Death Watch: The Undertaken 01 by Ari Berk

Author:Ari Berk [Berk, Ari]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Issues, Love & Romance, Family, Juvenile Fiction, Paranormal, Fantasy & Magic, Horror & Ghost Stories, Parents, Death & Dying
ISBN: 9781416991151
Google: LEdLWlJN1SEC
Amazon: 1416991158
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2011-11-15T08:00:00+00:00

When Silas returned home, Mrs. Bowe had dinner waiting. The table was set with two bowls, fresh bread and butter, and a large pot of soup set on an iron trivet. Steam rose toward the light that hung over the table.

“See anything interesting on your walk?” asked Mrs. Bowe as she ladled soup into Silas’s bowl.

“Nothing much.”

Mrs. Bowe nodded at the lie, handed him the bread, and said nothing.

DESPITE THE FEARFUL VISION at the Beacon, Silas continued to use the death watch. The sound of its ticking attracted him, and he told himself that if his father had left it to him, it must be okay to use it. Just once in a while. Not every day. He would trust his intuition, and maybe whatever the death watch showed him would lead somewhere.

More often than not, with its hand depressed, the death watch showed Silas things that he was at a loss to define, although these mysteries were themselves enticing. Each new vision was an invitation to use the watch again, just for a minute, just to see what else might be present. He told himself he was looking for “clues.”

He saw forms that moved across the earth that were not ghosts yet seemed spectral in the way they rose up out of the ground into the landscape and then faded or fell away. With the watch, Silas could see red, lately fallen leaves that were blowing on the wind suddenly become something more than leaves. At the edges of the path along the river, the leaves swirled and rose into vaguely human shapes. Silas wondered what they were; he queried the air, but the shapes had no voice and seemed to have no mind and so paid him no heed.

With the watch hands held, the leaves rose up, turned in the air, and drew themselves up and together into arms, legs, the suggestion of head and torso. The more Silas watched them, the more he was convinced they were not ghosts at all, but only memories. Like the leaves themselves, dry reminders of the passing years.

At first the image of the walking leaf forms was unsettling, but as Silas watched them he began to notice they never went very far. One would “walk” a ways, perhaps a few steps, perhaps a hundred yards at most, and then fall back to earth, its leaves quickly scattered. Others would spin upward in the wind and move as one form in another direction, then dissolve into the brown rotting leaf horde, cast down and indolent again on the grass.

After seeing the leaf-wraiths several times, Silas gave them little thought, even when he began to see them without using the watch. People had always walked along the river, as they went here and there, and that long line of folk left small impressions of themselves on the ground. Year after year, the earth bore their weight, carried their stride, remembered the passage of all the faceless wanderers—memories held by the land. Nothing more.

When he walked home, the leaves would eddy behind him.

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