Holes for Faces by Ramsey Campbell

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