Death Watch (29 page)

But the fluid dance of Mrs. Bowe and the ghost was intoxicating to watch, even though it pushed goose bumps up through his skin. Silas was lost in their dance. He was getting very cold, but he hardly noticed. He could not look away. Nothing moved. The world held its breath as they held each other and slowly waltzed around the living room.

As they continued to turn about the room arm in arm, Mrs. Bowe was looking only at her man’s face, as if nothing else in the world existed. But then the ghost’s head snapped back to look over his shoulder at Silas, keeping his eyes on him, a fixed point, although the ghost continued to move about the room to the music. Then, looking again on his beloved, the ghost brought their dance to a halt and slowly raised his hand, pointing to the doorway where Silas stood frozen to the spot, his mouth slightly gaping, his breath shallow and frantic.

Silas couldn’t run, couldn’t step away from the doorway. It was as though he’d been struck with lightning. Panic filled his body as the ghost held him in its gaze, not looking away even for an instant. Something rose in Silas’s throat, and although he desperately wanted not to moan or make any noise in fear, he wasn’t sure he could stop himself. He clenched his jaw against it, but when he felt Mrs. Bowe’s hand on his shoulder, he quieted and felt the fear slip away from him a little. He released the watch and took his empty hand from his pocket, and the ghost was gone. There appeared to be only Mrs. Bowe and himself in the room. The music had stopped. But as he took Mrs. Bowe’s hand and walked toward the parlor, the ghost appeared again before him.

“Come into the parlor, Silas,” said Mrs. Bowe very kindly as
she gently tugged at Silas’s sleeve. “Come in and meet my man.”

Silas walked slowly into the parlor as Mrs. Bowe went to the crystal decanter of brandy on the table. The ghost continued to look right at him but didn’t speak, and despite the chill of the room, Silas’s brow was hot as an ember.

The ghost reached out his hand to Silas, who didn’t know what to do, couldn’t think. He tried to speak, but fear held the words in his throat and he only coughed roughly, staring. The ghost smiled and turned back to Mrs. Bowe, with a last intent look at her face before he faded from the now warming air and took his leave of the living.

M
RS. BOWE SAT IN HER FAVORITE CHAIR
. She looked tired, but her face was glowing.

“It’s late, and I am used to being alone after my little reveries,” she said, raising the brandy glass to her lips. “Give me a moment to compose myself, and I’ll meet you in your father’s study and tell you a little something before I go to bed.”

Silas was sitting at his father’s desk when Mrs. Bowe came in and pulled the heavy velvet curtains closed before she took a chair by the window. She waited for Silas to speak.

“May I … I mean … was that your boyfriend?” he asked gently.

“He is the husband of my heart, although we were never married.”

“How long has he been dead?”

“Oh, a long time now. But ‘dead’ sounds so unkind, so impersonal, and
they
don’t like to be reminded about it; besides, he’s still here, so why bother upsetting ourselves with details? But now I shall ask you a question. It seems you have discovered something about one of your father’s artifacts, yes?”

“I’m not sure what happened. One moment you were alone in the room, and the next, he was there. I mean not there, really, but
present
, I guess.”

“I can tell you exactly what happened. You held the watch in
your hand, and then you prevented the dial from moving. Nothing more.”

Silas slowly took out the watch and set it on the table in between them, then he looked up at Mrs. Bowe, waiting.

“I think it’s best if I don’t speculate too much, but I will tell you what I know. I think Amos left the watch behind for a reason on the night he disappeared, and now you have it, and I think that is in accord with his wishes, though I would strongly have preferred it had your father told you of these matters himself. Still, I always found him a man of remarkable foresight.”

“A man of such ‘remarkable foresight’ might still be around,” Silas said a little coldly.

“True enough.” said Mrs. Bowe, as she picked up the watch.

She examined it closely. It drew the eye and no mistake. Mrs. Bowe could feel the gravity of such things, the weight bestowed by age and meticulous, precise, almost ritualistic craftsmanship.

“I had seen it before,” Silas said. “My dad showed it to me back in Saltsbridge.”

“Really?” she said, surprised. “I thought he never carried it out of Lichport, but maybe his work took him farther afield than I knew. I shouldn’t doubt that it was so, thinking about it now. Doesn’t matter. He could do with it as he pleased. It was his absolutely. And now it’s yours.”

Silas picked up the watch and looked at its inscription, trying to read it aloud, stumbling a bit on the Latin: “
Vita Fugit Ut Hora
.”

Mrs. Bowe translated, “Life flies away, as does the hour.”

“Mrs. Bowe? Before … when I saw you … you could see … your friend, couldn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And the watch allowed me to see him too?”

“At first, yes.”

“So the watch lets you see the dead.” He knew this now. It wasn’t a question.

“It does. But it is not consistent and may show you much more than ghosts.”

“But you don’t have one, do you?”

“No,” she said, slightly confused at first by his question, but then, when she realized what he wanted to know, she added, “I don’t need such a device to see my man. More to the point, he very much wants to be seen by me. Sometimes the dead wish to appear to the living, and if they are able, they will show themselves, just as my man appeared to you again after you put the watch away.

“I love him very much, and he loves me. If the heart is true, death may have no power over love. And when the desires of both the dead and the living are in accord, a bond of adamant exists, and neither death nor time can come between them. That is what I believe. The death watch, for that is what it’s called, is another matter entirely. It lets you see things that are lost to the eyes of the living. And it lets you see them whether they want to be seen or not. It is an intrusion. As it was tonight. But for your father’s work, perhaps for yours, it is a necessary intrusion, for you cannot help that which you cannot find.”

Silas looked down, a little embarrassed, but his eyes were quickly drawn back to the death watch, the curve of the skull, the bend of light across the silver, the miniature elegance of the jawline.

Mrs. Bowe gave him a thin but sincere smile and continued.

“You should not put too much faith in objects, Silas, nor invest too much belief in their small portions of power, although I can see you are fascinated with it, now that you know something of what it can do. Things can go missing, get lost, lose their shine … and then where will you be having relied on them? Better to invest in your own wits and God-given talents,
and those bonds that exist between people. To be sure, that watch is very special. And with it you may see many things. But not everything may wish to be seen, and more often than not, what you can see
may then see you
. So have a care. The death watch is a sad token, I think.”

“How do you mean?” asked Silas.

“Because it merely confirms the dead’s own pitiable state, merely shows with more clarity how a spirit is trapped in a moment out of time. Timeless. Endless. No way forward. No way back. However, some good has come of your father using it on occasion, so perhaps it’s for the best. I think your father found that the more he used it, the less he had need of it, if you take my meaning. It was something he took no joy in, for all its oddness. I respect such things, respect their power, but in the end I put more faith in a sympathetic heart than a pocket watch.”

Silas knew there was truth in her words but wanted to use it again, wanted to walk out the door and see every corner of the town with the ghost-eyes that the death watch bestowed, no matter what Mrs. Bowe said. Silas knew that if his father had left it behind, it was because he wanted Silas to have and to use it. Maybe he was supposed to use it to help him find his father, alive or dead? Silas could feel Mrs. Bowe watching him stare at the death watch. He looked up and asked her, “Is this the only one?”

“Your father thought there were others, although I don’t know if he ever held one. There were some early treatises written about them. You may find them somewhere here in this library, or find notes derived from them in your father’s writings. Here,” she said, looking through a small stack of old printed pamphlets and odd orphaned pages of long-lost books in a folder atop the desk, “your father collected information on the death watch,
though most of what he found was speculative and I don’t believe told him much more than he learned by using it.”

She handed Silas a piece of old paper. It was a page from an early book, maybe sixteenth century, judging by the image and the typeface. On the front was an engraving of the death watch. The mouth of the skull was slightly open, and the mechanism could be seen. Below it was a printed caption: “An accurate facsimile of the Hadean Clock, or Death Watch, an infernal machine, rendered from the actual artifact.” In the margins around the image were handwritten notes relating to the watch. The small, broken annotations were penned in a good, clear hand, although the ink had faded somewhat with age, so Silas brought the page close to his face to read them.

The dead reveal little of themselves,

but may be compelled.

Running water may confound the

watch’s properties, as streams and

rivers remind the holder of the

fleeting nature of time.

When time stands contemn’d,

you may not know what shall be

reveeled, for every place where

man hath been bears the mark of

his passage that endureth, but most

subtlie. Lykeways, Mysthomes,

Lands of Shadow, and the Dead

themsalves be ever about us and

onlie Time prevents owre findinge

them.

And below those, a note in Amos’s modern, crabbed handwriting:

STILLED HAND SHOWS THE OTHER SIDE … THE OTHER WORLDS. COLORS FADE FROM THE FAMILIAR AND THOSE THINGS THAT MOVE, OR FLOW, OR BREATHE, GRAY IN THE SIGHT. THE PAST OF A PLACE, OR THE APPEARANCE OF THE GHOST, MAY RISE IN HIGH RELIEF AGAINST THE BACKGROUND OF THE PRESENT. OLD LIGHT EMERGES IN THE VISION, AND LONG, UNNATURAL SHADOWS ARE THROWN FROM FAMILIAR OBJECTS, AS IF TWO SOURCES OF LIGHT EXIST AT ONCE. OBJECTS ARE CAUGHT BETWEEN THESE LIGHT SOURCES, ONE FROM THE PRESENT, ONE FROM THE PAST. IN THIS WAY, THE WORKINGS OF THE DEATH WATCH ARE NOT SO DIFFERENT FROM THE WORKINGS OF THE MEMORY. IN FOND RECOLLECTION, THE DIM PAST RISES UP IN ALL ITS GOLDEN GLORY, AND THE PRESENT FADES AWAY. AND HERE IS THE WATCH’S MOST OBVIOUS DANGER: THOSE WHO LIVE TOO MUCH IN THE PAST MAY COME TO SHARE PERDITION WITH THE DEAD, WHO ARE THEMSELVES LOST TO THE PRESENT.

Mrs. Bowe extended her hand, and Silas put the death watch into it. She ran her thumb over the dome of the skull, warming the silver.

“Your father rarely used it anymore I think, so facile had he become at perceiving the dead. For a time I wondered if there was any power in the watch at all … if it wasn’t all in the beholder. But once, being curious, I tried it.”

“What did you see?”

“I would prefer not to speak of it.”

“Mrs. Bowe, forgive me, you seem to know a lot about these things, yet you never seem very comfortable talking about any of them. But I don’t really have anyone else to turn to … I hope that my questions don’t offend you.”

“I am very comfortable talking about them. I am just a little uneasy discussing them with
you
. That pendant you wear tells me it was your father’s choice to let you into this world, despite his present absence. His choice. Not mine. Yet now, I’m the one left to fill in all the blanks. I loved your father as my dearest friend and I will abide by his wishes, but I am desperate that nothing ill should befall you. It is hard for me to see how I can reconcile his wishes for you and my own desire to keep you safe. I want to help you, so I will try to see a way through this hedge. Give me a little time, Silas. I think you will find, eventually, that I am up to the task.

“As I said, the work of our families shares a frontier. Your father and I worked together in the past to bring the bereaved what comfort we could. It was my honor to work with him. Your father was a man of sense, and he knew how to look through the records of the past and find things that might be of use to people. We shared that. A love of the old ways. I suspect you do too. And he was a good talker. People liked him, and so they told him
things that are not often spoken of anymore in society. He wrote it all down, as you know.”