Death Watch

by Berk, Ari

  We three have been friends for many years, sisters almost, meeting in this very room. Or rather, a room on this spot, for this building is far newer than we are and the old house was long ago destroyed, yet we remain here among the shadows of what was.

  We had no love of church, neither of making supper after. So much fuss. Each Sunday was like a curse. We couldn’t bear it. So we formed a little Sewing Circle. That was in the year 1692. A long time ago. We made blankets for the sick and poor of Lichport. So at the beginning, we were not censured for our behavior. We were modern women, even then, and had business to attend to!

  But we were married off young, and our husbands, like most then, were men of the sea. Gone for long stretches, making their living upon the whale’s road, and that suited us, though it was dangerous work. Many sailors did not come home—though ours always did—and we’d make shrouds when needed. And since our men were so often gone, we met more often, and that people didn’t care for. It was thought then that we should be about our housewifely business. But our own company suited us best, and when our husbands came home and heard harsh words from the old men of Lichport, well, they had some harsh words for us. Blows, too. Remember the time. Those who were different were a problem. We had become a problem. We were talked about. Our men stayed home from the sea to school us in good behavior … but we are not, by our natures, conventional.

  For a time, we obeyed, if only to avoid the beatings. And we waited. And the call of the sea came upon them and they set out, convinced we would abide by their word and make them proud before our neighbors. To church, to church! they said. Keep the Sabbath and keep the home! Instead, the evening after their ship had sailed, we went to the cliffs and stirred the sea into a fury with words. A broom and a cauldron and the right charm were all it took back then. Round and round we stirred the water and the sea complied, became a tempest, and the bottom of the sea sang out to their ship and drew it down and down beneath the waves … and so went their ship and all our troubles—well, some of them. But someone had seen us. To be fair, we must have stood out that evening: three women standing hooded at the cliff edge … what must people have thought! But we were ever bold and unapologetic, even at the day of our hanging. And for using spellcraft to contrive the death of our tiresome menfolk, death was prescribed as the cure for our modernism. They called us The Devil’s Mistresses. Absurd. We’d never even met him.

  Well, a little time later our bodies were cut down from the gallows and buried away from the church, which pleased us, frankly. And a little time after that, we met again. So habitual had the meetings of our Sewing Circle become that they did not end, even in death. And here we are, still at our work, though it has expanded somewhat, and we now know better what we are and what our work betokens.

  They were all three pointing at parts of the web with their long fingers, inviting Silas to look more closely. Some threads of the web trailed down through the floorboards, up the chimney, out the window.

  “Where do they all lead?” Silas asked, fascinated, his eyes moving this way and that along the lines.

  “Oh, child! We don’t know where all the threads go. We don’t leave this place very often. But we do know that the misthomes of Lichport, some of them, are connected to other places where the dead share similar histories. These places are not only for one place and one time. People have been dying since the beginning, and so there are many roads through the mist. Some are still used. Some are just waiting to be used again. Others have been long forgotten but are still there when the light is right, or when someone remembers it, or when someone dies in a rare and particular manner. Some of these paths are even shared with roads of the living. Once a road has been used to carry a corpse, even roads that are used every day by the living, it is always ‘lych’ from that day forward. Forever and always a lychway shall belong to the dead, in some measure. That is law.”

  Silas craned his head to look at the web hanging in the air above him, then looked again in each direction, where long, thin threads connected portions of the weaving in different parts of the room. It was beginning to make some sense, the way certain parts of the tapestry tied one place to another, like paths or roads.

  “Is it a map, then?” Silas asked.

  “Perhaps, Silas Umber, you begin to read what is written here. All deaths are connected because all people are connected. However distant, our lives are linked by ancestral threads, faint though they may be,” One said.

  “Clever. Clever,” said the second of the three. “Like the father.”

  Silas felt all the muscles of his neck go taut, and he broke out in a sweat.

  “Did my father come here very often?” he asked in a low, tense voice.

  “Not if he could help it.” The third laughed. “I think we made him uncomfortable.”

  Silas could see why. He could feel their strength, their age. While he couldn’t yet perceive the expansive role these three women played, he could sense that they knew far more than they said, which made him think they were something more and far stranger than mere ghosts. They also seemed to like the attention, which made Silas uneasy, as though no matter what he asked them, they would tell him only a portion of what they knew, to keep his interest, perhaps, to keep him coming back. This did not inspire trust. But if his dad had come here to speak with them, there must have been a reason for it.

  As if reading Silas’s mind, the first said, “Oh, when he came to us, your father loved to look upon the tapestry. He would come and just stare, studying it for hours and hours. Sometimes he would write something down in his great book. But most often, he would come and just wander the lines and lanes, the streets and stitches with his eyes, following one thread to where it met another, as though he was looking for someone, which I suspect he often was.”

  “Did my father see the tapestry as I am seeing it now?”

  “Oh!” said the second again. “He is a clever boy. Cleverer than the father, I warrant, and maybe braver too, wouldn’t that be helpful? That is a very perceptive question, Silas Umber. Very.”

  The first of the three spoke again.

  “The tapestry changes all the time, though some roads and places appear again and again. Sometimes, a place that has been appearing for centuries vanishes very suddenly. Your father might have known why. The comings and goings of individual features are not our concern. We weave what we see, and when the vision fails, we stop and start somewhere else. So you will see some elements as your father saw them. Others, well, your father would have benefited from your insight, I have no doubt. Besides, he is only one man, with his own particular ways of seeing the world, and he lacked your wounds, I think, and those must be a considerable boon to you. Pain grants such perspective. I can guess your life has not been easy. Be proud of your scars, for they most certainly affect what you’re seeing now. Like you, your father had desires and fears of his own, and those affected how he saw the dead and how he saw things in this room. But there is something else you’d like to ask us, I think.”

  Silas shifted his weight from one foot to another. Out of politeness and perhaps fascination with the tapestry, he had waited to ask them about his dad. He didn’t know what the protocol was for interrogating people like the three women before him. But hearing her query, Silas’s own question came flying out: “Have you seen him? Is he here in Lichport? Is he dead? Did my uncle have something to do with his disappearance? Will I see him again? Has he been here recently?”

  “Enough!” said the third. “In the old days, you’d have been allowed only one question.”

  “Yes …,” recalled the first, and then said, looking rapturous, “One question and then the gift. Oh … the gift … But that was long ago, and we needn’t stand on ceremony with one whose family is so well known to us. Why, we are nearly family ourselves.”

  “Silas,” the second began, “if your father is alive, we can be of little help to you. And if he’s dead, well, it is still a complicated affair. Your father wandered through so many sphe
res, who can say where death might have taken him or where it might hold him? Numerous lychpaths cross through Lichport, and though there are many signs of him in the skeins and threads, we cannot be sure when such evidences appeared or what they betoken, although we stitched them ourselves. Not all signs are for our eyes. Also, your father walked very often among the dead and their habitations, so his paths are shot through with their threads to such a degree that it is hard to untangle them. So he may be alive, or deceased, or lost somewhere in between, and we likely could discern little difference.”

  “Perhaps,” the first of the three mused idly, “you’ve been looking in the wrong Lichport….”

  “Please tell me how to find him,” Silas begged, the desperation growing in him.

  In response to the longing in his voice, the three came to stand before Silas and leaned over him like mothers about a wounded child.

  The second said, “You must look among those who have also lost something. Those are the folk who may, may, be able to help you. Such ghosts can also be the most dangerous, the ones most likely to be unable even to acknowledge your presence. But there may be a chance—”

  “Where would you send him then?” asked the third.

  “To the marshes. To the Bowers of the Night Herons. To the nests. To the mothers of the lost. He has lost something. He should go to them, although it is unlikely they will see him or speak with him.”

  “Slim odds, I give that path—but the farther he walks, the farther he may yet be able to walk … ‘way leads onto way’ as they say …,” said the first.

  “Yet there is a resonance. Their threads will easily twine together, no matter what follows the first knot. Here are complementary colors. It could be a beautiful scene, eventually,” said the second.

  “Please!” Silas insisted, frustration flooding through him. “Tell me!”

  “I will do more than that. I will take you to them.” And the second of the three stood close to him, drew her long shawl about her, and extended her hand to Silas, although he was unable to take it. “In the old days, no one set first foot upon a lychway alone, and he should not walk there by himself,” she said to the others. Then she turned back to Silas.

  “Child, will you come with me, though very likely nothing, or something much worse than nothing, may come of it?”

  “Yes. Yes, I will.”

  “At the very least, you shall have set foot to the dark road appointed for you, and that is a beginning.”

  “Oh! This is rare! Our dear sister is to play Virgil to the Undertaker. That is putting the cart before the horse,” said the third of the three.

  “Most rare!” said the first. “Safe travels then! And Silas?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Please see you don’t keep her out too late, now. We have so much work yet to do.”

  The first of the three looked out the window, to watch Silas and their sister make their way back up the road and toward the marsh. When they faded from sight, the first and the third could not stop thinking about the boy. The boy and the father. The father lost. The first felt the mist rise in her mind, and her eyes rolled back. She crossed the room by intuition, picked up her small, bone-white shuttle, and moved to a neglected corner away from the other. She worked very quickly, and soon an image began to form from the threads she worked so carefully—a small house or square room made all of knots, far along a thread, very distant from the other places on the tapestry.

  “What have you there?” asked the third of the three.

  “Too soon to tell …,” whispered the first. “Too soon to tell.”

  “And this one here? Closer in?” the second asked, as she pointed to a house with dark windows, all embroidered with somber silks of gray and brown and black.

  “I do not want to look too closely,” replied the first. “There is madness there, and the resident is not in full knowledge of its estate. Oh. Anger and terror both. And betrayal.”

  “Surely there is something you can tell, something you can see?”

  The stitches became more rapid, but more repetitive, and the first said, dreamily, “There is a cradle, a vessel … the signature of entrapment and containment … and look, a bee preserved in honey-colored threads. Very curious.” Deep within the stitches the outline of a cradle could be discerned, and below it in the tapestry, links of stitches hung as chains. And above them, a single bee heavily embroidered in gold.

  “No more!” said the first, quickly jerking her head up away from the stitches. “I can hear it crying. A terrible song stirs the air. I will not look again upon this place. If you wish to know more, we must ask the boy.”

  “Silas? Why?” questioned the third.

  “Because he has come very close to it. Because this place cries out for him. Because the threshold to this awful Shadowland,” said the first, pointing again at her bit of stitching, now covered in thick, uneven loops, “is in his uncle’s house.”

  LEDGER

  In 1672 Jeremiah Abury was lost among the marshes when in his fourth year of life. While his mother, a good woman of this town, slept upon the warmth of a summer’s afternoon, Jeremiah wandered from their house, taking himself up the very middle of the road. From that day he was never again seen in Lichport. The next year, the great birds began to congregate in the trees overlooking the marsh. Night birds and herons. And come the eveningtide they could be heard, their long plaintive cries sounding from high up in those high branches. There were only a few at first, but each time the soul bell in town rang out for a child who died, or a mother who did not survive her birth time, another bird came and made its nest here.

  —FROM THE LICHPORT CROW, BEING A COMPENDIUM OF

  REMARKABLE TRAGEDIES OF OUR OWN FAIR TOWN

  In the northern counties, rocking the cradle toom, or empty, is considered most ominous. For then it may be assumed that another occupant eagerly awaits the place of the first and may bring about its demise. It is further held that rocking a toom cradle and hearing the hollow creaking it makes shall call the wandering souls of lost children to it. We pray such may find comfort where e’er they be.

  —FROM THE PAMPHLET “A BRIEF AND TRUE ACCOUNT

  OF PORTENTOUS CUSTOMS” BY SAMUEL UMBER,

  UNDERTAKER GENERAL, LICHPORT

  In Rama a voice was heard

  Weeping and in lamentation and great mourning,

  Rachel crying for her children

  And would not be comforted

  Because they were no more.

  —JEREMIAH 31:15

  THE MARSH IS CLOSE. Do you have your timepiece with you? Good.

  We are nearly there.

  Silas Umber, prepare yourself.

  Few among the living can bear losses such as these. And those who do endure them, or die from them, come here to wait.

  When traveling among the salt marshes, it is best not to walk alone. Many things are lost among the tall reeds and brackish waters, and the folk who look for them are often single-minded in their search, unwilling to show kindness to others. Focus. Come in company or do not venture here. Everyone knows the wisdom of this. Nearly there.

  Always it is the same. The mothers of loss nest outside of town. Maybe north, maybe south, maybe both. Walk out of any town, and if you walk far enough, you will find a place such as this one. Always isolated. Always with a grim history. Loss calling out to loss down the ages.

  Your father came here only once. And he would never speak of it, though the bowers weighed heavily upon his mind. Amos said only that some places needed time, and you could do nothing for them until that time had passed. Well, some kinds of pain a parent cannot bear to look upon. To lose a child. And now you have lost your father … and though your father lost a father, it is not the same, is it, Silas? You will see them. You will look upon what haunts this place. You will see what your father could not.

  Before people ever came to Lichport, the marsh was here. And when people did come, they realized very quickly that it was not a place for idle w
andering. People got lost here. Folks who couldn’t be around others sometimes camped at the edges, but never for very long. Your people were among the first, and their ancient estate still stands, still casts its shadow upon the marsh where it comes closer to the sea. Who can say what brought them here? Something in the air, perhaps.

  Indeed. Silas Umber, look up.

  High in the branches is where they’ve built their nests. Each nest empty, as you see. But on the edge of each, there are the night herons, waiting, always waiting. On most nights, even in town, you can hear their cries of longing take wing across the marshes. Never are those calls answered. Such is their estate. You are surprised at how large the nests are. The branches come from very far away. Some were found floating on the surface of the sea. Others plucked from ruined houses, perhaps where some of their living days were endured. Others from places where they’ve picked among the hedges and tall grasses, looking, always looking, never finding.

  Where are their nestlings, you ask? Lost. Some at birth. Some later in life. A few who dwell here never had children, only longed for them all the days of their sad lives. No matter, for a hole in the heart is hard to heal. The heart wants what it wants, and a lost child is a terrible thing, a door closed forever.