by Ari Berk
The first doorway on the right led into the master bedroom. The high ceiling was domed, like the library, but on a smaller scale, and long, dark velvet curtains were drawn over the windows against the light. There were paintings on all the walls, mostly nineteenth-century oils of classical scenes. Silas recognized some of the subjects. Zeus and Semele, just as the god’s lightning-charged embrace was about to turn his mistress to ash. Hades and Persephone, a tear in the earth opening up and Hades driving his sable horses and red-gold chariot down in the underworld with his stolen and terrified young bride. Phaethon and Phoebus, father handing the son the reins of the sun-car that would shortly bring about the son’s demise. Proud Niobe, looking over the corpses of her children.
Silas looked but bit his tongue, even though he was dying to comment. Who could sleep with such images in the room? The bed was made, but its sheets were scored with creases, and it didn’t look like anyone actually slept there, merely used the bed to sit on.
Silas followed his uncle through a doorway and into the work-room, where he could immediately detect the thick, sweet smell of honey. Here, where Uncle kept his long-unused photographic equipment, was another small library. On the shelves were numerous glass jars with what appeared to be specimens of small animals. Uncle quickly explained, “These were part of my anatomical studies. So important for any artist. Even though I haven’t really used them in a long time, I could never part with them. To simply dispose of them would seem … disrespectful. So I keep them. My pets.” He laughed at his own words, but Silas could feel Uncle’s eyes on him intently. Uncle was watching every expression as it flashed across Silas’s face. But Silas turned away from Uncle, unable to keep his eyes from the shelves and their holdings.
On the shelves on the opposite side of the room stood numerous jars of honey. When he looked back at the specimens, Silas could see that some of them were suspended in honey and not formaldehyde, as he had previously thought. How the little jars glowed, even in the dim light. Unlike specimens he’d seen in school that were floating in formaldehyde or alcohol, these ones in honey seemed more alive, more like they were asleep rather than dead. The way the honey held them suspended kept the small corpses from losing their hair, or looking like they’d been roughly shoved to the bottom of their jars; the honey-preserved animals looked more likely to open their eyes, and there weren’t any little pieces of flesh flaking off them either. In their strange way, they were lovely, little golden creatures, barely affected by death.
“Now that is an ancient custom,” Uncle told Silas, his hands shaking slightly. “The Romans would sometimes preserve their dead in honey, as did the ancient Babylonians. Some cultures thought it was holy stuff, can you imagine? The food of the dead and the gods both. Of course, the dead and the gods are so similar, are they not? After enough time, the line between ancestor and deity blurs, and gods are born.”
With his eyes, Silas followed row after row of jars down toward the opposite end of the room, where a very strong door, one that did not match any of the others in the house, had been set into the wall.
“That is my Camera Obscura now. My private work studio. My darkroom, if you like. One day I’d very much like to show it to you, and if you’re interested, I’d like you to help me with my work.”
Thinking of the knocking sound he’d heard the previous day, Silas suddenly asked, “Is there anyone in there?”
His uncle had been walking toward the door, but at Silas’s question he seemed to take a small misstep and fall forward. He quickly caught himself and just as quickly stood up as straight as a pole. “No. It was the old nursery, in your grandfather’s time. I am eager to return to work in there. Perhaps with a new partner?”
“C’mon! Let’s have a look,” said Silas, intrigued and striding across the room. But as he approached the door, he could see his uncle tense visibly, and from somewhere, Silas thought he heard a low, soft cry, not unlike a cat. The door looked heavy, and as Silas got closer, he saw that it was inscribed all over its surface. Some of the marks were clearly deep gouges, while others looked like complicated circles and lines carved carefully and deeply into the wood. Uncle tried to cover them casually with his hand as he leaned against the door.
“Had I not already told you, you might have guessed by all the juvenile markings on the wood that this door once led to a nursery.”
Considering the thickness of the door and the size of the bolts on the bronze locks, Silas commented, “This is a very big door for a nursery, don’t you think?”
Uncle laughed somewhat uneasily and said, “Oh, Silas, children can be the very devil!”
He held up his hand and waved it, as if trying to keep his laughter going. “But seriously, this door is an antique and came with these locks. They are ornamental, very old, and I suspect no one had the heart to remove them. I am rather fond of them.”
“You sure we can’t take a quick peek inside?”
“We most certainly may, but not today. I would like to straighten up the mess in there before I show it to you. Allow me my pride, I beg you. Besides,” he said, as he put his arm around Silas’s shoulder and led him back to the opposite side of the room, “I was going to show you my photography.”
“Yeah, okay,” said Silas, willing to be distracted for the moment, wanting to see more because he was beginning to suspect this was not so much a tour as it was an initiation. Like him, Uncle had eccentric tastes and liked old things. The difference, Silas was beginning to see, was that Uncle saw such objects as extensions of himself, of his body, essential, required, uniquely his. This thought made Silas uneasy.
“Show me your art,” he said, as he turned away from the door, past the amber-lit flesh-filled jars, and looked back at Uncle, who had begun to bring some large leather-bound volumes down from a high shelf. He placed them onto a table inlaid with complicated marquetry designs in contrasting light and dark woods. A few he opened briefly and put back on the shelf. “No, no. So many were ill in those years, and it marred the final image.” He looked over the spines, stamped with gilt dates. He chose the volume farthest along the shelf and put it on the table. “Yes, the last were my best, I think.” His uncle drew two high-backed chairs up to the table and motioned wordlessly for Silas to come and sit by him.
In that moment, as he sat down, Silas felt cold, and he noticed his uncle’s skin: It seemed to absorb whatever light fell on it, and the longer Silas stared at it, the darker the room appeared to become.
“My work,” was all Uncle said, as he opened the first album and turned it slightly toward his nephew. He watched every move of Silas’s hand as he slowly turned a page. Silas could see that his uncle was perspiring.
With great care and some hesitancy, Silas looked at one page and then another. The first few images stopped him cold, and he could not look away from the subjects of the photographs. He turned more pages, paused briefly, then kept on turning page after page, unable to stop.
There were the dead.
The photographs were exquisite in their detail, composition, and contrast. The placement of hands and the postures were perfect, always merely at rest. The expressions were more various. Many were quite lifelike, although dreamy, like a person who had paused only briefly to close his eyes for a moment, the merest pause, a comma; then he would awake refreshed, rise, and carry on with his life. But the faces of the living captured in bereavement for their dear departed always gave away the illusion—their expressions spoke of death’s presence. Their posture described an angle of mourning, while their eyes seemed to glance somewhere off to the side, as if they might be looking for something they’d lost.
Slowly, Silas turned the thick pages of the album.
A picture of a mother cradling a dead child, her arms framing the body of the baby, mother and child still one being, maybe more so now, arranged in death.
Two children. One lying on a small divan, eyes closed, holding a doll. Kneeling behind the little sofa, another child with another doll that she holds tight
ly next to her head. Looking not at her dead sister, but beyond her, perhaps at her ghost waiting just out of frame.
Mother and child again. But this time the mother is dead, yet skillfully propped upright with her right arm around her child’s body. The mother’s eyes are very flat, eyelids not quite halfway down. The child’s arm is wrapped about his mother’s neck, and his other hand rests very tentatively on her chest, as if his mother’s body is made of air. The little boy seems well aware that his mother is not present. This is not my mother anymore, he thinks. He knows. He is weary of the farce, the small corners of his mouth are beginning to pull down. His remarkable composure is about to fall apart.
“They’re beautiful,” was all Silas could say, and he meant it. He looked up briefly at Uncle with awe. There was no denying Charles Umber was an artist of a very high order. Silas quickly looked back down at the extraordinary photographs that had captured his attention.
Uncle exhaled softly, said nothing, but put his hand gently on Silas’s shoulder.
Silas could barely look away from any of them. He slowly realized, These are all Lichport folk. These are my people, my ancestors, my neighbors, and I love them.
Toward the end of the album, Silas noticed an alteration in style, subtle at first, but disturbing. There was a growing fascination with particular parts of the bodies. In some photos, veils had been drawn over certain features of the body so that others could be highlighted. Finally, some had no faces at all, thick crepe wound about the head so only the white neck showed, or a portion of the chest and clavicle. These were not memorials, not people anymore. Under his uncle’s eye and careful deliberate manipulation, they had become objects. Looking at these pictures, Silas began to perceive a side of his uncle that seemed something less than human. For the first time since he had arrived in Lichport, Silas thought about his uncle with fear.
At the end of the album, Silas came to the strangest picture of all. This photograph was very dark, not because it was underexposed, but because there was a lot of black fabric that surrounded a single hand at the center of the picture. The hand almost glowed, it was so white. Silas at first thought it was the hand of a child, because it was fine and very smooth, but the length of the fingers and the delicacy of the bones told him it belonged to a woman. Who was she? More importantly, where was she?
There was no face in the photograph. Black crepe had been wrapped around and around the entire head, and more fabric had been drawn across the body and the arm so that only the single hand appeared to float against the dark background. Silas guessed that no relative of the deceased had ever been shown this photo. This was something Uncle had done for himself. It was an extraordinary thing, beautiful and awful both, and it raised bumps on Silas’s skin and turned his stomach. He could feel his uncle’s eyes, long ago, on this dead woman’s body, could feel him arranging her, caressing the hand, placing it in an unnatural relation to the body by covering the face and all the other parts. It was almost as though in taking this picture, his uncle had severed the hand from her body, as though the hand was a trophy. As if he didn’t want her to see what he was going to do to her.
“What was her name?” asked Silas very quietly, as if the woman in the picture were asleep in the next room and hearing her name spoken out loud might wake her.
“Whose name?”
“The woman in the photograph.”
“I certainly can’t recall. This was taken years ago. Anyway, it is of very little consequence. She was buried and forgotten in Newfield with all the rest of the rabble. This picture is what remains, what shall remain.” Silas thought that Uncle’s face seemed troubled.
“Most people give little enough real thought to their own mortality. Oh yes, they gabble on about heaven and the bosom of Abraham, but really, they are weary of life almost from the time they’re born, and are only waiting for it all to end. They live their days quietly, obscurely, and underneath their daily toils, they long for oblivion.
“But we can be eternal, Silas. We must be ready to embrace that possibility. Through sacrifice, and art, and meticulous study, we may join the gods in their bowers. Do you believe that is so? That death on deathless substance has no force, even on the body, if the seeker is prepared?”
Silas was fairly sure his uncle was mad, at least to some degree, and as Uncle continued to speak, Silas thought, He is sleepwalking. Don’t wake him.
“I have never thought about it quite that way, but I suppose it might be possible for someone to be remembered forever.”
“Not quite my point, but it is a beginning.” The eerie mood was broken when Uncle tousled Silas’s hair as though he were a dog that had brought a stick back to its master.
“Ah, I remember now,” Uncle said as he slowly slid the book around so he could see the image more clearly, as if the woman’s name and history were somewhere inscribed on the photo.
“There’s a story about her well worth remembering,” Uncle said, as he took a deep breath and half closed his eyes.
“Two children died. Their mother, this woman, lost her arm to infection a year later and, you may find this fascinating, buried the arm with her children in the earth. Of course, she was a God-fearing woman, and she would need that arm when the great horn sounded and the righteous were called. If you believe in such nonsense. But everyone in town knew her true purpose and why this strange action brought her such comfort. A part of her would be with them now in that low, lonely place. She could hold those children in her arm until she could be laid to rest beside them. Now isn’t that a curious thing, Silas? A great testament, I suppose, to a mother’s love. Yes, you can even go see the stone. You’ll see there is just one stone for the two children—this was common—and she even had the headstone amended, so that her arm might be carved above the little cherubic heads of the children. A portrait of the arm that she put into their grave. All true.”
“There were, at the time, many stories about her,” Uncle continued. “She was, I now recall, rather remarkable. A large family, and so well loved by everyone. A strong presence among her kin.”
Silas thought about the many ghost stories he’d read where the dead come back for things: treasure, unrequited love, a golden arm, to watch over their children.
“Were there any stories about her, you know, coming back?” he asked Uncle, his eyes never leaving the photograph.
“Who knows? Well, I suppose she might have become a ghost. I never heard any stories to that effect, but I mean to say, after the business with the arm, I shouldn’t be surprised. Ghosts are always a little needy, incomplete, if you take my meaning.” He smiled at his nephew. “Like the living, they are always looking for something or other that they’ve misplaced, no?”
Uncle was lost momentarily in his thoughts, but then cleared his throat quickly.
“Perhaps I should be getting back to my work, and surely some work of your own awaits you in our library?”
Silas understood that he was being dismissed, and after what he’d seen, he was eager to make his way back downstairs into a part of the house where at least some of the windows were open and uncovered and let in just a bit more light.
“WE LIVE ON IMMORTAL SHORES, SILAS.”
To the right of the massive carved mantel, Uncle’s living room boasted a tall wooden case carved with ivy vines and leaves. Behind its glass doors were numerous shelves of fossils. Before dinner, Uncle postured next to the case. “Did you know, Silas, the seacliffs of Lichport are filled with fossils, though many of these here have come to me from the far corners of the world.”
While Silas listened, he looked carefully at the ancient skeleton of one of the small reptiles, preserved in pale yellow sandstone, revealed as if a blanket had been drawn back from the bed of stone in which the creature had been sleeping without its skin. There were many urchins and shells, which most resembled themselves as they had been in life, now turned to stone. There were curled ammonites, some black, others with pearled surfaces; one on the floor was over three fe
et tall and leaned against the mantel.
Uncle had walked up quietly behind Silas and began to speak over his shoulder. Silas, surprised by the proximity, knocked his head to one side, trying to get a little distance between his ear and his uncle’s mouth.
“Rotting is so common,” Uncle said in a low voice, “so communal. But certain creatures, some forms, because of either some unique qualities they possess, or because of some extraordinary pains taken on their behalf or Nature’s, do not succumb, do not lose form. Instead, such fortunate souls continue into eternity by virtue of their enduring form. How wonderful are these little sigils of immortality, are they not? The dross, the physical body of the creature begins the process, but for the fortunate, it ends in eternity, in the endurance of the soul.”
“Are you suggesting a mollusk has a soul?” said Silas, and laughed a little. He picked up one of the specimens from the case and turned it over in his hands.
“Not, I think, in the way you mean it. It is very complex and, of course, not all wonderments occur on the physical plane. Calcination, fixation, solution, distillation, sublimation, separation, projection. Those are the keys and as much part of the soul’s preparation as the body’s—” Uncle’s eyes seemed to glaze over for a moment, but then he looked at Silas again, leaning toward him.
“That said, even a mollusk has an enduring principal element. All living things do, although most never consider the possibility of the continuation of spirit I am speaking of, because they are simply incapable of doing so. For those ignorant souls, the world is not unlike a hospital, a place to lie idle and then die. And after their body’s demise, they may watch silently from the gallery the tedious dumbshow of their corpse’s decay, followed by the yawning epilogue of the soul’s dissolve into nothingness. But it needn’t be so. Many of the ancient people of this world turned their great minds to just such a problem and discovered the truth, the same truth hinted at by this simple fossil. With the body preserved, we bind ourselves to an eternal present. We may retain the use of the immortal soul. No forgetfulness. No oblivion.”
