The Whispering Catacombs of Malta
The Whispering Catacombs of Malta
Chapter One — Sunlit Malta, Shadowed Malta
Malta dazzled Elena the moment she stepped out of the Arriva bus at Valletta’s City Gate. The heat struck first: not the timid warmth of northern summers, but a hammering brilliance that baked the honey-coloured stone until the air itself shimmered. The streets smelled of frying oil, diesel, and sea-salt. Shop shutters blazed white. A man hawked prickly pears from a battered van, and children tore past with red-and-yellow flags in anticipation of that night’s festa.
It was hard to imagine death thriving here. Yet Elena knew better.
She was thirty-one, a historian from Salamanca who preferred dust to sunshine, and she had come for the dust. Beneath this island—beneath its festas and fireworks, its harbours where fishing boats rocked like toys—lay catacombs carved when Christianity itself was still a whisper. Pagan, Jewish, and Christian tombs lay side by side, chiseled from limestone that remembered every chisel-mark. Malta was an archive of faiths, a library without books.
Her colleagues at the university had laughed at her trip. Another obsession with bones, Elena? Haven’t enough people died for your research? She smiled at the teasing but heard the impatience beneath it. She published slowly; she lingered too long on detail. What they wanted were conclusions. What she craved was context, the fine silt between stones that told of how people had lived as much as how they had died.
And here, in Malta, she hoped for that silt.
From the Upper Barrakka Gardens, she gazed across the Grand Harbour where fortresses rose like gold teeth. Ferries churned the water to foam. The sky was too blue, too loud. She shielded her eyes and whispered, “And below, the silence.”
That night she sat in a Rabat café, notebook open, jotting ideas for her first excursion. The ceiling fans stirred little more than warm air. Tourists chattered at the next table about St. Paul’s shipwreck, about grottoes and saints and miracles. Elena ignored them. She was not here for miracles. She was here for stone.
And for whispers.
Chapter Two — The Warning
By morning, she found herself beneath Rabat’s streets in the official tour of St. Paul’s Catacombs. A cheerful guide led a dozen tourists through the maze, his English polished by repetition. He waved his torch at the niches cut into walls.
“Here,” he said, “we have third-century burials. Note the arched recesses—loculi, carved to hold the dead. Some still bore oil lamps when first opened.” He pointed with relish at a triclinium table, benches around a stone slab. “Families gathered here for refrigerium—meals with the dead. It was not mourning, you see, but communion.”
The tourists shivered, half-pleased, half-appalled. Elena scribbled furiously in her notebook.
The guide moved on, listing statistics: the length of tunnels, the mix of faiths, the inscriptions of fish, menorahs, and crosses. His smile widened. “Malta welcomed all faiths in death,” he said. “Equal in the grave.”
But Elena lingered. She traced with her finger the outline of a menorah scratched hastily into stone. The lines trembled, as if carved by a hand that feared discovery. She thought of that hidden faith, pressed beneath limestone, and felt a pang of kinship.
When she looked up, she saw the old woman.
She had not come with the tour. Black shawl heavy in the July heat, she stood by the stairwell, eyes fixed on Elena. Her skin was as lined as parchment, but her grip, when she seized Elena’s wrist, was iron. The tourists walked on, oblivious.
The woman’s voice rasped in Maltese, but Elena, who had studied enough for her research, understood the words.
“Dawn mhumiex mejtin. Huma bil-ġuħ.”
“These are not dead. They are hungry.”
Elena tried to pull free, startled. The woman leaned closer, her breath sour with herbs.
“Don’t go where the saints never blessed,” she hissed. “The walls remember. The walls speak.”
And then, as quickly as she had appeared, the woman slipped away into the stairwell, leaving only the smell of rosemary.
Elena rubbed her wrist. The guide’s voice drifted faintly from ahead, tourists laughing nervously at some joke about skeletons.
She closed her notebook slowly. The warning would have unnerved many. But for Elena, it had the opposite effect.
She wanted to hear the walls speak.
Chapter Three — The Descent
Elena told herself she was being professional. Scholars take risks: it was practically an article of faith. Still, she knew how it looked—one more foreign academic ignoring the rules, one more tourist gone missing in a cave. She felt the prickle of unease in her neck as she walked Rabat’s narrow lanes, dusk sliding down the stone walls like wine.
She found him where she had expected: the old caretaker seated on a folding chair beneath a bougainvillea, keys jangling idly against his thigh.
“Carmelo Gauci?” she asked in halting Maltese.
His eyes, sharp despite the creases around them, studied her. “And who asks?”
“I am Elena Cortés. Historian. Salamanca.” She lifted her notebook as proof, though the gesture felt childish. “I need time inside. Unsupervised.”
His laugh was a dry bark. “Always the same. Spaniards, Italians, English. Everyone wants to crawl down there without ropes, without prayers.”
“Ten minutes,” she pressed. “Fifteen, no more. To sketch some inscriptions in chamber 7C. I’ll pay.”
He shook his head. “L-ewwel regola. First rule: when you hear water, you turn back.”
Her brows knitted. “Because of flooding?”
His gaze hardened. “Mhux hekk. Not that. The water doesn’t sound the same to every ear. To some, it drips. To others, it calls.”
He leaned forward. “You have faith?”
“In God?” she hedged.
“In anything,” he said flatly.
Elena thought of long library nights, of dust rising from manuscripts as if breathing. “I believe in history.”
He grunted, a sound halfway between approval and pity. At last he sighed, pocketed her envelope, and pulled a candle stub and a brass token from his pocket. The token bore a cross on one side, a spiral on the other.
“For luck,” he said. Then, with a shadow of irony: “For company.”
The service door was iron-banded, set into ancient stone worn by centuries of fingertips. Carmelo’s keys rasped like insects. When the lock yielded, a chill rose like breath from a cellar.
The second door gave more reluctantly. Cold dust drifted into her face.
“I’ll leave both on the latch,” he muttered. “Fifteen minutes. If you’re not back—”
“You’ll close,” she finished.
He nodded. “I always close.”
The staircase spiralled downward. Elena’s modern torch blazed confidently at first, but she lit the stub of tallow anyway, cradling its flame as though she understood what he meant: batteries die underground.
The air cooled with each step, sweet with stone, edged with something metallic. Her footfalls echoed. The catacombs closed around her like the throat of the island swallowing.
She counted niches to steady herself: one, two, ten, twenty. Each was an arched mouth in the limestone wall. She pictured them filled with bones, oil lamps guttering between them, families whispering prayers above.
In chamber 7C she found the triclinium table as expected: benches carved in a U around a stone slab where the living had feasted with their dead. She sketched quickly, charcoal scratching across the page. The lines steadied her hand.
And then she heard it.
Not rushing water. Not dripping, exactly. A measured tap somewhere in the rock, in time with her own steps.
She froze, torch raised. Only silence.
“No,” she whispered to herself. “Not yet.”
Still—when she placed her palm to the wall, she felt it. The faintest vibration, as if the stone itself held a heartbeat.
Chapter Four — The Whispers Begin
On her way back, Elena paused at a carving she had not noticed before: a spiral doubled back on itself, not closing neatly but ending in a sharp notch. The notch gleamed dark, filled with pitch that smelled oddly fresh. She lifted her candle closer. The spiral seemed to twitch, as if the line wanted to keep moving.
Her breath stuttered. She stepped back, torch beam sweeping.
Something laughed.
Not a full laugh, only the breath of one, the husk of amusement left behind. It came from farther down the corridor.
Elena tightened her grip on the brass token. “Who’s there?”
The answer whispered from the stone: Qed nistennewk.
We are waiting for you.
Her knees weakened. The corridor behind her seemed narrower than before, niches leaning forward like observers.
The triclinium table caught her eye. Her sketch lay on it where she had left it—but the charcoal lines had shifted. The spiral she had not drawn was now curling across the page, deeper and deeper, the tip burrowing through the paper as though it wanted to reach the stone beneath.
The air thickened. Her torchlight shivered.
“Enough,” she hissed, grabbing the sketch, shoving it against her chest. She turned back toward the stairs.
At the stairwell mouth, the latch gleamed like salvation. She touched it—only to feel resistance, as though someone on the other side turned it too, in the opposite direction.
“Carmelo?” she breathed.
The latch trembled. Not Carmelo’s strength. Something else.
And then, through the silence, the stone spoke her name.
Not shouted. Not even whispered. Simply shaped.
E–lay–na.
Her mother’s voice. Her grandmother’s. Voices she had loved, kneaded into one.
Her eyes burned. “No,” she said, fiercely, to the stone. “Not tonight.”
But the walls were already listening.
Somewhere behind her, a corridor folded open like a page. She had not seen it before. Over the lintel, carved deep, a palm branch spread its notched fronds. Martyrdom, or victory.
From within that dark new throat came the sound again. Not drip. Not laugh. A rhythm.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
A pulse. A counting. A welcome.
Elena swallowed, candle trembling. “I will not…” Her voice faltered. She realised the truth too late.
She already was.
Chapter Five — The Siege of Shadows
The stair latch would not yield.
Elena pressed harder, but the iron resisted, moving against her hand as though a polite palm rested on the other side.
“Carmelo?” she whispered again.
No answer. Only silence.
And then a scuff.
Not behind the door. Behind her.
She turned, candle guttering, torch beam darting through the corridor. Shadows thickened against the walls — but they did not recoil from the light. They arranged themselves. Stood.
Figures.
Not transparent ghosts, not bones, but absences shaped into people. They stood in silence, silhouettes of men and women pressed against the stone, each with hands cupped as though holding something delicate. Elena thought at first of bowls or books. Then she caught a scent: olive oil, and the faint sweetness of bread.
Refrigerium.
The feast of the dead.
One figure stepped closer, extending invisible hands. For a second — only a blink — she saw it clearly: a round loaf stamped with a cross, flour still clinging to its score. Her grandmother’s kitchen came back in a rush, though her grandmother had never baked Maltese bread.
Elena’s chest tightened. “I… I can’t,” she stammered. “I’m not staying.”
The figure did not move again. Instead, the crowd widened, gently, as if making room for her. Their arrangement was subtle but unmistakable: a corridor reshaping itself, nudging her sideways, steering her along a curve she had not meant to take.
“Host, not hunter,” she muttered, remembering Carmelo’s words. But hosts could become jailers.
The candle trembled in her hand. Wax dribbled down her knuckle, warm as blood.
Her phone buzzed suddenly in her pocket, a vibration she knew should be impossible this deep underground. She yanked it out — the screen lit grey, like static in an empty cinema. Shapes flickered: people crowding close, pressed shoulder to shoulder, staring upward. For a moment she thought they looked at her.
Then the light died. The procession breathed in unison, a sound like wind moving through reeds.
The stair behind her was gone. The walls had folded.
She was surrounded now, not crushed but escorted, the candlelight glinting against mouths that were not mouths.
She realised with a sick certainty:
The catacombs were not empty. They had never been empty.
Chapter Six — Legends Over Kinnie
Aboveground, Rabat looked innocent in the night. The streets tightened into alleys where old men smoked in doorways, where cats slinked between potted geraniums, where the scent of frying oil lingered from dinner.
And on Triq il-Kullegg, a single café remained lit. Its sign read Il-Lanterna, though there was no lantern, only a fluorescent tube buzzing like an annoyed insect.
Inside sat the regulars.
Marija tal-Kappella, widow in black shawl, shawl too heavy for summer, eyes sharp as knives.
Father Andrei, priest with Russian bones and Maltese vowels, clutching his water glass as though blessing it through contact.
Ġanni, who once made festa petards and now nodded between half-dreams.
The barman, polishing a glass already clean.
And in the corner, Carmelo Gauci, caretaker of doors. His keys lay on the table like an accusation. He bruised a sprig of rosemary between finger and thumb, lifting it to his nose to see if it still remembered its scent.
“There is a new voice,” Marija said suddenly. Her own voice rasped, the sound of stone being split. “Before the nine o’clock bells. I heard it.”
“Wind,” mumbled Ġanni. “The wells talk when the Scirocco changes its mind.”
“Not Scirocco,” Father Andrei said softly. “The other one. L-għajjat tal-ġebel. The cry of stone.”
The barman glanced at Carmelo. “You’ve heard them longest, sieħbi. What do you say?”
Carmelo’s eyes stayed on the rosemary. “I say that after fifteen minutes a door closes. And that is mercy.”
Marija’s shawl rustled, wings of disapproval. “You closed her in?”
“I closed the door,” Carmelo replied. “The catacombs opened a hundred others.” He finally looked up. “She walks still.”
The young tour guide, fresh from St. Paul’s with a badge still pinned to his polo, leaned forward. “Who? Who went in?”
“A historian,” Carmelo said, as if it were a weather pattern. “Spanish. No superstition. Too much respect. She gave me a candle. That was thoughtful.”
“Not enough,” Marija muttered.
“Tell him,” the barman urged. “He knows the tourist stories, but not the bones under them. Tell him.”
Marija obliged.
She spoke of the ħassul tal-lejl—the night washers of the dead. Women who laundered shrouds underground when plague or famine swelled the island. If you heard them, you went back to bed. If you went down to look, they lifted their heads and called your name in the voice you loved most. And you would go with them, because you thought you were only helping.
Helping to weigh the rope.
“They lower the shroud into the well,” she said, eyes on the boy. “Someone must hold the rope, to keep it steady. If there aren’t enough of them, they ask you. You agree, because who refuses? But the rope grows wet. And heavier. Until you are part of the weight you thought you offered.”
The boy swallowed.
Carmelo spoke next, voice low. “The Normans bricked up one chamber after a boy heard prayers sung backward and forward at once. When he came up, he had grey in his hair and did not know his mother.”
“Always does,” Ġanni muttered. “Sound like water.”
“And during the Great Siege,” Father Andrei added, “a man carrying fuses heard his grandmother’s voice from below. He went up at once. While he was above ground, the tunnel collapsed. The fuses were covered in dust like snow, but unburnt. He bowed his head and said ‘thank you.’ In the dust, he saw the words: ‘you are welcome.’ Then the dust blew away.”
The barman snorted nervously. “You people and your stories.”
“Pull one out,” Marija snapped, “and see what else collapses.”
The café fell quiet. Outside, a scooter coughed past, and the Mdina bells tolled the hour.
Carmelo rose at last. He pocketed the rosemary, left the keys on the table, then picked them up again as if afraid the island might steal them.
“I’ll wait by the door,” he said. “In case the island breathes out tonight.”
Marija’s eyes gleamed. “And if it doesn’t?”
“Then għada,” Carmelo answered simply. “Tomorrow.”
Chapter Seven — The Chamber of Crossroads
The air changed before the passage did.
It thickened, as though she had walked into a lung that remembered breathing. Each step seemed to echo twice: once in her ears, and once deeper, under her skin.
Then the corridor opened, and Elena forgot how to move.
A dome soared above her, higher than the plans allowed, impossibly high, impossibly smooth — as though the limestone itself had grown into architecture. No torch beam could catch its edges. The place was vast, solemn, not a catacomb but a cathedral sunk in secret.
Her candle’s glow revealed pillars standing like petrified trees. Between them, every wall was carved, dense with symbols. Crosses. Fish. Menorahs. Spirals that bent inward until the eye could not follow them. At first they seemed scattered, a confusion of faiths — but as she looked longer, she saw a hidden order, as though each mark answered another across the chamber, a dialogue etched in stone.
Her historian’s heart beat faster. This was not chance. This was deliberate. Malta had been crossroads above ground for millennia, and here, under its skin, the same was true. Pagan, Christian, Jewish — even symbols she did not recognise — all lived side by side. Not harmony, exactly. Coexistence.
At the centre of the dome, on a raised dais, rested a great wheel of stone. It was taller than she was, its circumference carved with teeth like a colossal gear. Dust furred its surface, but it did not look abandoned. It looked paused.
Elena climbed the dais. Her hand shook as she reached out and touched the wheel. The stone was warm.
The wheel shuddered.
A grinding groan rolled through the chamber, and dust sifted from the dome above. The spiral carvings on the walls trembled as if they were alive.
Her palm stung. She pulled it back and stared: a faint red spiral had risen in her flesh, as if burned there.
The chamber spoke. Not whispers now, but a chorus that filled the dome.
“Elena.”
And beneath her feet, the wheel began to turn.
Chapter Eight — The Saint and the Serpent
The light changed again. It came from nowhere and everywhere, a cold radiance that erased shadow.
On the dais, where the wheel spun, a man appeared. Chains bound his wrists. His beard was dark, his eyes darker still, yet they blazed with fire. He raised his shackled hands and cried out in Maltese:
“Mulej tiegħi, int is-saħħa tiegħi!”
(My Lord, You are my strength!)
Elena knew him at once. Paul. The apostle who had shipwrecked here, who healed the sick, who cursed serpents into silence. Every Maltese schoolchild grew up on that tale.
But this Paul’s face was not triumphant. It was terrified.
Because something vast moved beneath him.
The floor split, not breaking but revealing, as if it had always concealed. A body uncoiled — not a snake, not truly, but something that had once inspired the word. Its scales shimmered ash-grey, its coils thicker than pillars, its head hollow-eyed. A spiral unfurled where its tongue should have been, red and endless.
Elena’s knees buckled. The serpent was not myth. It was memory, bound but not banished.
Paul’s chains clattered as he lifted his arms. “I cast you out!” he shouted, his voice thunder, his body shaking. “In Christ’s name, I cast you out!”
The wheel shrieked in reply.
The serpent did not recoil. It laughed — not a sound but a vibration, shaking the chamber like an organ note too low for human hearing. Dust rained. Spirals on the walls widened, curling inward.
Paul looked straight at Elena now, not at the heavens. His eyes burned with desperate command.
“Choose! By faith, by fire — help me bind it! The cross! Place the cross!”
Elena staggered, clutching the brass token Carmelo had given her. Cross on one side, spiral on the other. Both sides burned equally against her palm.
The serpent bent its vast head low until she could smell iron, salt, storm. Its hollow gaze held hers. In the silence that followed, she heard its meaning as clearly as speech: Not chains. Freedom. Choose me.
The wheel ground harder, teeth screaming against stone. The dome above shook, as if the island itself strained at its foundations.
Elena’s breath caught. Cross. Spiral. Saint. Serpent. Faith. Hunger.
Paul roared again: “Now!”
The serpent’s coils brushed the dais, whispering: Join us.
And Elena, trembling in the centre of the chamber, realised the most terrible truth of all:
Paul had not defeated the serpent.
He had only shackled it.
And Malta had shackled itself with it.
Now the rope had been placed in her hands.
Chapter Nine — The Choice
Elena’s knees dug into the stone dais. The wheel turned beneath her hand, its groan like a world’s hinge creaking open. Dust sifted from the dome above, each grain glinting in the strange light that came from everywhere and nowhere.
Paul strained against his chains. His face, lined by hunger and conviction, was furious with urgency. His eyes, black flames, burned holes through her.
“Agħżel!” he thundered. Choose!
The serpent coiled tighter, its scales rasping like thousands of knives. It lowered its hollow-eyed head until the stink of brine and copper filled her throat. A spiral tongue unfurled, endless, and though it made no sound, the meaning poured into her blood like wine: Not banishment. Not chains. Freedom. Choose me.
Elena’s fist closed around the brass token Carmelo had pressed into her palm. Cross on one side, spiral on the other. Both sides scorched as if alive. She flipped it over, again and again, faster, until it blurred in her hand — neither one nor the other, but both, a coin that refused to settle.
Cross. Spiral. Order. Hunger. Paul. Serpent.
Her historian’s instinct clawed at her: Do not interfere. Record, observe, preserve. That was her training. Yet history itself had folded her into the record. She was no longer an observer. She had been drafted as participant.
Paul’s chains shrieked. “The cross!” he bellowed, his voice splitting stone. “Place the cross! Bind it again before it devours us!”
The serpent’s coils ground against the dais. A ripple of hunger shook the chamber. She felt it brush her spine — not malice, not violence, only an invitation older than saints: Join the feast. No more hunger, no more endings. Join us.
Her lips cracked. “If I choose wrong,” she whispered, voice raw, “does Malta fall?”
Neither saint nor serpent answered. Perhaps both.
Her heart hammered. The wheel screamed faster. Her branded palm throbbed with heat. The walls around her quivered, spirals widening, menorahs bending, crosses warping into fish. Everything blurred into one terrible, insistent demand: Choose.
Her breath broke. “No.”
The word was soft, yet it stilled the chamber.
Paul froze mid-cry. The serpent paused mid-coil. Even the wheel seemed to hesitate, its teeth grinding slower, as if caught in shock.
Elena rose to her feet. Her knees shook, but her voice, when it came again, was steadier. “I will not bind. I will not free. I am not your priest, not your rope, not your sacrifice. You will not turn Malta into your altar.”
The wheel’s groan deepened, rage or awe.
Elena lifted the token high. Both sides burned her skin. For a breathless second she felt she held the weight of the whole island in her hand — St. Paul’s sermons, the serpent’s hunger, the whispers of every niche and every well.
Then she hurled it into the well.
It fell without a sound.
The wheel shuddered once, then locked. Its teeth ground to stillness.
Paul’s chains slackened. He flickered, face caught between fury and despair, and dissolved like a flame snuffed by wind. The serpent hissed without voice, its coils shrinking, collapsing inward, spiralling into the walls until it was nothing but the carvings themselves, twisting inward forever.
The strange light collapsed.
Elena fell to her knees, suddenly blind. The torch in her hand was dead. The candle stub long since gone. Only blackness remained, broken by one sound:
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Her hand throbbed. She held it before her face though she could not see. A heat pulsed beneath the skin. When she dared strike the torch’s failing beam, she saw it at last: a brand seared into her palm.
Not cross. Not spiral. Both. Fused together, impossible to tell apart, a knot of faith and hunger, of order and abyss.
The chamber whispered.
Not Paul. Not serpent. Not even chorus. Her own voice.
“Agħżilt.”
You have chosen.
Elena staggered backwards. The wheel was silent stone once more, lifeless. No saint. No serpent. Only the faint drip-drip-drip of some hidden leak, steady as a pulse.
She turned. The chamber had folded narrow again, leaving a single sloping corridor, tilted upward. She did not question it. She began to climb, each step slower than the last.
And with every step, the brand in her palm pulsed — not with her own heartbeat, but with something deeper, vaster.
The catacombs had not been bound.
Nor freed.
They had been joined.
And she, Elena Cortés, was now their mouth.
Chapter Ten — The Caretaker’s Silence
Carmelo Gauci sat slumped on the stone step outside the service door, keys heavy in his lap. He had not moved since the bells of Mdina tolled eleven, then twelve, then one. He had counted the spaces between the bells, the silences that were sometimes longer than they should be, as though the island itself lost track of time.
He bruised a sprig of rosemary against his fingers, lifting it once, twice, to his nose. The scent grew fainter with each crush.
Fifteen minutes, he had told her. Always fifteen. Doors saved lives when rules were obeyed. Rules made sense of the island.
But she had not come back.
The air shifted at last. Not the hot breath of the Scirocco, nor the cool mist of the Maestral. Something older. A sigh that seemed to rise from the limestone itself, a slow exhalation from deep below.
Carmelo stood, every joint aching. He slid the largest key into the iron banded lock, turned it once. The latch clicked — but not because of him. The door gave an inch, as if it had already decided.
He did not push. He simply waited.
A hand slipped through the gap. Pale, dust-streaked, trembling.
Carmelo grasped it and pulled hard. Elena spilled out onto the flagstones, coughing as though the air itself scalded her lungs. Her hair was matted with dust; her skin was clammy with sweat. But her eyes — her eyes were too wide, as if they had seen the horizon from below.
Marija tal-Kappella was there already, of course. She emerged from the shadows like a crow from a hedge, black shawl tight around her shoulders despite the heat. “Mulej!” she cried, clutching at her chest. “You brought her back!”
Elena shook her head, struggling to breathe. “Not… back.” Her voice was cracked, and when she raised her right hand the villagers saw the brand seared into her palm: cross and spiral knotted into one.
Marija staggered backward. “Not back,” she whispered. “Changed.”
From the side alley shuffled Ġanni, rubbing sleep from his eyes, and behind him came Father Andrei with his glass of water, though no one had seen him fetch it. The barman was there too, towel still slung across his shoulder, pretending he had only come for the air.
They gathered around the girl who had gone below and returned marked.
Carmelo crouched, rough hand on her shoulder. “What did you do?” His voice was low, almost tender, but heavy with dread.
Elena looked at him, pupils huge. “I didn’t choose,” she rasped. “Or I chose both. I threw it away. And now—”
She pressed her palm flat to the ground. The stone pulsed beneath her touch.
Marija hissed, backing away. “She’s given them a mouth.”
“No,” Elena croaked, lifting her head. “They’ve given me one.”
The villagers fell silent. Even the night seemed to lean closer.
And then it came: a sound rising from the catacombs beneath their feet, rolling through the alleys of Rabat, a second toll to match Mdina’s bells. Not chant. Not whisper. A single word, spoken in Elena’s voice, magnified by stone.
Għada.
Tomorrow.
The bells of Mdina rang once, and in the same heartbeat another set of bells echoed from below, deeper, older, a harmony of stone.
The villagers crossed themselves, muttered charms, clutched shawls tighter. Ġanni swore under his breath. The barman dropped his glass.
Carmelo alone did not move. He only closed his eyes, leaned against the iron door, and muttered: “Once the walls learn your voice, they never give it back.”
Elena, still on her knees, stared at her branded hand. The stone pulsed with her heartbeat, or perhaps her heart had begun to pulse with the stone’s. She no longer knew the difference.
She tried to whisper, to herself, to Carmelo, to anyone — but her words came not from her mouth.
They came from the walls.
Chapter Eleven — Tomorrow
Elena lay awake in her Rabat guesthouse, the sheets twisted around her legs, her skin still gritty with stone dust. The ceiling fan wheezed above her, pushing heavy summer air that did nothing to cool.
She had bathed, scouring her skin until it reddened, but the mark on her palm did not fade. Cross and spiral, fused together, seared as though by a chisel of fire. When she closed her eyes, she saw it glow.
She pressed her palm to the mattress. The springs shivered.
Pressed it to the wall. The plaster hummed.
Pressed it to the faucet in the bathroom — the drip-drip-drip of water fell in rhythm with her pulse.
She tried to sleep. Each time her lids fluttered shut, she dreamed corridors opening like books, niches breathing, bread loaves pressed into her hands. And always, behind her ear, the same voice. Her own.
Tomorrow.
At dawn, bells tolled again — but not from Mdina. These were closer, lower, deep in the ground. She sat bolt upright. The guesthouse walls murmured. She could not understand the words, but she felt them: a gathering, a counting, a roll-call of the dead. And she was included.
When the innkeeper served her bread and olives, she found herself listening not to his chatter but to the faint murmur of the limestone beneath their feet. The walls were learning his voice too.
She wrapped her palm in a scarf and forced herself to walk through the day, trying to pretend normal. Tourists bustled, buses honked, children begged for ice cream. Yet every doorway, every well, every stretch of sunbaked wall seemed to lean toward her, listening.
Malta was smaller than it had been yesterday. Smaller, and infinitely deeper.
Chapter Twelve — The Feast Without End
Word spread in whispers, as it always had. Tourists spoke of hearing voices in the Hypogeum at Paola, voices not in any language they knew but answered in their own tongues. Divers in Gozo swore the sea caves murmured names when the tide went slack. Farmers drawing water from old wells near Żebbuġ heard their own mothers calling them from the depths.
And always, in Rabat, near the catacombs, the whispers carried Elena’s voice.
Not hostile. Not welcoming. Simply waiting.
The café regulars of Il-Lanterna avoided each other’s eyes. Marija muttered her rosary until the beads cracked. Father Andrei blessed every glass of water he touched. Ġanni swore never to pass the catacomb gates at night again, though no one believed he ever had the courage before.
Carmelo sat by the service door most evenings, keys on his lap, rosemary in his pocket. He did not open. He did not close. He only listened.
And Elena? She no longer belonged only above ground. When she spoke to herself in her guesthouse mirror, the walls moved their lips with her. When she walked Valletta’s streets, archways whispered her name. When she stood by the sea at Marsaxlokk, the waves hissed her words back at her.
She had joined the island, or the island had joined her.
Malta had always been crossroads: Phoenicians, Arabs, Normans, Knights, English. Now it had found a new voice to carry the burden of all its buried tongues.
A week later, a group of tourists descended into St. Paul’s Catacombs, laughing nervously at the coolness of the air. Their guide’s torch flickered against the niches. Someone joked about skeletons. Someone else dropped a coin down a well.
And then they heard it.
Not a chant. Not a ghostly wail.
A single voice, calm and patient, spoken in a dozen languages at once.
Tomorrow.
The tourists shivered. They looked to the guide, who only stared, pale as limestone.
The walls had spoken.
And they were still listening.
The Crazymad Writer Writes Again 