Death Watch

by Ari Berk

  Silas couldn’t believe what she was saying. She complained about her losses every single day of her life.

  “And here’s your uncle,” she continued, gesturing at the doorway his hurried departure had left empty, “trying to help us despite everything that’s fallen out between him and your father over the years. Your uncle would like nothing better than to be like a father to you now, and what do you do? You spit in his face. It’s unnatural to throw things back at folks who hold them out to you with both hands. But that’s just what you do, you throw it all back. And for what?” Her voice was tightening again, returning to normal, taking back its accustomed edge. “For what? Voices? Memories? Some nothing tugging at the corner of your mind because you lost something dear to you? Si, I’ve lost almost everything dear to me and here I am, still getting on with things.”

  “Yes,” Silas confirmed coldly, “getting on very well. I mean, you’ve really settled in here, haven’t you? And, I see, given my uncle every bit of thanks you can afford by appreciating his gifts to the fullest, the clothes he’s bought you, that glass he keeps full to the brim.” He was looking not so much at her, but at the rich velvet dress she was wearing. He could feel his face begin to burn as he said, “Actually, Mom, I can’t believe you waited a whole year before moving in here. That must have taken a lot of restraint.” He was leaning into his words like punches now. He wanted to hurt her, wanted her to know not just what he was thinking but how it felt, too. Under every spoken word flowed wave after wave of implication, and it showed clearly on his face, all the sneers and squints that said, silently, cruelly: A real mother would have felt her child’s pain and done something about it.

  Pummeled by Silas’s words, not able to get up, Dolores looked like she was going to start screaming at him. But very suddenly, her pointed features fell and her head slumped forward and began bobbing awkwardly; she was crying.

  Dolores looked at her son through her tears, moving her head from side to side as though she was trying to see him through rain-splattered glass.

  “Just like the day you were born,” she mumbled out loud.

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “When you were born. I couldn’t see your face at first because of the caul. Your father took it off and, Lord, how he cried to see it. I told him to quiet down, that the sound of a man crying was no way to welcome a child into the world. I was just glad to be able to see your face when that thing came off.”

  Silas was trying to think of something to say to her when he heard, haltingly at first, then louder, the approach of footsteps returning from somewhere deep in the house. A moment later his uncle came up behind him. Quickly assessing the mood of the room, Uncle said, “Silas, that’s enough now. Enough.” He went to stand behind Dolores, holding her shoulders, keeping her from collapsing entirely. “You can see your mother is not feeling at her best. Perhaps you ought to go now, son.”

  “Oh,” Silas snarled at his uncle, “I was already leaving!”

  Silas bristled at the word “son” and was about to start swinging again with his words as he stormed toward the door, but in the moment after loudly pronouncing his departure, a slow banging took up from someplace down the dark throat of the hallway, and up above somewhere, in some deep room upstairs. Like someone pounding a piece of soft wood, or a shoe, or a fist, very angrily against the wall. He and his uncle stopped and stood absolutely still. Here I am, the knocking said to Silas. Come and find me….

  His mind became a thousand moths flying at a single flame—Dad. Trapped. Held. Hidden. Imprisoned. Wounded. Lost. All of Silas’s suppressed suspicions furiously flooded his mind.

  Without warning, he turned away from the nauseating domesticity of his uncle comforting his mother and ran down the hall toward the sound and the stairs. An image of his father bound in some attic had dug its claws into his brain, and he couldn’t dislodge it. Locked away. His dad was being held somewhere in this house. Dad, Silas thought. God, Dad.

  “Silas!” his uncle called after him, as if shouting his name would bind him where he stood. But Silas, beyond the grasp of stern words, was already mounting the stairs, two and three at a time. As he reached the upper gallery, the sound of pounding stopped, but he knew exactly where it must have come from. He bolted straight ahead, into the long gallery of the north wing and through the door of his uncle’s room.

  Silas pushed it open and entered the bedroom. It was hard to see because the large room was lit only by a small lamp on the bedside table. He slowed a bit as he walked across the floor, trying to let his eyes adjust, but most of the room was too dark to make out. Books and papers and empty plates covered the bed. He picked up a piece of a map. It was of Newfield Cemetery and had all the plots numbered. Some had names written on them in his uncle’s neat, small handwriting. Uncle had been taking note of where certain people had been buried.

  Another small lamp was on in the next room, outlining the doorway with thin vertical and horizontal lines of gold light. Silas opened the door and crossed the threshold. He could see that the workroom had changed somewhat since his last, brief visit. The room was still scattered with his uncle’s photographic equipment, but now there were pieces of various projects at different stages, old volumes bookmarked with torn slips of paper, bits of wire for God knows what, several opened boxes of candy, most empty. The amber jewel jars of specimens preserved in golden liquid were still there, but many of the larger jars had been emptied of honey, their specimens now lying shriveled and pale at the bottom of their containers. The last time he saw the room, these things had been lined up neatly on the shelves, everything in its particular place. Now the contents of the room were scattered on the tables and floor, as though someone had been rummaging through them. Drawers were open. On the table where he had sat with Uncle weeks ago, the album of death portraits still lay open to the page of the dead woman’s moon-white hand. Next to it now lay old newspaper articles and another map of Newfield Cemetery.

  At the far end of the workroom was the locked door of the Camera Obscura. The heavy door was closed tightly like before, bolted with its bronze locks and several others that he could see had been recently added. Silas approached the door, and in the dim light, he could see that the surface of the door had been added to in other ways, scratched since he last looked at it. More of the geometric patterns and strange glyphs had been deeply incised into the door with a sharp tool.

  There were footfalls back out on the main landing. Silas could hear his uncle coming off the stairs and moving along the upper gallery now, getting closer.

  “Silas?” his uncle queried the second story of the house.

  Quickly Silas put his ear to the locked door and listened hard. From somewhere deep in the room, he could just make out a kind of rasping sound. Breathing, or panting, deep in someone’s throat. The guttural noise sounded hollow, far away from the door, and in Silas’s mind, the dimensions of a large space beyond now began to form. He squatted down, trying to hear anything he could through the tiny slip of a gap under the door. He could see little puffs of dust blowing out from under the door, only to be sucked back under a second later, as if the very room itself was drawing in breath, quickly, expectantly. He thrust his hand into his pocket, opened the death watch, and pressed his thumb to the dial. But instead of looking, he closed his eyes and listened. A rising scream rose out of the boards of the floor, and within that scream was a chorus of noises that crashed into his hearing from some abyss of times long past: small bells ringing and the soft rasp of a rattle, children laughing and an infant crying swirled together into strains of blurry joys and sorrows both. There was yelling … one voice trying to control another … a fit being thrown … chains shaking against a wall and a man … his uncle … sobbing. Then a voice rose above the other sounds. It was deep and muffled, as if someone was speaking through a cloth held in their mouth. “Saaahhlaasss …,” the voice seemed to sob and choke. “Saaaaahhhhlllaaaaasssssss …,” and as the exhalation of the word fell away,
the room took a sharp breath, and a hand like a vise closed on Silas’s right shoulder. Another grabbed the back of his jacket and pulled him up onto his feet, turning him rapidly around. Silas’s hand released the watch dial, and the rising cry fell away from him as he looked into his uncle’s face. Uncle’s skin was red as fire, and his chest heaved like a bellows. Silas could see that Uncle was furious, furious and scared both, but was trying to mask his anger if not his fear.

  “What do you think you are doing?” he said, nearly vomiting the words into Silas’s face.

  Coldly, flatly, though no less shaken, Silas answered, “I think we both know this is not about what I’m doing. It’s about what you’re doing.”

  “Oh? Silas”—Uncle coughed, still catching his breath—“pray tell, just what am I doing? What is it you think I am doing?”

  “There’s no need to become hysterical.” Silas relished seeing his uncle’s usual crisp composure wrecked. “But you have done something horrible.” Then, pausing between each word, he added, “We both know it. You have committed unimaginable acts.” In a way, Silas was bluffing. His mind was still reeling from what he’d heard, trying to sort out what it meant, what it might mean. But he could see he had his uncle on the run and so kept on at him, unwilling to let him regain his composure, hoping agitation would lead to revelation.

  “We both know you are hiding something, keeping something in this room. Keeping him!”

  Uncle opened his mouth and tried to speak, but no words came. Jumping into the pause, Silas began to scream at him.

  “You are a murderer! I am going to the police, and you are going to prison for murder!” The words flew out of him. Even as he spat them, he knew he had no evidence, only suspicion and intuition. He didn’t actually know whether he was right or not, whether the room held anything more than hidden relics of his uncle’s sick, lonely life, but his gut told him that Uncle knew something about his dad, and Silas wanted to hear him say so, or at least see if he could hear the lies working under his uncle’s words. “Murderer. Murderer,” Silas intoned slow as a spell. “You killed him, didn’t you? You always wanted my mother for yourself, so you put my dad out of the picture, right? C’mon, let’s go in there together, and you can show me what you’re hiding.” His bravery rose out of his wild anger, for if he’d stopped to think about it, it was more than likely that if the room did hold his father’s corpse, Silas would almost certainly find his own death waiting there for him.

  All the red ran out of Uncle’s face and he stood there, skin white as the handkerchief in his pocket. He slowly took a breath, trying to compose himself. “Silas, this room belongs to my son. It was his room before he went away”—he coughed—“to school. Before that, it was my studio. It is now, again, my private work-room. The things in it are private. My private things. Things of interest only to me, and of course, a few things of my son’s, which I know he would not want disturbed.”

  “You smell guilty, you know. Open the door. Just for one second. Open the door and let me see something that might convince me you’re not a monster.”

  “Oh, Silas,” Uncle said, breathing so shallowly now that Silas thought he might faint, “I don’t think there is anything I could show you or tell you that would convince you I wasn’t.” Uncle ran his hands down the lapels of his jacket. “And I don’t like this game. I will not rise to it. You have set your mind against me despite my only wanting the best for you and your mother.”

  “You know you want to show me, to be free of whatever you’re hiding in there, murderer,” Silas taunted him again, and then said, sarcastically, “Where’s your humanity?”

  “Oh,” Uncle said quietly, almost to himself, “somewhere neither you nor anyone, no, not even I, will ever find it.” He was gazing at the floor absently, but then looked up and met Silas’s stare with focus, as if he was remembering something. His hands began to tremble, but he continued with increasing calm. “Of course, Silas, if you think so little of me, perhaps you should leave. Leave this house now and don’t return until you learn a little gratitude. At such a time, when you are ready to become a part of this family, come back. And then I will gladly give you the key to every room in the house.” Uncle brushed the hair back out of his eyes. “But until such a time as you abandon these morbid fantasies and regain your composure and your respect, leave this house, Silas. Go!” This last word wiped the self-assured smugness from Silas’s face.

  At the word “go,” the locked door shuddered and vibrated sharply and briefly on its sturdy hinges. The dust began flowing again back and forth, back and forth under the door, like the breathing of a frightened animal, and the pounding started again just beyond the door. Silas’s eyes went wide. In the same moment his uncle’s knees went out from under him and he fell to a kneeling position on the floor murmuring, “Squirrels … they get inside the walls.” Sure they do, thought Silas in disbelief. Someone’s in that damn room. He pulled frantically at the door handle, though he could feel that the locks were too strong for him. He brought both fists down hard on the wood, sending a hollow booming sound through the room on the other side. The pounding stopped. Silence.

  “Dad?” Silas yelled, and again, “Dad?”

  From the basement to the dome the whole house was still. The only sound Silas could hear was his uncle’s soft crying.

  Uncle coughed, then spat out, “Your father is not in this house.” He said it with such directness, such matter-of-factness, that while the words held briefly on the air, Silas was almost convinced. But then, unable to release his suspicions, he bent down and snarled into his uncle’s ear, “You are a monster. And. I. Don’t. Believe. You.”

  Silas left his uncle’s house without another word, walking past the entrance to the front parlor where his mother still sat, not moving, just staring into space. Part of him wanted to go to her, hug her, tell her he was sorry for everything that disappointed and hurt her, to take it all on himself and off of her. He wanted to carry her out the front door with him, just get her out of that house where everything bad was made worse. But he knew she wouldn’t go. Silas knew she was there because some part of her wanted to be there, among the good furniture and the polished floors and the brother with money. So he walked out the door and slammed it behind him. He crossed the street and stood in the shadows of the trees. Back at Uncle’s house, a light went on in a room in one of the upper attics. His uncle, he guessed, going back to work. What was up there? What was Uncle covering up now? Maybe not his dad, he thought as his mind cooled, but something.

  And then downstairs, there was his mother, so close to whatever his uncle was keeping behind all those locks. Three times Silas started to turn to go home, but when he stopped himself the third time, he went back to Uncle’s. He climbed the stairs of the empty porch, lit only by the dim light falling out from the parlor window. Before he knew what he was doing or why, he was moving quietly along the wall until he was standing in front of the parlor window. His pressed his right hand against the cold stone of the house and leaned toward the glass. His left hand was in his coat pocket and the watch was in his hand, his thumb raising and lowering the hinged jaw that covered the watch’s dial. Looking in, he could see his mother hadn’t left her chair, but her shoulders were shaking now and she was holding her face in her hands.

  The light inside the house made the window into a mirror, and Silas had to look through his own face to see his mother. She sat inside his reflection, crying alone in an empty room. He didn’t want to feel anything, looking at her, but it felt like there was a stone sitting at the bottom of his stomach. He could see his eyes, reflected in the glass, watching her, and couldn’t decide which of the two of them he hated more; her for just sitting there, or himself for leaving her in that house. And then, wondering, he pressed his thumbs against the death watch’s ticking hand, stopping the mechanism. He was still looking through the window, but now the light in the room seemed to slant, and figures began to form around his mother, shapes of faded lace and long gowns sewn
from shadows, filling the room, leaning in toward her, all of them mimicking her racking sobs in silent pantomime. Most of the faces were blurred, as if streaked with water, rivulets of mourning that flowed in streams down their faces and over their forms. The figures closest to his mother were more distinct, and more familiar. An older woman in a mourning dress with his mother’s features reminded Silas of a photo of his grandmother. And next to her, a woman with a similar face, though older, clearly distilled from the same lineage. Maybe many of these spirits were relatives, female relations from his mother’s family stretching back who knew how far. Or perhaps these were the Umber women, still bound to the house where they spent their days and nights, quietly ignoring their husbands’ strange business, attending only to their private daily griefs.

  One of the figures closer to the window and the corner of the room lacked hands, and the blurred and rounded ends of her arms raised to her face could not stop her tears.

  In the middle of the crowd of spirits that wound about her, Silas saw his mother—as through a thin curtain—wipe the last tears from her eyes and begin to compose herself. As she did, the surrounding cloud of gray mourning women began to unweave itself from the room and fall away from her.

  Silas could feel his heavy guilt becoming mixed with something else. Was it comfort? Were these women watching over his mother while she remained in this house? What strange and ancient ritual was he watching where, in grief, kin surrounded her, drawn to her by her tears? Does mourning bring us closer to the dead? Silas wondered. It must be so, he concluded, that even when we can’t see beyond our own grief, we come close to their prison houses. Drawing his hands from his pockets and letting the clock continue ticking, Silas walked through the front door and went to his mother’s side, filled with resolve.