Death Watch (33 page)

The names. In other cemeteries, the stones were mute, but here they spoke to something deep inside Silas. These were his people. He could feel the sense of belonging in his feet. The earth of the hill warmed him, rose into him from below the ground, welcomed him home.

As he gazed out, Silas could see the roofs of the old pretentious nineteenth-century mansions on Coach Street rising high over the Narrows and looking down on them just as the rich folk had looked down on the poorer fishing families of the Narrows long ago. To the west, he could easily spot the spire of the near-abandoned church and some of the higher buildings in “new”
town. To the south, tall trees in the park and the streets of the better neighborhoods blocked his uncle’s house from view, and Silas thought that was just as well. Farther to the south, he could see the flat green expanse of Newfield, the town’s other cemetery, created about a hundred years ago when Beacon Hill was too full to push even a finger into the corpse-filled ground.

Questions came to him. In a cemetery such as this, where the town’s dead were stacked below the earth, generation after generation, did the spirits of the dead congregate? Did ghosts keep close to their graves? Mrs. Bowe, he imagined, might say that you just know when things are peaceful with the dead of a given place because you feel at ease, nothing “pushing down” on you, when you’re standing there. And Silas did feel at ease. Beacon Hill was about the quietest place he had ever stood. A breeze gently pushed some leaves about the monuments, but there was hardly any other noise at all.
Here
, he thought,
the death watch might reveal something more of the town
. Maybe the ghosts of his own kin were about. Maybe they would help him or show him something that might lead him to his dad.

Silas took the watch from his pocket, and as the metal warmed in his hand he could feel the mechanism inside it softly whirring and ticking like a baby’s rapid heartbeat. That small, sure pulse, the push and pull, as though the coursing of time and blood were the same. He pushed his thumb down hard on the watch’s hands, quickly drawing in breath. The force of the watch’s inner workings pushed against his finger, but the dial had stopped. Instinctively, Silas shut his eyes. With the exhale, he opened them.

A mist rose from the sea and sent long tendrils winding up the lanes of the Narrows, slowly crawling into the higher parts of Lichport. On and on the mist came, lapping at the base of Beacon Hill like little waves. But as the mist drew closer, Silas could see
shapes moving within it and rising from it. White, frayed forms, a procession of people made from smoke. He could see them now on every street of the town. Weaving in and out of buildings and streets, many of the forms looked up at the hill, quickly made their way toward it and reaching the bottom, began to rise up the slope toward Silas.

At the bottom of the hill, Silas saw Bea, although there was something odd about her. It was hard to tell from so far away. Did she look older? Her clothes were different. He’d never noticed them before. Had she always dressed like this? She wore a long, old-fashioned dress that flowed around her feet in the mist. It looked like she was crying, and something that appeared to be fish but must have been silvery bugs or moths were swimming and circling in the air around her.

Other gray forms continued up the hill toward Silas. When they came within about a hundred feet of him, the wraiths stopped, hanging on the air, as if waiting for him to say something. He couldn’t speak, and the ghosts raised their arms toward him, palms outstretched, and all around him Silas could hear the sounds of pleading and the most pitiful cries.

Unable to move or speak, Silas stood frozen, watching the spirits continue their ascent, passing without pause though tomb-stones and trees, some crying, some shouting—a river of the dead flowing upward toward him.

Just behind Silas, a voice called out, and he dropped the watch. The ghost-forms and flowing mist instantly blew away from the hillside as though caught by a great wind, even though the air was utterly still.

The voice said very clearly, “Master Umber! It is very kind of you to visit the dead, and you are always welcome on the Beacon, but too much time among the stones may not be the
best place for you, just now. May I show you the way home?”

Silas picked up the death watch and hid it in his pocket, as he tried to recover his composure. “Oh, I know the way. I’m okay, thanks.” He turned around and saw a tall, thin man wearing a long, tight-fitting black coat and a wide-brimmed hat.

“Of course, of course. It is a short walk back the way you’ve come. I suspect you are looking for your father, but he is not presently among my flock,” said the sexton, gesturing to the gray stones of the hill.

Silas looked out over the herd of tombstones, then smiled and turned to thank the man, but he was gone already, probably making his own way down the other side of Beacon Hill toward the small cottages leading to the river. When Silas looked at the bottom of the hill, he saw with disappointment that Bea was gone too, vanished with the mist. But now he wondered, had she been waiting for him, or merely pausing there on her way from one place to another?

When Silas returned home, Mrs. Bowe had dinner waiting. The table was set with two bowls, fresh bread and butter, and a large pot of soup set on an iron trivet. Steam rose toward the light that hung over the table.

“See anything interesting on your walk?” asked Mrs. Bowe as she ladled soup into Silas’s bowl.

“Nothing much.”

Mrs. Bowe nodded at the lie, handed him the bread, and said nothing.

D
ESPITE THE FEARFUL VISION
at the Beacon, Silas continued to use the death watch. The sound of its ticking attracted him, and he told himself that if his father had left it to him, it must be okay to use it. Just once in a while. Not every day. He would trust his intuition, and maybe whatever the death watch showed him would lead somewhere.

More often than not, with its hand depressed, the death watch showed Silas things that he was at a loss to define, although these mysteries were themselves enticing. Each new vision was an invitation to use the watch again, just for a minute, just to see what else might be present. He told himself he was looking for “clues.”

He saw forms that moved across the earth that were not ghosts yet seemed spectral in the way they rose up out of the ground into the landscape and then faded or fell away. With the watch, Silas could see red, lately fallen leaves that were blowing on the wind suddenly become something more than leaves. At the edges of the path along the river, the leaves swirled and rose into vaguely human shapes. Silas wondered what they were; he queried the air, but the shapes had no voice and seemed to have no mind and so paid him no heed.

With the watch hands held, the leaves rose up, turned in the air, and drew themselves up and together into arms, legs, the suggestion of head and torso. The more Silas watched them, the more
he was convinced they were not ghosts at all, but only memories. Like the leaves themselves, dry reminders of the passing years.

At first the image of the walking leaf forms was unsettling, but as Silas watched them he began to notice they never went very far. One would “walk” a ways, perhaps a few steps, perhaps a hundred yards at most, and then fall back to earth, its leaves quickly scattered. Others would spin upward in the wind and move as one form in another direction, then dissolve into the brown rotting leaf horde, cast down and indolent again on the grass.

After seeing the leaf-wraiths several times, Silas gave them little thought, even when he began to see them without using the watch. People had always walked along the river, as they went here and there, and that long line of folk left small impressions of themselves on the ground. Year after year, the earth bore their weight, carried their stride, remembered the passage of all the faceless wanderers—memories held by the land. Nothing more.

When he walked home, the leaves would eddy behind him. Silas thought that the worlds of the dead and the worlds of the living—or, rather, the past and the present—were not as far apart as he’d once thought. Fascinating as they were, such visions were only distractions and brought him little comfort, for the death watch had yet to show him anything that might bring him closer to his father.

And if the spirit will not be banished, nor brought to Peace by other means, and causeth the consternation of its kin or their needless demise, or would be in anywise revenged upon the undeserved livinge, let suche a spirit be bound and sealed in iron or some other sturdy vessel of metal and cast then into some divers deep pit or into the sea. Learned authors and venerable undertakers will attest that the bottom of the Red Sea, most favoured for such rites, is full littered with such unruly souls and their small caskets.

—C
OPIED OUT FROM THE
R
ECOLLECTIONS OF
F
ATHER
G
ALDING
, V
ICAR
, S
T
. M
ICHAEL’S
P
ARISH
, 1794

THEY ARE PRISONS. AS THE TIN CORRODES OVER TIME, A SLIVER OF LIGHT MAY ENTER THE CELL AND BEGIN TO ROUSE ITS PRISONER, WHO HAS WAITED, PERHAPS FOR CENTURIES, FOR LIBERATION. THOUGH, BY THAT TIME, MOST OFTEN THE SPIRIT IS MUCH DEGRADED. THERE MAY BE LITTLE MEMORY LEFT TO IT BEYOND ITS PAINS AND EVER-INCREASING WRATH. SO, AT LAST, WHEN IT ESCAPES OR IS RELEASED, AS EVENTUALLY IT ALWAYS IS, IT IS DRAWN HOME WITH A NEAR-MINDLESS PULL, CARING ONLY TO SPEND ITS FURY UPON ONCE FAMILIAR THINGS, THOSE PEOPLE THAT MAY ONLY REMIND IT OF ITS INNUMERABLE AND IRRETRIEVABLE LOSSES.

—
UNDATED MARGINALIA IN THE HAND OF
A
MOS
U
MBER

I
N HIS FATHER’S HOUSE
, there were many small rooms along the back of the upper hall. Silas slept downstairs, in a room that might have once been a private study. He preferred the ground floor. He didn’t like the view that could be seen from many of the upstairs bedrooms. When he looked south from the windows on the upper story, he could see across the top of Mrs. Bowe’s garden into the park that grew wild over the back of her gate. In that garden was a small clearing, in the middle of which was a little rise where the gallows stone stood. On that stone the wooden gallows had been erected for hangings long ago. And on the other side of the park was a depression of earth surrounded by high, dark trees. Mrs. Bowe had told Silas this was once colloquially called “the hole,” and it was the common burial place of those executed criminals. He had been tempted several times to use the death watch to see the spirits that attended on those spots, but something always held back his hand. He knew, just plain knew, that whatever lingered in the park didn’t want to be seen, and he was more than sure he didn’t want anything that haunted the gallows stone seeing him.

So he favored the view from downstairs. But at night, when he couldn’t sleep and the upstairs windows were turned to mirrors and afforded only reflection, Silas sometimes walked the upper gallery and explored the rooms until he got tired.

He’d had another dream about Bea. Although it took him close to Uncle’s house, he had waited for her on several nights, only to be disappointed. Maybe she’d left town for a while. In his dreams lately, she appeared often, skipping ahead of him, singing, calling him along, laughing, until they reached the edge of the millpond and her face began to change and sharpen, lit by the dream’s unnatural light. Then Silas would hear the sound of water splashing, and he’d wake up, confused and frustrated, unable to get back to sleep.

Six doors down on the right side of the hall, Silas found a very small room, almost a closet, with a desk and a chair, and all the walls lined with closely packed shelves on which were tins, old iron boxes, and bottles of every size and description, all tightly sealed. There were also some very old-looking small metal caskets, one of them rather ornate with tarnished silver filigree work that covered its rusted surface. On the floor of the little room several concentric circles were inscribed, and the same geometric images were carved into the surface of the desk, only in miniature.