by Ari Berk
She woke early and put on her best dress, the black taffeta with a deep V collar that she’d once thought looked very fine on her and still showed off the pearls. She put on shoes with proper heels, then looked at herself in the long mirror. She didn’t smile, but she was pleased with what she saw. Of course, she reminded herself, this was not a social call. A drink would help. She was tempted, but told herself she could have a double the minute she got back to the house. Keep your head about you. Keep your head high. Walk over there and come back and it’s done.
Since the first moment she’d set foot back in Lichport, Dolores could hear her mother’s voice, waking and sleeping, every moment, a constant harangue in that high, slow whine about her obligations to the family.
“Dolores? Dearest heart? I don’t care what you think about any of this. It’s what you do that matters. Think what you like, but you will keep up appearances and remember your obligations. He is still family, Dolores, whether you like it or not. If you are in Lichport, you will pay a call at that house, without fail. Visitations are an obligation.”
She couldn’t bear the lecture any longer and knew there was only one way to get that voice to be quiet. So Dolores was going to Fort Street, to the house where she was born.
Before going to bed, Silas stood outside on the front porch to get some air, and, looking to the corner, saw that Bea was there. He walked down Temple to meet her. She smiled as he approached, and as Silas got next to her, she began walking too. Neither of them spoke. Bea drew even closer to his side, though she did not touch him. They walked in silence, pleased to be in each other’s company, making a complete circuit of the block, up Fairwell, around Prince, down Highland Street along the cemetery fence, and back onto Temple, arriving again in front of Uncle’s house. Silas looked up, hearing a door close somewhere inside the house, and when he looked back, Bea was back at the corner, where he’d first seen her. She waved at him and vanished up Fairwell Street. He smiled to himself and went back inside and up to bed.
Silas woke up early the next morning from the most vivid dream he could ever recall having.
He was standing in a high-ceilinged hall, before a long carved table set with silver, and in the hundreds of chairs around the table, Silas’s kin were seated, rows and rows of all those from whom Silas was descended. He could feel that immediately. These were relatives and ancestors. Living and dead both. Hundreds gathered together to eat, each in clothing from their own time and land. The walls were hung with faded crewelwork tapestries, complicated stitched depictions of cities, towns, and great ancient houses, and with that curious insight that attends the dreamer, Silas knew these were the places where his relations had once lived or lived still. The largest tapestry, hung behind him, showed the most bizarre house Silas had ever seen, a great manor with centuries of additions, towers, and long-galleried wings stretching off, back and farther back in the forced perspective of the weaving, almost more city than house. Above the main door of the house on the tapestry was stitched, small but legible, the word A R V A L E.
Around the edges of the hall, and standing in the doorways and porticos, darker forms from even earlier times stood, barely visible now and nameless, remembered only as vague shapes sharing common blood.
Silas knew the names of only a few, his closest and most recent relations. His mother was there, seated a few chairs down, his uncle by her side.
“This is not my chair …,” she said, but Uncle ignored her and set upon his food, pecking and tearing at it like a vulture. Sitting in his uncle’s lap was a child wrapped in cloth and hooded, its features hidden. The child reached out a hand toward the food, but Uncle pushed it away saying, “Patience, little man.” At the far end of the table, some people with ruffled collars raised their glasses to Silas and laughed loudly, delighting themselves in so great a company, all joyfully carousing together. His grandfather was sitting next to him and kept filling his glass, so that wine poured over the cup’s lip and down onto the table. His grandfather took no notice of the spilling wine: “The dark drink of oblivion brings little comfort in this house. So, it’s wine or nothing for me!”
Directly across from Silas was an empty high-backed chair, and each time his eyes fell on that ebony throne, he began to stammer at those around him, although they ignored his questions and concern. What is this? Silas shouted, pointing at the chair. Who is coming? Who sits there? Some of the people down the table laughed knowingly, but no one would answer his questions. Fear rose in him, because he was sure that his father should be sitting there, yet even here, among the dead, his father was missing, and no one else in the great chamber seemed to notice Amos’s absence.
Silas continued to yell, Who sits here? Who is coming? but no one heard him, and far down along the table, someone stood on his chair and, ignoring him, called for music.
Silas woke up from this dream angry, frightened, and frustrated. Had his father been in the dream, but hidden, one of the dark forms in the doorways? Was he coming? Had he left? Or was he gone, and neither the dead nor the living noticed or cared? All the ancestors and relatives had chairs appointed to them, so why was this chair—his father’s, he assumed—empty? His mother and uncle were there too, so this was a family gathering; the living and the dead were present, so where was his dad?
Silas squirmed in the sheets twisted around his legs. He disentangled himself and tried to fall back asleep, but it was well into the morning and he was too aggravated by the dream’s mysteries to do so. He dressed and went downstairs to the parlor. He was thinking he might go out and explore the Temple Cemetery to the west of the house, the one he’d passed last night while walking with Bea. His mother came down the stairs, and Silas could overhear some of her conversation with Uncle in the breakfast room. His mother sounded impatient, Uncle condescending, and at the end of the conversation came a word Silas didn’t like.
“No. No. I am not going into the house.”
“But Dolores, really! It is an anachronism. Totemism at its worst. I really can’t believe—”
“I trust you will not mind if I take some flower cuttings from the side garden?”
“As you wish,” Uncle said, and chuckled. “Please convey my best wishes to the Fort Street zombies.”
“I would prefer it if you did not use that word.”
“Of course, Dolores. They’re not zombies, but really, are you sure—”
Before Uncle could finish, his mother was out the door, leaving the house for the first time since coming to Lichport.
A few moments later, when Uncle returned to his work upstairs, Silas quietly followed his mother out of the house.
HE FOLLOWED HIS MOTHER as she made her way up Fairwell Street. She was still well in view and hadn’t seen him behind her. As he walked, that word “zombies” stuck in Silas’s mind and seemed to open an unpleasant door in his memory that had long been closed.
Silas paused, remembering the first time he’d seen a zombie movie and how it had scared the hell out him. He was ten years old and couldn’t sleep, so he’d snuck back downstairs to watch TV. It was a black-and-white movie, and as the picture came into focus, there it was, shambling across the screen.
At first Silas thought it was supposed to be funny, the way the zombie walked drunkenly this way and that, never in a straight line. But then there were others, some pulling themselves from their graves with their mouths open and eyes rolled back like hungry infants, and they made awful moans as if the soil from their graves was rasping in their throats.
That was when he got scared. So scared he couldn’t move, even to turn off the TV. He was terrified and fascinated both, but too scared to call for his dad, or even turn his head away, because he knew if he did, he would see one of those corpses with its rotten head cocked to one side staring at him through the window.
Amos had heard the noise and came downstairs. He took one look at the screen and another at his son’s face and quickly turned the TV off.
“So what was that movie about?”
“Monsters …,” said Silas, who couldn’t stop looking at the now blank screen, eyes wide and unblinking as though they’d been taped open.
His dad turned Silas’s shoulders so he and his son were looking at each other and said to him, “What kind of monsters, Little Bird?”
“Dead ones. Really scary dead ones. Corpses. Dead bodies coming alive and eating people.”
“Silas, that’s not what that movie was about. That’s what was in it, what you see, and it’s not too nice, I know, but those terrible images are about something else.”
Silas looked at his dad questioningly, as his fear began to fall away a little at the calm certainty he heard in his dad’s voice.
“It’s about living people forgetting their kin. More and more, people bury their dead, but then they forget about them, almost like they weren’t family anymore just because they died. Every now and again, those living folks get to feeling bad about how they don’t even know where all their kin are buried. Then one of them writes a book or a movie about zombies. Dead folk who come back angry. It’s just people feeling a little guilty. That’s all those movies are about. Zombies are just reminders that someone has been forgotten by their kin.”
“But they eat brains …” Silas said, still unsettled.
“Of course they do. That’s the part that should have been remembering them.”
Even though he felt better after talking with his dad, Silas was still frightened by what he’d seen. He didn’t think about zombies all the time, but they stayed close to the surface of his fears, and he sometimes thought about them when his dad told stories about the funeral business, although he never said anything because he liked his dad’s stories about his work and didn’t want him to stop sharing them. When zombies would sit up unexpectedly in his thoughts, Silas would try to force them out of his mind right away. Sometimes he was successful, but not always.
As he grew older, he began to think his fear of them might have been related to how much he wanted to believe his dad could protect him from anything. If his dad was a mortician, then it was his work that prepared the dead for actually being dead. As a mortician, Amos was supposed to make sure the dead weren’t moving anymore, even made sure their mouths were stitched closed. Those zombies in the movie suggested to Silas that maybe his father missed things sometimes—that maybe he didn’t always pay attention to his work, that some of the corpses he got ready for burying maybe weren’t really ready but his dad just hadn’t noticed. His dad had important work to do. Silas knew his dad wasn’t perfect; his mother told him that all the time. But if his dad didn’t do his work perfectly, every time, then some people wouldn’t be ready for death, wouldn’t be ready to be dead, and maybe they’d come back angry. And now that he wasn’t sure what his father did for a living, maybe that meant Amos hadn’t been right about everything after all.
After a hesitant step, Silas ran to catch up with his mother.
A wet, chill wind was blowing into town from the sea as Silas turned the corner onto Fort Street. He was worried about what he might find there. Far down the street, he could just see his mom coming through a gate and its overgrown hedge, her brief visit at the house apparently already concluded. Her hands were empty now; the flowers she’d been carrying were gone. Silas backed into some bushes so she wouldn’t see him. As she passed by, he saw she was ashen-faced and walking much more briskly now than when she’d left Uncle’s house.
Nervous and breathing hard, Silas was suddenly overwhelmed by the scent of wisteria, despite the bare green vines he had seen a moment ago. Halfway down the block, he could just make out the roof of the house, which rose above the gate through which he’d seen his mother emerge. As Silas stared, he thought he saw a pillar of fire rise from the roof and lick at the sky with a blue-hued flame, but when he looked down and back up again, he saw only the overgrown chimney, the vision merely a play of light from the sliver of blue sky against the incoming clouds.
The wisteria smell was overpowering, and that rich perfume reminded Silas of funerals, because when his grandfather died, everyone had sent flowers. When Silas had entered his grandfather’s house on the day of the funeral, he was nearly knocked down by the smell of roses, lilies, tuberoses, stock, heliotrope, irises, lavender, and bowls of wisteria flowers. His dad had told him this was the old way of Lichport, which still clung to the tradition of scented flowers, used to mask the smell of the corpse during the wake….
Enough. That was enough. He was making himself nervous.
The pavement was broken everywhere, and weeds tall as bushes had grown up through the cracks. The property on his left was enclosed by an enormous thicket of briar roses, their blooms long since blown. Among the thorns, buried like bones in the high green bushes, there was a gate. The heavy vines had long since wound through every part of it, including the bars, which rendered the gate unopenable. Through gaps in the bars, Silas could see a small portion of the front garden. Like everything else on Fort Street, it was wild—a sort of wilderness of high self-seeded shrubs and randomly growing trees laid over a lost world. Near the steps of the house, there was a small patch that had been cleared, and in it, Silas saw something that caught both his attention and his breath.
There was what appeared to be a woman kneeling in the small clearing. Silas thought she might be a mannequin or some kind of absurd scarecrow, because she wasn’t moving. The figure wore a broad straw hat, very tattered at the edges and dirty, with weeds springing up from where the crown met the brim. Bees were swarming all around her limbs, setting down in groups on her exposed and discolored hands and neck, yet she didn’t brush them away or flinch. She wore a floral dress, much stained, especially over the arms and down the front, and moss grew from the fabric around the hem where it touched the ground. Silas wondered how long ago the figure had been put up in the yard, and by whom? Kids messing around? Someone’s idea of art?
Silas leaned forward and put his face right up against the gate to get a better look. Did she just move? Silas thought he saw the figure bend slightly, very slowly. Wait. There! It haltingly reached its hand forward, slowly and almost imperceptibly, toward a small bunch of weeds on the ground in front of it. Not sure what to do, but knowing it was rude to stand and stare, Silas said, “Good morning, ma’am.”
He waited for an answer, but none came. The woman, who had just taken a full minute to wrap her hand around the weed, stopped moving and was still again. She said nothing, but her head tilted slightly backward, toward Silas, although her face remained hidden behind her ruined hat. Then her arm jerked slightly and her body rocked back, and there was the weed pulled free from the ground, clutched in her brown hand.
“Okay, well, good day to you, ma’am,” Silas said, wondering who she was and how many people actually still lived on this street he thought had been abandoned long ago.
The plots were very large, and there were only four or five houses on each side of the street, separated by what might have once been formal lawns but were now fields of weeds as tall as summer corn. Far down at the end of the street, he could make out a high wall and great gates, each bearing an ornate letter A. For Arvale, Silas thought, just as Joan Peale had said. Beyond the gate, low clouds hid in shadow, then revealed the highest chimneys, spires, and towers. Again and again they quickly flashed in the brief light, as if they couldn’t decide whether or not they wanted to be seen. A great familiarity was rising in his blood and drew him toward the end of the street, but when he arrived in front of the gate where he’d seen his mother emerge, he stopped, unable to wonder about anything other than why his mother had come here.
Silas turned to look at the front of the house of his mother’s family. He found he could barely see it from the sidewalk; like the other houses on Fort Street, it was surrounded by a vast hedge, high and dense. Visible above the greening roof, the chimney was almost completely enveloped by ropey vines of wisteria and green ivy that held its color against the coming of winter.
The gate to the front
yard stood open, but torn bits of foliage lay about it, probably from where his mother had opened the gate, perhaps the first time it had been opened in many years.
As he made his way through the hedge, Silas could now see much more of the mansion. It was an enormous place, a house people had added to over many years as the family swelled. There was an eighteenth-century central structure, with three stories and five dormers that emerged from the top floor. The windows were high and wide, and the front door was set into the house’s brick facing and framed with ornamental pillars that supported a curved classical arch over the door. Two wings emerged from the sides of the house, perhaps built in the early nineteenth century, but Silas wasn’t sure because they were made with bricks that matched the earlier architecture. It appeared that at some later date, a large open porch had been added to the front of the home.
As Silas pushed his way into the yard, he followed the same rough path his mother had just used. He had to break some low branches off some of the many small conifers that had been planted there, and push through an array of weeds and overgrown shrubs to reach the front of the house. He mounted the stairs slowly, worried that the rotten wood might give way under his weight. He looked up and back over his shoulder repeatedly, a response to the unmistakable feeling that he was being watched, maybe by something hiding in the weeds. Or maybe his mother had seen him and had doubled back.
Silas looked back over the yard one more time but saw no one, so he walked up onto the porch. It was covered with dirty plastic flowers, bottles, many old vases that might have contained something sweet at one time because they were filled with dead ants, and small abandoned beehives that floated in murky green water. Potted plants, mostly dead ivy, were stacked up near the boarded-over front door; a few had fallen over and sent their roots down through the rotten floorboards of the porch, so they were now thriving and crawling their way over the brickwork that covered the front of the house. One vase by the door stood bright, brimming with the fresh-cut flowers his mother had brought.
