Isis by Douglas Clegg Read Free Book Online

that was the source of our wealth; and the Gray Minister, at his own locked window, calling down the Wrath of God upon his household.
     
    My rage burned, and my face felt hot. I leaned over the pump and pushed down on the lever until the ice-cold water poured out into the square sink. I took up a small and worn bar of soap and pressed it to my face. The scent assaulted me. The girls in the kitchen had made this for Harvey. It was my brother’s smell. I splashed my face, scrubbing it with soap and then rinsing it off, closing my eyes as the soap stung beneath my eyelids. When I had washed it all off again, I looked at myself in the mirror, but did not see myself.
     
    I saw Edyth’s face, and it made me furious to see her.
     
    It was as if she had triumphed in some way with Harvey’s death.
     
    It was if his dying had made her permanently part of our family.
     
    As if her words to me when I’d been younger had taken on a reality.
     
    “Someday,” she had said, “you might be where I am and I might be where you are.”
     
    I wanted her to leave. I wanted her to die. I wanted to expose what she and Spence continued to do in this house. I wanted to destroy them both.
     
    Those nude photographs in my grandfather’s Bible were dark and evil, not the beauties of art that I had once imagined them.
     
    No, they were as much demon as the books on summoning demons and ancient spells that my grandfather had collected.
     
    I knew now they were seducers taking from men, from others—to win a battle, to defeat the men that gazed upon them.
     
    They were bad women who sent good men to their deaths.
     
    I took the scissors and looked at my face in the mirror. Looked at Edyth in my mind. At Spence. At my mother.
     
    I hated all of us. Harvey had been too good for the world.
     
    I lifted the scissors and scraped them into the skin of my wrist and carved my brother’s secret name into my own flesh.
     
    OSIRIS .
     
    That is when I first heard a slight noise, as if something were scratching at the window. I almost dreaded glancing over, for I was afraid in some childish and irrational way that I had called some demon to my side. The window into the stairwell showed nothing, yet my sense of dread remained.
     
    When I went out through the door, and then through a second doorway into the mossy stone stairwell with its drains that led up to the grounds from the cellars, it was empty.
     
    I returned to the toilet, and the sound began again, as if something had been waiting for me to return.
     
    Now it was more like some small animal—a mouse, perhaps—batting at its confinement. I glanced about the floor, and looked behind the pipes, but saw nothing. The noise continued, and within it I heard the tiniest of chirps, again like a mouse or a small bird; and the thought went through my head that there was a bird trapped in the toilet bowl.
     
    Somehow, I reasoned, briefly, that a bird had flown in, unnoticed, and had gone into the bowl and was drowning. The irrational notion almost made me smile.
     
    I leaned over the crude chamber-pot of a toilet and drew aside the lid. It was full of reddish-brown water. I supposed no one used the water closet that much here. I drew the lid back over the bowl. At the same time, I noticed that the noise had stopped. I laughed. I reasoned too quickly that it had been the pipes themselves making a strange noise, and perhaps just the act of lifting the toilet lid had been enough to end it.
     
    But the effect of this was as if I had opened an unseen door, or unlatched another hidden shelf in my grandfather’s library. I felt a strange coldness clutch at my throat, and the hairs at the back of my neck stood up as goose bumps covered my arms.
     
    The strange scratching and chirping sound began again.
     
    This time, I was sure it came from the bowl beneath the lid.
     

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    I stared at the bowl as the sound became louder, as if—yes—a bird fluttered its wings as it drowned in that dirty