Death Watch (26 page)

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.

T
HE HEAVY AIR IN SILAS’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.

Fortune cannot, with all her power and skill,

Enforce my heart to think thee any ill.

Whoever stood above him was in some kind of distress.
Why is he in my room
? Fear ran through Silas like a current, for he imagined that in the dark, with him, was his father’s walking corpse, escaped from some hidden basement or walled-up room of the house where Uncle had hidden it.

Look
, he told himself.
Just look
.
Count to three, then open your eyes
. Then he just opened them without counting. For the briefest instant, he saw a face looking down on him. It was not his father, but he would never in his life forget that face. The eyes were far apart and slightly misaligned, and although it was hard to tell in the dark room, the head’s shape seemed unbalanced, larger on
one side than the other. Silas’s own eyes were wide open in amazement, and very quickly and without thought, he drew in breath to yell. But before he could make any noise at all, the face was gone and the breathing sound with it. Just before it vanished, that terrible face had smiled, the edges of its contorted mouth drawing up just slightly at the corners. And when Silas threw his hands up to push it away from him, he felt nothing; whoever it was had dissolved into the thick, oppressive darkness of the room.

Silas swiftly reached over to the bedside table and turned on the lamp. The light revealed … nothing. There was nobody else in the room with him. The door was closed. No one had left. He knew absolutely that he wasn’t dreaming and that he had been lying there wide awake, listening to the raspy breathing, the air warm with the smell of sweets.

Away in the north wing, Uncle’s singing continued and sounded slurry and confused. Maybe Uncle had taken a glass with Dolores earlier that evening. Silas got up from bed and dressed. It wasn’t hard to guess where the singing was coming from—Uncle was in his Camera Obscura. More words stumbled down the hall of the gallery, rolling along the walls and floors.

Live thou in bliss, and banish death to Hell;

All careful thoughts see thou from thee expel:

As thou dost wish, thy love agrees to be.

For proof thereof, behold, I come to thee.

Silas crept through his uncle’s bedroom and then on through the study, which was piled high with books and some of the fossils and other specimens his uncle had at some point brought from downstairs.

He could hear Uncle speaking very clearly in the Camera Obscura. For the first time since Silas’s arrival in the house, the door to the room had been left open slightly, its great bronze locks unset. Silas got up close to the door, but stayed away from the gap; he could hear Uncle’s voice, as he spoke to someone in the room.

“By my hands you shall know the perfection kept from you in life. As you were—bound to this mortal flesh—how many more years could you have possibly known? Twenty? Thirty? And I never would have let them take you from me. Never. Now you shall live forever, and we will see so much more of each other. We can at last be a proper family, a peaceable family. No dark box for you at your day’s end.
In claritas
shall you remain, forever. Do you see? No more corruption, for now, Death trembles at the sight of you.”

His uncle was now chanting more than singing, rocking his head from side to side, his voice becoming a crescendo as he pounded his foot in time with the song. Every time his foot struck the floor, the shelves in the outer room shivered, rattling the bottles displayed along their lengths. When he peeked through the gap, he could see that as Uncle pitched his voice around the Camera, he stood upon a small ladder, gently holding the hand of a limp arm and seemed to be speaking to it. Silas could see that Uncle’s eyes were wild, circled in distress and sorrow and madness. Uncle pressed the lifeless hand to his face but looked through the cracked door right at Silas and just went on singing….