Isis - Douglas Clegg [20]
3
After a brief interval, my dead brother released me. I lay on my side, wondering if my sanity had fled me, or if this were true.
If I had truly resurrected him from death.
In the flesh.
I lay with him out in the wet grass, near the fallen body of our gardener not more than twenty feet away from us.
This is me, I thought. I have a talent. I call the dead back. I am like that boy of the legends. I am like the Maiden of Sorrow.
I thought of that small bird in the bowl of the Thunderbox Room. The bird that had materialized, as if my mind had created it again and again. As if something had broken in my mind when my rage had grown too unwieldy, so that I could not quite turn off this ability.
I sat up, finally, looking at him.
Harvey, wearing the clothes he’d been buried in, sat with his legs crossed. He had picked up a small blossom in his hand, and marveled at it.
“Did you miss life?” I asked.
He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again, I sensed a seething anger, yet his voice seemed calm and steady.
“You must pay for all this. I had gone to a beautiful place. To a place that makes this earth seem ugly and monstrous. All I see here is terror and madness, my sister.”
I looked out across the expanse of night, the moon an opal above the sea. I wanted him to stop. “You’re here now. You’re home. You’re with me,” I said.
He leaned closer, his breath upon my ear, and spoke in whispers. “I was in paradise, and with me were creatures more radiant than any of this world. The trees that blossomed there were full of the spirits of the eternal. The air was inspiration itself. The grasses sang music that was finer than any you have known. All that was lost to the world was found there. All to which I had felt empty in this life, filled. All that had been mystery, answered. All of my ignorance was cured with the lamp of illumination, raised by a maiden of knowledge.”
He drew back from me and covered his face with his hands. Was he weeping? It seemed so, yet in his remembering of death, I felt as if he were describing the greatest of joys. “It is more magnificent than what I thought heaven might be, and yet it is all of its wonder, as well.” He wiped his eyes and reached out for me. I felt the warmth of life in his flesh as he clasped my hand. “Iris, we are shut off from it in this life because if any knew its magnificence, life itself would end, for all who are living would seek death. But as the egg must be in the nest for the bird to fly from it, so the living must live and die when nature intends so that the shell may be broken at the point when the living have wings to fly. It is as if in life we are blind, and in death we see. In life we think in error, but in death we know and love and understand. Those who died many centuries before me told their stories, and of the journey we might take in this new existence, and the questions we might ask of the great kings of this new world. I fell in love there, and she loved me.”
“But you were dead. You were gone,” I protested, tears filling my eyes. “My life was at an end without you.”
He laughed as if at a great joke. “Death is not the end of things, my sister. It is the beginning of a greater adventure than this small life you cherish can hold. And beyond these shores of death, there are great ships that fly from the golden seas to the skies of pearl. I heard of wonders from those travelers who had been dead many thousands of years. These lie beyond death itself, in another place where the dead may journey. And you,” he said, sadness in his face and the slump of his shoulders. “You call me from that. From the arms of my beloved. From the tales of all worlds past. From the eternal blessedness. Called me with those ancient curses and that window.”
“Window?” I asked.
“You know of it,” he said.
He stepped closer to me and pressed his thumb to the center of my forehead. His touch was warm as