Death Watch

by Berk, Ari

  Uncle hummed quietly, preparing a large cloth around Silas’s feet, perhaps to catch the blood. Silas thrashed his head from side to side, and the feet of the chair he sat in began to rock on and off the floor, but the ropes and knots held him. As Uncle drew the scalpel close to the light of the lamp to inspect its edge, a great booming noise was heard downstairs. Then there was another. Uncle’s face knotted in anger.

  “Oh, eternity! How long must thou wait?”

  Uncle picked up the fallen ax and, checking Silas’s bindings once more, excused himself and went to see who was trying to break down his door at such an inconvenient moment.

  MRS. BOWE STOOD AT THE EDGE of the salt marshes, below the stick-woven nests. Before her gathered the mothers of the lost, the Night Herons. Out of deference to the Wailing Woman, the ghosts appeared, high in their bowers, in maternal raiment. Tall women in dark gowns that spilled like tattered banners from their nests into the reeds of the marsh.

  Mrs. Bowe spoke quickly, but there was little need to say anything more than Silas’s name: Silas, who had brought the lost ones home. Silas, who had brought them heart’s ease and freed them from suffering. Silas was in peril, and they would come. Instantly the air of the marshes began to churn with a great wind, whipping the reeds in frantic circles. When the women of the marshes descended from their bowers, they were terrible to behold. Some moved as tall, impenetrable shadows, cowled still in their mourning weeds. Others took less discernible forms, anthropomorphic nightmares whose features became the blurred masks of horror-birds, beaks sharp and tipped in flame. Many of their lately restored young accompanied them, eager to repay their debt to Silas Umber. These cut through the air as a host of daggers, their small wings edged all in bloody hues, their eyes as fiery jewels burning deep in their sockets.

  As Mrs. Bowe walked from the marshes, the air behind her rose in wrath like a mighty wave cresting on the surface of a storm-churned sea, and it followed her like the tide in flood as she made her way toward Temple Street.

  Mother Peale and a host of men from the Narrows were turning from Prince Street onto Fairwell when they saw Mrs. Bowe and the dreadful storm that followed at her heels. The heavy air was filled with frightful sounds. The calls of birds and angry wails rose together into a vengeful chorus, and Mother Peale bowed her head and raised her hand slightly, saying only, “We are with you,” then joined the nightmare procession as it moved toward the Umber house.

  Mrs. Bowe and Mother Peale climbed the front steps of Uncle’s house. Mrs. Bowe struck the iron door with her walking stick. The knock rang hollow through the house, but there was no answer. Mrs. Bowe could feel Silas somewhere inside, as sure as she knew her own name. She looked at Mother Peale, and in silent acknowledgment Mother Peale raised her fist and hit the door with it, shouting a name in a voice that rattled the glass in the windows:

  “Grey Lady of the house, the mother of the Narrows calls you! Sister, open the door!”

  For a moment, all was silent. Then Mrs. Bowe and Mother Peale could hear the draw of the lock, metal against metal, and the door opened. Mrs. Grey stood far back in the entrance hall at the foot of the stairs. Her head was hanging down as if in shame, and it was hard to see her face. She was mumbling confusedly but said to Mrs. Bowe and Mother Peale as they came through the door, “I serve the house—”

  “And you shall continue to do so. Be easy, now we are come,” Mother Peale said as she mounted the stairs. She looked back toward the door. The men of the Narrows poured in, filling the hall. Beyond them, the front of the house was torn by frantic winds risen from the beating wings and billowing mourning gowns of the Night Herons. Feeling the rising wrath of the apparitions, the men parted to either side of the door and only watched as the ghosts stormed into the house, following Mrs. Bowe and Mother Peale up the stairs.

  Halfway up the stairs, Mother Peale turned and called down to her folk, “Until it’s done, no one leaves this house!” Below, the men closed the iron door and locked it again.

  From the landing, Uncle saw Mrs. Bowe and Mother Peale coming up the stairs. The air about them bristled with fury, and though the front door had been closed, a wind whipped up the leaves and dust behind them as they climbed the stairs. Fear rose fast in him, and Uncle turned and ran back to the Camera Obscura. Crossing the threshold, he quickly closed the door behind him and tried to lock it. The locks resisted him, so he left the door open and turned back to the room. What he saw set his hands trembling so hard that he dropped the ax.

  Silas was standing now. The chair he’d been tied to was shattered into kindling, and the rope spilled uselessly around his feet. His fists were clenched, and next to him a form took shape in the agitated air, framed of dust and motes of amber light. The golden thing moved in front of Silas, as if to protect him.

  Uncle’s whole body began to shake, and his mouth moved but no words came. “Adam,” he tried to say. Then, without warning, he threw back his head and laughed triumphantly. “See? He has risen forth in eternal gold!” He began to sob, and then laughed again in mad elation.

  Outside the Camera Obscura, a great roaring came upon the air, like a train streaming down the hall, and the door burst and fell away from its hinges. Uncle’s head and neck snapped up into a straight line, and then he fell to the floor, frantically scrambling for the ax. Holding it above his head, oblivious to what was happening in the room, Uncle stood and moved toward Silas through a blizzard of dust and papers that had been whipped up into the air. His voice rose above the wind. “A golden Eden awaits you, and today shall be the first morning of all the world!” Uncle ran at Silas, but three steps were all he took before the furious air held him fast.

  Silas strode over to where Uncle was suspended just above the floor, unable to move. He reached out and put his hand around Uncle’s wrist where it hung motionless, held by an unseen force.

  “I want to show you something,” Silas said, tightening his grip. “I want to show you something of the world you’ve made and the world you’re going to.”

  He clutched his uncle’s wrist, and with his other hand, he reached into his pocket and opened the death watch.

  “Let the dead keep the dead,” Silas said, repeating Uncle’s own words. He pushed down on the watch’s hand.

  The air in the Camera Obscura became a tempest.

  Uncle could now see the Night Herons in all their terrible wrath as more and more of them rushed forward to take hold of him. Uncle’s eyes were wide with what he beheld, and he began to scream. Silas stepped away to stand next to Mrs. Bowe and Mother Peale. In the far corner of the room, a tall woman, her features soft but veiled, held Adam close to her, her arms about his neck and shoulders, protecting him. The ghost looked once at his father and then hid his face in his mother’s voluminous gown.

  Uncle’s still-screaming body was dragged across the room, the heels of his shoes thumping at each gap in the old wooden floorboards. Flanking each side of the door, Mother Peale and Mrs. Bowe cast their eyes down. Without looking up, Mother Peale said, “Let it be done,” and as the words left her mouth, the nightmarish regiment of women from the marsh lifted Uncle higher into the air. His body jerked as if pulled by an invisible rope, and was flung through the covered window. Many of the wraiths continued to tear at him as he fell, screaming as they plummeted in a single dark writhing mass. Silas ran to the casement and saw his uncle’s body strike the earth below, utterly broken.

  The wind rose up in the west, and a great, deep, tolling bell rang out. Silas, Mother Peale, and Mrs. Bowe moved quickly from inside the house down to where Uncle’s body lay. Still clutching the halted death watch, Silas saw the Night Herons circling his uncle’s corpse, their wings lashing at it like scourges. A mist rose from the body, and Uncle’s ghost was set upon by the wraiths, the marsh women and their children both. A great cry went up from the avian-formed dead and as Uncle’s ghost fled, they pursued, lashing him this way and that, down and down toward the sea.

  Mrs. Grey stood in the doorway of th
e house, watching the living and the dead moving away toward the Narrows, before fading back into the dark interior.

  Down through the Narrows, the hunt coursed ever closer to the sea. The Night Herons were relentless, never letting Uncle’s ghost veer from the path they drove him hard upon. As the chase emerged from the alleys and poured out along the harbor, Silas could see the mist ship, horrible in its resplendence, towering over the sea. It had sailed in right up to the harbor’s seawall, and the bowsprit loomed over their heads and jutted into one lane of the Narrows. He looked closely at the ship and could see that the horror-drawn lines of his uncle’s face had been burned like a medieval shroud into the wind-torn spectral fabric of the ship’s great sail. Silas frantically looked among the other contorted portraits of the damned, but saw no other face known to him.

  An awful cry crawled its way into the air, first in his uncle’s voice, but soon that wailing strain was lost in a rising chorus of all those tortured souls who had been stitched tight by their sins into the rigging, and crushed into the wood grain of the mast, and nailed fast to the boards of the skeletal hull. Just as those voices rose into a stormlike crescendo, somewhere in the deep water beyond the boiling harbor a horn sounded, muffled at first, but then sharply breaking over the surface of the sea, its deep conch-call flying up from the depths and blasting through the damp night sky.

  The folk of the Narrows fell to their knees, and the spirits of the marshes hung on the air like wind-blown pennants.

  And to these sounds, one other was added. Mrs. Bowe screamed as she stood at the edge of the harbor wall, wailing the words of that terrifying curse her ancestress had spat out long ago at that same ship. Words of binding and wandering. Words of curse and imprisonment. Words of wide, harborless waters without ending. And when she was finished, the ghosts of the marshes had vanished, and all the folk of the Narrows were standing once more. Below them, little waves from the now peaceful sea lapped at the harbor wall.

  The harbor was empty. The mist ship had gone. Folks had returned to their homes. Silas walked next to Mrs. Bowe as they made their way back toward Main Street.

  “Joan Peale will see to your mother. Don’t worry. What she needs, she’ll have. Though now, there’s no reason why she can’t remain in that house, if that’s what she desires. You can go to her tomorrow, when the dust settles a bit.”

  Silas could barely hear her. He was walking faster now, leaving Mrs. Bowe behind as he leapt up the front stairs of his father’s house two and three steps at a time. Uncle was gone. The mist ship had sailed. Silas knew that when he opened the door, his father, in some form, would be standing there, waiting for him.

  The door was still ajar from when he’d left earlier. Silas spoke his father’s name into the mouth of the empty house. He stepped across the threshold, but nothing stood out. Silence. Motes of dust in the light of the lamp. A thought slipped into his mind, one that for more than a year he had tried to push away: I will never see my dad again.

  Mrs. Bowe came up behind Silas and put her arms around him.

  “I don’t want to be alone,” he said.

  “Child, I’m here,” answered Mrs. Bowe, misunderstanding him.

  “All my folk are gone. My mom might as well be gone. Everyone I know is dead. I am alone here.”

  Mrs. Bowe only nodded, knowing it would be best not to argue with him, or coddle him. She took his face gently in her hands and said, “You must take up where he left off, whether you find him or not. I wish you’d spent more time here in Lichport growing up. You’d have become more accustomed to the ways of the sea, more accustomed to people setting sail and sometimes not making it back to port.

  “But like all the living and the dead, Silas, you have your work,” she said, brushing the dust from his jacket. “And for the moment, that will have to suffice.”

  The next morning Silas woke early and walked slowly to Temple Street to see his mother. As he approached the house, the front door opened and she emerged, as if she had been waiting for him. Dolores came to the edge of the porch, pausing briefly, before coming down to the front walk to stand in front of her son.

  Words failed him. All he could do was look at his mother.

  When Dolores tried to speak, her voice was barely audible.

  “I didn’t know. Silas, I didn’t know—,” she started, but then went quiet.

  Silas stepped forward to hug his mom. She didn’t pull away, and he put both his arms around her and pressed his face against her cheek. She didn’t move. When Silas drew back, he felt her hand touch his back as if it had been hanging in the air, waiting but unable to move closer. He quickly kissed her cheek and said, “Soon,” before turning to walk back home.

  MRS. BOWE HAD SET AN ORNATE mahogany chest in Silas’s front hall, just by the door. Each day, when the letters came through the letter slot, she would collect them, date them, and place them in the box for Silas to read.

  Everyone in Lichport knew Silas Umber was the new Undertaker. And yet he remained hesitant, still nervous about the protocols.

  Each day he brought some of the letters into his study and read them. They were all of a kind: requests for help. Troubled houses. Cold rooms. Noises in the night. A grandparent who’d passed peaceably enough, but wouldn’t take to his road. Unsettled business.

  Some people just left notes in his mailbox, brief missives quickly scrawled on scraps of paper, as if the sender assumed that the Undertaker would already know the history of the house and what the particular details were. Perhaps his father would have known what to make of notes like these:

  147 Queen Street. Knocking resumed. AGAIN. Three sightings of HER. Will await your arrival any weekday evening between hours of eight and ten p.m.

  Most of the notes and letters were from Lichport or houses on its margins. At first Silas was unsure of what exactly his responsibilities were. Did he have to respond to every request? There were notes in his father’s desk and in the Undertaker’s ledger about some of the homes and the more familiar and recurrent hauntings in the town, but not all of them, and from what Silas could make of his father’s notes, there had been more and more problems of this sort in Lichport, even though the town’s population had been steadily shrinking. Certainly, by now, the dead far outnumbered the living. Though resolved to help, obligated even, Silas wasn’t sure exactly how quickly he had to respond. Was there to be a fee for his services? How much did his dad get paid for each ghost? Were some worth more than others? He needed a menu.

  Mrs. Bowe had tried to be helpful since Uncle’s “departure” from Lichport, but she seemed withdrawn, spending most of the time in her own part of the house, quiet, except at evenings when her visitor would still come. Since the departure of the mist ship, it seemed everyone in town was lying low. His mother never left the house on Temple Street, and he hadn’t seen the Peales much either. Bea was still nowhere to be seen.

  Mrs. Bowe noticed his confused looks as he sifted through the stacks of unanswered letters. “You will need to answer them, one way or another.”

  “I don’t know what to say, or what to ask them for. Is it rude to ask for payment?”

  “Silas, you are not a plumber. There is not a fixed wage for such work. I believe people paid your father whatever they thought was appropriate. To my knowledge, he never asked anyone for any money. Some paid cash, others paid however they could, in food or supplies. For that matter,” she added, gesturing at the stack of papers and deeds that had lately arrived from his great-grandfather’s attorney, “it’s not as though you need the money now.”

  Silas looked around his father’s study. He could now see how his dad might have come by his extensive collection of books and art. Lichport was filled with people living in large old houses, families who might now be poor but were still surrounded by the remains of once-opulent estates—libraries, paintings, sculptures, curiosities from abroad—and here, in this study, sat payment for the settlement of some of their ancestral troubles. Silas began to wonder what else his
dad might have accepted as payment over the years, from folks less well bestowed in family relics. A car? Clothes? Food? A drink at the Fretful Porpentine? He would have to figure it out as he went along.

  “You are only obligated as far as you wish to be, though if you help one family, others would take it very poorly if you didn’t answer their request. Your father found it very hard to close the door in the faces of people who needed his help. I expect you’d feel the same, no?”

  “I would. But what about my life?”

  “Your life?”

  “I mean, what about time to myself? For what I want to do?”

  “And what would that be, dear?” Mrs. Bowe asked in a patronizing tone.

  What else did he want to do, after all? He looked at the Undertaker’s ledger open on the desk and could easily see himself written into its pages, becoming, year by year, more a part of the world left to him by his father. It was no accident that this was a family business. There was something about him that rose to the work, that came more alive in the presence of the past, in the presence of the dead. And so he said, “I see your point.”

  Mrs. Bowe smiled. “Of course you do, dear.”

  She was knitting a long scarf, nearly done. She looked up and asked Silas if he’d had many curious inquiries lately.

  “I’ve had lots more,” he said, “since Mr. Peale’s wake. I haven’t gone through them all, but one just arrived from Saltsbridge.”

  “Really, that is a rare thing. It must be a Lichport family. May I see the letter?”

  Silas found the letter in a small stack on the desk and handed it to Mrs. Bowe. “There’s no address on the envelope or in the letter, just the postmark from Saltsbridge and a telephone number.”

  Mrs. Bowe turned the envelope over and then retrieved the note from inside. “That’s not unusual. They’ll expect you to call and then they’ll send a car, most likely.”