Death Watch

by Berk, Ari

  But here, in his house, everything was welcome. Anything that took his father’s interest, or inspired him, or formed a portion of his work; all had been given sanctuary. The room was lined with bookshelves that spilled their contents onto the floor, where more books were stacked unevenly.

  On one wall, a map of the town hung barely visible beneath the numerous newspaper cuttings that had been taped or pinned to it. Amos’s handwriting seemed to be on everything: map, scraps, articles, notes. His dad loved music, and there were shelves filled with sheet music and old records. On a small wooden music stand near the desk was the sheet music of a lullaby, and Silas read the words, the slow descending tune flooding into his mind like a rushing tide. His dad had sung him this song when he was young, but Silas hadn’t remembered it in a long time.

  Hush-a-bye, little ones, aye, aye;

  Hush-a-bye, little ones, aye.

  The night birds are singing,

  The bells are ringing

  And it’s time for you now to fly,

  Little birds,

  It’s time for you now to fly.

  Fly with me, fly with me, aye, aye;

  Fly with me, little birds, aye;

  Your mothers are waiting,

  For ages awaiting

  Little birds to their waiting arms fly!

  Silas sat down at the desk and took out his father’s pocket watch, running his thumb around the smooth silver dome of the skull. He didn’t care to know the time, it just felt good to hold it and hear it softly ticking in his hand. He had begun humming the tune of the lullaby without even realizing it. Thoughts of Uncle’s house and his mother and worries of what next began to quiet below the tune of the song and the ticking of the watch.

  Here, in this room, even the sharp edge of his dad’s absence softened, lulling him, leaving him numb but temporarily happy in the company of his father’s possessions. Part of Silas knew this was only an illusion of happiness, but for a moment, the bigger part of him didn’t care. He was sitting at his father’s desk, and in his hand was his father’s pocket watch. All around him were his father’s things. He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes, breathing in deeply.

  Mrs. Bowe quietly left Silas to his reverie. As she walked back down the corridor connecting his house and hers, she thought, This is too much for a young man, too much change at once, and all of it bad. Oh, Amos! You’ve told him so little. Left it to me, eh? Left it all to me? Well, so be it. I’ll do what I can for him. But Amos, I will try to keep him from the worst of what you’ve left him. Holy Mother, I will!

  Mrs. Bowe opened the door at her end of the corridor and gently closed it after her. And for the first time since Amos had disappeared, she didn’t lock it.

  MUSIC PLAYED AGAIN NEXT DOOR, softly drifting through the walls, under the door, and was now taking a turn about the lower rooms of Silas’s house, distracting him.

  He was sitting at his father’s desk, writing down some thoughts in a small empty diary he’d found in the drawer. On the desktop was an old nib pen, worn, smooth-handled—obviously a favorite of his father. The ink bottle was still mostly full, so he began using his dad’s pen to write. At first he found it awkward, stopping, dipping the pen, tapping it on the lip of the bottle to remove the excess ink, then returning to the paper. But as he did this over and over, he warmed to the ritual of it, and the pauses took on a rhythm. Think. Write. Pause. Think. Write. Pause. Over and over and even the scratching sound of the pen on the rough paper he used became musical.

  But then the other music started, and everything fell out of tune.

  Too distracted now to write, he put the end of the pen into a glass of water to clean the nib. He swirled it around and around, and the ink still on the pen began to spiral in darkening clouds. He took the pen out and watched how the ink revealed invisible currents and eddies in the once clear water. He wondered if the air around him was also filled with invisible things, imperceptible patterns, invisible spirits moving alongside him, stirred up by every little movement and action like the layers of dust in the house when he walked by.

  But again, his thoughts were interrupted by the soft, intruding tune.

  He’d been at his father’s house for over a week, and every night it was the same. Just after eleven o’clock the music would start, and he could hear it, coming down the corridor between houses, through the walls. Sometimes the words of the song would rise up loud enough that he could hear them, too. It might begin with “Sentimental Journey.” But the second song—sometimes played over and over—was always “Love’s Old Sweet Song.” When it began, that was when the dancing started.

  Once in the dear dead days beyond recall,

  When on the world the mists began to fall,

  Out of the dreams that rose in happy throng

  Low to our hearts love sang an old sweet song;

  And in the dusk where fell the firelight gleam,

  Softly it wove itself into our dream …

  If he listened closely, he could hear slow feet moving about the floor and the boards creaking all along the length of the room. The words from last night’s dance still turned in his head….

  Even today we hear love’s song of yore,

  Deep in our hearts it dwells forevermore.

  Footsteps may falter, weary grow the way,

  Still we can hear it at the close of day.

  So till the end, when life’s dim shadows fall,

  Love will be found the sweetest song of all …

  Every night, music and the sound of dancing. None of this seemed to fit with his image of Mrs. Bowe, although he hadn’t known her very long. As far as Silas knew, no one else ever visited Mrs. Bowe at the house, and he’d never heard anyone even knock on her door after dark. So who was she dancing with so late at night? He didn’t like eavesdropping. None of my business, he thought. But the whole affair unsettled him, and he longed to find out what was going on.

  Mrs. Bowe didn’t lock the door on her side of the corridor between their houses now, and she had told Silas that he was always welcome to come through. But the idea of walking into Mrs. Bowe’s house so late felt like an intrusion, even though he couldn’t imagine her having a private life. She never left the house except to work in the garden. His mind made up, Silas walked toward the door, slowly turned the knob, and pushed it open halfway. The music got louder, and he could smell candles burning. He took one careful step at a time, trying to be quiet. He passed the service porch, then walked more quickly as he came through to her kitchen. Standing where he’d eaten breakfast every day that week, he could hear the music was coming from the front entrance hall, or maybe the parlor.

  He continued, barely breathing, into the dining room and came to a stop in the doorway that led into the front hall. There the air turned suddenly cold, and without thinking he pulled the collar up on his jacket as though there were a wind blowing inside the house.

  Silas wondered if she was maybe a little crazy, mad in that quaint way old women who live alone sometimes are. She didn’t own any cats, so Silas had never thought so before, but what he saw before him made him rethink his first impression. There was Mrs. Bowe, and she was dancing across the polished wood floors of her entry hall. She went round and round in a circle, her arms up at odd angles, as if holding on to something. A lonely eccentric, Silas thought. Just a little off from spending so much time by herself. There’s nothing wrong with dancing with yourself. Nothing wrong with it at all. But the cold air was unusual, since her house was always so warm, and the way she held her arms, and the smile on her face … as though someone else was dancing with her. That thought scared him. He knew he’d interrupted something very personal and very strange.

  There was something else in the room. Silas could feel it as a kind of heaviness in his stomach and limbs. The full shame of his intrusion tightened his chest and he wanted nothing more than to leave, but his nerves had gotten the best of him, and he couldn’t seem to remember how to take a step backward.

 
; Cold air and fear had him now. He couldn’t look away as Mrs. Bowe circled the room, and he couldn’t think of anything to do but put his hands in his pockets, perhaps to warm them, perhaps to feel less exposed. His hand was glad to find the distraction of his father’s silver watch. He turned it over and over nervously in his hand, more and more quickly, like a frightened priest or a nun running their fingers over a rosary in frantic meditation. He made little circles with his thumb around and around the smooth top of the silver skull until suddenly the catch opened, and the jaw of the skull dropped, exposing the dial. His thumb pressed in fast to explore the new surface, pushed against the dial, and stopped the hands of the clock.

  Everything in the room changed as a mist rose from between the floorboards.

  It felt to Silas like the world had been turned upside down. Or like he was riding a high-speed elevator that was arriving at its floor and his stomach was a few seconds behind his head. It felt as though there was no longer any gravity, and he didn’t know if he was floating or falling. He could not speak, could not open his mouth. The stars had stopped turning. The earth and all about him were still, and nausea rose up in him and flooded his guts. He could not move, and his limbs felt as though they had been poured full of cement.

  Then things tilted, just slightly, and the room grew brighter and the cold air fell away from him. Each candle in the room became a beacon, and he squinted at their light. The gray mist that had washed the room a moment ago was gone; indeed the details of the room were so flooded with light that all he could see with any clarity was Mrs. Bowe dancing with a tall man who looked directly at her and at nothing else in the room.

  Silas recognized the dancing man from all the pictures in her house. There could be no mistaking him, although he seemed younger than he was in the most recent pictures Mrs. Bowe had shown him. This was her lover, dead since the war. Even without the photos, Silas could tell by the way Mrs. Bowe looked at him that she loved him, and that her love for him had not lessened in the many years since his death.

  And in that instant, Silas realized he was looking at a ghost.

  He’d seen a shadow of his grandfather at his long-ago funeral, but the difference between what a child remembers and what a man sees can be shocking. There was a ghost dancing in the room before him, and he could see it plainly. Silas clenched his eyes shut and then opened them. The ghost remained. Not an illusion or a trick of the light. A spirit of the dead was present in the room, and as Silas stared at it, unable to look away, he felt the walls crumble around the world he knew. Here was something he could see with his eyes. Not an odd noise, or the memory of a bad dream hanging in the air upon waking. The ghost not only moved through the room, his presence filled it and acted on someone else Silas could see, on another living person. Now he knew the stories he’d read were true, and the thought of an invisible world existing alongside his own both thrilled and terrified him. And somewhere, buried away deep inside him, a hidden chamber of his heart opened. Silas felt an odd hopefulness, because even if his father was dead, he might still be found.

  But the fluid dance of Mrs. Bowe and the ghost was intoxicating to watch, even though it pushed goose bumps up through his skin. Silas was lost in their dance. He was getting very cold, but he hardly noticed. He could not look away. Nothing moved. The world held its breath as they held each other and slowly waltzed around the living room.

  As they continued to turn about the room arm in arm, Mrs. Bowe was looking only at her man’s face, as if nothing else in the world existed. But then the ghost’s head snapped back to look over his shoulder at Silas, keeping his eyes on him, a fixed point, although the ghost continued to move about the room to the music. Then, looking again on his beloved, the ghost brought their dance to a halt and slowly raised his hand, pointing to the doorway where Silas stood frozen to the spot, his mouth slightly gaping, his breath shallow and frantic.

  Silas couldn’t run, couldn’t step away from the doorway. It was as though he’d been struck with lightning. Panic filled his body as the ghost held him in its gaze, not looking away even for an instant. Something rose in Silas’s throat, and although he desperately wanted not to moan or make any noise in fear, he wasn’t sure he could stop himself. He clenched his jaw against it, but when he felt Mrs. Bowe’s hand on his shoulder, he quieted and felt the fear slip away from him a little. He released the watch and took his empty hand from his pocket, and the ghost was gone. There appeared to be only Mrs. Bowe and himself in the room. The music had stopped. But as he took Mrs. Bowe’s hand and walked toward the parlor, the ghost appeared again before him.

  “Come into the parlor, Silas,” said Mrs. Bowe very kindly as she gently tugged at Silas’s sleeve. “Come in and meet my man.”

  Silas walked slowly into the parlor as Mrs. Bowe went to the crystal decanter of brandy on the table. The ghost continued to look right at him but didn’t speak, and despite the chill of the room, Silas’s brow was hot as an ember.

  The ghost reached out his hand to Silas, who didn’t know what to do, couldn’t think. He tried to speak, but fear held the words in his throat and he only coughed roughly, staring. The ghost smiled and turned back to Mrs. Bowe, with a last intent look at her face before he faded from the now warming air and took his leave of the living.

  MRS. BOWE SAT IN HER FAVORITE CHAIR. She looked tired, but her face was glowing.

  “It’s late, and I am used to being alone after my little reveries,” she said, raising the brandy glass to her lips. “Give me a moment to compose myself, and I’ll meet you in your father’s study and tell you a little something before I go to bed.”

  Silas was sitting at his father’s desk when Mrs. Bowe came in and pulled the heavy velvet curtains closed before she took a chair by the window. She waited for Silas to speak.

  “May I … I mean … was that your boyfriend?” he asked gently.

  “He is the husband of my heart, although we were never married.”

  “How long has he been dead?”

  “Oh, a long time now. But ‘dead’ sounds so unkind, so impersonal, and they don’t like to be reminded about it; besides, he’s still here, so why bother upsetting ourselves with details? But now I shall ask you a question. It seems you have discovered something about one of your father’s artifacts, yes?”

  “I’m not sure what happened. One moment you were alone in the room, and the next, he was there. I mean not there, really, but present, I guess.”

  “I can tell you exactly what happened. You held the watch in your hand, and then you prevented the dial from moving. Nothing more.”

  Silas slowly took out the watch and set it on the table in between them, then he looked up at Mrs. Bowe, waiting.

  “I think it’s best if I don’t speculate too much, but I will tell you what I know. I think Amos left the watch behind for a reason on the night he disappeared, and now you have it, and I think that is in accord with his wishes, though I would strongly have preferred it had your father told you of these matters himself. Still, I always found him a man of remarkable foresight.”

  “A man of such ‘remarkable foresight’ might still be around,” Silas said a little coldly.

  “True enough.” said Mrs. Bowe, as she picked up the watch.

  She examined it closely. It drew the eye and no mistake. Mrs. Bowe could feel the gravity of such things, the weight bestowed by age and meticulous, precise, almost ritualistic craftsmanship.

  “I had seen it before,” Silas said. “My dad showed it to me back in Saltsbridge.”

  “Really?” she said, surprised. “I thought he never carried it out of Lichport, but maybe his work took him farther afield than I knew. I shouldn’t doubt that it was so, thinking about it now. Doesn’t matter. He could do with it as he pleased. It was his absolutely. And now it’s yours.”

  Silas picked up the watch and looked at its inscription, trying to read it aloud, stumbling a bit on the Latin: “Vita Fugit Ut Hora.”

  Mrs. Bowe translated, “Life flies away,
as does the hour.”

  “Mrs. Bowe? Before … when I saw you … you could see … your friend, couldn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the watch allowed me to see him too?”

  “At first, yes.”

  “So the watch lets you see the dead.” He knew this now. It wasn’t a question.

  “It does. But it is not consistent and may show you much more than ghosts.”

  “But you don’t have one, do you?”

  “No,” she said, slightly confused at first by his question, but then, when she realized what he wanted to know, she added, “I don’t need such a device to see my man. More to the point, he very much wants to be seen by me. Sometimes the dead wish to appear to the living, and if they are able, they will show themselves, just as my man appeared to you again after you put the watch away.

  “I love him very much, and he loves me. If the heart is true, death may have no power over love. And when the desires of both the dead and the living are in accord, a bond of adamant exists, and neither death nor time can come between them. That is what I believe. The death watch, for that is what it’s called, is another matter entirely. It lets you see things that are lost to the eyes of the living. And it lets you see them whether they want to be seen or not. It is an intrusion. As it was tonight. But for your father’s work, perhaps for yours, it is a necessary intrusion, for you cannot help that which you cannot find.”

  Silas looked down, a little embarrassed, but his eyes were quickly drawn back to the death watch, the curve of the skull, the bend of light across the silver, the miniature elegance of the jawline.

  Mrs. Bowe gave him a thin but sincere smile and continued.

  “You should not put too much faith in objects, Silas, nor invest too much belief in their small portions of power, although I can see you are fascinated with it, now that you know something of what it can do. Things can go missing, get lost, lose their shine … and then where will you be having relied on them? Better to invest in your own wits and God-given talents, and those bonds that exist between people. To be sure, that watch is very special. And with it you may see many things. But not everything may wish to be seen, and more often than not, what you can see may then see you. So have a care. The death watch is a sad token, I think.”