Mistle Child (Undertaken Trilogy)

  Higher and higher up the carvings climbed into the air, stacked precipitously like blocks from a titan’s toy box. Near the top were stone rotundas, surrounded by columns, positioned atop one another like layers of a wedding cake. They stood upon a thick marble base holding engraved slabs that might have borne the names of some ancestral Umbers in a far distant land.

  Along the strata of awkward terraces, small trees clung to the cracked stone of the monuments, their snaking trunks bending this way and that around the columns, parapets, and elaborate carvings, striving up and up even as their roots pried loose bits of the masonry that supported them. Below those verdant vandals—strewn across the road where they’d fallen from the memorial battlements—were pieces of statues, broken pediments, and cracked chunks of dislodged decorative brick.

  Cautiously fascinated, Silas ventured within some of the lower monuments. Many along the roadway, perhaps a reflection of the great Via Appia of ancient Rome, were decorated in the Roman fashion. Inside, Silas saw murals and carved marble portraits configured in various activities—hunting, playing games, drinking. One depicted a family eating before the deceased as the corpse held up a curved cup in a triumphant gesture. The sculptures of his surviving wife and child cast their eyes down upon the somber offering table, less enthusiastic about the funeral feast.

  One after another, Silas explored the burial houses and tenements of the dead. Some bore readable inscriptions, brief, runic lines delineating thousands of individual lives. All remembered. All recorded. Yet in none of them did he encounter the dead themselves. Not a resident ghost in a single grave. Where was everyone?

  As Silas walked toward a row of primitive-looking rock-cut tombs, he heard someone clear his throat.

  From a small Etruscan mausoleum just ahead, a little light danced out onto the avenue and a tentative voice spoke.

  “Are you Silas Umber, sir?”

  “I am,” Silas said hesitantly, peering ahead, trying to see who was speaking.

  “Good evening, sir. I am to take you to the house.”

  A young man about Silas’s age stepped out from an ornate doorway holding a lantern. He was dressed in a very antique fashion, wearing breeches, a yoke-necked shirt, a vest, and a long wool coat. His long dark hair was tied at the back with a bit of leather cord.

  Silas walked forward and then extended his hand. “I am Silas Umber. Pleased to meet you.”

  The young man did not reach for Silas’s hand or immediately respond. He stood expectantly as though he was far off and Silas’s words had not yet reached him. But then he smiled suddenly, and replied, “Thank you, sir. I am to bring you to the house and make sure you don’t get lost, sir.”

  “There is no need to be so formal. What’s your name?”

  “Lawrence, sir. Um. Lawrence.”

  “Do you have a last name, ‘Lawrence Sir’?” Silas smiled as he spoke.

  “Umber. But you can call me Lars. If you like.”

  “Really? Then we are kin, Lars Umber!” Without thinking, Silas took Lars’s hand this time and shook it, then looked at Lars in surprise. There was a feeling, a warmth, to the skin that was in no way preternatural. Silas knew what a ghost felt like, particularly its presence, and Lars was not a ghost. But his clothes were centuries out of fashion, so what was going on? Silas had assumed he was going to a house that would not be occupied by any living relatives. Now he wasn’t at all sure what lay ahead.

  Obviously made uncomfortable by Silas’s tightening grip and the odd way he was being looked at, Lars drew back his hand and turned to the path. Lars held up the lantern and put his other hand in his pocket.

  “Have a care, Silas. The ground is very uneven here.”

  The two young men began making their way forward. The stones of the path were cracked and broken, some of the hexagonal tiles standing up along their fractured edges at all angles. Picking his way along, content to follow but still curious, Silas asked “Lars? How did you come to Arvale? In what year?”

  “Not so long ago. I have only served at the house a short time. I came last year. Seventeen fifty-five, that was.”

  Silas only nodded. This was mysterious and unfamiliar, but also a little exhilarating. What did it mean? Silas had just become accustomed to thinking of Lichport as both a world in itself and a crossroads. Now, here was another world waiting just on its edges. And behind this one, how many more? And behind those?

  Lars was looking at him expectantly again. Silas wanted to ask Lars more about his situation, but he held back. He knew from his work that it was best to let a person, or place, tell its own story in its own time. So although Silas had never met another living person in the shadowlands and wanted to know more about Lars, he decided to wait and watch a little longer. He nodded to Lars again and said nothing about his suspicions.

  “And what do you do at Arvale, may I ask?”

  “I serve as footman.”

  “But you are family. . . .”

  “Only a very distant cousin. Besides, this isn’t my place. Not really. I only came here by accident, and the folk of the house took me in, and well, things being as they were, I thought I’d stay on, since there was a job and things were bad at home. Leaving was the best thing.”

  “I totally understand,” said Silas. And he did. How many times in the last year had he wanted to hide somewhere? Or run away from his own problems?

  The two walked abreast. The high-stacked memorials began to fall away from the roadside, and now, on either side were low round hills, some crowned with circles of stones, or tall single monoliths. Some of the hills were open at their sides like Neolithic tombs, their entrances fitted with limestone or granite slabs that might have at one time been opened or closed to allow the corpses of the dead to complete their journeys by returning to the earthen womb.

  The road turned to the left, and Silas and Lars were in the open and could see the towers and high walls of Arvale before them. Silas’s stride slowed. He felt shaky and dizzy as he tried to focus on the house. It was as though someone had spun him around and around in a circle and then stopped him very suddenly. The house was so large, so sprawling, so vast in its dimensions, that Silas’s perception of distance was thrown awry. He had never seen a place like it, more medieval city than house. From every part rose towers, wings, and galleries, hundreds of chimneys, each with its own unique brick pattern. This was no common mansion or castle. Arvale was a world. A place unique and whole unto itself. Silas stared, trying to compass a complete image of the place. He knew that he was standing on the threshold of some estate of the otherworld. Yet here was neither worldly house, nor some mere misthome of trapped spirits. Here, his people had very deliberately built for themselves an ancestral dominion, a home of permanence, a place in which time could not assail them. This thought gave Silas an idea.

  “Lars, let me catch my breath for a moment. You go ahead, I’ll be right there.”

  “All right, but don’t leave the road,” said Lars, looking a little nervous. “I’ll wait for you at the bottom of the hill. It’s only a short walk to the house from down there. Don’t linger too long.”

  There are some houses that are best approached with evening drawing in. They benefit from the long shadows that dusk provides, and are lent an air of ancient, somber resplendence by the way the last light of day lingers upon the stonework. Arvale was one of those houses. The coming darkness only made it look larger, for there was no telling where its high walls ended and its long shadows began.

  Silas looked out over the mansions and towers of Arvale. All the time he’d been walking, curiosity grew in his mind. He wanted to use the death watch. There was no particular reason he could think of to do it, but this was a place very different from any other, and he wanted to know what further vistas of hidden perspective the death watch might show him. He took it from his pocket and opened the jaw to reveal the dial. But the hand wasn’t moving. He held it tighter, but felt nothing. Even the skull-shaped case, always so warm in his hand, was cold.
The little wound gears and springs of the death watch had stilled, its tiny mechanical heart beat completely stopped. No time, Silas thought. Or a place outside of time. Closing the death watch and putting it back in his pocket, eager again for the company, Silas continued down the hill where Lars was waiting for him.

  Before them, the house sprawled in architectural, almost chaotic, magnificence. The sheer enormity of Arvale made it impossible for Silas to focus on the house as a whole. It was as if the house had never been conceived as a completed structure, as though no one in its long tenancy had ever even thought about what a “finished” mansion might look like. Silas imagined that every occupant, every branch of the family, understood their obligation: Add to the house. New halls. New battlements, addendum after addendum of stone . . . each age of the world adding its signature to Arvale’s long rambling narrative about family and place, and the very definition of endurance. What Silas didn’t know was whether the house stood just on the edge of Lichport, or whether, beyond that gate was another land entirely. A land where all the portions of his family, all their various homes and tombs, were woven together into one vast estate of ancestral splendor and experience. Was he still in Lichport or some kind of “Umberland”?

  Everywhere Silas looked, there was palimpsest. Layer upon hereditary layer, and as he drew closer to Arvale, the very bricks and angles of the walls—windows, towers, chimneys, cornices, ramparts, gables, finials, domes, friezes, tracery, bastions, and parapets—began to speak to him.

  I am the battlement raised in 1260 by Gregory Umber for the protection of his family during the War of the Mount. I did not fail them, I did not fall. My walls are washed in the blood of those who came against us.

  We are the conical Persian spires. We are a whimsy born of pride. We say, look here! Are we not a fine family? We hold small chambers for secret meetings and assignations. Once, a young man was stabbed to death here. Then his pride-wounded paramour took her own life. Their corpses were left, and the little room was bricked up. Aren’t we a grand family, hiding away our indiscretions in such lovely architectural details?

  I am the gargoyle carved with the face of a lion. I watch. I do not sleep. I forget nothing.

  We are the panes of glass brought from Venizia by Maria Archimbaldo-Umber on the occasion of her marriage, so she might always sit in the light of her homeland.

  I am the sixteenth century chimney with the hollow space for hiding what you will. I have held bastard children, patient lovers, silver and plate, and men of unfashionable collars. Indeed, the bones of a priest still reside in me.

  I am the Norman bell tower. I have lost my tongue. I cannot sing. My bell was carried away and across the sea.

  We are the towers of the north range. We watch the skies through the cold nights. We hold ourselves aloof and aloft. We are not of that lower sort. We grant perspective and vision for we sit among the stars awaiting signs and portents. Climb our stairs and see. . . .

  Silas had wandered right up to the edge of the courtyard without noticing he had caught up to Lars, who was now standing directly before him.

  “Silas? Sir?” Lars’s voice broke Silas away from his architectural reverie. Silas rubbed his eyes briefly, and the two made their way across the courtyard toward the great door. The house was both rising up before them and sprawling away to the left and right. Silas had never felt smaller, or more insignificant.

  Lars paused for a moment and looked at Silas hesitantly.

  “Why have you come to Arvale, Silas?”

  “I was invited, and so I came. I think many of the men in my family have visited here . . . during their lifetimes. I know my father came to Arvale. Maybe more than once. It’s sort of a tradition.”

  “I don’t mean to be rude. It’s just that, you’re different from the usual sort that comes here. It’s a queer house, I know. And we’re a queer family. Who doesn’t know that? But it’s best to just keep going forward and not look back. I was lost when I came here and I wish . . . well . . . I mean it would be best if you—”

  “It’s okay. I understand. I’ll be careful. Thank you, Lars.” Silas shook his hand again and Lars nodded his head in seeming relief, but what exactly did he think Silas understood? Who did he think Silas was?

  Lars ran ahead, perhaps to announce their arrival. Silas’s feet crunched across the gravel that covered the ground in front of the house. Below the gravel, long thin slabs of stone were exposed in a few places, the kind sometimes seen lining the floors in the oldest churches. The very walls seemed to be inhaling the air around him, drawing him closer. As he came to the massive stone archway of the porch, the shadows of the house enveloped him completely, cutting him off from the rest of the world.

  Standing before the entrance, he looked up. The wall rose straight up into a riot of gargoyles and decorative and perhaps ritualistic carvings. Up and up the carved grotesques could be seen, crouching and squatting upon their perches of dressed stone. The farthest away became insects, tiny creatures living on the back of some architectural leviathan. Dizzy, Silas returned his gaze to the ground. But now all feelings of adventure and excitement at seeing new things flowed out of him. What was one person next to a place like this? It must have taken thousands of years to build such a house, and standing before its walls, he knew his lifetime was just the merest moment, not even a second, in its long and continuing history.

  The great doors of Arvale loomed before him, fifty feet tall and worked with riveted ornaments. Across them, wrought in early runes of iron, Silas could read the word DOOM. He wasn’t sure what to do next. Should he wait for Lars to open them? Should he knock? He hesitated. The cold air was alive with sounds, and voices emanated from the walls. When he closed his eyes, he could hear them shouting, singing, crying, rising and falling like wisps of music from a radio in another room.

  As he stood there, unsure how to proceed, one of the doors silently opened.

  Beyond the threshold, shadows moved and gathered. He took a step back and looked over his shoulder at the road home. He stared at the details of the path, pulling them into his memory—the trees that flanked it, the curve of their branches, the swell of the hill—suddenly frantic about being able to remember the way back to Lichport. He would have gazed longer, adding details to his mental map of the return route, but a voice from within the house bid him simply, ominously, “Welcome home.”

  LEDGER

  Wraetlic is thaes wealhstane

  —ANONYMOUS MARGINALIA (MEANING “GHOSTLY IS THIS FAMILIAL STONE”) NEXT TO AN ENTRY CONCERNING HOUSES IN DREAMS

  THE MOMENT SILAS UMBER HAD PASSED THROUGH the great gates, a shiver had passed from the cold ground and up into the stones of the manor. As he made his way closer to the house’s front door, the residents of Arvale felt that shiver as well, and all of them—whether residing in the lowest catacombs or the highest towers—became immediately aware of the approach of kin. Some woke from misty reveries of their former lives. Others began their long journeys from the outer corridors and distant wall towers to the great hall. A few folk of the house were not pleased, and would remain in quiet corners. But everyone would know of the arrival of the Janus; it was house business.

  Maud Umber was hopeful but uneasy. The cleverest of the house’s spirits would know what she’d done. She knew Jonas would be waiting for her. She traveled through winding corridors and long passages, unsure of how long her journey would take.

  When she arrived in the great hall, a single sharp voice rang across the polished stones of the chamber.

  “Who is this? Who is coming?”

  “Silas Umber, Undertaker of Lichport,” said Maud, refusing to be cowed, knowing he already knew the answers to his own questions.

  “Who has called him? Who has done this thing?” Jonas’s voice was edged with indictment and anger.

  “I have,” Maud said.

  Even as Maud softened her tone, the air seemed to bristle as their wills began to push and pull at each other.

  “Gods Bel
ow, Maud Umber! It was wrong to summon him. You know this. It is too soon,” accused Jonas sternly. He was tall, a robust man in gray clothes, standing bedside the monumental crest-carved fireplace. He gazed into the fire. The silver buttons on his long coat turned to mirrors of flame, and his lengthening shadow stretched out across the floor, like a finger pointing at a criminal.

  “Your actions have caused more trouble than you know. Sending the Messenger has woken—”

  “The house must come before all,” replied Maud matter-of-factly.

  “I agree. That is why we should have waited, consulted, made appropriate preparations.”

  “You find him too young?” asked Maud as she leaned forward, her long woolen sleeves draped across the table in front of her. She almost smiled, glad to argue about the boy’s merits because it shifted suspicion away from her motives.

  “He needs time. The boy is still in mourning.”

  “Beloved descendant, Jonas Umber, you are right, of course. But always and always it hath been thus: The Undertaker shall not be called forth until he, or she”—and she put special emphasis on the this last word—“‘has served for at least a score of years,’ or ‘unless the house have need of him.’ I have heard such noises from the sunken mansion—the dark huntsman stirs. And we have troubles concerning so many other matters. . . . Forgive me for letting my love of peace drive my actions. Of course, I should have consulted with you. But what’s done is done. And, in truth, the past has haunted me. The father refused the call because we waited too long and allowed him to become too independent, too foolish and sentimental about his work. He became set in his absurd, deluded habits, and now the noble office we’ve both held has been recast in shame. Without a living Janus our work shall never go apace. And what of that greater business? The Ebony Throne has too long sat empty and in abeyance. Who shall govern from that hallowed seat? Who shall once again command the dead and sit in reverend judgment over them and their estate? Who shall call the dead back once more into the circle of the sun? I am weary of waiting for the honors due to us.”