Death Watch (36 page)

“What have you there?” asked the third of the three.

“Too soon to tell …,” whispered the first. “Too soon to tell.”

“And this one here? Closer in?” the second asked, as she pointed to a house with dark windows, all embroidered with somber silks of gray and brown and black.

“I do not want to look too closely,” replied the first. “There is madness there, and the resident is not in full knowledge of its estate. Oh. Anger and terror both. And betrayal.”

“Surely there is something you can tell, something you can see?”

The stitches became more rapid, but more repetitive, and the first said, dreamily, “There is a cradle, a vessel … the signature of entrapment and containment … and look, a bee preserved in honey-colored threads. Very curious.” Deep within the stitches the outline of a cradle could be discerned, and below it in the tapestry, links of stitches hung as chains. And above them, a single bee heavily embroidered in gold.

“No more!” said the first, quickly jerking her head up away from the stitches. “I can hear it crying. A terrible song stirs the air. I will not look again upon this place. If you wish to know more, we must ask the boy.”

“Silas? Why?” questioned the third.

“Because he has come very close to it. Because this place cries out for him. Because the threshold to this awful Shadowland,” said the first, pointing again at her bit of stitching, now covered in thick, uneven loops, “is in his uncle’s house.”

In 1672 Jeremiah Abury was lost among the marshes when in his fourth year of life. While his mother, a good woman of this town, slept upon the warmth of a summer’s afternoon, Jeremiah wandered from their house, taking himself up the very middle of the road. From that day he was never again seen in Lichport. The next year, the great birds began to congregate in the trees overlooking the marsh. Night birds and herons. And come the eveningtide they could be heard, their long plaintive cries sounding from high up in those high branches. There were only a few at first, but each time the soul bell in town rang out for a child who died, or a mother who did not survive her birth time, another bird came and made its nest here.

—F
ROM
T
HE
L
ICHPORT
C
ROW
, B
EING A
C
OMPENDIUM OF
R
EMARKABLE
T
RAGEDIES OF
O
UR
O
WN
F
AIR
T
OWN

In the northern counties, rocking the cradle
toom,
or empty, is considered most ominous. For then it may be assumed that another occupant eagerly awaits the place of the first and may bring about its demise. It is further held that rocking a toom cradle and hearing the hollow creaking it makes shall call the wandering souls of lost children to it. We pray such may find comfort where e’er they be
.

—F
ROM THE PAMPHLET
“A B
RIEF AND
T
RUE ACCOUNT
OF
P
ORTENTOUS
C
USTOMS” BY
S
AMUEL
U
MBER
,
U
NDERTAKER
G
ENERAL
, L
ICHPORT

In Rama a voice was heard
Weeping and in lamentation and great mourning,
Rachel crying for her children
And would not be comforted
Because they were no more
.

—J
EREMIAH
31:15

T
HE MARSH IS CLOSE
. Do you have your timepiece with you? Good
.

We are nearly there
.

Silas Umber, prepare yourself
.

Few among the living can bear losses such as these. And those who do endure them, or die from them, come here to wait
.

When traveling among the salt marshes, it is best not to walk alone. Many things are lost among the tall reeds and brackish waters, and the folk who look for them are often single-minded in their search, unwilling to show kindness to others. Focus. Come in company or do not venture here. Everyone knows the wisdom of this. Nearly there
.

Always it is the same. The mothers of loss nest outside of town. Maybe north, maybe south, maybe both. Walk out of any town, and if you walk far enough, you will find a place such as this one. Always isolated. Always with a grim history. Loss calling out to loss down the ages
.

Your father came here only once. And he would never speak of it, though the bowers weighed heavily upon his mind. Amos said only that some places needed time, and you could do nothing for them until that
time had passed. Well, some kinds of pain a parent cannot bear to look upon. To lose a child. And now you have lost your father … and though your father lost a father, it is not the same, is it, Silas? You will see them. You will look upon what haunts this place. You will see what your father could not
.

Before people ever came to Lichport, the marsh was here. And when people did come, they realized very quickly that it was not a place for idle wandering. People got lost here. Folks who couldn’t be around others sometimes camped at the edges, but never for very long. Your people were among the first, and their ancient estate still stands, still casts its shadow upon the marsh where it comes closer to the sea. Who can say what brought them here? Something in the air, perhaps
.

Indeed. Silas Umber, look up
.

High in the branches is where they’ve built their nests. Each nest empty, as you see. But on the edge of each, there are the night herons, waiting, always waiting. On most nights, even in town, you can hear their cries of longing take wing across the marshes. Never are those calls answered. Such is their estate. You are surprised at how large the nests are. The branches come from very far away. Some were found floating on the surface of the sea. Others plucked from ruined houses, perhaps where some of their living days were endured. Others from places where they’ve picked among the hedges and tall grasses, looking, always looking, never finding
.

Where are their nestlings, you ask? Lost. Some at birth. Some later in life. A few who dwell here never had children, only longed for them all the days of their sad lives. No matter, for a hole in the heart is hard to heal. The heart wants what it wants, and a lost child is a terrible thing, a door closed forever
.

No. No. The children do not come here. They are in other places, other shadowlands. Always on the margins, never able to find their own way home. Never able to find their way here where loving arms await them
.

There is yet more to see here, if you would like. Ask them what you will. Yes. Use the death watch and tell me what you see. I suspect you and I may not see this place in quite the same way…
.

Most of the dark-winged herons, their underbellies glowing white, were perched on the edges of their nests. Others flew in widening circles over the marsh, and made their short throaty calls that fell echoing, searching, among the reeds.

Silas brought out the death watch and stopped its hand.

He could still hear their cries, but the sound had become longer, stretched into wails, long questions drawn across the air with a knife. And where once the birds and their nests stood in his sight, now great platforms of interwoven branches spread across the upper limbs of the trees, and, pulled through the branches, stitching them together, were bits of rotten fabric, children’s blankets long ago grown threadbare, torn by the winds. On the platforms women sat in high-backed chairs, their faces thin and drawn, the tattered crepe of their mourning gowns hanging down from the trees like Spanish moss. Before each of them was a cradle, empty and hollow, lying on its side.

Silas opened his mouth to say something, but several of the women began to wail and cry above him. Another, who had been walking in circles around and around the base of her tree, altered
her are and walked close to Silas and reached out her arm in a pleading angle. Unable to look on her face, racked as it was with the pain of loss, Silas closed his eyes. Then, against his skin, he felt the brush of a wing, and in that instant whatever he might have said or asked flew from his mind.

Evening was approaching. Silas stood gaping, trying to speak, trying to recall his question. There was something he wanted to ask, but he couldn’t remember what it was, and after a few more minutes at the edge of the marshes, under those ancient, empty bowers, among the weeping mothers of the lost, he couldn’t remember why he’d even come here. His eyes welled up with tears, became red and salted as though the marsh water had been drawn up into his body and mixed with his blood.

A voice that seemed familiar said, “Why do you stare so among the shadows of the lost? Come away, Silas Umber, let us linger here no longer….”

Someone stood next to him, speaking, but he could neither remember who she was nor turn to look at her. He could hear her singing softly then, something, a little childish rhyme, and he could just make out the words that floated up to join the spilling moon rising over the salt marshes….

Once I saw a little bird

Come hop, hop, hop;

So I cried, “Little bird,

Will you stop, stop, stop?”

And was going to the window

To say, “How do you do?”

But he shook his little tail,

And far away he flew.

The song had ended, or was about to begin again, and flocks of night herons took up their accustomed cries. Silas couldn’t listen anymore, couldn’t remember why he’d come, and he felt, suddenly and very strongly, that he must leave this place. He turned away from the marsh, away from the lady who’d brought him, and without another word, as though she wasn’t there, he walked home, his heart even emptier than before.

Mrs. Bowe had placed a candle in the window.

It was that kind of night. Wandering folk moving, everyone agitated and nervous, both the living and the dead. “Holy Mother, see them home. All to their hearth sides this night, and every night, and all. Bring him home,” she prayed at the window.

Silas was out on some business. She used to leave a candle in the window some nights for his father.
A little light to lead you home
, she’d say. And except for once, it had always worked.

But now she could hear someone walking along the sidewalk. Someone with wet shoes.
Oh
, she thought,
oh! If he’s gone to the millpond again
! She considered herself a peaceful woman, but she would give Silas more than a piece of her mind if he had gone to that place.

She threw open the doors, ready to give him harsh words, but when she saw his face, with all the color gone out of it and his breathing so labored, she gathered him up into her arms as she had done before and brought him inside and over to the large wingback chair by the fireplace.

As she put more wood on the fire, she said, “This is becoming a habit,” and she stooped to pull the wet boots off his feet as he
lay his head back. “At least your father’s good boots are not going to waste,” she told him with a smile as she tried to make light of it.

Mrs. Bowe lifted the boots to put them by the fire to dry. She knew from the look of them that he’d been to the marshes; she could feel the drag and suck of the mud on them, the pull of deep places, and the tearlike droplets that still clung to them. The brackish water glistened in the firelight.

“The marshes are the loveliest place, I think,
by daylight
. I used to walk there very often when I was young. I would take the longest walks along the marsh edge, sometimes even wandering a little ways into the interior, though it was always so boggy. Still, it was a very fine place for bird-watching.”

Silas looked up at her.

“They are still with you, you know. A part of them, all about you, pulling the sadness up out of your bones. I can feel it coming off you now, like water from those boots. That’s how it is with the dead sometimes, Silas. Your losses, their losses, become the same … this is the real danger of the road you’re now traveling down.”

Mrs. Bowe put her hand on his chest and felt the pendant that she knew his father had given him. “Silas, you must be of two minds. Look things straight on, but keep your own wits about you. If you look at the dead for too long, you become like them. Do you understand me? Keep one eye on them, and one on the road home. Always.”

But even as she spoke, he drifted off to sleep.

I might as well have been married
, she thought,
for all the men who come home late to me expecting to be put to bed and then fed breakfast
.

She went to the window and pinched out the candle.