Death Watch

by Ari Berk

  Fortune cannot, with all her power and skill,

  Enforce my heart to think thee any ill.

  Whoever stood above him was in some kind of distress. Why is he in my room? Fear ran through Silas like a current, for he imagined that in the dark, with him, was his father’s walking corpse, escaped from some hidden basement or walled-up room of the house where Uncle had hidden it.

  Look, he told himself. Just look. Count to three, then open your eyes. Then he just opened them without counting. For the briefest instant, he saw a face looking down on him. It was not his father, but he would never in his life forget that face. The eyes were far apart and slightly misaligned, and although it was hard to tell in the dark room, the head’s shape seemed unbalanced, larger on one side than the other. Silas’s own eyes were wide open in amazement, and very quickly and without thought, he drew in breath to yell. But before he could make any noise at all, the face was gone and the breathing sound with it. Just before it vanished, that terrible face had smiled, the edges of its contorted mouth drawing up just slightly at the corners. And when Silas threw his hands up to push it away from him, he felt nothing; whoever it was had dissolved into the thick, oppressive darkness of the room.

  Silas swiftly reached over to the bedside table and turned on the lamp. The light revealed … nothing. There was nobody else in the room with him. The door was closed. No one had left. He knew absolutely that he wasn’t dreaming and that he had been lying there wide awake, listening to the raspy breathing, the air warm with the smell of sweets.

  Away in the north wing, Uncle’s singing continued and sounded slurry and confused. Maybe Uncle had taken a glass with Dolores earlier that evening. Silas got up from bed and dressed. It wasn’t hard to guess where the singing was coming from—Uncle was in his Camera Obscura. More words stumbled down the hall of the gallery, rolling along the walls and floors.

  Live thou in bliss, and banish death to Hell;

  All careful thoughts see thou from thee expel:

  As thou dost wish, thy love agrees to be.

  For proof thereof, behold, I come to thee.

  Silas crept through his uncle’s bedroom and then on through the study, which was piled high with books and some of the fossils and other specimens his uncle had at some point brought from downstairs.

  He could hear Uncle speaking very clearly in the Camera Obscura. For the first time since Silas’s arrival in the house, the door to the room had been left open slightly, its great bronze locks unset. Silas got up close to the door, but stayed away from the gap; he could hear Uncle’s voice, as he spoke to someone in the room.

  “By my hands you shall know the perfection kept from you in life. As you were—bound to this mortal flesh—how many more years could you have possibly known? Twenty? Thirty? And I never would have let them take you from me. Never. Now you shall live forever, and we will see so much more of each other. We can at last be a proper family, a peaceable family. No dark box for you at your day’s end. In claritas shall you remain, forever. Do you see? No more corruption, for now, Death trembles at the sight of you.”

  His uncle was now chanting more than singing, rocking his head from side to side, his voice becoming a crescendo as he pounded his foot in time with the song. Every time his foot struck the floor, the shelves in the outer room shivered, rattling the bottles displayed along their lengths. When he peeked through the gap, he could see that as Uncle pitched his voice around the Camera, he stood upon a small ladder, gently holding the hand of a limp arm and seemed to be speaking to it. Silas could see that Uncle’s eyes were wild, circled in distress and sorrow and madness. Uncle pressed the lifeless hand to his face but looked through the cracked door right at Silas and just went on singing….

  Die not in fear, nor live in discontent;

  Be thou not slain where blood was never meant;

  Revive again: to faint thou hast no need.

  The less afraid, the better thou shalt speed.

  Silas couldn’t see whose hand it was, but fear set every nerve in his body on fire. At his first step away from the doorway, the whole house shook, as if it was filled with a giant heart trying to beat its way out from inside the walls.

  The pounding noise appeared to wake Uncle from his macabre reverie, and as he seemed to realize that the always locked door was open, he dropped the arm and, nearly falling coming down the ladder, shot to the doorway. Pulling the door shut Silas could hear him fumble with the mechanisms of the bronze locks while the door shivered with frantic vibration.

  As he moved backward, his eyes still on the door, Silas tripped on a stack of books and fell over. He did not stop moving, and when he hit the floor, he began crawling toward the door leading away from that awful room. At the threshold, Silas pulled himself up and ran. Uncle began yelling now at something inside the Camera Obscura, and Silas could still hear him through the closed door.

  “Not yet! You must remain. I will bring him here. I will bring him back, then you won’t want to leave, will you? No, no! Then you will be content to remain, won’t you? No more trying to leave …”

  But Silas had heard and seen enough. Back in his room, he was sick with fear at the thought that Uncle had been talking to his father. But that couldn’t be. How could his father, or part of his father, be in this house? He would know. Somehow, he would just know. He couldn’t think. He could only run. Something horrible was happening in this house, and he must get out. Coward! Coward! said his eyes as they watched his hands furiously packing clothes in suitcases, a few books on top. Quickly and quietly he carried his suitcases down the back stairs and went into the yard to the carriage house, where Uncle had insisted Silas’s boxes of books and other belongings should remain until they could find “a more suitable place” for his “former life.”

  Silas found a wheelbarrow and stacked it full of boxes of his books. With a couple of his belts, he tied the suitcases to each other like saddle bags and put them over the top of the boxes. Their weight helped hold everything down. Not the most stable mode of transport, but he had no other choice, and he desperately wanted not to have to return to Uncle’s house tomorrow, if ever.

  As he came around the side of the house, Silas heard a sound above him, like a coin being tapped on one of the windows of the second floor of the north wing. When he looked up, he could see only the dark glass panes set in their heavy frames. There was a glint of light from one of the windows, but when Silas blinked to look again, he saw nothing. Worried his uncle might follow him into the yard, he quickly brought the wheelbarrow around the front of the house and turned his back to Temple Street.

  He rolled the awkward wagon of his possessions up Fairwell. Who could he go to? Which of the several people he barely knew could he impose on to put him up? He thought of Mother Peale, but her husband was probably dying, and she had enough on her plate without Amos Umber’s homeless son showing up in the middle of the night. He thought about his great-grandfather’s house, and he knew he’d be welcome. But the idea of the long walk down Fort Street, in the dark, past the overgrown gardens, past the ruins of the other houses and their occupants … it put a knot of fear in his stomach, and he abandoned the idea. Maybe in the morning, in the light, he’d make his way there.

  The street was empty, but as he went past various houses and the large, untended shrubs and bushes in front of them, he heard things rustling in the undergrowth. The wheel on the wheel-barrow was coming loose, and Silas started to panic, as he imagined having to sleep in some doorway, or in one of the rat-infested, abandoned, and boarded-up houses. Best to just keep walking then. He went up Main, then back along Garden until he was panting and anxious, unsure of where to go next. He kept walking along Garden and turned up Coach Street, hoping someone or someplace would stand out. He wondered how late it was now and what time the sun would rise.

  He looked in every direction and saw nothing to welcome him. Fear danced in his stomach, and his childhood was all around him: standing alone in front of the class, looking down
the rows of other children and watching them avert their eyes. Go away! their faces all said. Don’t sit near me. There’s no place for you. We don’t want you here!

  As he approached the corner of Coach and Main, he began to change his mind and considered heading for the Narrows. He remembered his great-grandfather’s words: Be with those you can trust. Then, around his neck, he felt the long-idle key to his father’s house given to him by Mrs. Bowe burning where it lay against his chest. He walked more quickly, until he came to the edge of Mrs. Bowe’s property, where he could see the sunflowers lit by the moon as they rose up around the Bowe family crypt at the garden’s corner. He took out the key on the chain from where it hung next to the pendant of Janus that his father had given him, and leaving the wheelbarrow briefly on the sidewalk, he walked up the steps to his father’s house and put his key in the lock.

  This is your house, Mrs. Bowe had told him.

  Silas was usually uncomfortable taking people at their word. But tonight he had neither the heart nor the inclination to doubt her.

  SILAS TURNED HIS KEY IN THE LOCK. He paused for a moment at the threshold of the partially opened front door, one foot in, one out. His skin was hot from pushing the wheelbarrow, but a breeze rose up that cooled him and blew leaves about the porch, past his feet, and into the foyer of his father’s house.

  When he looked into the entrance hall, he could see that everything was quiet, undisturbed, perhaps just as his father had left it, nothing changed since Mrs. Bowe had given Silas the key. Back outside, the wind was quickly picking up, and cold gusts slowly pulled the trees one way, then another. Waves of leaves rolled down the street, only to be whipped back by the growing wind as it changed directions.

  Silas crossed the threshold and entered into his father’s—his—house. He was home, and he could feel it in every breath as the dusty air filled his lungs. Tiny bits of death, he thought, tiny particles of the past, now part of him, part of the rising and falling of his breath. Nothing in the house had been cleaned in years. So here was his father, lying like an invisible film over everything. Particles in space, in the house, on everything in it, settling again now that he’d closed the door; settling over Silas’s outstretched hand, falling on his skin, sinking in. In that small way if no other, Silas was partially reunited with his father. Now the house was their place.

  From her bedroom in the adjoining house, Mrs. Bowe heard the door on Amos’s side open and knew Silas had come home. She wanted to go to him, to welcome him, to hold him, because she knew if he was here, then there had been trouble back at his uncle’s house. Let be, she told herself. Leave him for the night. Morning is soon enough for welcomes.

  When Silas awoke early the next morning, he was still tired. He fetched the boxes he’d left in the front hall the night before and brought the books into his father’s study through the large pocket doors, which he had opened all the way.

  A familiar voice called to him.

  “I’m surprised those old doors opened that far! Your father usually liked them closed. When he was in his study, I think he liked to feel closed off from the rest of the world. How much nicer this is. It lets so much more light into the study.” The smile on her face became concern as Mrs. Bowe asked, “Would you like to tell me about last night, Silas?”

  “Not really,” he said, but as Mrs. Bowe crossed the distance between them, he began rambling, as bits of detail began to fall out of him like shards of glass from a broken window. Before he knew it, he had blurted out most of what he’d seen and heard at Uncle’s, focusing much of his attention on describing the door to the Camera Obscura. And then, without pausing to catch his breath, Silas asked, “What do you think my uncle keeps in that room?”

  Mrs. Bowe put her hands on his to stop him from talking, and said, “Don’t go back there, Silas. Leave that house be. Never go to that room again. Never. Just stay away from that house!”

  “But what about my mom?”

  “That’s her choice to be there,” Mrs. Bowe said with a hard edge to her voice. “She’s never made good decisions for herself, not even as a child. Besides, she does more harm to herself than your uncle is likely to do to her. If she wants to be in that black house, well, you just leave her to it. But you keep away from there now you’re out of it. You hear me, child! I don’t know what Charles Umber has locked away in that room, but it’s nothing that will bring anyone any good, I can assure you of that!” Mrs. Bowe was flustered and nervous now herself, and tiny pearls of perspiration were forming on her brow.

  She drew in a long, deliberate breath to mark the end of one subject and the beginning of another, dabbed her forehead with a handkerchief she drew deftly from her sleeve, and asked, “Shall we take a turn about the houses? I see you have brought some books with you. May I assume you are here to stay then?”

  “Yes and yes.” He answered both her questions at once.

  Mrs. Bowe showed Silas the lower rooms of her house first, the dining room with its many portraits of the women of her family, and near the front of the house, the small office where her father had once conducted the business of the mortuary emporium, the door leading to the mortuary proper, and stairs leading down to where bodies had once been prepared.

  “Did my dad work here with your father?”

  “Did he what?”

  “Work here, in the mortuary, with your father?”

  “I don’t think I understand you, Silas. Are you under the impression your father was a mortician?”

  Confused, Silas replied quietly, “Yeah. My uncle told me he wasn’t, but he didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t believe him anyway—”

  “I knew it! That’s your mother’s handiwork…. She wouldn’t have wanted Amos to tell you anything.” Her face flushed with anger. “Your father was an Undertaker, Silas.”

  “So he was a mortician. Undertaker is the same thing as a mortician. Aren’t they the same thing?”

  “Not in this town,” she said. “Morticians prepare the body of the deceased for burial. And that’s important work, don’t mistake me. In some places, they help the family come to terms with the departure of the deceased, and in some places, they organize the customs that surround the burial. But here in Lichport, a mortician only prepares the physical body for burial, and in my father’s case, makes available the funereal trappings. Coffins, coaches, mourning clothes, postmortem portraiture, death masks, carriage plumes, mutes, and the like. Before my grandfather’s time, the family would prepare the body themselves, as had always been done. And when my father died, people went back to that practice, for the most part. Those who remained in Lichport, that is. I have long suspected people only came to my father for that work out of respect for my mother. But the older families and the families that came here from afar to bury their dead have long appreciated the elaborate funeral processionals, and the men of my family have long supplied those trappings. Those have always been needed. Still, our fathers’ work was not unconnected.”

  Silas could barely take it all in.

  “Mutes, did you say?”

  “Yes. The presence of mutes at funerals is a very ancient custom,” Mrs. Bowe said matter-of-factly. “There were once several families of mutes in Lichport, who made their livings just attending funerals. One of the families still remains.”

  Of course, thought Silas. Families of mutes. When Mrs. Bowe said it, it felt completely commonplace.

  “Mrs. Bowe, everything you tell me is strange and familiar both. I can’t explain why it feels that way. It’s like I’ve lived here all my life, though I’ve never really been here, and I’ve known that some of what my father was telling me all my life was a lie. Well, not a lie, but a story I would one day get to understand, even the parts that I now know weren’t really true. I know I was born here and lived here for a very short time as a baby, before my parents moved. But I’m sure I don’t remember anything from that time. It’s like when I look around this house. Everything seems new and old to me at once.”

  “The m
emories you’re having aren’t the photograph kind of memories we have when we recall something we did on a particular day. These are blood memories. What I am telling you speaks to your blood. You know these things to be true because your ancestors knew them to be true. You are remembering things, deep things, that’s all. And it’s nothing to be afraid of,” said Mrs. Bowe, smiling kindly.

  They had walked through her home and back into his house and had returned to his father’s study. Silas liked being in here. The walls had a way of drawing him in, with all the warm wood paneling and the books stacked to the ceiling and the paintings of the sea; some with the ships of past centuries sailing, their sails high and full of wind; others just of the sea itself in its various moods, blue water, green water, gray and black under the moon. Silas felt peaceful there, and closer to his father than he’d felt in a long time, maybe even closer than before he disappeared because in this room, his father had been allowed to be himself.

  The room was filled with things his mother would never have tolerated in the Saltsbridge house. The study was stacked with what his mother would have called “crap.” Crap, and “trouble things.” She told him once that “trouble things” were any object that had to be picked up when cleaning, things that gathered dust and made a room look cluttered. But Silas had made a careful study of what his mother did and didn’t like, and came to have a deeper understanding of what “trouble things” really meant to her. They were any item that reminded her of something else. Anything that had meaning beyond its immediate function. A kitchen knife was fine. A knife with an inscription and a story was a trouble thing. A throw-away-when-finished paperback novel was fine, so long as it was actually thrown away. A book that made you think about yourself too much, or revealed something of the past: trouble. She had a bit of a double standard. Her rich heirloom furnishings were always acceptable, perhaps because they were about her family’s prestige and its position in the world. But anything, anything Amos or Silas brought into the house other than food and clothes was almost certain to get the evil eye.