by Ari Berk
“It will only be a moment, I promise. And then we’ll be together. The way may be terrible, I know, but follow me from Hades’s hall, and then we’ll walk together on the paths of the sun.”
His mind rang as he rehearsed the grim spell Cabel Umber himself had once whispered into his ear. In the furthest corner of his mind, a small, bright, inner voice pleaded with him not to conjure. Over that, Silas drew a pall.
He moved a low table to the side, clearing a place before the fire. He leaned over and carefully placed Bea’s skull on the floor and began his incantations.
Words of conjure and command.
Words of darkness and summons.
Terrible words to tear a ghost away from one place and drag it to another.
The only words. The only way, he told himself, even as his mouth shaped and sounded the vowels of hell.
Silas could feel an awful heat begin to rise from the skull, as though mighty frictions worked against it. The strength of Cabel’s bindings on her was considerable. But Silas had both her remains and his own desire to fuel his work. He chanted louder and Bea’s skull cried to its wayward soul. The combined might of Silas’s words and the bone of her body drew Beatrice’s wavering presence to him and away from that place Cabel had hidden her.
The fabric of the air shuddered, then ripped, and Bea stood next to her skull in Silas’s study, bent over and screaming into her hands.
He stepped toward her and she shrank from him.
“Beatrice. Look at me.”
Still infected by the tone of command, Silas said, “Beatrice, speak to me!” Notes of iron rang through his words.
Beatrice opened her mouth as though she could not breathe.
“Bea!” Silas said more desperately. “It’s Silas. I’m here!”
Bea leaned over the low table and pulled a brown, withered stem from a vase of dead flowers. She opened her mouth again and spoke. Her voice was a single, worn thread about to break.
“Shall we have more thyme? I had much of it once. Now I feel there is little left.” She offered the weed to Silas. He didn’t move. Bea dropped it, and put her hand into her wet, matted hair and pulled a tress out from the roots. She held out her hand again.
“Bea?”
“I have seen such places . . .”
“Please, Bea, hear my voice.”
“. . . such dark places . . .”
“Beatrice?”
For a moment, Bea looked frantically around her, looking with unfocused eyes through the room into some other place. Then she began to grin like a child. “I remember flowers. The fields were bright with them.” She pointed to her skull on the floor while pulling more strands of hair from her head. “Here is something. . . .”
Silas watched, silent and afraid of what he and the Dark Call had done to her.
“There’s rue.” She looked down at her hand still clutching the torn hair. “Where are the violets? He would bring me flowers.” She dropped the hair onto the floor and put her hands to the sides of her head and cried, speaking in sobs between the moans. “And now . . . and now I know . . . I know . . . below, nothing blooms! Nothing ever, or at all! In the darkness, flowers cannot be.”
“Beatrice,” Silas said loudly, trying to call her back to sense, to any remembrance of where or what she was. “Look at me! Remember! It’s Silas, Bea! Silas! We are together!”
She lifted her head and said softly, “No more, please. Please . . . I cannot be . . .”
“Bea, look at me.”
Her eyes, palest aquamarine, did not focus, but looked through and past him, as though Silas were now the ghost.
“Listen . . . just listen to my voice. Can you hear me?”
“. . . Yes.”
“Good. That’s good.”
But Bea turned quickly, first behind her, then to the left, as if hearing the angry approach of another.
“Listen only to my voice.”
Her face contorted into lines of fear. Her mouth was gaping and she opened and closed her hands, her fingers miming signs of panic.
“It’s just you and me, Bea. There is nothing to worry about. I want to keep you here with me.”
She looked up at the ceiling of the study, but didn’t see it. “I am longing to be elsewhere, where my love is hid. Let me look into the sun. . . .”
“I’m right here. Please look at me. Let me help you, okay? I have power now, over . . . over people like us. I can keep us together. I can make sure you’ll be here with me forever.”
“Not again,” she muttered. “I was not born to live in darkness . . . or in the shadow of another . . . please let me go,” she begged, looking through him.
“Bea, it’s me . . . it’s Silas. I love you.”
“My love?”
“Yes. Please remember . . . please. . . .” He was crying. Silas’s desperate sorrow let through a little more of his heart. He could see her more clearly, as she was. He could perceive what Cabel had done to her, what the Dark Call he’d cast had done to her. She had become little more than a frightened animal in a trap. Through his tears Silas could read on her face, within the wavering lines of her spectral form, that his love for her was another kind of prison, another selfish cruelty that bound her within a world not her own. His love for her put a veil before her eyes, blinding her to what was, blinding her to everything but the darkness of her own past. But if she could remember what had happened . . . if she could only remember him and say his name . . . then all the bindings on her could be broken for good. She would be free and they could be together.
Silas went to his desk and from his satchel took out two crystal vials of water from the springs below the earth at Arvale. Water of memory. Water of forgetting. He looked at Bea and back at the vials.
He put the water of Lethe back in his satchel.
Silas opened the flask of the water of memory, and put it to Bea’s mouth and tipped it up. A few drops of the water fell onto her lips, diffused into a mist that moved through and enlivened her form. She closed her eyes and did not move.
“Beatrice? Can you hear me? Do you remember me? How we used to walk together? We sat on the statue of the lion and walked among the stones. You used to love me.”
Her lips slowly moved and then the sound came. “I love you . . . ,” she whispered, her eyes still closed. The firelight illuminated her body, which, with each moment in the room, took on more solidity, more presence.
Silas couldn’t move, though his heart beat furiously in that terrible, exquisite moment of joy.
Then she spoke.
“Lawrence,” Bea said, opening her eyes. “I love you, Lars.”
All the color drained from the room.
In Silas’s sight, the walls and floors paled; the chairs and books lost their hues of brown or green. There was nothing real left in the world to him now. She had never loved him. All the words of his father’s diary flooded his mind. She had haunted his family out of confusion and loss. His pathetic, desperate love showed him only what he wanted to see. Only her broken memories of her own past had made him into the semblance of someone she could love. They were two sad lies stitched together. All through the years her ghost had endured, she remembered only terrible losses, but no names. He wasn’t Silas Umber to her, even though she had once spoken those words. He was a placeholder for someone else, for Lars, for Lawrence Umber who in life had been her lover. Her true and only love.
Now the waters of memory had restored her mind to her. She knew who she was and whom she truly loved. He had loved her, but Bea had only needed Silas to help her keep lively her own losses. And he had played the part of paramour well. She had watched him from the time of his infancy, but she’d never really seen him. He’d always been, at best, a substitute. Now he had hurt her. Because of him, Bea had been subjected to unknown horrors at Cabel Umber’s hands. Because of him, she suffered being summoned under compulsion. Silas saw himself as just another of her tormentors. His need to be loved could not bring her peace. He could see that no
w. And he knew there was only one way to heal everything Beatrice had endured in life and death . . . even though it meant sacrificing any happiness he might have been able to fashion from the fantasy he had made of her.
“Lawrence, Lawrence . . .” Bea closed her eyes and again began to weep.
Silas turned from her and went to his coat. From its pocket, he took out a handful of the ashes of Lawrence Umber he’d collected at the gates of Arvale.
Silas’s chest tightened, as though his heart was seized in a vise. Yet here was something he could do, one promise he could keep.
He threw the ashes into the fire. Lawrence Umber’s remains hallowed the hearth, made it lych, and Silas followed the ashes with words to carry his dead cousin back, then he moved his arms apart, opening the threshold. But there would be no spell of compulsion. Only invitation, and hope.
“Let a path be made by love or not at all,” Silas said. “Lawrence Umber, I have made a way for you through the fire. Come, cousin Lars. If it is your will to come again into the circle of the sun and have your heart restored to you, come, now! Follow my voice through the flames!”
The fire rose up in a gold and scarlet fan, then folded back down into its embers.
As Lars’s ghost came forth from the fire, Beatrice opened her eyes.
The two ghosts stood looking at each other, and for an instant, Silas thought they could not perceive each other.
The three figures stood and did not move.
Each side of the triangle was equal. Each had its measure of pain and hope and fear, and not one of them could speak for fear of banishing one of the others. But then Bea lifted her hand toward Lars, and he moved swiftly toward her. The two slid together, their edges blurring in a growing brightness until a brilliant light filled the room. Silas shut his eyes, as much to banish the scene from his sight as to spare his eyes from the lovers’ glare.
“Go,” he said to the ghosts. “Go now and find what joy you can. Don’t look back.”
Bea reached out to him. Silas stepped away, his eyes wet with rising tears. Yet, as the ghosts stepped past him and through an opening in the air, Silas felt her hand brush his cheek.
Silas stood alone in his study, looking at the floor where Bea’s skull still sat, a cold, dead thing requiring burial.
Silas took his coat from the chair and his satchel and left his house.
As he walked, he took out the death watch and the vial of the water of Lethe. To him, they now seemed the same. Two ways to hide. He put both in his pocket and looked at the sky. Morning was still hidden, but he couldn’t be at home. He could not be in that room where they’d all three been a moment before.
He needed to keep moving because every place he passed reminded him of Beatrice, and the memories hurt him. Wasn’t there anywhere in Lichport where memories could just die away instead of crying out and clinging to the living?
He saw several of the Restless who had attended his mother’s funeral. Two were slowly, aimlessly wandering, side by side. Silas looked away and walked down another street to avoid them. On the next street, another living corpse had stopped, motionless in the yard of a house. The owners of the home were begging with the deceased to leave. The corpse stood with its eyes closed, immune to or ignoring the pleas of its descendants.
“Just go. Please, for the love of Christ. Go back to where you came from!” cried the voice from the porch.
Silas quickly turned the corner and kept walking.
He didn’t want to see anyone or speak with anyone. Much of Lichport was abandoned, and yet at every turn was a memory or a problem waiting only for him.
He made his way down Coach Street, passing the cemeteries of God’s Small Acre and the Lost Ground before he could see the ocean. The wide expanse of featureless water, the incessant crashing of the waves against the shore brought no comfort.
He thought of the tavern at the end of the Narrows. He had entered it once as a shadowland, saw there upon the stools the ghosts of the forgotten, the ghosts of the lost, saw them drinking down their days. He imagined the tavern that still stood there, still existed in his world, was probably the same. Filled with derelicts. A place to be and not to be. A place to become invisible. A place to finish falling apart.
He wandered north again, then down into the cold lanes of the Narrows.
LEDGER
The first offspring of every womb belongs to me. . . .
—EXODUS 34:19
For now I will stretch out my hand, that I may smite thee and thy people with pestilence; and thou shalt be cut off from the earth.”
—EXODUS 9:15
CABEL UMBER STOOD ABOVE THE ghost of the young girl who shuddered in his shadow.
He spoke to her of the wonders of fire—of both the righteous furies of a father, and of the sacrificial altars and pyres where punishment might bring about redemption.
He whispered of the evils of children, their selfishness, and of how they might be brought to heel. He bellowed about the joys of hunting and how Death was himself a huntsman.
He spoke to her as if she had been his own child. He told her the stench of sin was all about her, and how soon it would be burnt away. And he marveled at how much she looked like that lost and ruined child who once, long ago, was his daughter.
The ghost of the drowned girl clamped her eyes shut as he touched her cheek with a long, blackened finger. The lines of her face were pulled thin in terror. She had seen the fire in the furnace, in the great bronze god. She had seen its piercing horns, its glowing belly thick with smoke and flame. She would not open her eyes again.
Enraptured by his self-made scene, Cabel Umber delighted in seeing Silas Umber’s paramour standing confused and afraid as the idol’s sickly glow grew brighter in anticipation of what was to come. He had hunted well, and brought back worthy prey.
The hollow idol of Moloch groaned as the bronze stretched and contracted with the rising heat of its burning innards.
“Child? It is nearly time,” Cabel said to the ghost of the drowned girl.
As he stepped toward her, the trembling girl blindly backed up until she was nearly upon the idol. Cabel paused, enjoying her terror. But as he stepped forward again, and would have pushed her into the furnace, the drowned girl shuddered and her form wavered and grew translucent. The air about her body darkened, and the outline of her skull glowed briefly behind her face as her body was drawn up suddenly toward her head, as though she was made of water spiraling upward from the surface of the sea in a storm funnel.
Cabel Umber shouted words of command and binding, but none availed him, and before his voice had stopped ringing in the air of the chamber, she vanished within the shadow of her own skull’s hollow eye socket.
Cabel stood, the flickering flames about him rising into a conflagration brighter than the idol’s burning heart.
His prey had been stolen.
This was Silas Umber’s doing.
Once more, his quarry had been taken from him by the boy Undertaker. Silas had not fallen to the curse Cabel had put upon him, and now here was another affront.
So be it, thought Cabel. If Silas cannot readily be killed by curse, then let his sufferings continue as they have begun. As the folk of this place perish, so shall Silas Umber. Let him die of grief if no other death can catch him.
Cabel Umber had hoped to savor the destruction of this town, to drag it out, make the killings last a while. He had imagined himself riding out, becoming Death to these people, a grim hunter on his dark mount cutting down the living.
No matter.
He would set more fires; burn them in their beds if nothing else. But what of the sacrifice to Moloch, who required the lives of the firstborn? Repeatedly his planned offerings had come to nothing. His daughter and the Mistle Child had been taken from him. Silas Umber would not die. But a firstborn must be brought to the fire. Cabel Umber swore he would not break that promise to his god again.
He paced and stalked the twisting aisles of the labyrinthine rotunda, sta
cked high with the spoils of many crusades. And here, the stone idol of the demon of fever, carried out of Babylon.
He recognized it immediately.
Cabel swooned with remembering the plagues of old. The purgings. How the weak were carried off, all the miserable and sickly folk. The ignoble wretches were the first to succumb, the first to fall. Whole towns, cities . . . all died. He remembered bodies stacked up along the city walls, and how the wolves and jackals came then to feast upon the dead.
Then as now, he thought, the hunter always wins the day
He put the statue upright. It stood on four legs, part lion, part man. Before the ancient idol, Cabel rocked his head back and forth as he spoke.
“Nergal! Lord of Pestilence! I greet thee!”
Cabel began, reveling in a distant memory of his first sight of this statue, of when he’d first heard that it had been bought from the desert tribes. Those exiled folk who long ago fled from Babylon, living as shepherds when the Brothers of the Temple met them in the desolate wilderness. How, in the raiment of a knight pilgrim, did one of the Brothers pay an old man with silver to show the god’s power. A child he bought from some poor family . . . how it whimpered to come before the god. Then fell words were spoken. A wind rose in the surrounding desert, sending shifting sand howling across the dunes. The Brother told how the flaps of the darkened tent were ripped aside like the veils of the bride upon her wedding night. Wind-thrown sand flew at their faces, but about the child the air turned more slowly. The boy was placed before the idol. The idol stood motionless as the child trembled. Soon the child’s face grew red and he began to sweat profusely and cry. The boy clutched at his throat as if mere water might have saved him. As the fever raged, his screams rose to match the wind. A moment later, it was done. The boy lay dead of a fever, and the old man gestured at the statue and held out his hand for more silver. He was paid and the idol was carried away.
