Lych Way

by Ari Berk

  LEDGER

  “Life is a dream wandering, death is homecoming.”

  — CHINESE PROVERB

  He hath need of warmth, who now is come,

  numbed with cold to the knee;

  comfort and company the wanderer craves

  who has walked o’er the rimy world.

  . . .

  The pine tree wastes, alone on the hill,

  neither bark nor needles shelter it;

  such is the man whom none doth love;

  for what should he longer live?

  — FROM THE ELDER EDDA, TRANSLATED BY AMOS UMBER

  Among the most important obligations of the Undertaker are the rites of Separation and Isolation. Namely, the keeping of the dead in the ground, by force, if necessary. Should the dead arise, the sanity of the vicinity is threatened. Pestilence often follows in the wake of the dead should they come to walk. If this basic task is not attended to, the hallowed office of Undertaker shall know shame, and those that once venerated the Undertaker shall hate and despise him.

  —MARGINALIA OF JONAS UMBER

  THE RESTLESS WERE GOING HOME.

  For some, like Augustus Howesman, the journey was habitual and simple. They merely returned to Fort Street where they’d lived, alone, since their families had left them behind. For them, the journey ended as it had begun, with the opening and closing of a familiar door. Crossing the thresholds of their homes, they returned to their favorite chairs, their bodies slowing, their minds pondering the recent events, the more distant past, and what might follow now that some of their traditional rites had been rekindled by the death and return of Dolores Umber.

  The oldest and most resigned of the Restless returned to where they’d been put: So Miss Hattie and most of her retinue returned to the Egyptian ghetto of the dead at Newfield, to the elaborate but largely forgotten tombs where they had long resided.

  But others had been emboldened by Silas’s words about going home and, filled with hope, followed their hearts back to long lost places of comfort. Some had taken Silas’s parting words as a sort of blessing and had been enlivened. A few of the Restless still had family—living descendants—residing in Lichport. Some had former houses that had not fallen to ruin. So, with the encouragement of the Undertaker, they were going back to the places where they had once lived, and where those previous lives had come to their ends.

  One man, who had once lived in a fine mansion on Coach Street, returned home to find his house had all but fallen to the ground. The nature of the ruin told the tale well enough: The deeply carved stonework had been pulled off and the copper gutters as well. Anything of value had been stripped from the outside, and water had come in through the cracks. Finally, the roof had fallen, along with most of the walls. Here and there, tall trees now grew up from the pile. He could remember building every part of that house. Each new profitable venture had led to more and more ornate improvements. He thought of the tomb house behind the home of his great-great-grandchildren, where he had more recently resided. He was not supposed to leave it, for his appearance was found to be distressing. His descendants had not seen him leave for the funeral on Temple Street, but if they learned he was gone, there would be harsh words. Had he endured so long to be spoken to in that fashion by his children’s children’s children? Or to hear the sound of their laughter, the music of their daily lives at a distance, from the margins? And after the fine company of the funeral, the thought of going back to the lonely tomb house brought him little comfort. He walked away from the ruin of his former house and down toward the sea. Making his way awkwardly over sand, he continued, moving into the small, cold waves, letting the sea take him where there would be no more sound to trouble him and where he would trouble no one.

  Two of the Restless, husband and wife, long entombed together at the Garden Plot Cemetery on Prince Street, thought fondly about evenings by the hearth of their old house south on Queen Street, overlooking the sea, and so headed there. When they arrived, the house still stood, though it had no lights in the windows and looked to be abandoned. After slowly ascending the long stairs up to the entrance, they knocked on the door. When there was no answer, one of the couple tried the handle and, finding the door open, the two corpses walked inside and to their old parlor. They found two chairs still by the hearth, and using some matches and scraps of wood he found on the floor, the husband lit a little fire. There they sat in the dark, and closed their eyes, and were content.

  Some time later, the occupant of the house, an elderly man who had inherited it from an aunt, came downstairs to find two corpses sitting in his dilapidated parlor by a dying fire. As the man began to scream, the corpses rose and, without word or ceremony, went back to the front door and left their former home once more. As they descended the stairs, the corpse of the old woman slipped and fell to the street, tumbling and turning over and over on her way down. Being dead, she felt no pain, but most of the bones of her legs and hips were shattered. Her husband tried to help her stand, but it could not be done. And so he tenderly lifted his broken wife up into his arms, and carried her back to their cold tomb.

  Juliette Howesman-Ellis turned her back on Newfield and walked home to the family she herself had raised and to the house where she had raised them. She had not been dead so long as most of the others, and her daughter and grandchildren were all still alive and in Lichport, though they mostly kept to themselves and spent much time in Kingsport at another house. She put on no airs, did not bother to fix up her hair into the tight bun she wore in life, but rang the bell of her former house on Cedar Street. Her daughter answered the door, but quickly slammed it shut. A tiny ornate hinged peephole set in the door opened.

  “What do you want?” the living woman said, her voice a mix of fear and anger.

  “It’s me, your mother,” the corpse said to her elderly daughter. “I’ve come home.”

  “My mother is dead,” said the daughter from the darkness behind the door.

  “I am your mother,” the Restless corpse said again.

  “You were my mother,” the daughter said, closing the peephole cover abruptly and walking back into the belly of the house.

  Other Restless were also turned away over the next few days. Some by family. Some by strangers. None gently. Some, struck with renewed grief and rekindled sorrows, simply stopped moving, frozen on the streets and sidewalks where misery held them fast. Standing in the cold, those silent Restless looked like newly placed memorials, reminders to Lichport’s living residents of both their own mortality and the shameful treatment of their deceased kin.

  Of course, the people of Lichport were no strangers to wonders and terrors. Ghosts were common and trouble enough, but compared to the irrefutable and physical presence of a living corpse, a specter, now seemed somehow less terrible. A ghost did not usually sit, eyes wide, and stare at you for hours as you watched television, or while you slept. A ghost did not usually give you advice on how to raise your children or what to do with your finances. A corpse raised fears of sickness and contagion. A corpse was a curse.

  There was talk of a fever. Rumors rose almost as soon as the first corpse knocked on a door, and fearful whispers and accusations ran rampant through the town as people looked upon the lingering dead on the streets of Lichport. Some called the corpses’ return a plague and, as happens during plague-times historically, people began to look about for something or someone to blame.

  LEDGER

  Though you are young and I am old,

  Though your veins hot and my blood cold,

  Though youth is moist and age is dry,

  Yet embers live when flames do die.

  —THOMAS CAMPION (1567–1620). MARGINALIA OF AMOS UMBER

  SILAS AWOKE LATE IN HIS old bed in Temple House. His broken memories of the previous night were waiting for him. His stomach still felt full, which confirmed some of his stranger recollections. He remembered standing in the parlor, watching the Restless slowly pack up the temple relics, many of them smiling
as they prepared to make their way back to their homes and not-so-final resting places. He would never forget that moment when his mother’s corpse opened her eyes and said his name. He wasn’t sure how to feel about her death now. She had died. Now she was . . . not alive . . . but back. There had been a funeral, but by the end, it had become more of a birthday party. Despite his mom’s very real and renewed presence, he could not help feeling that he still should be mourning her. Even as he’d looked into her eyes last night, and felt her brush his hair with her dead hand, he’d felt an awful sense of loss.

  Work was easier than trying to sort out his feelings. It brought focus, and his participation in the funeral, his speaking words from the ancient Book of the Dead had made him feel a little more competent, having used another, older rite related to the Undertaking. Now, rested but still tired, the funeral over, his role completed, the bindings on his sorrows had come loose again, and he could no longer keep his feelings from bleeding into one another. His mother’s death. Bea’s absence. Lars’s death. His dad’s. The harm he’d brought to Maud in trying to help Alysoun and her poor baby. And in helping mother and child, he’d broken a vow and set Cabel Umber free from his prison house. No action in his life was discrete from any other now. All the edges blurred into a wound of obligation, guilt, and aggravation that he could not get to heal properly or avoid making worse.

  He’d slept in his clothes and couldn’t remember how he’d gotten upstairs. He wanted to talk with his mom, but there was no hurry. Not anymore. His mother wasn’t going anywhere. But the more he thought about the events of the last two days, the more he just wanted to go home. He needed some quiet. As he prepared to go downstairs into the rooms where his mother had risen from the dead, an anomalous thought broke in: He idly considered what others his age might be thinking as they prepared to take their morning meal. He found himself wondering what it might have been like to go away to college: to wake up some morning and go to a lecture, to eat with people his own age, to worry about an upcoming exam and no other thing. What would it be like to have a real girlfriend, to date, to ask her if she’d marry him? To have children and raise a family? He pushed those thoughts from his mind. What was the point? If that world could ever have existed for him, it was a million miles away now. Silas’s stomach tightened as his thoughts unraveled into the reality of his life. His actual life. He had a girlfriend. She was dead and lay imprisoned beneath the ice. She was dead and waiting for him. More than anything, he wanted Bea back, and he needed a moment to himself to sort out how he was going to get her.

  The upper galleries of Temple House were quiet. Letting his memories of Bea flood everything else from his mind, he returned briefly to the little study off the Camera Obscura. Nothing had been moved since the other night when he’d searched for spells to summon the spirits of the dead. Books lay open on the desk just where he’d left them. He ran a finger idly down an open volume. “Ye Darke Call” was written in red ink across the vellum page. A marker still lay in the book’s gutter. Not his. Uncle’s. His uncle had once used this spell. Silas could almost smell the residue of the words from the book sunk into the wood of the walls and floor. Maybe, he thought again, Charles Umber had used them to hold Adam’s spirit in his corpse. Or on the poor woman whose hand he’d robbed out of a grave in Newfield.

  Silas looked away from the book and past the open door leading into the Camera. A room of wonders, Uncle had told him. Empty now. What wonders would it hold next? Silas scanned the lines of the book again. He took a clean sheet of paper from the desk and carefully wrote out the dire words of the spell, reading them once to compare them against the original. He knew these words already, for Cabel Umber had whispered almost the exact same formula into Silas’s ear in the sunken mansion at Arvale. Heard once. Read once. All that remained was to speak them. Soon, he told himself. Soon.

  He folded the paper and thrust it into his pocket. He closed the book and left the room, passing once more through Uncle’s empty bedroom and out into the long hall of the north wing.

  As he approached the hall overlooking the foyer, Silas heard music. The cheerful tune floated about in stark contrast to his mood. Even though he could hear his mother walking about the house below, he felt sure that when he went downstairs, he would still see her corpse lying on the dining room table. His head hurt and he felt sore all over. The stresses of the previous day still sat heavily on him. He was beyond trying to sort out his tumultuous feelings. Anger, grief, weariness, and longing were the four horses still drawing and pulling at him. The strain showed on his face. He looked into a mirror near the top of the stairs. His eyes were swollen and his skin looked pale and splotchy. He should have stayed in bed.

  Words of a song from the old Victrola downstairs pulled his attention from his pallor. Didn’t we have a lovely evening. . . . It was Bing Crosby’s voice, one of his mother’s favorites. She used to listen to his records in Saltsbridge on her cheerful, not-quite-too-much-to-drink nights. He hadn’t heard this song in years, and it gave him an uneasy, displaced feeling, as though he might go down the stairs and into a moment long gone from the world. A time before last night’s funeral. A time before both his parents’ deaths. And couldn’t such a time still exist somewhere, out there, in the mist?

  They didn’t leave a scrap for Rover

  We ought to feel real proud

  And mighty glad the darn thing’s over . . .

  As he stood at the top of the stairs, the music sang out on the scratchy recording, filling the house . . . Sure was a hungry crowd . . . Silas could smell tuberoses; perhaps the fragrance of some perfume Uncle had given his mother after they’d arrived in Lichport.

  He could see the night had not ended when he’d fallen asleep. His mother had been busy. More statuary had been hauled out of storage and carefully arranged. It was not the museum it had been when Uncle was alive, but the rooms of the lower floors now seemed a sort of salon. Fresh flowers had been delivered and stood in vases and urns all about the room. Mostly roses and chrysanthemums, their perfume was slight, as they’d surely come from a hothouse, perhaps in Kingsport. And the room was immaculate. There was not a drop of blood or dust on the floor anywhere.

  “Did you sleep well, Silas?” said his mother’s voice from the dining room, rising over the music just as the song came to an end. She stood dramatically in the doorway with her hands clasped lightly before her waist, more portrait of a mother than a mom. She wore a leopard-print turban and a black dress with more leopard print on the collar and cuffs. As she stepped toward him, the dozens of bangles and charms on her wrist chimed with the sound of tiny bells. Around her neck was a heavy gold chain. The heart scarab hung from it, resting on the upper part of her chest. Her skin was pale and smooth, her lips reddened, and there was the smallest touch of rouge on her cheeks. For a corpse, she looked good, Silas thought. Even the thick black eye makeup—right off a 1950s Italian movie set—suited her. It made her eyes look large and luminous, and when she looked at Silas, he could not look away from her.

  Except for the fact that she looked better than ever, it was as though nothing had changed.

  She took a seat at the dining room table and gestured for him to join her. “Brunch! It’s Mother’s Day, Si!”

  “Um. It’s not Mother’s Day yet, Mom.”

  “It is Mother’s Day for me.”

  He nodded and walked through the open pocket doors. The scene was surreal yet utterly common. If he had not known his mother was a walking corpse, he wouldn’t have even blinked at the sight of her sitting at the table waiting for him to come and eat. There was fruit and some cheese. Juice had been poured for him into a wineglass.

  Dolores repeated the question. “How’d you sleep, Si?”

  “Not well. I must have kicked like a rabbit all night. My legs are sore.”

  “It was a long day for you. Maybe a warm bath later. Tonight you should take a little drink before bed.”

  He stared at her.

  “Don’t look at me
like that. I’m not saying you should get drunk. I am suggesting a nightcap to help you sleep. A hot toddy, maybe. I’ll make you one.”

  “I need to get back to my house. I want to sleep in my own bed.”

  “Of course, I just thought . . . well, that you might like to stay here for a while. You’d like it here now. See? I even brought a few of the finer objects out of storage. I was going to sell them, but now, I think, they rather suit the house and I know how you love such things.”

  “I can’t stay. I need my own—”

  “And I wouldn’t smother you like Mrs. Bowe.”

  Silas didn’t answer.

  “Of course. Don’t worry. I am very self-sufficient. More so now than ever. You’ll see. I just think life would be easier for both of us if we were closer.”

  Silas realized she probably meant that literally. His great-grandfather benefited enormously from their time together. Even his pace had quickened after Silas’s numerous visits. He understood that spending time with the living gave the Restless a kind of charge. Company was manna to them. Without the attentions of the living, they slowed, and began to move less and less. If left alone long enough, Silas imagined they could become statues, their minds looking out through their hardened, immobile human remains. Without the love and remembrance of kin, the Restless could endure, but not pleasantly. Silas knew then that he would be paying his mother a lot of visits. “Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll be back. I just have work to see to, that’s all.”