by Ari Berk
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.
—FROM “A VALEDICTION: FORBIDDING MOURNING” BY JOHN DONNE. MARGINALIA OF AMOS UMBER
THE YOUTH IS WALKING THERE. Below the mountains, in the field of asphodel.
The land is quiet but for the sound of the watch in his pocket. The ticking of the pocket watch is all the youth can hear. He takes out the watch and looks at it. A miniature skull. He opens it and tries to stop the hand from moving around the dial. It will not stop, and the harder he presses, the more the dial tears into the skin of his finger as it pushes past on its ceaseless round.
The youth turns the watch over in his hands. The silver watch is warm. There is a seam that runs along the outside of the skull. Sometime in the past, someone had opened it and then sealed it shut with more silver.
On the ground are two stones. Heavy and weathered, they sit upon the dry earth.
Ticking. Ticking. The watch is ticking.
The youth puts the pocket watch on top of one of the stones. A small scorpion emerges from the shadow of the rock, raises its tail, then scuttles away. Carefully, the youth lifts the other stone. With it, he strikes the pocket watch and it breaks open. Small gears are smashed and the dial lies in two halves.
A child appears.
The child looks at the broken watch and smiles.
“Do not leave me again,” says the child.
“I am lost myself,” says the youth.
“You are not lost. We are where our roads have brought us. We are where we are supposed to be.”
“Can’t you go home either?” the youth asks the child.
“No. That was another time.”
“Another Mistle Child?”
The child nods. “Neither of us is a stranger to loss.”
“Where are your people?”
“All dead. Long ago. There was a storm in the desert. The animals fled. The storm did not stop. Crops failed. Many died. I was left as an offering, along with a bull. The storm stopped, but the offerings continued. Animals were burned at first, but then mostly children. I was lonely. My name became the name of loss and hunger. So I waited close by the living, and then all the firstborn were given to me, for without sacrifice, there can be no blessing.”
“You are the god of this place?”
“To some.”
“Have you so little power that you cannot leave?”
“I have been held here. Now I might leave. I have power over all things.”
“Over love?”
“No,” the child says, his eyes welling with tears. “Not love.”
Beneath the child’s feet, a green blush of color spreads. Verdant curls unfold and rise as flower stalks, but almost as soon as they bloom, they brown and shrink, falling back to the ground even as more shoots rise up.
Then the youth knows who the child is, and asks, “Are you going to kill me now?”
Sadness falls across the child’s small face. “Death does not come to punish the living. Acceptance of death is a gift. I have been waiting to free you, and only your father’s fear has kept us apart.”
“I saw him once. Why hasn’t he come to me?”
“He loves you very much. That can never die. Perhaps now he may more frequently tell you so. It has always been his choice. Your father, of his own free will, has bound up his estate with that of my prison house, which you have just destroyed. As a result, a portion of him was imprisoned in the death watch as well. He is now free. Just as I am. Just as you are.”
“How am I free?”
“You are free to choose what you will do next. That is the only kind of freedom there is, for both the dead and the living.”
The child and the youth walk across the field of asphodels and along the foothills that run beneath the mountains.
“I want to go home,” says the youth.
“Take me with you. Carry me with you.”
“I don’t . . . I don’t think I can.”
“You may.”
“How?”
“Welcome me home. Say my name,” says the child.
“Moloch.”
“No,” says the child, smiling. “That was what they called me in the Long Ago.”
“Please tell me how to get home. What must I do?” says the youth.
“Say: I give myself to you.”
“To you?”
“Yes. ‘I give myself to you.’ Say it.”
The youth says, “I give myself to you.”
“My Death,” adds the child.
The youth closes his eyes and says, “I give myself to you, My Death.”
“Now it is all one,” says the child. “Shall we walk together?”
The child holds up his hand to the youth. On his small palm is a dark stain, perhaps a birthmark. It is in the shape of a key.
The youth takes hands with the child.
They walk together.
“No one wants to be alone,” says the youth.
“Yes,” says the child. “No one.”
They are standing upon the edge of the sea.
The moon is over the water. High above, a firedrake, a comet, draws a line of flame across the firmament.
A sound of keening is heard over the water.
The child hears the sound and smiles at the youth.
“Only the unloved are truly lost,” says the child.
Ahead, there is a path.
“I want to go home,” says the youth to his death.
“There is no other place for us,” his death replies, and the two walk together down the path that runs along the sand hills and to the sea.
LEDGER
Thou, who art about to consign
your years to the flames
who, by this illusion of death
are destined to find life again;
Thou whose demise shall only
be prologue to renewal and
rebirth,
and through self-destruction
shall regain thy lost youth,
take back thy life,
give up the body that can not
endure,
and by metamorphic exchange of
form,
Return and come forth, golden,
beauteous, eternal.
— RETRANSLATED BY AMOS UMBER FROM HENDERSON’S CLAUDIAN, VOL. II. 1922
THE SURFACE OF THE STONE would not part. There was no veil. Only murk and shadow.
Mrs. Bowe looked down at the sphere of crystal but could not find what she sought in its depths. “He is very far, I fear,” she said to Mother Peale, who peered over her shoulder.
“Call him,” said Mother Peale.
“I don’t know where he is. He could be here in Lichport already. I don’t know.”
Mother Peale stood upright, put her hands on the back of Mrs. Bowe’s chair to steady herself, and closed her eyes. “Dolores,” said Mother Peale, “take Mrs. Bowe’s hand.”
“Yes. He is far. . . . ,” said Mrs. Bowe. “Kyrie eleison,” she whispered, reaching over her shoulder to cover Dolores’s hands in hers.
“He is wandering. . . .”
“Thanatos, eleison.”
“He comes to the place of flowers. . . .”
“Lord of Earth, Thanatos, eleison,” said Mrs. Bowe, barely breathing.
“The shadow draws close. . . .” Mother Peale opened her eyes.
“Come home to us, child! Let the doors of your homecoming be open wide,” the three women spoke as one.
“Pace tua, Thanatos,” said Mrs. Bowe, bowing her head. She rose and went to the front door. She opened it and then untied her hair. Letting it fall over her face, she cried out, and a great wailing went forth into the world.
When the keening ended, Mrs. Bowe went back into the parlor and said to Dolores, “You must call to him. The voice of the mother is puissant.”
Dolores nodded but
did not look up. She said, “Silas, oh, my own son, come home. Little bird, come back to me. Sail with me once more upon the bark of the sun.”
And above the house, a comet briefly blazed and passed over Lichport and the sea.
LEDGER
“This,” he said, “O King, seems to me the condition of men on earth, compared with that time which to us is uncertain: It is as though, on a winter’s night, you sit feasting with your noblemen—and a little sparrow flies into the hall, and entering through one window, it quickly exits at another. In that brief moment when it is indoors, the furious cold of winter does not touch it; but then that tiny instant of warmth being swiftly ended, from winter going back once more to winter, the bird is lost to our eyes.”
Thus appears the life of man—but of what went before or what may follow, that remains hidden in the shadows.
—THE VENERABLE BEDE, FROM ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY, BOOK II, TRANSLATED BY SILAS UMBER
SILAS UMBER WALKED ALONG THE sea.
The sound of his blood coursed in his ears.
Or was it the waves of the ocean?
The sun was just beginning to go down. It was his favorite time of day.
He passed back and forth across the Narrows, making a game of trying not to cross his own path more than once. Candlelight and hearth-light lit many of the windows, and beyond the glass, there was laughter, and stories culled from the doings of the day. The fresh air of the sea was all about him, and the savory smell of well-cooked suppers, for many of the cottage windows were opened.
He walked along the wall of Newfield Cemetery and toward Temple House. There, he quietly looked through the window.
His mother sat with Mrs. Bowe and Mother Peale. The three were weaving together by the blue-tinged fire where a small loom now stood. Silas could see that, although his mother’s fingers were not as nimble as the others’, she held the fateful shuttle in a grip of iron, and when she tied a knot, it would never come undone.
Beyond, unseen by them in the dining room, Silas saw the three ladies of the Sewing Circle, watching over while the other three women worked. He could see the pattern now, of what was, of what would come, and of who would soon assist him in his work.
The elder of the three looked up and met Silas’s gaze. The three bowed deeply. Their mouths did not move, but he could hear their voices.
“Hail, great lord of shadows, ruler over the dead. It is you who grant beneficence that our threads be spun and our work continue by the industry of new hands.”
Silas smiled at them and continued his pilgrimage.
He passed through the cemetery of the Umbers, where so many of his kin lay sleeping below the soil and in their tombs. He walked back toward Coach Street and through the Garden Plot, and then passed the Bowe tomb behind Mrs. Bowe’s house, where the bees were preparing for the work of the rising year. He walked under the long shadow of the Beacon and over the water to Fort Street. Silas heard voices from his great-grandfather’s house. Augustus Howesman was not alone. Some of the other Restless were with him there in his enduring mansion. Music was playing.
He walked up Main Street past the ruined church. Over the distant marshes, dark birds flew and folded across the air in slow, gentle murmurations, while others sang their song of eventide from the trees.
Looking at the ground beyond the streets and sidewalks, he could see that no more ice clutched the soil. Tiny purple flowers had appeared. It was nearly spring. But hadn’t the flowers always been there, just hidden below the frost?
The sun was already setting, for the year was still young. The brief burnished twilight had settled over Lichport, and the first stars rose in the east and were reflected in the waters of the millpond and the pools of the marshes.
It was time to go home.
As Silas approached his house, a man sat waiting on the porch, picking at the paint on the handrails. Silas smiled.
Amos looked up. “Son?” he said.
ARI BERK, author of the Undertaken Trilogy, is an award-winning writer who works in a library filled to the ceiling with thousands of arcane books and more than a few wondrous artifacts. When not writing, he moonlights as professor of mythology and folklore at Central Michigan University. He lives in Michigan with his wife and son. Visit him at ariberk.com.
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Also by Ari Berk
Death Watch
Mistle Child
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Ari Berk
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Design by Laurent Linn
Jacket design by Laurent Linn
Map illustration by Drew Willis
Quote from the poem “The Finished House” used with permission of the literary estate of George Mackay Brown.
The text for this book is set in Minister Std.
Library of Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berk, Ari.
Lych way / Ari Berk.—First edition.
pages cm.—(The undertaken trilogy ; [3])
Summary: As his family and friends suffer and fall at the hands of the vengeful Huntsman from Arvale’s sunken mansions, Silas Umber must reach deep into his complicated bloodline to summon powers and wisdom beyond those required of a Lichport Undertaker.
ISBN 978-1-4169-9119-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4424-3915-3 (eBook)
[1. Fantasy. 2. Ghosts—Fiction. 3. Future life—Fiction. 4. Families—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.B452293Lyc 2014
[Fic]—dc23
2013009306
