Death Watch

by Ari Berk

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yes. It is traditional to provide transport, unless the Undertaker specifically declines it. You know how it feels when you … well, when you do what you do. Best not to drive after. Safer. Your father usually walked when it was in town.” Mrs. Bowe read the letter, raising an eyebrow as she finished. “Northend … Northend … yes, that is a Lichport name. Most of the family left some years ago, but there were a few of them still living in town until, oh, about the time you and your mother arrived. They would certainly have known about your father’s work and may still have friends or acquaintances in town, so they could easily have heard about you. I don’t believe your father ever had any work in Saltsbridge, and most of his work out of town was for wakes, families here and there still wanting something traditional. Are you going to help them?”

  “I think I’d like to help them, yes. Maybe I’ll just go to the house and have a look and then decide what’s to be done. You saw in the letter they’re not staying in the house now, so it must have gotten bad.” Silas decided that he would call them and make arrangements.

  The next morning he dialed the number, and as Mrs. Bowe predicted, they had indeed once been a Lichport family, and they would send a car for Silas.

  Later that afternoon, when the hired car pulled up, Silas was surprised to see that it was the same driver who had brought him and his mother to Lichport.

  “Going home, huh?” the driver asked, recognizing Silas.

  “No, no, just visiting back in Saltsbridge. This is home now.”

  “Funny,” said the driver, “it’s usually the other way around.”

  Though he was nervous about the job, Silas enjoyed the drive over the marshes. But as they approached Saltsbridge, it began to feel odd to be back in the neighborhood where he grew up. Familiar sights, the school, restaurants, the library, held little for him now. They were just places, no more, no less. That part of his life was over.

  And how strange it all looked after the time he’d spent in Lichport: the bright lights of the streetlamps, the people, all the cars, traffic. He realized, driving through Saltsbridge, that he’d been living in another world entirely, one with very few connections to the lands beyond its borders. Surrounded by the sight of other cars on the road, and hearing all the noise from the street, he felt uneasy, unable to hear himself think clearly. He had changed. He had become accustomed to quiet and stillness and ruined streets and the colors of faded, forgotten buildings. All around him, from well-kept street signs and stores and the lights coming from the wide windows of the houses and small shops, was an awful electric glow, making every hour in Saltsbridge into an overlit candy-colored blur.

  As they wound their way through the suburbs, Silas reviewed the letter and his recollections of the conversation with the family. They’d said the house had never been “quite right” since they bought it. Upsetting noises got worse the longer they stayed. Sometimes they’d see a shape, some hunched thing come out of one of the walls. It would wail, and darkness poured from its eyes like ink or smoke, and it would feel along the walls with its hands like it was blind. And their kids would see things and start screaming, and well, who could live like that?

  It was supposedly a newer house, built sometime in the last twenty years, and that worried Silas. The problem would more likely be related to something terrible that had happened there, a murder, maybe. No point in speculating, but it was hard not to. It might be older than the house. Something buried beneath it. Something older than Saltsbridge. He was making himself nervous, and so he conjured up Mrs. Bowe’s calming voice in his mind: Don’t borrow trouble, the voice told him. But then another voice—his mother’s—said softly, cruelly: No need to borrow what you’ve already got coming in spades.

  It was dark as the car slowed, and Silas looked up to see they’d turned down an overgrown driveway. As the car parked in front of the neglected home, his heart nearly stopped. Without another word to the driver, he got out of the car and stood staring at his old house.

  Silas approached the front door. He turned the handle and found the door unlocked. He reached in and turned on the light switch. Two exposed bulbs in the small foyer cast hard light toward the front room. Inside, the house was almost completely empty, the family having moved out the previous week. As he stood in the living room, it was as if no time had passed since moving day. The house was cold, far colder than it was outside. Wind was blowing down the chimney, making a low, endless moan. Silas stalled the hand of the death watch, and the sound took on more depth, clarified, and grew louder.

  A man cried somewhere near the door. He was waiting.

  Silas didn’t want to turn around. He looked down at the floor, scared of what he might or might not see.

  Then he heard his name from within the walls.

  He turned and lifted his eyes.

  By the door, looking out the window, stood the ghost of his father. The ghost was close enough to touch, yet Silas felt like he and his dad were standing on opposite sides of a crevasse. The ghost was saying his name, “Silas? Silas?” over and over, as if asking the wind outside to give him back his child. Thick black smoke poured down from his chest, like a bleeding wound above his heart.

  Silas’s breathing quickened, and the shape of the ghost solidified and sharpened and seemed to take on more presence in the room. Silas saw that he and the ghost were wearing the same jacket.

  “What are you doing here?” Silas said, choking back a sob.

  “I’m waiting for my son to come home,” the ghost said absently. “I’ve called the school. No one knows where he is. Something has happened to him. I know it.”

  “Dad,” said Silas. “I’m right here next to you.”

  “No one can find my son. He hasn’t come home. Where is Silas?”

  “I’ve been in Lichport, Dad. In your house. Come home with me. Let’s go home.”

  “I can’t leave until Silas gets home.”

  Silas knew then that he and his father were not part of the same room, or the same house. They were barely even part of the same conversation.

  “Why are you here? Why are you waiting here, in this place? Can you tell me?”

  And the ghost wailed and then said in wracking pain, “Because I was not here! I didn’t come home, and now my son is lost. He is gone and I’ll never find him.”

  “Dad? We’re both here. Silas and Amos. I followed you. Followed the path you left for me. I’m okay, Dad. I promise.”

  “Where are we?” Amos asked, never looking away from the window.

  “Where we were.”

  “Then we’re lost.”

  “No. We’re right here. Together. But we can be someplace else if you’d like to be. You can come with me now. We can leave this house together.”

  “I am trying to get home.”

  “No. We are home. Right now. You and me. Where we are together, there is home. Look at me. I am not out there. I am here. With you. Always with you.”

  And Amos turned away from the cold glass of the window to face his son.

  “Oh, Silas … I am so sorry.” Amos’s whole form began to shake as he cried, saying his son’s name over and over.

  “No, Dad, it’s okay—”

  Amos’s voice was broken, but he spoke through his sobs. “You’ve gotten so big. I forgot how much you’d grown. There was a child here once. You were smaller. I was looking for a child … it is as though no time has passed.”

  “Dad, it’s okay. I’ll stay here with you as long as you like. We can live here like we did, if that’s what you want. Please …” Silas began to cry. “We can go anywhere. There’s no reason for you to be bound here, not now. Come away with me.”

  His eyes filled with tears, and the ghost wavered on the air. Silas held the death watch up in front of his chest as he tried to push the dial, not trying to halt its motion, but to reverse it, to push the dial backward.

  “Son?” said Amos. “Son?”

  Silas looked up, his face streaked
with tears as he pushed hard at the tiny immovable dial with both thumbs.

  “It doesn’t work like that, Little Bird. You may stop its hand, but there is no going back. What’s done is done.” The ghost was becoming dimmer, as though he was lit by only the smallest candle.

  “Dad? I love you. Can you hear me? What’s happening?”

  “I can feel what’s become of me. I am lying on cold earth. I must go. I can’t explain.”

  “Tell me where. I’ll go there. I’ll—”

  “No, Silas. Leave it. I don’t want you to see me like that. Remember me as I was. I will come again. Remember me….”

  And Amos Umber walked through the veil of the wall and into the night air, and was gone.

  WHEN SILAS RETURNED FROM SALTSBRIDGE, Mrs. Bowe was waiting for him on the porch of his house.

  Before he could speak the words, she said, “Yes. I have seen him. Preparations are being made. Friends have gone to his side and will bring him home. Tend to your own heart now, and those of your family. We will see to the rest.”

  She left him, making her way out to the garden and the tomb, for there was much to tell the bees.

  The next morning Silas walked to Fort Street to tell his great-grandfather what had happened. As he walked up the path through the front yard, he was surprised to see his mother, who had just come out of the front door and was standing on the porch, leaning hard against the rail.

  “I was just paying my respects, Si. I thought he should know, and I thought I should tell him.”

  “I understand,” said Silas, joining her on the porch.

  “Yes, son. I expect you do. Your sense of obligation comes from my side of the—well, you come by it honestly on both sides. I suppose my mother would have been pleased to see you here. Your great-grandfather is very impressed with you. Very proud.”

  Silas looked at her and nodded.

  Dolores leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead. She turned away quickly. It was still uncomfortable, but there was a truce and they both could feel it. A truce, and a chance at maybe a little more, so they were both careful and protective of the lightening of the air between them.

  “Si, I’ll be needing some help at the house. I know you’re busy, but when things settle down, could you come by and give me a hand? I plan on making a few changes, and there are some things I’d like out of the house as soon as possible. Maybe you’d like to see if any of them would be of use to you before I get rid of them?”

  “Of course. Thank you. Mom, you know, if you want, you can come and live with—”

  “No. I will stay where I am. Thank you, Silas.”

  “Okay, but if you change—”

  “Silas, I have no intention of leaving my house. It’s mine now, and I’m staying in it. That house should have been ours anyway, and if you think—” She was becoming agitated, but she caught herself and paused. She looked up, allowed herself to be distracted by the sound of a distant bird, and said, “I suppose now there will be a funeral?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you be—overseeing things?”

  “I will. Though the Peales and Mrs. Bowe are helping with the preparations.”

  “Of course. Fine. When it’s time, maybe you could come by and get me? We could walk together.”

  “Sure, Mom. I will.”

  “That will be fine, Si.”

  “Good.”

  “Good.”

  “Silas?” his mother asked, her voice tentative and falling quickly to a whisper. “I have spoken with Joan Peale. I know that … oh … I don’t know how to say it. There was something in the house. I’ve closed off the north wing. I can’t bring myself to go into that room. Silas, what’s become of the son? Of Adam?”

  “I’ve seen to it.” said Silas slowly. “The Peales brought his body out of the house that night. The peace is on him. He is at rest among our relatives and his mother.”

  “My, you sound so like your father.” Dolores nodded her head in relief and resignation both.

  “Mom?”

  “I know,” she said.

  Dolores put her hand on her son’s shoulder, then turned away and walked down the stairs of the porch, heading home. She wobbled slightly as she made her way down the uneven sidewalk in her high heels past the houses of the Restless, but her back was straight and she held her head up like she owned the street.

  LEDGER

  A MAN DIETH NOT GLADLY THAT HATH NOT LEARNED IT, THEREFORE LEARN TO DIE SO THAT THOU SHALT LIVE. FOR THERE SHALL BE NO MAN WHO LIVES WELL BUT HE WHO HATH LEARNED TO DIE WELL … THIS LIFE IS BUT A PASSING TIME … AND WHEN THOU BEGINNEST TO LIVE, THOU BEGINNEST TO DIE. NOW HEARKEN AND UNDERSTAND. DEATH IS BUT A PARTING BETWEEN THE BODY AND THE SOUL AND EVERY MAN KNOWS THAT IS WELL.

  —From “Lerne to Dye” by Thomas Hoccleve (c.1421–26) Translated by Amos Umber

  As hard pains, I dare well say,

  In Purgatory are night and day,

  As are in Hell, save by one way:

  That one shall have an end.

  —From The Last Judgment (ca. 1475)

  AMOS UMBER’S BODY HAD LAIN in a shallow grave in an overgrown corner of the old Temple Cemetery since the night he had disappeared. These circumstances would not allow Amos’s body to be displayed at home as was still the preferred custom in Lichport, and Mother Peale and Mrs. Bowe thought it best that Silas not look on the body, all things considered. So Amos’s remains, wrapped in good linen, had been kept in an icehouse overnight with Mother Peale sitting the vigil, and then put right into the coffin. Even though the body would not be brought into the house, no one in town would be denied the wake, and as if by instinct, people began arriving at Silas’s house that afternoon, many of them walking up just behind the cart that was carrying Amos’s coffin to the Beacon. Joan Peale was driving the horse-drawn cart that had been hung with black crepe and ropes of ivy.

  That morning Silas had walked to his mother’s house on Temple Street to fetch her. She would wait with the folks making preparations. Silas and most of the others waited quietly outside to follow the cart from the house where Amos had lived in Lichport, to the ground where his body would rest. As Silas climbed into the cart, a wail rose up from Mrs. Bowe, who had been standing with him on the porch. That wild strain rang in the cold air, piercing every heart that heard it. To its sound, Silas rode off with Joan Peale to the Beacon to bury his dad, a company of mourners trailing behind them. No one asked why Silas had preferred the Beacon to the old Umber plot on the other side of town. They all knew, as Silas did, that Amos would prefer the communal Beacon to the formal family plot, for the view over the sea if nothing else.

  They carried the coffin up the hill, feeling its weight with their hearts and hardly at all in their arms and backs. With the sexton looking on from the long shadows of the trees, and with his father’s own spade, Silas and some of the men of the Narrows dug a grave near the top of the Beacon. Then, with little ceremony, they lowered the cedar coffin into the waiting earth. Silas knelt by the grave, but offered no words. Not yet.

  After the burial, most of the mourners returned directly to Silas’s house to begin the funeral revels, but Silas went to the little chapel of the Narrows with Mother Peale before going home to the comfort of his friends and neighbors. He’d insisted that the Passing Bell should be rung for his father only after his body had been laid to rest, and he wanted to ring it himself. At the chapel, Mother Peale unlocked the heavy door with a large iron key and lit a lantern as they entered, for the windows were small and the day was nearly spent.

  “You go on up,” she told Silas, putting her hand to the side of his face and handing him the lantern so he could see his way up the ladder. “Go up into the tower and ring the bell by hand. Put your hand to the bronze and give it a push to send it swinging. That is the old way.”

  So Silas climbed awkwardly up the ladder with the lantern. The walls of the tower were close in about him as he ascended, a small orb of light moving up and up through the clutching darkness.
At the top of the ladder, he stepped off into a small room with four unglazed windows that looked out over the town. Just in front of him, the bell hung from a short, thick beam that spanned the small chamber. Silas held up the lantern to better see the tarnished surface of the bell. He could see there was an inscription commemorating its installation here in Lichport, for the bell had been brought from across the sea hundreds of years ago. The inscription was deeply and ornately carved and still clear, even in the low lantern light.

  Lichport’s bell rings o’er the tide,

  And to its call the dead abide.

  They hear its chime and dream of home,

  And leave behind this bed of loam.

  Come Young or Old, your time is past—

  Here is thy final song at last!

  Silas set the lantern on the floor. He put his hands on the bell and pushed against it, briefly feeling the cold metal on his skin. The bell swung away from him, then came back, its hinge creaking and the clapper striking its first note. As it swung toward him again, he moved in rhythm with the bell, leaning back, then forward, pushing it, gracefully, with only a finger now, as it made its way out and back, out and back, its song ringing across the Narrows, out over the water and along the lanes into the upper part of Lichport.

  The sky was deep azure, and the little room was lit only with the light of Mother Peale’s lantern, for the moon had not risen. The Passing Bell had been ringing for some time when Silas turned and saw his father standing in front of him. As the song of the bell grew softer and softer, as its are slowed, Amos and Silas spoke to each other. It was nearly time to go.

  Silas was crying.

  Amos stood looking tenderly at Silas, as if wanting to remember everything he could about his son; his face, the way his hair hung a little in his eyes. Then Amos leaned in close and whispered into Silas’s ear before becoming indiscernible from the air and leaving Silas alone in the bell tower.