Death Watch (14 page)

No big deal.

But all the way back, Silas thought about what it would be like to take a date to his place and say, real casual,
Yeah, I own it. Yeah. This is my house
.

L
ONG BEFORE THE UMBERS TOOK HOLD
of the property in 1768, the street had an awkward and lingering reputation that Uncle rather enjoyed. It had been named Temple Street because the old Knights of the Eastern Temple meeting hall once stood where the house was now. Some of the meeting hall and a portion of the rotunda were still standing at the time the Umber house was built, and the large, ornate columns of the rotunda had been incorporated into the new house. It was in that rotunda that—according to the more imaginatively inclined townsfolk—the brothers of the temple were said to have enacted their secret and most blasphemous rites. The brotherhood of knights had arrived in the earliest days of Lichport and had kept very much to themselves. By the early eighteenth century, perhaps because of spreading rumors, perhaps because of the appearance of a comet in the eastern sky, the brothers dissolved their order, leaving Lichport by ship in the middle of the night. Five of the brothers of the order remained in the house. Four of those disappeared, some say leaving Lichport by night-coach, a few years later. That left only one elderly brother to live out his days in the crumbling hall, and why he remained behind no one knows. It was said he was living in the rotunda even as the roof fell in around him. He never left the house and died there in 1765. Three years later, the Umber family—who had been living in Arvale Manor, a large estate on
the edge of the marshes and too close to the sea and brackish warerways to be thought fashionable—acquired the property and began refurbishing the buildings in the neoclassical style.

Of all the remaining portions of the brotherhood’s ancient meeting hall, Uncle’s ancestor had loved the rotunda the best and, despite its dilapidated condition, insisted on making it part of the main house by erecting walls within the older building as well as an elaborate, statue-lined gallery that connected the temple to the main house. The original structure that formed the basis of the rotunda library had been built by the brotherhood in the seventeenth century as an outdoor ornamental classical temple with high limestone columns that held up a lead-lined roof. The original limestone columns still stood on the outside, most covered with ivy, but inside, additional decorative columns of dark wood had been added by the Umbers and between those, carved oak shelves. So, from the time it was added to the house, it was meant to be a library.

Uncle was eager to show Silas this library for several reasons, primarily because he wanted Silas to spend more time in the house. A little sightseeing in town over the past few days was fine, but there was no telling what Silas might eventually find out, or who he might meet. Uncle knew the boy had an interest in books and would doubtless be impressed by the collection, so this was a way to keep him busy in his new home and curtail his wandering.

Uncle watched as Silas slowly made his way down the long gallery, looking at the faces of the statues as he went. Most wore distant expressions, and they seemed to regard his nephew passively as Silas scrutinized them. Uncle looked at his watch as Silas approached. A little late.
Good. He is comfortable here. He is sleeping well. All for the good
, Uncle thought, and with a flourish of his arm, he welcomed Silas into the library.

Uncle could see his nephew’s obvious excitement, his palpable curiosity. Silas lifted his face as he entered the room, perhaps intoxicated by the smell of wood polish and old books. Around the room, between the columns, high shelves soared, connected by a thin brass rail to which was attached a ladder on wheels that could be pushed easily in front of any bookcase to access the high shelves. There were several long wooden tables in the middle of the room. Several small lamps with green glass shades were set along the length of each.

“Rumor has it that there is a chamber here, in the earth, beneath our very feet,” Uncle said with a deliberate hint of mystery in his voice.

At the mention of a subterranean hollow, Silas looked quickly to the floor, turning his head this way and that, as though he was trying to see through the tiles into some vast dark space below. He put his hands out to his sides, as if to steady himself.

“It is said it was built by the brothers of the temple to house their most hallowed rites and treasured artifacts, and only the highest ranking of their initiates could enter the sacred subterranean vault.”

“Is it true?” asked Silas, clearly fascinated.

“I think it unlikely, but who can say? No one in my father’s time was brave enough to pull up the tiles of which your grandfather was justly proud. But just here,”—Uncle moved toward the center of the room, where one of the inlaid spokes of a large marble compass star lay on the floor—“yes, just here, come and listen.” Silas moved toward his uncle, and as he approached, Uncle raised his foot and brought it down sharply on a particular spot on the floor. On the surface of the sound was the expected slap of shoe leather on the marble, but then, extending beneath that sound and beyond it, there was a low
TOOOM
that indeed suggested a
large, hollow space below the floor. Silas listened carefully as the sound faded.

“Please be welcome here. This room is yours day or night. Nothing would make me happier than the sight of you reading and studying in this library. My father and grandfather were learned men, and I know your father loved learning, so I suspect you have inherited this trait. Your mother is keen for you to return to school, but I have said to her that all the learning you need may be had here. And of course, if there is some other text you require, well, I am sure we can obtain it.”

“I … I was thinking about college before my dad disappeared, but I don’t have any real plans yet. I haven’t really started to—”

“It’s all right, Silas. I see,” Uncle interrupted gently. “Let this place be your university.”

Silas looked at him with surprise and something else. Was it thanks? Uncle wondered.

“Silas, even a learned man could spend a lifetime studying in this room.”

“I want to—” Silas said absently as his eyes flew from shelf to shelf.

One entire case was dedicated to books on ancient Egypt. Silas reached out and took a tall, brown volume. It was an excavation report dated 1901 from Abydos, the funerary city on the Nile. Uncle watched Silas dreamily turn the pages and scrutinize the many photographs of amulets, drawings of inscribed columns, and images of carved walls bearing sacred portraits of animal-headed gods. On one particular page, Silas’s eye fixed on a portrait of Osiris, the god of the dead. Before Osiris stood the deceased, whose heart was weighed against a white plume, the feather of Ma’at, and there the Ammit stood ready to devour the deceased if its soul did not measure up.

“Please,” said Uncle, “leave it on the table so you may return to it later. So much to learn from the Egyptians. Oh my, yes. They understood what it means to live forever. Truly. Theirs was a philosophy of permanence. That the soul might endure through the preservation of the body. What implications! What insights! And so long ago.”

Uncle was pleased. Silas showed a sincere interest. Uncle thought that he might fish a little further to see what else might pique his nephew’s curiosity.

“Of course, there are other books stored throughout the house, rare volumes on the most curious subjects. And other collections. Odder things I prefer not to exhibit in the public rooms.”

“What kind of collections?”

Uncle smiled, as he ran his thumb and forefinger along the sharp crease of his lapel.

“Well, the albums containing my photographic work, for example. Those are kept in my workroom upstairs.”

“That was your job once, you were a photographer?”

Without letting his smile drop, Uncle wondered how much Silas knew and to whom he might have spoken in town.

“I was. Yes. Though that part of my life seems a very long time ago now. To be honest, I think that your mother would be disturbed by the subject of my photographic work, and perhaps might not be so pleased that I show it to you.”

Silas’s face fell a little, just as Uncle hoped it would.

“Even so, why don’t we meet in the upstairs hall after dinner, after your mother has gone up to bed, and I might then show you something more? Shall we?”

At the appointed hour, Silas and his uncle walked side by side past the entrances to the west wing where his bedroom was, the east
wing, which housed his mother’s, and straight ahead through the carved archway into the north wing of the house. Atop the arch, Silas could see as he passed below it, was a carving in light-colored wood of a pelican and its offspring. The pelican was piercing its own breast with its beak to feed its young on its blood. Beyond the arch, a long gallery extended in front of them. There were pictures on the right-hand walls and windows on the left.

Long ago, a gallery such as this would have been used for exercise and amusement when the weather was bad. Small tables, ornate chairs, and settees were arranged apparently randomly along both walls. With the exception of Uncle’s room, all the rooms in the north wing were closed, and the doors on the right side were blocked with large pieces of furniture: bureaus, bookshelves, and highboys. Silas had found those immovable the first day when he tried to shift a high chest of drawers to get at the door behind it, where he’d imagined he heard a soft knocking on the wood. When he had opened one of the lower drawers, Silas found it carefully and tightly packed with bricks. It seemed that the only easy way into these interconnecting chambers was through Uncle’s bedroom.

The first doorway on the right led into the master bedroom. The high ceiling was domed, like the library, but on a smaller scale, and long, dark velvet curtains were drawn over the windows against the light. There were paintings on all the walls, mostly nineteenth-century oils of classical scenes. Silas recognized some of the subjects. Zeus and Semele, just as the god’s lightning-charged embrace was about to turn his mistress to ash. Hades and Persephone, a tear in the earth opening up and Hades driving his sable horses and red-gold chariot down in the underworld with his stolen and terrified young bride. Phaethon and Phoebus, father handing the son the reins of the sun-car that would shortly bring
about the son’s demise. Proud Niobe, looking over the corpses of her children.

Silas looked but bit his tongue, even though he was dying to comment. Who could sleep with such images in the room? The bed was made, but its sheets were scored with creases, and it didn’t look like anyone actually slept there, merely used the bed to sit on.

Silas followed his uncle through a doorway and into the work-room, where he could immediately detect the thick, sweet smell of honey. Here, where Uncle kept his long-unused photographic equipment, was another small library. On the shelves were numerous glass jars with what appeared to be specimens of small animals. Uncle quickly explained, “These were part of my anatomical studies. So important for any artist. Even though I haven’t really used them in a long time, I could never part with them. To simply dispose of them would seem … disrespectful. So I keep them. My pets.” He laughed at his own words, but Silas could feel Uncle’s eyes on him intently. Uncle was watching every expression as it flashed across Silas’s face. But Silas turned away from Uncle, unable to keep his eyes from the shelves and their holdings.

On the shelves on the opposite side of the room stood numerous jars of honey. When he looked back at the specimens, Silas could see that some of them were suspended in honey and not formaldehyde, as he had previously thought. How the little jars glowed, even in the dim light. Unlike specimens he’d seen in school that were floating in formaldehyde or alcohol, these ones in honey seemed more alive, more like they were asleep rather than dead. The way the honey held them suspended kept the small corpses from losing their hair, or looking like they’d been roughly shoved to the bottom of their jars; the honey-preserved animals looked more likely to open their eyes, and there weren’t any little
pieces of flesh flaking off them either. In their strange way, they were lovely, little golden creatures, barely affected by death.

“Now that is an ancient custom,” Uncle told Silas, his hands shaking slightly. “The Romans would sometimes preserve their dead in honey, as did the ancient Babylonians. Some cultures thought it was holy stuff, can you imagine? The food of the dead and the gods both. Of course, the dead and the gods are so similar, are they not? After enough time, the line between ancestor and deity blurs, and gods are born.”

With his eyes, Silas followed row after row of jars down toward the opposite end of the room, where a very strong door, one that did not match any of the others in the house, had been set into the wall.

“That is my Camera Obscura now. My private work studio. My darkroom, if you like. One day I’d very much like to show it to you, and if you’re interested, I’d like you to help me with my work.”