Death Watch by Ari Berk
Quiet her, says one.
Shut her mouth, says the youngest to the oldest, and the oldest understands and grabs her face and puts his hand over her mouth, feeling her hot breath upon his palm. She sets her teeth deep into his flesh, and he cries out. He does not think but seizes her throat and thrusts her face into the water.
Be quiet. Be quiet. Be quiet, is all he thinks. He hears nothing else but this thought: Silence her for our father’s sake. He does not hear his brothers’ frightened cries to leave her be, nor the thrashing of her limbs against the water. Nothing. And when he lets her go, after all her shaking stops, she does not move.
What shall we do? the brothers cry, and so the first, all light gone now from his eyes, takes the stones and fills her dress with them, lifting the hem up and, with his belt, securing the rock-filled dress to her waist.
She sinks fast, for she is such a little thing, so lithe and fair. Above her, the moon goes small as she sinks down and down. And when she reaches the bottom, she is alone. No lover’s corpse to rest upon. Nothing there but eels and crabs and cold mud.
And now here’s truth: Her brothers found her lover, and beat him and drove him from the town to save their family shame, and they told him that if he spoke of their sister to anyone they’d come to kill him sure as dusk ends each day, and that was a promise. And so he fled, ran out into the marshes and toward the woods and away, and lived, though Lawrence Umber was never seen in Lichport again.
But she was not so lucky.
And her story is not over, because sometimes she wakes and rises. When a face pleases her, especially an Umber face, she rises and walks for a time, until she takes him by the hand and joins with him and brings him down with her among the deep water weeds so she will not have to be alone.
As the voice of the first grew quiet, Silas’s face was white, all his blood gone heavy and cold, sinking in his limbs. At the knowledge of how close he’d come to death that night at the millpond, his mind began twisting in every direction, coiling around and about itself. Yet part of him knew that she loved him and that in the depths of the millpond, she’d tried to help him. She let him go. He could almost see her face before him, hear her voice, and he knew he cared for her and wanted, truly desired, to help her if he could.
The three ladies could see him becoming uncomfortable. The second of the three spoke.
“Silas, we know this is no easy matter, and there is no right answer about what to do. Your love for her is part of what makes you exceptional. Who but an Umber, who but you particularly could love one such as her? Knowing you have nearly nothing to gain, you love anyway. I believe that is heroic, in its way. But she is a very dangerous someone, Silas. She died desirous of so many things, and very angry, very betrayed by so many. That has confused her and bound her in a state where she cannot see her way out. You know why, I think. What we desire most in life, we shall try to find in death. And right there is the problem for so many souls.”
Then the third of the three continued, “Sadly, our ruling passions—our wishes and hopes and desires—are not often in accord with reason or simple goodness. Thus we make our beds in life, and have to lie in them in death. People make such poor decisions and then cannot see a way out of them. Death limits you, believe me. And this is why you must forget her and commit yourself to your path, to your work. Only in that way may you bring peace to those like her. Your father’s work, your work, helps to mitigate such circumstances, extends a very welcome hand to the dead who need help. But not every spirit can be helped or knows they need it, or even knows that they are dead at all. And such spirits are perilous. The more complicated a person, the more complicated are their deaths. You know those folk you meet? The quiet, simple, good folks one meets often in the daily course of life?”
“Boring, you mean!” said the first.
“Normal,” said the third, chiding just a little. “Regular, common people who live unremarkable lives … those are the ones who die easy, and when those folk die, they hardly ever get up again. Put ’em in the ground, they stay put and don’t trouble anyone again. But those others, those people who are so damn funny, or clever, or mean … the ones you always put at the top of your party guest list, the ones who’ve got their minds made up about something or other, the ones you can’t talk out of nothing once they’ve set their minds on it? Well,” she said knowingly, making a sweeping gesture across the whole length of the tapestry from one corner to another, “those are the ones who don’t always want to move on. They couldn’t let anything go in life. Same in death. They know everything, don’t they?” The three laughed loudly together, sharing a private joke.
“Some folks just can’t bear to leave it all behind. And you’ve met one of those, haven’t you? The ones who are so stubborn, even their bodies aren’t allowed to go to their rest because they’ve feathered their nests so well,” said the first.
“You mean my great-grandfather?”
“Yes. He’s one of the good ones. Sometimes the bad ones stay on too. Those are the worst. Though really, you can’t blame any of them. Life can be habit-forming, and isn’t it always the bad habits that are hardest to break!”
“But those who want things—finery, children, wealth, revenge—desire them so bad they can’t rest at night for wanting them. Those are the folks who don’t settle,” added the second. “One way or another, they want what they want and will see no reason. So when they die, their flesh rots, if they’re lucky, but the wanting doesn’t. On and on the wanting goes, right past death and into something else.”
Silas knew everything they said was true. He needed to think. Every word they said careened into another, and it was becoming harder and harder for him to keep focused. And the little voice was ringing out from the back of his mind, “Come and find me. Find me.” Only now, Silas didn’t know whether the voice was his father’s or Bea’s. He turned to go and was almost at the door when the first spoke again, calling after him.
“And Silas, what will you do when what the dead want so desperately is you?”
He waited quietly, unable to answer, unable to leave. Everything had become one to him and he felt, standing there, eyes running across the room from one scene to another, that if he could just bring his mind to bear on one single thing and quiet the rest for even a minute, he might be okay. If he could do that, solve one problem, then everything, his mom, Bea, his future, everything else would begin to sort itself out too. He tried to calm his thoughts, to summon in his heart the one thing he knew he needed more than anything.
He held his father’s face in the front of his mind, and in response, the threads and scenes of the tapestry became a blur of color and texture to him. As he watched, some of the scenes stood out in sharp contrast, rising up from the rest, drawing him in. He began pointing at these, buildings and streets of stitches and knots, some looming over the neighboring portions of the tapestry. He pointed to one and then another and asked again and again, trying to piece together the shards of a puzzle, “What is this place? What is it called?”
“Ah!” they exclaimed together. “He has chosen!”
And they told him the names:
The Peony Lantern Teahouse
The Red Parlor
The Yacht Club
The Hall of Twelve Corpses
The Tavern
The Garden of Delights
The Theater of Summer
The Bowers of the Night Herons
The Millpond
The Sunken Mansions
On and on the list went.
Some of these names he thought he recognized from notes in the ledger. Others only felt familiar, like the names of acquaintances met long ago. Some sang in his mind, pulled at his attention like a tide, and those he underlined as he wrote them on a folded piece of paper he’d found in the pocket of his father’s jacket. As the ladies spoke the names, Silas noted any clues to their locations he could discern in the tapestry. Some were in the Narrows, others spread throughout the town, overlaid in gauze
The three said to him, “At last you begin to truly see this town for what it is, for what it has always been. The names we have told you are places wherein the dead congregate and have done so for a long time. Some of these misthomes and shadowlands share their borders with other places. Some, such as the Teahouse, you may find very commodious because it is so ancient in the other countries where it also stands. Beware. Not only Lichport’s dead inhabit such realms. All of them were known to your father, who had many times walked within these hostels of the lost, though he knew and visited many others besides.”
“Most noble and helpful ladies, how will I find them?” asked Silas with gratitude.
They smiled.
“Most shadowlands and misthomes, or limbos, if you like, may be found to be associated with places you can see without assistance. These are. But your manner of approach will always be crucial. Some may not be entered unless you understand their nature first. Others must be approached in a particular manner, or at sunset, or hungry, or with eyes wet with tears, or while you can hear the sound of the sea, or a child crying. Because of who you are and the death watch you bear, it will be easier for you than most. The names are calls. Hold the names in your mind, and you will find your way through the mist.”
“Will I find my father?”
“That’s sweet,” said the third, “he thinks us oracles—”
But the second of the three interrupted.
“We did not say you’d find him. Only that he has been in these places. Whether he is currently residing in one or another, that is for you to find. But here, let me whisper some needful words into your ear, child….”
She spoke of strange lands and the signs by which they might be found, and Silas tried to remember all he could, but her words were like a dream, and as she drew away from him, his memory made smudges of what she’d told him.
Silas bowed to the three, but as he turned to leave, the first of the three said, “Silas, be careful what you eat on your journey. In some lands, it is fine to sample the fare, especially if you are among beloved friends or kin, but in others … well, tasting even the smallest morsel might mean your road home, if you can find one at all, is not so nice.”
He nodded in acknowledgment and left the room, walking quickly from the house of the Sewing Circle, wanting to begin his search before more of what he’d seen and heard slipped away from him.
After Silas had left them, the three ladies whispered in their high, strange room, gathered about the web.
“Wait, wait,” said the second, “no need to tear out what was. Stitch over it. Let the past keep its place.”
“Whatever was shall be again,” said the third.
“Can you see who it comes for?” said the first.
“No. Not yet. But it has only recently arrived. Patience.”
And from the steadily working needles of two of the women, blue and green threads poured forth in mighty waves in the air. Then, drawing out a spool of stone-white thread as thin as a hair, the first of the three began to stitch with a needle carved of bone. Here there came the outlines of a ship. The others cast off, and, working now with the same pale thread as the first, began to fill in the gaps: salt-encrusted boards, tall masts, tattered sails that had billowed through storm a thousand times. All in white, but no detail missing. And in the torn sheets of the sails meant to catch the wind, there was now a net of souls. Faces of the damned stitched down in the very fabric of the sails, so that when the ladies’ breaths blew across the tapestry, and rippled it like the wind, the faces billowed and distended as though they were screaming or crying.
“It has been a long while since we’ve worked out such a theme.”
“Not long enough!” said the first. “This town is filled with malcontents. Time for them to set sail, I say!”
Then, more seriously, the second said, “Look here at this long thread. Here’s a yarn we know—” And indeed, the anchor line stretched away from the ship to another, more familiar, part of the tapestry.
“Perhaps we should tell the boy? Fetch him back,” suggested the second.
“Why?” said the first. “You’ll ruin all our sport. Besides, he’ll know soon enough.”
And with that, the three grew silent again, gathering up loose threads, stitching them down where they could.
SILAS MADE A COFFER IN HIS MIND, and into it he put his uncle, his mother, Bea, his nameless fears, and every other thing he could think of that might keep him from finding his father.
He was going to find his dad. Alive or dead, he needed to know where his dad was and what had become of him, no matter what might be waiting in the mist.
Warm in his father’s jacket and a long wool scarf, Silas walked from his house only partly sure where he was going. As he came down Main, heading east toward the water, he wound strong cord around the open death watch, binding the hand of the dial to the face. He didn’t knot it, in case he had to remove the cord quickly.
He instantly began to feel the light dizziness he associated with the drawing aside of the veil between the worlds, and already, the town around him had begun to fill with mist. It seeped up from the pavement, winding in gray, snakelike tendrils about his feet, falling in thin rivulets down the walls of the buildings, as if all the structures of the town were boxes filled with fog. Just ahead of him, unchanged in shape but now somehow more alive, Beacon Hill glowed as if on fire. And away to the north and south, from Fort Street and down on Coral, thin columns of blue flames spiraled upward, piercing the low clouds.
From the ladies of the Sewing Circle, he knew the names of the places he was looking for, and he kept those names at the front of his mind, right behind his eyes, and this seemed to keep the others—the ghosts who might be found on every street in Lichport—in the pale half-light of his peripheral vision and away from the path before him. He chose the most familiar place first and made its name into a prayer.
Silas walked and did not stop. Streets rose up before him in confusing composites, familiar in parts, foreign in others, as though the many periods of the town were thin sheets of gauze hung before his eyes and he was looking through all of them at once.
The mist was before him and behind him. As he said the name of the shadowland he was looking for again and again, summoned its image from the tapestry, the brume seemed to abate as though stirred up by his breath, or buffeted by a wind. The mist parted in front of him, revealing some odd angle of the street, or a worn corner of a wall, or a worm-eaten ornament on a carved column, or the small glazed window of an ancient house, or a white quartz cobblestone set among the dark. The signs had always been there, merely unnoticed in the intoxicating flow of time. Silas could see it clearly now: how certain of the strange individual elements of the town, indeed, the world, might form—if seen in just the right way—a map to the land of the dead.
He walked on and farther on. He first went down into the Narrows, for the misthome he sought first lay within its boundaries, close by the sea. Silas noticed the gulls were quiet, and then—as he descended the twisting lanes, arriving at the bay—even the incessant crashing of the waves against the rocks was now absent.
As he walked along the quay toward the tavern, Silas could just hear the voices of the Narrows folk, living people going about their business, unaware of him passing among them. He could not see their faces. On the margins of the lands of the dead, it seemed to Silas, the living could become mere shadows.
As he approached the Fretful Porpentine Tavern at the end of Downe Street by the old wharf, he found it changed from the place he’d seen many times before. He knew the building well enough as a run-down bar where some of the Narrows folk drank, and more than a few transients who’d washed up in Lichport and were unable to find their way out again filled the worn bar stools. At one time, the tavern had been a prominent coaching inn, holding forth at the entrance to town on the ancient coastal highway; now it was little more than an
The Fretful Porpentine had two doors. One, Silas had seen before. It led to the tavern, where the living drank and met to share news. The second door, which he had never seen, was far older and led—the ladies of the Sewing Circle had told him—to a shadowland of the dead. In truth, they’d said, both doors shared a frame—each leading to a room where the forgotten gathered to forget.
Stepping back, Silas saw the front of the tavern was much larger now as it rose from the mist, and horses stood at a post a little ways away from the door. As he again approached the tavern, those familiar voices behind him fell aside, and he could hear raucous shouts just ahead, coming from inside. The noise rattled the hanging lanterns on their hooks and the glass of the candlelit windows, which cast a jaundiced yellow light out onto the cobbles of the street. Just over the door hung a hand-painted sign he’d never seen before, depicting a porcupine with its quills standing straight up from its back. THE FRETFUL PORPENTINE—TAVERN, INNE, AND TRAVELLER’S EASE was written below the startled animal in bold red letters. As Silas stood looking at the tavern-as-it-was, ghost after ghost flowed past him and into the place. A loud cry of greeting burst through the doorway as each one went in. Silas also noticed, as he crossed the threshold that, while many ghosts were going in, none were coming out.
Silas had seen hastily written notes regarding the limbo of the Tavern in the ledger, but as he tried to recall them, he could no longer discern whether the words that swam in his mind were in the past or present tense … the third person or the first….
Just inside the door of the tavern, a sign greets all weary travelers with the words:
Wand’rers, be welcome
Sit down at your ease
Pay with a story
And drinke what ye please!
Here you will always find a lively company, still drinking hard, laughing, cursing, lamenting their losses, and bragging about whatever unspent joys still fill their pockets. Only those who’ve lost something they don’t want to find come here. A wife. A child. A job. A family. A way. If you’re missing something and want to forget about it, there is a stool waiting for you just by the door. And there’s always something to stay for.