Authors: Ari Berk
Silas looked at her with eyebrows raised, waiting for details. If he’d had a tail, it would have been wagging furiously.
“Ah. I see. Did your father never show you any of his writings? Or any volume containing the writing of your ancestors pertaining to these matters?”
“No. Never.” Silas was practically panting. “Are there any?”
“Indeed there are, and this is how we shall proceed: We shall let your father’s own words and the words of others like him educate you. That is the way.”
She looked away from Silas and cast her eyes about the room, deep in thought. Very suddenly, she got up and paced the length of the study, until she stopped with purpose in front of one of the shelves higher and deeper than the others.
Silas’s heart was beating hard in his chest.
On the shelf sat what looked to be a large rectangular object, wrapped in a piece of old woven rug. She reached for it, but paused and instead asked Silas to get it down. “It’s an old, heavy thing, and I wouldn’t want to drop it. Yes, bring it down with your own hands. Your father was the last person to touch this book. From father to son it passes now. Blessed mother, guide their hands—”
When Silas brought it to the desk, Mrs. Bowe nodded him on to indicate that he should unwrap it from its shroud. It was an enormous book. More than a book, it was an ark, stuffed with hundreds of pieces of paper, pages of other books stuck and stitched into it all through its length. Its covers were large, leather-bound boards, and it looked to be over a foot thick.
“This book was part of your father’s work. It has been held by all the Undertakers of Lichport, all of whom were Umbers, so this, too, must come to you. It has not always passed from
father to son, but I believe it is best when it is so. However, it is not yours. It belongs to the town. I would have thought you might have seen this, but perhaps your mother didn’t want such things about. Amos was given this book when he took the job of Undertaker. I know because I was the one who handed it to him. It is my job as … as town crier, if you like, to make sure the ledger gets from one Undertaker to another. Once, long ago, I read that three generations of Umbers came and went before an Undertaker took up the ledger. That was a bad time for dead and living both. So, people will be eager that you continue down the path of your father, whether you wish it or not. I must say, you are the youngest person to ever hold this volume, and that makes me uneasy. And, unless I’ve missed something, you have not formally accepted the position of Undertaker of Lichport. With your father not here to advise us, well, we’ll just let things unfold as they must. You have stopped the hands of the death watch and looked kindly on the dead—let that betoken an auspicious beginning.”
“But—stopping the watch was an accident.”
“Honest error may play prologue to wonders. I shall pray that it is so.”
They looked at each other as a strange understanding passed between them; then Silas slowly opened the book. It smelled like his dad. Old. Dusty. Ink and the mystery of ancient things crumbling between the pages. His eyes were wide as headlamps.
“Here are the names,” said Mrs. Bowe, pointing at the first pages, “all the names of the dead going back to the town’s founding. Of course, curious as your father was, he added a great deal to the book. I know from talking with him that he used the book as a sort of scrapbook of anything he could find about the town, about the lore of the dead, anything he thought would help him in his work. The entries go back a long way. I know that. In adding
to it, he took part in a conversation with other Undertakers going back hundreds of years. What will you say to them, Silas Umber, young as you are?”
Silas didn’t answer.
The book was open, and every page spoke his name in the creak of bindings and the raspy turning of thick pages.
As was her way when Silas’s attention was about to become lost in something, Mrs. Bowe quietly left the room. Silas hardly noticed that she was gone, his eyes seeing only the book in front of him. He pulled out the chair—Amos’s blazer hanging from the back—and sat down at his father’s desk.
His hands shook as he turned the pages. His first thought was of spells. Did the book record rituals? Incantations? He had read enough folklore to know such things existed, and the thought of his father being master of such arts excited him, because he would have liked to have such secret wisdom, some portion of knowledge larger than himself, something he could control and use. Secrets that would work
for him
, instead of the usual kind, which just made him feel small and left out.
He flipped rapidly through the pages. Dozens of small pieces of paper and parchment blew out of the book and onto the floor. Silas realized with a sinking feeling that these had been bookmarks of some sort, perhaps marking the pages his father returned to again and again. Whatever they had once marked, those favored pages were now lost until Silas could find them again on his own.
He closed the book and began again at the beginning.
Silas slowly opened the cover first. There on the flyleaf had been pasted in an old engraving on a piece of heavy paper. The imagery was Roman, although the engraving was probably from the seventeenth century. The central image depicted a tall figure enthroned before a tomb with its door half-open. The seated male
had two bearded faces adorning its head, one that looked toward the tomb, the other that looked in the opposite direction, down a road leading from the door of the tomb and off into the hills. In the hand facing the tomb, the figure held out an elaborate key. Below the printed image were words written in thick ink by an early hand:
Hail, Lorde of Gates! Hail to He who sees All Worlds and Watches at the Thresholde. Hail, Lorde of Vaults and Mystpaths! Hail, Janus, Father of the Undertaking and Maker of Wayes. Be thy roades e’er blessed!
And below this were some letters he could not read. Some in Greek. Others looked like quickly written Egyptian hieroglyphs, but he wasn’t sure. On the back of this page had been inscribed a list of phrases. Many of these Silas could make out, as they were written in only slightly faded ink in bold capital block Roman letters. It looked like a handwritten table of contents, but none of the entries had corresponding page numbers. Silas could make out
THE PATHE OF VIRGIL
ACTS OF DISSOLUTION
EXTREME UNCTION
YE DARKE CALL
RITES OF JANUARIE
WATER OF LETHE
DOOR DOOM
But as he continued to turn the pages, the handwriting became a real problem. Much of it seemed unreadable. Although it was mostly in English—many entries appeared to be translations from older works—it was still like trying to listen to someone with a very thick accent. Silas could see a few words clearly, but they were quickly crowded out by the words he couldn’t read. The first few pages were the easiest, perhaps because their subject was clear and meant to be read by anyone.
Announcements. The first thing Silas noticed was that whatever the book had
become
, it had
begun
as a ledger of the town’s dead, recording their birth and death dates. The earliest date of death was recorded for Robert Careborn, who died at age fifty-three in 1625. Some of the entries, many in fact, had the word “PAX” written next to them in the margin. A few were noted “LOST” or “WANDERING.” Some were recorded as “MALEFIC.” Others as “RECURRENT.” The handwriting in the margins was in a variety of styles, indicating that numerous authors had commented on one another’s inscriptions.
After the death of Agnes Farnham in 1761, only the names of Umbers were recorded. Silas assumed that at that point, the public death ledger was carried on in another book, and this enormous volume had come into the possession of the Undertakers of his family. He followed the long list of names, most of them unknown to him, most of the older ones clearly from the Bible: “Jonathan, Abel, Sadoc, Enoch, Joram, Jonas, Abram, Solomon, Uriah, Caleb.” A few of the names had a small drawing of the double head of Janus next to them, Silas assumed at first because they were Undertakers.
When he got to the end of the list, he saw that it halted a few inches above the bottom of the page. The last complete entry was “William Umber,” and the date of his funeral ten years ago was in his dad’s handwriting. Below that, the page was empty except for
a final incomplete entry: “Amos Umber” with a Janus head drawn beside it that had been crossed out, followed by his dad’s birth date and a blank line for the death date to be inscribed.
Silas paused, then ran a finger over his father’s name and continued reading.
After the entries of the dead, very little in the ledger was sequential. Silas turned page after page. Most of the handwriting was unreadable. Several pages contained only newspaper cuttings. These, at least, were easy to read. Most were clippings that had been pasted into the ledger, stories about accidents, murders, and terrible deaths that someone thought might be related to or result in ghostly activity. The headlines were terrible:
AVENGING PREACHER—FIRST FATHER AND THEN SON SHOT
WHILE ATTENDING TO THE DEAD
GIRL GUILTY OF MURDER—SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD CONVICTED
OF POISONING NUMEROUS PEOPLE
DIED BESIDE HIS GOLD—AN OLD MAN SEIZED BY DEATH WHILE
GLOATING OVER HIS HOARDED WEALTH
DOWN IN THE CABIN, DEAD—A LITTLE BOY’S NIGHT
WITH HIS FATHER’S CORPSE, AND THE BABY AND HIS SISTER—
HIS COLD AND DREARY VIGIL
A VITRIOL FIEND’S WORK
KILLED INSTEAD OF CURED—AN OLD MAN, TO CURE THE GRIPPE, CUT
A RTERY BY MISTAKE—GIRL DIES OF BLOOD LOSS—
HE DIES FROM THE SHOCK
WERE THEY MURDERED? A HOUSE SUDDENLY BURSTS INTO FLAMES
,
AND AFTERWARD FOUR SKELETONS ARE FOUND IN THE RUINS
But the other pages were largely mysteries. Page after page of foreign lines and curves. Silas tried to pay attention, but his eyes began to blur and hurt.
He looked up from the ledger, and his surroundings slowly came back into focus. The room was cold. He looked around and thought about laying a fire on the hearth, but as it was close at hand, he pulled his dad’s coat off the back of the chair and held it up for a moment. It was a little big for him, especially through the shoulders. It still smelled like his dad. He pulled the jacket on and then crossed his arms in front of him, imagining his father was hugging him, one of those long, been-away-for-a-few-days-and-missed-you hugs that always made Silas instantly forgive his father’s many absences.
Blinking a few times to resharpen his sight, he looked down at the ledger again, slowly and passively, almost as if he wasn’t trying to read it. Letters seemed to rise to his eyes. He could begin to see each handwriting style, each word, as its own accent. Now a sentence seemed clear, then a paragraph. Now a whole page became plain reading. Voices rose from the pages as though the book itself now spoke to him.
Then he saw clearly what the book contained: many long quotes from even more ancient books and records, diagrams, and spells to bind the dead. To release a soul, to protect and banish. There was much poetry, or portions of poems containing lines an Undertaker had probably once thought illuminating in some way.
He saw that toward the end of the book, there were lots of pages in his father’s handwriting. Some mentioned the watch, others were broken entries and brief comments.
“What you see can also see you,” his father wrote in a margin. And below it, even more cryptically, “We are who we were.”
As Silas continued to read for the next few days, he returned often to the back portions of the text, not just for fragments of lore and instructional notes, but because reading those entries in his father’s hand made it feel like his father was coming into clearer focus too, like Silas was holding up to the light parts of his dad’s strange and rapidly deepening work and world.
The problem was, his father recorded information all through the book, as did its other contributors, taking every opportunity to add to, elaborate on, or refute what previous Undertakers had recorded. This made some pages read like overheard arguments. Even so, reading those words breathed life into their writers—his father and all the others who had written these lines and left them just for Silas to find and read. His people were speaking to him.
The closer he looked, the more ages of the town, the more voices and hands rose up to greet and confound him. Not all the voices were kind. Some recorded terrible things, awful happenings with equally frightening resolutions. He could see that the book was more than a ledger. It was chronicle, journal, and spell tome, utterly occult even in its most common account. It was about the dead and what they can do and where they reside and how they may be dealt with, controlled, banished, and brought to peace. Many lifetimes of records spilled from the pages before him. There was no index. Some texts ended abruptly, as though pages had been removed. Some parts of the book wouldn’t lie flat because extra pages and portions of other manuscripts had been glued or stitched in. Some texts had been written over, or hastily added in the margin; others had been amended by the taping in of related works. He could see that someone, perhaps his father, had taped in some bookmarks with labels such as
“Bindings,” “Banishing,” and “RE old district Restless,” but none seemed entirely consistent, or made a whole work of any topic. So Silas concluded that reading the ledger would be much like his relationship with his father: deep but hieroglyphic, rich but full of secrets, half-truths, mysteries, and fragments.
He opened the ledger somewhere in the middle and began reading again. He decided this was how he would continue to read the book, since it was impossible to examine it in any kind of order. He would simply open it and look for any text he could read.