Mistle Child (Undertaken Trilogy)

by Ari Berk

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Map

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1. Lighthouse

  2. Earth to Earth

  3. Bookkeeping

  4. Regrets

  5. Let Them Dream

  6. Words

  7. Angle of Approach

  8. Washing Day

  9. Man of the House

  10. Highway

  11. Old Straight Track

  12. A Word of Welcome

  13. Threshold

  14. Room with a View

  15. At Table

  16. Keys to the Kingdom

  17. Under the Earth I Go

  18. Woken

  19. Knock, Knock

  20. Relativity

  21. Stepping Down

  22. Lost Child

  23. Solar

  24. Garden Party

  25. Old Flame

  26. Down

  27. The Help

  28. Ancient Light

  29. Fallen

  30. What’s Past Is Prologue

  31. Wake Up

  32. In the Woods

  33. The Book of Earth

  34. Lullaby

  35. Homeward Bound

  36. A Promise Broken

  37. A Hunting I Will Go

  38. Curses

  39. Coming to Terms

  40. Moonlight Becomes You

  41. Homecoming

  About Ari Berk

  For Tracy Ford

  Amicitia Numquam Moritur

  Here is the book of thy Descent . . .

  Here begin the Terrors.

  Here begin the Miracles.

  —Perlesvaus, 1225

  There the patient houses grow

  While through the rooms the flesh must flow.

  Mothers’, daughters’, fathers’, sons’,

  On and on the river runs . . .

  —From “A Devon Signpost” by Jacquetta Hawkes

  Thus he arrived before a great castle,

  on whose façade were carved the words:

  I belong to no one and to all.

  Before entering you were already here.

  When you leave you shall remain.

  —From Jacques Le Fataliste (1773) by Diderot

  PROLOGUE

  “BRING HOME THE CHILD . . . ,” she said through her sobs. “Little soul, by swift wing fly homeward to me.” Maud Umber spoke desperately, her eyes spilling over with tears. She looked as though she had been crying for a thousand years.

  She could move freely at most times through the whole of the house, though she often allowed her losses to hold her here, in the zone of the tears of fire, and within her private chapel. This was her own place, a casket for her grief. Here, alone in the chapel, Maud Umber gave free rein to her sorrow.

  She stood in a long woolen gown, limned with flickering, melancholic fire, looking out over the twilight salt marshes. The deep casement of the window was used as an altar and was thick with wax from the centuries of candles left burning there. Little blue flames flowed and leapt across the surface of her hands and fingers as she lit another candle. She stared at a small, gilded statue of a woman who sat on a throne with a small child in her lap.

  Maud closed her eyes and wrung her hands in front of her heart in desperate supplication.

  “Almighty and all merciful Queen, to whom all of this world fleeth for succor, Flower of Flowers, help and relieve my mighty misery. Lady of Heaven and Mother of the Stars, Thou who guardest little children in life and in the hour of their death, and hast prepared for them, and their mothers, a spacious place, even in the angelic abodes brightly radiant which befit their purity, wherein the souls of the righteous dwell, Thou, Cause of Our Joy, who makest a way for all the mothers of the world: Do Thou take pity, and restore my child to me . . . to my arms. Let a mother’s prayer be answered, I beg You, Holy Mother, Advocate of Eve. Bring home the child. Please, Mother of Heaven, light the way for my child to come home again so that we may make our way to Your side. Bring home the child. BRING HOME THE CHILD. . . .”

  The prayer became a scream woven with every kind of sorrow and longing and misery. It was the cry of a soul torn into portions of unfathomable grief. She screamed until there were no more screams left in her. She dropped to the floor, looking up at the carved beams of the ceiling and the thick, impervious stone of the walls.

  Shadows hung all about her, cast from the candles and from the preternatural glow rising from her form. Her chest heaved as she turned to look at the fluttering tapers. Suddenly, beyond the window’s frame, something flew upward from the earth and filled the air of the distant sky. Flocks of small birds were circling over the salt marshes, joined in their flight by the night herons. Something was happening. That place was changing. She rose from the floor and walked quickly to a bronze mirror hanging next to the hearth. She breathed across its surface and whispered, “Mother of Heaven, who hath caused this?” An image rose.

  A young man, a scion of her own house, blood-kin, stood before the salt marshes where nested the souls of the mothers of the lost. She knew that place well and had at various times looked out over the water, seeking solace with those weeping souls who had also lost their children, but whom she could never join. Now the once heavy, miserable air of the marshes was light with birdsong. Small birds. Children. The spirits of children filled the air. And below them stood a young man. It was the son of Amos Umber, and he had brought the lost children to the Bowers of the Night Herons where the mothers of loss had long been waiting to be free of their sorrows, to have their hearts restored to them, to find their children, any children, to whom they could give comfort, and so know peace.

  Maud Umber’s heart leapt and the flames that traced her body stilled and nearly went out. So, the child of Amos Umber held within his hands the rare power to bring lost children home. She went to the door of the small ancient chapel, stepped across the threshold, and ascended one of the high towers of the house. Without any consideration, without a care for the consequences, she raised her arms and spoke the words of summoning.

  “Let name call out to name! Scion of the house of Umber, come home! Your family calls you. Take up the mantle that is yours by rite and right. By threshold and Door Doom, by Limbus and mansion, by hall, by chamber, by lintel and post: Child of Amos Umber, come, now, by the ancient way, to the house of your kin!”

  She prayed he would come, for fascination with the house, with the ancestral manor, if nothing else. And once he arrived, he would take his place as Janus and would help her. He would restore her losses. He was obligated to his relations.

  A deep brazen trumpet sounded. Long and low came the ancient carnyx-call from some high place among the range of battlements. Then, from atop the long-abandoned clock tower, a decorative figure carved of limestone stirred, shifting from steadfast rock to undulating fabric just below the huge, unmoving dial. Tall and hooded, the figure slowly bent forward and set down its mighty scythe by the foot of the clock’s face, then stretched its hands, each finger a thick, sharp-tipped bone that clicked and scraped against its neighbor.

  Again, the trumpet cried out in metallic staccato notes that lengthened and deepened the longer they were held—SilAAAAAs, SilAAAAAs, SilAAAAAs. The blasts pierced and shattered the freezing air.

  The messenger pulled back its hood to reveal a skull, no longer of pitted, greening limestone, but dark, smooth bone, polished now like obsidian. From below the shelf of stone where it stood, a wind blew up the tower and roused the tattered hangings from its flowing robes into the semblance of wings. Then, as though the wind had caught in the billowing garment, it rose into the air and flew from that high place to deliver its invitation. Its eyes
flared like embers leaping to flame as it flew along the lychway. When it came before the gates, the messenger unhinged its jaw and let forth a sound like the cry of a thousand night birds. The gates opened, and in this way, the messenger passed into the town of Lichport.

  It floated silently down Fort Street, unseen, except by one venerable corpse sitting watch in a high window of its crumbling house.

  The messenger passed from shadow to shadow along the leaning and abandoned buildings, swiftly making its way closer and closer to its destination. A few moments later, the messenger stood on the porch of Silas Umber’s house. Without pausing, it drew its long finger up and down across the surface of the door, tracing out six letters in flame, burning the lines deeply into the surface of the wood . . .

  ARVALE

  LEDGER

  Sanctify unto me all the firstborn . . . both of man and of beast: it is mine.

  —EXODUS, 13:2. MARGINALIA OF AMOS UMBER

  NIGHTMARE TIME.

  From the ruined lighthouse clinging to the rocks stacked high above the sea, a gray ghost-light swept out over Lichport.

  Every evening, for over a week, on the very edge of town, the miasmic beam shone down from that tower. Grim weather descended with that light: furious winds and buffeting rain. And when the storm rose into a gale and screamed from the cliffs and whipped the surf into flying sheets of foam, that’s when the bad dreams began. It was mostly in the Narrows, where folks lived closest to the lighthouse; they would wake, terrified, from awful dreams of drowning and shipwrecks and muted voices crying through slowly rising bubbles far beneath the surface of the sea. Even in the upper part of town, people were affected.

  But not Silas Umber, the Undertaker of Lichport. He wasn’t sleeping anyway. Not since a few nights ago, when someone burned the name of the old Umber family estate into his front door. Silas had spent the rest of that night pulling books and records from the shelves of his study, anything he could find that would tell him more about the house called Arvale. He had a large pile of these on his desk, awaiting his attention. But the lighthouse would have to come first. People were talking. Letters requesting help had been coming in every day since it started. Nights were bad for the rest of the folk in Lichport, and Silas knew they expected him to end the trouble.

  Mrs. Bowe, who lived in the house attached to his, woke screaming six days ago and hadn’t had a good night’s rest since. Silas’s mother called him two days before to say the dreams were so bad that she had resorted to only napping in a chair during daylight hours. Silas had spent several evenings at his mother’s house across town, playing cards with her from midnight until morning because he was worried she’d go back to drinking to calm her nerves. Things had eased a little between them. They were talking to each other now, not at each other. He knew his mother was proud of him in her way. She still had trouble saying it, Silas could tell, but things were better. She had come to his dad’s wake and had begun talking about Amos civilly. Silas had even invited his mother to move in with him once more. And although she declined, saying again the house on Temple Street was her place now, and the only way she was leaving was feet first, she took her son’s hand warmly and kissed his cheek for having asked.

  But the nightmares were fraying the edges of everything.

  Now Silas looked out from a high window in his house. In his hand, the death watch was silent, its ticking stilled by his thumb against the dial. Silas could see, clear with the ghost-sight the watch bestowed, the beams of sickly gray light turning out from the lighthouse and falling like a pall over land and sea.

  At first, Silas thought the light might have been one of the occasional phantasmal glimmerings seen near the ocean. These were not uncommon, and while they might be related to sunken ships, or some poor soul lost beneath the waves, no ghost ever manifested, and the lights would usually vanish almost as soon as they appeared. But this was different, and people in town, his town, were suffering.

  Enough, he said to himself. Enough.

  He opened the enormous funereal ledger that contained everything his father and the other Undertakers of his family knew about ghost lore and death rites. Scrawled throughout the book and upon its margins were the notes, instructions, and gleanings of his ancestors, those previous Undertakers who, like him, sought to bring Peace to the unsettled dead.

  The ghost of the lighthouse had been known to his father, but only through secondhand accounts. Silas had read an entry in his father’s handwriting that explained that the ghost of the lighthouse would never appear to him, though he had tried to speak to the spirit on more than one occasion. For several days, and as the nightmares continued to run like wild things through the town, Silas read and read, making an especial study of the lighthouse and its sad history. He devoured newspaper accounts, memoirs, notes, rumors: everything he could find in the ledger and in the large collection of books on local history that spilled from the shelves of his father’s home library.

  When he had learned all he could on the subject of the lighthouse and its last occupant, Silas set out for the cliffs, a little before dark. In the months since his father’s death, he had diligently applied himself to Undertaking, reading widely, and practicing the arcane rites he’d read about in the ledger when and where he could. And while Silas wasn’t even sure if he’d be able to help, he was resolved to try. In his mind Silas carried a name, held it like a talisman with which he might be able to settle the dead within that spindle of brick perched upon the rocks. He prayed the name would be enough.

  The sky was pouring down pitch as Silas walked quickly along the cliff toward the old lighthouse. He wore an oilskin cape over his father’s jacket and held a small lantern. As he approached the high tower, he reached into his jacket pocket and took hold of the death watch, that ancient timepiece that when stopped, compelled the dead to become visible to the living. Silas drew no comfort from how quickly the silver warmed in his hand. It was as if the death watch wanted to be held and used. It made Silas feel uneasy.

  Before even reaching the door, before stopping the hand of the death watch, he could sense the past of the place weighing down on him, more and more with every step, pulling at his feet as though the earth itself were trying to hold him back. He picked up his pace and when he reached the door, he took out a large iron key lent to him by Mother Peale, who had taken it upon herself to keep an eye on the place many years ago. She had been only too happy to hear that Silas would try his hand at bringing Peace to that haunted tower.

  “You take this key and do what you can, Silas Umber,” Mother Peale had said. “You know we’re all for you, no matter what happens. And remember, if you don’t come back, your funeral is paid for by the townsfolk, as is customary, so don’t you worry. It’s all taken care of should it come to that.” Mother Peale had smiled and winked at Silas then, to rouse his good humor. Silas had smiled back, but hadn’t found it terribly funny.

  At first, the key wouldn’t turn in the lock. Silas twisted it back and forth, worried that it might break. Finally, the rust gave way and the lock turned, but when Silas pushed the door, it wouldn’t budge. He shoved it, then struck it with his fist as though the door might fly open by the sheer force of his rising aggravation. Finally, in anger, Silas threw his full weight at the door, hitting it hard with his shoulder, and the door relented. A damp, salty smell flowed out from the darkness beyond the doorway as he stumbled inside. He held up the lantern, its weak light barely making an entrance into the inky black of the room, and then closed the door behind him. He walked to the center of the room, set the lantern on a small uneven table, and took the death watch from his pocket. Opening the jaw of the small silver skull, he brought his thumb down hard on the dial. He could feel the watch’s little heartbeat slow and then stop. Silas closed his eyes, drew in a breath, and opened them again.

  Where only a moment ago there had been an abandoned room with a few pieces of rotted and broken furniture, now a new scene glimmered before him. A wood-burning stove glowed on the
far side of the room and a few toys lay scattered on the rug. In the middle of the room, a table was set with a cloth and candles. A hutch against the wall bore dishes and mugs. Here was a comfortable family home.

  A sudden movement caught Silas’s eyes. A shadow was drawing away from the wall. Slowly it lengthened out across the floor, and began to rise and take shape. The shadow moved against the light to place itself in a chair across the room from Silas. There, now, smiling faintly, was a young man, perhaps in his twenties. His body gave off a gray ineffectual light, as though he were a candle seen on the screen in an early film.

  “Good evening,” said Silas to the ghost, breathing slowly, steadying himself.

  “Is it evening? I hadn’t noticed,” the ghost replied absently.

  “Almost. I am looking for the keeper of this lighthouse. Is that you?”

  The ghost looked away. “No. That is my father.”

  “May I speak with him?”

  “I am afraid not, sir. He’s not here at present.”

  “May I ask where he is?” Silas inquired.

  “My father’s not here. Just me now. The son.”

  Silas was surprised. He knew that the lighthouse keeper’s son, who had died with his mother in a shipwreck, had been an infant. So who was this? Was there another son? Had the records he’d consulted been incomplete? There was something in the ghost’s voice—a knowing hesitancy—that made Silas uneasy.

  “I need to speak with your father,” Silas said again, this time putting some iron into the words.

  The ghost began to shake. He looked at Silas, then toward the window.

  “I think I know you. . . . I’ve seen you, sitting out there, with a girl.” The ghost smiled wanly then. “You were with a strange girl. Her skin was like the moon—”

  “I don’t remember,” Silas said. While he couldn’t recall the particulars, he knew the ghost was right. He’d been there with a girl. What was her name? No. He didn’t want to start on this topic. Not now. Memories of her . . . of the girl . . . made his heart ache, and he hadn’t come to the lighthouse to talk about his own losses. “But,” he said instead, “I am pleased to meet you. I am Silas Umber. I am the Undertaker. I am here to help you.”