Isis - Douglas Clegg [16]
I returned to the toilet, and the sound began again, as if something had been waiting for me to return.
Now it was more like some small animal—a mouse, perhaps—batting at its confinement. I glanced about the floor, and looked behind the pipes, but saw nothing. The noise continued, and within it I heard the tiniest of chirps, again like a mouse or a small bird; and the thought went through my head that there was a bird trapped in the toilet bowl.
Somehow, I reasoned, briefly, that a bird had flown in, unnoticed, and had gone into the bowl and was drowning. The irrational notion almost made me smile.
I leaned over the crude chamber-pot of a toilet and drew aside the lid. It was full of reddish-brown water. I supposed no one used the water closet that much here. I drew the lid back over the bowl. At the same time, I noticed that the noise had stopped. I laughed. I reasoned too quickly that it had been the pipes themselves making a strange noise, and perhaps just the act of lifting the toilet lid had been enough to end it.
But the effect of this was as if I had opened an unseen door, or unlatched another hidden shelf in my grandfather’s library. I felt a strange coldness clutch at my throat, and the hairs at the back of my neck stood up as goose bumps covered my arms.
The strange scratching and chirping sound began again.
This time, I was sure it came from the bowl beneath the lid.
8
I stared at the bowl as the sound became louder, as if—yes—a bird fluttered its wings as it drowned in that dirty water.
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