by Ari Berk
To enact the Dark Call, articles associated with the deceased or “mummiae” were required and considered most efficacious: bones or body parts. Such mummiae were to be collected by plundering the graves of the dead. So he could see his course plainly now. To the grave. To the box among the bones. He needed the arm. Of course, any part of her would do, but in his mind, he wanted only the arm of comfort. The arm of the mother.
Though it wouldn’t deter him from his path, the idea of plundering her grave began to let worry leak into the corners of his mind. It would involve leaving the house, and because the occupant of the Camera was being very difficult, he didn’t like the idea of going out, unsure of what it might do in his absence. Still, he knew where she was buried and wouldn’t need to be gone for long. He knew just where to find the headstone, with its extraordinary carving of the arm, and he hadn’t seen a car enter Newfield Cemetery in many months. Dolores could be locked in her room … she spent most evenings half-unconscious anyway. He would go at night when he could be assured of privacy. There would be the unpleasant work of unearthing the grave and actually removing the arm from the remains. Unpleasant, though he had no fear of corpses per se; it was just that even the thought of smelling something rotten turned his stomach. Not to mention, there were often wild dogs that roamed Newfield Cemetery after dark, and they scared him because those animals didn’t appear to fear anything themselves. How their frequent baying at night set his teeth on edge.
But he made himself smile at this. What have I to fear? he thought. We are all just dogs digging for our bones.
LEDGER
Alas for those poor souls, enslaved by thieves, who bring forth their resting bones from the earth. For no peace have the dead when one holds in bond even a portion of their remains. Yet, if avenged or honored by those hallowed rites yet known, such a spirit may rise up as a terrible and mighty soul.
—From the Codex of Klytaimnestra, translated from the Greek by Jonas Umber
THOUGH UNCLE HEARD THEIR BAYING in the distance, from their hiding places among the tombs and mausoleums, he encountered no dogs.
The soil was heavy but soft from the recent rains. It took him two hours to dig down to Mary Bishop’s casket, buried on top of the twin coffins of her children. Removing the lid, which crumbled when he pulled at its edges, he saw the remains of Mary Bishop’s fallen chest. The coffin was rotten right through, and this was a boon because the body was mostly bones now. The smell was merely mold and earth and not the rotting stench that would have so distressed him. Uncle pushed the bones aside and dug a little further until he found the small box among the bones of the twins. Removing the lid, he gazed on its contents with fascination and wonder. Unlike the body, the arm in the box was almost perfectly preserved. Was this the curious action of the illness that had taken her arm in life? The surface of the arm was shiny and very smooth and gave off an odd scent that seemed almost floral.
“Truly, madam,” he said, still panting from digging up the grave, turning the arm over in his hands like a holy relic, “you are one of God’s anointed.”
He put the arm back in its small casket, and setting it on the edge of the grave, pulled himself out. He shoveled the earth back in and laid the sod back on top. The once flat earth over her grave was now a little hump. He hoped no one would notice before it had a chance to settle. But who would come to see it? Most of the people who had kin in Newfield buried them here to forget about them. And where were those survivors now? Off and abroad on their adventures, just as the dead of Newfield were on theirs, making their remarkable, though common, progress through loam and time into nothingness.
And even if someone did notice the grave had been despoiled, what of it? This was hardly the first grave to be plundered in Lichport.
Mary Bishop?
Mary Bishop!
Someone was calling her name.
The voice was unfamiliar, but incessant, and she followed it like the tolling bell of a buoy through the mist.
When she saw the light, she stopped, but on and on the voice called her, drawing her closer and closer.
She emerged from the mist in a small, well-lit chamber, and the light hurt her eyes.
Welcome, the voice said. And, You are bound to this place and to these, your remains.
A weight came upon her, and it seemed she could draw no breath. It felt like hands were upon her throat and her chest and shoulders all at once, crushing the wind from her, yet she could not swoon, did not expire, but could feel the awful constriction like the tightening of a knot.
She knew that she was dead, and had been for some time now, though she did not know where she was, or what had become of her. She knew she hadn’t come home, because home smelled like biscuits and here, no smell she loved welcomed her.
Fear rose up in her, and she screamed. Something else in the room screamed too, and she could feel the pain in its cry.
She looked down at her body and saw that a blackish and burning light, like embers, glowed at one of her elbows and no arm was there. She was dressed in a garment colored by the earth, yet barely perceptible, swirling colors of mud and leaf mold in varying states of decay, but thin as a wisp. If she could scream, she could speak.
“Where are my children?” she asked. “Where are my remains?”
The features of the room began to fill themselves in and become solid in her sight.
The stern voice of her conjuror came again:
“‘Who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried? Who hath the oracle of his ashes, or whither they are to be scattered?’”
A man stood before her next to a large, olive-shaped globe of glass in which a form was suspended in translucent gold. He was holding an arm, her arm, and he smiled amiably, as though he was welcoming a guest into his parlor on a Sunday. But there was something in his tone that made quote into curse, and she screamed again in chorus with the form that floated in the enormous glass ampoule.
The man spoke again as he put the last knots in a piece of cord he had wrapped tightly about her arm. He said merely, “Here you are, and here be you bound.” And in his words were an acid truth that she could feel burning through her form.
Uncle set the arm at the foot of the massive vessel. He looked through the glass and past its contents and could see that there was now something else in the room. He could not see the ghost, but as he finished the Dark Call, the air seemed to divide and the floor of the Camera was awash with mist. There was a faint shadow rising against the inside wall of the room, and a ringing in his ears began that—he guessed—was the sound of the ghost’s screaming.
But Uncle only smiled again, covered his ears, and raised his own voice.
“But here is a child, changed through time to be sure, but no less a child in need of a mother’s love.” He pushed the arm closer to the foot of the glass.
Something else in the room gibbered familiarly.
And then Uncle heard her voice again, though in his mind or in his ears he did not know. The sound was very low, like the hiss of a leaking gas line.
“This poor creature is not mine.”
“Of course he is,” said Uncle flatly. “At least, he is now.”
“No.”
He took up her arm once more and bound to it a flat stone of gray slate with more cord. He reached up and over the lip of the vessel, placing the bundle on the surface of the thick liquid and watched as it slowly, very slowly, made its way down to the bottom of the glass. “Madam,” he said with all formality, “welcome home.”
A pitiful shriek rose up again and filled the room as Mary Bishop’s shadow on the wall turned golden and her arm sank to the bottom of the honey-filled vessel, coming to rest against the preserved thing that was kept within it. Uncle did not know if the whole house could hear her awful crying, but he could remain in that room no longer. As he unlocked the door of the Camera to leave, the roar briefly subsided, revealing only the small sound of something tapping softly. Tapping, tapping, against its prison
of glass.
Later that night, Mary Bishop slipped into Uncle’s all-too-rare sleep, waiting for him around every corner of his dream, flying up at him with wings of fire in place of her arms, screaming so that the world shook and trembled behind his eyes. Every night after stealing her arm from its resting place, the dreams would come again. Some by night, some by day, but whenever Uncle closed his eyes, she was there, waiting for him.
If Uncle was lucky, the sound of banging on the walls and floor of the Camera might wake him from those nightmares. Finally, between the continuing noises in the Camera and the new dilemma of the screaming and terrible apparition in his dreams, he stopped sleeping completely. Then he knew what madness was, and soon he could not easily remember even his own name.
After seven nights, he knew this arrangement was impossible and decided to release her. He admitted to himself what he had perhaps known from the beginning: It must be kin. Only blood kin could bring peace to his house.
Using an iron from the fireplace in the gallery, he fished the arm out from the vessel and severed the cords that bound it. He had no intention of going back to Newfield to rebury the arm, and indeed, the dogs had been howling and barking every night since his last visit. Instead he walked to the edge of his property and threw it over the gate, over the narrow street, and into the wild briars of the long-abandoned Temple Cemetery—his accustomed dumping ground—speaking only a few words of parting when he heard the arm land among the foliage:
“Mary Bishop, I release you. Rest there and come never again to my house. Trouble me no more….”
But she neither heard nor heeded his words.
Her ghost had already risen from the brambles in the form of a great, dark bird and was flying silently toward the salt marsh and the Bowers of the Night Herons.
UNCLE WAS ON HIS KNEES, sweeping broken glass onto a piece of newspaper, when another jar crashed to the floor. He jerked himself upright, all the muscles of his upper body and face pulling taut as piano wires.
“Enough!” he shouted, but then deliberately calmed his voice. “There have been mistakes. I know you are angry.”
Uncle had spent much of the afternoon locked inside his innermost workroom, the Camera Obscura. He had been speaking for much of that time, his voice rising and falling, pausing, and continuing as if in conversation. “I will make it right. I will bring peace again to this house. You have waited so long. I know. I know you are lonely here. I will bring him back for you. Silas. Your kin. The blood must be present and the same. Again and again I failed to see the simple elegance, the symmetry, but you knew, didn’t you?”
He looked at the shelf near the boarded-up window, allowing his eyes to pass briefly over the reminders of his several previous attempts at reconciliation: the box of his wife’s hairbrushes and nail parings; the parchment scroll; family photographs—one of his brother Amos, another with the hooded child standing in the doorway of a nursery; his own photograph of Mary Bishop’s arm.
“Let blood be kept by blood. That way is best. I see that now. No more relics. Let the child come home again. Let kin keep kin. This is the path of resonance and of sympathy. I will bring him back to this house. For you. Because when you are together, here, there shall be peace without ending. You would like that, wouldn’t you?” Uncle leaned over so he could see the eyes, and be seen by them.
“No need to speak. I know now what you require, what is needed.” He rested his hand on the top of an open crate of bottles containing an amber liquid. He slid the box over so he could get all the shards of glass that had scattered under the table.
“Almost done. Ah, there. You see? Everything clean. Everything accounted for.”
He gently lifted a bottle from the crate, and as he went to place it on the shelf, it slipped from his shaking hand and hit the floor with a pop, sending glass and a pool of slow-spreading golden ooze across the floor. The room seemed to inhale suddenly, holding its breath.
“Sorry,” he said in a voice that seemed soothing but had sharp serrations along its edge. “I know such noises are awful to you.”
Uncle paused and waited to see if anything else was going to happen. He looked at the other glass jars in the room. A few of the smaller containers moved very slightly, shook, clinking briefly against their neighbors on the shelf, but a moment later all was quiet again.
He looked down toward the floor, still shaken.
“I know you do not care to be kept in this manner. No. No,” he said, his head jerking this way and that as if trying to hear some small, distant sound. Uncle’s voice strained with sympathy and impatience. “I am not hiding you.” At those words the dim light in the room seemed to sharpen, crystallize, light and shadow becoming more distinct at their edges, while the air grew heavy, like someone breathing under a blanket.
Uncle ground his teeth together, then locked his jaw as though he was waiting to be hit.
“I am protecting you. You know this.” He paused again, listening before going on. He spoke more quickly, in a lower tone.
“This is your place, your home. Our home. We were both born here. You are safe here. This will not change. We have always been here. We always will be here. You must trust me a little longer. We are family and shall endure through the years as family. No other way can insure eternity.”
Uncle was tired. He could hear movements downstairs. Dolores was awake. He began to turn out some of the lights in the room. He would go down and meet her for a drink in the parlor. He smoothed back his disheveled hair.
“Rest now. Soon all shall be well. All shall be well.” He was almost singing these words. “I shall bring the child home again. Your very own. All for you as it should be. Patience. Rest.”
He bent over slightly and looked closely into the large vessel. He could see the soaking hair was standing up now in the viscous golden liquid, like once waving kelp now frozen in place. He climbed the small ladder next to the glass, then reached down and moved his hand through the thick syrup, passing it gently along the top of the head, brow to back, again and again, smoothing the hair into place, though he knew it wouldn’t stay. After a few moments, he drew back his wet, sweet hand and climbing down, wiped it back and forth on his apron for many minutes.
“Better, yes? Be easy. Please.”
A crack in the boards covering the window allowed a single line of late daylight into the chamber. Motes of dust moved back and forth quickly, swirling as they rose and fell through the revealing beam like tiny glowing flies. Will nothing here be settled? he thought angrily. Easy. Be easy. He quickly tried to calm the rising pitch of his thoughts.
Enough for today. Failure after failure.
It was nearly dinnertime. He removed the stained apron, hung it on its hook, and looked once more at the room. His eyes nervously swept the entire space, making sure everything was as it should be. He still felt uneasy. He would have porridge for dinner, or bread, to soak up the acid and anxiety from his delicate stomach. He put out the last light, drew back the inner bolt, and left the room through its only door, locking it again behind him. At the sound of the outer locks sliding into place, something in the room exhaled and loosened its grip on the stilling air.
LEDGER
The spirit, as it enters into the Other World, is immediately recognized by its friends and acquaintances, for spirits recognize a person, not merely by his face and speech, but also by the sphere of his life as they draw near it. When anyone in the Other Life thinks of another, he thinks of his face … and when he does this the other becomes present, as if he had been sent for or summoned.
—From “Certain Useful Notes and Translations from Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell,” copied out by Jonas Umber
IN SILAS’S MIND, all the time he spent with Bea melted into one long evening of looking at the sea and stars, of looking at her and hearing her words, her voice surrounding him like a song. Silas loved the distraction Bea provided because when he was alone, all he could think about was how he didn’t know what to do next about his
dad. When he was with her, he could think of nothing but her; she worked on him like a spell.
Now he was alone again, trying to hold off the coming day. He lay in bed, awake but with his eyes closed, thinking about the night, about Bea; little moments, strung together like jewels, were turning over and over in his mind, growing brighter in remembrance.
She loved the footpath by the river, and at night, the sound of the rushing water was soft music running alongside their conversation.
“Will you ever leave Lichport, Silas?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have any plans to leave here. Where would I go?”
“Will you promise me, Silas? Promise me that you’ll never leave.”
“I’ll try,” he said tenderly.
“Try not to leave, or only try to promise?” she asked, looking away at the sky.
“I’ll try,” he said again. When he looked at her face lit by the pale moon, he thought his heart would break for the way it glowed, her perfect features, so familiar, limned in pearl and opal light. “You are beautiful …,” he whispered.
And Bea looked back at him, the light slipping from her face, and said with a voice he could barely hear, “You always say that, my darling.”