Isis Read online

  I drew the lid aside.

  In the water, a swallow—the kind I often saw at twilight swooping and flying along the trees and the eaves of our home—batted at the water as if trying to fly upward.

  I felt, for the first time, as if I stood at the edge of some borderland, ill-defined by the physical world.

  I thought that, like my grandfather, I might be going mad.

  The bird drowned as soon as I reached for it. When I took it out into the night to lay its body down upon the flagstones, I was convinced that I had begun losing my grasp of what was real and what was not.

  But I felt that brief spark of what I would later come to regard as psychic ability. That window—which opened in my mind when I fell with my brother—seemed to burst wide again.

  9

  That night, I stayed up until dawn, poring over my grandfather’s books of the sacred and the profane.

  At sunrise, I went to Spence’s room.

  I opened the door to look in on the two of them lying in bed.

  I could not even look directly at Edyth or my brother, but instead looked through them.

  Edyth shrieked when she saw the scissors in my hands, and while I tried to explain that it was not to hurt her or him, Spence leapt from his bed and knocked them from my fingers.

  The scissors scuttled across the floor toward the wardrobe.

  “You have to let this go!” he shouted. “You are driving all of us mad! You had no right to come into my room! You have no right to interfere with Edyth! It was you who killed him, Iris! You with your foolishness! I was there when you fell! I stood behind Harvey when he reached for you. You pulled him out of that window, Iris! We could have saved both of you, but you pulled him out!”

  “It’s a lie! It’s a lie!” I cried, covering my face, trying to block out his terrible voice.

  “Ask anyone who was there!” he shouted, his face above me, a monstrous face, a liar’s face. “Ask Edyth! No, ask Percy! Ask Elizabeth from the kitchen! They all saw it. They all saw you reach up and pull him down! If you had just let him draw you up, you both would be here. You are the one who took him to his death! I could kill you, Iris! I could kill you!”

  SIX

  1

  I ran out to the Tombs with keys in hand, stumbling several times. My own tears blinded me. I did not understand why my brother had told me such terrible lies, but I knew he was wrong.

  I did not pull Harvey out the window. I could not have done it. We were doing our old trapeze act, and I was meant to reach for him. Yet, in my mind, as I recalled those brief moments before we fell, I could not help but now see that Spence was correct. I had been too eager and had felt Harvey lose his balance as I reached up for his arms. But I did not pull him out of the window. He had fallen; it was an accident. If anyone was to blame, it was Edyth Blight. Edyth Blight and her harlotry, and slapping me hard enough that I fell backward from the tall window.

  Edyth had killed him and had nearly killed me.

  I pressed my hands to my face as I fell down in the grass in front of the doors of the Tombs. Please, Harvey, let me know you forgive me. Please.

  I unlocked the doors of the Tombs and ducked my head to take the steps down among the narrow rock corridors where the Villiers were buried.

  I checked the graves marked along the plastered stone wall and looked in the recesses of rock where stone biers had been placed.

  I found Harvey’s tomb, and tore a strip of cloth from my dress. I used it as a blindfold, for I wanted to block out all of the world around me. I used it the way Old Marsh had told me blindman’s buff had once been played, not as a game, but as a way of speaking with the dead. I turned about until I was disoriented. Strangely, I did feel as if I had stepped into another world, and in that self-imposed darkness, I began to feel as if others were there, surrounding me.

  I wanted to see Harvey again. I wished with all my might that he would come to me.

  I prayed first to God, and then to the gods I had heard once roamed this land.

  I nearly conjured his face in my mind.

  Remembering how we had once tried to summon our father by using an old spell, I recited this as well. I imagined that I held the bones of the dead in my arms as I said this, and wished for them to rise up from their pathways and bring my brother back to me, to life.

  “Let’s summon the dead,” Harvey had said to me our first spring in Belerion Hall. He and I had laughed as we sat down at the Laughing Maiden after supper and said that we wanted to see our father. Harvey used a handkerchief for a blindfold and put it on, turning around and around a few times. At first we laughed more, and then we grew sad, for our father was alive. We could not summon the living with the ancient Chaldean summoning spell, and it was the living we wanted then.

  When the night had grown dark, Harvey had slipped his arms around me in an embrace that was both comfortable and familiar and that still haunted me after a few years had gone by.

  We had talked of death then, and of life, and of how we would both grow up and move away from Belerion Hall. “But I will always find you,” he said. “Just summon me from the ends of the earth. Just call me here.”

  The smell of lavender; the whisper at my ear as he told me how much I meant to him and always had; and how he called me Isis after our play, and I called him Osiris. And like Isis, I told him, I would always find him and bring him back home with me.

  That night had seemed innocent and sweet, but as I stood before his grave with a blindfold on so that I might be distracted from my purpose, I felt a shiver of terror go through me.

  Yet, I could not stop.

  I prayed to the dead.

  Send him to me.

  No matter how.

  Bring my brother home to me.

  I will give you anything for him to return. Anything at all. My life. My life. All lives. All that I can.

  Hours passed, and I heard a few sounds, as if some small animal—a rat, perhaps—skittered along the carved rock floor.

  Then, I heard what seemed to be a man clearing his throat. Yet I did not take off my blindfold to see who was there with me. I did not want to break the spell of imagining that Harvey had arisen as if he were Christ from the tomb. I knew that once I drew that blindfold from my eyes, I would see the nothing that was there: the carved rock with the old tombs and burial places. While the blindfold remained, I could believe that he stood beside me, nearly touching me.

  I could believe that I smelled lavender.

  As I was about to give up this foolishness, I felt a draft of chilly air as if a window had opened, but within me. Some call this the higher self, but for me, it felt as if it was someone other than me, some other girl. I called her Isis, in order to see her as different from myself.

  Come back to me, Harvey. Come now. Come from those highways of the dead. I cannot live without you. I cannot live if I can’t see you again.

  2

  Later that night, I stood looking out the window, remembering Harvey’s embrace as we fell from it.

  The moon’s white light cast itself upon the sunken garden just beyond the flagstone walk. The wind blew in gusts from the sea and lightning played along the far reaches of the horizon, though it would be hours before the storm came to our estate.

  I saw a wriggling movement in the shadows of the stone walls.

  A whirl of motion, as of leaves and seedlings stirred up by a sudden breeze.

  As if I were connecting parts of a puzzle drawn upon the air, I saw a strange form manifesting itself from the soft white milk thistles that blew in a circular motion at the garden wall.

  It seemed the outline of a man.

  He arrived in a breeze where thistle and deer-broom whirled and formed a pattern that at first I could not distinguish as anything other than a flurry of wisps and seedlings. But gradually, as the wind rose up, the flurry grew to a small whirlwind in one corner of the garden, clearly visible to me.

  Within it, I saw a man’s face and form, and though it did not see
m to be Harvey, I felt it was. I felt I had summoned him and conjured him and had stepped into a kind of happy madness, half-believing he had returned and half-knowing I had let my imagination run away with me.

  I went down to the garden, hoping to see him. My heart beat as if it wanted to burst from my body; my throat grew dry as I ran along the walls to the gate into the sunken gardens.

  When I reached the place where the milk thistle had blown, I saw nothing but the tiny seedlings whirling in the brisk wind.

  This did not dampen my belief.

  I walked toward the Tombs, following the thin paths between the stone-hedges to get to the cliff.

  3

  The doors were thrown back as if by a great force of wind, and a man stood there with a lantern.

  He glanced over at me, shining his lantern my way.

  Old Marsh wore a look of sorrow upon his face. “You called him, miss. You called him. You must send him back now. You must send him back. He won’t be the brother you remember. It ain’t his spirit comes back. I told you that. It’s the soul of death comes back, that’s what it is, miss. The soul of death in disguise like your brother. Only the one who called him can send him back. I saw the bird in the cellars, in the bowl, miss. I know what you done. I know what you called.”

  4

  I was still but a girl, and even at that, my world had been one of shelter and privilege. I had no real understanding of life or death, and when the gardener told me about what he had seen in the Thunderbox Room, I laughed. “It’s him. It’s all him!” I said.

  “Miss, it’s you. You been touched—the fall did it. The fall almost took you with the dead. But you come back and you got that touch of something. I seen it before with a woman in the village. She near-drowned and when she come back, she got touched, too.”

  “If it’s me, then I’m glad,” I said. “I want him back. I want him back with us.”

  “Unseen things come with accidents,” Old Marsh mumbled to himself, clucking like a roosting hen. “Happens sometimes. I heard a man got hit with an iron bar once and he predicted the future. You, miss, you opened a door to the dead when you fell. That’s what it is. And you keep opening it. Need to close it now.”

  “But if Harvey’s here,” I said, “I just want to see him. Just once more. Just once.”

  “I told you,” he said. “I warned you. It ain’t him. It’s like something that knows what you want and shows it to you. But it’s only reflecting what you want to see.”

  “What’s there to be afraid of?” I said. “Thistles floating in a breeze? A swallow drowning in a bowl?”

  “You shall know soon enough, miss,” he said, sadness in his voice. “For it doesn’t stop until it’s good and ready to stop. Or until the one who calls up the dead, sends them back. He will ask you to promise him something now. And you must make that promise so that he will go back into death’s embrace. When the dead been promised, the dead be paid.”

  5

  As we stood there, I saw a shadow figure walking out along the stone-hedges, nearest the cliff. “He’s there! Look!” I shouted, my heart beating fast.

  “Miss! Miss!” Old Marsh cried out, and when he looked at the cliff side, he dropped his lantern to the earth and I heard a terrible coughing coming from the old gardener.

  I knew it was Harvey, and I ran toward the figure, but as I reached him, no one was there at all. And yet, right up until I reached the spot where he had stood, I saw Harvey’s features more clearly in that dark night than I had on any bright afternoon when he had been alive.

  I glanced around, my arms outstretched as if I were truly playing blindman’s buff with him where sight itself was my blindfold.

  “Come back! I’m here!” I cried. “Come back! Show me! Show me!”

  I sobbed and cried out to God and the angels and the devils and all the gods that had once been in Cornwall. Tears began to cloud my vision and my thoughts. I began whirling around and around, hoping to see Harvey again.

  Hoping to call him from my mind, from his grave, into a physical form again as I had seen him a shadow and a whirlwind of thistle.

  I heard Old Marsh’s calls at a distance but ignored his warnings. He shouted for me to draw back from the edge, his voice nearing as I spun about.

  I turned around and around, feeling as if I were dancing, as if Harvey would stop me from whirling. I knew in some reckless way that I spun in this slow, graceful dervish dance toward the cliff’s edge, but I no longer cared. Let me fall, I thought. Let me fall so I can be with him. Fall the way I was meant to fall down from the window. I belong at the bottom of the sea, on the rocks, in the harbor. I belong to Death. I belong to Harvey. I owe him my life.

  And just as I felt my foot catch in a crag of a rock and a dirt hole, and looked down to see the crashing sea below, and know that I might fall and all of this would be over and that I would join him in the Tombs and follow those paths of the dead, someone grabbed me about the waist and drew me to the grass again. I fell backwards onto Old Marsh, and he fell, as well, so that I lay atop him. “Marsh,” I said, “Marsh, Marsh.” I wept and laughed and tried to rise up, but he pulled back against him and I felt a strange strength in the old man’s arms.

  “You called me back,” Harvey whispered in my ear.

  SEVEN

  1

  My brother, in flesh and bone, had returned from the dead and had drawn me back from death itself and wrapped me in his embrace.

  I felt as if I were freezing as he held me.

  2

  I struggled against him, but he held me so tightly that I began to find it difficult to breathe.

  The lavender of his whisper chilled me. “You should not have ignored Old Marsh, Iris.” Although my brother’s voice spoke, and the small hairs at the back of my neck rose up against his warm breath, it was not Harvey, and yet it was. He spoke in a way that seemed almost foreign, and yet I knew it was my brother—the smell of him, the feel of his arms, and even a strange perverse comfort came to me as he held me there in the grass. His voice sounded as if he were just learning to form consonants and vowels. Gradually as he spoke, his voice was his again, and I almost felt comforted by it. “I am sorry to tell you, my sister, but there is a price when you call the dead back. It will be paid. It is your debt. Do you remember the story of the boy and the warriors? The debts of those who call the dead will be paid.”

  I felt as if ice ran in my veins as he spoke; this man that was not Harvey and yet was wholly him.

  As he clutched me, I craned my neck that I might see Old Marsh and call to him to rescue me, but Harvey whispered, “He came to the cliff’s edge to draw you back, but when he saw me, my sweet, I’m afraid his weary heart gave out. Poor old chap. His eyes went wide and the pipe dropped from his lips and spittle ran down his white beard. But then, you did promise in your prayers to the dead that you would give anything for me to come back to you, didn’t you?”

  3

  After a brief interval, my dead brother released me. I lay on my side, wondering if my sanity had fled me, or if this were true.

  If I had truly resurrected him from death.

  In the flesh.

  I lay with him out in the wet grass, near the fallen body of our gardener not more than twenty feet away from us.

  This is me, I thought. I have a talent. I call the dead back. I am like that boy of the legends. I am like the Maiden of Sorrow.

  I thought of that small bird in the bowl of the Thunderbox Room. The bird that had materialized, as if my mind had created it again and again. As if something had broken in my mind when my rage had grown too unwieldy, so that I could not quite turn off this ability.

  I sat up, finally, looking at him.

  Harvey, wearing the clothes he’d been buried in, sat with his legs crossed. He had picked up a small blossom in his hand, and marveled at it.

  “Did you miss life?” I asked.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again, I sensed a seething anger, yet his
voice seemed calm and steady.

  “You must pay for all this. I had gone to a beautiful place. To a place that makes this earth seem ugly and monstrous. All I see here is terror and madness, my sister.”

  I looked out across the expanse of night, the moon an opal above the sea. I wanted him to stop. “You’re here now. You’re home. You’re with me,” I said.