Death Watch (46 page)

She was talking in circles, and he was letting her get to him, like always. “Why would I come back to this house?” he asked, his voice getting higher as he spoke.

“Where else is there? Not that spinster-haunted pile your father stayed in? Or some poor shack down in the filthy Narrows? That was the rubbish of your father’s life. We’re meant for better. Doesn’t your uncle have enough books for you here?”

Silas had heard his uncle come downstairs and assumed he was standing in the hall, listening and waiting to make an entrance, but as the pitch of the conversation rose, he heard him climb the stairs and return to the second floor.

“Oh dear,” Silas said, filling his voice right up to the brim with sarcasm, “now you’ve scared off the landlord.”

“Sure. Have a go at me, or your uncle, the only people in the world who care whether you live or die. Go on and make yourself look stupid. Silas, you don’t know anything. I thought it would be better to keep your father’s awful life from you. Tried to keep you safe and away from those kinds of people, away from a life filled with ridiculous superstitions and nonsense. I did this, Silas, because I’ve always known how soft you are. You’re the kind of person that other people will always take advantage of. No one can count on a man who’s soft on the inside. Believe me, I know! But now I’m thinking it might have been better if I’d let you see a little more of the cruelty of the world, and let you see more of the truth about the kind of man your father was, the
things
that he built his life out of. He was a man of such selfish, wretched,
soft
parts.”

Silas rose from his chair. He knew now it was pointless coming to talk with her. No one here would help him. It was all the wrong way around now; he the parent, she the child. He walked
to the threshold between the hall and sitting room and stared at his mother.

“What?” she said. “
What
?”

He kept staring, as though he was waiting for her to change into something else. He knew that if he waited her out, she would usually start saying something a little more thoughtful.

“What the Christ are you staring at?”

This time it clearly wasn’t working. So Silas spoke again, his voice slow, trying to be reasonable, but behind his teeth was a throat full of quiet, suppressed anger. “I don’t think you know me at all. I don’t think you’ve ever been very interested in knowing me. You hated Dad, and now, since he’s gone, you hate me instead. And for what? Because I’m like him? Because I care about something other than you? Because I like parts of this town other than Charles Umber’s dining room?” That last part rang loud in his head. Yes. He did like being in Lichport. It was strange and full of the oddest people he’d even met, but they were his people, he was realizing. His kind of odd. Both the living and the dead.

“Silas … you’re my son—,” she began to protest, but he interrupted her.

“And that’s about as far as it goes, isn’t it? I am your son, but what else? We don’t have anything else in common, do we? So why should you care? You know, not once in the whole long year after Dad disappeared did you ever ask me how I felt, or what I was feeling. Not once.”

She tried to get up, but the liquor swam in her blood, and her torpid limbs pulled her back down onto the chair.

“Silas, hon, it was a hard year for both of us….”

Again, he was at her. “Oh, I don’t think it was so very bad for you. You didn’t love Dad, so now he’s gone, and that’s okay with you, right? You got to move out of a house you hated, so that
was okay too. You have a few more reasons to sit and drink away the days. Score. Not so bad by my count. What did you lose? Nothing. I mean, what is a lost husband when you wanted him gone anyway?” Silas pulled his coat tighter around him, trying to block the air of the room from touching his skin. Now that he’d started, he was shaking and couldn’t stop himself, as if his growing anger was the only thing that could keep him warm.

“Should I tell you how scared I was? Should I tell you how much I worried, how much I still worry, that I might have said or done something that made Dad leave, or that made him feel like not coming home? But then I’d think, maybe something happened to him. Should I tell you how, every night in my mind, I traced over every map I’ve ever seen, hoping that some point would leap out, some crossroad or lane would stand out from the others and say to me,
He’s here, Silas. Your father is here. Come and find him
. And the only place that ever spoke to me was this town. Every street and lane says,
Come and find me
. How do you think it feels to lose the only person who ever loved or understood you? I hear his voice all the time, all around me now, but in my gut, I know I’ll never see him again. What am I supposed to do with that? What the hell am I supposed to do with that?”

Dolores looked away. She breathed in deeply and then said, with every thin bit of kindness she could muster, “Honey, your dad is somewhere, we just don’t know where that is. And we’ve done everything we can and can’t do any more, so it’s time to get on with things. If he’s gone somewhere, well, that means he left us, and there’s nothing we can do about it. If he’s
gone
gone, then he’s in heaven.” She smiled wanly.

“Do you actually believe that?” Silas responded, surprised at what she was saying.

“Well, Si, no, not really. I don’t think I believe in heaven
anymore. I mean, I don’t know. I believe in the things I can see and touch. I believe in this dress, in this chair, in those candlesticks. I believe we make heaven for ourselves out of what makes us happy. So now, for me, heaven is someplace with nice things, and a full glass, and someone bringing me breakfast on a tray.

“Silas, if you’d just calm down and see things straight on, you might understand. I don’t have any money of my own, and that gives me very few choices. You won’t like to hear it, but people lose things every day. We’ve lost a house. It happens to people all the time. I’ve lost a husband. Commonplace. You’ve lost a father. Hell, your father lost a father. And to keep going on and on about what you’ve lost, well, it’s unmanly, for one thing. And it’s rude, son. It’s selfish and rude. This is my home now, and I plan to make the best of it.”

Silas couldn’t believe what she was saying. She complained about her losses every single day of her life.

“And here’s your uncle,” she continued, gesturing at the doorway his hurried departure had left empty, “trying to help us despite everything that’s fallen out between him and your father over the years. Your uncle would like nothing better than to be like a father to you now, and what do you do? You spit in his face. It’s unnatural to throw things back at folks who hold them out to you with both hands. But that’s just what you do, you throw it all back. And for what?” Her voice was tightening again, returning to normal, taking back its accustomed edge. “For what? Voices? Memories? Some
nothing
tugging at the corner of your mind because you lost something dear to you? Si, I’ve lost almost everything dear to me and here I am, still getting on with things.”

“Yes,” Silas confirmed coldly, “getting on very well. I mean, you’ve really settled in here, haven’t you? And, I see, given my uncle every bit of thanks you can afford by appreciating his gifts
to the fullest, the clothes he’s bought you, that glass he keeps full to the brim.” He was looking not so much at her, but at the rich velvet dress she was wearing. He could feel his face begin to burn as he said, “Actually, Mom, I can’t believe you waited a whole year before moving in here. That must have taken a lot of restraint.” He was leaning into his words like punches now. He wanted to hurt her, wanted her to know not just what he was thinking but how it felt, too. Under every spoken word flowed wave after wave of implication, and it showed clearly on his face, all the sneers and squints that said, silently, cruelly: A
real
mother would have
felt
her child’s pain and done something about it.

Pummeled by Silas’s words, not able to get up, Dolores looked like she was going to start screaming at him. But very suddenly, her pointed features fell and her head slumped forward and began bobbing awkwardly; she was crying.

Dolores looked at her son through her tears, moving her head from side to side as though she was trying to see him through rain-splattered glass.

“Just like the day you were born,” she mumbled out loud.

“What? What are you talking about?”

“When you were born. I couldn’t see your face at first because of the caul. Your father took it off and, Lord, how he cried to see it. I told him to quiet down, that the sound of a man crying was no way to welcome a child into the world. I was just glad to be able to see your face when that thing came off.”

Silas was trying to think of something to say to her when he heard, haltingly at first, then louder, the approach of footsteps returning from somewhere deep in the house. A moment later his uncle came up behind him. Quickly assessing the mood of the room, Uncle said, “Silas, that’s enough now. Enough.” He went to stand behind Dolores, holding her shoulders, keeping her from
collapsing entirely. “You can see your mother is not feeling at her best. Perhaps you ought to go now, son.”

“Oh,” Silas snarled at his uncle, “I was already leaving!”

Silas bristled at the word “son” and was about to start swinging again with his words as he stormed toward the door, but in the moment after loudly pronouncing his departure, a slow banging took up from someplace down the dark throat of the hallway, and up above somewhere, in some deep room upstairs. Like someone pounding a piece of soft wood, or a shoe, or a fist, very angrily against the wall. He and his uncle stopped and stood absolutely still.
Here I am
, the knocking said to Silas.
Come and find me…
.

His mind became a thousand moths flying at a single flame—
Dad
. Trapped. Held. Hidden. Imprisoned. Wounded. Lost. All of Silas’s suppressed suspicions furiously flooded his mind.

Without warning, he turned away from the nauseating domesticity of his uncle comforting his mother and ran down the hall toward the sound and the stairs. An image of his father bound in some attic had dug its claws into his brain, and he couldn’t dislodge it. Locked away. His dad was being held somewhere in this house.
Dad
, Silas thought.
God
,
Dad
.

“Silas!” his uncle called after him, as if shouting his name would bind him where he stood. But Silas, beyond the grasp of stern words, was already mounting the stairs, two and three at a time. As he reached the upper gallery, the sound of pounding stopped, but he knew exactly where it must have come from. He bolted straight ahead, into the long gallery of the north wing and through the door of his uncle’s room.

Silas pushed it open and entered the bedroom. It was hard to see because the large room was lit only by a small lamp on the bedside table. He slowed a bit as he walked across the floor, trying to let his eyes adjust, but most of the room was too dark to
make out. Books and papers and empty plates covered the bed. He picked up a piece of a map. It was of Newfield Cemetery and had all the plots numbered. Some had names written on them in his uncle’s neat, small handwriting. Uncle had been taking note of where certain people had been buried.

Another small lamp was on in the next room, outlining the doorway with thin vertical and horizontal lines of gold light. Silas opened the door and crossed the threshold. He could see that the workroom had changed somewhat since his last, brief visit. The room was still scattered with his uncle’s photographic equipment, but now there were pieces of various projects at different stages, old volumes bookmarked with torn slips of paper, bits of wire for God knows what, several opened boxes of candy, most empty. The amber jewel jars of specimens preserved in golden liquid were still there, but many of the larger jars had been emptied of honey, their specimens now lying shriveled and pale at the bottom of their containers. The last time he saw the room, these things had been lined up neatly on the shelves, everything in its particular place. Now the contents of the room were scattered on the tables and floor, as though someone had been rummaging through them. Drawers were open. On the table where he had sat with Uncle weeks ago, the album of death portraits still lay open to the page of the dead woman’s moon-white hand. Next to it now lay old newspaper articles and another map of Newfield Cemetery.

At the far end of the workroom was the locked door of the Camera Obscura. The heavy door was closed tightly like before, bolted with its bronze locks and several others that he could see had been recently added. Silas approached the door, and in the dim light, he could see that the surface of the door had been added to in other ways, scratched since he last looked at it. More of the
geometric patterns and strange glyphs had been deeply incised into the door with a sharp tool.

There were footfalls back out on the main landing. Silas could hear his uncle coming off the stairs and moving along the upper gallery now, getting closer.

“Silas?” his uncle queried the second story of the house.

Quickly Silas put his ear to the locked door and listened hard. From somewhere deep in the room, he could just make out a kind of rasping sound. Breathing, or panting, deep in someone’s throat. The guttural noise sounded hollow, far away from the door, and in Silas’s mind, the dimensions of a large space beyond now began to form. He squatted down, trying to hear anything he could through the tiny slip of a gap under the door. He could see little puffs of dust blowing out from under the door, only to be sucked back under a second later, as if the very room itself was drawing in breath, quickly, expectantly. He thrust his hand into his pocket, opened the death watch, and pressed his thumb to the dial. But instead of looking, he closed his eyes and listened. A rising scream rose out of the boards of the floor, and within that scream was a chorus of noises that crashed into his hearing from some abyss of times long past: small bells ringing and the soft rasp of a rattle, children laughing and an infant crying swirled together into strains of blurry joys and sorrows both. There was yelling … one voice trying to control another … a fit being thrown … chains shaking against a wall and a man … his uncle … sobbing. Then a voice rose above the other sounds. It was deep and muffled, as if someone was speaking through a cloth held in their mouth. “Saaahhlaasss …,” the voice seemed to sob and choke. “Saaaaahhhhlllaaaaasssssss …,” and as the exhalation of the word fell away, the room took a sharp breath, and a hand like a vise closed on Silas’s right shoulder. Another grabbed the back
of his jacket and pulled him up onto his feet, turning him rapidly around. Silas’s hand released the watch dial, and the rising cry fell away from him as he looked into his uncle’s face. Uncle’s skin was red as fire, and his chest heaved like a bellows. Silas could see that Uncle was furious, furious and scared both, but was trying to mask his anger if not his fear.