Death Watch (22 page)

“Sir, I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but wouldn’t you like to rest … finally? Be done with it all?”

His great-grandfather turned his head in a slow, graceful, tired are toward the window, and the light played across the stretched skin of his face, showing its translucence.

“Child, if I wanted to go to bed, I’d have been set under the dirt a long time ago. I am waiting.”

“May I ask, for what?”

“To see what happens!”

“What happens? To what?”

“Any old damn thing. To the town. To me. For the stars to fall. Who knows how long this trick might last? So, my wise great-grandson, to the offer of sympathetic immolation—or whatever you may have had in mind—may I gratefully decline?” The corpse paused. “But Silas? You come back and visit me, won’t you? Besides, this is your house now.”

“My house?”

The corpse’s hand was rising slowly, pointing at a table covered in documents near the wall.

“Well, I know your mother doesn’t want this house—couldn’t even bring herself to come inside, aye, I know she was here—so that makes it yours. If you hand me that stack of papers over there, and a pen, I’ll change the will.”

Silas watched as his great-grandfather slowly turned the pages of his many-paged will, struck through several lines, and carefully wrote in Silas’s name.

“There now, it’s all yours, Silas. What’s left of it. And all you have to do is pay the occasional visit.”

“I would have come anyway,” Silas said sincerely.

“I know. And that makes it especially nice to give you a little something.”

His great-grandfather was still writing, now on a small, stained piece of paper he had removed from a pocket inside his jacket. At the bottom of some barely legible lines, he made his signature. Folding the paper up, he handed it to Silas and said, “Is your father’s friend Mrs. Bowe still residing in Lichport? Yes? Then please deliver this to her. She’ll know what to do with it.”

Silas took the paper and put it in his pocket, resting his other hand on the corpse’s shoulder. He was eager to come back and hear more, and in the meantime, maybe his great-grandfather would think of something or see something that might help him find his dad.

The visit to his convivial ancestor’s house left him feeling unsettled now about when it was that life actually ended and death began. Before meeting his great-grandfather, it had all seemed more cut-and-dried. Death might be a sort of memory loss, when people or spirits forget who they were in life. Silas was also not especially comforted by his relative’s version of life everlasting. As he closed the door behind him and took the wooden steps two at a time down into the overgrown front garden, he could not quite decide whether the Restless had conquered time or been trapped by it, making limbos of their own undying flesh. As he closed the gate behind him, he caught his finger on a thorn. He stood looking at the drop of blood on his fingertip for several moments before briefly putting it in his mouth and making his way home. At least he knew he might investigate a little farther afield about his dad, and he even had an address, a place to begin. And as for someone to show him something more of the town, as his great-grandfather had suggested, Silas was hoping Bea might oblige.

He went to see Mrs. Bowe. He had the paper to deliver to her from his great-grandfather, and he wanted a little more time
to think before going back to Temple Street. As he entered his house, with his own key, Mrs. Bowe called from the other side, inviting him over.

“And where have we been today?” She asked from the dining room, as she set a sphere of crystal back on a shelf.

“Fort Street.”

“Really? Well, I trust you saw to your obligations?” she said with a small smile.

“You seem to know a lot about my family, Mrs. Bowe.”

“Yes—” But then the smile left her face. “Formally, professionally, Silas, I don’t approve of that sort of thing. The dead should not be encouraged to linger. But the Restless here in Lichport keep to themselves, and those are their houses, so they can go on living in them if they like, I suppose.”

Silas was still having trouble accepting that everyone in town knew about these matters, about living corpses in the houses. He meant no disrespect to his great-grandfather, but what kind of a town was this?

Remembering the note, Silas handed Mrs. Bowe the paper his great-grandfather had asked him to deliver.

“He wanted me to give you this,” said Silas.

Mrs. Bowe paused before extending her hand to take the note from him. Her eyes became small as she opened the paper and read its contents. “I see … I see. All right. I will make arrangements. Silas, you are about to become a man of means…. Your great-grandfather has made you a very generous gift.”

Not wanting to press her about the note’s particulars, and not sure how he felt about taking money from someone he’d only just met, even family, Silas changed the subject. “My great-grandfather told me that there might be some other people in town I could ask about my dad, but he was too tired to go into much detail. Do
you have any idea whom he might have meant? He mentioned three women and described the house where they might be found … maybe that tall house on Coach and Silk, is that the place he meant?”

Mrs. Bowe’s face tightened, but then she raised an eyebrow as a shadow of fear crossed her face.

“The three …,” she said under her breath.

“Who?”

“No one,” replied Mrs. Bowe, sitting down. “That house is mostly empty, though it is true that your father has certainly visited it. It’s a very old house with some remarkable architectural features. Your father used to say that in some houses, and I’m sure he meant in the
features
of some houses, there are things much older than the town. Elements brought from elsewhere, other lands. Antiques and architectural ornaments, that’s all. We have some very remarkable homes here,” she said, her back straight, her face now expressionless.

“But Silas, surely this will keep? I can’t imagine why your great-grandfather thought this was important just now. It’s not safe to go wandering through these old abandoned houses. Here,” she said, walking toward the bookshelf, “if you’re so interested in that old house, I am sure we can find you a book or two about the architectural history of Lichport. Wouldn’t that be interesting?”

S
ILAS AWOKE BARELY AN HOUR AFTER GOING TO BED
. Despite Uncle’s lecture on the virtues of hard mattresses and how they induce “light, healthful sleep,” Silas was finding it more and more difficult to rest in the house on Temple Street.

The hard mattress wasn’t helped by the fact that the house did nothing but make noise. Like its master, the house itself was restless. Branches scratched against the windows. Heating pipes banged suddenly and the floorboards creaked, even when no one was walking on them. And the knocking. It could begin at any time and might continue for up to a half hour before it stopped. The first time Silas heard it he thought something upstairs was being struck repeatedly, the sound of something hard hitting something soft. Sometimes it sounded like stomping, over and over and over, on the walls and floor. Uncle always explained away the noise: the pipes, or rodents in the walls, but Silas didn’t believe him. He hadn’t lived there very long, but he already knew most of Uncle’s tells. When Uncle laughed, he was lying. When Uncle changed the subject, he was lying. When Uncle tried to sound like he was siding with Silas instead of Dolores, he was lying. So where was all the noise coming from, and why did Uncle keep lying about it?

Since following his mother down Fort Street, Silas felt differently about the large houses he saw and the large house he was
currently occupying. Now there were too many closed doors for his liking. Too many unexplained noises.

So when Silas awoke in the dark of his room and heard the sounds coming from the north wing, he tensed. Uncle was awake too. The thought of Uncle wandering around the house while he and his mother slept made Silas feel nauseated. He imagined Uncle standing outside the door to his room, or his mother’s, while they slept … listening, maybe even opening the door a bit, staring as the hall light sliced across closed eyes. Looking at their bodies like the subjects of his photographs. Just the thought of it threw a chill up and down Silas’s back.

He sat silently in the dark, barely breathing, hardly moving. But then he thought of the town waiting just beyond the porch:
I am not a prisoner in this house. If I want to take a walk in the middle of the night, what are they going to do? Lock me in my room?

He got up and dressed himself normally, as though it were morning, with no attempt to be quiet anymore. Again, his great-grandfather’s words were close to him: “See something more of the town.” He pulled on his jacket and shoes, and before leaving the room, he got a flashlight from his backpack, because although most of the streetlights seemed to be lit, he knew some certain of the lanes were darker than others. He turned on the hall light and walked confidently down the stairs, across the entrance hall, out of the house, and into the street.
See
? he told himself.
Not a prisoner
. And as he walked, he began to hum to himself.

At dusk Lichport held its breath, but by midnight, the town had begun to talk to itself.

Silas could hear faint voices way down by the docks where a ship might have arrived, the sound of night birds calling out their sharp evening laments away over the marshes, and music,
the high, long whine of a violin, from somewhere down toward the sea. From the south, perhaps from within the wide expanse of Newfield Cemetery, dogs were barking. Now, at midnight, Lichport was awake and almost lively. He walked north.

Silas looked at the Umber family plot across from him, hoping beyond reason that he’d see Bea waiting. The rusted arch stood empty, framing nothing but the air.
Of course she’s not here
, he told himself.
What would any girl being doing out alone in the middle of the night?
But the other noises rose up to greet him, and Silas followed the distant tune of the violin, away toward the sea and the wharf and the Narrows.

Both his mom and Uncle had told Silas to “keep clear of the Narrows.”

The Narrows was the “lower” portion of Lichport, which crawled right up and out from the sea in crooked lanes and turning alleys. “Full of low-class people,” Uncle said. “Shopkeeps and criminals,” his mother added, telling him that “people have gone missing down there.” But the Peales lived in the Narrows, and that was all Silas needed to know about it.

The Narrows were not hard to find, for most of the east/west running streets drained into the Narrows and then down into the sea. He returned to Temple Street and walked west, then walked up Coach for a couple of blocks, looked down Lower Street, and could see that it quickly plunged downward very steeply. After a foot or two of cracked pavement, the street bubbled up into a river of old polished cobblestones that ran down through all the lanes and alleys of the Narrows.

The Narrows was another world compared to “higher Lichport,” as Uncle called it, far more ancient, yet its old houses still stood proudly, cemented in place by years of salt air and dampness. It wasn’t difficult to see how the streets of the Narrows
got their names. Some lanes were so thin that if you stretched out your arms, you could touch two doors on opposite sides at once. On most streets down there, the houses leaned so precipitously in toward the street that they actually met at the top and formed an arch that blocked out the sky. Where the sky did show through, Silas could see that thick, black clouds had rolled in off the sea, and the air was wet with the promise of rain.

Some of the “cottages,” as Uncle called them, had their windows open, and people were cooking late dinners for night visitors. On the air Silas could smell roasting meats, and plenty of fish, and boiled cabbage. The main streets had lit lamps, although many of the side lanes and alleys were dark, or only dimly illuminated by lanterns hung beside a cottage’s front door. Unlike the upper part of town, the Narrows were truly alive at night. Voices flew up and down the slate-clad streets, bounced off the walls, and faded as they ran farther and farther from their sources. Silas glanced down a dark lane and saw two people in long coats lock their door and raise lanterns in front of them before they walked off down an even darker passage to whoever awaited their company in the small hours before dawn.

Silas wasn’t sure what time it was, or how long he’d been wandering in the maze of the Narrows, but it didn’t trouble him; there was a well-worn homeliness about this part of Lichport he found welcoming. Eventually, he’d arrive at the docks, or he’d begin walking uphill and would soon find his way back to the upper portion of town. But he didn’t want to do either. He liked these streets, so old and unchanged, and alive. So different from the affluent neglect of “higher” Lichport. He was absolutely sure his father had walked these same lanes many times, and as he wandered them now himself, he felt somehow closer to his father.

Silas’s reverie was interrupted by a terrible, low wail. Just ahead, from the mouth of an ancient-looking alley, someone was in pain. The long, low cry was carried by a breeze that smelled like wet stone and damp earth, and cold and rotting things.