Death Watch (4 page)

It had been six months and one week since Amos Umber had disappeared.

Silas was in his room, looking over his collections. Old things lined the bookshelves. Odd, old-timey things. He took some objects down from the shelves and lined them up on his desk. Then he’d put some back, leaving others in the desk collection. It was as if he was arranging the pieces of a puzzle without knowing what it was supposed to look like.

As a boy Silas had collected everything. It might have started because his mother would never allow him to have pets. So he brought home rocks, interesting bits of wood, books he would buy with money his father gave him. And as he got older, Silas became more and more his father’s son. He had boxes of small bones he’d find among the bushes in the park. Silas would draw them and try to figure out what animal they might have belonged to.

A fox skull sat in front of him. He was watching a sliver of late-day sunlight make the teeth of the bottom jaw spread into jagged, pencil-long shadows on the surface of his desk.

Mostly he brought home books. Saltsbridge had a few bookstores, their shelves filled with new novels and cookbooks, but Silas hated these. There was only one bookstore in Saltsbridge that carried old, used books. Antiquarian books. Books with leather covers and engraved images. The owners knew Silas well and would look out for things they thought might interest him.

Looking at his bookcases, Silas saw what he loved best: books on folklore and ghost stories. Books about magic, a photocopied manuscript on medieval sorcery, a thick, broken-spined leather tome about Renaissance astrology. Books about bizarre customs, lost ceremonies. Things folks in Saltsbridge didn’t care about or even know existed. If he could afford the book, Silas would buy it. Often, his father would add related titles to his growing collection, always quietly left on the edge of Silas’s desk sometime during the night.

While Silas looked at the books on his shelves and stacked next to the bed, he could remember when he’d seen each one for the first time at the bookstore. Surprisingly, the local store was usually well stocked, because the owners visited the surrounding towns, small ancient seaports whose inhabitants had long ago brought books with them from across the sea, and so still had libraries with curious subjects on their shelves. These were bought cheap from desperate folks selling up and moving on. While the bookstore owners might have gotten more for such titles as
The Sworn Conjuring Book of Honorius
in a handsome translated and reprinted edition, it pleased them to see books like this go to Silas, who was so desperate for them. His eyes opened wide when he held such books and turned their stained pages. Besides, in Saltsbridge, who else was buying anything but romance novels and Westerns?

Silas looked at the empty doorway and could almost see his dad standing in it.

Sometimes his dad used to come in, spot a curious title among the stacks of books piled around the room, and sit down for a chat.

“Do you believe in this, Bird?” Silas remembered Amos once asking him, after he thumbed through a volume filled with drawings of conjuring circles inscribed with the names of spirits. Often his dad would call him “Bird,” and when Silas was younger, or he was feeling fragile, “Little Bird,” and it always made him feel better. When he had been really young, there was a song about birds his dad would sing him when he couldn’t sleep. Silas could remember their conversations as if they’d all happened only the day before.

“Well,” said Silas, sitting down on the edge of his bed to consider his dad’s question, “I think it was true once. In the past, someone believed in it, and it was true to them. And maybe,” he added after a little more thought, “these things might still be true, or might be real again, if someone needs them to be.”

At first Silas liked the subjects simply because of their strangeness, but slowly he began to believe in the possibilities of what he was reading, in a world filled with secrets and magic. When he was younger, he’d suspected his father believed in many of these things too, so that made it easy for them to talk. As he grew older, Silas began to see the glimmers of hieroglyphic logic behind the occult. There was a reason for these oddities to exist, perhaps as strange connections between the mind and the things people feared or desired. Magic was a conversation. Ghosts were real, and they were watching because something had happened that necessitated their presence.

Silas began to see this mystery as part of a process, an arcane mechanism that fueled the inner workings of the world, but a part of the world known only to a very few special people. That made
it all even more exciting. This hidden world where magic worked and ghosts walked was like a secret club. His dad belonged, and the more Silas read, the more he could belong to the club too.

There was one moment when Silas thought,
Yes
,
now I’m in
.

Around his neck he wore a pendant his father had given him on his thirteenth birthday. From a finely made silver chain hung a silver coin set in a sort of frame with clasps to hold it securely. On one side of the coin was a wreathed head in profile. On the other, a head with two faces, one looking left, the other looking right, a small door below them. His father told him it was a very old Roman coin.

“Whose head is that?” Silas asked immediately.

“Ah, that is, I believe, Emperor Nero,” his father told him in a scholarly tone with a mock British accent—and a smile.

“No, no. Not him. This guy.” Silas turned the coin over and pointed to the head with two faces.

“Oh, him,” Amos replied knowingly. “Well, why don’t you see if you can find out for yourself? Put a few of these books we’ve collected to some use.”

It took Silas less than five minutes to find a name to go with the two-faced head. But when he asked his father why he’d given him the coin with Janus on it, Amos got quiet and seemed a little distressed and sad, like he didn’t want to talk about it. “I’ve had that coin for a very long time, but it’s time to pass it on. Please keep it close. Besides,” he said, speaking softly now, “you never know when you’re going to need a little pocket change.”

Silas could feel when the pendant touched his chest that it was already warm. This was his father’s thing. Silas had seen it on him, and his dad had been wearing it right up to the moment he gave it to him. When Silas looked up, he saw that his father’s eyes were tearing up.

“Dad?”

“It’s all too soon,” Amos whispered, “but I will not take it any further. I cannot. Maybe you will be able to …,” but his voice broke and he trailed off. “Maybe you will be able to make something of this.”

Amos put his hand to his son’s chest where the pendant lay, over his son’s heart. He hugged Silas and said finally, “Let it remind you that you have choices and to keep your eyes open, Bird.”

“And look both ways when crossing the street?” Silas added, smiling, trying to cheer his father up.

“Yes, especially when crossing.”

Since his father had disappeared, Silas hadn’t gone to school more than a couple of times a week. He did his work in a perfunctory manner, and when approached by his teachers about his irregular attendance, he told them his family was having a difficult time.

He just couldn’t be with people. There were a few kids he sometimes spoke with at school—at lunch, or walking home—but months ago even they had stopped trying to talk to him. Silas had no real answers for their predictable questions.

“Are you all right?”

“Don’t know.”

“Any news about your dad?”

“Nah.”

Easier just to stay home where he could slip through most days more or less unnoticed. Not wanting to add to the family’s grief, the school let him graduate without any fuss. Silas didn’t attend his graduation, despite his mother asking him about it repeatedly. The day after the graduation ceremony was held, his mother brought home a cake from the market. They sat in the kitchen, each picking at their piece of cake with a fork.

When his mother asked about college, Silas looked away without answering, then left the room.

“Just glad we got through high school, right?” his mother answered for him into the air. “No real plans after today, right, Si?” she yelled after him. “No
real
plans?”

He had plans, but his hopes for higher education, like all his others, were built on “mights.” He
might
go hang out somewhere, with someone. He
might
get a job and earn some money. He
might
go to college, a really old school with gray stone buildings and an enormous library. He was thinking of applying next year. Maybe the year after. He wasn’t thinking about application deadlines. That sort of detail wasn’t a part of his plan. Not at the moment. And why tell his mother about this anyway? It would rekindle her expectations, and she’d only start riding him again. Better to let it be. When his dad came home, they’d sort it out together.

His mother retreated into her world, Silas into his.
What a family
, his mother would say, but until now, Silas had never realized that they weren’t really much of one. The names of the days retreated from them both, and soon after the school term ended, Silas was no longer sure what day of the week it was. Every morning when he woke up, he missed his father more keenly than the night before, but the details and differences of each day blurred and eventually vanished. For Silas, the passage of time became a longing ache in his heart that grew daily worse.

Twice a year, by tradition and without fail—once when the weather got warm, and again when it turned cold—Dolores sifted through the family’s closets to get rid of anything beyond use, and she insisted Silas do the same. Silas had taken a blue blazer, just a little too small for him now, from the closet to throw into the “give away” box. He remembered this jacket. His mother had bought
it for him for special occasions, although there were not many of those in his family, so Silas put it to another purpose. Sometimes when he ditched classes, he went to the cemetery in Saltsbridge. It was quiet, and the few people there had their minds on other things; it wasn’t the kind of place anyone was likely to look for a kid cutting school.

Floral Hills was an enormous property, meant to serve the now sprawling suburbs of Saltsbridge, as well as the older town of Kingsport to the north. It was built to be a “proper” cemetery for local people after Lichport began its descent and rumors had started circulating abroad about the numerous “irregularities” in “that forsaken place by the marsh.” Floral Hills, it was clear, was built by people who cared more about money than about the peace of the dead or the bereaved. It was filled with “art,” the largest and most garish reproductions of the world’s masterpieces. There was a poorly made version of Michelangelo’s
David
, with hands far too small for the big body. There was a garden of tombs displaying a copy of the Winged Victory of Samothrace at its center. Everywhere you turned, these sculptures rose up as if to say,
Look here! I was a
very
important person in life! Isn’t this place tasteful and cultured
?

Silas enjoyed the cemetery’s visitors. Some came to pay respects to loved ones. Others were tourists, attracted by Floral Hills’s garish advertisements along the highway. These people wandered the property, viewing the monuments and taking pictures, as though they were on vacation in Rome. It wasn’t long before Silas found other ways to amuse himself. He started wearing his blue blazer to Floral Hills and would give tours to the sightseers. He knew the grounds well by that point, where the famous people were buried, and even knew a bit about some of the sculptures. What he didn’t know he made up.

After a while, to make it more interesting, he began to invent stories about some of the people buried there, sometimes quite elaborate family histories. The storytelling lasted only a few weeks because honestly, it made him feel guilty. He meant no harm, but they were lies he was telling, and he got a sour taste in his mouth when he told them. And sometimes, when he spoke the names of the dead and attached them to things he’d made up, he had the unsettling feeling he was being watched, listened to, and hated.

It was eleven fifteen p.m.

Dolores Umber was not quite sure how many months her husband had been gone. More than seven.

She held a gin and tonic in her hand because when she tried to set things down, sometimes she dropped them. The heat of her hand would warm the drink too fast, so she sipped quickly. She was pretty sure there wasn’t much gin left in the house.

Out of gin and tired as hell.

She could see her son was tired too. Exhaustion and depression floated like bruises just under the skin of his handsome face.

In her presence, Silas wouldn’t retreat from the belief that his father was alive. He refused to back down, though she knew he must have
some
doubts. She knew what Silas wanted. He wanted
her
to believe Amos was alive somewhere. Silas wanted help, clinging to his hope. She knew her son. For all her dislike of how much he was like his father, she knew him. She suspected that under all his yelling about not giving up, far, far down inside him was a place where he might just barely consider that he would never see his father again. He needed to visit that part of himself more often, let it out, let it breathe a little. She knew that if he did, he might start feeling like she did: a little guilty, but relieved.

She could see Silas wasn’t sleeping well, and how jumpy he
was every time the phone rang. He was tired. But what was his losing a little sleep compared to what she had lost?
She
was tired, damn it! Tired of living without for so long. Tired of living with a man who cared more about the dead than he did about how or where his family lived. And she was tired of being the sensible one, the one telling people to get on with things and to stop dreaming about what wasn’t likely to happen. She’d given up her dreams a long time ago, so now it was someone else’s turn.

More than anything, she was tired of looking into her son’s eyes and seeing how much he wished at every moment that his dad might come back. Silas’s neck was taut as a bowstring all the time. And his eyes were like headlights, wide open, staring at every corner, as if his father might be hiding somewhere and if he didn’t spot him fast, Amos might slip away for good.