Mistle Child (Undertaken Trilogy) (5 page)

“Good evening, hound of hell,” said Silas, trying to speak in a high, happy tone, though his heart was tight in his chest. “Are you a good puppy, or . . . something else?”

The dog rose up on its massive paws and walked over to Silas, looking at him expectantly. Silas stepped back, feeling the earth shift below his feet. He reached behind him to steady himself on a tombstone, looking away for only an instant. When he looked again, the dog had vanished.

Silas sat down hard on the ground next to his dad’s grave and remained there for many moments. It had been a long, strange night. His mind began to turn toward home. Mother Peale’s words and the dog’s appearance had shaken him, and now the whole evening, lighthouse and Beacon both, felt like one long troublesome dream. He didn’t like feeling anxious. He’d spent a lot of time in the last months trying to focus on his work, trying to take charge, trying not to remember how much he still had to learn.

He put his hand on his dad’s gravestone and pulled himself up, then arched his back and stretched. Sleep was the only thing for it. He put his hand in his jacket pocket and grabbed the handful of grave earth in case he should meet the dog, or anything else on his way home.

When Silas reached the bottom of the Beacon, he turned up Main Street. Nothing troubled his homeward journey. When he reached his front porch, he found a basket of eggs, several glass bottles of fresh milk, and a cheese—gifts from folks who had already heard, or sensed, that he had worked that night at the lighthouse, or perhaps from one of the families he’d helped earlier in the week. His heart was warmed momentarily by the kindness of these “payments.” But as Silas went to open the front door with his key, his eyes were held by the deeply engraved letters. He paused there on the threshold, worry rising in him again. Back at the Beacon, he could still hear the black dog’s howl, leaping now to greet the dawn.

T
IRED THOUGH HE WAS,
the memory of the dog’s baying kept Silas from sleep. He tried to doze in a chair by the fireplace in his study, but too many questions flooded his mind. After an hour, he rose and turned to his books.

On the same desk once used by his father, the great funereal ledger of the Undertakers of Lichport lay open, and dozens of volumes containing references to Arvale were stacked about it like crooked towers. Most of the books had been marked with small slips of yellowed paper. This was how Silas liked to read while he was researching something: opening many books at a time, letting his eyes flow from page to page, catching words, phrases, and passages in quick succession. The method was more intuitive than critical, but it allowed the texts to flow into one another, no longer masses of individual references, but one massive volume on precisely whatever it was he was trying to find.

There were no books entirely dedicated to the subject of Arvale house. But there were references to “Arvale” throughout many different volumes and in numerous entries in the ledger. Silas began making a list.

Toward the end of the ledger, Silas found a page of book titles in his father’s handwriting. None of these works was in his library, but it was clear that at some time his father had taken up a study of Arvale just as Silas was doing now. The list was headed with the words “Relating to, or with references of, A R V A L E.” Silas noted with interest titles such as
Spectral Domestic Topography: Visions, Encounters, and Displacements
; and
Manes Intus, Manes Foris: Being a Practical Examination of Internal and External Spirits and Demons
. At the end of the list of titles were more notes in his father’s handwriting. One read:

Where we have enacted our abysmal rites, there shall we pay the punishments for them, for so long as the Doom is predicated on judgment and banishment, so shall all the family be likewise held and judged. So the halls and galleries and chambers of Arvale shall be a prison-house because we think, in our arrogance and our goetic power, that we are above the more ancient magics of sympathy and kindness. The Call to the house must be heeded, but as to whether the Undertaker shall submit to the “obligations and traditions” of the house and its perilous threshold, this is a choice each must make in his own time. Either way, there is a price to be paid.

Throughout the ledger and in other books, Silas found the word “Arvale” written on many earlier bookmarks. Within the ledger, they highlighted inscriptions of varying length, most copied out from other works, other authors’ attempts to offer some insight into the place, or into the
condition
, that was Arvale. Some of the marginalia were authored and included an Undertaker’s name; other commentators preferred to remain anonymous. It seemed most of the authored posts had been made by a distant relative, Jonas Umber.

The entire heaven is divided into societies . . . and every spirit . . . is taken to the society where his love is; and when he arrives there he is, as it were, at home,
and in the house where he was born.

—
C
OPIED BY
J
ONAS
U
MBER FROM
S
WEDENBORG’S
H
EAVEN
AND
H
ELL

The greatest throngs of the dead appear, as Gervase hath writ “Confinibus et Amicis” to “friends and relatives.” But so long as they remain in the lands of confinement or punishment, those places that border and share so wide a frontier with our world, they may, of their own power, or divine dispensation, appear in the dreams and visions of their living relatives in the semblance of their living bodies. Yet, when their allotted hour comes and they either cast off their cares or are freed of them by the goodlie actions of their kin or Peller, they are gone from all the spheres and shalle present themselves to us no more.

—
J
.
U
MBER

And so we must find that the dead, by preference and when able, will congregate about their kin, about their descendants, in whom they place their hopes not merely for the future of the family’s honor and estates, but for their rescue from the shadowlands or other purgatorial entrapments that only memory and the honoring of their names may effect.

All must attend the house and its springs, for where else may the waters of forgetting and the waters of memory be found? For Arvale is the very font of Lethe . . . the source of the Undertaker’s power to bring forgetfulness to the dead. That other spring, which some call Memory’s Cauldron, it bubbles up through the earth there too, though its waters are not for the nourishment of all. . . .

—
J
ONAS
U
MBER

The entries became briefer, mostly quotes, many in his father’s hand, marked “Arv./Damnable Mansion.” Some had been scrawled and even amended in ways that seemed to suggest his dad’s anger or frustration.

F
ROM
R
USHWORTH’S
H
ISTORICAL
C
OLLECTIONS
:

I have neither eye to see, nor tongue to speak here, but as
the House
is pleased to direct me.

F
ROM THE
B
OOK OF
P
SALMS:

And yet they think that
their houses
shall continue for ever: and
that their dwelling-places
shall endure from one generation to another. . . .

F
ROM
M
ILTON:

Y
ET SOME THERE BE THAT BY DUE STEPS ASPIRE TO LAY THEIR
JUST
HANDS ON THAT
“
GOLDEN
”
KEY THAT OPES THE PALACE OF ETERNITY.

As Silas read, he came to understand that the house of Arvale might hold more in common with the shadowlands than even the oldest homes of Lichport. Recent accounts that referred to Arvale seemed increasingly philosophical and speculative, less about its architectural prominence and more about the nature of its existence. He began to sense that his summons was no mere invitation to supper. He also wondered very seriously about what he might learn there. Every shadowland he’d visited taught him something new about his work, and sometimes at great cost. What might such an ancient place teach him about the landscapes of the past and the habitations of the dead? Would he meet people there who knew more about the Undertaking than he did? The thought both excited and worried him.

Whatever else it might be, Arvale was clearly the ancestral estate of his ancient family, and though every Undertaker journeyed there at some point, some even visiting many times over their careers, no one who left a record of their visit in the ledger seemed to think of the journey to Arvale as a homecoming. Arvale was an obligation, one of many dangerous responsiblities that, as he read Amos’s final entry on the house in the ledger, he now knew he was required to undertake. . . .

But the summons is a kind of binding that works through both blood and bloodline, and it must be heeded, no matter what comes. For should the summons be ignored, madness and death follow like furious hounds, and the house of ancestors becomes a place of perdition and demise, and so I have gone to that strange and long-enduring house against my will but in preservation of my life,
and once, my son’s.

M
RS.
B
OWE SAT IN HE
R CANDLELIT PARLOR
and heard the front door at Silas’s house. She waited, but he didn’t call from the hallway, or come over for a cup of tea before bed, or even knock to see if she was still up, as were once his customs.

She was a little hurt by this. It was not the first time it had happened. Since Amos’s funeral, Mrs. Bowe assumed, Silas had wanted to feel more self-sufficient. So she tried to convince herself Silas’s behavior was normal. Well, as normal as the behavior of a young man could be, considering he spent much of his time talking with the dead.
This must be what it’s like for every parent when their child prepares to leave the nest,
she thought. True, he’d avoided her a little over the last month or so, but he was still hurting and trying to adjust. Anyone could understand that. He was also turning into an adult. If she thought about it calmly, it was all completely understandable. He’d been busy. He was settling in. It had been only two months since the discovery of his father’s death; Silas was adjusting to a new life. No matter that she and Silas used to share a meal nearly every day.