Death Watch
Page 40
She drew her shawl around her, put her hand on Silas’s shoulder, and told him good night, muttering to herself as she left. Silas closed the door after her and made his way across the hall to his bedroom, hoping that the sobbing, if nothing else, would have tired him out and he’d fall asleep easily now. The house was silent. Even the floorboards had stopped gossiping. It was well past one a.m. and into that portion of evening where things went very quiet, as if the world was waiting for something to happen.
But Silas was tired of living in a world where everyone and everything held its breath.
MOTHER PEALE ROCKED BY HER FIRE. Silas Umber sat next to her, tapping his foot on the stones of her hearth.
Outside, the night was cold, even for late November. Before dusk a biting wind had risen off the sea and came fast to shore, blowing up the lanes of the Narrows like a quick-running tide, and then rose up, crashing wavelike over the cottages in the midnight lanes, rattling loose slate shingles and blowing smoke in gusts down the chimneys.
Silas was looking at Mother Peale, whose attention was fixed on the embers of the hearth.
“Murk night,” she said to the fire.
Though there was no one else in the room, Silas heard a voice say, Something comes. What is this? What is here?
Mother Peale said, as if in answer to the air, “The mist ship is at anchor.”
Silas wanted to be a part of whatever was happening, so he said, “I can feel it too. I think I’ve seen it.”
On the hearth, the fire leapt up, and Mother Peale turned to look at him, saying, “We all can feel it. I suspect now you could see something more of it if you wanted to.”
“Where does it come from?”
“I’m surprised your friend Mrs. Bowe has not told you anything about the mist ship, for it was a Bowe woman who set it sailing on its awful course long ago.”
“I think things like that make her nervous,” Silas said. “Some of the old stories get her a little upset.”
“I see, I see. Perhaps you’d like me to tell you of it? Since you were kind enough to call and keep a widow company?”
“I would, please.”
“All right then, since, in a way, this is all your business now.”
And she began.
“Once and ago there was a sea captain. I will not say his name with things as they are just now.” Mother Peale inclined her head toward the harbor. “But he took to visiting one of the Bowe women, a young girl whose mother didn’t think very much of this captain, and for good reason. His reputation was a horror in itself, filled with the usual things, more than a hint of piracy and worse. So this mother says no, and no one really knows how the daughter felt about this captain anywise. But this captain, you see, he ain’t used to hearing no from anyone, let alone some town woman, so he comes by night and takes this girl from her home and sails off with her. That was terrible, and her mother wept by night and day for the stolen child. But that is not the worst of it, not nearly.
“A fortnight later, the body of her daughter washes up on the beach here. It had not been in the water long, yet was much bruised and battered, and most folks thought she had been beaten to death and thrown in the sea after dying. The girl’s mother goes down to the beach, and she looks at her daughter’s corpse and knows all—she’s wise that way. Puts her hands on the corpse and knows right then everything that’s happened, and when she looks up, there, near the horizon, she sees that captain’s ship, sailing off after all he’s done.
“She waves away her family and neighbors. They leave her there, with her daughter, on the strand. Terrible words she spoke then. Curses and bindings as none should ever speak upon another. And the sky goes dark and the sea churns itself into boiling foam, and she puts the curse of the wave-bound and the water-road on that ship and all aboard it, and that captain most especially. The wander curse, that’s what she put on them, and it’s a god-awful thing, for it means you may never find rest, never find home. Never.”
“What happened then?” Silas asked, sliding his chair closer to the fire.
“Nothing, right away. The child was buried on the Beacon. Folks went back to their lives. The mother of the girl died after a sad, long life, and though I don’t expect the Bowes have forgotten the story, no one spoke of it for years and years. Until the ship came back. It has been back to Lichport twice before, according to legend. Once each hundred years. And over those years and from wherever else it sails and takes on crew, it has grown swollen with damned souls. Maybe the ship is a part of hell itself—a piece of the Devil’s own fleet, cut loose from its moorings—set upon the seas of the world by that Bowe woman’s terrible vengeance. You can hear it coming. Doom. Doom. Doom is the sound of its heavy hull as it rises on the swells and crashes back down onto the sea. And when it comes here, it takes on another soul.”
“Just one?”
“Tradition holds that to be the case, but it could be more. How could you tell? Perhaps your father would know something like that.”
“And it’s always a hundred years?”
“Yes, though I can’t say why. Could be anything … that mother who cursed the ship could have said the captain’s name a hundred times to bind him. No one knows. And how long the mist ship stays in harbor—well, that’s a bit of a mystery. Once, when Joan was very young, she told me that the kids at school told her the mist ship would take her away to hell if it came, and that scared her so bad she couldn’t sleep. I told her not to worry, there were plenty worse people in this town than her to take, but she wouldn’t settle, and she asked me real quiet, ‘what does it come for, Mama?’
“Well, I give it a good think before answering her. I don’t care for lying, Silas, especially to children. But I don’t think everyone needs to know everything just because they ask. So I tell her: ‘Bad people. Real bad folk. That’s who gets on that ship.’
“‘Do they ever come back?’ Joany asks me, maybe more interested now than scared.
“‘No, child, they don’t never come back, because to get on that ship, you got to be dead already. Ghosts get on that ship, real bad ghosts of real bad people, and they don’t never come back. Not never.’
“So I hope that will suffice as an answer for you, Master Umber, because I ain’t got another.”
“I hope it is not here long.”
“I do too, for the winds that blow from its sails bring madness to the living and dead. It causes to be felt what it is itself. Restlessness. Torment. And both the living and dead can feel it. Let it take what it’s come for and be on its way. But as for how long it’s here, I think that may depend on your good self.”
“What? Why?”
“Just an old woman’s intuition. In any event, Silas, unsettling as its arrival is, it is also a thing most rare and uncommon. Shall we look on’t together?”
Silas and Mother Peale walked down from her cottage to the wharf. The high winds had cleared the sky, and the moon was bright and full and lit the surface of the sea like a lamp.
The wind worked the edges of the waves into tatters, and there was a loud crack of the surf as the wind pitched it to the sand. But below those sounds lurked another. A low song rose up from the churning sea, a chorus of the lost, rising and falling in hopeless strains.
“Master Umber, if you will oblige me by making use of your watch and taking my hand, we may see something more of this awful rarity.”
With his left hand, he took up Mother Peale’s hand. With his right, he reached into his pocket and opened the death watch to hold its small dial fast against the worn face. At once the sea before them went wild as if whipped by a furious storm. Spouts of water flew from the crests of great waves, and plumes of white water fanned out and up as if a great weight were repeatedly rising and falling on the sea. Silas watched the salt sea foam flying higher and higher into the air but could see no ship, not even a hint of its rigging as he’d seen from the Yacht Club. He turned to Mother Peale, confused, but her voice rose shrill and crested above the roaring gale. “L
ook down!”
And there, in the reflection on the sea’s face, was the mist ship. Its tall masts stretched out on top of the surging flood. The ship’s keel had rotted away, leaving only the hanging skeleton of the hull, curved beams like the ribs of some long-dead whale that had washed up on shore. The sails and jib were little more than thin veils of gauze, and woven into them were the faces of the damned, who wailed and cried, torn again and again by the action of the wind and the horror of their own perdition.
“Oh, God!” said Silas.
“Child,” said Mother Peale, “this ain’t got nothin’ to do with God and that’s for certain.” She put her arm around him, but then patted him roughly on the back, saying, “Many are lost, Silas Umber. Not so bad as these, maybe”—she gestured at the terrible ship below the waters—“but lost just the same. And so it ever shall be, Undertaker, if you don’t get on with your work!”
LEDGER
FOR WHATSOEVER FROM ONE PLACE DOTH FALL,
IS WITH THE TIDE UNTO ANOTHER BROUGHT:
FOR THERE IS NOTHING LOST, THAT MAY BE FOUND, IF SOUGHT.
—Edmund Spenser, copied out by Amos Umber
All spirits, provided they are kept in REMINDED OF their ruling love, can be led wherever one pleases, and are incapable of resistance. Their love is like a bond or rope tied around them by which they may be led and from which they cannot loose themselves.
—From Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell, copied out by Jonas Umber, amended by Amos Umber
EVERYWHERE SILAS LOOKED, pieces of the past flew into his eyes like windblown dust.
As he walked the now familiar path through town that led to the mansion of the Sewing Circle, the road seemed longer than before, because everywhere he looked were reminders of the past. He would become fascinated with a carved stone column, or the worn bricks in a wall, or the ripple in an ancient pane of glass. Each door might lead into another world. He knew that now. And it made him worry that behind every detail might be something he’d missed before, a clue, a key to unlock the mystery of where his dad had gone.
But as he climbed the front steps leading to the mansion’s door, a bell still sounded in his mind, ringing again and again: Come find me. I am here. I am waiting. Was it Bea or his father calling out to him? Or was it just some lonely portion of his own mind, telling him what he already knew: He was alone in a town more dead than alive? So in desperation he returned to the house of the Sewing Circle. Maybe since he’d now taken his first steps on the mistpaths of Lichport, other scenes had appeared in the tapestry. His great-grandfather had told him that he must know more of the town and its past, must go back to go forward. Well, then maybe it was okay that for every step he took, he ended up retracing his steps.
Silas entered their high chamber and found the three were waiting for him. They said nothing at his arrival, but continued on quietly with their work as he walked back and forth across the room. He would follow one thread for an hour, only to find that it ended at a wall, ultimately connected to nothing but itself. He followed the threads that spun away from town. As he looked closely at the tightly woven strands, he saw the millpond worked out in a strong twisted-knot stitch. The surface of the water was thick with cold-hued silks that seemed to hold that water motionless. He rubbed his eyes and looked closer. Down, below the stitches, there was a girl’s form outlined in barely visible needlework. Her body was lashed over in red threads, and she appeared to be sleeping. Silas reached out slowly as though he might pull at the stitches.
“Stop!” said the first of the three. “Do not touch the tapestry!”
“What is worked there cannot be undone. Not by you. Not yet. Hold fast to your road, Silas Umber. The millpond is not why you’ve come here.”
Silas dropped his hand and walked past the millpond. At last he came to stand before the silken marshes, before the portion of the tapestry that depicted the Bowers of the Night Herons. A place he had seen and visited before.
The second of the three finally spoke.
“If you tell us what you’re looking for, perhaps we may assist?”
An idea had begun to form in his mind. A plan grounded in sympathy. He had felt the pain and losses of some of the dead. Maybe somewhere there were ghosts who could feel his pain and help him. Maybe there could be an arrangement. “I am looking for something connected to this place, the Bowers of the Night Herons. My visit there has left a feeling in me … I don’t know what it is. But the ghosts who reside there are looking for people they’ve lost, children. In some way, each one of them has lost a child. I have lost my father. That means he has lost me. There is a resonance between us. I can feel it. Maybe if I can help the ghosts of these bowers they will speak to me and help me in return. But I want to help them anyway, even if I don’t benefit from it. I think that the more use I am to others, the more I’ll be able to help myself.”
“He has taken up the father’s fallen mantle!” trumpeted the third of the three. “Hail! Lord of January! Hail! King of the D—”
“Enough!” said the first, silencing the third. “We mean to say, it is well that at last you have warmed to the work.”
“Maybe,” Silas said.
“In that case,” said the third and first together, “perhaps we may be more accommodating. Since, after all, we are now business partners.”
“Look here! There is a thread—,” said the third of the three.
“Do not!” said the second, but the third was already walking to the web.
“I think we may help him. I think we must. Look at the state of the web, the frayed edges, unknotted threads … on and on the work goes, because the grief in this place has no end. He may be able to bring about some resolution, and I am eager to cast off, if only for a moment,” said the third.
“Resolution at what cost? You wish to help him. Fine. As do I. But he, most especially, should not come to that place,” said the second.
“Enough! Show him,” said the first. “Let him see and decide for himself.”
With sharp fingers, the third plucked the thinnest thread from the tip of a marsh reed done in emerald flax and followed its length just a few feet away to a tangle of knots hanging in the air.
“What is it?” asked Silas.
“Look close,” said the first.
Here was a square of rough cloth onto which had been stitched numerous knots. At first, Silas couldn’t make out any details, but when he brought his face right up to the stitching, he could just make out small figures worked in beneath. Each seemed isolated from the others and was held down to the ground by numerous tiny gray binding stitches and knots. Below those were hidden hundreds of birds, almost invisible, also in gray thread. Wave after wave of little birds was lost in the knotwork.
“Why shouldn’t I go there and try to help them? If I am the Undertaker, I believe that is my job.”
“We can only sew what we know, and that is that there are lost children here. Your pain and theirs are not unrelated. You will have no trouble finding them.”
Silas stood back and looked at the portion of the tapestry holding the two misthomes, the Bowers of the Night Herons and the other place where the lost children dwelled; they appeared to share a border. He wondered if each held the thing the other lacked. Maybe they could be joined, brought into accord, and both limbos relieved of their suffering occupants at once. Silas asked the ladies if they could just knit them together, pull the threads and draw them closer, make them one place instead of two.
“Oh, no!” said the first. “That would lead to ruin. You can’t just pull threads together like that. It must happen out there first.” She pointed out beyond the high window of old rippling glass. “Out there, in the places where the dead reside and gather. Changes occur, things take root, and we make it so on the web. This place, this room, is itself a shadowland, but the weaving is something else entirely. It is a reflection of all misthomes. We can only weave and stitch what is, not what we want to be.”
“Have you ever tried?”
“Do not ask. These places, these shadowlands and misthomes, are greatly isolated from one another. Although they may appear very close in our work, it is a false perspective. These two limbos you’re looking at are separated by the deepest chasm of grief that can form in the human heart: to lose a child. Silas, what you ask cannot be done. Must not be done. We are not the only ones who keep a web, and our work is connected to innumerable others. Threads lead from this place to lands very far removed. All are connected. In the past, others have tried to force things, to bring together misthomes that were not in accord.”
The second of the three appeared to be crying. Silas pressed, “What happened?”
“Terrible things,” said the first.
“Not to be told.” said the third.
“Not even to an Undertaker?” Silas asked again more pointedly.
The first, who was the oldest of the three, rose from her chair and walked toward Silas, her dress trailing frayed tendrils of silk and mist behind her, connecting her, perhaps even binding her, to the portion of the web she had yet to finish. Silas could see the weight of her work on her, and that whoever she had been while living, she was now a part of her weaving, bound to it, something far more extraordinary and powerful than whatever single name she once owned. Now she merely occupied a familiar form from a favored life, but she had become a constellation of forces and fates stretching back in time; a nexus of extraordinary power that had its source far beyond Lichport.
“Ladies,” Silas asked with great reverence, “has my father ever visited this place?”
“No. It would never have been open to him. Always you were at the front of his mind and very much alive, so to consider such a misthome as this would have been difficult for him. Not because he was without sympathy, but because to imagine the causes that result in such a world forming is very awful for any parent. To imagine it terrifies them.”