Mistle Child (Undertaken Trilogy)

by Ari Berk

  As he turned down Fairview Street, he glanced back toward the millpond and said softly, “I will come for you,” before he started to run. With necromantic intentions burning at the edges of his mind, Silas ran down Fairview toward Temple Street and his mother’s house, where his uncle’s rarest and darkest books were still kept, locked away in the north wing.

  As he ran, he briefly noticed the awkward weight of the scepter he’d taken from Arvale had vanished from his coat pocket. The scepter had not come with him beyond the gate. Forget it, he told himself, starting to run a bit faster. It was the smallest item on his growing list of losses.

  WHEN DOLORES UMBER HEARD THE FRONT DOOR open, she knew it was her son. She was relieved he was back; part of her worried he was not ever going to come home. He’d been gone for a month.

  As Silas walked into the parlor, Dolores could see by his face that he was in pain, and his clothes were torn at the shoulder and stained with blood.

  “Christ, Si, what happened to you?”

  “Nothing,” he said distractedly, “I’m fine. I fell. I’ll be okay.”

  But Dolores could see he was not okay. Her son’s face showed it, and every time he moved his arm, he grimaced and squeezed his eyes closed tightly.

  “Take off your coat, Silas.”

  “Mom, I said I’m fine. I just fell.”

  She walked over to him and started pulling off his coat.

  “Mom! I said—”

  “I don’t care what you said, Silas. You show me, or by God . . .”

  “All right, all right.” Silas removed his coat and jacket and then, with difficulty, unbuttoned the top of his shirt and slid it down.

  Dolores’s heart nearly stopped at what she saw. “Jesus Christ! Silas, what the hell happened to you?”

  “I told you, I fell and hurt my shoulder.” He wasn’t even trying to lie.

  She couldn’t take her eyes off the malicious glyph burned into her son. All about the lines torn through his flesh, the skin rose up red and angry. She didn’t know what kind precisely, but she knew this was a cursing mark. Someone was trying to kill her son. Her face paled as she pulled his shirt back up over the wound.

  “Silas, we need to see someone about this,” she said, stumbling over her words. Who could help them? Mother Peale? Possibly, but this was no Narrows shanty spell.

  Silas kept looking back at the stairs with an anxious look.

  “Mom,” he said, “I don’t want you to get worried, but I need to go upstairs.”

  “Those doors are locked, Silas, and they are not going to be opened again.”

  He looked at her, all expression gone from his face and said, “It’s important. Please.”

  “Silas! You know what went on up there. That’s all in the past. We don’t go into that wing.”

  “Mom, I just want to read and rest. I am not of afraid of this house or anything that happened in it. Please.”

  But then Dolores thought if he went upstairs and relaxed, it might give her a chance to go get help. Maybe, if Silas stayed put, she could run out without worrying he was off getting into more trouble. “All right, Silas, if it’s important to you, you can go up there for a bit, but why not rest downstairs first.” She didn’t think he’d wait, but it was worth a try to buy her more time. “I was just about to go out. How about when I get back, I’ll unlock the door for you? I won’t be gone long, and when I get home, I’ll dig up that key. How about that?” She could tell he wasn’t listening to a word she said. Fine, she thought. I’ll go get help and fight with him later.

  “Silas, please wait for me. You look terrible. Sit down here and wait. Please say you will.”

  “I will.”

  His answer was cold, mechanical. A portion of light had left his eyes and he stared at her, unblinking.

  Without another word, Dolores went into the hall and grabbed her coat, calling back over her shoulder, “I’ll be back real soon, Si. Fix yourself something if you like. You just relax until I come home!”

  As she went out the front door, she could already hear him on the staircase. Was he going to break down the door up there? On the sidewalk, she looked back and saw lights on now in the north wing. How the hell . . . ? She mustn’t stop. She started to walk fast.

  Dolores knew that her son was in bad trouble. She knew it. As she walked, her mind started to play out every horrible scenario it could imagine. She saw herself walking back into the house and finding Silas cold and dead on the carpet of the parlor. “Oh, Christ! Oh, Christ . . . ,” she said, and before she could stop herself, she was sobbing. She knew she wasn’t going to Mother Peale’s.

  There was only one place in Lichport where she might find the kind of help Silas needed.

  “WELL, THIS IS QUITE THE SURPRISE,” said the first of the three.

  “Indeed,” said the second, “especially considering what you said to us on your last visit. We thought you’d brought your baby to us for a blessing . . . because he’d gotten such an awkward start in life.”

  “But she called us meddlers,” said the first.

  “So long ago,” whispered the third. “Hardly worth mentioning.”

  “We’d thought you’d forgotten about us,” the first said.

  “No. I have not forgotten you,” said Dolores in a low voice, her eyes running wildly over the tapestry. There were hastily stitched depictions of a dark figure striking someone wearing a large coat. Was it Silas? There was the same youthful form, leaning over a desk covered with books. Several unknotted threads still hung from it, as though it had only recently been stitched down. In the scene, a menacing shadow of black wool was hanging from the ceiling of the room just above the figure’s head.

  Back and forth, Dolores’s eyes scanned the tapestry for signs of her son.

  “Can’t you look upon us, even now?”

  Dolores raised her head and looked at the three women. They were cloaked in tattered sackcloth and their faces were streaked with ashes. In their hands they held an unfinished winding sheet. While they stared at Dolores, their hands continued embroidering its edges.

  “So, Dolores Umber, you have come to observe with us the ancient rites of passage? That is good. To have the mother of the Janus present as we weave and embroider his burial shroud is indeed an honor. Will you take up needle and thread and join our work at last?”

  “No . . . I cannot. I have come to ask you—”

  “She is here to sue for his life,” the second of the three interrupted with disappointment weighing down her words, her needle pausing its work.

  “Is this true, Dolores Umber?” the first asked. “Do you come here on behalf of your son, to beg? It is too late. The curse will hold. His spool has raveled down to thrums. A great pity, for we had such high hopes for him.” And the first glanced at her sisters with a knowing look in her eyes and nodded slowly as if to say, Almost there.

  “Besides,” said the second, “you should be grateful. Had Amos not been so talented, Silas would never have lived even this long.”

  “Silas does not know I am here. I have come because I have failed him so many times and now I must . . . if I can . . . I must help him. You must help him!”

  “Does she ask us or tell us?” said the third, raising an ash-encrusted eyebrow.

  “She would do better to beg,” the second said to the third, “for we find compulsion a most unsavory dish, even here, upon the eve of the funeral feast.”

  “I am begging you! Please!” Dolores cried, falling to her knees on the floor. She struck her breast with her fist and cast down her eyes. “I know you owe him something. He is important to you. I know that.”

  But the third corrected her. “That depends on where you’re standing. We might, however, agree to an exchange. We cannot annul the decree, that is not within our power. The curse is a terrible one, wrought by a powerful spirit, and its price must be paid . . . one way or another.”

  “But,” said the second, relishing the words, “if there were another sacrifice who wa
s willing . . . a worthy sacrifice . . .”

  The aspects of the three were growing darker as they spoke. Older, wilder. A fire leapt up in the cold hearth at the center of the room.

  “Only fair,” said the third.

  “A life for a life,” added the second.

  Her heart almost stopped when she heard those words. Still, something in Dolores had known that it would come to this, that an Umber man would be the death of her one way or another. It was for her son. She was ready to do whatever was required. She opened her mouth as if to argue, but then thought, For my child, anything, anything.

  “You realize,” said the first, “we would do this only for a woman, and a mother, someone with strength. You know this seals it?”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Dolores said, resigned. “I’ve always known that.”

  “Then it’s a bargain?” the first of the three asked, leaning in close to her.

  “Yes.” Dolores nodded slowly in assent, but quietly thought to herself, We shall see.

  “You know there must be blood,” stated the third. It was not a question.

  “I understand.”

  The first of the three bent down and pulled a long thread from the hem of Dolores’s dress. She cut it in half with small silver shears and handed one part to the second of the three who held it briefly while she began to pull out the stitches depicting Silas in the tapestry. Then the second drew up another spool from the floor, black flax, and used it to stitch down the piece of thread from Dolores’s dress, quickly covering it over, embroidering the shape of a woman upon a bier.

  The first examined the new stitches on the tapestry. Tiny particles of ash fell from her face as she pulled a thread from the now ripped-out embroidered form of Silas that hung loosely from the weaving. Turning back, the first then plucked a hair from Dolores’s head. These she twisted together with the piece from Dolores’s dress into a tight, thin thread. She drew a tiny bone needle from her gown and stood next to Dolores.

  “Dolores Umber, do you come here of your own free will?”

  “I do.”

  “And do you make this sacrifice willingly?”

  “I do.”

  The first of the three smiled, threaded the needle, and then took up Dolores’s arm.

  “This will only hurt a little. . . .”

  Almost instantly, the thread was stitched through her flesh in the shape of the curse-glyph. Dolores’s skin rose up in a red sore all about it, as though the thread were being absorbed into her body. A moment later, the thread was gone, but a bloody scar stood upon her skin in the shape of the same sigil she’d seen on her son.

  “It is done,” the three said as one.

  “Do you promise? Is he safe?”

  The three spoke together. “He will never be safe, but he will live tonight. The curse is no longer upon him. Who knows what tomorrow may hold for him?”

  “It is broken, then?” Dolores asked, already knowing the answer.

  “No. The curse is not broken, but has been lifted from him. Now you must leave us. Travel well, sister. And return to us when you can.”

  Dolores Umber made her way slowly down the stairs.

  After Dolores had gone, the three spoke among themselves.

  “Well, that’s something,” said the second of three.

  “Indeed,” said the first, “only two more to go and then perhaps we may walk a little and be free of our troubles.”

  “May it be so!” the three said in chorus.

  “And what of the other two?” asked the second. “The Bowe woman and the Mother of the Narrows? Will she bring them?”

  “They would be fine choices, but who can say?”

  “There must always be three,” said the third.

  “Indeed,” said the first. “That is law.”

  “They are all moved by their love of the boy . . . ,” suggested the second.

  “This has not escaped my notice,” replied the first of the three.

  “But enough! We’ll keep on until the others come. They are close. Very close. None are so very young, and they keep dangerous company. Patience. Patience. Even now, the scene is changing.”

  And the three took up their needles and returned to the tapestry.

  AS DOLORES LEFT THE MANSION OF THE SEWING CIRCLE, the wind was coming in from the east, carrying the smell of the sea. She looked at the marking on her arm. It no longer hurt, but the rest of her body ached with chill.

  She just wanted to get home.

  It was almost over.

  She was nearly to the end of Prince Street. Not much farther.

  Dolores looked up as she walked. She wanted to see the stars, but the moon’s light outshone them. There was only the moon. Ahead, she thought she saw someone, maybe Silas, go running up Fairview Street and swiftly pass out of sight again. Dolores called out to him, but the words fell back in her tightening throat. Had it even been Silas?

  The moon seemed too bright now, as though it had swung too close to the earth, as though it were stooping to crush her. Her chest pulled tight and her teeth crashed together as the pain shot through her like a dozen barbed arrows. She knew where Silas was going eventually. To the millpond. He was always going to her. She put her head down. But my son is still alive, she thought. No matter what followed, at least he was alive. Dolores began to sob. The millpond. Christ. She had saved and failed him both at once.

  The pain pulled her down to the sidewalk. She closed her eyes and saw her son’s face. In her mind’s eye, he was kneeling next to her. She held the vision for as long as she could, but the curse knotted her body with anguish and poison. The moonlight spilled across Dolores Umber’s form, and her cooling skin appeared to glow against the dark stones of the street. She shook her head slowly in self-reproach. She wished she’d worn her pearls. With her last remaining strength, she tried to move her limbs to her sides so she wouldn’t appear so pathetic when someone found her body.

  LEDGER

  Every night and every morn

  Some to misery are born.

  Every morn and every night

  Some are born to sweet delight.

  Some are born to sweet delight,

  Some are born to endless night.

  —fROM WILLIAM BLAKE, AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE, TRANSCRIBED BY AMOS UMBER

  AUGUSTUS HOWESMAN HAD LEFT HIS HOUSE to find Silas. He had seen his great-grandson pass by his house on his return from Arvale. Why hadn’t he come in? He’d wanted to follow, but he was moving slowly again, and knew he wouldn’t be able to catch up. Yet the more Augustus thought about Silas, tried to see him in his mind, the more his limbs eased, allowing him to move more quickly.

  It was a bad night. There was a bite in the freezing air, and something worse. They were all bad nights now. What had happened up at Arvale since Silas had set him free from the Doom? He’d make sure Silas was safe with his mother and then make his way back to Fort Street and wait this night out. He stood still, and his eyes paled to white stones. He could see Silas in this way. Ease his own mind.

  The vision came rising up behind his rheumy eyes.

  First he saw Silas sitting in a room lit only by a candle. Old books lay open on a table before him, and he was furiously writing on a notepad. Then the vision turned, and Augustus could see only ice, but the angle of sight pulled back suddenly. He saw his great-grandson not at Delores’s house on Temple Street, but standing by the edge of the millpond. Silas was speaking into the air, on and on. Then Silas leaned over, put his hand on the ice, tilted his head back, and shouted again into the night. The ice covering the pond cracked.

  Beyond the vision, in his mortal hearing, Augustus heard a clap like thunder break the air. Before the vision dissolved, he saw a shadow rise up in front of his great-grandson, a familiar form coming up from below the waters, taking shape upon the rising vapor. In his vision, through their shared blood, he could feel Silas’s heart and hear his voice crying out a terrible spell, dark with words of summoning, and command, and a love fro
m which no good comes. Words to break the binding of the dead. Words to summon shades up from the murk places of the earth. Words of love and longing to call the dead back into the circle of the sun. And something else, rising above all the others. A name. Beatrice. But was the vision showing him the present or the future? He couldn’t be sure, but he prayed none of it had happened yet.

  Either way, Augustus Howesman knew he had to go to Silas, to warn his great-grandson, or, if it had already begun, to cover the boy’s mouth with his hand, to make him swallow those awful words, and hold him back from that grim path that led to perdition.

  He was about to begin walking again when he heard a loud howl, maybe over on the Beacon. A black-dog night to be sure, he thought. Augustus turned his head slowly toward the sea, toward the sound of the night-cry, and saw something on the sidewalk farther down Prince Street. He stared for many moments and finally, realizing what he was seeing, choked around the lump in his throat, and tightened his hands. Silas would have to wait.

  Augustus Howesman walked slowly toward the corpse of his granddaughter.

  He leaned down, careful to keep his balance, and stroked the side of her face with his large hand.

  “Child, child . . . ,” he said, the dry skin of his lips and throat straining the words into a low rasp. He put his hand under Dolores’s head and began to lift her as though she weighed nothing. He put his other arm under her knees and stood up, cradling her against his large chest. “. . . Child, come away with me. Blessed child of the people of the barrow, be easy within your limbs. Child of the dawn and the twilight, may you rest in the shade of the cedar. May you be content until you wake again, at home and forever in the house of your eternity. Little daughter, how I love you, now and always. Look, I shall carry you home.”