Mistle Child (Undertaken Trilogy) Read Online Free PDF Page B

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