Isis - Douglas Clegg [17]
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