Death Watch

by Berk, Ari

  “That is precisely what he wanted,” said Mrs. Bowe quickly, as though they were of one mind on the matter. “A trophy. Something only for himself. Something to look at when he was alone. Well, she wasn’t his to take. She wasn’t an object. She was a person and deserved respect, alive or not. My father saw that picture and got quiet and then got terribly angry. He went to his desk, got the money, and sent your uncle from this house. Needless to say, marriage between your uncle and myself was never mentioned again. But every day for the rest of his life, whenever my father looked at me, there was an apology written on his face. How the thought of me marrying such a man haunted him.”

  “What did the rest of my family make of this business?” Silas asked.

  “Your grandfather came to call, of course, wondering why his son had been sent away. I’ve never been sure what my father told your grandfather, but whatever it was, he obviously wasn’t surprised by it, and he never asked my father about it again, though they remained friends. I think your grandfather pitied your uncle. Maybe that’s why he left him the house and the money like he did. Or maybe your uncle just worked on him until he signed everything over to him. Don’t know. I know this much, though: Your father was left right out of the will, and that was your uncle’s doing, one way or another.”

  She was breathing hard again, worked up as if everything was happening in the very moment of the story being told. She turned her head toward the window, where the dark glass reflected them both now that the sun had set.

  “I thought my father destroyed the picture, but it’s clear now your uncle kept copies of all the pictures he took. I am sorry to hear that, very sorry. I hate to think of him looking at those people. Running his fingers over their faces.” She looked back from the window and closed her eyes for a moment, then smiled very weakly.

  “Well, it was not long after that incident that I met my man. My father made no objection, although I know he wished we would have married and had children. And when my man died in the war over the sea, I wore black as any widow would, and no one said anything against it.”

  Silas could see Mrs. Bowe was tired and feeling uneasy, as though she felt she had said too much. Maybe it was just the mention of his uncle’s name that brought some portion of him into her life again, into her home from which he had so long ago been banished. But there was so much she knew. So much more Silas wanted to know, but already he was feeling protective of her and didn’t want to do anything that would upset her further. It was clear she was always going to be of two minds about sharing troubled family histories with him. Maybe about everything. He knew Mrs. Bowe felt responsible for bringing him into Amos’s world, but the more they talked, Silas was also pretty sure she felt guilty about whatever she told him.

  Her fighting days were over, he could see that. That was why she didn’t leave the house. She was safer inside with her memories to protect her. She had done a lot for him already. She’d made a home for him and had given him the key to his father’s world, and he loved her for it. So no more questions if he could help it; he would have to keep Mrs. Bowe out of it.

  Silas knew then that he had to keep looking for his father, and he knew, from what Mrs. Bowe told him, that part of his search might take him back toward Uncle’s house on Temple Street. What he needed most was some perspective on his father’s work and a better understanding of the town, and the parts of the town where that work took place.

  LEDGER

  There are also hells beneath hells. Some hells communicate with others by passages, and more by exhalations …

  —COPIED BY JONAS UMBER FROM HEAVEN AND HELL, BY EMANUEL SWEDENBORG, 1757

  THE ROOM WAS FAR COLDER than the air outside, and steam rose off Uncle’s face as he entered his Camera Obscura, still sweating from his walk home with the wheelbarrow. As he set the complicated locks on the door behind him, he could see his breath in the broken reflection on the ornate metal lock plates. He locked this door to keep the room’s occupant in and also out of habit. But since Silas had left, there was no one else in the house who might disturb his private work in the Camera. Most days found Dolores numb before noon and lounging in the parlor or “retiring” in her room. Since Silas had left, the mood in the Camera had become angry and agitated, far more so than before. The room’s occupant knew Silas was gone, and the air bristled as Uncle entered by himself. When he walked in the room, the hair rose on the back of his neck, and he could feel the cold anger filling the chamber with an acrid, metallic smell. His brow furrowed in disappointment as he lit a candle.

  His plans had begun to fray about the edges. He knew it, and his own aggravation wasn’t helping. Uncle had hoped Silas would come back to the house. He had hoped this wouldn’t be difficult to accomplish. Indeed, Dolores was doing most of the work for him. Uncle assumed her slipping health would inspire her son to come back to her side. Let her slip. Then Silas would come back to play the dutiful son.

  From the middle of the chamber, Uncle could feel eyes watching him.

  He spoke into the air of the room, trying to invoke a feeling of confidence and calm.

  “I can see why you long to be near him. Despite his upbringing, there is something very remarkable about our Silas. Perhaps it is his sympathy. Or his independence. You admire that. And he knows you’re here, doesn’t he? He can feel your distress. He sees what a person has inside. That kind of perception is admirable. It can only come from pain. He has been hurt. You have been hurt. That is the kind of bond you can’t just conjure into existence. But we shall make a home for him, won’t we? Right here with you. In the bosom of his family. In the very house where his father was born. What symmetry.”

  Uncle pulled a chair up to the glass, settling in for a chat.

  “You would like to have your kin closer to you? Yes. I now see what is best. You want Silas close to you…. Yes, that will remedy all, but it will take a little time. He must come of his own accord. At least at first. Now he is in that other house, and it will be hard to get him out.

  “Time. Always time. I know. I know you are lonely.

  “Perhaps there is something I can do to fill the gap until Silas returns. Perhaps there is someone who can share your discomfort and bring you some ease, someone who might calm your shattered nerves. Someone to mother you a bit until our larger plan ripens.

  “Will you abide? Just a little longer? For me? If I bring you something nice?”

  The candle blew out, leaving him in the acrid darkness of the Camera, and Uncle said with a tired sigh, “How kind of you to indulge me.”

  SINCE SEEING THE GHOST of Mrs. Bowe’s man, Silas almost never put down the death watch. If it wasn’t in his hand, it was close by, in his pocket, or on the table in front of him, where he could always see it, although he was careful not to stop its hands. He wanted to use it, but felt doing so for mere curiosity would be somehow … inappropriate. It was a tool, not a toy. And knowing now what it could do, he was also frightened by it even as it exerted a pull on his imagination. No matter where he was—in his house, walking through the town—he wondered what the death watch might show him should he choose to use it. Maybe there was a way to use it to help him find his dad. His great-grandfather had told Silas to see more of the town if he wanted to find out more about his father.

  There was no straight path to the top of Beacon Hill, so Silas picked his way among the crowded gravestones that jutted up like crooked teeth from the mossy, flesh-fed earth. He tried not to walk on the graves, but it was hard to tell exactly where they were. Very few of the tombstones were aligned or faced the same way. Most leaned in various disjointed angles. Some had fallen forward, their names now pressed into the ground. Others reclined as if looking up at the sky, waiting for something to happen. Silas walked around the hill, his motion upward slow as spaces between the gravestones appeared infrequently. Simply climbing over any of the monuments only to hasten his ascent was unthinkable, and besides, there were the names.

  Everywhere he looked, the names of the
dead were inscribed about him. Fisher. Barnaby. Kettle. Ransom. Hariot … He could almost make a song of the inscriptions—a song leading right back to the earliest days of the town’s founding. Silas noticed that as he went higher on the hill, the names seemed stranger, more old-world, harder to read, and he realized that the ancient townsfolk began by burying their dead at the hilltop, and slowly made their way down with the passing generations. It seemed only right the oldest townsfolk should have the best view. Mounting the top of the hill, Silas could see why the first Lichporters chose to bury their dead here: Out a bit, past the ragged edges of the Narrows’ slate-roofed tenements and low gabled houses, the sea ran wide and far, flowing over shoal and deep water, streaming back across the horizon to where the first settlers had started from. From the hilltop, the ancient dead could look over their town and remember their distant, ancestral homelands, all at once. Surely, with such a view, the dead rested well here.

  The names. In other cemeteries, the stones were mute, but here they spoke to something deep inside Silas. These were his people. He could feel the sense of belonging in his feet. The earth of the hill warmed him, rose into him from below the ground, welcomed him home.

  As he gazed out, Silas could see the roofs of the old pretentious nineteenth-century mansions on Coach Street rising high over the Narrows and looking down on them just as the rich folk had looked down on the poorer fishing families of the Narrows long ago. To the west, he could easily spot the spire of the near-abandoned church and some of the higher buildings in “new” town. To the south, tall trees in the park and the streets of the better neighborhoods blocked his uncle’s house from view, and Silas thought that was just as well. Farther to the south, he could see the flat green expanse of Newfield, the town’s other cemetery, created about a hundred years ago when Beacon Hill was too full to push even a finger into the corpse-filled ground.

  Questions came to him. In a cemetery such as this, where the town’s dead were stacked below the earth, generation after generation, did the spirits of the dead congregate? Did ghosts keep close to their graves? Mrs. Bowe, he imagined, might say that you just know when things are peaceful with the dead of a given place because you feel at ease, nothing “pushing down” on you, when you’re standing there. And Silas did feel at ease. Beacon Hill was about the quietest place he had ever stood. A breeze gently pushed some leaves about the monuments, but there was hardly any other noise at all. Here, he thought, the death watch might reveal something more of the town. Maybe the ghosts of his own kin were about. Maybe they would help him or show him something that might lead him to his dad.

  Silas took the watch from his pocket, and as the metal warmed in his hand he could feel the mechanism inside it softly whirring and ticking like a baby’s rapid heartbeat. That small, sure pulse, the push and pull, as though the coursing of time and blood were the same. He pushed his thumb down hard on the watch’s hands, quickly drawing in breath. The force of the watch’s inner workings pushed against his finger, but the dial had stopped. Instinctively, Silas shut his eyes. With the exhale, he opened them.

  A mist rose from the sea and sent long tendrils winding up the lanes of the Narrows, slowly crawling into the higher parts of Lichport. On and on the mist came, lapping at the base of Beacon Hill like little waves. But as the mist drew closer, Silas could see shapes moving within it and rising from it. White, frayed forms, a procession of people made from smoke. He could see them now on every street of the town. Weaving in and out of buildings and streets, many of the forms looked up at the hill, quickly made their way toward it and reaching the bottom, began to rise up the slope toward Silas.

  At the bottom of the hill, Silas saw Bea, although there was something odd about her. It was hard to tell from so far away. Did she look older? Her clothes were different. He’d never noticed them before. Had she always dressed like this? She wore a long, old-fashioned dress that flowed around her feet in the mist. It looked like she was crying, and something that appeared to be fish but must have been silvery bugs or moths were swimming and circling in the air around her.

  Other gray forms continued up the hill toward Silas. When they came within about a hundred feet of him, the wraiths stopped, hanging on the air, as if waiting for him to say something. He couldn’t speak, and the ghosts raised their arms toward him, palms outstretched, and all around him Silas could hear the sounds of pleading and the most pitiful cries.

  Unable to move or speak, Silas stood frozen, watching the spirits continue their ascent, passing without pause though tomb-stones and trees, some crying, some shouting—a river of the dead flowing upward toward him.

  Just behind Silas, a voice called out, and he dropped the watch. The ghost-forms and flowing mist instantly blew away from the hillside as though caught by a great wind, even though the air was utterly still.

  The voice said very clearly, “Master Umber! It is very kind of you to visit the dead, and you are always welcome on the Beacon, but too much time among the stones may not be the best place for you, just now. May I show you the way home?”

  Silas picked up the death watch and hid it in his pocket, as he tried to recover his composure. “Oh, I know the way. I’m okay, thanks.” He turned around and saw a tall, thin man wearing a long, tight-fitting black coat and a wide-brimmed hat.

  “Of course, of course. It is a short walk back the way you’ve come. I suspect you are looking for your father, but he is not presently among my flock,” said the sexton, gesturing to the gray stones of the hill.

  Silas looked out over the herd of tombstones, then smiled and turned to thank the man, but he was gone already, probably making his own way down the other side of Beacon Hill toward the small cottages leading to the river. When Silas looked at the bottom of the hill, he saw with disappointment that Bea was gone too, vanished with the mist. But now he wondered, had she been waiting for him, or merely pausing there on her way from one place to another?

  When Silas returned home, Mrs. Bowe had dinner waiting. The table was set with two bowls, fresh bread and butter, and a large pot of soup set on an iron trivet. Steam rose toward the light that hung over the table.

  “See anything interesting on your walk?” asked Mrs. Bowe as she ladled soup into Silas’s bowl.

  “Nothing much.”

  Mrs. Bowe nodded at the lie, handed him the bread, and said nothing.

  DESPITE THE FEARFUL VISION at the Beacon, Silas continued to use the death watch. The sound of its ticking attracted him, and he told himself that if his father had left it to him, it must be okay to use it. Just once in a while. Not every day. He would trust his intuition, and maybe whatever the death watch showed him would lead somewhere.

  More often than not, with its hand depressed, the death watch showed Silas things that he was at a loss to define, although these mysteries were themselves enticing. Each new vision was an invitation to use the watch again, just for a minute, just to see what else might be present. He told himself he was looking for “clues.”

  He saw forms that moved across the earth that were not ghosts yet seemed spectral in the way they rose up out of the ground into the landscape and then faded or fell away. With the watch, Silas could see red, lately fallen leaves that were blowing on the wind suddenly become something more than leaves. At the edges of the path along the river, the leaves swirled and rose into vaguely human shapes. Silas wondered what they were; he queried the air, but the shapes had no voice and seemed to have no mind and so paid him no heed.

  With the watch hands held, the leaves rose up, turned in the air, and drew themselves up and together into arms, legs, the suggestion of head and torso. The more Silas watched them, the more he was convinced they were not ghosts at all, but only memories. Like the leaves themselves, dry reminders of the passing years.

  At first the image of the walking leaf forms was unsettling, but as Silas watched them he began to notice they never went very far. One would “walk” a ways, perhaps a few steps, perhaps a hundred yards at most, and then fall back
to earth, its leaves quickly scattered. Others would spin upward in the wind and move as one form in another direction, then dissolve into the brown rotting leaf horde, cast down and indolent again on the grass.

  After seeing the leaf-wraiths several times, Silas gave them little thought, even when he began to see them without using the watch. People had always walked along the river, as they went here and there, and that long line of folk left small impressions of themselves on the ground. Year after year, the earth bore their weight, carried their stride, remembered the passage of all the faceless wanderers—memories held by the land. Nothing more.

  When he walked home, the leaves would eddy behind him. Silas thought that the worlds of the dead and the worlds of the living—or, rather, the past and the present—were not as far apart as he’d once thought. Fascinating as they were, such visions were only distractions and brought him little comfort, for the death watch had yet to show him anything that might bring him closer to his father.

  LEDGER

  And if the spirit will not be banished, nor brought to Peace by other means, and causeth the consternation of its kin or their needless demise, or would be in anywise revenged upon the undeserved livinge, let suche a spirit be bound and sealed in iron or some other sturdy vessel of metal and cast then into some divers deep pit or into the sea. Learned authors and venerable undertakers will attest that the bottom of the Red Sea, most favoured for such rites, is full littered with such unruly souls and their small caskets.

  —COPIED OUT FROM THE RECOLLECTIONS OF FATHER GALDING, VICAR, ST. MICHAEL’S PARISH, 1794

  THEY ARE PRISONS. AS THE TIN CORRODES OVER TIME, A SLIVER OF LIGHT MAY ENTER THE CELL AND BEGIN TO ROUSE ITS PRISONER, WHO HAS WAITED, PERHAPS FOR CENTURIES, FOR LIBERATION. THOUGH, BY THAT TIME, MOST OFTEN THE SPIRIT IS MUCH DEGRADED. THERE MAY BE LITTLE MEMORY LEFT TO IT BEYOND ITS PAINS AND EVER-INCREASING WRATH. SO, AT LAST, WHEN IT ESCAPES OR IS RELEASED, AS EVENTUALLY IT ALWAYS IS, IT IS DRAWN HOME WITH A NEAR-MINDLESS PULL, CARING ONLY TO SPEND ITS FURY UPON ONCE FAMILIAR THINGS, THOSE PEOPLE THAT MAY ONLY REMIND IT OF ITS INNUMERABLE AND IRRETRIEVABLE LOSSES.