Isis - Douglas Clegg [18]
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 seem 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