Lych Way

by Ari Berk

  Never taking its eyes from the window where Silas stood, the fiery specter raised its arms and stretched its mouth into a howl. Though the words came raggedly to Silas’s ears, they set his teeth on edge.

  “. . . let all be done . . . now . . . all receive at last the profits of their sowing . . . and all debts . . . paid. What is . . . shall be mine. And it . . . end in fire . . . by the kingdoms of infernal rule . . . by Styx . . . Acheron . . . by the fiery lake of ever-burning Phlegethon . . . and by my god’s ever burning . . . I swear . . .”

  Silas strained to make out the words that only he could hear. The glass was fogging up, and Silas wiped at it quickly with his sleeve. Sweat was dripping into his eyes as desperate, ineffectual words fell from his mouth. “Whether thou art from out of the earth, or one that lieth upon the earth, or are a ghost unburied, or one forgotten, you shall not come against this house, you shall not come against this house . . . you shall not.”

  But through the clear parts of the window, around the ghostly conflagration, Silas saw other figures were approaching, oblivious to the spectral fire in the middle of Temple Street. They moved slowly but deliberately toward Temple House. A moment later he heard loud, crushing footfalls on the porch.

  Silas turned quickly toward the foyer, but the flames out on the street flared up, and Silas could feel their heat through the glass. He looked back out the window.

  The ghost in the flames turned its head from side to side. Was it afraid of the shambling figures on the street, or perhaps the rising light in the east was abhorrent to it? The ghost quickly put its stare on Silas once more, even as it became indiscernible from the fire. All at once, both flames and spirit sank down into the earth and were gone. In that instant, Silas felt nausea wash over him and he clutched at his stomach. Not wanting to see any more, his stiff, aching fingers released the dial of the death watch.

  As the proper light of the rising dawn spilled into the house, a tremendous booming sounded from the foyer.

  Something very strong was beating on the front door.

  LEDGER

  Three Sorrows

  When I think on these things three

  Never may I happy be:

  The one is that I must away,

  The other: I know not the day.

  The third thought is my chiefest care:

  I know not whither I shall fare.

  –TRANSLATED FROM MIDDLE ENGLISH BY AMOS UMBER

  EACH BLOW TO THE DOOR reverberated through the front rooms of Temple House. Silas Umber wet the inside of his dry mouth with his tongue, tasting the acrid words of power, preparing to shout down whatever else might come against his mother’s house. He made a fist with the hand bearing the scarab ring. With his other hand, Silas opened the door.

  The dead were there, and nothing more.

  All the Restless had arrived. Corpses paced along the porch and milled about the lawn. On the path leading from the street, the two younger corpses from Newfield held aloft a decorative bier on which Miss Hattie sat in her golden chair. Silas looked past the small throng on the porch and standing in the yard, to where Joan Peale had just arrived. She was easing a large bull out of the back of a trailer. Visibly nervous and without a word, she handed the neck rope to one of the Restless near the bier and got back in her truck. She saw Silas and half raised her hand, then rolled up the window of the truck and drove off down Temple Street towing the trailer. The corpse walked the bull through the yard to the bottom of the stairs and waited there. The bull was extraordinary, the cleanest animal Silas had ever seen, lean and muscled, with beautiful markings. It had been pampered and very well treated. Its horns had been burnished with gold foil and seemed to glow and flash as it moved its head, even in the low light.

  Miss Hattie’s bier was carried up the stairs. The bearers paused before the door of Temple House.

  “Child? Aren’t you going to invite us in?”

  “Of course,” said Silas. “Please, be welcome in my mother’s house.”

  “Dear?” Miss Hattie asked patiently, shaking her head a little, “We cannot enter. You have bound this threshold against the passage of the dead. Where’s your hospitality, child?”

  “Sorry.” Silas looked down. Then, as he had done at Arvale, he threw his hands wide in the gesture of opening. The door of Temple House shook on its hinges.

  “There, now, that’s fine,” said Miss Hattie, as her bier was carried over the threshold and into the house.

  Her chair was placed in the parlor by the fireplace as the other Restless of Lichport came in. Miss Hattie sat watching the others assemble in the parlor and flank the entrance to the dining room where Dolores Umber’s body lay in state. Silas was absolutely sure that behind Miss Hattie’s eyes, dead as stone, an ancient but agile mind was thinking, waiting. Looking at her, he could feel her deliberateness, a mighty but unmoving presence in the room. This was not a social call.

  Among the Restless he recognized the group that had been summoned against their will to Arvale. These, he guessed, were from Fort Street. As they walked past Silas into the house, some whispered “Thank you” while others touched his shoulder or briefly held his hand in appreciation.

  The corpses from Newfield accompanying Miss Hattie immediately set about their work, slowly moving ornate chests from the sides and back of the litter on the porch into the house. They set up tall bronze braziers and set coals alight within them. Over these they spread dried resins and herbs. As the coals grew hot, thin ribbons of smoke began to rise. The smell was strangely familiar to Silas, and that portion of his mind that held open the Book of the Dead whispered, “Kapet . . . pine resin, camel grass, mint, mastic, sweet flag, cinnamon, wine, raisins, honey, to hallow the temple . . .” He inhaled deeply.

  As the rich incense spread through the air of the rooms, Silas noticed the Restless began to move more easily, the stiffness of their condition lessening as more and more smoke came from the braziers, clouding the room. Looking over, Silas saw his great-grandfather inhale deeply and then quickly stand up, turning his head from side to side, stretching.

  A wreath of dried flowers had been hung about the neck of the Ammit statue.

  A box of small stone relics—ancient iron, alabaster, and quartz—was opened like a surgeon’s tools and set out on the dining room table next to his mother’s corpse.

  Unsure of what he was supposed to do, Silas asked Miss Hattie, “Are we ready to begin?” He was not eager to conduct his mother’s funeral, but the longer she lay there on the table—a spectacle he knew she would never have approved of—the sadder and more nervous Silas felt. He welcomed the focus that conducting the ritual would bring.

  Miss Hattie lifted her head, as though she had been listening to something far off. She tapped her finger on the gilt arm of her chair, then slowly rose and walked to Dolores’s body. She held her hand over the corpse and touched Dolores’s mouth. Then she turned back toward Silas and said, shaking her head, “No, child. We may not proceed. We have come too late. Her soul has fled.” She looked at her assistants and said softly with real sorrow in her voice, “There shall be no rite. Prepare our daughter for the fire.”

  “Wait!” Silas said, standing beside his mother’s body and putting his hand on her arm. “You can’t burn her! There must be a funeral. There must be words and a wake. She’s not some candle that got blown out.”

  “That is not our way,” said Miss Hattie.

  “Well, this is not my way.”

  “The corpse is like a child, like a baby. It requires care and is in a state of extraordinary delicacy. The newly dead spirit, even more so. I don’t have to tell you this, Silas Umber. Sometimes, and even if you watch over the body very dutifully, as I know you have, sometimes . . . well, there are complications. The soul knows best its own mind.”

  Miss Hattie slowly passed her hand over the corpse again. “It is no matter now. Her spirit has fled the house of eternity. She is gone. No demon or ghost has defiled her body, but her sorrows and fear have carried
her off.” She gestured to the others to collect the corpse.

  Silas moved to stand between his mother’s body and the other Restless.

  “Stop! Wait. I can help. I will call her spirit now. We will have the wake. I can give her the waters of Lethe, and then we can bury her properly.”

  “Oh, my. No, no, no,” said Miss Hattie firmly. “We do not partake of that tradition. Neither will she come. She will not hear you. She is not present in this place. Even now”—she lifted her head as though watching something pass overhead—“she makes her way to the dark land on the far bank of the river. She will pass into the realms of night and will reside in the shadows and shall not return. I am sorry, child. Her Ba, her soul, has fled.”

  “I will bring her back.”

  Some of the Restless began to murmur and speak, words of dissent and concern, but Miss Hattie raised her arm, her golden bracelets catching the light of the candles burning about the corpse.

  “So be it. Try if you like.” To quiet the others she added, “Silas is Undertaker here. And he is the son. It is his right. So be it. The sun shall journey through the world below and the realm of night. Where will you look for her in the Tuat?”

  Silas knew the term immediately, for it was recorded many times in the Book of the Dead, and the very word summoned frightening images from tomb walls and scrolls. Monsters and fearsome beasts that would lie in wait for the dead, for the lost. The Tuat was the shadowland, but an old name, a primal name, a terrible name.

  Miss Hattie saw the blush of worry on his face and spoke again.

  “So be it. Bring her back and we will perform our traditional rites, or, if you fail, if she has gone to her second death, we shall make preparations to burn the corpse so that none other shall occupy it or cause her harm, as is our custom.”

  Silas didn’t answer.

  He walked toward the door and then called to his great-grandfather.

  “Was my mother’s body brought through this door into the house after her death?”

  “Yes. I carried her into this house myself.”

  “Good,” Silas said, “if a corpse has passed over the threshold, then it’s lych and holds the memory of her passing.”

  “Lych?” said his great-grandfather.

  “A lych way, a road of the dead. Once a corpse is carried over a path, that way is forever hallowed. Lichport is covered with them, but because her corpse came into the house this way, it’s easier for me to enter the shadowland and follow her from here. Please do not close this door until I return.”

  Augustus Howesman moved to stand by the front door of Temple House and said, “Silas, I swear to you, no one will touch this door while you’re gone.” Then, remembering, he spoke again. “Silas, I don’t know if this is helpful to you, but when your mother was a child, she used to play along the riverbank. She loved it and would spend hours there. When she was older, she would walk there by herself, I think, when she wanted a little peace. Love of the river was in her blood. We were, long ago, river people—”

  “Oh, my yes, child,” Miss Hattie continued. “We steered our long, lean ships up the river valley, along the black-earthed lands on either side. From Alexandria down into the lower cataracts. Then, more recent ancestors took our people out across the seas and we again found the river, following it up into strange lands where we settled and traded, when the others came. But your great-grandfather is right, child. She will go to the river and follow it into the nightland. That is our common road.”

  “Have bodies ever been brought along the River Branch? Into or out of Lichport?” Silas asked them both.

  “Not recently, but yes. Bodies used to come into Lichport for burial by barge from the inland towns, especially during wartime,” said Augustus Howesman.

  “Then the river here is lych too. I will use the river to find her.”

  Silas touched his great-grandfather’s shoulder and then put his hand on the front door. He took the death watch from his pocket once more, and opening the skull, wound string around the dial to hold it fast. It was still warm. Beyond the door, like a tide, the mist came in. Silas turned back once more to look through the parlor entrance at his mother’s body beyond.

  Already the house voices were fading.

  “Now the weighing of our sister’s heart begins,” Miss Hattie said to the assembled. And where it sat, loyally waiting by the corpse, Silas was sure the Ammit stirred, shifted its weight slightly, eagerly, from one mismatched foot to another.

  Outside the door, an unnatural night had followed in the mist, draping over the morning.

  Thinking of the river and holding a portrait of his mother’s once living face in his mind, Silas stepped from Temple House and into shadowland. He felt numb. His dad was cold in the ground. His mom lay dead on the table.

  Time to go to work.

  LEDGER

  “Loneliness is the first thing which God’s eye named not good.”

  — JOHN MILTON, MARGINALIA OF AMOS UMBER

  “O thou goddess Isis, whose mouth knows well how to chant and speak in spells and charms, your son shall travel without harm. No illness, no pestilence or poison shall injure your son, for in the boat of the god of the sun, there is health and well-being. I have come today by the boat of the solar disk to the place where yesterday we stood. When darkness rises, when night puts on its crown, light shall vanquish shadow, for the sake of the son, for the sake of Isis, his mother.”

  —FROM THE WANDERINGS AND SORROWS OF ISIS, TRANSLATED BY SILAS UMBER

  I have risen up from the chamber of beginnings.

  I fly and circle in the air like a falcon.

  I have risen. I have gathered my soul as a falcon.

  I have come forth from the Night Boat . . .

  —FROM “THE CHAPTER OF CHANGING INTO A DIVINE FALCON,” BOOK OF THE DEAD, TRANSLATED BY SILAS UMBER

  THE YOUTH HOLDS IN HIS mind the image of his mother. Her face. Her eyes. The down-turning of her mouth and her rare smile. Then he conjures more familiarity: a smell of fine perfume she wore only on special evenings, or on the more frequent occasions when she just needed to feel special. The more of her he recalls, the closer to her ghost he will come.

  In the distance, he can smell the river, too; the deep water and everything it holds. Once, as a small child, he had seen three dead deer that, while in rut, had locked their antlers together and, still connected, drowned in a pathetic triskelion. The stags, waterlogged and stiff, spun slowly like a pinwheel in the larger eddies near the riverbank before their joined corpses were carried downriver.

  There is the smell of smoke suddenly, and the earth warms as the youth walks. There are fires below the ground. He has felt them before. But the youth keeps his mind on the water and the ghost he is looking for. He does not want to think of fires, of things burning. Let the earth be cold, he thinks, and the acrid smell fades.

  He can hear the water, the slush and churn of the river ahead. He does not look back.

  Ahead, a voice emerges from the reeds along the riverbank. It says his name.

  An old woman in a faded dress of calico pulls a long, thin skiff out from the rushes. A boat made of reeds.

  The youth can see the river now. Black, it flows swiftly as though in a hurry to get away.

  “We are going upstream, I think,” says Mrs. Grey. She bows to him. Deeply. Reverently.

  “I am surprised to see you here,” says the youth, returning the bow, but not so deeply.

  “Shouldn’t be. We are both waiting for the same thing, I reckon.”

  “Why should you wait for my mother?”

  “When the Howesmans came down the river, I was here. They built their great mounds there, beyond the marshes. They felled the trees and made ships and sent them up and down the coasts and grew prosperous. Great houses they built overlooking the sea. As a favor to your father and his father, I have watched over your mother since she returned here to her own land. Now my sister needs to make her final journey upriver to the headwaters, and I w
ill take her, though her passage may be perilous.”

  “Why you, Mrs. Grey? Who are you to her?”

  “Her Death,” says Mrs. Grey, reaching out a hand to help the youth into the boat. “Nothing more.”

  “Do you know when she’ll be here?” asks the youth, carefully stepping aboard.

  “She is here now.”

  And the youth turns toward the prow. His mother stands there, looking forward and away.

  The youth asks the ghost to come with him. “Return,” he says. “Mom, come back with me.”

  “She will not,” says Mrs. Grey. “And she cannot hear you. But you may travel with her, if that is your wish.”

  The youth nods.

  The ghost does not look backward as the youth takes his place. The ghost looks not to either side. Only ahead holds any interest. There is no other thing except what lies before the boat. And seeing the waters before her, the ghost begins to weep silently. Her tears fall past the prow of woven reeds and into the river, making tiny eddies that unwind themselves into larger ripples and then make quick rapids, memories that will carry the bark upriver toward the long forgotten headwaters, through the nightlands.

  The youth touches her shoulder. She does not move. He speaks her name. She does not answer.

  On both banks of the river, voices whisper and call, drawn up from mist and the dark undulations of the land, just there among the reeds. And flickering images, reflections of the past, shine in the sheets of ice that break free from the shoreline as they pass. All about the boat, the past casts a glow over the water.

  A birthing room in one of the great houses. A baby girl is born and handed to her mother. There is a throng about the bed. Grandparents, a few siblings and cousins, and the dead. Several corpses smile and coo over the baby girl. She turns her head and seems to look at one of the corpses, a stately man who wears a cravat. He insists on holding her and the mother, reticently, hands the baby to the corpse. Child, child, the corpse says lovingly. The baby opens her eyes and the first face she looks into is that of a corpse. Someone hastily tells the mother, perhaps to comfort her, that the baby can’t really see yet. The baby begins to cry softly and the corpse hands the tiny girl, his granddaughter, back to her mother.