Death Watch

by Berk, Ari

  And here he was again. But at least now she could remember his name: Silas. Grown and fine and handsome. Like always. She had waited, and at last he’d come.

  Then, before she knew it, Beatrice was standing by the edge of the millpond, her feet where Silas’s feet had made impressions in the wet earth. In her memory, she watched Silas walk away. When was that now? Then she thought of what might come next. Tomorrow night. Or the next, she thought. We must be careful. Love is fragile and rare and cannot live long in open air. She remembered her father berating her, her brothers’ harsh words the last time they discovered she had a paramour. What was it they said? They were always looking down at her. She remembered being frightened, but now, it all seemed so very far off. Never mind. So long ago. Let the past fall away, fall away, fall away from me….

  And it did.

  Oh, Silas! she thought. Here you are! Our time has come.

  It was all so familiar now, so right. They would meet here, in the quiet solace below the trees, though many of the trees she once knew were gone. But he was here. He was here. Silas. And she would be with him. She was still mostly cold. She turned away from the water. The fog was receding, and she could clearly see the path to town.

  Silas’s name was everything, and now she could remember almost nothing of the past. Now was all she had. Suddenly she could no longer recall that it always began this way. Each and every time, no different. And always the same ending. By the time she took her first step toward town and away from the millpond, she had forgotten the awful ending to her own story entirely.

  SILAS HADN’T SEEN MUCH during his post-supper pacing on Temple Street last night. It already was late when he departed the dining room. He’d left the table angry, storming out of the house without his coat, so he’d returned not long after, once the cold, hard rain began. The ground floor was quiet when he returned, though he heard people moving about above. Later, from his room, after he thought everyone had gone to bed, Silas heard the sound of running on the stairs, then heard the front door open again, and later still, he heard Uncle muttering to himself as he paced the long upstairs gallery. Boards creaked. The house and its occupants were restless.

  Silas awakened early the next morning with a strong desire to see more of Lichport. The street was quiet in the pale light and he was filled with nervous excitement as he stepped from the porch and set off to walk the town. Although he was only part-way down Temple Street, he already felt more alive, more himself with each step.

  He was fascinated by the variety of the houses, the way they all seemed to come from different periods. In Saltsbridge, everything had looked new and had to be kept that way: brightly lit streets and malls, freshly painted houses built out of things that didn’t decay, and they all looked the same, with residents who worked hard to keep them looking pristine, with carefully maintained lawns and tightly pruned trees. “Candyland,” he had called it.

  Here in Lichport, everything appeared neglected, forgotten, but still somehow sort of wonderful.

  When he looked down Garden Street, Silas saw tall, high-peaked houses, each trying to outdo its neighbors. Farther on, there were rambling mansions that overlooked the sea, built up over the years by successive generations. There were entire homes covered in ivy. Many houses had broken windows, and shards of glass remaining in their window frames caught the light and glinted against the blackness behind them. Occasionally he’d hear muffled noises from inside one of the houses or a hidden garden, so he knew that even some of the most dilapidated houses were still occupied. Who would live in houses like that, with the whole place falling down around them? Silas wondered. People with secrets, he told himself.

  On Lichport’s streets, the trees were very large and strangely shaped, and he guessed that most had been planted well over a hundred years ago. Most looked as though they had not been pruned in decades, their wildly growing branches reaching higher than the houses. The trees had dropped many limbs—every street was covered with them, and along some of the streets, the branches formed large, brittle hedgerows along the curbs.

  Most of the houses, small and large, had what Silas thought of as the “Lichport lean,” some oddness of angle, or curvature perhaps caused by settling, that made the neighborhoods look as though they were drawn by children. Many buildings were boarded up; there were several whole streets like that. Fine high houses with their front doors covered over with planks.

  On the north end of town, at the entrance to Fort Street, beyond the overgrown hedges, the upper windows of the large houses were dark eyes that looked out over the street. Strange, Silas noticed, that none of the windows on that street had been broken as was the case with the other abandoned homes. He felt uneasy here. Watched. He turned around and went back the way he had come.

  All over town, through the overgrown bushes and tall weeds, he began to notice the cemeteries. At nearly every turn of the various streets, a portion of a cemetery could be seen. Practically every corner or lane had some plot with a family name, and as Silas approached the end of Fairwell Street, which dominated the southern end of Lichport, there lay before him what appeared to be a vast necropolis.

  At the gates of Newfield Cemetery, an enormous lion stood guard, fashioned out of bronze. Silas climbed up the body and sat between its paws. The warm, smooth bronze against his back was so comfortable that for the first time since arriving in Lichport, he felt the tension in his shoulders unknit. From the lion’s view, he stood up and looked into the cemetery, where the crowded plots of Newfield formed another city entirely: a vast city of the dead.

  Silas climbed down from the lion and walked up to the far end of Fairwell, toward the town’s center again. At the corner of Fairwell and Main, he saw a large, handsome Victorian building with a warehouse attached and a sign that read:

  BOWE’S MORTUARY EMPORIUM

  MR. EDWARD BOWE, MORTICIAN AND PROPRIETOR

  The emporium appeared to have been closed a long time, lock rusted, boards across the door, filthy windows, everything sealed up. Silas wondered if his dad had been associated with it, and the more he thought about it, the more confused he became, because he thought Amos would have been the “Mortician and Proprietor.”

  The mortuary emporium was attached to a large house that was itself connected to a second sizable Victorian dwelling. Silas walked through the park between Garden and Main, around the back of the houses attached to the emporium. As he got closer to the gate that ran around the property, he could hear bees, some of which buzzed past him. He figured that he must be near a hive. As he tried to find a gap in the foliage, Silas thought he heard a voice say his name. As far as he knew, he didn’t know anyone else here, so he shrugged it off.

  He walked quickly away from the fence and went up Coach Street, which ran alongside the other boundary of the large, gated property. He turned again onto Main. A few old cars drove back and forth, and a truck piled high with boxes turned right on Coach Street and headed back the way he’d come, likely toward Lichport’s only real grocery store. He passed high yew trees on his right, and then the front of a fine old house rose up alongside him, and as he walked by, he heard the voice again, which seemed to call from behind a high gate covered with vines and climbing roses.

  “Silas Umber!” the voice called, laughing. “Don’t you dare walk off again!”

  A little door in the gate swung open, and hesitantly Silas walked through it and into the garden. A woman held it open as he entered, and then closed and locked it behind him. Though her gray hair was tucked up under her hat, Silas thought she might be in her late sixties. She wore a long sundress and a wide-brimmed straw hat, and there was a basket of cuttings at her feet. Her gloves and apron were covered with dirt. She had a kind, inviting face, and although he’d never been too willing to trust anyone right off, he was drawn in by her voice. She had enough joyful runes lining her face that Silas knew she was a kind and good-natured woman, that she smiled and laughed a lot. Worry can pull a person’s face into a mask of anxious l
ines, and he could tell she’d had some of that, but even worried folks could laugh.

  “Silas, I am Mrs. Bowe, and although I have not seen him in over a year, I am your father’s good friend.”

  The fact that she used the present tense when she referred to his father made him like her immediately.

  “I am so happy to see you, though I must tell you, I am concerned about the company you’ve been keeping,” she said, chiding him in a joking tone, and he knew at once that she bore his uncle little affection.

  Silas turned to look more closely at the garden, which was beautifully kept, just a little wild around the edges, especially in the corner, where a large crypt stood with its green metal doors open.

  “The women of my family are all buried there,” Mrs. Bowe told him, as she followed his gaze.

  “Where are the men?” he asked.

  “Elsewhere.”

  Silas moved closer to the crypt, but a rising buzz from inside halted his progress.

  “The crypt is also a hive, so you’ll have to ask the bees’ permission before crossing the threshold, I’m afraid.”

  “It’s okay,” Silas replied, as he retreated a few steps back. “I don’t want to bother them.”

  Then, very suddenly, Mrs. Bowe asked, “Silas, I wonder if you wouldn’t like to see the inside of the house now?”

  “Um, okay, sure, if you want to show me your home, that’s very kind. Maybe I could trouble you for a glass of water? I’ve been walking for a while.”

  “Oh, I don’t mean my home, I was referring to your father’s. Though you are welcome to tour them both if you like. Your father and I were very close, and nothing would please me more than to have Amos Umber’s son as a guest in my house.”

  His father’s house. His father stayed here. His heart began to beat as if, when he opened the door, his father might be standing inside, just taking a rest from the day’s bright sun. He knew that was not going to happen, but his blood was pounding through him, making him nervous and anxious both.

  “Yes! Oh, yes, please!” he said to Mrs. Bowe, who had already removed her dirty gloves and apron and was opening the back door.

  “It’ll be easier going in through my house than going all the way around the front. Our homes are connected, you see. You didn’t know your father lived here, did you?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Well then, here’s another surprise. This won’t be the first time you’ve been in these houses. You were born here.”

  Silas didn’t speak, and he felt embarrassed that Mrs. Bowe could see he was becoming emotional. He wasn’t crying yet, but his hands were shaking badly and he felt close to tears. She put her hands on his shoulders and said, “It’s all right, Silas. This house has waited a long time to see you again. I think it’s okay to feel a little … overcome.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you,” said Silas, his voice breaking.

  She opened a door leading to a hallway with another door at the far end. “That door will let you into your father’s house. I think it might be best if you see it first by yourself. This is your father’s place, Silas. Part of him is still here, waiting for you. You go on in. And Silas, dear? Everything in there is yours. Everything. You take anything you want, you understand? Anything. Your father’s study is just across the hall on the ground floor through the big open doors. Perhaps today, you may just wish to remain on the ground floor. I’m not really sure about the condition of the upper rooms. I’ll be right here if you need anything. You just come back here to me when you’re done, or give a call and I’ll come to you, all right, dear?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Silas whispered. He walked down the hall toward the closed door, paused only for a moment, then reached out, turned the bronze doorknob, and opened it.

  Right away, Silas could smell his dad. A moldy smell. Not rotten or bad, just the smell of someone who read old books and kept a lot of them around and spent his time in old places. The smell of dust. The smell of the past after it had been put up on a shelf and left to sit for a while. If it were a cologne, it would be called Cherished Neglect. That’s what his dad smelled like. Old silver, vellum pages and leather bindings, like a two-hundred-year-old suit of clothes from the attic, like a stack of magazines stored in a basement, like the lining of a steamer trunk that had been around the world, or a blazer that hasn’t been laundered in a few years. That much of his father at least was still here.

  The quiet reminded him of his dad too.

  The waiting stillness of his father’s house was so very different from the captive, subdued quiet of Uncle’s. That was the quiet of a place holding its breath. Here was the stillness of a home at ease with itself. He felt safe here, surrounded by his dad’s dusty things. Comforted by the presiding peace of this house, he realized that at Uncle’s, he might always be a little on edge, even when reading or looking over the treasures in Uncle’s wonderful collections. Maybe that would pass in time.

  His father’s large study was on the ground floor of the house. Although it hadn’t been kept up well or painted in a long time, there were lots of carved details in the house’s architecture that gave the place a feeling of history. Carvings adorned the tops of the doorways, and many of the walls were covered in faded wood paneling.

  One entire wall was covered with high bookshelves that spilled over with volumes of every size. Great folios lay on their sides toward the bottom, and right up to the ceiling were shelf after shelf of leather-bound books, vellum-bound manuscripts, nineteenth-century volumes of folklore, whole runs of journals. He passed his hands over some of the fine embossed bindings as he thought, I am a book also, words and thoughts and stories held together by flesh. We open and close ourselves to the world. We are read by others or put away by them. We wait to be seen, sitting quietly on shelves for someone to bother having a look inside us. He drew one of the early tomes from the shelf and read its title page, Anatomy of Melancholy.

  “Mine or his?” muttered Silas to himself as he returned the book to the shelf.

  It looked like nothing had been put away or straightened up, so Silas guessed all was as it had been the night Amos disappeared. When he looked around the study, he could almost see his dad sitting at the desk. His jacket was there, hanging from the back of the chair. He wouldn’t have needed it that night, as the summer had been warm. Silas took the jacket off the chair and held it up. He brought it to his nose and smelled it. He put it on, slowly, first one arm and then the other. It was worn and comfortable and it smelled like his dad. Book mold and wood grain and something of the sea.

  One side of the jacket hung a little lower than the other, and when he looked in the pocket, Silas found his dad’s pocket watch. He had seen the watch only a few times before; his dad never took it out in public. It was silver, fashioned in the shape of a skull, very realistic, with great attention to detail. The suture lines on the top of the skull were so carefully engraved. Despite its small size, it felt heavy in the hand. The lower jaw could be unlatched and when open, the watch mechanism, face, and dial—built into the upper part of the skull—could be read. Silas remembered his dad showing it to him the night of his grandfather’s funeral.

  Silas had not thought about his grandfather for some time, but now, clear as a picture on a screen, he could see him in his memory, just as he did on the day of the funeral. That day was the first and only memory Silas had of his grandfather, although surely they’d seen each other when Silas was an infant, before his mother and father moved from Lichport. At the funeral, Silas had to stand on his toes to look over the edge of the coffin and see his grandfather. Eyes closed. Skin looking like a doll’s, painted and still.

  A moment later, returning to his seat with his father, Silas saw his grandfather again.

  Silas wasn’t sure if that was the first time he saw a real ghost, but it was the earliest and best memory he had. Maybe it had only seemed true because his father had believed him. Maybe, looking back, it was just that Silas had always believed in ghosts, as long
as he could remember, even before his father had told him they were real and his mother made his father start sleeping on the couch. Silas had looked up again from his chair and was staring at the coffin when his grandfather stepped into the air from somewhere behind the open lid.

  Silas glanced down, then quickly back up, and the figure was growing clearer with each breath he took. It stood very still, and the space around it seemed blurred, as if the air was a pane of smudged glass. The ghost looked right at Silas and smiled. Then it put its forefinger to its lips and mouthed the words, Don’t tell.

  When the funeral service was over, he told his mom about the ghost, and she slapped him. Right there in front of everyone in the church, and without even a moment’s hesitation. Silas’s eyes welled up, but he didn’t start crying until they were outside in the car. It was his only trip to Lichport, and he hardly saw any of it, because his mother wanted to pay her respects only briefly at the Umber home and then return to Saltsbridge as quickly as possible.