Isis

by Douglas Clegg

  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 any living man’s might be. “Here.” He dropped his hand to his side and looked at me with an intense scrutiny. In the legends of the dead returning, it was often said that their eyes were empty or pitch black, but his eyes were the warm blue eyes of my brother. His hair was dark and had grown long in death, and his skin, though pallid, glowed with life. “In your mind. The moment I died. I felt it, too. A window opened inside you. A window, and you are on its ledge. It is why you could call me at all. But I wish . . . I wish you had not.”

  He walked slowly with an uncertain gait over toward the Laughing Maiden stone. I got up to follow him, and as we reached it, he pointed at the grass.

  Old Marsh lay there, his eyes wide and his mouth open, his tongue hanging out. “Fear stopped his heart. Death came with me and touched him. Look, he is like a shell,” Harvey said. “Do you see? We are shells, and inside us, the bird is born that must fly. Poor old man. I loved him, and I loved his stories. It was not meant to be his time.”

  Harvey bent down and pressed the dead man’s tongue back between his lips, closing his mouth. Then, he put his fingers over his eyes, shutting them. “The body at death is at rest. At peace. Do you see this? No, no, you see the terror of death. I tell you, Iris, there is more terror in a day of life than there is at the moment of death. It is as if a door has opened to a prison, though you do not believe it is a prison while you exist within it.” He turned to look back at me. “Do you know what I felt when I died?”

  I shook my head, more tears coming to my eyes. “Please don’t speak of it, Harvey. Please. I can’t bear to remember. You are alive now. You are here. That is all that matters.”

  “I felt as if I could truly breathe,” he said. He whispered a prayer over Old Marsh’s body. “He is, right now, seeing the green cliffs at the other side. The mermaids along the shore sing to him. The light—it is like all lights, and yet like none I had ever before seen. Perhaps his wife is there to greet him. Or an old love. Sometimes, they wait. Sometimes, you see the dead come in to the harbor, and their old dogs are all along the docks, wagging their tails, for they have waited for their masters and mistresses for many years. You see mothers who have missed their sons. Fathers who had never spoken of love to their children, ready to embrace them as they voyage from the end of life. It shows the lies of this world, you see. We are wrong about so many things here. Mankind has done terrible things, yet we are forgiven. Those who have been trodden upon are lifted up there. All wrong is righted.” He wiped at the edge of his eyes though he shed no tears. “You do not know what you have done, Iris. You do not know.”

  “But I love you,” I whispered feebly. “I missed you. I could not bear it, knowing I might have . . . that I . . . that if I had fallen . . .”

  “Shh,” he said, rising up again. He put his hand over my mouth. His hand felt warm, full of blood, the hand of a living man. “Death is a gift, so long as it is nature’s hand. But this,” he drew his hand away, and nodded toward the dead man in the grass. “When we are called back unnaturally, Death demands a price, for there is always a balance. If I am alive, then someone else must die before his time. This is what you have done. But he is the lucky one. He is at peace. I know what awaits him, and I envy him.”

  “You are truly yourself,” I said, surprised even as I said it. “I feared you might be . . .”

  “The soul of Death?” he asked, with a weary grin upon his face. “You call it ‘death’ to smudge filth upon it. You should call it ‘the infinite.’ That is what it is. It is existence without end. It is world without end, amen.”

  I could not help myself. I nearly threw myself at him, embracing him as he had embraced me when he drew me back from the cliff. I wept against his collar. “Please forgive me, Harvey. But I could not live without you. I could not let you leave. It is not home if you are not here.”

  “So be it,” he whispered against my ear. “But we will both pay a price for what you have done, I am afraid.”

  He would not return with me to the house, but insisted on going to the Tombs. “I am more comfortable there,” he said. “The bones of the dead remind me of that wonderful place I’ve left.”

  4

  So, he slept his first night in his grave, and swore me to secrecy that I not tell Spence or our mother or any of the household of his return.

  At dawn, I went to find Percy Marsh to tell him that his father had died. The household was in a flurry over this, and my brother Spence went off to arrange a funeral for the loyal groundskeeper who had served Belerion Hall for more than forty years.

  By late afternoon, I went to the Tombs again to look at my brother as he slept, for the dead sleep in the day and rise at sunset.

  When he opened his eyes at dusk, my brother begged me to kill him. “I have dreamed of it again. I long to go there,” he said.

  But I could not bring myself to hurt him. At night, we walked along the cliff’s edge and he told me much of what he could remember of the land of the dead, although he had already begun forgetting parts of it. He asked me if I had seen other manifestations of my talent—had the bird come back? What of the whirling of the thistles? Had I seen anything in the sunken gardens? When I told him that none of these things—or any others—had occurred again, he grew silent. I asked him why this was important to him, for I felt these were outward signs of the grace bestowed upon me for raising him from his tomb. He would not tell me, although he spoke of “debt of return” and the “balance of dissonance.”

  On the third night, when he rose from the Tombs, he told me that Death itself spoke to him in a dream. “Do you r
emember the play? Of Osiris in Egypt? Do you know why Isis sought Osiris and brought him back from the dead?”

  “Because he was her brother,” I said. “And because she loved him dearly.”

  “No,” Harvey said, turning away from me to face the sea beneath the cliffs. “It was because she was jealous that Death had him when she wanted him all for herself. Many died so that Isis could bring Osiris back from the land of the dead.”

  Briefly, he looked back at me and in the moonlight, perhaps he smiled. “Do you know something else? Life has made me afraid of death again. That is what it is meant to do. Look down there.” He motioned for me to come close to him. He pointed down to the darkness below the cliffs, the sound of the crashing waves; the moon, as it emerged from behind a cloud, cast an eerie light upon the rocks far below us. “To fall from a window is terrifying. But to fall to the rocks, to the sea, is a poem.”

  I tried to draw him back from the cliff’s edge, but he pushed me away, and I fell onto the grass.

  My dead brother stepped off the edge of the world and went to his death again.

  EIGHT

  1

  When the body was found, swept up by the sea not a mile away, it was not known who it was, but upon examination, the local doctor, who acted often as not as coroner, claimed that the man had been dead for at least a year or more, judging by the rotting of the corpse.

  2

  I slept for the next several nights better than I had in many months. Harvey was at peace, and the terrible mistake I had made had been fixed, though I was heart-broken by losing him a second time.

  Spence and Edyth announced their engagement, and I did not begrudge them their happiness. Our mother finally told us that our father had long ago left her for a woman in India and would probably never return again to his own ancestral home or to his wife and children. And though I felt terrible sadness at the loss of my brother again, I remembered his stories of this place of death and of new life—this place of the infinite, the radiance, the magnificence. I grew happy thinking of him there, not as Osiris who needed resurrection, but as a man whom I had once loved as my brother named Harvey Villiers who had gone on to a finer place, a place where I might someday see him at the docks when my own ship of death brought me to the harbor.

  But one twilight, when I walked with Percy Marsh through the gardens, I saw a figure out at the Tombs—a man who seemed to be crouched down and nearly crawling on his belly.

  When Percy left to return to his cottage, I went out in the hazy light as the evening darkened.

  Harvey lay there on the ground, his wounds unhealed, his face torn and bloodied. He had dug his way out of the earth—this was evident from the filth upon him.

  He said nothing, for his tongue had been eaten away by fish and his teeth had been broken to nubs in the fall. Half of his scalp had been peeled back and was rotting.

  But I understood, and I went with him along the path.

  I sat with him in the doorway of the Tombs and remembered our childhood, and the swings and the window and the play of Isis and Osiris and the trunk he had been afraid to climb into one day when he was too old to be afraid of such things.

  In my mind, he whispered, Death would not take me again. I cannot heal. I am neither living nor dead.

  “I’m sorry for what I did,” I said.

  Old Marsh went in my place. There is no room for me among the dead.

  “Forever?” I asked.

  He did not answer. I suppose he did not know. He seemed more like the little boy I had known when I was young—in our happiest times on the island, riding a tree swing, playing games near the water’s edge—than the corpse of a young man. He hugged me as a child might, and made sounds as if he were weeping.

  At dawn, when he went to sleep in the Tombs, I dried all my tears as I helped him crawl into the coffin, with those dark sockets where his eyes had once rested staring up at me.

  I drew the lid over his coffin and nailed it in place, and then sealed it again.

  I slept several nights near him, and heard his tapping at the coffin. At first it was rapid. He moaned in pain. He made shrieking noises as if he were terrified of being trapped within that box.

  I bit my lip to remain silent. I held my hands together as if in prayer to keep from wanting to open his coffin again.

  I cried as he knocked against it, kicking at it from within, making guttural noises that must have been cries of torment.

  You are Osiris, I thought. Trapped in your sarcophagus. I am Isis. But I will not release you. You have to die. If you can die, you will do so here. Please forgive me.

  Gradually, after several nights, he stopped making any noise at all.

  3

  He did not speak in my mind, though I wished he would.

  I did not open his tomb again, and when my mother died the following year, I took my inheritance and traveled overseas because I did not want to be near my brother’s tomb.

  Some nights—whether in Paris or Cairo or New York—when I felt that window in my mind open, I thought I heard my brother Harvey’s voice. I could never understand what he was saying, for it was all whispering and strange utterances.

  I hope that death has finally taken him, but even as I write this, he may be in that tomb, still, my beloved wonderful brother, buried alive but without the release of death, hunger without satisfaction, thirst without end, terror until the world itself might end.

  Old Marsh had told us that the trick of calling the dead back to life was a one-way street, for no one in all of history had ever learned the way to send the dead back to Death again.

  But the stone-hedges of the Tombs keep him in, and though my brother Spence and his wife Edyth now own Belerion Hall, I wonder if someone—someday—will hear him tap at the edge of his tomb.

  I wonder if someone will break open that coffin and see what has become of my brother Harvey.

  Will he be there with flesh and bones? Will he be dust, moving eternally, within a stone bier? Or will Death take pity on him, and on me? Will Death call him back, across the shores to that radiant journey? Or will he forever be there, trapped in a box until the world itself comes to an end?

  I loved him more than life itself. I had called him back to life from that open window inside myself—that place where I could speak with the dead themselves, if I loved them enough.

  I know the secret that Isis herself knew when she resurrected her brother Osiris, and the secret that the Maiden of Sorrow knew when she brought her lover back from the dead, and which the boy knew after he had grown up and owed his first-born to the dead warriors. Old Marsh himself knew.

  The secret is:

  Death has a price, and all who bargain with the dead must pay it.

  Copyright © 2006, 2009 by Douglas Clegg

  Illustrations Copyright © 2009 by Glenn Chadbourne

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information and inquiries, address Vanguard Press, 387 Park Avenue South, 12th Floor, NYC, NY 10016, or call (800) 343-4499.

  Set in 12.5 point Garamond

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Clegg, Douglas, 1958- Isis / Douglas Clegg. p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-0-786-75149-5

  1. Haunted houses—England—Fiction. 2. Death—Fiction. 3. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 4. Grief—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.L3918I75 2009

  813’.54—dc22

  2009009776

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