Death Watch (25 page)

It was a long while before the laughter died down and folks started to drift away from the fire and toward their homes. Joan Peale and her husband, who both lived above the store, offered to walk Silas home, which they gladly did even though it took them closer to the center of uptown than they liked to go at night.

When her last guest left, Mother Peale began to extinguish the oil lamps and candles about the room, until only a single taper burned by the hearth next to her high-backed rocking chair. Then, with a strong and loving arm, she helped her husband up the stairs and to his bed. His eyes were closed even as he sat on the side of his bed, even before his feet were off the floor. She laid him out, and pulled the covers up over him, and turned off the little electric
light on the bedside table. She left the room and closed the door quietly behind her.
The company is good for him
, she thought.
He’ll sleep well tonight
.

Mother Peale returned downstairs and was neither shocked nor frightened when she looked across the room to see the pale little girl who sat on the stool by the fire, just by the foot of her chair. The girl was looking into the glowing red embers of the hearth, but their light seemed to bend around her body, for the small child’s face remained white as the risen moon.

Mother Peale crossed the room and took her accustomed place in her chair. The small girl looked at her, and the old woman welcomed the child into her lap. Immediately, the child put her head on her mother’s chest and closed her eyes. Mother Peale began to sing softly—
“Hush-a-bye, little one, aye, aye, hush-a-bye, little one, aye”
—while she rested her heels on a stone of the hearth and pushed her chair back and forth, while she rocked the poor child, her first, dead now these fifty-four years.

S
ILAS STOOD UNDER HIS WROUGHT-IRON NAME
at the gates of the Umber family cemetery. He had been whistling for a moment when he saw Bea coming down Fairwell Street. She was skipping, her feet hardly touching the pavement, moving in and out of the pools of light cast on the ground by the streetlamps. They had met for short walks several times before, always finding each other, seemingly by accident. Strange but also nice, Silas thought, that now if he thought about her, conjured up her face in his imagination, more often than not when he went outside he’d find her waiting for him. But it happened too often and felt too good to be a coincidence, and Silas knew it. Was she stalking him? He hoped so.

“How did you know I needed someone to show me around?” Silas asked, smiling but surprised at how quickly Bea crossed the distance between them.

“Well, it’s very easy to get lost around here, especially if you’re new in town.”

“I’m only sort of new—I was born here. But thanks. That’s very kind of you,” he said, leaning toward her.

“I know,” Bea said. “Believe me, I’m not this nice to everybody.”

Silas looked at her face, so pale, as if the sun hardly ever touched it. He wanted to touch her cheek, but leaned a little closer instead. “I’ll consider myself lucky then.”

“Oh, you have no idea,” Bea said, as she began to skip away, just out of reach. Without pausing, Silas followed her through the gate and away from his family’s bone houses.

“I was thinking, Silas. I could, if you want, show you some
places
,” she said, drawing out the last word as if it might mean something more than a mere walk around the block. Silas wanted to see more of Lichport, and he wanted to see it in Bea’s company.

He grinned, then replied in mock surprise, “Why, that’s
remarkable
! I was just thinking the
very
same thing! What kind of sights do you think I should see?”

“I like the places that people mostly leave alone. Quiet places. Well, mostly quiet. Silas, our little town is so old, and such a lot of awful things have happened here. Would you like to see where some
things
happened? I’ll be your guide. Your very own special guide. It’ll be fun. I can show you a house on Morton Street where you can still see the bloodstains on the wooden floor of the abandoned house. No one even tried to get them out after the body was spirited away from the murder scene!”

“I’m not sure I want to see too many places like that.”

“Okay, I can show you others, if you like, quieter places. Places I
really
like.”

“All right,” he said uneasily. He wanted to trust her, even though something in the strange light of her eyes and the odd coincidence of their mutual attraction to the gothic told him to go slow. But she wasn’t like other girls. He could see that already.

“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.”