Isis - Douglas Clegg [7]
“What?” I asked, my heart nearly leaping to my throat.
He pointed to the doors of the Tombs. “Those very doors. Open, where they had been locked. Three bodies at the threshold.”
“It was them,” I whispered.
He nodded. “Their fingers,” he rubbed the tips of his fingers together as he said this, “and the soles of their feet. All blackened. As if they’d been burned. The little son, the third finger of his right hand, cut off at the second knuckle. Upon their foreheads, ancient markings. Heathen symbols. It were that boy, grown up. His bride. And his son. Their spirits live between worlds, for a promise broken is a newborn curse. Death has a price, and all who bargain with the dead must pay it. You must never sleep there, for the dead enter your dreams. They look for ways back to this world. See that?”
He pointed around Belerion Hall’s property to the stone wall that surrounded the gardens and the Tombs and ran along the edge of the cliffs by the Laughing Maiden rock. “Beware a field hedged with stones. See there? The hedge holds in. Will not let out. Things lurk about places like that. Unseen things. In the garden, in the Tombs, up along the flagstone walk beneath the windows, even down in the Thunderbox Room, for the cellars are stone-hedges, too.” He chuckled at this last admission. “Even in places in a stone foundation. It’s all held in by those stones, which were put in place after those three bodies were found at the doorway of the Tombs.”
“To hold that boy and his bride and his son here forever?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Not them, though it might have done. No, it was so that if any should ever again call up such dead in times of trouble, the dead could not find their ways out to the highways to hunt down the ones who had summoned them. The stone-hedges blind and confuse them and keep them from knowing the paths that the dead would know.”
“I wish I could see the dead,” I said, too brightly.
“The old people had a way of doing it,” Old Marsh said, but he pointed his pipe at me as if about to scold me. “You mustn’t, miss. But there is a game children play sometimes that comes from the old days. They take a blindfold and spin around, and them’s what’s got the touch, they talk with the dead.”
“Blindman’s buff?” I clapped my hands together. “Lovely! We shall play it and call the dead.”
“No, miss,” the gardener said, “never do that. The dead must sleep, and we must leave them be. Only God’s meant to wake ’em, on Doomsday. Not for us to do it.”
As Harvey walked with me back to our home, he nudged me and said in a bad approximation of Old Marsh’s Cornish accent, “Beware a field hedged with stones, deary, for unseen dead look for their paths but canna git out.”
“But Old Marsh believes it.”
“Yes, he does,” Harvey chuckled. “He plants his corn by the dark of the moon, and he won’t let a black dog set foot in the gardens. I heard he pays one of the old women in town to keep the Evil Eye off him, as well. He is quite the nutter. But, miss,” again he imitated Old Marsh’s voice, growling a bit as he spoke, “don’t be entering the Tombs on Lammas night ’less ye have bathed in holy water and said yer prayers. Ye must nev’r sleep there for the dead enter yer dreams, miss.”
I ignored all warnings one afternoon when I stole the keys to the Tombs from the little desk that Mrs. Haworth kept for her accounts and papers—and crouched down to open its door.
THREE
1
I did not go far in my exploration, but stood just inside the low door and looked down upon a kind of rock shelter.
It smelled of mold and earth. Though I had no candle, I could see the stone tombs as well as what seemed to be a pile of rubbish—carriage wheels and thin wooden boards, no doubt thrown into the Tombs within the past sixty years by my grandfather.
I thought of the boy and the warriors.
The story of the Maiden of Sorrow and her undead lover.
The Laughing Maiden who had been turned to stone by God.
I stepped back into