第 27 页

‘Stefan, the sum is?’

Ah, such a beautiful modulation! A triplet in the last of the sentence. Syncopated. G, G, then B flat as her voice rose in tone because of the question. Beautiful.

‘Stefan, you’ve ignored me for the last time. You’re going to the principal. Now.’

And ‘principal,’ an even better triplet!

Only then did he realize: Oh, messed up again.

And the other students either looking away or staring (equally cruel).

Strange. Stefan is strange.

Well, he was. He knew that as well as anybody. His reaction: Make me unstrange or shut the hell up.

Now, on this busy corner in a busy city, Stefan pressed his head against an old stone wall and let a thousand sounds pass over him, through him, bathing him in warm water, circling and soothing his rampaging heart.

Hearing, in his head, his fiery imagination, the tolling of the red bell on the dirt, spreading outward from the man’s neck last night.

Hearing the sound of blood roaring in his ears, loud as a blood bell ringing, ringing, ringing.

Hearing the refugee’s screams.

Hearing the Black Screams.

From the time of adolescence, when the Black Screams started, it had been a battle to keep them at bay. Sound was the lifeblood for Stefan, comforting, explaining, enlightening. The creak of boards, the stutter of branches, the clicking of tiny animal feet in the Pennsylvania garden and yard, the slither of a snake in the woods. But the same way that healthy germs can become sepsis, sounds could turn on him.

Voices became sounds and sounds voices.

Roadside construction equipment, driving piles was really a voice: ‘Cellar, cellar, cellar, cellar.’

A bird’s call was not a bird’s call. ‘Look swinging, look swinging, look swinging.’

The wind was not the wind. ‘Ahhhhhh gone, ahhhhhh gone, ahhhhhh gone.’

The creak of a branch: ‘Drip, drip, drip, drip …’

And a voice from a closed throat that might have been whispering, ‘Goodbye, I loved you,’ became merely a rattle of pebbles on wood.

Now a Black Scream, a bad one, the whining drill. It was starting in his groin – yes, you could hear them down there – and zipping up through his spine, through his jaw, through his eyes, into his brain.

Nooooooooo …

He opened his eyes and blinked. People stared uneasily as they passed. In this part of town, fortunately, there were homeless men, also damaged, so he did not stand out sufficiently for them to call the police.

That would not be good at all.

Euterpe would not forgive him.

He managed to control himself enough to move along. A block away he stopped. Wiping sweat, pressing his face against a wall, he struggled to breathe. He looked around. Stefan was near the famed Santa Chiara church, on Via Benedetto Croce – the mile-long street that bisected the ancient Roman part of town and was known to everyone as Spaccanapoli, or the Naples Splitter.

It was a chaotic avenue, narrow, throbbing with tourists and pedestrians and bicycles and scooters and punchy cars. Here were vendors and shops offering souvenirs, religious icons, furniture, commedia dell’arte figurines, cured meats, buffalo mozzarella, limoncello bottles in the shape of the country, and the local dessert, sfogliatelle, crispy pastry that Stefan adored – not for the taste but for the sound of the crackly crust between teeth.

The morning was hot already and he took off his cap and wiped his shaved head with a paper towel he carried with him.

A Black Scream began but desperately he turned his attention back to the street sounds around him. The putter of scooters, shouts, a horn, the sound of something heavy being dragged along stones, a cheerful child’s tune chugging from a boom box next to a street performer – a middle-aged man folded into a box that resembled a cradle. Only his head, covered with an infant’s bonnet and positioned above a doll’s body, was visible. The eerie sight and his bizarre singing captivated passersby.

The wind, snapping laundry overhead.

Mommy silent, Mommy silent.

He was then aware of another sound, growing louder.

Tap … tap … tap.

The rhythm caught him immediately. The resonant tone. He closed his eyes. He didn’t turn toward the sound, which was behind him. He savored it.

‘Scusati,’ the woman’s voice said. ‘No, uhm, I mean: Scusami.’

He opened his eyes and turned. She was perhaps nineteen or twenty. Slim, braided hair framing a long, pretty face. She was in jeans and wore two tank tops, white under dark blue, and a pale-green bra, he could see from the third set of straps. A camera hung from one shoulder, a backpack from the other. On her feet were, of all things, cowboy boots with wooden heels. They were what had made the distinctive tap as she approached.

She hesitated, blinked. Then: ‘Dov’è un taxi?’

Stefan said, ‘You’re American.’

‘Oh, you are too.’ She laughed.

It was obvious to him that she’d known this.

Obvious too that she was flirting. She’d liked what she’d seen and, college girl on her own, had moved in. The sort who had no problem making the first – or second or third – move. And if the boy, or maybe, for a lark, the girl, said no, she’d offer a good-natured smile, no worries, and move on, buoyed by the unbreakable union of youth and beauty.

He was round, he was sweaty. But handsome enough. And not a player. Safe, cuddly.

‘I don’t know where you’d get a taxi, sorry.’ He wiped his face again.

She said, ‘Hot, isn’t it? Weird for September.’

Yes, though the humid southwestern Italian air was not the source of his perspiration, of course.

A group of schoolchildren, in uniform, streamed past, guided by a protective Mother Hen of a teacher. Stefan and the girl stepped aside. They then shifted again the other way as a Piaggio motor scooter bore down on them. A grizzled deliveryman in a dusty fisherman’s cap drove them yet another direction as he staggered under the weight of a carton-filled pushcart, glaring and muttering, as if the sidewalk were his own personal avenue.

‘Crazy here! Don’t you just love it?’ Her freckled face was infinitely amused, and her voice was light but not high. If the sound had been flower petals, they would have been those from pink roses, plucked but still moist. He could feel the tones falling on his skin like those petals.

None of the crackly rasp of vocal fry that the music-hater refugee, Fatima, had.

As she spoke, the Black Screams grew quieter.

‘Don’t know anyplace back home like it, that I can think of,’ he said, because that was what somebody from back home would say. He thought New York City was like this actually but, given his recent adventures there, he didn’t volunteer that observation.

She rambled, charmingly, about being in the south of France most recently, had he ever been? No? Too bad. Oh, Cap d’Antibes. Oh, Nice!

The screams abated some more as he listened. He looked too: such a beautiful young woman.

Such a lovely voice.

And those tapping boots! Like a rosewood drum.

Stefan had had lovers, of course. But in the old days. Before what the doctors would call – though never to his face – the Break, at around age twenty-two. It was then that he had simply given up fighting to be normal and stepped, comforted, into the world of sounds. Around the time Mommy went all quiet in the cellar, quiet and cold, in the quiet and hot cellar, the washing machine spinning the last load of towels ever washed in the house.

Around the time Father decided he wasn’t going to be aproned to a troubled son anymore.

Before then, though, before the Break, sure, there’d been the occasional pretty girl, those who didn’t mind the strange.

He rather enjoyed them – the occasional nights – though the sensation grew less interesting than the sounds of joining. Flesh made subtle noises, hair might, tongues did, moisture did.

Nails did.

Throats and lungs and hearts, of course.

Then, though, the strange got stranger and the girls started to look away more and more. They started to mind. Which was fine with him because he was losing interest himself. Sherry or Linda would whisper about taking her bra off and he’d be wondering about the sound of Thomas Jefferson’s voice, or what the groans of the Titanic had been like as she went down.

Now the young woman in the cowboy boots said, ‘So, I’m here for a few days is all. My girlfriend, the one I was traveling with? She broke up with her boyfriend before she left, but then he called and they got back together so she just went home, pout, pout. And abandoned me! How about that? But here I am in Italy! I mean, like, I’m going back to Cleveland early? Don’t think so. So here I am. Talking and talking and talking. Sorry. People say I do that. Talk too much.’

Yes, she did.

But Stefan was smiling. He could affect a good smile. ‘No, it’s all good.’

She wasn’t put off by his silence. She asked, ‘What’re you doing here? You in school?’

‘No, I’m working.’

‘Oh, what do you do?’

Presently slipping nooses around people’s necks.

‘Sound engineer.’

‘No way! Concerts, you mean?’

With the Black Screams now at bay he was able to act normal, as he knew he had to. He ran through his arsenal of blandly normal tones and words and launched a few. ‘I wish. Testing for noise pollution.’

‘Hm. Interesting. Noise pollution. Like traffic?’

He didn’t know. He’d just made the career up. ‘Yep, exactly.’

‘I’m Lilly.’

‘Jonathan,’ he said. Because he’d always liked the name.

Triplet. Jon-a-than.

A name in waltz time.

‘You must get lots of data, or whatever it is you do, here in Naples.’

‘It’s noisy. Yes.’

A pause. ‘So, no idea where to get a cab?’

He looked around because that was what a blandly normal person would do. He shrugged. ‘Where do you need to go?’

‘Oh, a touristy thing. A guy at the hostel I’m staying at recommended this place. He said it’s awesome.’

Stefan was considering.

Not a good idea … He should be following up on his plan regarding Artemis (it was quite a good one). But, then, she wasn’t here, and Lilly was.

‘Well, I’ve got a car.’

‘No way! You drive? Here?’

‘Yeah, it’s crazy. The trick is you just forget there’re traffic laws, and you do okay. And don’t be polite and let people go ahead of you. You just go. Everybody does.’

Blandly normal. Stefan was in good form.

Lilly said, ‘So you want to come with? I mean, if you’re not doing anything.’

A Black Scream began. He forced it to silence.

‘What is this place?’

‘The guy said it’s totally spooky.’

‘Spooky?’

‘Totally deserted.’

So it would be quiet.

Quiet was never wise. Even the best intentions went away when there was quiet.

Still, Stefan looked Lilly over, head to toe, and said, ‘Sure. Let’s go.’

CHAPTER 37

Skulls.

Ten thousand.

Twenty thousand.

A hundred thousand skulls.

No. Even more than that.

Skulls arranged in orderly rows, eye sockets staring outward, triangles of darkness where noses had once been, rows of yellow teeth, many missing.

This was the place to which Lilly had directed Stefan. The Fontanelle Cemetery in Naples.

Spooky …

Oh, you bet.

It wasn’t a burial ground in the traditional sense; it was a huge, forbidding cavern that, Lilly’s guidebook explained, had been used as a mass grave site when half the population of Naples had died from plague in the 1600s.

‘And there are rumors that underneath here’re more, going back to Roman days. There could be a million skulls under our feet.’

They stood at the entrance, a massive nature-made archway that led into the darkened expanse. This was no longer prime tourist season and the place had few visitors.

And those who were here seemed to be on missions of devotion, rather than sightseeing. They lit votives, they prayed.

Spooky … and quiet. Almost silent.

Well, he’d have to deal with it. Stefan wiped sweat, put the tissue away.

‘You okay?’

‘Fine.’

They walked farther inside, her boots tapping and echoing. Lovely!

Reading from her guidebook, she whispered – here was a place to inspire whispers – that Naples was savagely bombed during the Second World War, and this was one of the few places where the citizens could be safe from the Allied planes.

The lighting was subdued and flames from the candles cast eerie, unsteady shadows of bones and skulls – reanimations of victims dead hundreds, or thousands, of years.

‘Creepy, hm?’

‘Sure is.’ Though not because it looked creepy. Because of the quiet. The cavern was like a petri dish for Black Screams. A couple of them started to moan. Started to rise. Started to swell within.

Until he had a thought. A new mission. Good, good.

The Black Screams faded.

A new mission.

Which involved Lilly. And suddenly he was wildly grateful they had met. It was as if his muse had sensed his distress and sent her to him.

Thank you, Euterpe …

Of course, he realized, as he’d thought downtown, this was definitely not a good idea. But he also thought: As if I have any choice.

The failure last night … The swish, swish of the knife at the refugee camp. The spreading blood in the shape of a bell. The nightmares, the sound waves of approaching Black Screams.

Oh, he needed this.

He was looking Lilly over carefully. Probably hungrily. Before she caught him, he gazed off.

Lilly was acting girlish now. Smiling, despite the wall of skulls, the dark eye sockets turned their way. ‘Hello!’ she called.

The echo danced back and forth.

Stefan heard it long after she’d turned her attention elsewhere.

They walked farther into the dim, cool space.

‘Your face,’ she said.

Stefan turned, cocking his head.

‘Your eyes were closed. What’re you thinking about? Who all these people were?’ She nodded to the skulls.

‘No, just listening to things.’

‘Listening? I don’t hear anything.’

‘Oh, there’s a thousand sounds. You hear them too but you don’t know you do.’

‘Really?’

‘There’s our blood, our heartbeat. There’s our breath. The sound of our clothing against itself and our skin. I can’t hear yours and you can’t hear mine but the sounds are there. A scooter – that one’s hard because it’s an echo of an echo. A tapping. Water, I’d guess. There! That shutter. Somebody took a picture. An old iPhone Four.’

‘Wow. You can tell that? And it was so far away. I didn’t hear a thing.’

‘You have to allow yourself to hear things. You can hear sounds everywhere.’

‘Everywhere?’

‘Well, not exactly. Not in a vacuum. Not in outer space.’ Stefan recalled a movie, Alien (not a bad flick, by any means). And the advertising line was: In space no one can hear you scream.

He told Lilly about this now. And added, ‘You know in space movies, when you hear ray guns and spaceships colliding and exploding? Well, that’s wrong. They’d be completely silent. All sounds – a gunshot, a scream, a baby’s laugh – need molecules to bump against. That’s what sound is. That’s why the speed of sound varies. At sea level it’s seven hundred sixty miles an hour. At sixty thousand feet, it’s six hundred fifty miles an hour.’