.

  Charlie was looking for reassurance, but there wasn’t much. Spartacus had been a rebel slave who’d set up camp on Vesuvius six years before it erupted. Lot’s wife in the Bible had probably been turned into a kind of mummy by a volcano. Charlie could have lived without learning this, never mind that some of the headless remains in the catacomb had been painted on the walls where the bodies used to be. Even if this explained the uneven outlines he’d mistaken for stains, it made the figures far too reminiscent of the ones at the fair, and what had happened to the bodies? The guidebook left that out as if it would do people no good to know. He was gazing at the page rather than read on when his father said “Too much for you, Charlie? Time for a feed.”

  In the restaurant the task of grinning at the waiter made the boy’s face feel as constricted as it had by the board at the fair. He managed to avoid looking whenever anything loomed at the oval in the window. He took all the time he could over the meal the waiter assumed was his favourite, and succeeded in eating some of it as long as he forgot how the mirrors could be hiding an intruder. Eventually his mother said “Time to say goodbye, Charles.”

  The other couple must have heard them come upstairs, because Bobby called “Ready” as if he were playing hide and seek. Charlie hurried to the bathroom, hoping to outdistance his mother’s night-time phrase, but she called through the door “Face and teeth.” At the sink he shut his eyes so as not to see his bulbous face in the magnifying mirror. His parents delivered their signs of affection and waited for him to climb into bed. “We won’t be any longer than we need to be,” his mother said.

  As soon as he couldn’t hear their footsteps Charlie lurched out of bed to switch on the nearest light and then the rest of them. He tried watching television with the sound turned low, but he couldn’t find any programmes in English, which made him feel as if the people on the screen were saying things it was vital for him to understand. They reminded him of his parents and the secrets he suspected were about him. He didn’t want to read the guidebook in case it contained more information he wouldn’t want to be alone with, and the sight of the photographs from the fair would be worse. He read every word in the folder about the hotel and tried to
avoid looking at the spyhole in the door; every glance at it felt too much like inviting a response. He’d lost count of how often he’d read through the folder by the time he heard a fumbling at the door.

  Was it one of his parents? Whenever they drank a lot they seemed to have trouble climbing the stairs at home—but the noise was too shapeless, almost not there and yet more present than he liked. With more reluctance than he’d ever previously experienced Charlie tiptoed to the door and stretched up to peer through the spyhole. When he glimpsed a shape so ill-defined it looked incomplete, vanishing from sight like a worm withdrawing into the earth, he managed to stay at the door long enough to jam the end of the chain into the socket. Once he’d shot the bolt as well he retreated to his bed and dragged the quilt over the whole of himself.

  He was in a nervous fitful doze when he heard the fumbling again. He pressed the quilt against his ears so hard that he didn’t hear the voices and the rapping on the door until they must have gone on for some minutes. He floundered off the bed and ran to let his parents in. Bobbie and her husband were watching from across the corridor. “Who on earth do you think you are, Charles?” his mother demanded. “This is our room.”

  He thought of an answer he hoped would placate her. “I didn’t want any robbers to get in.”

  She only shook her head as if she had an insect in her hair and gestured him into the room, not even glancing at the other couple as his father murmured to them. From his bed Charlie heard his parents muttering at length in the bathroom. If they’d resolved their differences while they were without him, he’d spoiled that now. He heard his father declare “I’m not saying what I think has made him like this.”

  Eventually his parents went to bed. Their silence felt as ominous as the cloud above Vesuvius, and weighed on the dark. Charlie listened for signs that they’d fallen asleep, which might relieve at least some of the foreboding even if it left him by himself, but he didn’t know whether they’d drifted off by the time he did. He dreamed they were at the door again, although when he managed to unchain it and open all the bolts and locks, the faces that poked at him out of his parents’ heads weren’t theirs. He clutched at the pillow to blot out his screams as his jolt awake almost flung him off the bed. The quilt dragged the pillowcase back so that the pillow bulged into his face. The pillow was lumpier than he remembered, and the irregular padding that covered the lumps was unhelpfully thin. Feathers must be spilling out of the pillow to make it feel as though fragments were flaking off. Charlie was pulling his head back, disliking the dry sour taste, when his thumbs dug into the contents of the linen sack—into something hinged, where an object stirred like a worm. In the faint light from the corridor he saw that his bed-mate had widened its withered eyes and bared its mottled teeth.