Isis - Douglas Clegg [15]
I understood, then, where his madness had come from: He, too, had experienced the loss of the good and the victory of the evil.
7
Sifting through my grandfather’s nude photographs in the study, I began to see the women in them as of the devil himself. I went to my grandfather’s great mahogany desk and searched for the scissors beneath various old papers.
I neatly cut the heads off the women in the pictures. I imagined each was a state execution, and this would kill the women who had somehow influenced Spence to lie with Edyth. I thought of the two of them passing the filthy pictures back and forth as Spence became aroused with passion and Edyth began to allow him intimacies. I took the scissors and the headless photos into the cellars that day, down into the water closet used by servants that led out into the outdoor stairwell. I decided I would flush the pictures down the drain, out of the house, for—having looked at them—I began to even blame the pictures for that terrible day.
In the Thunderbox Room in the cellars, I looked at the cracked mirror, imagining the demons from my grandfather’s books circling around Edyth, tearing at her clothes. I imagined Jezebel and Delilah and Rahab and Ruth and Naomi, headless, coming toward her with a great pair of scissors and cutting off Edyth’s head. I imagined Spence hanging himself from the chandelier in the foyer. All of them dying horribly—even my beloved mother, who had allowed her mind to turn inward and keep her sick so that she would not have to be our mother again; my father, in Burma, or in India, or in one of the war-torn countries that was the source of our wealth; and the Gray Minister, at his own locked window, calling down the Wrath of God upon his household.
My rage burned, and my face felt hot. I leaned over the pump and pushed down on the lever until the ice-cold water poured out into the square sink. I took up a small and worn bar of soap and pressed it to my face. The scent assaulted me. The girls in the kitchen had made this for Harvey. It was my brother’s smell. I splashed my face, scrubbing it with soap and then rinsing it off, closing my eyes as the soap stung beneath my eyelids. When I had washed it all off again, I looked at myself in the mirror, but did not see myself.
I saw Edyth’s face, and it made me furious to see her.
It was as if she had triumphed in some way with Harvey’s death.
It was if his dying had made her permanently part of our family.
As if her words to me when I’d been younger had taken on a reality.
“Someday,” she had said, “you might be where I am and I might be where you are.”
I wanted her to leave. I wanted her to die. I wanted to expose what she and Spence continued to do in this house. I wanted to destroy them both.
Those nude photographs in my grandfather’s Bible were dark and evil, not the beauties of art that I had once imagined them.
No, they were as much demon as the books on summoning demons and ancient spells that my grandfather had collected.
I knew now they were seducers taking from men, from others—to win a battle, to defeat the men that gazed upon them.
They were bad women who sent good men to their deaths.
I took the scissors and looked at my face in the mirror. Looked at Edyth in my mind. At Spence. At my mother.
I hated all of us. Harvey had been too good for the world.
I lifted the scissors and scraped them into the skin of my wrist and carved my brother’s secret name into my own flesh.
OSIRIS.
That is when I first heard a slight noise, as if something were scratching at the window. I almost dreaded glancing over, for I was afraid in some childish and irrational way that I had called some demon to my side. The window into the stairwell showed nothing, yet my sense of dread remained.
When I went out through the door, and then through a second doorway into the mossy stone stairwell with its drains