Mistle Child (Undertaken Trilogy)

by Ari Berk

  “I am Silas Umber. I am the Janus of this house.” Silas was not sure how he could be so certain of it, but in every fiber of his being, he knew those words to be true. He looked at the palms of his hands. Nothing stood out. Now, whatever he was, it was inside him, woven right through the very core of his being.

  “That is well,” Jonas said, sounding unconvinced. “Be welcome, now and always, in this house, Silas Umber, Janus.”

  From the ghosts in attendance, still filling the corners of the long hall, a cry went up, a cheer that rang for a brief moment until the room went quiet again. They were waiting for something. It wasn’t over.

  Slowly, Silas stood up. His legs were weak. He looked down at the Limbus Stone nervously, afraid of what he might see. Now it was solid beneath his feet. He thought about the abyss he’d seen in his vision, and as he did so, the stone began to vibrate and thin, as though the fabric of its atoms was becoming threadbare.

  “Stop,” said Jonas. “You must regulate your thoughts. The stone is yours to command. It is a doorway itself and will now open and close at your will.”

  Silas deliberately imagined a door slamming shut, and in response, the Limbus Stone waxed solid again. Silas stepped off the stone, back into the hall.

  Slowly, as though she no longer recognized him, Maud walked toward him with trepidation. “Welcome, Silas Umber, Janus of the Threshold. Your family thanks you. . . .” It looked like she wanted to say more, but she stayed several paces back from him and grew quiet. What does she think I’ll do? Silas wondered.

  “So is that it? It’s all done, then? I am now Janus?” Silas asked hopefully.

  “For the most part, yes,” answered Jonas.

  “For the most part?”

  “Just one small thing remains,” said Jonas, a look of mild concern settling on his brow. “A necessary formality.”

  Emboldened by the first part of his initiation, Silas said, “Bring it on.” As he spoke, the tone of the assembled crowd began to turn. A single word had begun working its way through the multitude, one word, rising to the rafters, shouted over and over as the family devolved into a mob.

  “Drink! Drink! Drink!” they chanted, and the beams of the roof and the stones of the floor began to shake in time with their shouts.

  “You must descend and drink. You must claim remembrance,” said Jonas, who was frowning again. “When you drink from the waters of Eunoe, the Spring of Memory, it will be done. You shall be the Janus of the Threshold, and then we shall see what comes of it. This is no idle task. All the Undertakers in the family have walked upon this path and made their way to the springs, every one. Though not every one has returned.”

  “Is this where the water comes from that brings forgetting to the dead?”

  “Yes. Though there are other places in the world where that spring appears as well. Arvale is not its source, just one of many places where it bubbles up through the earth. This is also a place where the Spring of Memory flows and it is from those waters that you must drink. Although he eventually turned from his responsibilities, your father tread the path below, and it was on that journey that he drank from one spring, and then filled his flask from the other with which he dispensed forgetting to the dead.”

  Silas still carried that flask of his father’s. It was in his satchel, less than half-full. As Undertaker, he felt it was his responsibility to carry it with him almost everywhere, in case it might be needed to bring the Peace. Now he would be able to refill it.

  “Are you ready, Silas?” Jonas asked.

  “I believe so,” Silas replied.

  Jonas leaned in very close to Silas’s face, and quickly whispered, “Do not stray from the path.”

  The cry from the crowds lifted up again, this time chanting “Down! Down! Down!”, their words becoming almost a howl. The hollering was getting on his nerves.

  “Okay!” he shouted. “Enough! I’m going!”

  Jonas and Maud walked Silas to the side of the Great Hall. As Silas turned away from the now hushed mob, he noticed that in the high windows, stars were alight. It was still night and it was starting to feel like morning might never come. At the wall, Jonas drew aside a tapestry to reveal a doorway, old and arched. Maud pulled back the bolt and opened the heavy wooden door. A cold, moldy breeze rushed up into the hall. Beyond the door there were steps, well worn and steep, that swiftly descended into darkness. Not even the light of a candle shone from below.

  Above the door, carved deep into the keystone, were the words: DIS MANIBUS SACRUM.

  Jonas slowly swept his hand toward the opening in the wall with a hesitant gesture of welcome. “Silas Umber, the catacombs await you. Descend.”

  Silas took one step down, then two more. He turned to look back up toward the lighted hall, to ask for a lantern, but before he could speak a single word, the door slammed shut. He heard the bolt slide back into the thick stone of the wall, locking it behind him.

  FROM THE BOOK OF CEREMENTS

  But that place which brings most wealth unto the place, are not the waters from without, but those waters which are within.

  —TRANSCRIBED BY AMOS UMBER FROM ENGLISH HISTORY, 1671

  He that builds a fair house, upon an ill seat, committeth himself to prison.

  —TRANSCRIBED BY AMOS UMBER FROM “OF BUILDING” BY FRANCIS BACON

  SILAS SAT ON THE THIRD STEP in the chill darkness. He wondered if his father had sat here once, and the thought briefly warmed him. A “necessary formality,” Jonas had called this part. If this was where the Undertakers went to refill their supplies of the water of forgetting, then this was merely the first of many visits he might be making to the catacombs. That thought calmed him. A candle would have calmed him more. He wanted to ask for one, but he refused, out of pride, to knock on the door for help. Mostly, he didn’t want to fall.

  He stood up slowly, unable to see any detail of the stairs, roof, or walls of the steeply descending passage. The air was so still, so close, it sounded like he was breathing into his own ears. He reached up and could just feel the rough stone a little above his head. He took another few steps down, each time letting his foot dangle for a moment before he pointed his toe, letting it slowly find the next step. Holding out his hands to the walls, he continued, trusting he would find each step, or that he would eventually come to solid floor. He pushed from his mind all fears that the stairs might simply lead him to the edge of another abyss.

  As he descended, he felt things brush his face in the darkness: spiderwebs, or he imagined fingers of the dead formed from the soft condensing air. The air thickened and soured the farther he went.

  After what might have been an hour, or a day, Silas sat down on the steps again, frustrated, unsure how deep into the earth he had already descended. He could feel the weight of soil and rock above and about him. His breath slowed on the still air. He could sense the land and the house pushing down on him. He was suffocating, and knew that if he didn’t drown his rising panic in distracting thought, he would run back the way he’d come.

  He slowed his breath and tried to remember something about light: strange lights appearing in unexpected places. He’d seen them before. Ghosts could give off such illumination. So could places where the dead gathered. As Undertaker, when helping the dead, often he would see little lights. He remembered how he had called out toward the sea for some spirit to help the ghost of the lighthouse keeper, to help guide the way of that lost soul. He had spoken the words, out over the sea until little candles had risen up—conjured, called—in answer to his heartfelt request. He had assumed those preternatural lanterns were kin, the long lost wife and child of the lighthouse keeper, family helping their own, shining through the darkness for the spirit who could not make a way for himself. Wasn’t this house filled with family from its heights to its depths? Why couldn’t an Undertaker reach out to his own family and ask for help?

  Silas stood in the darkness. He tried to let the words just come, like a prayer, a poem, his next breath. Just a few goo
d, true words, he thought. He closed his eyes tightly and rubbed them, like he used to do at bedtime as a child. Immediately, little sprays of color jumped up behind his eyelids. Yes, he thought at seeing the colorful phosphenes, the light is always here, we just forget to see it. In the ledger there had been pages of instructions to help the Undertaker better traverse the dark roads of the shadowlands. No one text stood out in his memory, but some of the words were there, and Silas began to speak them out loud.

  “I consign myself to earth. May ancestral light be about me as I descend. Let the deep places make a way for me. May I go forth in the light of my kin.”

  And before him and behind him, tiny blue particles wavered, barely bright enough to see the walls on either side.

  “May I make my way with the light of my ancestors to guide me,” Silas added, his voice rising in excitement, cutting through the heavy air. “May the darkness of the world fall away from me!”

  Small orbs of light leapt up, becoming candles of blue fire bobbing in the air before him, brightening his way. He stood there in delighted amazement, watching the flames. He could clearly see the dressed stone of the walls and the worn steps below his feet. He pressed on.

  The stairs led him to a large chamber with a floor made of rough stone slabs that slanted even deeper into the earth. The chamber—or perhaps it was a vast tunnel—had smaller passages heading off on each side. Coffins and funeral urns filled niches on all the walls. The deeper into the earth he walked, the older the sculptures became, as if his descent was taking him the through the strata of history. He passed carved tombs, medieval sepulchres, Etruscan sarcophagi, and paintings of animals and spirits made on the undressed stones of the walls with charcoal and pigment sprayed from the mouth and shaped by the curves and angles of ancient hands, like those he’d seen in books about the thirty-thousand year old ancient caves discovered in the cliffs of southwestern France.

  Silas paused to peer into a side passage, and saw vaulted chambers. Huge blocks of stone formed the walls, seemingly the work of titans. Massive figures like Atlas, carved of basalt and black quartz, stooped and hunched with the weight of the roof slabs pressing down on them. Here were the very buttresses and foundations of all the earth above. Farther down those passages, high-carved arches were set with tiny white jewels that might have been skulls. Silas remembered the hollow sound of the floor under his Uncle’s library and wondered if the house on Temple Street had been built above some lost quarter of this sprawling underground necropolis.

  One passage caught his eye. It was fashioned entirely of black marble, with rows of fluted columns running along its length. The opening was covered in cobwebs, and some stones had been stacked at the entrance as if, at some point, the passage had been sealed off. Silas moved a little closer, and with each step he took toward the entrance, the colder he felt. This is a bad way, he thought. He pushed the cobwebs aside and looked beyond the broken wall. In the blue light in the distance, he could see a greening metal door. Bands of iron had been riveted it, and molten lead had been poured about its edges. Across the door’s surface were scrawled the letters DM. And beyond the impassable door, Silas was sure now, someone was crying. As soft as it was, the sound startled him, and he pulled his head back.

  “Hello?”

  The crying grew softer.

  “Is someone there?”

  The crying stopped.

  Ignoring Jonas’s warning about staying on the path, Silas pulled loose stones from the top of the pile to widen the opening and then crawled into the passage. Slowly he walked up to the sealed door. Its surface was rimed in verdigris, and at its edges, tiny crystals had formed, making the door look like it had risen up out of the rock floor.

  “Do you need help?” Silas could see no handle on the door. He began to reach out to touch its surface, but then drew back his hand. He picked up a rock and tapped the door with it. It made almost no noise, for the door was thick and solid, and the dank air swallowed every sound.

  “Is there anyone in there?”

  Silence. Not the silence of nothing, but the silence of waiting. Something waiting and holding itself still on the other side.

  Locked doors were dangerous, in his experience. They were usually locked for good reasons. This door reminded him of the Camera Obscura at Uncle’s, and of the sealed tins of souls at his father’s house, each with its tortured occupant. Now Jonas’s words about not leaving the path began to pull at him. Silas turned away, crawled out of the passage, and continued on, pulling cobwebs off his hair and clothes as he walked.

  The farther he went, the more the walls drew in, closer about him until the once vast passage funneled down to a small chamber with a single door on its far side. In the middle of the room, there was an enormous desk where, Silas was surprised to see, a man sat, wearing a green visor like some old-time accountant. His skin was thin, translucent, and creased, his face like a wrinkled piece of vellum. The man’s long robes looked like they had been woven from skeins of dust. The desk was covered in nearly tipping towers of papers and just in front of the man were various stamps, seals, and signet rings. Slowly, like an automaton, the man pulled a document from one pile, stamped it, then put it on another pile. About the table were many tall, pillared candles, and on the very corner of his desk perched the skull of a small child.

  Without raising his head, the man at the desk rasped, “Dropping off, or picking up?”

  “Um . . . neither, I believe. I am here on my own business,” said Silas.

  “Well, then, who have we here?” the man asked, looking up. When he saw Silas with the corona of corpse fire about his head, he rose and bowed slightly but reverently, and said, “Begging your pardon, sir. I was trying to get through some of the backlog. How may I help?”

  “I’m looking for the springs.”

  “Oh, ’course you are! How long has it been since the last time?”

  “I don’t believe I’ve been here before,” answered Silas.

  “Of course you have,” said the man at the desk. “All the Undertakers come here.”

  “But this is my first time,” Silas tried to explain.

  “First time, last time . . . all the same from where I sit.”

  Silas wondered how long it had been since this man had gotten out. Did he live down here in the catacombs? “I don’t mean to be rude, but may I assume, sir, you are not among the living?” Silas knew a ghost when he saw one, but experience had taught him it was always more polite to let others describe themselves first, before making any assumptions.

  “If you are alive, sir, then in truth, I am among the living.”

  Silas smiled. “I mean, are you dead? Departed? Like the other folk of this house?”

  “As you like,” said the keeper of the crypt. “It’s just a job. Who’s to say what’s dead and departed down here in the dark? I am here. So I can’t be ‘departed,’ can I? Besides, nothing so small as life or death need keep us from a friendly chat surrounded by the bones and cerements. Living or dead, it’s all family down here, in’t? Just one big family reunion, that’s what the catacombs are.”

  “I suppose that’s true. May I ask what it is you’re doing down here?”

  “Keeping the records up-to-date. Someone has to make a note of who and what comes and goes, and that someone, for the time being, is me.”

  “It’s a family trait, I think,” said Silas, thinking of the enormous funereal ledger back in his father’s house in Lichport.

  “Indeed it is. Whenever something ends, there should always be a reckoning. And now, may I ask who you are?” The man looked at Silas skeptically. “You are kin, are you not?”

  “Yes. I am Silas Umber.”

  “That is very well. Now, if you don’t mind, would you please show me the psychopompic token?”

  “The what token?”

  “The psychopompic token. Any will suffice. Scepter of Mors? Sandals of Virgil? Wand of Hermes? Ring of Anubis? Cushion of Hypnos? Hadean Clock—”

  “Yes!
I have that one!” Silas exclaimed, relieved as he fumbled for the death watch in his jacket pocket. When his hand closed upon it, the watch felt hot, almost angry. Silas held it before him on its chain.

  “Good, good. All is in order, then.”

  As Silas returned the death watch to his pocket, he asked, “Will you tell me your name, cousin, so that I may remember you?”

  The keeper of the crypt paused, and seemed touched that someone would ask him his name. “Indeed, sir. My name is Jacobus Umber. Very kind of you, indeed.” Composing himself again, he added, “But I suspect you’re not here for a chat with a distant cousin, so, how may I serve the Lord of the Upper Halls?”

  “As I said, I’ve come to take the waters of the spring.”

  “Yes. So you have. And you don’t know where the springs are? Of course. I may be of some small help, then, for the sake of your kindness. You are almost there in any event. Here is what you must do: Pass below that arch and follow the path down, and you shall come to a low hall. Within it, two springs flow up from the deep earth. Now, the spring on the left side of the hall, bubbling up from among the roots of a white cypress—do not drink even a sip of that spring. You may fill a flask of forgetfulness from it as your fathers and mothers have done before you, for the sake of your Undertaking, but nothing more. If any should fall upon your finger, let it dry in the air! Do not put even a drop into your mouth or all is lost.”

  “What of the other spring?”

  “Yes. The spring you seek is on the right side of the hall, and you will see two guards before it. That spring flows forth from the Lake of Memory, and its water is cold and fresh and splendid. From this spring you must drink your fill, drink until your stomach is heavy and your very lungs feel as though they will burst their bands.”

  “Thank you, cousin Jacobus!” Silas said, already walking toward the arch.

  “Wait!” cried the keeper of the crypt. “I have not said all. These guardians, you must get past them and neither strength of arms nor wit will avail you.”