by Ari Berk
The little girl is perhaps seven years old and she is screaming in the street. Her mother pulls her arm. Both are dressed in fine clothes. They are to make a visit. The mother stops pulling, slaps the girl. The girl relents and walks ahead of her mother up the steps leading to the mansion’s front door. They go inside and ascend the staircase to an upper gallery. Every step the girl takes is slower than the last. They enter a room where a corpse with a cravat sits in a carved chair. Slowly the corpse rises and raises its arms affectionately. The little girl turns to run, but her mother hisses her name, and she turns back and walks to the corpse, who embraces her. Still caught in the tender hug, she cranes her head around the corpse’s body to stare at her mother. The girl appears ready to burst into tears. Her mother takes a piece of candy from a bowl on a table near the door and looks sharply at her daughter. The little girl nods and holds back her tears. A little while later, as they descend the staircase once more, the mother offers the candy to the girl, who refuses it. You saw me buy it to bring here last time, says the mother sharply. She pushes the piece of candy into the girl’s mouth and waits for her to swallow it. When they pass the front door and come down into the yard, the girl runs to the bushes and vomits.
A repeating scene: the girl alone in her room. She has many dolls, many toys. Often, shadows lengthen along the floor and walls, and spirits move close to her, stand about her, fascinated by the presence of living kin. Her parents don’t let her talk about it. They open the door to her room, look in, smile, close the door again. When she cries, the ghosts of women of the family, living in the walls of the old great house, come to her, flock about her. Soon they follow her outside her room, through the galleries of the large house, sometimes on the streets. Only when she is alone. When the ghosts come to her, she cries because their presence upsets her. Yet when they leave, she cries more because she is left alone again.
The girl is in her teens. She stands looking at the wreckage of a motorboat that has washed up on the shore. The driver had been her boyfriend. They cannot find him. They cannot find his body. The sea has gone silent. Three days later, at sunset, the young man comes home. His ghost stands outside the girl’s window. Every night he comes to her. Her family sends for help. Another young man arrives. He is quiet and somber and tall. He brushes his dark hair out of his eyes every few moments. He takes out a pocket watch and asks the family to wait in the drawing room. He goes upstairs to the girl’s room. The family hears voices. He is talking to the ghost. A short time later, the young man comes downstairs and says the ghost is at peace and not to worry. Her parents thank him. She thanks him. He looks at her and tells the parents he does not need to be paid. She watches him as he puts on his coat. She smiles a little as he leaves.
The young man with the dark hair comes back to the girl’s house. They walk about the town, talking in whispers. When he walks her home, the girl says, Stay with me. I won’t leave you, the young man says. He is in love with her already. They are a handsome couple. She holds him tight, and he begins to sing, so softly, the sound barely stirring the air. “Dolores holds my heart in thrall. She holds my life and liberty, for love is lord of all.” And by the river they kiss and when they walk from the water, they hold each other’s hands.
They are together in a house, some years later. Things have changed. The woman wears loneliness like a housecoat. He is very good at his work. His needful work. He works most nights. One night after another, he leaves the house, closes the door. She sits below the low light of a lamp. She watches the door. Waits and waits for it to open. Some nights he does not come home. His work. His needful work. She begins to hate the door, hate both its opening and closing, hate the man who passes back and forth over its threshold. Even when he is home, he is quiet, his mind elsewhere, someplace she cannot go, does not want to go.
At first the youth feels pity to see the sorrow of his mother’s childhood. Then his heart swells to see his parents fall in love. To watch them, the same age as himself, growing closer, walking hand in hand. But soon the light of the scenes begins to darken as past regrets spill into later episodes. The youth has seen enough. They are floating on a river of self-indulgence, and where once pity filled his heart, now there is anger seeping in.
“Enough,” he says to the ghost of his mother, who has closed her eyes again. “Look! You must look! This is what has happened. It’s not happening anymore! These scenes have gone out of the world. Only in your mind do they endure. Look at them! Mom! Look at them and let them go.”
The bark turns, following the river’s course. About them, creatures swim just below the surface, their movements churning the dark water. The ghost does not stir, but ahead of the boat, a scene takes on light and presence.
From the reeds along the riverbank, walls waver and rise. A room in a common house. A midwife stands beside a silent mother who lies on the bed in labor.
At the front of the boat, the ghost clutches her fists.
As the birth continues, she becomes more and more agitated at the vision before them, though her eyes remain closed. The youth’s father joins the phantom scene on the shore. His face is pale as all men’s faces are pale when they are in the presence of the mysteries of women’s bodies.
The baby is coming.
“There is a caul,” the father says, and steps back.
The midwife holds up the child and hands it to the father.
The father draws aside the caul and moans. He says it will be all right.
The new mother says, “Show me the baby!” But then she cries out, “Bring home the child!”
Back on the boat, the youth says, “Good God. Good God,” and cannot look away.
Something in his voice has changed. The scene has him now, has set its teeth in him, and he can’t hear anything but weeping from the birth room. He sits down in the boat and looks at the shore. He whimpers and begins to cry.
A shiver of powerful maternity passes through the ghost, still standing at the prow, and passes down through the boat and into the water. She hears her son crying. And wakes.
The ghost of Dolores Umber turns back, leans over, and covers her son’s eyes.
The air about the shore wavers.
“Come away!” the ghost says to him. “Do not look! Do not see this! Silas, close your eyes now, right now!”
The youth looks away from the scene, his mother’s voice the only thing he hears, and his attention loosens and slips from the shore. He looks into her face, and the land goes quiet again. His mother’s eyes are open and dry. She sees him and he knows it, can feel her recognition, and her rising confusion and then sorrow as she realizes, or remembers, her condition.
He sees the ghost’s eyes, dark and present. The youth stands up and says to her without thinking, “Will you take the water of peace and forgetfulness that I can offer you?”
“Silas!” Dolores says, almost beginning to laugh. “Don’t be stupid. You know I gave up drinking.” Dolores looks at the light of distant street lamps beginning to glow beyond the river.
“Do you want to come back with me? To Lichport?” Silas asks.
“Is that where you’re going, Si?”
“Yes. And no other place.”
“Then that’s where I want to go.”
Without a word, Mrs. Grey turns the boat and steers back the way they’ve come, and the water flows so gently beneath them that the river seems to be asleep.
LEDGER
O Proud Memphis! Great city who keeps the God! Osiris! Apis! Earth and Bull, Below and Above! Now, glorious Serapis! You, who carry the dead upon your back into the Lands of the West! You, who were conceived by lightning! Now wondrous bull, die for us, and we shall live!
— FROM THE COFFIN TEXTS, TRANSLATED BY SILAS UMBER
Most wretched are the abominable Restless of Lichport and their stolen Nile Rites. For in their vile imitation of life, they mock both the living and the wisdom handed down from the past, even claiming a direct descent, an undiluted stream of practice, from that an
cient time unto our own; a claim that can only be accounted absurd. They worship Serapis in his many forms, that composite god of Alexandria whom the Ptolomies adored and who may have somehow derived his name from ASER APIS, a pairing of the name of Osiris and Apis, the Bull god of Memphis . . . two deities closely associated with regeneration and vitality. Or, more likely, the name was aped or stolen outright from the term Serapsi, the honorific of the elder god Ea of ancient Babylon. Serapis” will be a title not unfamiliar to any Undertaker familiar with our traditions, for that honorific has been sometimes used by generations of Undertakers who may be often called not only Janus, but Lords of the Deep, which is the meaning of the name Serapis when Englished.
— MARGINALIA OF JONAS UMBER
THE MASSIVE OPEN DOOR OF Temple House stood in the distance as Silas came away from the river. He could feel his mother’s ghost close by him. As he walked toward the door, he heard his great-grandfather calling out.
“Is all well among the living and the dead?”
The voice sounded far off.
“Yes,” Silas answered. “I think all’s well.”
Silas crossed the threshold. It was nearly dusk.
Inside the house, bright embers burned in their braziers and incense swam through all the rooms of the ground floor. Even though Silas had released the dial of the death watch, his mind still clung to the movements of the river, and the voices of the past buzzed about his ears like marsh flies. The boundaries remained blurred in him. He was constant to no single sphere, and it seemed that each time he used the death watch, one foot stayed more firmly planted in the shadowlands after he returned to his own time and place.
Looking about the rooms, he could see that more additions had been made in his absence. His mother’s house had become a temple in more than name.
The dining room table had been pushed to the wall, and his mother’s corpse had been stood up and wrapped in a linen sheet with her arms straight down at her sides. Behind her was a life-size statue of Osiris carved of black stone. Silas hadn’t seen this one in his uncle’s collection, so it had either been brought out of storage from someplace in the house, or the Restless had carried it with them out of Newfield. It appeared to be truly ancient, for the patina of age had softened its surface, and the weight of time and long veneration came off it like a heat. The god of the dead wore a tall crown. An actual withered sheaf of wheat had, at some time, been tied to it. God of the dead, and god of fertility both, Silas thought. Life and death, or life in death? As he looked at the statue standing guard over his mom, he realized that preparations had been set in place that he had not approved of, and he was not in control of what was happening. He wanted to bring this around to something he felt he could handle, something he knew. He didn’t want anything going wrong he couldn’t fix. It was his job, his obligation, to conduct his mother’s funeral now that her spirit had been found, and to preside over her wake. Silas turned to his great-grandfather. “Sir, I would like to begin.”
“Oh, Silas. I thought you understood. You and I will participate, but the Undertaker does not preside over certain funerals among the Howesmans and some of the other families. Now don’t take this the wrong way. You have a part to play, as the son, and your father was always, always very helpful to us, but we have our own customs, and it is important that we stay true to them when they are required. I know only what I’ve heard. So let’s you and me just try to be useful. As I understand it, we are not entirely out of the woods.”
Silas was about to protest, but Miss Hattie rose from her throne. “Bring in the god,” she said formally, her voice rasping against the bottom of its register.
One of the Restless went outside to lead in the bull. As the great creature came through the parlor and into the dining room, it bowed its head so its long, high horns did not scrape the door frame. A ring of flowers had been hung about the animal’s neck. The bull came to stand facing Silas’s mother’s body on a large piece of canvas, on which also sat a massive wooden tub. Silas couldn’t help but stare at the bull. It was not the strange sight of it indoors that captured his attention, but the beauty of the animal itself. The bull was black except for two patterns of white hair: a diamond on its forehead and an elegant bird’s wing shape on its back. The bull was utterly serene as it stood before the corpse, surrounded by the Restless. Its nostrils flared as it breathed, and it slowly rolled its eyes to look about the room, but otherwise did not move.
From one of the carved crates now stacked along the wall, one of Miss Hattie’s assistants drew out a long ornate sword with a curved blade. Its edge was so sharp that Silas had to squint to see where the sword stopped and the air began. The corpse handed the sword to Augustus Howesman and rasped something into his ears. Augustus Howesman nodded and turned to Silas.
“You see, son? I told you we had important work to do.”
“Yes?”
“The bull is to be sacrificed.”
Silas looked at the bull and back at the sword.
“You don’t mean right now! Here?”
“Indeed I do. I think it’s best if we don’t overthink this. Better to get it over with.”
“This is not what my mother would have wanted.”
“Your mother made her wishes clear on her last visit to see me. She wished to observe the most prestigious of our family’s traditions. I promise you, grandson, as foreign as this may seem, none of this would have shocked her. Besides, is it really so strange? You eat meat, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but I don’t sacrifice it.”
“But it is a sacrifice nonetheless. It is killed for you. Surely this isn’t so much different from the funeral rites you know or have studied? There are offerings, prayers. . . . Isn’t it all one, really?”
Silas looked about the room again at the corpses, the bull, the statues of ancient gods, and said, “It’s not its strangeness. I have read of such rites in books. It’s that I like to know what’s happening. Part of being an Undertaker is being prepared for anything that might occur, and to be able to help the dead as required. It’s hard for me to feel prepared if I don’t know what’s next.”
“Well, next comes the sacrifice. If the god, any god, gives its life for the assembled, then that is a sacrifice. It’s like that in church.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Is food ever given to the dead when you’re running a funeral?”
“Yes. Sometimes bread is placed on the body—”
“A loaf of bread, a good steak, or a good god, it’s all one in the belly. All are sustenance. A life is given so your life might continue. Oh, it’s not spoken of in just this way, but you should accommodate yourself to the truth of how you eat, of the animals whose lives are taken and given to you. If you eat it, or use it, you should be man enough to kill it yourself, at least once in your life. Anyway, this is a requirement of the rite and it’s up to us to do it. So, Silas, pick up the sword and do what must be done, and let’s have no more small talk about it. It’s for your mother, remember. I’ll help you. I’m sure you can’t take off its head cleanly by yourself, and the creature should not be made to suffer.”
The bull stood before the corpse of Dolores Umber. It continued to breathe easily, as though it knew what was to happen and it didn’t seem to care, as though the bull better understood the nature of sacrifice than Silas did.
“All right,” Silas relented. “I guess it’s best to cut its throat?”
“In a manner of speaking, I suppose that’s right.”
Without a word, Augustus Howesman took Silas’s hands in his. Together they grasped the sword hilt, stacking their hands, alternating them along its length. Standing side by side, they lifted the sword over their heads. Silas could feel his great-grandfather’s determination through the metal of the sword and the skin of his hands. They were one person now, one machine, ready to deal out death to the animal that stood quietly in front of Dolores’s body. No hand held the bull’s neck-rope now, but the animal bowed its head slightl
y and the sword swung down with the supernatural force that August Howesman’s enduring condition bestowed. Silas relaxed and moved in concert with his great-grandfather, and faster than the eye could follow, the sword whipped through the animal’s neck, past sinew and bone, and struck the floor below, digging deep into the floorboard. The bull’s head fell away from its body, and into the wooden tub. Blood sprayed from its exposed neck and over the corpse, making Dolores Umber glisten as though she were a statue carved of garnet. The body of the bull fell over with a crash, and for several moments, the crystals of the chandelier shook and chimed.
Miss Hattie walked forward and dipped her tight-skinned hand into the tub, then reached up and gently smeared more blood on Dolores’s lips.
“Dolores stands before you, you, who destroy destruction. The door has been opened and the son has brought home the mother to the house of her eternity. See? Oh, ever-living folk, how the mother of the son returns to you! Now let her sinews be knit up, her bones made firm. May all corruption be taken away from her. Now we take hold of her hand and say: Here is the Living One! May she live forever!”
Miss Hattie turned to Silas but spoke outward to the assembled Restless. “We normally take no food, for we draw sustenance from our offerings, but when the god is present, we dine. This is a blessing upon all of us. Y’all come on now.” And Miss Hattie reached down and tore a warm, fist-size piece of flesh from the bull’s neck, raised it to her mouth, and ate.
Silas stepped back as the other Restless came forward and fell upon the bull’s body. His great-grandfather pulled one of the legs from the animal and then tore it in two. The lower half he handed to another. The upper part of the leg he stripped of skin. “Silas, there’s good meat here. If you prefer, I’ll take this through to the kitchen and you can prepare it for yourself as you like, but, son, I do think, to be polite, you ought to have some as it is.”
