Jeffery Deaver - The Burial Hour

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.’

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.’

‘Wow, that’s way different! Because of the thinner molecules?’

‘Right. In space there are no molecules. There’s nothing. So if you opened your mouth and vibrated your vocal cords no one would hear you. But say you were with somebody else and he put his hand on your chest while you were screaming, he’d hear you.’

‘Because the molecules in his body would vibrate.’

‘Exactly.’

‘I like it when people’re excited about their jobs. When you first said “sound engineer,” I thought, hm, pretty dull. But you’re, you know, totally into it. That’s cool.’

True. Funny when the one thing that makes you crazy keeps you sane.

He was looking over her now, as she turned and walked closer to an inscription in Latin, carved in stone.

Tap, tap, tap.

Her boots.

This isn’t a good idea...

Stefan said to himself: Leave. Tell her goodbye. It’s been fun. Have a nice trip back home.

But Stefan felt Euterpe hovering over him now, looking out, giving him permission to do what he had to do. Anything to keep the Black Screams away. She’d understand.

To the right the cave disappeared into a dim recess.

‘Let’s go in the back there.’ He pointed that way.

‘There? It’s pretty dark.’

Yes, it was. Pretty dark but completely deserted.

Stefan wondered for a moment if he’d have to convince her but apparently Lilly believed she was in no danger. He was a little quirky maybe, he sweated a bit much, he was pudgy, but he was a sound engineer who didn’t mind conversation and who said interesting things.

Women always fell for men who talked.

Oh, and he was an American. How much danger could he be?

‘Okay, sure.’ A sparkle in her eyes.

They started in the direction he’d indicated.

On the pretense of looking around, he fell slightly behind her.

Hearing her boot soles and heels snapping:

Tap, tap, tap...

He looked around. They were completely alone.

Stefan reached into his pocket and closed his hand around the cool metal.

Tap, tap, taptaptaptaptap...

Carl Sandburg.

‘Carl... The poet, right?’ Amelia Sachs asked the balding man driving a small, gray Renault.

The associate of Charlotte McKenzie’s, he’d picked her up at Linate Airport, the smaller of the two aerodromes in Milan, closer to the city center. They were in thick traffic.

‘That’s right,’ Pete Prescott told her. ‘He wrote “Chicago.”’ The legal liaison dropped his voice a bit, to sound poetic, Sachs guessed, and recited the opening lines, about the Hog Butcher.

‘You from there, Chicago?’ Sachs didn’t know where this was going.

‘No, Portland. My point is the poem might’ve been about Milan. Milan is the Chicago of Italy.’