Death Watch

by Berk, Ari

  When Silas was eleven, he had a real friend. Not one of his imaginary friends. This was a real kid from his real neighborhood who lived in a real house just like Silas’s, although in mirror opposite with the living room to the right of the entry hall instead of the left. Tom was his only friend, and Silas’s parents were pleased he finally had someone in the neighborhood to play with, someone real. Before Tom, Silas hadn’t wanted to play with any other kids from his school.

  When his parents asked him why, why not play with some of the kids from the neighborhood who also went to his school, all Silas would say was they looked different at school. School made them different. But Tom looked the same wherever he was, and he smiled a lot and didn’t seem to mind when Silas got quiet and started talking fast about something that had nothing to do with what they had been doing. Tom would just wait him out. And when Silas looked up, or stopped rambling, Tom was still there, smiling.

  It was a holiday weekend, and early Saturday morning, Tom had come to Silas’s house and yelled from the lawn, “Come outside and play, Si! C’mon already!” Silas and Tom played with guns they had made from white plastic PVC pipe and black electrical tape. The battle waged all day Saturday and well into Sunday. Sometimes they were on the same team, running missions behind enemy lines; other times they each took a side, and tracked and chased each other through the neighbors’ yards and through their own houses until one or the other of their parents ordered them back outside.

  Silas had been hiding behind the trash cans in front of his house. He’d been waiting for over fifteen minutes for Tom to appear. Just as Silas thought Tom might have quit, Tom came around the wall of the house next door. He crouched low and moved close to Silas’s hiding place. When Tom passed in front of him, Silas knocked over the cans, jumped up, pointed his gun and made a barrage of shooting noises, then chanted, “Dead! You’re dead! Dead, dead, dead, Tom! You’re dead!”

  Always a fair player, Tom fell over dramatically, and his gun flew out of his hand and landed on the lawn a few feet away. Gracious in victory, Silas went to help him up and a few minutes later, Tom’s parents called him in to dinner. The boys went home dirty and exhausted but agreed that this was the best time either could remember.

  As Silas got ready for bed that night, he did something he rarely ever did: He thought about the future. Made plans in his head for sleepovers and bike rides and a dozen other adventures. He thought things might change for him. Even if his parents didn’t get along any better, Silas thought he might now have something to do other than try to avoid them when they were fighting. Maybe Tom’s parents would let him spend some weekends at their house, you know, when things got bad at his.

  Three days later, Silas and his parents were eating dinner when the phone rang. Tom had been struck by a car and killed. Silas’s mother refused to let him go the funeral, but allowed him to accompany his father to pay their respects. Silas remembered his dad telling his mom that he wanted to speak with Tom’s parents, but before he could even say what it was about, Silas’s mother started in on him: “Oh, leave it, Amos! Let it alone. No one here cares! When someone dies out here in the suburbs, that’s the end of it!”

  His parents barely spoke a word to each other for almost a month after that, and Silas grew quiet too. He kept mostly to himself, invited no more friends home, and hid the guns he and Tom had made in the back of his closet. Silas got sick a lot, or said he was sick, and stayed home more than he went to school.

  Silas’s mother, Dolores Umber, looked into her son’s room and saw him holding that old toy gun he’d made seven years ago with that other boy, the one who’d been hit by the car. She drew herself quietly back into the hall without disturbing him. She remembered that event very well. It was shortly after the boy’s funeral when she began noticing differences in her son. Silas seemed off somewhere. Absent, even when he was standing right in front of her. She’d talk and talk, and he’d stand there with a blank look; his face might have been the still glass surface of a lake on a windless day.

  And now it was bad again, since Amos had vanished. Dolores even tried to cut back on the drinking some, tried to talk to Silas when he came home from school, or wherever he took himself when he ditched. He’d just look at her. Blank. Then, sometimes, maybe a few words. She tried to talk to him, but if she mentioned one of the Forbidden Things, like school, or making plans for the future, or moving on in general, he’d get mad fast and then go quiet again for days.

  She thought he cared too much. Sometimes Dolores could see that her son felt what other people were feeling. He was sympathetic, she knew that. But Silas managed to make his feelings about others into another kind of absence. You’d laugh, Silas would laugh. You’d cry, he’d start crying. It was like he was tuning in to a radio station. It took a moment for the distant signal to lock in, but once it did, he’d be right in sync with you. Only when he got angry, or hurt, did the signal fail and he’d become very present indeed, and very annoyed to have his calm broken. Then it was nothing but static.

  She couldn’t win. Eventually, Dolores came to dislike her son’s empathy intensely. She worried it would hold him back, distract him, keep him worrying so much about others he’d be unable to look after himself. Her son’s empathy was just another one of his father’s “gifts.” Why take on another’s misery when you had your own to deal with, was her feeling. But there was Silas, after she and Amos had been fighting, standing in the doorway of her room crying because she was crying without knowing why in the world either of them was crying. It was like he was trying to take the pain from her, as if anyone could. Old pain was heavy in the heart, hard to move, and anyway, Dolores Umber kept a tight hold of her pains and grievances. She thought her pain was the last thing she really owned, the last thing that she could keep all to herself. Her very own thing, and she didn’t much care for the idea of someone else trying to take that away from her too.

  Amos Umber had been gone for three months.

  It was a Tuesday.

  Silas was on the porch for a change. Paint was peeling from porch rails, and he was pulling it off like dried skin after a sunburn.

  He was wearing the usual, too, clothes that hung on him because they were slightly too big. He was on the tallish side, but in between more usual sizes, so the pants that fit him almost everywhere were always a little too long. His mother did no hemming, although she used to embroider years ago, so the pants Silas wore were frequently frayed along the bottom edges. This infuriated his mother, and Silas knew it. But if she wouldn’t hem them, they’d stay long, a symbol of her inattention. He even left her a note on the near-empty fridge:

  Things Mothers Do

  1. Keep food in the house

  2. Wash clothes

  3. Stay sober

  4. Say “I love you”

  5. Hem pants

  It was a stalemate Silas was willing to live with, and apparently, so was his mother. They both knew it wasn’t about the hem on a pair of pants. One of them was mourning, the other was not, and their individual reactions to Amos’s disappearance created a powerful tension. The air in the house was charged with it.

  Silas knew, instinctively, that mourning required people. Effort. Community. Although he had been to only one funeral and hadn’t at the time been allowed to participate in it fully, something deep down in him told him that sadness is best when shared out among others. His mother believed anything that caused distress was a weakness, something that might embarrass you in front of the neighbors. It was plain in the days following Amos’s disappearance that whatever had happened to him, his wife and son would never be able to agree on how to handle it. So Silas grew sadder, more detached. The fatherless world he now lived in left him with no one to talk to, no one to help him see his fears as part of something reasonable, practical, or even natural. Every day Silas felt like he was standing at the edge of a cliff, and try though he might to see the how deep it was below, or catch a glimpse of the land on the other side, he couldn’t see anything bu
t his own feet wavering against a chasm.

  It had been six months and one week since Amos Umber had disappeared.

  Silas was in his room, looking over his collections. Old things lined the bookshelves. Odd, old-timey things. He took some objects down from the shelves and lined them up on his desk. Then he’d put some back, leaving others in the desk collection. It was as if he was arranging the pieces of a puzzle without knowing what it was supposed to look like.

  As a boy Silas had collected everything. It might have started because his mother would never allow him to have pets. So he brought home rocks, interesting bits of wood, books he would buy with money his father gave him. And as he got older, Silas became more and more his father’s son. He had boxes of small bones he’d find among the bushes in the park. Silas would draw them and try to figure out what animal they might have belonged to.

  A fox skull sat in front of him. He was watching a sliver of late-day sunlight make the teeth of the bottom jaw spread into jagged, pencil-long shadows on the surface of his desk.

  Mostly he brought home books. Saltsbridge had a few bookstores, their shelves filled with new novels and cookbooks, but Silas hated these. There was only one bookstore in Saltsbridge that carried old, used books. Antiquarian books. Books with leather covers and engraved images. The owners knew Silas well and would look out for things they thought might interest him.

  Looking at his bookcases, Silas saw what he loved best: books on folklore and ghost stories. Books about magic, a photocopied manuscript on medieval sorcery, a thick, broken-spined leather tome about Renaissance astrology. Books about bizarre customs, lost ceremonies. Things folks in Saltsbridge didn’t care about or even know existed. If he could afford the book, Silas would buy it. Often, his father would add related titles to his growing collection, always quietly left on the edge of Silas’s desk sometime during the night.

  While Silas looked at the books on his shelves and stacked next to the bed, he could remember when he’d seen each one for the first time at the bookstore. Surprisingly, the local store was usually well stocked, because the owners visited the surrounding towns, small ancient seaports whose inhabitants had long ago brought books with them from across the sea, and so still had libraries with curious subjects on their shelves. These were bought cheap from desperate folks selling up and moving on. While the bookstore owners might have gotten more for such titles as The Sworn Conjuring Book of Honorius in a handsome translated and reprinted edition, it pleased them to see books like this go to Silas, who was so desperate for them. His eyes opened wide when he held such books and turned their stained pages. Besides, in Saltsbridge, who else was buying anything but romance novels and Westerns?

  Silas looked at the empty doorway and could almost see his dad standing in it.

  Sometimes his dad used to come in, spot a curious title among the stacks of books piled around the room, and sit down for a chat.

  “Do you believe in this, Bird?” Silas remembered Amos once asking him, after he thumbed through a volume filled with drawings of conjuring circles inscribed with the names of spirits. Often his dad would call him “Bird,” and when Silas was younger, or he was feeling fragile, “Little Bird,” and it always made him feel better. When he had been really young, there was a song about birds his dad would sing him when he couldn’t sleep. Silas could remember their conversations as if they’d all happened only the day before.

  “Well,” said Silas, sitting down on the edge of his bed to consider his dad’s question, “I think it was true once. In the past, someone believed in it, and it was true to them. And maybe,” he added after a little more thought, “these things might still be true, or might be real again, if someone needs them to be.”

  At first Silas liked the subjects simply because of their strangeness, but slowly he began to believe in the possibilities of what he was reading, in a world filled with secrets and magic. When he was younger, he’d suspected his father believed in many of these things too, so that made it easy for them to talk. As he grew older, Silas began to see the glimmers of hieroglyphic logic behind the occult. There was a reason for these oddities to exist, perhaps as strange connections between the mind and the things people feared or desired. Magic was a conversation. Ghosts were real, and they were watching because something had happened that necessitated their presence.

  Silas began to see this mystery as part of a process, an arcane mechanism that fueled the inner workings of the world, but a part of the world known only to a very few special people. That made it all even more exciting. This hidden world where magic worked and ghosts walked was like a secret club. His dad belonged, and the more Silas read, the more he could belong to the club too.

  There was one moment when Silas thought, Yes, now I’m in.

  Around his neck he wore a pendant his father had given him on his thirteenth birthday. From a finely made silver chain hung a silver coin set in a sort of frame with clasps to hold it securely. On one side of the coin was a wreathed head in profile. On the other, a head with two faces, one looking left, the other looking right, a small door below them. His father told him it was a very old Roman coin.

  “Whose head is that?” Silas asked immediately.

  “Ah, that is, I believe, Emperor Nero,” his father told him in a scholarly tone with a mock British accent—and a smile.

  “No, no. Not him. This guy.” Silas turned the coin over and pointed to the head with two faces.

  “Oh, him,” Amos replied knowingly. “Well, why don’t you see if you can find out for yourself? Put a few of these books we’ve collected to some use.”

  It took Silas less than five minutes to find a name to go with the two-faced head. But when he asked his father why he’d given him the coin with Janus on it, Amos got quiet and seemed a little distressed and sad, like he didn’t want to talk about it. “I’ve had that coin for a very long time, but it’s time to pass it on. Please keep it close. Besides,” he said, speaking softly now, “you never know when you’re going to need a little pocket change.”

  Silas could feel when the pendant touched his chest that it was already warm. This was his father’s thing. Silas had seen it on him, and his dad had been wearing it right up to the moment he gave it to him. When Silas looked up, he saw that his father’s eyes were tearing up.

  “Dad?”

  “It’s all too soon,” Amos whispered, “but I will not take it any further. I cannot. Maybe you will be able to …,” but his voice broke and he trailed off. “Maybe you will be able to make something of this.”

  Amos put his hand to his son’s chest where the pendant lay, over his son’s heart. He hugged Silas and said finally, “Let it remind you that you have choices and to keep your eyes open, Bird.”

  “And look both ways when crossing the street?” Silas added, smiling, trying to cheer his father up.

  “Yes, especially when crossing.”

  Since his father had disappeared, Silas hadn’t gone to school more than a couple of times a week. He did his work in a perfunctory manner, and when approached by his teachers about his irregular attendance, he told them his family was having a difficult time.

  He just couldn’t be with people. There were a few kids he sometimes spoke with at school—at lunch, or walking home—but months ago even they had stopped trying to talk to him. Silas had no real answers for their predictable questions.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Any news about your dad?”

  “Nah.”

  Easier just to stay home where he could slip through most days more or less unnoticed. Not wanting to add to the family’s grief, the school let him graduate without any fuss. Silas didn’t attend his graduation, despite his mother asking him about it repeatedly. The day after the graduation ceremony was held, his mother brought home a cake from the market. They sat in the kitchen, each picking at their piece of cake with a fork.

  When his mother asked about college, Silas looked away without answering
, then left the room.

  “Just glad we got through high school, right?” his mother answered for him into the air. “No real plans after today, right, Si?” she yelled after him. “No real plans?”

  He had plans, but his hopes for higher education, like all his others, were built on “mights.” He might go hang out somewhere, with someone. He might get a job and earn some money. He might go to college, a really old school with gray stone buildings and an enormous library. He was thinking of applying next year. Maybe the year after. He wasn’t thinking about application deadlines. That sort of detail wasn’t a part of his plan. Not at the moment. And why tell his mother about this anyway? It would rekindle her expectations, and she’d only start riding him again. Better to let it be. When his dad came home, they’d sort it out together.

  His mother retreated into her world, Silas into his. What a family, his mother would say, but until now, Silas had never realized that they weren’t really much of one. The names of the days retreated from them both, and soon after the school term ended, Silas was no longer sure what day of the week it was. Every morning when he woke up, he missed his father more keenly than the night before, but the details and differences of each day blurred and eventually vanished. For Silas, the passage of time became a longing ache in his heart that grew daily worse.

  Twice a year, by tradition and without fail—once when the weather got warm, and again when it turned cold—Dolores sifted through the family’s closets to get rid of anything beyond use, and she insisted Silas do the same. Silas had taken a blue blazer, just a little too small for him now, from the closet to throw into the “give away” box. He remembered this jacket. His mother had bought it for him for special occasions, although there were not many of those in his family, so Silas put it to another purpose. Sometimes when he ditched classes, he went to the cemetery in Saltsbridge. It was quiet, and the few people there had their minds on other things; it wasn’t the kind of place anyone was likely to look for a kid cutting school.