Isis - Douglas Clegg [19]
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