by Berk, Ari
Silas looked at the Umber family plot across from him, hoping beyond reason that he’d see Bea waiting. The rusted arch stood empty, framing nothing but the air. Of course she’s not here, he told himself. What would any girl being doing out alone in the middle of the night? But the other noises rose up to greet him, and Silas followed the distant tune of the violin, away toward the sea and the wharf and the Narrows.
Both his mom and Uncle had told Silas to “keep clear of the Narrows.”
The Narrows was the “lower” portion of Lichport, which crawled right up and out from the sea in crooked lanes and turning alleys. “Full of low-class people,” Uncle said. “Shopkeeps and criminals,” his mother added, telling him that “people have gone missing down there.” But the Peales lived in the Narrows, and that was all Silas needed to know about it.
The Narrows were not hard to find, for most of the east/west running streets drained into the Narrows and then down into the sea. He returned to Temple Street and walked west, then walked up Coach for a couple of blocks, looked down Lower Street, and could see that it quickly plunged downward very steeply. After a foot or two of cracked pavement, the street bubbled up into a river of old polished cobblestones that ran down through all the lanes and alleys of the Narrows.
The Narrows was another world compared to “higher Lichport,” as Uncle called it, far more ancient, yet its old houses still stood proudly, cemented in place by years of salt air and dampness. It wasn’t difficult to see how the streets of the Narrows got their names. Some lanes were so thin that if you stretched out your arms, you could touch two doors on opposite sides at once. On most streets down there, the houses leaned so precipitously in toward the street that they actually met at the top and formed an arch that blocked out the sky. Where the sky did show through, Silas could see that thick, black clouds had rolled in off the sea, and the air was wet with the promise of rain.
Some of the “cottages,” as Uncle called them, had their windows open, and people were cooking late dinners for night visitors. On the air Silas could smell roasting meats, and plenty of fish, and boiled cabbage. The main streets had lit lamps, although many of the side lanes and alleys were dark, or only dimly illuminated by lanterns hung beside a cottage’s front door. Unlike the upper part of town, the Narrows were truly alive at night. Voices flew up and down the slate-clad streets, bounced off the walls, and faded as they ran farther and farther from their sources. Silas glanced down a dark lane and saw two people in long coats lock their door and raise lanterns in front of them before they walked off down an even darker passage to whoever awaited their company in the small hours before dawn.
Silas wasn’t sure what time it was, or how long he’d been wandering in the maze of the Narrows, but it didn’t trouble him; there was a well-worn homeliness about this part of Lichport he found welcoming. Eventually, he’d arrive at the docks, or he’d begin walking uphill and would soon find his way back to the upper portion of town. But he didn’t want to do either. He liked these streets, so old and unchanged, and alive. So different from the affluent neglect of “higher” Lichport. He was absolutely sure his father had walked these same lanes many times, and as he wandered them now himself, he felt somehow closer to his father.
Silas’s reverie was interrupted by a terrible, low wail. Just ahead, from the mouth of an ancient-looking alley, someone was in pain. The long, low cry was carried by a breeze that smelled like wet stone and damp earth, and cold and rotting things.
Not a woman, Silas thought, and not a very young child. But it was hard to tell because the sound had gotten very soft, as though made through a blanket or a wall or from under the ground. His mom’s murky warnings rose up fast in his mind. Murders. Muggings. Criminals. Maybe someone had been robbed, or stabbed? He was about to run when he heard the cry again, louder this time. Someone was definitely in agony.
He stepped toward the sound and into the mouth of the alleyway. The air was very cold, and Silas knew immediately that the sun never penetrated this alley or fell on its green stones. He took another step. Two. He moved slowly because he didn’t want to give up the option of turning and running away if necessary. With each step, he could feel his feet slipping on the mold-damp cobbles, but he pushed forward, still unable to see the source of the sound, which now seemed to be coming out of the very walls of the buildings around him. No lights were lit in any of the windows.
The alley turned slightly to the right, so Silas crossed to the left side to see around the turn more easily in case something lay in wait. His nerves were starting to get the better of him, so he began to quicken his pace. The ghostly cry rose in Silas’s ears, and he thought he must be very close now to its source. He checked the covered doorways and peered down side alleys but saw nothing.
Then suddenly he froze. Before him was a small cottage, very old, its windows dark and unrevealing. The lamplight from the street flowed strangely across the ancient, rippled glass. Silas blinked several times but then was sure of what he saw.
The house appeared to be more brightly lit than the other buildings around it, and its pale glow made the rest of the alley seem less substantial. Despite the cloud cover and the deep hour of night, the stones of the cottage’s walls seemed cold-lit by a moon that had swung too close to the Earth.
Silas was transfixed by the cottage door, drawn to it like an insect to a deadly flame. The strange crying had stopped. Somewhere near him he heard a voice say, “A room for the night … a room for a traveler,” followed by an odd, knowing laugh. Then the awful moaning, like some wounded animal’s last cry, rose again both behind and before him. The icy sound grew louder and more shrill until Silas could not move. His limbs became cold and still as steel. Now the cry was in him, running like a fever through his frame, and Silas mouthed words that were not his own: I am your son, I am nobody, I am your son, I am nobody …, and every part of him froze up as he felt the possessive truth of the words that pooled in his mouth. Those words became his beginning and ending, and that was all. The long cry became his name, “Nobody. Nobody,” and the light of the door and the end of everything he once knew hung there on his stilling breath.
FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS STARTED ARRIVING after ten o’clock, a little earlier than usual. Most evenings, people didn’t begin their night visiting until nearly midnight, but everyone was worried these days, with the fog as thick as it was, churning up from godforsaken deeps and rolling in sooner and sooner each night. Mrs. Kern was usually among the first of the night visitors, yet no one had seen her that evening, so Mother Peale just stole out to be sure all was well. Nothing to fret over, as it turned out. Mrs. Kern had put in a long day’s work mending nets and had gone early to bed without letting anyone know. All as it should be.
On Mother Peale’s way back home, she saw something that gave her pause. Three crows perched on the crooked spine of the old Banks place, which stood abandoned at the entrance to Dogge Alley where it emerged at Silk Street. Just three crows, cawing at one another high above the cobbles. But everything meant something, as her mother used to tell her, and Mother Peale would give a reading to anything she saw that struck her as strange. And this did.
Out from the entrance to Dogge Alley, the air blew cold, and she took this as another bad sign, so she turned down the lane, although it was her strong preference to leave this place to itself whenever possible. She had walked only a dozen paces into the alley when the cold of the stones rose up into her. A few yards in front of her, a young man stood stock-still, his face blue and frightened. Silas Umber!
She could tell at once. Imagine walking the Dogge at night! Anyone with Lichport blood in him should have more sense. Let alone an Umber! Well, raise a child in Saltsbridge and this is what comes of it. Not to mention it had been threatening to rain all day, and here he was taking a stroll in the middle of the murky night. Well, Mother Peale could forgive him that, for wasn’t she out herself on such an evening?
Silas was staring at a portion of the wall that belonged to a small r
uined cottage and did not hear the approaching sound of her feet on the cobbles, nor the sound of her stick on the stones, nor her breathing, which had become very fast and loud as it drew the sides of her nostrils in and out rapidly.
“Silas Umber!” she said very loudly with command in her voice, as one would speak to a child about to touch an exposed flame. “Silas Umber! Do you hear me, boy?”
Silas did not move. She could see his hands were trembling. She bent down and picked up a small pebble and threw it at him. It struck him on the cheek and the sting brought his eyes shut, and then he looked up. His eyes were wide and fearful, and he began to turn slowly, as if he were building up the courage to walk toward her.
“Silas, do not move! There is something between us, child, something terrible sad. Stay where you are please, Master Umber. It’ll pass in a moment. Oh, oh,” she said, her hand fluttering over her chest, “you don’t want to come close to such sadness as this …” Her voice began to break, and a distant look came down over her like a veil. “I am nobody’s son….,” she murmured below her breath.
“Ma’am?”
She moved her hand over her heart again, but this time as if brushing something away. She hummed a child’s tune and put words to it, forcing herself to smile as the words came: “Good night, sleep tight, wake up bright, in morning light, to do what’s right, with all your might …”
Silas began to smile a little at this too, not quite sure what she was saying but responding more to the sound of it, the singsong sound of her motherly voice. “What did you say?”
“Nothing. Just a little ditty to start our going home.” The smile left her face as she strode to Silas’s side and took him by the arm firmly, almost roughly, and drew him away, down and out of the alley. As they were about to emerge onto another lane, she looked back over her shoulder and said clearly and without embarrassment, “Power of heaven and power of God I have over thee. Power of heaven and God over thee.” The old woman’s face flushed, and she looked at Silas again.
“It has passed. Come with me now. Right now!”
And with that, she pulled Silas along with her out into the lamp-lit street that rose away from the sea and would soon lead them to her door.
Silas had to walk fast to keep up with her. “Who was that?” he said, as though they had only just met a neighbor in the street whose name he had suddenly forgotten.
“The Sorrowsman,” Mother Peale said, then paused and asked him softly, “What did you see, child?”
Silas became suddenly confused at the question. “I didn’t, I mean … there was something there, a sound, someone was crying. I think … I am supposed to do something.” Silas walked so slowly that he nearly brought them both to a halt. “I can remember … may we just stop for a second?”
“No, no. Let it go for now.” She pulled him along even more quickly but was excited to hear a hint of the father in the boy. You will indeed have to do something, she thought, but said to Silas, “You don’t need to think about such things yet. Thinkin’ on them brings them close in, or takes you out to them … either way, let it be until you’re ready. That back there is stuck, and if you think too long on it, you’ll get stuck too. Lost and stuck. Some folk are just lost, don’t know where they are, or how to move on. But we know where we’re going, don’t we?”
“I guess so …,” said Silas, still hazy, but then admitted, “No, actually, I don’t. Where are we going?”
“Home, boy! We are going home.”
Mother Peale led him up the turns of Stepcote Lane, which rose from the wharf, the steepest but widest street of the Narrows. Now that she had slowed her pace, she began to talk more freely, a lightness coming into her voice, despite the subject.
“Some places ain’t at all safe after dark, even for an Umber. It’s not often seen, the thing that walks in the alley, and why it’s walking so strong now, well, I might be able to guess with that rare ship coming in on the mist. Even with its rarity, we in the Narrows give Dogge Alley a wide berth by night, though during the day, skip up it or down it without a care in the world.”
“But more importantly, Master Umber”—she leaned in close, speaking very softly—“you must know that we are for you, and for you taking up the Undertaking. Most of the folk of the Narrows knew your father as a good man. I thought of him like my own son. You will always be welcome here in the Narrows, and among my kin most especially. I knew your father, Silas. And I know you.” She said this last part with an especial emphasis, and she put a long finger up against the side of her nose and tapped the end of her nose twice, and Silas understood immediately that she was familiar with aspects of his father’s life that he was only beginning to guess at.
“I don’t have your father’s book learning, but I know something of this town and the things that have happened here, and more than a little about all the folk of the Narrows, living and otherwise. You come to me with any trouble, Silas. Any trouble, you hear?”
“I understand,” Silas replied gratefully but full of confusion. Still, he was glad to know someone who knew things about his dad and didn’t go pale at the thought of being asked. Despite his experience in Dogge Alley, it felt good, walking arm in arm with Mother Peale, over the cobbled streets past some of the oldest houses and cottages he’d ever seen. The mist-strewn Narrows wound itself around him like a bandage, and for the first time since coming to Lichport, Silas felt protected.
“Mother Peale, I don’t want to appear like I don’t appreciate his, um, hospitality, but I don’t much like my uncle’s house. I think he may have had something to do with my father’s disappearance. I don’t know. There are things in that house, and my uncle is …” He found himself grasping at words, unsure of the implication of what he might say, but sure that there were so many things just wrong about his uncle and that house. “There are locked rooms and such strange noises. I was thinking about calling the police in Kingsport, maybe speaking to someone there about my dad. I think that’s where the investigator came from when my dad disappeared.”
“Silas, hear me now. No one in Kingsport cares about some Lichporter going missing. People come and go here all the time, and no one takes any notice. We are an island unto ourselves, and always have been. More importantly, we take care of our own. Good or bad, we settle our own accounts. You understand me? We don’t bring the outside in here. Never. You keep your eyes open and be wary around your uncle. And if there’s any need for justice, well, you have friends here who will stand behind you. But I’ll tell you this, the sooner you take up where your father left off, the better it’ll be for all of us.”
It was raining, the whole wet darkness of the night pouring down on Lichport. Silas and Mother Peale made their way through it, up and up the lane, moving from one overhang to another. But the rain refused to merely fall. It spilled like marbles through the lanes of the Narrows, rolling this way and that, seeming at times to splash up from the wet cobbles. Even with the rain, Silas wanted to stop and ask Mother Peale a hundred questions, but suddenly she let go of his arm and called out, “Hey there, the house!” and just ahead, a door of worm-riddled, salt-crusted wood opened before them, golden light falling out of the house and into the wet streets like broken rays of the sun on the sea at dusk.
The house was low and gabled, perhaps three hundred years old, and Silas had to stoop just slightly as he stepped across the threshold. The door opened into a room with many exposed beams that ran across the ceiling and descended vertically into the walls. These were very thick and dark, smooth with the patina of time and wax, and the paneling on the walls was a kind of satiny, lustrous grayish brown, toned by the smoke of hundreds of years of hearth fires.
“Come in, boy! Come in,” the old woman said. “Take a glass with me by the fire and warm yourself. A bad night, yes? A bad night to be wandering.” She addressed the others in the room: “And look who I’ve found, roaming our dark and lonely lanes!” At once, everyone looked up, and after only the shortest pause, began whispering excitedly
, worriedly, frantically. Caught in their many stares, Silas held his place by the door; only his eyes moved about the room.
The house’s compact exterior gave no hint of how very large it actually was. The wide main room, which also served as the kitchen and dining room, looked like a museum; there was very little of anything modern to be seen. There was a phone and a radio, but these sat on a chest that might have dated to the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Any modern objects just seemed to dissolve into the ancientness of the walls and furnishings. The room looked as it must have hundreds of years ago. Around the hearth hung iron implements, hooks and long-handled spoons, tongs, pots of all sizes, brooms, skewers, bellows, and bed warmers, and there were dozens of other objects that Silas couldn’t identify. Small lanterns hung from the ceiling beams, their jeweled panes casting angles of light in every direction. There were several large wooden hutches against the walls, with shelves full of pewter plates, cups, and pitchers of all sizes. This was a house that was accustomed to company. A long trestle table ran down the center of the room, and most of the chairs were filled by Narrows folk, some eating sooty potatoes that looked to have just come out of the fire, some drinking, all talking and whispering to one another. Silas imagined that he looked on an eternal scene, an evening caught in time that had played itself out over and over, unchanging, through hundreds of years.
He wondered if an old house like this might be haunted. How would he be able to tell? The more Silas saw of Lichport, the more he began to believe the world of the dead is our world. Or something that lurks alongside it, like the shadows cast from the common objects all around us. The dead are dark reflections of the familiar, Silas thought, insubstantial, but present and visible from the proper angle. Or maybe a ghost was only a thing that endures, like the furnishings of this room, like the chairs, or table; a little worse for wear, but still here because someone cherished it, or because it was made of such hardy stuff that time couldn’t wear it down fast enough.
