Isis (10 page)

Authors: Douglas Clegg

BOOK: Isis

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I slept for the next several nights better than I had in many months. Harvey was at peace, and the terrible mistake I had made had been fixed, though I was heart-broken by losing him a second time.

Spence and Edyth announced their engagement, and I did not begrudge them their happiness. Our mother finally told us that our father had long ago left her for a woman in India and would probably never return again to his own ancestral home or to his wife and children. And though I felt terrible sadness at the loss of my brother again, I remembered his stories of this place of death and of new life—this place of the infinite, the radiance, the magnificence. I grew happy thinking of him there, not as Osiris who needed resurrection, but as a man whom I had once loved as my brother named Harvey Villiers who had gone on to a finer place, a place where I might someday see him at the docks when my own ship of death brought me to the harbor.

But one twilight, when I walked with Percy Marsh through the gardens, I saw a figure out at the Tombs—a man who seemed to be crouched down and nearly crawling on his belly.

When Percy left to return to his cottage, I went out in the hazy light as the evening darkened.

Harvey lay there on the ground, his wounds unhealed, his face torn and bloodied. He had dug his way out of the earth—this was evident from the filth upon him.

He said nothing, for his tongue had been eaten away by fish and his teeth had been broken to nubs in the fall. Half of his scalp had been peeled back and was rotting.

But I understood, and I went with him along the path.

I sat with him in the doorway of the Tombs and remembered our childhood, and the swings and the window and the play of Isis and Osiris and the trunk he had been afraid to climb into one day when he was too old to be afraid of such things.

In my mind, he whispered,
Death would not take me again. I cannot heal. I am neither living nor dead.

“I’m sorry for what I did,” I said.

Old Marsh went in my place. There is no room for me among the dead.

“Forever?” I asked.

He did not answer. I suppose he did not know. He seemed more like the little boy I had known when I was young—in our happiest times on the island, riding a tree swing, playing games near the water’s edge—than the corpse of a young man. He hugged me as a child might, and made sounds as if he were weeping.

At dawn, when he went to sleep in the Tombs, I dried all my tears as I helped him crawl into the coffin, with those dark sockets where his eyes had once rested staring up at me.

I drew the lid over his coffin and nailed it in place, and then sealed it again.

I slept several nights near him, and heard his tapping at the coffin. At first it was rapid. He moaned in pain. He made shrieking noises as if he were terrified of being trapped within that box.

I bit my lip to remain silent. I held my hands together as if in prayer to keep from wanting to open his coffin again.

I cried as he knocked against it, kicking at it from within, making guttural noises that must have been cries of torment.

You are Osiris,
I thought.
Trapped in your sarcophagus. I am Isis. But I will not release you. You have to die. If you can die, you will do so here. Please forgive me.

Gradually, after several nights, he stopped making any noise at all.

He did not speak in my mind, though I wished he would.

I did not open his tomb again, and when my mother died the following year, I took my inheritance and traveled overseas because I did not want to be near my brother’s tomb.

Some nights—whether in Paris or Cairo or New York—when I felt that window in my mind open, I thought I heard my brother Harvey’s voice. I could never understand what he was saying, for it was all whispering and strange utterances.

I hope that death has finally taken him, but even as I write this, he may be in that tomb, still, my beloved wonderful brother, buried alive but without the release of death, hunger without satisfaction, thirst without end, terror until the world itself might end.

Old Marsh had told us that the trick of calling the dead back to life was a one-way street, for no one in all of history had ever learned the way to send the dead back to Death again.

But the stone-hedges of the Tombs keep him in, and though my brother Spence and his wife Edyth now own Belerion Hall, I wonder if someone—someday—will hear him tap at the edge of his tomb.

I wonder if someone will break open that coffin and see what has become of my brother Harvey.

Will he be there with flesh and bones? Will he be dust, moving eternally, within a stone bier? Or will Death take pity on him, and on me? Will Death call him back, across the shores to that radiant journey? Or will he forever be there, trapped in a box until the world itself comes to an end?

I loved him more than life itself. I had called him back to life from that open window inside myself—that place where I could speak with the dead themselves, if I loved them enough.

I know the secret that Isis herself knew when she resurrected her brother Osiris, and the secret that the Maiden of Sorrow knew when she brought her lover back from the dead, and which the boy knew after he had grown up and owed his first-born to the dead warriors. Old Marsh himself knew.

The secret is:

Death has a price, and all who bargain with the dead must pay it.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information and inquiries, address Vanguard Press, 387 Park Avenue South, 12th Floor, NYC, NY 10016, or call (800) 343-4499.

Set in 12.5 point Garamond

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clegg, Douglas, 1958- Isis / Douglas Clegg. p. cm.

eISBN : 978-0-786-75149-5

1. Haunted houses—England—Fiction. 2. Death—Fiction. 3. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 4. Grief—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3553.L3918I75 2009

813’.54—dc22

2009009776

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