by Ari Berk
The first of the three came up alongside Silas and put a hand lightly on his shoulder. To his surprise, it felt warm. She drew him to the other side of the room away from the others, who had already gone back to their needlework. She walked with him to the window and stopped very suddenly as if something had snagged the hem of her dress.
“What you propose is very dangerous, and I will have no hand it in. Dangerous for me, dangerous for those souls involved, dangerous for you. Silas, there are mysteries within mysteries at work here, and I cannot pretend that in this place and at this time I know much more than I have told you. You know that what you say to the dead can have a profound, even painful effect on them?”
“Yes. I also know that the right words can set them free from their troubles.”
“The challenge will not be, I suspect, extricating them from their losses. Like almost all the dead, they may leave their prisons whenever they wish to or acknowledge that they can. The problem will come when you try to leave. The condition of the souls bound to this place is very particular, because they are all young, all children. The young have not yet come to full knowledge while alive, and that makes coming close to them in death very perilous. Entering their shadowland will likely affect you greatly and in ways you cannot anticipate. They are lost, and so may cause that condition in those who are like them.”
“But I’m not lost … I mean, not like that. I know where I am. I know who I am and what, I think, I am becoming.”
“Oh, child, please—you have not even the barest knowledge of what the world has in store for you now that you have accepted the mantle of Undertaker. Now that you have returned to Lichport, forces have been set in motion, stitches that may never be picked out or cut. This is an awkward, delicate business all around. Just as you cannot wave your hands and reappear in your simple life before coming here, so you cannot merely clap them to wake up the dead from their troubles. Indeed, it would be very much like waking a sleepwalker. Where will they find themselves? Where did they dream they were? Who are they when they are woken? How will they find themselves? Walking? Dreaming? Dying?
“I will not knot two lands of shadow together, even when, as now, within one may reside the solution to another’s grief. You must do this out there. You must help them see themselves. You’ll have to find a way. But rest assured, when you puzzle it out, we will then do our part and make it so in the tapestry. Then, and only then, may the pattern of the web be changed. Resolve yourself. Set your mind to the task. Do not confuse your world with theirs, no matter how alike they may seem to be. You will have to use what you know to bring peace to the dead you encounter. In the work itself is salvation—for them, perhaps for you, but do not hope for anything in return. Silas, work such as this will require sacrifice.”
“From them or from me?”
Each of the three was looking at him now and spoke in one voice: “From all.”
“Will you tell me where to find them, these lost children?”
“I cannot, because the doors to that world are various,” said the first.
As he looked again, Silas could see that there were other threads, at first hidden from view, leading from the corners of this knotted bit of the web to many other portions, though none, not one thread, connected it to the Bowers of the Night Herons among the marshes.
“For everyone, the entrance to this misthome will be different and individual. You will know where to find it. You must follow your own particular pain to its threshold. Where was the place you felt the most alone, the most lost, the most frightened and miserable? In such recollections will you find it.”
Silas didn’t even need to think about it.
“School. The playground at school. But I went to school in Saltsbridge. Will I have to go back to Saltsbridge?”
“How tiresome,” said the third. “I would not have taken him for a literalist—”
But the first spoke again, cutting off her sister.
“Any such place should be sufficient to provide an entrance for you, for many children share a common story and bear similar portions of sadness when it comes to regret and loss. By foot, you will not have to travel far to find the Playground.” And as the first said the word “playground,” a large portion of the tapestry shivered, like the taut thread of a spider’s web when a fly becomes trapped in it. Very suddenly, the second began stitching a slide to the ground cloth where Silas had been looking, then swings and benches, and in the corner, the outline of a tree in rough nut-brown yarn.
“There!” cried the first. “You see! Already your mind hovers about this place, remembering, and already it is changing. Silas Umber, take great care! This shadowland is waiting for you. It knows you are coming.”
LEDGER
THE DAYS OF YOUTH ARE MADE FOR GLEE, AND TIME IS ON THE WING.
—transcribed in haste in the hand of Amos Umber, quoted from “The Miller of Dee”
Once I saw a little bird
Come hop, hop, hop;
So I cried, “Little bird,
Will you stop, stop, stop?”
And was going to the window
To say, “How do you do?”
But he shook his little tail,
And far away he flew.
— Overheard on the Lichport salt marsh, March 23, 1924. From Mother Goose
The hours must be endured and those who cannot do so in life will most surely do so in death. You say you cannot face them? Life’s joys and pains both? You shall find them waiting for you, a world of ignored moments there to be explored. Then shall you know how long an hour can be, shall feel the awful depth and restlessness of even a single day, and all the days you fled from life while you were alive.
—From The Sermon Book of Abraham Umber, 1810
ON MAIN STREET, near the edge of town, stood the old Catholic church, long since abandoned. Behind it, on the church’s north side, by custom, was a small, derelict cemetery holding the mostly unmarked graves of travelers or strangers who died anonymously in Lichport before the Lost Ground graveyard had been consecrated. Unbaptized children were also brought to the church, and white stones lay deep in the tall grass marking those long-forgotten little graves. Directly across from the church was the school. Like the church, the school hadn’t been used in years. Any children left in town either went to residential schools in Kingsport, or attended a small irregularly meeting classroom in the Narrows. North of the school, church, and cemetery was a weedy, fenced-in plot that was once the school playground. Rusted swings and a slide still stood there, and at its far corner grew a thick low tree, its trunk scarred with the names of children, which, though carved deep, were year by year vanishing below the thickening bark.
Silas had never explored these buildings, though he’d passed them many times. He had been a baby when he’d left Lichport and had never attended this school, yet the playground felt vaguely familiar to him. At one end, as on all playgrounds, popular children would have once gathered around the swings and worn benches to talk. At the other end, by the tree, one or two awkward kids would hide, talking quietly about their unpopular interests until the bell sounded to bring them all back to supervised activities in the bland, orderly world of their classrooms.
A small breeze whipped at the weeds that grew up through the cracks in the pavement, pushing and pulling at the swings that whined on their rusted chains. In the tree, and in the bushes that grew wild around the playground’s fence, he could hear hidden creatures. The long, lone cry of a small bird pierced his ears, calling out again and again but never answered, though other birds seemed to move invisibly among the branches.
Silas opened the small rusted gate and walked onto the playground. He took the death watch from his pocket and held it for a moment without opening it. The sound of the wind grew louder. A plastic bag rose and fell on the air, hovered, then dropped to the ground, where it made spirals and scraped the pavement before leaping up again. Up and down it went, never blowing away. The death watch was heavy in his hand, and Si
las could feel it tick in time with his heartbeat. It was as though it had become a part of him, this strange artifact; a second small heart that beat outside his body. When he felt it ticking like this, Silas knew that the watch wanted to be used, that it wanted to show him something, like a child begging for attention. He wasn’t sure he entirely liked that sensation. But he had come to the playground with a purpose. He opened the skull and brought his thumb down hard on the dial until the clock’s tiny mechanical heartbeat stopped.
At first, nothing stood out. The day remained gray. The weeds waved from their beds of broken pavement. The sound of the birds was getting louder, many of them calling out from their hidden perches, though none in concert. And in little pockets about the edges of the playground, the shapes of children stepped from the shadows. It was hard to make out faces, but their eyes, lidless and white as stones, shone from below their brows.
Silas turned in a full circle, and when he looked at the tree, one child hovered there near the trunk, slightly more discernible than the others, looking at him. When Silas took a step toward him, stooping slightly to bring himself closer to the child’s height, the little boy drew back from him, scared.
The surface of the child’s form was constantly changing, his skin a palette of shifting colors. He was covered in blotches of dark pigment, like clouds casting their shadows on his skin. Bruises, all the colors of bruises.
“Did someone hit you?” Silas asked, reaching out to the child.
“No one hit me,” he said, recoiling back into himself, becoming smaller, the colors on his skin intensifying as he shrank.
“Did someone hurt you?”
“My stomach hurts. I want to go to the nurse. Why won’t they play with me? I want to go home.” The child was drawing farther and farther away from Silas now, and the air around his form began to darken like his skin, so it was becoming harder to see the child’s shape. It was receding into the long, irregular shadow cast by the tree. “Why can’t you leave me alone like everyone else?”
“Wait! Wait! I won’t hurt you. I want to help,” Silas called out.
“Please!” the child pleaded. “No more. No more words. They hurt. You’re hurting me.” The child moved in and out of the dusky air. When for a fleeting moment Silas could see him clearly, he saw that all the child’s skin was now the plum-black stain of a bruise. The boy was defenseless and everything he heard hurt him.
“Where is my father?” the child asked pitifully, his eyes cast down, his shoulders making tiny jumps as he began to cry. “Do you know where my dad is?”
Silas had begun to grow very cold. At the edges of his vision, the gates of the playground were growing less and less distinct.
“What is your father’s name?” Silas asked. “Maybe I can help you find him.”
The child moved toward Silas very slowly and stood before him, a wave of freezing air rising up behind and breaking like a wave, crystallizing his features, making them sharper every second. The small boy raised his head to look at Silas, his white eyes bright and hanging in the air like two cold stars.
“Amos. My father is Amos,” said the child, “and I can’t find him. Where is he? I can’t find my dad. Why won’t he come for me?”
When the child spoke his father’s name, Silas felt hands seize his chest and he stood stunned, unable to move or breathe. The boy’s face was clearly visible now, even behind the bruises, and Silas could see himself in the childish features. He reached out and took the child’s small hand and he could feel it, like it was one of his own hands holding its mate. In that instant Silas knew with complete certainty that he had unknowingly found his way into the limbo that awaited him at his death. Here, to this awful twilight, was where he would come at his life’s end.
Papers blew and drifted over the shattered pavement. There were birds in all the trees, and each called out discordantly against the others so that no one song could be heard, but the air was full of noise and distraction. The equipment on the playground was now filled with gray shapes of children. They did not look at one another, their pale, unblinking eyes staring forward. Silas looked absently this way and that, trying to make out any of the faces, but no one held its form and no one would look back at him. And how could he know them? Here were lost children from many lands, many times. Silas felt very small and as though there were no weight to him anymore. A word from anyone, the smallest wind, would puff him away.
He sat at the base of the familiar tree, his once daily perch, its exposed roots polished from years of other children waiting there; waiting for a bell to ring, waiting to go home. He could see a few names carved into the lower trunk of the tree. None looked familiar. Nothing stood out.
Silas had crumpled into a posture of retreat and fearful expectation. Among the timeworn roots of the tree, he sat with his head on his upraised knees and his arms wrapped around, clasped together in front of him. There was cold metal clutched in his right fist. He couldn’t remember what it was, but he knew he couldn’t let go of it. Not ever. He was staring at the ground in resignation. When he heard a noise, his head would briefly fly up to see if someone was coming, but then quickly fall back down again, his eyes rimmed with rising tears. In the distance, he thought he heard a car. He strained to see, searching for a familiar shape: his dad’s car, or one of his parents walking to the playground to find him. But his father wasn’t there, and his mother had forgotten to come. So he waited, for a hundred years it seemed, and his father was not there, and was not there, and was not coming. He put his head back down and felt himself melting—like the old carved names—down into the bark of the tree. He could hear the other birds but not see them. The voices of other children were about him too but had become just an indistinct circle of sounds, isolating him from the rest of the world. I am invisible, he said to himself, at himself, trying to block out the noise.
I am invisible.
And I am alone.
They forgot me.
I don’t want to be here by myself.
I don’t want to be alone.
I want to go home.
I don’t want to look at their faces. When I see them not seeing me, I feel sick.
My stomach hurts. I want to go to the nurse. I want to go home.
The kid from math I never spoke to walked past me.
I am not here.
Is that the girl who’s been in homeroom with me for three years?
You know her. You know her name. Idiot. Say it.
There’s Math Kid. Say his name.
He’ll turn around.
I can’t. He won’t hear me. He’ll ignore me because I am not here.
See? Invisible. No ones saves me a place at lunch.
Because when someone looks I look away.
They go on talking about something else. I’ll never ask now.
Maybe at recess. Maybe they’ll see me. Maybe someone will call my name.
I might get called. I might. Hey! You wanna play? No one will mind.
I’m Silas.
Hi.
I’m Silas.
Can I play?
Can I play with you guys?
The playground is loud with words, so many I can’t hear myself anymore.
But no words for me.
Okay. Later, guys. I’ll just say: Another time, it’s okay. They don’t turn around because I am not here. I am invisible.
I’ll be over there. By the tree. If you need another player. I’ll just be by the tree. But when I walk away, I disappear like I was never there.
Liar. I just lied. I told my dad I’d try to make friends, but I can’t say their names.
There’s something wrong with me. They know it.
I won’t tell my dad about school, because he hates a liar.
Lies murder the world, he tells me. I’m a liar because I don’t want to make him angry.
Maybe he knows. Maybe that’s why he won’t come to get me and bring me home. Because he knows I’m invisible too. It’s not my fault they can’t see m
e. He’s mad at me because I don’t have any friends and because he knows it.
If you’re invisible, you don’t count.
No one wants to be with someone they can’t see.
My stomach hurts.
I want to go home.
Please.
Dad?
A child sits by the tree on the playground. Every day it is the same. He sits by the tree. He does not look up anymore. No one comes for him. He can no longer remember what he is waiting for or how long he’s been waiting. There is only the tree and the cold earth below him and the voices calling out from the yard, but they never once say his name. He can barely remember his name anymore. He lays his head down on his folded arms and closes his eyes, and he doesn’t know how long he’s been there or how long it has been since he closed his eyes, and every second becomes a lifetime to him.
The child does not know how long he’s had his head down.
But then, as his tears fall, the ground begins to feel different, no longer the frozen clay of winter, but warming now, even as he sits on it. There is movement in the branches, and the air around the tree stirs with unexpected heat, and from the brightening air behind the tree, these words fly to him, and he hears a name—his name.
Come outside and play, Silas! You’ve been inside too long! Come outside!
Silas lifted his head to look about him for the source of the voice.
It was Tom.
And Tom’s name, like a key, opened a door in Silas’s mind, and bright memories began to fill up the dark corners.
At first he could see Tom’s face as it was on a Saturday afternoon seven years ago, when they played and played until the dark came, but then more of the past emerged. Silas watched Tom’s face change, saw it pale and grow still as it might have looked on the day of his funeral. Silas wasn’t allowed to go, but he’d had nightmares about seeing Tom in his coffin. And now that image rose again. Silas slammed his eyes shut and turned his head back to the roots of the waiting tree, the cold light falling around him once more.