Death Watch

by Berk, Ari

  It must be noted as a testament to their dedication to all matters historical that they generously included the cottages of Dogge Alley on their hallowed register because, surely, it was the oldest part of the Narrows, and of course, the oldest of anything must always be noted. They never inquired of the Narrows folk why most of the cottages on this particular alley were long ago abandoned, and why one in particular still stands in such a sad state of ruination. Neither do they mention why no folk of the Narrows will enter that ruined cottage. I am sorry to report that neither may I enlighten the curious reader in regards to these eldritch curiosities. We must merely assume that the dear simple folk of this ancient street have long since moved on to more modern and hygienic premises in one of the northern ports. Bless them.

  —From Town and Down: A Traveler’s Handbook to the Neighborhood Environs as Well as the Funereal Monuments of Old Lichport by Samuel Oddtern, 1892

  TACITUS SAYS THE GAULS ACCOUNTED THE NOONTIDE GHOST TO BE THE MOST TERRIBLE OF ALL APPARITIONS. HENCE, THE CHURCH STILL RETAINS ITS MIDDAY PRAYER TO HOLD AT BAY THE POWERS OF THOSE SPIRITS STRONG ENOUGH TO WALK ABROAD IN BRIGHT SUNLIGHT. THE GAULS FURTHER CONJECTURED THAT WHAT WE TAKE FOR THE HEAT OF THE NOON SUN IS, IN FACT, THE FIERY BREATH OF SUCH GHOSTS FALLING ON US. I CANNOT GIVE CREDENCE TO SPECULATIONS ABOUT THEIR “FIERY BREATH” BUT ATTEST TO THE AWFUL POWER AND NASTY DISPOSITION OF SPIRITS WHO CHOOSE, OR ARE FORCED, TO WALK THE WORLD BY DAY OR MAY APPEAR DURING ANY HOUR OF THEIR CHOOSING. SUCH APPEARANCES ARE USUALLY EVIDENCE OF A VERY TERRIBLE AND UNRESOLVED BURDEN ON THEM THAT MUST BE SETTLED WITH ALL SPEED BY THE UNDERTAKER. FROM MY EXPERIENCES, IT IS AT MIDNIGHT, AND NOT NOON, WHEN SUCH GHOSTS SHOULD BE FEARED MOST.

  —Marginalia of Amos Umber, 21 June 1973

  SILAS WALKED FAST TOWARD DOGGE ALLEY. He pulled his father’s jacket close about him and held the death watch in his hand, thrust deep into the front jacket packet. He was walking quickly because if he stopped to think about what he was doing, he’d turn around and go back home.

  A few hours earlier, after leaving his great-grandfather’s house, Silas had stopped home briefly to eat lunch. Maybe because she saw something in his face that spoke of trouble, Mrs. Bowe had asked him pointedly where he was going. Silas ignored her question and asked instead what was for dinner that night. Mrs. Bowe only stared at him, waiting. Silas didn’t want to upset her by his silent avoidance of the subject, so he hesitantly told Mrs. Bowe of his plan. He could tell by her look she wasn’t any too pleased.

  “What exactly is it you think you’re going to do down there?”

  “I’m going to try to help, I guess. I want to help. Besides, maybe I can find out something about my dad.”

  “From whom, for goodness’ sake?”

  Silas didn’t answer.

  “Well?” asked Mrs. Bowe.

  “I’d like to help the people down there in the Narrows. They’ve been very kind to me. I know they don’t like that place, and Mother Peale told me Dogge Alley has gotten worse. The ghost saw me, looked right at me, so maybe I can do something for it like my dad would have. It’s been there a long time, so it might have seen my father. Maybe I can help the ghost, and then I could ask it for help.”

  “So you think that whatever it is that’s been haunting that alley has just been sitting around all these years waiting to help you with your problem? Oh, Silas, really!”

  “What I mean to say is, I want to continue my dad’s work. I want to help.”

  “I don’t think you really know the implication of what you’re saying”—she paused to consider—“but maybe that’s for the best. Aren’t you scared at all?”

  “Yeah. I’m scared of what happened last time, what little I can remember of it. And what might happen this time if no one comes to help me. I don’t want to end up like my dad, lost somewhere and alone. I mean, I want to be like him, just not in that way, and the only thing I can think of to do is this. I can’t just sit here every day drinking tea.”

  Mrs. Bowe blinked at the comment clearly directed at her, but slowly swallowed her tea and went on.

  “We don’t know what’s happened to your father, so don’t borrow trouble. And I think you’re not quite understanding what an Undertaker’s obligations are to the dead. I wish your father were here to talk with you about this, because there is so much I don’t know about his work. Still, I think he might have told you that you must learn to see death as something more than loss, more than absence, more than silence or a cold room or a bad dream, or a dragon that needs to be slain. You must learn to make mourning into memory and understand that memory is the dead’s chiefest problem. For once a person takes leave of his life, they become so much more a part of ours. In death, they come to be in our keeping, so to speak. They find their rest within us. Thus, in remembrance, we are never alone and neither are they. It’s only when the rites of remembrance aren’t kept up, or are ignored, or can’t be met for some reason that things go bad; when people die in secret, or by violence, or they leave important things undone. And that’s where maybe you can be of some help, although I don’t know if your wistful heart will be help or hindrance. Your father would have had other words for you, but here are mine: Keep the dead and their needs foremost in your mind. Foremost. Forget about what you want to happen and remain focused on what needs to be done in order to bring peace to the dead. A ghost is a puzzle in pieces, and you must be patient in trying to put things into place. Be polite. Ask questions, but let it speak. Silas, hear me: Let the dead speak their peace. Let it speak its Peace.”

  “I understand,” Silas said, almost waving away her words, “but I still want to ask it about my dad. It’s been there a long time, and Mother Peale said my dad spent a lot of time in the Narrows. Whatever’s there might know something.”

  Mrs. Bowe furrowed her brow and looked hard at him.

  “I suspect whatever is waiting for you in the Narrows will be not an ‘it’ but a person, and I advise you to remember that. I might also suggest you focus on what they need, Silas. Even the dead deserve a little consideration … a little kindness,” she said, putting down her teacup and leaving the room.

  Silas tried to put his conversation with Mrs. Bowe behind him and steel his nerves for whatever was waiting in the alley.

  He wasn’t worried about being able to find the ghost, because he had met it before, and he knew from Mother Peale that it had been heard at all hours, even at noon, since folks began to feel the arrival of the mist ship. He also knew from Mother Peale that it was pernicious and that it was very old.

  Again, Silas came to Dogge Alley from Silk Street. He did not wait to get far down the alley, but instead stilled the hand of the death watch even before he stepped onto the cobbles of the Dogge. This was a mistake, because the Narrows is so ancient a place, its lanes are filled with the dead at most times. So the moment Silas stopped the watch’s hand, the dead were all around him, wandering this way and that on their business. In front of what might have once been her home, a young woman stood in a doorway, her arms larded in blood. Two doors down, three young men ran across the street and through the wall on the opposite side where there had once been another lane, now long blocked by newer houses. Silas was staring at the throng, when as one, the river of ghosts turned their heads toward him. Startled, he let go the watch dial.

  Now the street appeared empty, though Silas’s fear had been sharpened to a fine edge.

  As he stepped into Dogge Alley, a doleful cry went up, rising from the stones as if one huge, wounded body was buried under the long length of the street and every step a person took on the alley caused it pain. Silas continued to the cottage Mother Peale had pointed out to him. The same cottage where he’d had so much trouble before.

  Focus on what you’ve come to see, he told himself.

  He pushed his thumb onto the death watch’s dial. It stopped moving, and for an instant, the world went absolutely silent, all the familiar sounds of the Narrows, of the living, getting thinner and thinner, dying on the air.
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  Silas slowly raised his head to look at the street and staggered back in terror at what he saw. The ghost of the alley was directly in front of him, its mouth stretched wide and screaming. It was as though a radio had been turned on when the volume had been all the way up when last turned off. Silas fell backward, but on rising found his perspective tilted out of all proportion as the alley seemed to draw away from him, the walls of its buildings becoming the stones and boulders emerging from the earth in a long valley. He could see other folk, or the gray shapes of folk, wandering in the half-light of the valley, each isolated and alone though they stood close by their fellow spirits. None could see another in that valley where every ghost cast a shadow as long as its last lonely breath. Within the complicated angles of those shadows, Silas and the ghost stood staring at each other.

  The ghost was terrible in appearance. The top of its skull was smashed in, from what must have been its death wound. Mist poured forth from the side of its head, as though it was bleeding smoke. Roots crawled through its form, clung to the surface of its body, pierced its skin as though it were a clod of earth caught in the roots of a great tree.

  Silas stood staring at the ghost, unable to look away, and felt his limbs go numb. He tried to rationalize away the terrible sight and told himself that the ghost didn’t mean to appear as it did. The ghost couldn’t help it. This was how it looked because this was the moment that had become its reality. As Silas tried to reason out the ghost’s appearance—the meaning of the crushed head, the roots—his arms and legs began to move freely again, but his chest started to ache and he clutched at it, not in pain but in pity.

  Silas looked on the ghost’s shattered face. He watched the bloody mud coursing over its form, the stream of tears flowing in rivulets down its body and pooling in the air before its heart, and he felt such sorrow for it. And something more than pity rose up inside him too, as he began to think of the worst thing his heart had ever known: that long night his dad didn’t come home, the long nights that followed, living all those days … alive, but feeling like something was rotting inside him. What if he had died during that time? Looking at the ghost before him, Silas knew exactly what would have befallen him. There was the ghost, changed into a reflection of its own loss. Broken. Stopped in the moment of its death. No other moment for it after, ever.

  The more Silas examined the ghost’s appearance, the harder it was to stop thinking about the ghost’s body, rotting somewhere. And then, increasingly, about himself and his own pain. His thoughts began to blur at their edges.

  The ghost backed away from him, screaming still, and walked to the base of a tree a few yards away. There it thrust its hands into the earth, raised its mouth skyward, and roared until Silas thought he would go mad at the sound reverberating in his skull.

  Silas tried to think of questions to ask it, to try to help, but as he spoke, the valley darkened and black water rose against the roots of the land.

  “Are you okay? How can I help? What happened?” One question after another, and none of them seemed to have any effect on the ghost, who had begun to fade around its edges, and perhaps, feeling itself fading, began to cry piteously.

  “Where are we now? What is this place? How did you come here?” continued Silas, hardly noticing the ghost’s increasing distress. Above the valley, great black birds flew against the dim carnelian sun.

  Then, very suddenly, the ghost began to shriek loudly, and words became woven with its wail. “Nobody I am nobody I am no body …”

  Silas froze, fear rising high in him again, and he stopped talking, but wondered frantically: What if this were my father’s ghost? And though the thought put a stark, cold chill in his blood, he pursued it. What would I say to my father, right now, if this was his own ghost? Without meaning to, his eyes began to well with tears. He said to the ghost simply, “What has happened here?” And then he sat down in front of the ghost, waiting, crying softly as he looked at it.

  And though it did not appear to open its mouth, thin words rose like ribbons of smoke in the air, and Silas could just hear them before they unravelled into silence.

  “It is lost in the earth. It has no mother. No father. It is no one’s son. It is unclaimed. It is nowhere to be found, comes from nowhere has never been when it came home there was no door no welcome no food no fire only blood from blood only blood from blood blood from a mother’s hand blood from a father’s hand it is no home where once was home nothing there no mother no father it cannot be seen a mother put it back in the womb deep root bed now it is lost Their son is lost it is no one’s son it is lost to them by them no body …”

  “Wait, wait!” clamored Silas. “It’s too fast, I don’t follow you.”

  Silas ran the ghost’s words over and over in his mind. Lost to them by them. The riddle was not complex, but it suggested awful events. Blood from blood … blood from a mother’s hand … a father’s hand.

  Silas stood up, and holding his hands in front of him, he moved them slowly up and down, as if telling the ghost to wait. Then, with deep sympathy and insuppressible fascination, he asked, “Did your parents kill you?”

  The ghost hung in the air, still as a figure in a photograph. Features began to emerge from the mud of its face, the mouth first among them.

  Silas went on, encouraged at what seemed like progress, but again, he gave the ghost no chance to respond, pressing it with incessant questions. “That’s what happened, isn’t it? Someone in your family killed you? Right?”

  But the ghost only went on repeating itself, over and over, with almost no alteration to the stream of words flowing from it, and soon, its face was running again with dark mud, most of its features reburied in the slurry.

  Silas felt his face reddening in increasing aggravation. He was partially angry at himself. There might be another way to ask, and he didn’t know what it was. Or maybe the ghost was afraid to admit what had happened to it. Maybe there needed to be more of an exchange. If Silas spoke to it about something else first, maybe it might speak more about itself. What to ask it? Maybe the ghost knew something about his dad. It had been in the alley a long time, maybe it would be easier for it to talk about something unrelated to its own misery. Silas thought this might be worth a try and said, “You know, I’ve lost a parent. My dad disappeared, and I haven’t seen him in over a year. Maybe you’ve seen him. His name was Amos Umber. My dad. Missing. Have. You. Seen. Him?”

  The ghost’s form began to shake and the space on its face where its mouth might have been tore open. A shriek flew from it, piercing the air. “Where are the bones?” it howled pitifully. “Where are no one’s bones?”

  Silas was stunned by the ghost’s sirenlike cry. His eardrums were close to bursting. The scream cut through his flesh, his blood became ice, and the bones of his body felt like they were cracking from the sound. He opened his mouth and, unable to stop himself, began to scream as well.

  The ghost went silent.

  Silas’s scream fell back into his throat, and he stood for a moment, unable to think or move. His ears pulsed with pain. He couldn’t see for the fear that now began boiling over into anger. He blamed the ghost for not wanting to be helped, and he began to think of other people he knew who never listened to reason, like his mom, and so consigned themselves to needless suffering.

  He began yelling, not stopping to think about what he was saying, just yelling and letting all the bile out of the bag.

  “You’re dead, you know! Cold! Over! You are yesterday and never again, so give it up, will you? Hello? Can. You. Hear. Me?”

  The moment those words left him, Silas could see the ghost cracking at the edges of its form, like mud drying and crumbling. He immediately regretted his selfishness. Think! Silas told himself. Just shut up and ask it again. Don’t talk. Listen.

  “Sir, I am sorry. I spoke first and should have allowed you a turn to speak. Please tell me, why are you here? Why are you so troubled? Please say the words yourself.” And because he’d read an account in t
he ledger where such phrases were traditional, Silas added, “In God’s name, please speak.”

  And so the ghost began.

  The Lonesome Valley was growing lighter, as though true morning was coming to it for the first time. The long, solitary shadows seemed to shorten, the lightening world adding solidity to the ghost’s form.

  “He went away, across the sea.”

  The ghost stopped, as if remembering something, and then began again.

  “I went away, across the sea, to seek my fortune. And fortune I found, though it was many years of hardship and toil before that happened, and so I sent no word home, for fear of shame. But years later, I found myself more fortunate, and with my rich earnings I sailed for home again. When I arrived in Lichport, it was too late to put my heavy bag of gold in the bank, for it was almost night when my ship arrived. So I made for home, happy to be bringing such good fortune home to my ma and pa. When I arrived at the cottage, I hardly knew it, roof falling in, a broken window. And I knew then that my parents had fallen on very hard times indeed. All the better a homecoming it would be, for I would pour gold into both their hands. I knocked on the door and when my ma opened it, how careworn she looked. She stared at me as though it were the first time she’d ever laid eyes on me. My pa, too. I had grown a beard and looked only a poor, wretched traveler. Here’s good luck, I thought. The laugh’s on them! I asked for lodging for the night, and tomorrow, I thought, I will surprise them indeed: their own son returned home and they not able to even recognize him!