Death Watch

by Berk, Ari

  Like most of the wood on the exterior of the house, the boards over the front door were dry and partially rotted, so it took Silas only a few minutes to pull them loose. His mother had not gone into the house, unless she’d done so by another way. He thought it strange that the front door would be unlocked. Why bother boarding up a house when you hadn’t even bothered to lock the front door?

  Silas opened the door and stretched his head inside to listen and sniff the air. No noise at all. He guessed the roof was sound because the interior, so far as he could tell, seemed well preserved, although everything was covered in dust. There wasn’t much of a moldy smell, either, so there probably weren’t any broken pipes or major leaks.

  He walked inside and stood at the center of the entry hall. From there, he turned left and entered a long octagonal room with a marble fireplace on one wall. The windows, bookcases, and ornamental shelves were all flanked by flat, decorative columns that extended only a few inches from the walls. Portions of the walls had been embellished with detailed paintings of Roman urns filled with flowers. The wood floors were piled high with books and magazines, some with dates as recent as fifteen years ago. An enormous bed stood at the center of the room, surrounded by many chairs, which all faced the bed. It seemed as though, at one time, lots of people had been sitting there together, like an audience in a theater, as they looked on the bed’s occupant. The bed was long since empty, and its embroidered bedclothes hung in tatters from the canopy. It might have been the weight of them, and perhaps the work of moths, that had put tears and holes in the once-rich fabric.

  A tapping sound from the far end of the room startled him. A sparrow was sitting on the ledge of one of the windows, striking the glass with its beak. It must have flown in, maybe coming down the chimney. The little bird was beating its beak on the window, and as Silas approached, it became frantic, as it turned over and over and flapped its wings madly. He tried to open the window, but it had been sealed shut, and he didn’t feel comfortable breaking the glass. The bird fell off the ledge onto the floor, then leapt awkwardly into the air, flying from the room into the hallway.

  Silas turned back toward the entry hall to see if he could find the bird when another noise caught his attention. From the upper floor he heard a hollow scraping on the floorboards, as if a chair was being shifted perhaps. He didn’t move, hardly breathed, but heard nothing else.

  As Silas walked back into the entrance hall, he could smell turpentine or pitch. To his right, long stairs rose to the upper floors, and, his curiosity stronger than his fear, he began to walk up, careful to stay close to the wall in case any of the stairs proved weak. The turpentine smell grew stronger as he approached the second floor. He crossed the landing, and before him stood a very wide, closed door that would, Silas assumed, lead to a larger room that overlooked the front yard and Fort Street. In front of the door, several more dried-out ivy plants in ornate porcelain vases had been left on the floor.

  Quietly Silas walked to the door and turned its tarnished handle. The door swung open silently into a room flooded with light from the large windows facing the street, and for an instant, Silas couldn’t see through the brightness. The smell of turpentine burned in his nostrils, dizzying him.

  As his eyes grew accustomed to the light, Silas instantly froze in the doorway, seeing what looked to be a corpse positioned upright in a chair by the window. His eyes quickly flashed about the room, but he couldn’t focus on anything except the body in the chair. It was clothed in a stained dark suit, a long morning coat, and a loose cravat. There were several large, sealed Chinese vases near the corpse, and the smell of honey and pitch were even more pervasive in the room than they had been on the upper landing.

  Without moving from the doorway, Silas saw that the corpse was not rotten but desiccated, like the dried meats that graced his uncle’s dinner table. And it was swollen in places, its arms seeming especially strong, with thick, long nails on each finger of its large hands. Its skin was discolored, very dark in patches, almost black on the neck and bottom of the jaw and about the wrists and lower portion of the hands.

  Silas had just begun to shift his attention to the room when very slowly, almost mechanically, the corpse turned its upper torso and raised its arm to point at Silas in the doorway. He felt his heart jump. With a slightly jerky motion, as if its head had previously been stuck looking forward out the window, the corpse continued to turn its head toward its guest and opened its mouth; opening and closing it several times, as if it were testing the muscles, preparing them to speak.

  Silas looked on, wide-eyed. It was just like the night he’d watched the zombie film on TV. He couldn’t run or speak or move or think of what to do other than not to blink for fear the corpse would—in that split second—rise out of its chair and take a step toward him.

  The corpse made a long, low hiss, an exhalation of breath from windpipes long sealed, now opening again to air. The voice, as it emerged, was somber and deep, but beneath it was a strange sound, a kind of rattling in its chest, as though the walls of its lungs were desperately clapping to get attention. Slowly, again and again, it drew breath into itself, and Silas could see its chest rise and fall. Then it spoke.

  “Name?” it rasped.

  Silas couldn’t make his mouth work.

  Then, slower and louder, as if it thought Silas hadn’t heard it or perhaps spoke another language, it said, “What … is … your … name?”

  Fear had a hold on Silas, and he was breathing so fast he thought if he didn’t start running, he would pass out, but his legs would not obey him, so he stood there, fear-frozen just outside the door, staring and panting, the corpse’s question ringing in his ears. After a moment of trying to control his breathing, Silas managed to whisper his name so softly he could barely hear himself say it.

  The corpse made a throat-clearing sound and began to speak with more clarity and not quite as slowly. Its tone was refined, well polished if a bit rusty around the edges, bearing the confidence of one who was used to being obeyed.

  “‘Silas’ is not a Lichport name. I don’t recall any Silases in Lichport. What were your grandparents’ names? On what street did they reside?”

  Silas opened his mouth, but no words came.

  “Well?” the corpse demanded.

  “Um—,” Silas tried to form the words. “Silas is my first name, sir. My last name is Umber.” His voice cracked as he spoke.

  Was the corpse smiling now? Was the tanned skin of its face stretching into a grin?

  “Now that is a name I know. We’re kin, child! Come closer! Your mother’s father’s father invites you in!”

  Silas looked about the room as he entered, calmed only somewhat by the corpse’s hoarse but kindly and familiar tone. The rooms downstairs had once been well-appointed, but this was a room in which someone with money had spent a lot of time. Even with the dry rot and falling plaster, Silas could see that it had once been very fine. The room was wide and high-ceilinged and had perhaps been the house’s best bedroom, or maybe a family gathering place away from the busier ground floor. Some of the walls had been painted with verdigris foliage, and edges of the ceilings were adorned with carved moldings. Moth-eaten dark velvet curtains hung, most still drawn back from the windows, the rest mimicking the starry night sky with the light shining through their many holes. There were mahogany chairs placed about the room, and like the chamber downstairs, many books had been piled about on small tables. Tarnished silver urns adorned both ends of the marble mantel.

  Silas looked back at the corpse of his great-grandfather in its large, leather upholstered chair, mustered up enough courage, and said, “Sir? May I ask … when did you—I mean, what are you—Sorry! I mean, are you … are you … dead?”

  “You are suggesting I am dead?” The corpse raised his arm and pointed at Silas in mock recrimination. “Yet here we are speaking to each other. I would suggest, then, that I am not dead, although I admit, I have looked better.”

  Silas looked
at the animated corpse, its tight skin pulled thin over the skull, the finger bone pushing through the leather flesh of the hands, the vacant corpse-stare.

  “Then, well, why aren’t, I mean … how do you …” Silas stammered toward a question but couldn’t find one that didn’t seem rude.

  “It’s a joke, child! Of course I’m dead. Don’t I look dead?”

  “Well, I would say yes, you do look a little … dead,” Silas answered, aware of how ridiculous he must sound.

  “Indeed I do look ‘a little dead,’ and that is because I am, in fact, deceased. Oh, you should have seen folks when I died but kept going about my business. I was not the first person in town to do that, not even the first on this street, but it always takes people by surprise. People assume that after a funeral, you will be quiet, that the dead will rest in peace. I am afraid I may have disappointed them in that regard. At first, some people just kept bringing casseroles, like the wake had never ended. They were clearly unsure of the protocol when a person just up and says ‘no’ to death. Still, for a while, they accommodated my … eccentricities. See that album over there?” The corpse pointed. “Please, feel free.”

  A photo album rested on a small table near his great-grandfather, thick with captured moments out of the family’s past. Most were in black and white; a few near the end were in color.

  “I think, for a time, it was even considered fashionable when the old pater stuck around. It seemed to bespeak a certain nobility. I must say, I am inclined to agree. So at first, when the heads of the some of better households remained beyond their allotted hour, our families obliged us, as you can see.”

  In the photographs, Silas saw a bizarre collection of images. The usual sorts of pictures taken at family gatherings—Christmas, Easter, even the old Lichport holidays like Revolution Day—but in all of them, there was the corpse with the family posed around him. A Revolution Day summer party: a family picnicking in their yard, striped hats with stars, sitting on blankets, and next to the blanket, a chair with a smiling corpse dressed in a dark suit. Children made faces behind its back. Just another member of the family. In many of the photographs, the corpse’s eyes were open and so was his mouth, clearly caught by the camera in mid-sentence. People seemed to be pleased enough at his presence, although at every holiday gathering, Silas noticed, there was one little girl in the pictures who always looked upset when she was set to pose next to the corpse. In several of the pictures, she was crying and reaching out in the opposite direction of the corpse to someone standing just out of frame.

  “For a long time, we just continued as we always had, but then, and who knows why, our families seemed less and less inclined to care for their ancestors. Perhaps our presence bothered the children, or maybe they wanted to get on with their own lives, who can say? Some just boarded us up inside our houses. Others began their separations more delicately with the tomb houses. You’ll see them behind certain of the homes on this street. Elaborate stone tombs, built to be miniatures of the main houses. The family would just take their dead but slow-departing beloved and move them in with all their favorite belongings, and if lucky, the old corpse might be let out for one or two holidays a year, maybe his birthday.”

  Silas was looking at the photos near the end of the album. The scared little girl was now a young woman, and he could see by her face, by her frown, that she was his mother. The last pictures seemed to chronicle the family packing, preparing to move out of the house in which Silas was now standing. Several images showed people hugging the corpse, saying their good-byes, and always in the background, there was his mother, standing as far away from her grandfather as she could.

  As if he knew what Silas was looking at, his great-grandfather said, “Can you imagine? Your family leaving you in your house to rot? Just one day telling you, ‘We’re moving on, You have everything you need, Gran? Dad, you gonna be okay?’ And then they board up the front door and never come back. There is very little dignity left in you when your kin turn their backs while you can still see them go. To be fair, some just moved camp. Over to the new houses on the south side of town, facing the water; or they built large homes on Prince Street or Garden. Some would come back every now and then, for birthdays, you know. Most just left town. Those never came back.

  “After the families left, other people began to come. Strangers mostly. Rather like pilgrims. They’d come to touch the hand of a corpse. That’s so old-timey, don’t you think? Used to be believed, so I learned, that to touch the hand of a corpse brought good luck and could heal many afflictions. People used to come once or twice a week. I should have hung out a sign and charged a fee.

  “And let me assure you, my boy, this is not by any means a Lichport-only phenomenon, though, generally speaking, it happens only in the best families. What do you think all those royal mummies are in Egypt? I’ll bet they started out just like me. Made a little fortune all their own, nice things around them, a fine home. Who wants to up and leave all that behind after you spend a lifetime winning it from the world? I’ll bet you a hundred dollars some of those ‘mummies’ locked up in their tombs or in museums could speak if they wanted to. Bet they are still dreaming away, even now, in their bodies. Wouldn’t knowing that wake people up to their obligations!”

  “Obligations to what?” Silas asked. “What do you mean? If someone’s dead, what else are people supposed to do for them?”

  “I mean: Families don’t die, Silas. I mean: We have obligations to our kin, to our ancestors, whether they are with us bodily to remind us or not. We don’t just stop at our skin. We go way back. Every one of us. I have had a bit of time to think about this, and the new fashion for abandoning ancestors troubles me, even though I’m not really part of the world anymore and, obviously, can’t really be objective. Silas, a question?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Have you ever seen anyone like me before today?”

  “No, sir. I most certainly have not.”

  “What do you make of this?” The corpse gestured to himself. “You seem to have inherited the brains from our side of the family, and goodness knows your father is a learned man regarding such arcane matters. Have you come across this sort of thing much in your literary adventures? Or has your father spoken of it to you? ‘Restless,’ we’re sometimes called, but the word ‘Restless’ has never sat well with me, and I’d like to know what else people in my particular situation might have been called.”

  “I think,” said Silas, hoping this would be taken the right way, “I think you are what used to be called a revenant.”

  “That’s not some kind of zombie, is it? I am mortified by such indelicate associations.”

  “No. No. Not at all. A revenant is just a person who’s died, but who hangs around for a while, that’s all. I think there are other names in other places. I read about these things in ancient Greece called the ataphoi, and it just means people not buried in their ancestral tombs.”

  “Were they dangerous?”

  “I think so,” Silas admitted, self-conscious now for mentioning it.

  “Perhaps revenant is more appropriate then.”

  “Yeah, those are more like people—well, they are people, some nice, some not so nice, but they just won’t lie down when they die.”

  “Yes, that sounds right.”

  Silas was utterly riveted watching and hearing his great-grandfather speak, but he couldn’t help thinking, as he looked at the corpse, wouldn’t death be better than what he saw before him? Continuation, yes, but in this way? He had to ask:

  “I can see how it would be very lonely … are you happy like this? Happy to continue in this way for as long as it lasts? Other than the family not coming around anymore, is there anything that troubles you? Does it, well, does it hurt?”

  “No, it doesn’t hurt, but there are some problems, I’ve found. For one thing, I don’t sleep anymore. That’s the only thing that troubles me, really. It’s all one long day now. Drowsy dreaming and wide-eyed awake, one and the sam
e. I look out the window some days and see my children come up the street toward the house, toward my steps, though they’ve both been gone for a while now. Other days, I see folks I don’t recognize coming and going so much faster than before, so I know days have passed, passed me right by because I am not moving. Not really.”

  “And my vision and hearing have changed. Seeing is different now. When I focus on something, there is a sort of shift, and it’s like I’m both here and there, subject and object, all at once. I see something, but can very keenly see and feel myself seeing it. Maybe that’s death encroaching, the moment—for me, a long one—where one distinct being becomes part of everything it’s ever known, everything it’s seen, smelled, experienced. Also, I don’t get around much anymore, and I used to enjoy a walk after supper. Sometimes I hear things. Voices. And I know they are not from anything around me in this world. I think that’s because I have one foot here and another there, so I can hear things in both.”

  All the fear had left him, and Silas’s heart had grown very tender toward the old man. He was nodding in understanding all the while as his great-grandfather spoke to him.

  “I know what you mean,” Silas said. “I have trouble sleeping sometimes too, these days. And when I do sleep, I have strange dreams.”

  “About your father?” his great-grandfather asked.

  Silas nodded at the directness and accuracy of his great-grandfather’s question. “Why do you ask that?”

  “Because no one comes here unless they’re looking for something, because the dead sometimes visit the living in dreams, and because we’re family, and so I can hear a little of your heart and can tell that an absence has broken it.”

  “Yes, I’ve been dreaming of him a lot lately, although in one particular dream, everyone was there but him. I can’t stop thinking about him, because I don’t know where he is.”