Death Watch

by Ari Berk

  —UNDATED MARGINALIA IN THE HAND OF AMOS UMBER

  IN HIS FATHER’S HOUSE, there were many small rooms along the back of the upper hall. Silas slept downstairs, in a room that might have once been a private study. He preferred the ground floor. He didn’t like the view that could be seen from many of the upstairs bedrooms. When he looked south from the windows on the upper story, he could see across the top of Mrs. Bowe’s garden into the park that grew wild over the back of her gate. In that garden was a small clearing, in the middle of which was a little rise where the gallows stone stood. On that stone the wooden gallows had been erected for hangings long ago. And on the other side of the park was a depression of earth surrounded by high, dark trees. Mrs. Bowe had told Silas this was once colloquially called “the hole,” and it was the common burial place of those executed criminals. He had been tempted several times to use the death watch to see the spirits that attended on those spots, but something always held back his hand. He knew, just plain knew, that whatever lingered in the park didn’t want to be seen, and he was more than sure he didn’t want anything that haunted the gallows stone seeing him.

  So he favored the view from downstairs. But at night, when he couldn’t sleep and the upstairs windows were turned to mirrors and afforded only reflection, Silas sometimes walked the upper gallery and explored the rooms until he got tired.

  He’d had another dream about Bea. Although it took him close to Uncle’s house, he had waited for her on several nights, only to be disappointed. Maybe she’d left town for a while. In his dreams lately, she appeared often, skipping ahead of him, singing, calling him along, laughing, until they reached the edge of the millpond and her face began to change and sharpen, lit by the dream’s unnatural light. Then Silas would hear the sound of water splashing, and he’d wake up, confused and frustrated, unable to get back to sleep.

  Six doors down on the right side of the hall, Silas found a very small room, almost a closet, with a desk and a chair, and all the walls lined with closely packed shelves on which were tins, old iron boxes, and bottles of every size and description, all tightly sealed. There were also some very old-looking small metal caskets, one of them rather ornate with tarnished silver filigree work that covered its rusted surface. On the floor of the little room several concentric circles were inscribed, and the same geometric images were carved into the surface of the desk, only in miniature.

  Somewhere in the ledger Silas had read that in the past, restless spirits who could not be brought to peace by any other means would be banished into containers like these and sealed up, there to remain until time, corrosion, or both released them. Looking at the shelves brought Uncle’s cupboards to mind, filled to brimming with preserved foods. A feast of things held over past their allotted time. And now here, shelf after shelf of ghosts, tinned and preserved like jellied meats or bottled like the tomatoes of a hundred summers ago. A collection of unfinished business. A pantry of souls.

  Next to the desk, there was a box that had in it several tins whose seals had been broken, that were pierced with holes or had the lids pried away, rust falling off them. Who had trapped their occupants and why? And why did his father bring them here? A sense of obligation, perhaps. Silas wondered for a moment why his father hadn’t merely opened them all at once and been done with it. But, as he looked closely at some of the tins and boxes, he saw how very meticulously some had been sealed—wrapped with innumerable layers of cord or wire, not that it would have made them any more secure or held the soldered lids on any tighter, but it might have been a comfort to whoever had sealed the spirit inside … the sure feeling of winding cord about and about and about the tin, binding its contents, an act of will as much as metalwork.

  The more Silas thought about it, the more likely it seemed that the contents of most of these containers would have been troublesome. He thought the circles on the floor and desk might have been a kind of protective magic, additional safeguards his father had invoked before he opened a tin, in case its contents proved dangerous. Tentatively, Silas reached out to one of the shelves and carefully brought down a red metal can that read, PRINCE ALBERT LONG-BURNING PIPE AND CIGARETTE TOBACCO. The top of the can had been sealed with lead, and then it appeared to have been dipped in wax as well. A tag had been tied to the can with the inscription

  HOME OF JOHN D./ 1932/ANON./SPIR.MALEDICTUS/3 DECEASED PRIOR TO CONTAINMENT.

  Very gently, Silas held the can in both his hands and felt it begin to hum, as though it was filled with bees. His mind went back to his uncle’s cupboards again, to all the tins forgotten at the pantry’s back—things gone sour in the fullness of time. Potted meat turned at last to putrid soup. Looking at the tin in his hands, the carefully wrought seal along its edges could be interpreted to read, “Leave me be. You don’t want what I got locked up in me!”

  But the longer Silas looked at it, the more the tin also eerily suggested, “I have a secret, open me and find out!” As he shook off the voices in his mind, he realized why his father kept such things here. Anyone else who found one might have easily assumed there was a coin or some valuable inside, and without thinking, pried it open only to discover some gibbering thing, angry at its many years kept in so small a space. It made Silas feel claustrophobic even thinking about anger like that being so confined. He gently put the tin back on the shelf.

  He couldn’t help wondering if something in this room might be related to his dad’s disappearance. Some vengeful ghost attacking the first person it saw after it was released? Silas didn’t like thinking about even having such objects in the house. Some of them were rusted and might at any moment be about to let go of their contents like some spectral jack-in-the-box. What should he do with them? He didn’t know their histories and so couldn’t risk opening one, and the thought of throwing them away, or sinking them into water somewhere, the sea or maybe the millpond, seemed very wrong, like condemning someone without knowing their crime, or even their name. He left the room, went downstairs and found the ring of keys to the inside doors, came back upstairs, and locked the room from the outside.

  Silas was startled by a sudden sharp hissing sound outside the window in the room next door. He’d heard that noise before outside several of the upstairs windows, so it must have been coming from a lower portion of the roof covered by one of the eaves. Some animal, he guessed.

  He walked softly across the room and looked out the window, but saw nothing. But after his experience in the tin-room next door, he felt skittery. He went back downstairs again, this time to fetch the death watch from his coat pocket and pick up a flashlight.

  He opened the window as wide as he could and climbed out onto the roof. He shone the flashlight into the overhang where one section of the roof hung out over another to form a small cave. Within was a weather-worn nest of pale sticks that he could see now were actually small bones. He heard the low hiss as before, although it grew louder the closer he came to the bones. He drew out the watch on its silver chain and opened the skull to get at the dial. The moment he pressed his thumb on the hand to halt its progress, the hiss exploded into the air right in front of his face, as though the sound had been flung at him. There below the eaves, half-edged in shadow even with the flashlight pointing at it, was a large raccoon, its head low to the shingles, crouched among its bones, hissing and chittering madly at Silas, who nearly fell backward off the roof when it appeared. Silas quickly released the watch’s mechanism, then looked once more at the nest of dried and exposed bones before crawling back into the house, shaken and cold.

  Before he’d released the death watch’s hand, he had seen a light in the distance beyond the rooftops. Past Mrs. Bowe’s garden, past the park, on the other side of Coach Street, past the woods along the marsh, the spires and columned chimneys of a tall house glowed with an incandescent light, but when he put the watch away, the light slowly faded. Silas wasn’t able to go back to sleep, but lay in bed turning over in his mind what he’d seen. The bones, the strange light, and what either m
ight portend.

  The next morning he returned to the roof, gathered up the bones, and brought them to the backyard to bury them, near the compost heap in Mrs. Bowe’s garden where all the scraps from the kitchen were thrown. Silas placed some of the choicest bits from last night’s dinner into the small grave before covering the bones with earth. Just to be sure, that night he went to the roof to try the death watch once more. In the distance, he saw the light again, brighter tonight, as though a star had been hung on the distant house’s weathervane. When he looked away from the light, he saw that the space below the eave was empty and quiet. Good, thought Silas. Good. As he’d been burying the bones earlier that morning, he’d thought that up until recently, he might have kept the skull and displayed it on a shelf. No, he thought, let it all go back to the ground. Just let it go.

  Now, again unable to sleep, he walked the upstairs gallery and wondered: If even a small space on his roof held a ghost—let alone the cemetery—what about all the empty buildings in the town? The deserted lanes and cottages? The lonely streets lined with great houses, overgrown and abandoned? Were they all homes to the dead? Did “ghost” simply mean “forgotten,” or “thrown away”? Was a ghost present everyplace something was left behind, or abandoned, or undone, or an unspoken word had fled the world? And if a ghost was remembered or acknowledged, did it just leave? Or did it stay stuck to that place, waiting for something else to happen? Could a ghost forget itself? Forget who it was and where it was? Was it the Undertaker’s job to remember those ghosts who’d forgotten themselves?

  Through one of the bedroom windows, through the reflection of the room he stood in, Silas saw the light from the house on Coach Street, bright as a beacon on a lighthouse, and remembered that his great-grandfather had told him to watch for a light, that there was a house where there might be someone who could help him. Silas stared out the window until the light began to fade in the approaching dawn, then went downstairs and quickly dressed. It was early, and he left the house with the death watch in his pocket before Mrs. Bowe could call him for breakfast.

  LEDGER

  In life, a person will come and go from many homes. We may leave a house, a town, a room, but that does not mean those places leave us. Once entered, we never entirely depart the homes we make for ourselves in the world. They follow us, like shadows, until we come upon them again, waiting for us in the mist.

  —FROM THE SOUL’S HABITATION BY JONATHAN UMBER, 1789

  SILAS STOOD BEFORE A HOUSE at the corner of Coach and Silk Streets. There was no question this was the house of the people his great-grandfather had mentioned, the place Mrs. Bowe didn’t want to say much about. He also found it marked on his father’s map of the town, circled in ink with a small “3” written next to it enigmatically. He might have continued the search at home, to look for a reference in the Undertaker’s ledger, but minutes and hours felt like stones in his stomach, and if there was something in this building that might point him toward any news of his father, he wanted to find it. Besides, hadn’t this place “called” out to him?

  He had been standing in front of the house for ten minutes, in hopes that someone might see him and come outside. He didn’t like the idea of just walking into houses anymore, even one that was so clearly abandoned. The front door hung at an angle, and most of the windows on the bottom floor were broken, their glass hanging like fangs in their frames. Thick vines of ivy grew up the house, and their leaves gave it a shaggy look that blurred all the straight angles of the walls. The house had a Georgian roof, a Colonial window, a nineteenth-century door knocker. Like so many of the larger houses in town, it was a veritable patchwork of architectural details from its long history. Yet behind the walls, or under them, in the odd conjunctions of certain of its angles, Silas could sense something older than the structure; the hidden lines of an ancient floor plan far, far older than the building he could see, older even than the town.

  The door nearly fell from its hinges when Silas tried to get past it and into the house. The main room was very large; the farther walls of the room and the ceiling were hung with shadows and couldn’t be seen clearly from the entrance. All around the entry hall and the front room were many chairs of different styles. There were also old carved pews, set at random angles, that gave the room the look of a waiting room, or some kind of derelict bus station. Many pieces of furniture and some statuary, all from different periods, were thrown about the room as if left here by the furious tide from some long ago tempest.

  A beam of sunlight came in through a broken window and fell on the staircase with inviting brightness, and Silas decided to explore the upper floors.

  The stairs wound upward in a wide circle and were much longer than he expected. Silas became increasingly tired as he ascended the stairs, sure he’d climbed much higher than the roof of the house, yet the next floor was still some ways off. The stairs finally brought him through the high ceiling of the lower floor and to a landing that formed the entrance to an enormous chamber with tall ceilings that followed the various peaks of the roof. Perhaps as a result of the strange angles of the many supporting beams, the room looked far larger than the third story of the house he’d seen from the outside. The room was empty except for three spinning wheels gathered around a vast hearth at its center. Across his vision, gray forms gathered, and Silas knew he was not alone. He brought the death watch from his pocket and set his thumb against the dial, but as he began to apply pressure to the mechanism, a woman’s chiding voice came from the far side of the room.

  “You don’t need to use that, you know. Very rude, I call it. We are pleased to receive you, Silas Umber.”

  Startled and embarrassed, Silas returned the death watch to his pocket. At once the room changed. It was now a large, plain wooden chamber across whose heights spanned large, curved pale beams that gave the impression of standing inside a whale. From the many beams hung weavings and knittings and knotworks, a vast loose tapestry, with various parts of the room holding different scenes. Most were small and quite intricate, more like pictorial tattings than weavings. All were detailed, even exquisite, the work of careful hands unhurried by time. Looking closely at the hangings all about him, Silas could begin to discern their subjects: buildings, streets, avenues, cottages, some of them vaguely familiar.

  When he looked up, three women stood in the center of the room. They appeared to be in their thirties, yet their gray eyes bespoke a greater age. They wore very long dresses and aprons of rough cloth, with sleeves rolled back along their lengths, exposing white skin and long hands tipped with delicate fingers sharp as spindles.

  “You approve, then, of our work?”

  Silas was rapt as he looked over the room and over all the details of the enormous web of weavings, but said quietly, distractedly, “It’s very fine … all the details … extraordinary. But may I ask, what is it all?”

  “Misthomes,” said the first of the three.

  “Obsessions, stations of habit, fixations, traps,” said the second in a singsong voice.

  “The places in between,” said the third. “The shadowlands.”

  “Do you mean, like limbo?” Silas asked, confused.

  “If you like, though that sounds far too singular, and falls very short of the mark,” said the third of the three.

  The charged air of the room, the resonance of their voices, and the extraordinary nature of the tapestry all told Silas he was in the presence of Mystery, so with great reverence in his voice, he asked, “Will you tell me what it is you have made here?”

  The first smiled and spoke again, and when she did, the voices of the other two seemed woven in somehow with her voice, giving her speech a choral quality.

  “Silas, stir your mind! Here is the whole town and its long history stretched out before you. Many scenes are here, woven in pale silk and knitted in sturdy wool. Look close and see the first suicide on Prince Street marked in red tatting. And there is embroidered a teahouse where some souls sit and drink and long for home. And h
ere, the Theater of Love Confounded set forth in widow-worthy lace, where many passionate but foolish souls have tarried too long in the third act. Attend, attend!”

  He didn’t know where to begin. Each stitch seemed to have a story, and the weaving as a whole, its complexities and possibilities, left him unable to form a question. There were too many emblems hanging in the air before him to decipher any single one.

  The ladies stood patiently, waiting for him to recover. All Silas could think of was to ask them about themselves.

  “Ladies,” he said hesitantly, “may I ask how you came to do this work?”

  “Reading the work through its author, eh? How unfashionable!” said the first, then added, “He wants our life story!”

  “Get an advance before you tell him anything!” said the second, laughing.

  “It is a tale worthy of the telling,” said the third, more soberly.

  “But truly,” said the third, her voice going low, “it is the most common story in the world. Girls gone bad.”

  “I’d like to hear it. I think our threads have tangled for a reason,” Silas said.

  “I like him already,” said the second of the three, perhaps acknowledging Silas’s polite choice of metaphor.

  “Very well,” spoke the first. “Here is something of our latest ending….”

  The women seemed to speak with one voice, although clearly only one was speaking at a time. As they spoke, the second of the three began working her long needles very quickly, and Silas could see a figure made of thread the exact same color of his clothes, standing in a room stitched in pale wool, and the figures of three women standing before the first, dark knots for their heads and frayed threads for their tall bodies. Around him, as he watched the second at her work, their voices rose together. Silas found it a very strange sensation, to see and hear people talk when their mouths didn’t appear to move, so after a moment, he closed his eyes and listened.