Death Watch by Ari Berk

You were born here.”
    Silas didn’t speak, and he felt embarrassed that Mrs. Bowe could see he was becoming emotional. He wasn’t crying yet, but his hands were shaking badly and he felt close to tears. She put her hands on his shoulders and said, “It’s all right, Silas. This house has waited a long time to see you again. I think it’s okay to feel a little … overcome.”
    “Yes, ma’am. Thank you,” said Silas, his voice breaking.
    She opened a door leading to a hallway with another door at the far end. “That door will let you into your father’s house. I think it might be best if you see it first by yourself. This is your father’s place, Silas. Part of him is still here, waiting for you. You go on in. And Silas, dear? Everything in there is yours. Everything. You take anything you want, you understand? Anything. Your father’s study is just across the hall on the ground floor through the bigopen doors. Perhaps today, you may just wish to remain on the ground floor. I’m not really sure about the condition of the upper rooms. I’ll be right here if you need anything. You just come back here to me when you’re done, or give a call and I’ll come to you, all right, dear?”
    “Yes, ma’am,” Silas whispered. He walked down the hall toward the closed door, paused only for a moment, then reached out, turned the bronze doorknob, and opened it.
    Right away, Silas could smell his dad. A moldy smell. Not rotten or bad, just the smell of someone who read old books and kept a lot of them around and spent his time in old places. The smell of dust. The smell of the past after it had been put up on a shelf and left to sit for a while. If it were a cologne, it would be called Cherished Neglect. That’s what his dad smelled like. Old silver, vellum pages and leather bindings, like a two-hundred-year-old suit of clothes from the attic, like a stack of magazines stored in a basement, like the lining of a steamer trunk that had been around the world, or a blazer that hasn’t been laundered in a few years. That much of his father at least was still here.
    The quiet reminded him of his dad too.
    The waiting stillness of his father’s house was so very different from the captive, subdued quiet of Uncle’s. That was the quiet of a place holding its breath. Here was the stillness of a home at ease with itself. He felt safe here, surrounded by his dad’s dusty things. Comforted by the presiding peace of this house, he realized that at Uncle’s, he might always be a little on edge, even when reading or looking over the treasures in Uncle’s wonderful collections. Maybe that would pass in time.
    His father’s large study was on the ground floor of the house. Although it hadn’t been kept up well or painted in a long time, there were lots of carved details in the house’s architecture thatgave the place a feeling of history. Carvings adorned the tops of the doorways, and many of the walls were covered in faded wood paneling.
    One entire wall was covered with high bookshelves that spilled over with volumes of every size. Great folios lay on their sides toward the bottom, and right up to the ceiling were shelf after shelf of leather-bound books, vellum-bound manuscripts, nineteenth-century volumes of folklore, whole runs of journals. He passed his hands over some of the fine embossed bindings as he thought,
I am a book also, words and thoughts and stories held together by flesh. We open and close ourselves to the world. We are read by others or put away by them. We wait to be seen, sitting quietly on shelves for someone to bother having a look inside us
. He drew one of the early tomes from the shelf and read its title page,
Anatomy of Melancholy
.
    “Mine or his?” muttered Silas to himself as he returned the book to the shelf.
    It looked like nothing had been put away or straightened up, so Silas guessed all was as it had been the night Amos disappeared. When he looked around the study, he could almost see his dad