Death Watch

by Berk, Ari

  “Show me your places.”

  She looked at his feet with a grin that went from ear to ear.

  Silas tried to smile too. “I’ll bet we like lots of the same things,” he said, trying to assure himself that this game was okay.

  “I bet you’re right. So how about I show you where most folks in town have gone?”

  “You mean Saltsbridge? Kingsport? Just how far are we walking tonight?”

  “No, no. Not them. I don’t know anything about the ones who fled, the ones who left by the broad road. They go their own way and hardly ever come back.”

  “But I came back,” Silas said, cocking his head knowingly to the side, as if his only plan all along had been to come back to Lichport so he could take this walk with Bea.

  “Yes, you did. And that makes you something of a rarity,” said Bea, playing along. “But I mean everyone who stayed here. Would you like to see where they’ve all gone? The dead, I mean?”

  Silas felt his heart beat faster.

  Bea had his full attention.

  “There are so many places. All the old folk of Lichport, dreaming away under their sheets of soil.” She laughed at that. “Would you like to see the plots? The cemeteries are what Lichport is best known for. Know the cemeteries, know the town; that’s how it is here. For oh so long now, people have died here, and they did it so well, folks from away wanted to come here to rest too. Lichport is famous for its ‘Restful Soil.’ Come on, you might see someone familiar.”

  There was something knowing in her tone that made him uncomfortable, and he wasn’t sure where things were headed, but he couldn’t look away from her. He followed her with his eyes, and her eyes called him on.

  She began to skip backward, never looking away from him, leading him down Fairwell Street.

  “Oh! Wait a sec,” Silas said, suddenly realizing which way they were going. “I’d—I’d rather not go near Temple Street if it can helped. I’ve … seen enough of it.”

  “I understand,” Bea replied with concern. “We’ll go down Prince Street. It will take us past some interesting places and still get us where we’re going, eventually.”

  “And where are we going, Miss Bea?”

  “Here and there …,” she said, still skipping lightly on the pavement, smiling to hear him say her name. “Here and there.”

  And so it went.

  As fall turned the trees to flame, Silas and Bea met most nights for the next two weeks to continue their grand tour, a welcome distraction from the tedium and growing discomfort of life at Uncle’s.

  There were so many places to see. Many nights found Silas and Bea strolling among the stones, weaving their way through the town’s greater and smaller necropolises. He lost track of how many they visited as the town’s groves of the dead began to merge in his mind into one vast cemetery, the innumerable graves and tombs separated only occasionally by the homes and streets of the living. It was as though the town had carved itself from an enormous funereal forest that had always been there, as though all the dead of the world had always been brought to this plantation of Lichport by the sea.

  There were only a few streets in town they didn’t explore. Silas had no desire to return to Temple Street, even though it boasted the long-abandoned and historically remarkable ancient burial grounds of the brothers of the temple. Silas also made a practice of avoiding Garden Street where the gallows once stood atop the little rise in the middle of the park. The worn, square stone that had served as its base was still visible. Mrs. Bowe had told him the name of the street had been changed, many years since, because no one wanted to remember it had long been called Gallows Street after the punishments that used to be carried out there.

  They often visited favored cemeteries repeatedly. Their places, Bea called them. However, delighted and a little dizzy to be in her company, Silas would sometimes forget where he was—one carved stone flowing into another, making a river of names—until a particular monument came into view.

  Silas loved the mausoleums of the founding owners of the American West India Company, which were strewn with sky-piercing minarets and once golden domes. High arched doors emulated the palaces and the grand tombs of Mughal India. Now small bushes and weeds had taken root in the rotten leaves caught where the domes met the columns, spoiling the once perfect arcs of the roofs. Even the green foliage added a sense of loss. How long, Silas wondered, until their roots would pull apart the stones?

  At dusk, Silas liked to visit the plot that Bea had shown him behind a large ruined home on the town’s southeast side. It contained a tomb built in the fashion of a temple dedicated to Artemis. Graying columns still stood, holding the angled roof aloft, not a single one fallen. Within each column, Bea told him before they walked on, a body was entombed, standing to better meet the Day of Judgment when it came.

  Their walks often brought them to the massive gates of Newfield, the vast cemetery that sprawled at the town’s south side. High walls with Gothic finials and decorative towers curved around the outside of the cemetery and gave it the appearance of a medieval city.

  “You like the lion?” asked Bea, who enjoyed watching Silas enjoy something.

  “Very much,” he said, running his eyes over the massive bronze animal that guarded the cemetery’s main entrance. “We’re friends already. I’ve come here to sit and think a couple of times, you know, just to get out of the house.” He put his hand on the enormous paw. “The bronze is always warm. I guess the sun must heat it during the day enough so that it stays warm at night. Anyway, it’s nice to sit on.” He climbed up and over the leg into the open area between the paws and the chest, in one of two rounded corners where the leg met the body, and settled comfortably and familiarly into the curve. He stretched out there, feeling the warmth of the bronze rise up and into his back. It felt like the sun was shining beneath him. Looking over, he saw that Bea had taken a similar position on the other side. They were very close to each other, their legs almost touching. The two of them lay there, two portions of light against the dark, time-worn bronze, arms folded behind their heads, as they looked away down the long avenue that led from the cemetery back into Lichport. Bea began humming.

  “I like that tune,” said Silas.

  She laughed coyly. “I know you do.”

  “Will you sing it for me?” Silas said, flirting a bit.

  She said nothing, but as she sang, she added his name here and there, as though the song had always been sung about them.

  O the summertime is coming

  And the trees are sweetly blooming

  And the wild mountain thyme

  Grows around the blooming heather.

  Will you go, Silas, go?

  And we’ll all go together

  To pluck wild mountain thyme

  All around the blooming heather

  Will you go, Silas, go?

  I will build my love a bower

  By yon pure crystal fountain

  And on it I will pile

  all the flowers of the mountain

  Will you go, Silas, go?

  If my true love he were gone

  I would surely find another

  Where the wild mountain thyme

  Grows around the blooming heather.

  Will you go, Silas, go?

  As the words of the song trailed off into a hum, Silas sat up, leaned on his arm, and looked at Bea’s face. Her eyes were closed and her body was still while she sang. As she hummed the tune, the sound seemed to come from some other place, a time far away from this moment under the quickly sinking sun. Silas couldn’t speak—did not wish to speak—because he feared that if he started, he would tell her something stupid and fawning about how much he liked her. She was different. Beautiful and different. She never talked about modern things, or anything outside of Lichport. And sometimes her words fell very softly on his ears, as though they were from a long way off and carried to him on the wind. But his heart beat quicker when they were together despite all—despite the distance
between them, despite being from very different parts of Lichport, and despite the fact that every minute he spent with her made him feel guilty because it drew him away from trying to find out anything about his dad. But she acted on him like a spell, and in their moments together it was just the two of them and nothing else.

  Bea had opened her eyes and was looking back at Silas. She smiled and said his name, drawing him deeper into their moment together, under the rising stars of evening.

  “You know,” said Bea, “there’s a real lion inside this statue.”

  Silas sat up a bit, still a little dreamy, as he looked up at the lion’s head that loomed above him.

  “Really? Inside the sculpture?”

  “Yes. And it was your great-great-grandfather on your father’s side who put it there.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Not at all. This statue is a sort of tomb. Well over a hundred years ago, a ship wrecked on the reef during a storm. The ship was carrying animals for the zoo in Kingsport. A storm at sea had damaged the ship, and they were coming to port here instead of Kingsport for repairs because the ship was in some distress. But the mooncussers heard of the ship, and thinking there might be valuable cargo out of Africa or India, they went out and lit their false light and tricked the ship onto the reef.”

  “Mooncussers?” Silas asked. “That’s a word I don’t think I’ve heard.”

  Bea looked away briefly. “It’s an old Lichport word. A word some of the sea folk in town know because it was used by their ancestors. Mooncussers were just thieves, men who swore at the moon when it shone bright because the moon is a blessed beacon to ships near these coasts. Their business, generally carried out on dark nights, was to make ships think they were being led to safe harbor by the lighthouse lamp. But in fact, the light was false and often led ships and their crew to their deaths. Then the mooncussers would wait on the shore for whatever cargo washed up from the wreck.”

  “That’s horrible!” Silas said. “What kind of person would do that?”

  “My brothers,” Bea replied, as she drew into herself. “It wasn’t so uncommon. It’s sort of an awful tradition among the coast towns. Always has been.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Silas said. But he couldn’t help wondering how such things were still practiced, even in a town as odd as Lichport.

  “No. It’s okay. I didn’t get along very well with my family.”

  “Yeah,” Silas said hesitantly, not wanting to let the rest of his life bleed into his time with Bea. “Neither do I.”

  “Well,” Bea continued, “seeing that false light and hoping for safe harbor, the ship turned too soon and hit the reef. The townsfolk came down to the quay to see the ship and its rare cargo come in, but the ship broke apart. Soon after you could hear the screaming of the sailors and the strange, awful sounds of the animals dying in the water or thrown onto the rocks. That was a terrible night. It seemed that neither man nor animal could survive the wreck. But the lion did. It managed to swim to shore. When the ’cussers came down to await their spoils on the tide, the lion had recovered enough to kill one of them in the cove. It was your great-great-grandfather who caught the lion. He had a cage built for it and kept it. Loved it like a child of his own. And I believe the lion lived for many years. When it died, your great-great-grandfather commissioned this statue. It came in pieces all the way from London on the biggest two ships you ever saw. He had the body of the lion preserved and placed inside, and then the sculpture was assembled, and here it still stands.”

  Bea started to climb down from the paw, but Silas didn’t move for many moments. He thought about that dark hidden chamber of bronze somewhere deep within the statue, where the lion slept.

  The moon was up, and small lights had begun to appear among the tombs and mausoleums of the cemetery. Unnerved a little by their mysterious glow, Silas asked Bea if tramps lived in any of the buildings.

  “Maybe. Lots of folks live here. I guess there could be tramps. Sometimes there are night markets in the center of the avenues. People come with things to trade. Old things. Strange things. Lost things. It’s not easy to find what you want in the world, but sometimes, every now and again, someone has just what you’re looking for and then … then everything might change.”

  “I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”

  “Well,” Bea continued, “have you ever lost something? A toy? A watch? A ring? Someone you love? All those things have to go somewhere, right? Now some people, when they lose something, they feel sad about it for a bit, but then they move on, they forget about it. Other people, though … they make a place in their heart for that thing—whatever it was—and they can’t let it go, and the loss of it eats at ’em day after day and eventually, they can’t get any rest at all. Those are the ones who come to the night markets. Looking for just that one thing that will make them feel whole again. Would you like to go and look? Have you lost something?” She was being coy now, but below her soft, playful words there were teeth.

  “Haven’t you ever lost something?” Bea went on. “C’mon! Maybe we’ll find it. What are you looking for, Silas?”

  Silas didn’t answer, although his mind held fast to the image of his father’s face. It felt like she was leading him on, like she knew something about him, and he didn’t like this new game of hers.

  More and more lights appeared. Many of them could now be seen brightening a long row of tombs fashioned in the Egyptian style. Tall columns, fluted and shaped like closed lotus flowers, stood idle, the roofs they once held up having long since fallen in, leaving open to the sky a lengthy gallery of ornate, open doorways. The thresholds were flanked by statues of the jackal-headed god Anubis and opened into small tombs with hieroglyphic walls, or to stairs leading down to the catacombs. Some of the doorways now seemed to glow as if inside them, down within some lower chamber, torches had been lit.

  Then, in the distance and down that shadow-strewn avenue of obelisks and sphinxes, Silas could hear voices rise and begin to wander in the air.

  He grew more and more scared. Maybe it was the way the light swayed on the overgrown walls of the tombs. The idea of a market of lost things unnerved him. What would he find there? There was only one thing he was looking for, and he knew it wasn’t waiting over there with whatever was hiding inside the tombs. This was not for him, and he told himself that instead of finding something he wanted, it was more likely that something he didn’t want would find him. His usually adventurous nature had completely dissolved.

  “I want to go home,” he said, and started, without warning, to walk back toward the gate—leaving Bea, who was rapt watching the rising lights of the Newfield night market, to catch up with him.

  They passed through the gates and quickly left the bronze lion behind them to cool in the night. Silas and Bea walked back up Fairwell Street. By the time they reached the corner of Temple, Silas noticed Bea was shaking from the cold. He reached out to put his arm around her, but she stepped away, beyond his reach.

  “You don’t like this street either, do you?” he asked her, looking west toward Uncle’s house.

  “No. I don’t like it down there at all, Silas,” she said, and even as they passed the street where Silas and his mother resided, Bea tilted and turned her head toward her rising shoulder, as if something had crawled inside her ear and she was trying to shake it out.

  “Me either,” Silas said, noticing her discomfort. “I live down there, you know, but I am thinking of leaving.”

  “I wish you would. I don’t like that street. There are things in the houses there … things that are not happy to be where they are.”

  Silas asked her to tell him what she meant, what she’d heard, but Bea had gotten very quiet, and when they reached the gates of the Umber cemetery, she smiled at him and glanced up at the name on the arch. Silas looked too, but when he turned back, Bea was gone and he was alone again, looking through the gate at the tombs of his silent ancestors.

  THE HEAVY AIR IN SI
LAS’S ROOM SMELLED LIKE STALE CANDY.

  Tired from exploring with Bea, Silas had fallen asleep easily. Now, in the middle of the night, he was awakened by the sound of raspy breathing just above his face. He lay absolutely still, sure that someone was standing over him. The room was dark, but the blackness above him felt somehow deeper. He knew it was not Uncle in the room with him, or his mother—the breathing was so irregular that Silas thought the person must be ill. He could feel himself being looked at, and the room felt smaller, closed in about him as if someone had pushed the walls in about the bed. He waited several moments for the breathing above him to stop, or for the sound of footsteps leaving the room. But the breathing continued, along with an awful sound of air desperately being sucked through a constricted throat, as if someone was trying to draw breath through a straw filled with thick jam.

  Outside his room, from the north wing, he could hear his uncle singing, the words drifting down the hall and onto the landing, wandering here and there into the other rooms, under doors, through the vents, winding their way about the shadow-strewn upper floor of the house.

  Fortune, my foe, why dost thou frown on me?

  And will thy favors never better be?

  Wilt thou, I say, forever breed my pain?

  And wilt thou not restore my joys again?

  In vain I sigh, in vain I wail and weep,

  In vain my eyes refrain from quiet sleep;

  In vain I shed my tears both night and day;

  In vain my love my sorrows do bewray….

  As the song continued, his uncle’s voice rose in volume and in pitch, yet through the words, the awful raspy breathing continued. Silas knew it was no dream, knew he was awake, but he was afraid to open his eyes. The sound of broken breathing was coming and going in time with the words of his uncle’s song, one word in, the other out, faster and faster, just above his face….

  Ah, silly Soul art thou so sore afraid?

  Mourn not, my dear, nor be not so dismayed.