Lych Way

by Ari Berk

  CONTENTS

  Epigraph

  1. Migration

  2. Beginning at the End

  3. Cold

  4. Necessities

  5. Old Folks’ Home

  6. Night Market

  7. Rumors

  8. Vigil

  9. Fireside

  10. Wanderlust

  11. Hosts

  12. Flow

  13. River Cruise

  14. A Wake

  15. When the Party’s Over

  16. Cold Comfort

  17. Brunch

  18. Play

  19. Fire and Water

  20. A Word of Welcome

  21. Lament

  22. Harmonies

  23. Burnt Feathers

  24. Chase

  25. From Before

  26. Below

  27. What Cannot Be

  28. Remembering Babylon

  29. Outsider

  30. Names

  31. Above Stairs

  32. Birth Rite

  33. Turn the Page

  34. Rotunda

  35. In Memoriam

  36. Underworld

  37. Seconds

  38. Field

  39. Veil

  40. Coda

  About Ari Berk

  For my father

  When you have read folktales of this god and that, you have perhaps spoken patronizingly of the old mythmakers and thanked your lucky stars that you lived in a more enlightened age. But those old storytellers were the really enlightened ones, for they saw into the other world and recorded what they saw. Many of the world’s favorite gods are said to have lived upon the earth as men. They have so lived. Does that idea startle you? How does a man become a god, and how does a god become a man? Have you ever wondered?

  —Elsa Barker, from Letter From a Living Dead Man

  A bed is laid in a secret corner

  For the three agonies—love, birth, death—

  That are made beautiful with ceremony.

  —George Mackay Brown, from “The Finished House”

  A FALCON TURNED SLOWLY IN the cold air, its arcs becoming wider and higher with each pass it made over the corpse.

  It rose above the cobbled lanes and leaning houses and flew north, past the bare trees whose roots cracked the sidewalks on most of Lichport’s crumbling streets. It could see the river in the distance ahead. Then, as though it had changed its mind, the bird banked, and flew back the way it had come. It circled once more far above the body and then stooped, dropping from the sky into a blur until it opened wide its sharp-tipped wings again, briefly holding the air before landing gently on the dead woman’s shoulder. The falcon flapped quickly, finding its balance. Dark and light markings flashed from the underside of its wings as it lifted its yellow legs up and down, careful not to pierce the corpse’s clothing or flesh with its talons.

  The peregrine tilted its head to the side and looked at the woman’s dull eye with its bright one, perhaps seeing its own reflection. Leaning closer, the bird moved its smooth beak slowly across the woman’s face as though to wake her. It plucked tentatively at the disheveled tresses of hair lying across her face and shoulders. The bird stood atop the body, crouching, vigilant, jerking its head sharply this way and that, attentive to each sound it heard—branches scraping against one another, distant waves falling to shore, anything that moved or stirred the air.

  The falcon waited like that for some time before a movement farther down the street caused it to leap into the sky again. Another corpse, desiccated and elderly, shambled toward the woman’s body and, lifting it from the ground, carried it away. The peregrine followed above them, unseen and silent, in the direction of Temple Street, where the one corpse carried the other up the stairs and onto the veranda of a large house. On the roof of that house, the falcon perched upon one of the spiral brick chimneys and waited. Inside the house—she knew with the instinct of a mother—was Silas Umber, who in life had been her son.

  LEDGER

  It is now surely beyond any dispute that the first death watch, the original Hadean clock, was built by Daedalus. Hesiod makes no mention of this episode. True. But what cared he for the machinations of mere men? Pausanius, Apollodorus, and Ovid are all cryptic, and generally reliable, but the most detailed account is found in the “lost” portions of Hyginus’s Fabulae. No other versions of this account exist but, in truth, what classical author would have written openly on such a matter, particularly in those long ago times when selfish, vengeful gods walked closer to the sides of men? Who would scribe a story that would have reddened the face of Hades with shame, only to have such records used against them when they later arrived in Tartarus’s dark tribunal halls, where more creative punishments might be meted out over the long eternities? Then as ever: better to say little and live long.

  Nevertheless, my own careful studies of the surviving accounts reveal that Daedalus, on the occasion of his son’s death, sought to confound the work of Hades, the Lord of the Dead. Mors was then merely the herald, not yet king, and so it would indeed be Hades that would take offense at such an undertaking. Daedalus’s cleverness was considerable. With his son’s corpse close by, he created a kind of clepsydra, or water clock, and in a small metallic chamber below where the water pooled, he summoned and locked up the ghost of his son, so that the boy would not be lost to him, could not be taken away into the lands of shadow. Nor could his son’s spirit wander—that most terrible of fates. Father and son would remain together. Hades, go hang.

  All depictions of the original device are lost, but its workings we know well enough from the writings of the those Undertakers, those inheritors of Daedalus’s invention, who both saw that first Hadean clock, kept it safe, and who later made their own versions, each with the technology that time and their own craft afforded them. I suspect, since Daedalus’s day, the technique has been more or less consistent. The clock merely kept the time, noted the passing of moments and hours, by the flow and collection of water (and later, by mechanism), a simple reminder of man’s fleeting mortality. But, with the spirit entrapped within, when the workings of the clock were halted, when the hole through which the water passed was blocked with wax (or the dial stopped), time halted its course as well, and the dead could be perceived.

  How the particular “spiritual” mechanism functions remains a considerable mystery. And surely, long ago, the action must have been performed with some trepidation, for the halting of time would have been an affront to both Hades (who so relies on time’s passage to carry death to mortals) and Cronos himself, the miserable Titan who fathered Hades into the world so that the dead might be herded like cattle into pens and thereby remain peasants, even in the afterlife where we might all one day have continued on as kings in our own manors and blissful estates, had things been otherwise.

  Still, we may speculate that when the forward motion of time, or its semblance, was halted, the entrapped soul, sensing the moment or lack thereof, would seek to make a way for itself into that Other World that is the inheritance of every soul. Yet, being bound, and though the gate, or Lych Way, be opened, the ghost could make no egress. But the pale light of those shadowlands, passing into our world through the Lych Way as a mist, or rather, a sort of Plutonian ether, might make transparent mortality’s curtain, revealing, with time suspended, the presence of the dead yet residing within or about our mortal sphere.

  It is perhaps best not to dwell too long upon the miserable irony of Daedalus’s creation. For while he sought freedom for Ikarus from that harsh imprisonment Hades would have put upon him below in Tartarus, by setting his son’s ghost in the prison of the clock’s mechanism, Daedalus himself became Ikarus’s unwitting jailor. But in truth, what father does not seek, through love or necessity, or ignorance, to choose for his son that occupatio
n that will keep him gainfully employed and close to home?

  —FROM THE HIDDEN HISTORIES OF THE HADEAN CLOCK, ALSO CALLED THE UNDERTAKER’S FRIEND AND BURDEN, BY JONAS UMBER

  HE SHOULD HAVE GONE HOME.

  But instead of sitting in the safe quiet of his own study surrounded by his father’s things, Silas Umber was stacking books upon Charles Umber’s desk in the cold, private library of Temple House. He had promised his mother he wouldn’t enter the north wing until she got back. He’d lied. He went in the moment she’d left the house, and he’d been there all night.

  The north wing was no longer used. But up until recently it had been the busiest part of the house. It was there his cousin’s corpse and spirit had both been hidden and trapped by his uncle. Silas’s own life had nearly ended there, and his father’s corpse had almost certainly been brought to this part of the house after he’d been murdered. The little library off his uncle’s bedroom was also the storage room for numerous volumes of funereal photography as well as Charles Umber’s collection of forbidden occult books. Now his uncle was dead. Silas had insisted that none of the books be removed until he’d been able to go through them all. His mother hadn’t been too keen for anyone to enter that part of the house, and had locked the doors of the north wing. Silas knew she wouldn’t want him to open it again, but that would be an argument for another day. At least he knew that the books and much else were still there undisturbed.

  Here was a collection not fit for the public rooms of the house. Volumes filled with portraits of Lichport’s dead, taken, preserved, and prized by his mad uncle. Silas pushed aside the postmortem photographs. He’d seen them. His eyes moved quickly across the titles of the older books: The School of Night. Compendium Demonii. The Cult and Rites of Canaanite Idolatry. The Book of Abramelin. The Areopagian Grimoire. Demons, Spirits and Spells of Assyrian Sorcery. Shelf after shelf stacked with books of necromancy. He pulled down two and three volumes at a time, piling them on the inlaid desk. And as his hands passed over these forbidden tomes, the words of his ancestor Cabel Umber crawled in his ears. . . . You can bring her back. . . . Such arts, dark as they are, are meant to be used by the wise. . . . As much as Silas hated and feared Cabel Umber, he knew his ancestor was right.

  Beyond the desk and the piles of books stood open the large bronze door with its sigil-inscribed surface. Across its threshold lay the Camera Obscura, Charles Umber’s room of . . . experiment. That chamber was empty now, its floors and walls scrubbed nearly clean, but traces of the chalk-drawn magic circles remained on the floor. The massive glass ampule that once held the corpse of his cousin, Adam, had been taken away by the Narrows folk, along with all the bottles of honey and other preservatives. But the sickly sweet smell remained, and it distracted him from his reading, making him look up frequently, as though someone, or something, might at any moment come through the door.

  He opened another volume. See, he told himself, centuries of people all wanting the same thing, all crying out in spells and chants to bring back the spirits of the beloved dead. What they have done, I can do. And I have more longing and as much aptitude as most. As Undertaker, if I used such spells, surely they would work. Surely the dead would come if I called them.

  He noticed the bindings of some of the oldest tomes were worn and cracked. Those must have been brought to Lichport long ago, maybe by his own ancestors. Others, it seemed from their inscriptions, had been collected by the Knights of the Eastern Temple, that mysterious brotherhood who built the house’s original rotunda and for whom the street, the cemetery, and the house itself had been named. An easy guess, for on the shelves, Silas could see, held between the books, were also pages and documents from the times when the brothers still occupied the property. They looked like mostly ledger pages, lists of objects, long ago stolen out of the East and brought, ultimately, to Lichport. Some of that very collection certainly formed the basis of the assemblage of artifacts gathered by his grandfather and then added to by his uncle: the relics now stored in the attics of Temple House. Silas carefully put those brittle pages aside and turned back to the books. It was in the ancient books of forbidden rites—books his father would have shunned—that Silas was searching for a spell to break a spell.

  He read by candlelight. Looking into the wavering flame, he could almost see her face through the frozen water. Beatrice. Her features were blurred but discernable below the ice. Blue-skinned. Wide-eyed. Terrified. Trapped. She was waiting for him, had been reaching out to him in his sleep all the time he was in Arvale. Who else could help her if not him?

  Looking up from the books, he noticed that his arm wasn’t hurting anymore, and the curse mark had faded. Maybe his return to Lichport from Arvale had worked loose the stitches of the spell? Or maybe Cabel Umber’s powers had dissolved as the cousins of the summer house chased him from the gates and back into his prison inside the sunken mansion? Either way, that business was far away now and finished.

  The air of the room was freezing.

  He knew Bea was cold too.

  The thought of her spirit trapped in the dark, icy water quickened his breathing.

  Looking down, Silas could see wisps of vapor form on the air in front of his mouth. His fingers were going numb. He moved his hand down to the pocket of his jacket to warm it, but remembering it was filled with dust—the remains of Lars Umber, who’d perished at the Arvale gate—he stopped. He rubbed his hands above the flame of the candle instead.

  Before him on the desk was a worm-riddled copy of The Virgilian Heresies. He had found, in more than one book, broken versions of some of the spells hissed into his ear by Cabel Umber in the sunken mansion at Arvale. He mistrusted those words and their source, though he could even now feel the power in them. One of the pages bore what looked to be a recent bookmark. As he silently read over the words of the Dark Call—the accursed rite that would forcibly summon a ghost back into its bones—the chamber grew even colder, and the candle dimmed as if the flame crouched in fear. Silas closed the book. More of its pages had been marked, and Silas suspected that his uncle had used such spells to summon certain spirits to his awful purposes, or maybe even to keep poor Adam bound to his corpse.

  Silas rubbed his eyes and sighed in frustration. He wasn’t sure if he could do it. Such rites required using the bones of the deceased or other “mummiae,” or remains. The words were forceful and grim. He’d already found many spells of binding and numerous summoning rites, but the sounds of those words . . . Command, compel, demand, require, force, order, constrain . . . He couldn’t think of using them on Beatrice. She was not his slave. He loved her. He didn’t want to use violent language to drag her spirit from the millpond. He just wanted her back. Back with him, out of his dreams and at his side. He wanted, more than anything, to walk with her again as they had done when exploring together Lichport’s streets and monuments. Just to hear her voice again. Wasn’t love enough to bring her back? No, chided Mrs. Bowe’s voice in his mind, nor has it ever been. Alas! Poor Orpheo! If love were enough to bring them back, the world would be crowded with corpses, forced to endure an eternity of embraces by those weak-hearted folk who could not bear to say good-bye! Let death come and do not look back!

  “No,” Silas said aloud to the air.

  The candle was sputtering and a chilling draft idled now about the desk where he worked. He didn’t know how long he’d been there. All he knew was that he was cold right through. He rose and stretched his back, aching from hunching over the desk. From where it leaned against the wall near the door to the Camera Obscura, a broom fell and loudly struck the floor, startling Silas.

  Someone is coming, he thought, recognizing the portent.

  My mother is home. . . .

  LEDGER

  I heard of what happened to a family in the town. One night a thing that looked like a goose came in. And when they said nothing to it, it went away up the stairs with a noise like lead. Surely if they had questioned it, they’d have found it to be some soul in trouble.


  There was a man used to go out fowling, and one day his sister said to him, Whatever you do don’t go out tonight and don’t shoot any birds you see flying—for tonight they are all poor souls travelling.

  —PASSAGES FROM VISIONS AND BELIEFS IN THE WEST OF IRELAND BY LADY AUGUSTA GREGORY, 1920. TRANSCRIBED BY AMOS UMBER

  FROM SOMEWHERE ON THE GROUND floor of Temple House, Silas heard noises. Had his mother come home during the night or early morning? He knew she would be furious with him for going into Uncle’s upstairs rooms.

  Silas got up and walked slowly into the north wing’s long gallery. There was gray light in the windows. He’d been up all night and hadn’t noticed the morning, or the dusky, clouded noon when it came.

  Then he heard the sound of heavy footfall stumbling down the back hallway.

  It was not his mother.

  He knew every version of her footstep: the quick and angry click of high heels, the slow, drunken slur of house slippers, and all the variations in between. Whoever was walking around downstairs was not Dolores Umber. Someone else was in the house. The loud, slow footsteps made their way through the butler’s pantry. Silas moved closer to the wall. He barely breathed.

  Downstairs, he heard metal hit the floor. Maybe one of the candelabra falling over. Then nothing. Whoever it was had come to a stop in one of the downstairs reception rooms. The dining room, most likely. Those were absolutely not his mother’s footsteps. Someone had broken into the house and was looking for the silver, or worse, hiding, lying in wait for him to come downstairs, or for his mother to come home.

  Where was she? Where had she run to so quickly? Dolores had been frantic when she’d left. Where had she needed to go in such a hurry? Was the person in the house connected somehow to her absence? Silas did not like unanswered questions, especially those that came to him in Temple House.

  There was more noise from below. Chairs were being dragged across the floor. Was someone stealing the furniture? Silas kept close to the walls to avoid the floor creaking and made his way out into the upper hallway. With even more trepidation, he walked one hesitant footstep at a time through the doorway leading from the long gallery of the north wing and onto the upstairs landing overlooking the foyer.