I sat on my suitcase in the back room with the phone held near my mouth, and I pressed the red button before I could talk myself out of it.
"Right. This is a voice memo. Second of November, a bit after midnight." I stopped. My voice sounded thin in the room, and the room was bare enough that it came back at me. "I'm recording this because nobody knows where I am. That isn't a complaint. It's just the situation, and it seems like something should have it on record."
I'd never kept a diary or made a memo. Sitting there with a dead woman's flat around me and no one to text, it seemed like the only thing left to do with my hands.
"My name's Mike Taylor. I'm thirty-eight. I've never held a job. I live off a trust in Cheshire that my grandfather set up so his descendants wouldn't have to be useful, and it's worked on me perfectly. I'm in Naples because my father's aunt, Silvia Taylor, died last month at ninety. She wrote me one letter a year for ten years. I answered none of them. I read the first two, I think. After that I'd see the Italian stamps and put the envelope in the drawer with the takeaway menus."
I looked at the floor. Old boards, dark, with pale patches where furniture had stood for decades and then didn't.
"Then a solicitor wrote to say I was her sole heir. It was the first thing in years that asked anything of me. That's why I'm here, and I'd like to say it was grief or duty. It wasn't. I was curious, and I was bored, and somebody wanted me for something."
I let the phone record a few seconds of nothing. Then I got up and started talking again, because the silence in that flat was the kind you can feel in your teeth.
"I got in around ten. Via dei Tribunali is narrow enough that the taxi driver stopped at the top and pointed. I walked the rest with the suitcase bumping behind me. Scooters, a pizza place still open, someone's washing hanging over the road on a line." I found the door of the building. "The stairwell is stone and it smells of damp tufa, coffee, and frying oil, all at once, and none of it fades as you go up. Four flights. My legs were shaking by the third. That's the trust for you."
I hadn't mentioned the courtyard yet, so I did. It was the one part of the building I'd actually stopped for. You come in through the archway and it opens up, a square of sky between the walls, with washing lines strung across it and nothing on them. In the middle there was a well-shaft, stone-rimmed, with a wooden lid rotted half through. I'd looked in and it was dry. I dropped a coin in to check, and it took a long time to land, and when it did it made a flat dead sound, like nothing had ever been down there.
"There's a lift cage, too," I told the phone. "Iron, rusted brown, wedged at the ground floor with the gate hanging open. I don't think it's moved since before I was born. I took the stairs."
I'd reached the front room by then. There was a table, two chairs, a dresser with the doors shut, a crucifix on a nail and a paler square on the wall where something else had hung. The whole flat was narrow, a long stone tube of rooms one behind another. Kitchen with a two-ring stove and a tap that coughed before it ran. A bedroom with a bare mattress and a glass on the bedside table. Everything smelled of old soap.
"Nothing personal in here," I said, walking. "She's had somebody clear it, or she just didn't keep much. I keep expecting a photograph. There's a calendar in the kitchen and it's still on last year."
I stopped in the kitchen and looked at the calendar, and then I said the other thing.
"My father doesn't know I'm here. Floyd. We haven't spoken in years. I could tell you which year, but it's not one incident, it's more that we ran out of things to say and neither of us minded enough to fix it. He'd have told me not to come. Or he wouldn't have said anything, which is what he does, and I'd have come anyway."
That was as far as I wanted to go on that, so I stopped talking and just walked.
The back room was the last one. It had a single window with the shutter closed and a bare bulb on a cord, which I'd left on. My suitcase was where I'd dropped it, and there wasn't much else in there. A chair with a broken cane seat. A bucket, empty. And on the far wall, a doorway, about the width of a door, filled in with brick.
It had been done properly. The bricks were old and flat and a dull yellow-grey, and the mortar between them was thick and not quite the same color as the wall around it. Somebody had bricked it up a long time ago and then, for years, kept the paint off it. I was looking at it when I said, "There's a doorway in here that's been filled in. Looks like it went somewhere."
Then I crossed the room and put my palm flat on it.
It was cold. I'd expected cold from stone in November, but this was more than that. It was the cold of a cellar in July, and it went into the heel of my hand and up my wrist. I didn't take my hand away. I left it there, and I could feel the grit of the mortar under the pads of my fingers.
"It's cold," I said. My voice was lower. "Really cold. Colder than the wall next to it. I checked." I moved my other hand to the plaster beside the frame and it was just a wall, cool and a little dusty. I put the first hand back.
That was when I heard it.
Behind the bricks, something dripped. One drop, then a long gap, long enough that I started to think I'd imagined it, and then another. Slow. Wet and small, landing on something that gave it a hollow place to land.
I stopped talking. I held the phone against my chest, still recording, and I put my ear near the brick, not touching it.
Drip.
I counted the gaps without meaning to. Eleven seconds. Thirteen. Nine. Not regular. A pipe would have been regular, I thought. A pipe would have been a pipe, and a plumber would sort it out in the morning, and I'd have felt stupid for standing there with my palm on a wall.
I stayed anyway. I'd meant to give it a minute. When I finally straightened up, my knees hurt and the phone said I'd been recording for eleven minutes, and the last six of them were nothing but me breathing and the drip behind the wall.
I looked at the screen, and then at the bricks.
"Right," I said quietly. "Pipe."
I didn't stop the recording.
Third of November, evening. I know because I said so into the phone, standing in the back room with my coat still on.
"There's a cup on the floor," I said. "Espresso cup, white, chipped on the rim. It's in front of the bricks. It's full to the top and it's cold. I mean the water's cold, and so is the cup. I'm not sure what else to tell you."
I'd slept most of the day on the bare mattress with my shoes on, woken at dusk with a dry mouth, and eaten half a stale roll from the bag I'd bought at the station. I hadn't been in the back room since midnight. When I opened the door the bulb was still on, the suitcase was where I'd left it, and the cup was sitting on the floorboards about a foot from the wall, dead centre in front of the doorway.
It wasn't mine. I hadn't brought a cup, and the kitchen had two glasses and a saucepan. This one had a hairline crack running down from the chip. I crouched and looked at the water. It stood right at the lip, held up by its own skin, and it didn't shiver when I breathed on it. I touched the side with one finger. Cold enough to ache.
"Right," I said. "Someone's been in."
So I checked. The front door first, because that was the obvious way. The chain was on, fastened from the inside, exactly as I'd left it at midnight when I'd put it on out of habit. I slid it off and back on to be sure it wasn't broken. It wasn't. The bolt was across as well.
Then the windows. The back room had one, and the shutter was closed and hooked from the inside. The bedroom window gave onto the vicolo four floors down, and the latch was stiff with paint. I had to lean my weight on it to get it to open at all, so nobody had come through it quietly. The kitchen had a little vent, about the size of a shoebox. I looked in the dresser and in the cupboard under the sink. I even opened the oven. A tin of matches, a folded tea towel, and a lot of nothing.
When I got back to the back room the cup was still there and hadn't changed.
I noticed something then, and I said it to the phone almost proudly. "I'm not frightened. I should probably say that. I've gone through the possibilities and I'm interested. That's all it is." I did feel that way. It was the most alert I'd felt in years, and I think I was a bit pleased with myself for it.
What I did next was the sort of thing I've always done, which is ask someone else. There was a door directly across the landing with a strip of light under it and the smell of onions coming through. I'd passed it on the way up the night before and hadn't thought about it. I knocked.
It took a while. A chain rattled, and the door opened about a hand's width. A short, stout woman looked up at me. Grey hair pinned back, black housedress, dark eyes going over my face and my crumpled shirt.
"Ah," she said. "Il nipote." Then, in slow English, "You are the one from England. Silvia's."
"Mike," I said. "Sorry to bother you. I'm just across the way."
"Giulia. Giulia Fontana." She opened the door the rest of the way and didn't step out. "You have a problem with the water? The boiler?"
"No. There's a cup." I felt ridiculous the moment I said it. "There's a cup of water on the floor of the back room, in front of the bricked-up door. It wasn't there last night. The chain's on the front door and the windows are shut, and I'd like to know who put it there."
She didn't look surprised. That was the first thing that bothered me. She looked the way someone looks when you tell them the post has come.
"It is Silvia's custom," she said.
"Silvia's dead."
"Yes. Three weeks." She crossed herself quickly and went on. "Every evening, forty years, she pours a cup. Water from her own tap, clean, in the kitchen. She puts it on the floor in front of the wall. Every evening." She held up one finger for each part, the way you'd give someone directions. "Not from the courtyard. Not bottled. From the tap of the house. The thing below drinks what it's given, and it takes the water of the house back, in kind. So it knows the house."
I waited for the rest of it. "The thing below," I said.
"Below." She waved her hand at the floor, then at the wall, and didn't go any further. "You understand? It is simple. You pour, it drinks."
"Who poured tonight, though? I didn't."
She looked at my collar rather than my face. "The cup is there, yes? Then it is as it should be."
That wasn't an answer, and she knew it. She reached out and took my hand in both of hers. Her palms were dry and warm and much stronger than I expected. She pressed hard, as if she were passing me something small.
"Listen to me. Never let the cup go unpoured. Not one night. The pouring keeps it down."
"Keeps what down?"
"Keeps it down," she said again, quieter, and let go. "Buona sera, Michele." She shut the door. The chain rattled back into place, and then I heard a second lock turn that I hadn't known was there.
I stood on the landing a minute. The stairwell light had gone off on its timer, so I stood in the dark with the smell of onions and damp tufa. Nobody came out. A scooter went past in the street four floors down, quite far away.
I went back in and put the chain on. My hand still felt pressed. In the back room the bulb was buzzing faintly and the cup was where I'd left it, full to the lip, with the crack running down its side.
I said, "Ridiculous," and I heard myself almost laugh. It came out as a breath through my nose. Forty years of a dead woman pouring water for a wall, and a widow with onions on the stove telling me it kept something down. I could see myself telling it at a dinner. I could see the faces.
But I was still standing there, looking at the kitchen tap through two doorways, and I knew exactly where the saucepan was.
I did it on the evening of the fourth, after I'd spent the day pretending I wouldn't. I went out for bread and a bag of oranges, and on the way back I stood in the courtyard a minute under the empty washing lines. The well-shaft was there with its half-rotten lid, and the lift cage sat rusted at the bottom of everything. Then I climbed the four flights with my thighs already complaining, and by the time I got to the top I'd run out of reasons.
The old cup was still by the wall, full and cold, exactly where I'd left it. I picked it up, and my fingers ached inside ten seconds. I carried it to the kitchen and tipped it down the sink. The water had no smell at all, which struck me as wrong for water that had stood two days in a stone flat. I ran the tap. It coughed twice, spat brown, and then ran clear. I let it go until it was properly cold and filled the cup to the brim.
Carrying it was the worst part. I walked through two doorways with the cup held out in front of me, watching the surface, and I was so careful not to spill that I felt like an idiot. I crouched and set it on the boards in front of the bricks, in the same spot, with the chip facing me. Then I said, "There," out loud, to no one. I stayed crouched a while, waiting for something to happen, and nothing did.
It rained from about eight. I heard it start on the shutters, and later I opened the bedroom window a crack and looked down at the vicolo. It was running with water, and the one streetlight that should have been on the corner was out, so all I could see was a wet black slot with a scooter parked in it. I ate two oranges over the sink. I didn't go into the back room again. I left the door open a hand's width and the bulb on, and told myself that was for the pipe.
After midnight the scooters stopped. I hadn't realised how many there were until they went. It got so quiet that I could hear the rain thinning out on the sills, and then, from two rooms away, the drip. It was slow and hollow, and it wasn't on any rhythm I could catch. I lay on the mattress with my shoes finally off and counted. Fourteen. Nine. Twenty. I lost the count somewhere and slept.
In the morning my mouth tasted of chalk. It wasn't the dry, stale taste of a sleep with the window shut. It was thick, and it coated my tongue and the roof of my mouth, as if I'd been eating plaster. I sat up and drank from the tap in the kitchen, straight from my cupped hand, and it didn't help.
Then I went to the back room, because I'd been putting it off for the length of a whole glass of water.
The cup had moved. It wasn't by the wall anymore. It stood a full pace out from the bricks, on the boards, in a straight line toward the door I'd left ajar. It was still brimming and there wasn't a wet ring around it. I looked at it for a long time. I crouched and looked at the floor around it and found nothing but dust and old varnish.
I told myself I'd done it. I'd been half asleep at some point in the night, and I'd come in and nudged it with my foot, or picked it up and put it down again. I have walked in my sleep before, once, aged nine, into a wardrobe. It was a perfectly good explanation. I said it to the empty room and then left, and I noticed I didn't turn my back on the cup until I was through the door.
I spent that day out of the flat as much as I could. I walked up as far as the cathedral and bought a coffee I didn't drink, and I watched a man mend a shoe in a doorway. When the light started going I came back, and I did not pour a second cup. I told myself it was still full from the night before, and that was true, and I didn't look too hard at that argument. I ate bread and cheese standing up. I went to bed at ten, and I slept badly and heavily, both at once.
I woke up thirsty. It wasn't ordinary thirst. My lips had stuck to my teeth, my tongue felt too big for my mouth, and there was a kind of scraped feeling all the way down my throat. It was grey daylight through the gap in the shutter. I reached for the glass on the bedside table, the one that had been sitting there since I arrived, and I'd filled it from the tap before I lay down. I remember filling it. It was empty. Bone dry, with a faint dusty bloom on the inside as if it had been empty for years.
I hadn't drunk it. I would have known.
I put it down and swung my legs off the mattress, and my foot came down in something wet.
There was a print on the boards. It was small, a bare foot, all five toes distinct and the ball and heel clear and dark against the dust. Beyond it there was another, and another beyond that. I got down on my knees and followed the line with my eyes, out of the bedroom and through the doorway and along the floor of the front passage into the back room. They were coming from the wall. The last of them stood in the dust right at the foot of the bricks, and then they turned, and I could see the whole line running toward me. They ended at the edge of the mattress, beside the pillow, where my head had been.
They were still wet. One toe had a bead of water sitting on it.
I sat back on my heels. I took off my sock, and I don't fully know why, except that I needed to know something in a way I could measure. I put my bare foot beside the nearest print, heel to heel. Mine was more than twice the size. I could have laid the whole print inside the arch of mine. Whoever it was couldn't have been much taller than the bed.
My own foot was shaking a little on the board. I watched it do it.
"This is ridiculous," I said. My voice cracked halfway. I said it to the floor, mostly, to hear how it sounded.
From the back room, from behind the bricks, someone said it back.
"Ridiculous."
It was my voice. It had my accent and my flat vowels, but it was calmer than I had ever been, and slightly hoarse, as though it had been talking a long time before it got to me.
I didn't ring anyone that first morning. I put my sock back on and stood in the kitchen and drank four glasses of tap water, one after another, and the chalk stayed where it was. I spent most of that day out of the flat, and that night I poured a second cup because I couldn't think what else to do. This time I set it where the first one had ended up, a pace out from the bricks. By the next morning the cup was two paces out, and there were no footprints. I checked the mattress edge first, before my feet touched the floor.
I rang my father at about two in the afternoon. I stood in the front room with my back to the closed dresser, where I could see down the passage to the back room door. I hadn't had his number in my contacts for years, so I typed it from memory. I was surprised I still had it.
It rang five times. Then, "Taylor."
He has always answered the phone with his surname, even at home.
"It's Mike."
There was a pause. I could hear a clock somewhere behind him, or thought I could. "Are you all right?"
"I'm fine. I'm in Naples."
"I see." He didn't ask why. He knew, of course. The solicitor would have written to him as next of kin, and I hadn't thought of that until right then. "Is there a problem with the flat?"
"There's a door in the back room. It's been bricked up. Do you know what was behind it?"
Nothing for a few seconds. The clock kept going, wherever it was.
"Who've you been talking to?"
"Nobody useful. A neighbour. She says Silvia poured a cup of water in front of it every night for forty years."
"Yes," Floyd said. "She would have."
"Dad."
I hadn't called him that in a long time. I heard him breathe out.
"Silvia had a son," he said. "Matteo. He was six. It was nineteen seventy-one, I was sixteen, we'd all been out there that summer. He went down behind that door after a cup of water. I don't know why he took it. Somebody said it was for the dog, but they didn't have a dog." His voice stayed very flat, the way it does when he reads out an account. "He never came up."
I said nothing. I was watching the back room door.
"The Comune sent men. Two days, I think. They told the family it was a cistern collapse, that the shaft had gone and there was nothing to be done. Then they bricked the door and that was that. Nobody was to raise it with Silvia. My mother told me once, and never again."
"You never told me."
"No."
"Why did she pour it? Silvia. Why every night?"
"I don't know." He said it plainly, with no apology in it. "She started the week he was lost. I asked my mother, years later, and she said to leave it. I left it."
"Dad, something's—"
"I have to go, Michael. Don't stay in that place."
He hung up. The screen showed the call had lasted one minute and thirty seconds. I remember reading that, and thinking it was the longest we'd spoken since I was twenty-nine.
I stood there for a while with the phone against my leg. Then I walked down the passage, and I didn't decide to. I stopped in the doorway of the back room.
The bulb was on. The cup stood two paces out from the bricks with the crack running down from the chip and the water level with the rim. There was no wet ring under it. The bricks looked exactly as they had the first night, dull yellow-grey, the mortar thick and a different colour from the wall.
A six-year-old, I thought. A print that would fit inside the arch of my foot.
I didn't say anything. I hadn't spoken out loud since the morning, and I wasn't going to start now with something listening on the other side.
I sat down on the broken cane chair, and it creaked under me. I looked at the cup, and I did what I'm apparently always going to do, which was count. First cup, the night of the third. Set there by nobody, and it stayed. It sat against the wall the whole of the third and all through the fourth, full and cold, and it didn't move a hair. I'd looked at it that second morning, before I ever touched it. It was exactly where it had been.
Then I tipped it out. I ran the tap and filled it with my own hands and carried it back and put it down.
The next morning it had moved a pace.
I sat very still. My mouth tasted of plaster, and I noticed I was pressing my thumbnail into the pad of my finger hard enough to hurt.
It had waited. That was the part I kept coming back to. Two nights the water sat there, and it hadn't come. It came once I started pouring. I poured on the fourth, and it moved a pace. I poured again two nights later, and it moved again. Every cup I'd carried in from that kitchen tap had put it one step closer, and I had done it carefully, without spilling a drop, because a woman on the landing had held my hand and told me that was how you kept it down.
I looked at the two paces of floor between the cup and the bricks. Then I looked the other way, at the door I'd left ajar, and at the length of the passage beyond it, and at the mattress, which I could just see from where I was sitting.
I didn't work out how many steps it was. I didn't have to. The cold had reached my wrists already, and it wasn't from the wall.
I whispered after that. I had no choice, because the voice in the wall had started getting there first.
I found out that afternoon. I said "hello" to the back room, quietly, just to hear the flat, and the bricks said it a beat before I finished. Half a second, maybe less. Mine came out of my mouth into a word that was already in the air. I stood in the passage with my hand over my mouth and didn't try it again. Now I talk to the phone with my lips almost on the speaker, and it can only say what I've already said.
I tested it that night, the seventh. I'd spent the afternoon thinking it through, sitting on the mattress with my back to the wall. If the cups were what kept it down, then not pouring one should be a bad idea. Footprints, or worse. If they weren't, nothing would happen. It was the only experiment I could run, and I was the only subject.
So I didn't pour. I ran the tap for a glass of water for myself, looked at the cup where it stood in the back room, two paces out from the bricks, and left it alone. I sat on the bed with my shoes on and the bulb burning through the doorway and waited.
The scooters stopped a little after midnight. The drip went on, slow and hollow, and I counted it because there was nothing else to do. Twelve. Seven. Twenty-two. At one I checked the boards around the mattress with my phone torch, dry and dusty. At two I checked again. At half past two I went and looked at the cup. Full, cold, no wet ring, exactly where I'd left it. Nothing had moved. The floor between it and the bricks was dry.
I should have felt relieved. What I felt was cheated, because that's what Giulia would call proof. Don't pour, and it stays away. But I'd been sitting there for five hours with my mouth full of chalk, thinking about how the cup hadn't moved on the third or the fourth either, and I wanted to see the other half.
So I poured. It was nearly three by then. I emptied the old cup in the sink, ran the tap till it went cold, filled it to the brim, and carried it back with both hands, slower than I'd ever carried anything. I set it down on the same boards, chip toward me. I lay down on the mattress with my shoes still on and told myself I'd only close my eyes.
I woke up because of the sound. Water, moving in a small container. It was a light slop against china, close to my feet.
The cup was standing at the foot of the mattress. Full, and rocking, the surface still trembling against the rim, though not a drop had gone over. I lay looking at it. The whole road between the bricks and my bed, the length of the back room, the passage, the bedroom doorway, and it had covered all of it in one night, and I hadn't heard a thing except the last bit. It had been set down, and it was still settling.
There were no footprints. It hadn't needed any. It had only needed the cup.
I sat up slowly and put my back against the wall and thought about Giulia holding my hand. Never let it go unpoured. She'd said it like a recipe, and I'd followed it like one. Every cup I'd carried in had been laid down by me, one at a time, because nobody had asked me to pour a cup to keep something in. I was building it a way out. Silvia had done the same, every evening, for forty years, until the road must have run out the door and down the stairs. The week her boy went down that hole she'd started laying it, and she'd never stopped, because he'd been six and she wanted him to be able to find his way home. She had poured for a child. And I was the one still pouring.
I whispered all that into the phone, and stopped at "child." My voice, from two rooms away, said it first.
I didn't sleep again. At seven I put my shoes on properly, which took a while because my hands weren't working, and I crossed the landing. The stairwell light came on at the first knock and I knocked again anyway.
She took a long time. The chain rattled, and the door opened, but only far enough for her to stand in it, one hand on the latch, the other flat against the frame. She was already dressed, in the black housedress, with her hair pinned. The kitchen behind her smelled of coffee and nothing else. It was the first time I'd noticed there was no onion.
"Michele," she said. "You don't look good."
"Who told you to say it?" I said. "About the cup. Never let it go unpoured. Who told you?"
She looked at my collar, the way she had the first time.
"Silvia," she said.
"And?"
"And Father Ferri. At San Gregorio Armeno." She said the name carefully. "He told all of us. The whole building, in the courtyard. Years ago. Silvia stood beside him and nodded."
"Told you what? That it keeps it down?"
"That it must be poured. That it was good for the house." Her hand tightened on the latch. "I never asked what it was for. You didn't ask Silvia things, and you didn't ask Father Ferri. I did what I was told and I told other people. That's all."
"Do you know what happened to her son?"
She didn't answer right away. Down in the vicolo somebody dragged a shutter up, and the noise came all the way up the stairwell.
"Everybody knew there was a boy," she said. "Nobody said his name."
"Why not?"
"Father Ferri asked us." She said it flatly, as if she'd said it to herself many times and was tired of it. "If we talked, the Comune would come back. Men, papers, drills in the wall. They'd take the house apart and put everyone out. So we kept quiet. It was easy. It was just a cup of water."
I looked at her hand on the latch. It was the same hand that had pressed mine so hard on the third, warm and dry and strong, and it wasn't holding on to me now. It was holding the door.
I went back in and put the chain on. Then I took it off again, because I needed to go out and it seemed stupid to lock myself in for ten minutes.
The ironmonger at the bottom of the vicolo opened at half past seven. I bought a mop with a grey rope head, six cloth towels from a bin by the till, and four litres of bottled water. The man wanted to know if I had a flood. I said something like that and he nodded and gave me a bag.
I started in the back room, at the bricks, because that was where it began. I got down on my knees and looked at the boards properly, with the bulb on and the shutter open a crack. I'd walked over them for a week without seeing anything. Now that I was looking, the wet was there. It lay in the grain, dark in a line, one patch about every pace, running out from the wall, through the passage and the front room, and toward the door. I counted them on my knees, and I lost count and started again. Thirty-odd. I stopped at thirty-four because the last few went under the dresser and I didn't want to move it.
So I mopped. Bucket from the back room, water from the kitchen tap, because there wasn't another tap. I did every board from the bricks outward, wrung the mop into the sink, and went back for the next stretch. The boards went pale and dry-looking behind me. I felt quite good about it for about a minute.
Then I turned round and the first patch had come back. Not spread, not leaked. Come up out of the grain in the same place, the same shape, as if I hadn't touched it. I stood there with the mop dripping on my shoes.
"Right," I said. Very quietly. The wall said it too, a bit before me.
I did the whole run again. Then a third time, with less water, then with none, just wringing the mop out until it was damp rope. It made no difference. So I went to the towels and got on my hands and knees and pressed each patch flat with my whole weight, then rubbed, then moved on. Six towels weren't enough. I used my spare shirt and the pillowcase, and the tea towel from the kitchen, and after that my sleeves.
Around noon I noticed my hands. The knuckles had split across the top, and there was a fine white grit in the cuts that wasn't soap. It was tufa dust. It came off the boards on every wipe, and it was in the towels and in my cuffs. When I rinsed the cloth it turned the water milky. I drank from a bottle and stood at the bedroom window and looked at the flat roof across the vicolo, where a woman was taking in sheets. She didn't look up.
The smell had got worse. It wasn't in the flat now, it was on me. I took my jacket off and smelled the collar, and it was damp stone. I opened the suitcase for a clean shirt and the shirts had it too, and the paperback I'd never opened, and the zip pocket with my passport. I washed my face and it was still on my skin afterward, under the soap. I sat on the bathroom floor for a while with my head against the cold wall tile and did nothing.
I hadn't drunk the tap water since morning. I'd been drinking it for a week without a thought, and now I couldn't bring myself to fill a glass. The bottles were fine, cold and plain. I drank one and then a second, and the thirst stayed exactly where it was. It wasn't in my throat. It sat further down and further back, the way you want something you can't put a name to. I drank a third bottle to prove it to myself. My tongue was chalky. I stopped counting bottles after that.
The cup was still at the foot of the mattress. I mopped around it. I didn't lift it and I didn't tip it. It sat there, full and trembling a little each time I put a foot down, and there wasn't a ring under it. I kept my back to it while I worked and turned round every few minutes to check it hadn't gone anywhere. It hadn't. That was worse, in a way I couldn't have defended.
By three the front room was done. I sat at the table with a bottle and looked at the boards. They were dry. They looked exactly as they'd looked when I arrived, dusty and pale and slightly warped by the door. While I watched, a dark spot came up in the grain near the leg of the dresser. Then another one, a pace beyond it. I didn't get up. I watched the second one darken and spread just a little at the edges, and I thought that Silvia must have seen this every night for forty years and never once had a mop in her hand.
I don't know why that was the thing that got me. I put my head down on my arms on the table and stayed there for some time.
I got up in the end because it was getting dark. The window in the front room faced the wrong way for sun, so it never had much, but the back room had a little in the afternoons through the shutter. When I went in with the last dry towel the gap in the slats had gone grey and the bulb looked yellower than it had that morning. The whole room had that flat, cold light with no direction in it.
I stopped in the doorway. I'd dried the boards there twice and they were pale, and nothing showed on them. But I could feel it from the door. The cold was coming off the bricks in a slow wave, a low draught along the floor, and it had already got to my ankles. Not from the window. Not from the passage. It came straight across the boards from the wall to me, and it was in no hurry at all.
I stood there with the towel in my split hand. I realised I'd stopped breathing through my nose, because the smell was worse in there. Then I held the phone up to my mouth, right against the speaker, and told it the date, and that I'd been at it since eight, and that none of it had worked.
I didn't say what I was going to do next. I didn't know yet.
I waited until it was properly dark, and by then I'd stopped pretending I was waiting for anything else. Around eleven I went to the bedroom, took the cup from the foot of the mattress with both hands, and carried it back to the bricks. I set it on the boards where it had started, chip toward me. I don't know what I thought that would undo. Thirty-odd cups of road don't go away because you put the last one back at the beginning, but I did it anyway.
Then I turned the bulb off, because I wanted to hear the wall properly. The shutter let in a little orange from the street, and after a while my eyes stopped fighting it.
I knelt in front of the bricks with the cup on my left and the phone in my right hand. I held the phone flat against the wall to record. The bricks were wet. They'd been dry and dusty on the first night, but now the mortar sweated and the damp went straight through my sleeve. The cold was up to my elbow.
"Ninth of November," I said, right into the microphone. "Just gone midnight. The drip has stopped."
It had. I'd been counting it for a week, in the eleven-thirteen-nine way, and now there was nothing. I noticed that before I noticed anything else. The scooters had already gone and the rain had gone with them.
"I'm going to say what I know," I said. "Silvia's son went down behind this door in nineteen seventy-one. He was six. I've been pouring water for him without knowing it, and I've been..."
"Open," my voice said.
It came from about a hand's width behind the brick, right under the phone. It wasn't hoarse this time, and it wasn't ahead of me. It was gentle. It was how I'd talk to somebody on a ledge.
I didn't move. My thumb was on the red button. I said "No," quietly, and the wall said it back a beat late, softly, like it was being polite.
"Please," it said. Nothing else.
The mortar cracked. It was a dry little sound, and a line ran up through the joint between the third and fourth courses. I felt it in my knees before I heard the brick go. It dropped inward, and I heard it land on something soft. Another one followed, then a third, and cold air poured out over my hands and smelled of wet stone and something I'd been tasting for a week.
I should have got up. I want that on record. I had time.
The hand came out of the gap. It was small. It was grey, the colour of tufa, and it was wet the whole way up. The fingers weren't right, too smooth, no nails I could see. It didn't grab. It came out and laid itself around my wrist, the way you'd take a grown-up's hand to cross a road, and then it closed.
And it pulled. There was no violence in it. It just pulled, evenly, and it wasn't going to stop. I went forward onto my shoulder against the bricks, the phone skidded off somewhere, and my arm went into the hole up to the elbow.
Something looked out at me from the dark. It was my face. I could see the stubble I hadn't shaved and the hollow under the cheekbones. It looked at me with my own tired grey eyes. Then it wasn't mine. It was a child's, round and very pale, with wet hair flat to the forehead. A boy of six with his mouth a little open, waiting. Then that went too, and there was just a shape where a face should be, and no one behind it.
The mouth opened. What came out was the sound of a cistern filling, water running into a great hollow stone place from a long way off, going on and on.
I didn't scream. I remember being surprised about that afterwards. I was thinking about the cup. It was right there by my knee, brimming, and I saw it in the orange light from the shutter. Everything Silvia had done, and everything I'd done, came down to that white cup with the chip in it. It drinks what it's given. So give it all at once, and give it somewhere it can't climb out of.
I got my left hand around the cup. It was so cold my fingers didn't want to close. I lifted it without spilling anything, which I still can't explain, and I stood up.
The thing at my wrist came with me. I felt it slide out of the hole, low and wet, and I didn't look down. I walked. Through the back-room door, along the passage, through the front room past the dresser, and it dragged behind me across the boards. I heard the small wet sounds it made, one after another, hands and knees, keeping up. The water in the cup trembled against the rim the whole way, and I watched it, not the floor.
I got the chain off with my teeth. The bolt took two goes. On the landing the timer light came on for me, yellow and stupid, and I went down.
Four flights. My legs had been shaking on the third floor the first night, and now they didn't. Giulia's door was shut. The light was on under it, and I heard nothing. I didn't slow down. If she was standing behind it with her hand on the latch, that was what she'd always done.
The steps were slick behind me. The grip on my wrist got firmer on each landing, and by the second floor it had started to hurt.
In the courtyard the air was cold and clean and smelled of nothing. The washing lines were empty, and a bit of moon showed over the roofs. The lift cage sat rusted at the ground floor with its gate open, and the well stood in the middle, stone-rimmed, with its lid rotted half through. I kicked the lid and it caved in and went down, and I heard it hit a long way below.
I held the cup out over the shaft in my one good hand.
"Here," I said. My voice was steady. Nothing answered me, which was the first time all week.
I tipped it. The water went down in a single clear rope, the whole cupful, with a sound like nothing at all. The hand let go, all at once, and my wrist was just my wrist, cold and ringed with wet.
Something small went past my knee and over the rim after the water.
I stood there with the empty cup and listened. It fell for a very long time.
I didn't sell. The solicitor's office emailed twice that week about a valuation, and I wrote back once, three lines, saying the flat was off the table for now. I don't know what they made of it. Nobody at home had known where I was, so nobody was in a position to be surprised.
The phone was still on the back-room floor, under the chair, with the battery dead. I left it there a full day before I picked it up.
The hole was where I'd left it. Five bricks lay inward on a wet, sloping floor, and the mortar around the gap had gone soft and crumbled in my fingers. I didn't put my head through it. I put my arm in once, up to the elbow, to feel for the edge of the doorframe, and got it back out fast. That was all I wanted to know about the other side.
The ironmonger at the bottom of the vicolo sent me to a yard out past the station for the blocks. It was a man with a van and a stack of pale tufa under a tarp. I bought thirty, more than I needed, because I didn't trust my own arithmetic. The ironmonger sold me a bag of lime and a bag of sand and a trowel with a wooden handle, and this time he didn't ask about floods. He looked at my hands, which were still split across the knuckles, and put a tube of something in the bag for free.
I carried the blocks up four flights, two at a time. It took most of a day. Giulia's door stayed shut every trip, with the light on under it.
I mixed the mortar in the bucket on the back-room floor, the same bucket, with water from a bottle. I read how to do it off my phone once it had charged. It said the mix should hold a ridge when you drag the trowel through it, and mine slumped, so I added sand and did it again. The first course went in crooked. I took it out and did it over. By the third course I had a rhythm going, butter the block, set it, tap it level with the trowel handle, scrape the squeeze-out. It was the first thing I'd made with my hands in my life, and I'd have liked to say it felt like more. It felt like brick-laying. My back hurt.
I finished at dusk on the second day. The new wall was paler than the old one had been, and the joints were thick and uneven. I stood and looked at it for a while and said nothing, because I didn't know who I'd be saying it to.
Then I went and filled the cup.
I'd worked out the water by then. Not from the tap, because the tap was the house, and the house was what it knew. I bought the bottled kind, four litres at a time, and I poured a single cup from a fresh bottle at about seven every evening. I carried it down the four flights with both hands and no lid, and I didn't spill. The stairwell smelled the same as it had on the first night, tufa and coffee and frying oil, and I'd stopped noticing it, which I suppose means I lived there now.
In the courtyard I went to the well. I'd propped a plank over the hole where the lid had been. I slid it back, held the cup out over the dark, and said, "Here." Then I tipped it. Every night the water went down in a rope and made no sound, and every night I stood there and listened to nothing, and then slid the plank back across and went up.
That was the whole job. One cup.
The first morning, the cup was back. It sat on the floor in front of the new bricks, chip facing me, dry. Not drained, dry. I picked it up and turned it over and ran my thumb round the inside, and it was dusty as the glass by the bed had been. I put it in the sink. The next night I carried that same cup down again, and the morning after it was on the floor in front of the wall in the same spot. I've stopped putting it in the sink. I leave it where it is and pick it up at seven.
The drip came back on the sixth night. I was lying on the mattress with the bulb on and the door open, and I heard it two rooms away, slow and hollow, landing on something that had been waiting for it. I counted before I could stop myself. Ten, fourteen, eight. Then I made myself stop counting, and I've kept to that.
It talks too, some nights. Not often. It's my voice, still calm and a bit hoarse, and it's no longer ahead of me because I don't give it anything to be ahead of. It says my name. It asked me once what the date was. Another night it said "Ridiculous" in exactly the tone I'd said it in, the first time, in the bedroom with my sock off, and I lay there with my jaw shut so hard my teeth hurt. I didn't answer. I don't now. If I don't say anything it has nothing to repeat, and whatever it's practising for, it can practise without me.
I know how it sounds. A man with a trust fund and no job, hauling water down four flights every night to a hole in a courtyard. My father would say leave. He did say it, in ninety seconds. But I've thought about the first cup, the one nobody put there, and the two nights it sat still before I touched it. Something had already been asking. Silvia poured for forty years, and I think she was answering it wrong the whole time, and she never got the chance to find out. I got the chance. I don't think that makes me better than her. It just means I know what to do with the cup.
Some evenings on the way down I slow at Giulia's door, and once the light under it went out as I passed. I didn't knock.
Matteo hasn't come up. I say that plainly because I listened, that first night, and the well didn't tell me anything, and it hasn't since. Whatever went over the rim after the water is down there, and I hope it's quieter for it. That's the most I can say. It isn't the same as knowing.
I rang Father Ferri at San Gregorio Armeno on the twelfth, and a woman said he was out and took my name. I rang again on the fourteenth, and she said he was at a funeral. On the seventeenth it rang and rang and nobody picked up. I left a message that time, in Italian, badly. I said I lived in Silvia's flat and I would like to talk about the door.
He hasn't called back. I've rung twice since, at seven in the morning and at night, and both times it just rang out.