Death Watch

by Berk, Ari

  “They must have seen my bag, or heard the chink of gold within it, for so poor had they become, so destitute and miserable from holding in their hearts the thought of their son, lost over the sea, that they conspired and while I slept … while I slept …”

  The ghost paused in his tale, and his whole frame seemed to run red, as though he was standing beneath a gutter spout and the sky was raining blood.

  Silas looked at the ghost. He did not speak, did not look away. After a few moments, the ghost continued.

  “They murdered their son while he slept. Their own son. They murdered me while I slept because they had become so poor. Because I had been gone so long and had been no help to them.”

  The ghost could now be very clearly seen. Silas saw a young man standing before him, perhaps in his late twenties, his face and head covered over with the wild tangle of beard and hair long from sea travel.

  “May I see them?” the ghost asked Silas.

  “I don’t know.” Silas was unsure what the ghost meant. Was the ghost asking to see his bones? His parents’ bones? “I don’t know what happens now. You are still here, so I think there is still something to do. May I ask you your name, please?”

  “I was Roger Arliss in life.”

  “Mr. Arliss, may I ask you one more thing?”

  The ghost nodded.

  “What became of your body? Where did your parents bury your body?”

  The ghost’s form shivered in the air, but he pointed to a tree a little ways off from where he and Silas were standing. Silas drew his hands from his pockets and released the dial of the watch. The valley faded from view, and because good words had passed between them, Silas found he could still see the ghost, who continued to point at the small, thick tree that could be seen through the window of the cottage. A dim sun had risen. Night had passed.

  “Mr. Arliss, I think you would like to be buried next to your parents. Is that so?”

  The ghost wept at those words, and Silas continued.

  “I know your name. I have seen the name Arliss among the graves on Beacon Hill. If I can restore you to them, I will. Mr. Arliss, may I have your permission to move your bones?”

  Still crying, the ghost nodded his head slowly up and down.

  Silas went into the little overgrown yard behind the house and found the rusted head of an old hoe. He began to dig in the soil at the base of the tree the ghost had pointed out to him. It was late morning when he found the bones a few feet down in a shallow grave. Silas brought the bones out into the air, unwinding some from the roots that had held them during the many years, they had been hidden in the earth. With a piece of yellowed moth-eaten lace curtain from the cottage, he wrapped the bones of Roger Arliss and carried them away.

  Silas took Silk Street along the waterfront and then climbed the footpath up to Beacon Hill cemetery. He couldn’t quite remember where he had seen the Arliss graves, though he knew they were old and closer to the top of the hill than the bottom, so he walked in a tight spiral, slowly working his way up the hill. By the time Silas had found the graves of Roger’s parents, Elias and Judith Arliss, on the Beacon, it was late in the afternoon. He set the parcel of bones down on the earth between his parents’ graves.

  “Master Umber,” said a familiar voice behind him, “how nice to see you again. What brings you back to our hill of peace, may I ask?” Without turning, Silas knew it was the voice of the sexton.

  “Good afternoon, sir. I am here on business, I’m afraid.”

  “Yes. I can see that you are. You have your father’s look about you.”

  “I wonder if you can help me. I need—” Silas began, but the sexton gently interrupted him.

  “If you return to the hollow oak at the bottom of the hill, you will find that your father kept a spade hidden within the trunk for, I believe, such a purpose as yours. Bless you and bless your ways, Master Umber. You are as fine a man as your father.”

  Silas had knelt to unwrap the bones, and when they were set out on the lace with the late-day sun on them, he rose and turned to shake the sexton’s hand, but found him gone, already around the bend of the hill, and only his shadow trailing behind him. Silas walked down to the tree and there, inside the trunk, he found the spade waiting. He lifted it from the tree, feeling the polished handle, the blade indented from years of digging through rough earth and small stones. He wondered how many times, for how many graves, his father had used this spade. No different, Silas thought. I am no different from him now, for we are in the same business. I am about to dig a grave for a ghost with my father’s spade. And as strange as the thought might have seemed, there, on the Beacon, it felt the most natural thing in the world.

  With the spade in hand he climbed the hill again, and between the two Arliss graves, he dug a hole perhaps four feet down. He dug until he found the other bones. He wanted to put Roger Arliss truly among his kin. Though the earth was loamy and soft, it was much harder work than he’d imagined, and by the time the hole was deep enough, Silas’s back and arms were sorer than they’d ever been and the day was nearly spent. Into the hole he set each bone, one at a time. Then over the bones he laid the piece of lace and, taking up the spade once more, covered everything up with earth. The world was going quiet at the coming of twilight. The birds had stopped calling from the trees of the hill. Silas stood by the graves in that silence for many moments.

  When he looked up, the sun was very low, and the edges of the sea were burning with the last embers of the dying day. In a moment that light would be extinguished by the falling night, and the surface of the water would be still and dark.

  He wondered if his father had some formula or ritual words for moments such as this. In the ledger, many of the words he’d seen seemed stiff, formulaic and formal. His gaze hovered on the two names cut deep into their shared tombstone, and with his finger, he traced the letters of the son’s name on the stone next to those of his parents. Then he spoke their three names out loud into the evening air—the father, the mother, the son—and then said, simply and very tenderly, “Rest in peace.”

  And they did.

  Silas looked down, opening and closing his aching palms, and despite all the dirt pressed deep into his skin, he could just trace the lines of his father’s hands in his own.

  AS SILAS DESCENDED THE BEACON, he found the town flooded with fog.

  Instead of going home, he walked back into the Narrows, though he could hardly see ten feet in any direction. He wanted to walk and revel a bit in his success. With the fog came a sharpening of his other senses, and soon he heard sounds he’d hardly ever noticed before: the soft rasp of shoes on stones, the lap of the water against the pier posts—higher pitched than the low flop of wave on sand—the whip of a flag atop a mast, bells from buoys and bells from ships, a world of common music heard only when listening particularly, or when a heavy mist made the world blind.

  Silas found Mother Peale waiting near the water. She had been standing and “having a listen” as she called it, waiting for something. Silas came up next to her and looked out in the direction of the water.

  “There is peace now on the Dogge,” he said.

  “Truly?” she said with real surprise in her voice.

  “Yes,” said Silas. “I think Roger Arliss is at peace now. I feel that he is. Walk on the Dogge and see.”

  “In time. Sometimes, after a bad stint, a place needs to be on its own for a while, to resettle, if you take my meaning. I am impressed that you could do what your father couldn’t. Your father tried many times, but that ghost would never speak to him. But not everyone can see the same thing, even when they are both looking right at it.” She went quiet for a moment, but then added, “Or maybe you and that ghost have something in common.” Before she could explain, or Silas could question her, she said in a whisper, “Do you hear that? A quiet sea. Slack tide. Not coming in, not going out. Just a moment in between. Maybe that’s what it’s like for them. Not here. Not there. Nowhere. Tide’ll be coming in in a mome
nt. But for the lost ones, the tide never changes. It just goes on and on, never an end to the pause, until, well, I guess until something changes. Like now. Things are changing here. You can feel that, I know.”

  “What do you think it is that’s causing the change? What’s making people so nervous?”

  “Some say it’s you being here. I agree.” And she smiled at him. “Others say things haven’t been right since your dad disappeared. Lots of folks think things have been wrong for a long time. Maybe that’s true too. Some say it’s because the mist ship is coming. Because even now it’s making its way into port. Nights like this herald hard days ahead. But there’s no mystery to it. Every hundred years it comes. ‘Everything to its hour,’ as my mother would say, ‘everything to its appointed hour.’ A hundred years. That’s the bargain. One hundred years between visits, but sure as anything, when the years run up to a clean century, there it will be. That ship has always run regular,” she insisted. “It’s predictable, like the holy days coming and going, each to its own quarter…. All Souls’, and Yuletide, and Midsummer, round and round and back again.”

  “I have read something about ghost ships in my father’s writings, about ships that become prisons for the dead, wandering on and on until the world’s end, occasionally coming to harbor to take on crew, or to revenge great wrongs done to their captains. Where are they when they’re not visible to the living? The old sources do not say,” Silas said.

  “No tellin’ … but every hundred years, in it comes and it won’t leave until it’s had its due,” said Mother Peale. She looked away from Silas and pulled her hands under her shawl. She began to walk along the harbor, and he followed her.

  Silas thought she knew more than she told, that she was holding something back. Maybe she thought this was likely to scare him. Yet if the ship came only once every hundred years, anything anyone knew about it could only be speculation, stories handed down. How frightened did she think he’d be by a legend?

  As if in answer to his unspoken questions, Mother Peale said, “It’s a bad business, Silas, I don’t mind telling you. Very bad. Bad folk are on that ship, and it brings only the worst sort aboard. No one knows who it’ll take until they’re took, and that’s what makes everyone so edgy. One thing for sure. No one wants to sail on that ship, for once you’re aboard, you don’t never come off it.”

  Silas and Mother Peale were approaching the last wharf, near where Downe Street emerged at the seaside, before turning back up into the Narrows to make their way to the Peales’ house, Silas hoped, for supper. Suddenly, Mother Peale grabbed Silas’s arm.

  “Listen!”

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Then stop trying to hear ‘anything’ and listen.”

  Silas shook his head. No remarkable sound found its way to his ears.

  “Do you trust me, Silas Umber?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I truly do.”

  “Then hold my hand and use that watch your father most surely left to you.”

  Silas wasn’t surprised that she knew about it, and it was obvious from what he’d told her about the settling of matters at the Arliss cottage that he had at least begun to consider going about business as his father did. So without hesitation, he took Mother Peale’s left hand in his and held it. With his right hand, he brought the hand of the death watch to a stop. Immediately Mother Peale’s hand clutched his like cold iron.

  “There! Now don’t tell me you don’t hear that, boy!” She was peering into the mist as though her eyes might burn a hole right through the very air. “It’s far out still, but, ah! The voices!”

  And rolling in with the fog came the words. Strange and strangled as though screamed from underwater. Subdued, resolved, hollow, drowned. The voices were distressed and full of fear. Then, like waves, the voices rushed up and broke near Silas and Mother Peale, drawing thin as a whine until the cries sank into the sand and were gone, before the next wave of sorrow rolled in from that ship that yet lay beyond any mortal sight.

  Mother Peale was looking at Silas with her eyes wide and questioning.

  “I can hear it. Oh, God. I can hear it,” he said, and as the voices churned in the dark water, Silas’s mind became a whirlpool of worry, wondering whom the ship was coming for, frantic that it might be—Enough! he told himself. He couldn’t even think it. It could be anyone. Even someone he now knew in Lichport. For didn’t everyone have secret parts and shadows? How well did he know anyone here, really?

  “How long until it comes to harbor here?” Silas asked in a near whisper.

  “Soon,” was all Mother Peale said, and her hand lay cold and still in his.

  IT HAD BEEN A LONG NIGHT IN THE CAMERA, and Uncle’s tenant was troubled. The preceding week had been no better. Lights had been unexpectedly going out in the upper floors. Blasts of cold air tore angrily through the north gallery. The knocking and banging noises had continued unabated between the floors and behind the walls. And in the few moments of sleep Uncle could find, he found only dreams he prayed to forget.

  Uncle could now admit that his original plan had almost completely fallen apart. His dream of a whole, right family living under his roof, well, he would have to apply himself more earnestly now. Silas leaving the house had made matters much worse, far more difficult, in fact, than he could have anticipated. Rising waves of anger permeated the whole house like smoke from a blocked chimney fire. The Camera had become a chamber of constant aggravation. Uncle blamed Silas for this change in the house’s mood. His nephew’s presence in the house had had a surprising and much appreciated effect on the occupant of the Camera. A calming influence. That temporary peace was now ruined. Uncle still hoped Silas could be brought peaceably back to the house, though he suspected that such an event might only happen if it was carefully arranged. It would take time, and as things stood, more immediate action was required. Waiting was accomplishing nothing.

  The book of photographs he and Silas had looked at together was still open on the table just outside the Camera, and every time Uncle stared at it, he could recall more and more about her life, her sacrifice, about that woman and her arm who, in death, had gotten him fired all those years ago. Ironic, he thought, that it was Silas who reminded him of her.

  Despite dying at the age of ninety-two, and despite the early loss of her arm—that loss necessitating her remaining hand having to do twice the work in her later years—how young she had looked at her funeral, he remembered, and how remarkable that hand had been. She had labored in joy for her large family every day of her life. Yes, her remaining hand should have been creased and worn. When he had seen the photo again with Silas, Uncle had immediately remembered the story of the arm this woman had buried with her dead children. In his mind, he could see her arm resting within its box among the bones of her offspring, a comfort to them still. What a heart she must have had to think of putting her arm, lost to infection, into an early grave. He understood immediately. It would hold them in death. Serve her as though it were still attached to her. It would hold her children and keep them safe against the long, long night of the grave. He understood her mind. And like her, he had something that needed comforting. Something that needed to be held and watched and mothered.

  Uncle held her closer to his face so he could see the details of the arm in the low light, and he recalled how moved he’d been by her appearance on the day of her funeral. There was something pure about her, something incorruptible even then, especially her hand. Let the hand stand for all, he had thought when he took the photo all those years ago. That was why he’d covered her face. He was drawn to her corpse. He remembered how he wanted to comfort her, in death … how softly he spoke to the family. “Let us draw her favorite shawl about her, to keep her warm, her family’s love to work against the cold.” Her kin liked that. In that way, the missing arm she’d buried with her children would not disturb the appearance of the corpse. He pushed cotton into a long glove and set it in place of her already buried arm, in case anyone should touch
the shawl; all would seem right and whole. He wanted her to look her best.

  He looked again at the photo of the woman’s remaining hand lying across her body. He was admiring his work now, noticing again how he’d arranged the lighting to make the skin glow like alabaster. He said to the photo, to her incorruptible portrait, “Now I know why I have kept you all this time.”

  He had paid homage back then to her life, her mothering, her perfection. Now he would pay her another honor.

  And then, at last, even her name had come back to him across the chasm of years: Mary Bishop.

  Her name was Mary Bishop.

  Uncle’s mind began to prowl in several directions at once. Could Mary Bishop be a possible solution for his problem in the Camera? Could something as simple as a mother’s love console the Camera’s occupant? That arm—surely it must have brought such peace to those cold children of hers. Such comfort. A mother’s love was what was needed. The calming presence of a mother’s love. Where the father and son had failed or fled, let the mother—one far better than the first—bring peace.

  There were ways he knew to call and bind the spirits of the dead. Certain rites. Prayers more Babylon than Bethlehem. He knew already he would get no sleep that night. He took the relevant books down from the shelves and quickly found what he was looking for. He was spoiled for choices. A world longing for congress with the dead had recorded numerous methods of bringing them back. From every nation of the ancient world, here were words and acts to bring the living face-to-face with the deceased. Charms to make the dead speak. Spells to make them serve. Rites to make them reveal secrets taken with them to their graves. His hands were starting to tremble with anticipation. He had made a ritual of slowly looking through the vellum manuscripts and early bound books, had taken no wine, had bathed before searching through their pages. He was grateful that so many other people, driven by need and want, had turned to these practical philosophies to see their way through their mighty problems. He had pored over his books, leather-bound heresies from his brothers in Arte, and had found readily enough the text he needed. Actually, there were many versions of what was known as the Dark Call, that dangerous rite by which the dead are forcibly called back to earth, back into the limbo of their bones. Such practices were held accursed by the church, hated by the dead, and despised by all ethical philosophers, but what did moral folk know of his dilemma? Let those who live with my burdens judge my actions, he thought.