Death Watch (57 page)

“Look here! There is a thread—,” said the third of the three.

“Do not!” said the second, but the third was already walking to the web.

“I think we may help him. I think we must. Look at the state of the web, the frayed edges, unknotted threads … on and on the work goes, because the grief in this place has no end. He may be able to bring about some resolution, and I am eager to cast off, if only for a moment,” said the third.

“Resolution at what cost? You wish to help him. Fine. As do I. But he, most especially, should not come to
that place
,” said the second.

“Enough! Show him,” said the first. “Let him see and decide for himself.”

With sharp fingers, the third plucked the thinnest thread from the tip of a marsh reed done in emerald flax and followed its length just a few feet away to a tangle of knots hanging in the air.

“What is it?” asked Silas.

“Look close,” said the first.

Here was a square of rough cloth onto which had been stitched numerous knots. At first, Silas couldn’t make out any details, but when he brought his face right up to the stitching, he could just make out small figures worked in beneath. Each seemed isolated from the others and was held down to the ground by numerous tiny gray binding stitches and knots. Below those were hidden hundreds of birds, almost invisible, also in gray thread. Wave after wave of little birds was lost in the knotwork.

“Why shouldn’t I go there and try to help them? If I
am
the Undertaker, I believe that is my job.”

“We can only sew what we know, and that is that there are lost children here. Your pain and theirs are not unrelated. You will have no trouble finding them.”

Silas stood back and looked at the portion of the tapestry holding the two misthomes, the Bowers of the Night Herons and the other place where the lost children dwelled; they appeared to share a border. He wondered if each held the thing the other lacked. Maybe they could be joined, brought into accord, and both limbos relieved of their suffering occupants at once. Silas asked the ladies if they could just knit them together, pull the threads and draw them closer, make them one place instead of two.

“Oh, no!” said the first. “That would lead to ruin. You can’t just pull threads together like that. It must happen out there first.” She pointed out beyond the high window of old rippling glass. “Out there, in the places where the dead reside and gather. Changes occur, things take root, and we make it so on the web. This place, this room, is itself a shadowland, but the weaving is something else entirely. It is a reflection of all misthomes. We can only weave and stitch what is, not what we want to be.”

“Have you ever tried?”

The second of the three turned away from the others. The first of the three raised her hand toward Silas.

“Do not ask. These places, these shadowlands and misthomes, are greatly isolated from one another. Although they may appear very close in our work, it is a false perspective. These two limbos you’re looking at are separated by the deepest chasm of grief that can form in the human heart: to lose a child. Silas, what you ask cannot be done. Must not be done. We are not the only ones who keep a web, and our work is connected to innumerable others. Threads lead from this place to lands very far removed. All are connected. In the past, others have tried to force things, to bring together misthomes that were not in accord.”

The second of the three appeared to be crying. Silas pressed, “What happened?”

“Terrible things,” said the first.

“Not to be told.” said the third.

“Not even to an Undertaker?” Silas asked again more pointedly.

The first, who was the oldest of the three, rose from her chair and walked toward Silas, her dress trailing frayed tendrils of silk and mist behind her, connecting her, perhaps even binding her, to the portion of the web she had yet to finish. Silas could see the weight of her work on her, and that whoever she had been while living, she was now a part of her weaving, bound to it, something far more extraordinary and powerful than whatever single name she once owned. Now she merely occupied a familiar form from a favored life, but she had become a constellation of forces and fates stretching back in time; a nexus of extraordinary power that had its source far beyond Lichport.

“Ladies,” Silas asked with great reverence, “has my father ever visited this place?”

“No. It would never have been open to him. Always you were at the front of his mind and very much alive, so to consider such a misthome as this would have been difficult for him. Not because he was without sympathy, but because to imagine the causes that result in such a world forming is very awful for any parent. To imagine it terrifies them.”

The first of the three came up alongside Silas and put a hand lightly on his shoulder. To his surprise, it felt warm. She drew him to the other side of the room away from the others, who had already gone back to their needlework. She walked with him to the window and stopped very suddenly as if something had snagged the hem of her dress.

“What you propose is very dangerous, and I will have no hand it in. Dangerous for me, dangerous for those souls involved, dangerous for you. Silas, there are mysteries within mysteries at work here, and I cannot pretend that in this place and at this time I know much more than I have told you. You know that what you say to the dead can have a profound, even painful effect on them?”

“Yes. I also know that the right words can set them free from their troubles.”

“The challenge will not be, I suspect, extricating them from their losses. Like almost all the dead, they may leave their prisons whenever they wish to or acknowledge that they can. The problem will come when
you
try to leave. The condition of the souls bound to this place is very particular, because they are all young, all children. The young have not yet come to full knowledge while alive, and that makes coming close to them in death very perilous. Entering their shadowland will likely affect you greatly and in ways you cannot anticipate. They are lost, and so may cause that condition in those who are like them.”

“But I’m not lost … I mean, not like that. I know where I
am. I know who I am and what, I think, I am becoming.”

“Oh, child, please—you have not even the barest knowledge of what the world has in store for you now that you have accepted the mantle of Undertaker. Now that you have returned to Lichport, forces have been set in motion, stitches that may never be picked out or cut. This is an awkward, delicate business all around. Just as you cannot wave your hands and reappear in your simple life before coming here, so you cannot merely clap them to wake up the dead from their troubles. Indeed, it would be very much like waking a sleepwalker. Where will they find themselves? Where did they dream they were? Who are they when they are woken? How will they find themselves? Walking? Dreaming? Dying?

“I will not knot two lands of shadow together, even when, as now, within one may reside the solution to another’s grief. You must do this out
there
. You must help them see themselves. You’ll have to find a way. But rest assured, when you puzzle it out, we will then do our part and make it so in the tapestry. Then, and only then, may the pattern of the web be changed. Resolve yourself. Set your mind to the task. Do not confuse your world with theirs, no matter how alike they may seem to be. You will have to use what you know to bring peace to the dead you encounter. In the work itself is salvation—for them, perhaps for you, but do not hope for anything in return. Silas, work such as this will require
sacrifice
.”

“From them or from me?”

Each of the three was looking at him now and spoke in one voice: “From all.”

“Will you tell me where to find them, these lost children?”

“I cannot, because the doors to that world are various,” said the first.

As he looked again, Silas could see that there were other
threads, at first hidden from view, leading from the corners of this knotted bit of the web to many other portions, though none, not one thread, connected it to the Bowers of the Night Herons among the marshes.

“For everyone, the entrance to this misthome will be different and individual. You will know where to find it. You must follow your own particular pain to its threshold. Where was the place you felt the most alone, the most lost, the most frightened and miserable? In such recollections will you find it.”

Silas didn’t even need to think about it.

“School. The playground at school. But I went to school in Saltsbridge. Will I have to go back to Saltsbridge?”

“How tiresome,” said the third. “I would not have taken him for a literalist—”

But the first spoke again, cutting off her sister.

“Any such place should be sufficient to provide an entrance for you, for many children share a common story and bear similar portions of sadness when it comes to regret and loss. By foot, you will not have to travel far to find the Playground.” And as the first said the word “playground,” a large portion of the tapestry shivered, like the taut thread of a spider’s web when a fly becomes trapped in it. Very suddenly, the second began stitching a slide to the ground cloth where Silas had been looking, then swings and benches, and in the corner, the outline of a tree in rough nut-brown yarn.

“There!” cried the first. “You see! Already your mind hovers about this place, remembering, and already it is changing. Silas Umber, take great care! This shadowland is waiting for you. It knows you are coming.”

T
HE DAYS OF YOUTH ARE MADE FOR GLEE, AND TIME IS ON THE WING
.

—transcribed in haste in the hand of Amos Umber, quoted from “The Miller of Dee”

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.

—
Overheard on the Lichport salt marsh, March 23, 1924. From Mother Goose

The hours must be endured and those who cannot do so in life will most surely do so in death. You say you cannot face them? Life’s joys and pains both? You shall find them waiting for you, a world of ignored moments there to be explored. Then shall you know how long an hour can be, shall feel the awful depth and restlessness of even a single day, and all the days you fled from life while you were alive.

—From
The Sermon Book of Abraham Umber
, 1810

O
N MAIN STREET
, near the edge of town, stood the old Catholic church, long since abandoned. Behind it, on the church’s north side, by custom, was a small, derelict cemetery holding the mostly unmarked graves of travelers or strangers who died anonymously in Lichport before the Lost Ground graveyard had been consecrated. Unbaptized children were also brought to the church, and white stones lay deep in the tall grass marking those long-forgotten little graves. Directly across from the church was the school. Like the church, the school hadn’t been used in years. Any children left in town either went to residential schools in Kingsport, or attended a small irregularly meeting classroom in the Narrows. North of the school, church, and cemetery was a weedy, fenced-in plot that was once the school playground. Rusted swings and a slide still stood there, and at its far corner grew a thick low tree, its trunk scarred with the names of children, which, though carved deep, were year by year vanishing below the thickening bark.

Silas had never explored these buildings, though he’d passed them many times. He had been a baby when he’d left Lichport and had never attended this school, yet the playground felt vaguely familiar to him. At one end, as on all playgrounds, popular children would have once gathered around the swings and worn benches to talk. At the other end, by the tree, one or two awkward kids would hide, talking quietly about their unpopular interests
until the bell sounded to bring them all back to supervised activities in the bland, orderly world of their classrooms.

A small breeze whipped at the weeds that grew up through the cracks in the pavement, pushing and pulling at the swings that whined on their rusted chains. In the tree, and in the bushes that grew wild around the playground’s fence, he could hear hidden creatures. The long, lone cry of a small bird pierced his ears, calling out again and again but never answered, though other birds seemed to move invisibly among the branches.

Silas opened the small rusted gate and walked onto the playground. He took the death watch from his pocket and held it for a moment without opening it. The sound of the wind grew louder. A plastic bag rose and fell on the air, hovered, then dropped to the ground, where it made spirals and scraped the pavement before leaping up again. Up and down it went, never blowing away. The death watch was heavy in his hand, and Silas could feel it tick in time with his heartbeat. It was as though it had become a part of him, this strange artifact; a second small heart that beat outside his body. When he felt it ticking like this, Silas knew that the watch
wanted
to be used, that it wanted to show him something, like a child begging for attention. He wasn’t sure he entirely liked that sensation. But he had come to the playground with a purpose. He opened the skull and brought his thumb down hard on the dial until the clock’s tiny mechanical heartbeat stopped.