by Berk, Ari
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Ari Berk
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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Book design by Laurent Linn
Map illustration by Drew Willis
The text for this book is set in Minister Std.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berk, Ari.
Death watch / Ari Berk. —1st ed.
p. cm.—(The Undertaken trilogy)
Summary: When seventeen-year-old Silas Umber’s father disappears, Silas is sure it is connected to the powerful artifact he discovers, combined with his father’s hidden hometown history, which compels Silas to pursue the path leading to his destiny and ultimately, to the discovery of his father, dead or alive.
ISBN 978-1-4169-9115-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4424-3603-9 (eBook)
[1. Fantasy. 2. Fathers and sons—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.B452293De 2011
[Fic]—dc22
2011006332
For Robin & Kristen, always
CONTENTS
Chapter 1: Home
Chapter 2: Nobody
Chapter 3: Outer Circle
Chapter 4: Mail
Chapter 5: Portents
Chapter 6: Carriage
Chapter 7: Night Trip
Chapter 8: The White Things That Are Mine
Chapter 9: Sidewalk and Statuary
Chapter 10: Bring Home the Child
Chapter 11: Quiet Voices
Chapter 12: New Digs
Chapter 13: Preserves
Chapter 14: Falling Water
Chapter 15: Grand Tour
Chapter 16: Books of the Dead
Chapter 17: Little Creatures
Chapter 18: Locals
Chapter 19: Obligations
Chapter 20: The Young and the Restless
Chapter 21: The Narrows
Chapter 22: Night Visiting
Chapter 23: Plots
Chapter 24: Fortune, My Foe
Chapter 25: Like Night and Day
Chapter 26: Night Music
Chapter 27: Inner Workings
Chapter 28: Borrowed Time
Chapter 29: Camera Obscura
Chapter 30: Beacon
Chapter 31: Leaving
Chapter 32: Small Spaces
Chapter 33: In Stitches
Chapter 34: Bowers of the Night Herons
Chapter 35: Reaching Out
Chapter 36: Dogge Alley
Chapter 37: Mist Ship
Chapter 38: Camera Obscura
Chapter 39: Dark Call
Chapter 40: Not Easy
Chapter 41: Together
Chapter 42: Letting Go
Chapter 43: Admission
Chapter 44: Last Words
Chapter 45: Composure
Chapter 46: Preparations
Chapter 47: Wake
Chapter 48: Family Business
Chapter 49: Tangled Threads
Chapter 50: We Are Travelers All
Chapter 51: Retreat
Chapter 52: Anchor
Chapter 53: Forward and Back
Chapter 54: Old School
Chapter 55: Fire Within
Chapter 56: Can’t Hide
Chapter 57: Homecoming
Chapter 58: Storm
Chapter 59: Lost and Found
Chapter 60: Street Scene
Chapter 61: Passing Bell
Acknowledgments
Time is now fleeting, the moments are passing,
Passing from you and from me.
Shadows are gathering, deathbeds are coming,
Coming for you and for me.
Come home, come home,
Ye who are weary, come home …
—from “Softly and Tenderly” (traditional hymn)
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
—from “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” Wilfred Owen
Ye mournful folk, be ye of Goode Cheere! In the comforting soyle of Lichport, your dead shalle finde peace. We shalle give every consideration to the speedy restfulness of your dead and/or departed. Let us minister to your grief in the venerated and accustomed manner of Lichport, a town well known for its verie full knowledge relating to every ancient and worshipfull ritual that shalle bring peace to all deceased or wandering folk. Walk abroad upon the peaceful lanes of Lichport and finde at every turn goode ground for your kin’s eternal rest. Here shall they be made welcome. Here shall they come to the sweete comfort that only our goodlie earth may give. Come ye! Come ye! To Fayre Lichport where the Dead and the Living find an Ende to Life’s Toil and Worldly Troubles Are No More!
—A Printed Advertisement distributed along the coastal and inland towns between 1792 and 1802 Written by Samuel Umber, Undertaker, Lichport
HE SHOULD HAVE GONE HOME.
It was after eleven, so he’d have been home already. Arguing with his wife. Lying to his son about work and the hours of his work and the kind of work he said he did back in Lichport.
Amos Umber’s lies had become habitual. He would invent something about the corpse to tell his son. That’s what Silas always wanted to know. The grisly details. What happened to them? How did they die? What did it take to put all the pieces back in place? How did he treat the flesh so the family wouldn’t be reminded there was anything other than sleep waiting for them at the end of days?
It was their little ritual. Father and son. Lie stitched to lie. An elaborate collection of details and variations to make the stories he told sound real, momentarily fascinating, but also common and forgettable. Corpses and coffins, chemical order forms, and a dark pin-striped suit. So many details it almost held together if no one pulled at too many threads. No matter that his son assumed that “Undertaker” meant “mortician.” No matter that in the Umber family an Undertaker was something else entirely.
Amos hated lying to his son, but he had made a promise to his wife. He’d sworn not to say anything about the Undertaken, or Wanderers, or the Restless. He’d sworn not to talk to Silas about his side of the family or the family business in Lichport, where they all once lived together briefly when Silas was a baby.
Most of what he told his son was a lie, but not all of it. No matter how many minute details he fabricated, he always tried to say something about the Peace. At the end of each evening’s tale, that’s what he told his son he tried to do in his work: bring peace. And at least that part, that most essential act, was true.
On nights like this one, he longed to actually live inside his story-life, just doing the easy stuff: Bag ’em. Bury ’em. Arrange the flowers, line up the chairs for the visitation, hold the hands of the bereaved. But these were not part of his calling. His work began after the funeral. Or when there hadn’t been a funeral because the body was lost and rumors
were making folk restless. Or because something so awful happened that folk couldn’t bring themselves to speak about it at all. As sure as a curse, secrets and silence brought them back and kept them wandering. If they couldn’t find the Peace … that’s when his dark and difficult work began.
He should have gone home.
But instead of driving his car on the road over the marsh, back to Saltsbridge and the other house in the suburbs, he was walking from his office down Main Street toward the water, deeper into the old neighborhoods, and singing softly to himself as familiar houses rose up against the night sky as if to greet him. He’d never once felt at home in Saltsbridge. Lichport would always be home, and he knew it.
The Morton house stood on a street of old leaning mansions above the Narrows, and it hadn’t been on his list of trouble spots. Sure, things came up unexpectedly, but not often—a quiet one might turn wakeful—but nowadays this was a rare event. That neighborhood had been peace-bound for a long time, even though the houses and the families around there were old and had troublesome pasts. Lots of the founding families had left Lichport, or died out, like the one last ancient aunt who lived with a hundred cats until someone noticed she wasn’t picking up her mail anymore.
Only the families with more dignity than money still lived near the waterfront, and the Mortons were one of those, lingering quietly among their losses, generation after generation, as the whole pile continued to fall down around them. One of the remaining Morton children had written to Amos, hastily, before abandoning the house “temporarily.” And now, very suddenly, there was talk of awful visitations and unsettled business, and no one wanted to walk past the house at night, and Lonely Folk were seen wandering at noon, even in the Narrows. Three people had heard the Sorrowsman on Dogge Alley. Two had seen him.
Rumors were running again in the streets of Lichport.
Even before he got to the house, even without seeing it, he guessed it was a box job causing the trouble, because those were the ones that came back without warning. That’s why no one used boxes or tins anymore, even though it used to be common practice, because they almost always broke open or corroded, and when it came back it was always worse than before. The last box he’d read about in the Undertaker’s ledger was used maybe two hundred years ago. Put it in the box, seal the box, bury the box somewhere deep. Under water. Under earth. Under stone. Many of the older sources suggested sinking such containers to the bottom of the Dead Sea, though this always seemed to Amos a little impractical.
But those boxes never stayed shut, and once the seal cracked it would start its long journey home one stride at a time, making a little progress every year, getting angrier and angrier along the way. And when it finally got home it would all start again, and that was a bad time for everyone. Amos had made quite a collection of boxes, keeping them away from people who might open one up out of curiosity, and occasionally, he’d try to set one right if he thought it could be done without causing any trouble.
All of the houses on this street roosted high above the sidewalk and peered down over the edge of land and out to the sea. Each was approached by long stairs that rose from below, ascending to carved front doors set deep within elaborate but crumbling porches and porticoes. As he looked up at the Morton place, he could see he was expected. Curtains, usually closed, were drawn away from the windows, and candlelight played out onto the casements.
When he arrived at the top of the stairs, he knocked once, firmly, on the faded door, its red paint peeling from the carved surface, and after several moments, opened it. No one greeted him. Perhaps the family had left the house for the night. This was often the case, and he never minded, because it was so much easier to be alone when he was at work. He looked back briefly over his shoulder before he entered the house to see the water out beyond the Narrows, where the moon cast a long warm shadow over the summer sea.
Somewhere deep inside the house a clock began to chime. Amos turned his head back toward the open door and crossed over the threshold. As he closed the door behind him, the last chime struck.
The rest was silence.
Outside, beyond the door, the moon had fled.
Shadowland was waiting.
HIS FATHER WAS COMING HOME.
Silas Umber had been waiting all day for his dad. He’d stayed home “sick” from school that day.
“Uh-huh. Sick of school, you mean! Silas, please. Just tell me you’re going to graduate,” his mother pleaded when he’d told her he was staying home.
This was their usual conversation. Silas would come up with an excuse to remain home. His mother would complain. He’d try to calm her by saying he wasn’t missing anything and that his grades were good enough for him to graduate high school, that he’d catch up when he went back. For the most part, Silas made good on such promises, though he could tell his mother was disappointed in him, but she was too tired most of the time to fight about it.
“Then run to the store for me, Si,” she said, “we’re out of a few things.”
Toward dusk Silas thought he could hear his dad’s shoes on the stones, could hear his father’s familiar step making its way up the drive and onto the porch.
It was time for their little ritual: Silas would run to get to the door before his dad could put in the key, throw the door open, and playing the annoyed parent, yell the famous lines, Well, young man? Where have you been?
Although he had not yet heard the key in the lock, Silas turned the knob and swiftly pulled the door open, but no one stood on the porch. A nightbird called from the park at the end of the street, and the smell of the distant salt marsh rolled past him into the house, but his father was nowhere to be seen.
His mother called wearily from the den, the sound of her voice accompanied by bells of ice ringing in a thick, half-empty glass.
“Si? Is that your father?”
Silas couldn’t answer her. He stood looking out past the certainty of the empty porch, but he couldn’t imagine his father standing anywhere else. It was like listening for the phone to ring, wanting it to ring so badly you convince yourself that you can feel the person on the other end of the line, feel them dialing your number, but then you wait and wait, and it never rings.
IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN NOON OR MIDNIGHT. When Silas woke each day, only the light beyond his window gave a sense of the hour. Since he now often slept in his clothes, when Silas looked in the mirror, he saw the same person as the day before, the same costume. He had become a character in a play, same story, over and over.
With each day of his father’s absence, time fell further and further away from Silas. He spent his time moving belongings across the surface of his desk, examining them. An old arrowhead, a toy gun made from PVC pipe, a book given to him by his father. Everything came from somewhere. Everything was going somewhere. Even the smallest toy was moving its way through time. Each treasured object in his collection occupied space, had weight and a story. Since his father’s absence, memories became the minutes and hours of Silas’s days.
He needed the quiet that attended memories.
Even common sounds now annoyed him terribly. The texture of certain noises became harsh, even unbearable: The awful scrape of his mother’s butter knife across the ragged surface of a slice of toast would drive him from the breakfast table back to the safety of his room.
The sound of some words—like “school”—affected him badly. Certain words were banished altogether.
Silas refused to say the word “dead” in the same sentence as his father’s name. He worried every day that he’d get the actual news that his dad had died, but he believed, absolutely, in the power of words and so, for a long time, he was careful with what he said. Growing up, he’d watched his parents throw words like rocks at each other, words like weathering tides that would tear at the shore and eat away at their lives. So he wouldn’t say his dad was dead, even when his mother told him it was possible, even probable.
Silas knew words could have power behind them. Usually it was
just a sort of bad luck. He also knew, very early on, that you could never tell when that bad luck would jump up to claim its due, so it was best to be careful. Quiet was safer. He wished his parents had been quieter when they were together. Who knew what might happen when you said something awful to someone else? It was hard to take some words back. Some words stuck and you couldn’t shake them off. Silence was better than those kinds of words. Silas had learned that lesson the hard way.
