Isis by Douglas Clegg Read Free Book Online Page A

water.
     
    I drew the lid aside.
     
    In the water, a swallow—the kind I often saw at twilight swooping and flying along the trees and the eaves of our home—batted at the water as if trying to fly upward.
     
    I felt, for the first time, as if I stood at the edge of some borderland, ill-defined by the physical world.
     
    I thought that, like my grandfather, I might be going mad.
     
    The bird drowned as soon as I reached for it. When I took it out into the night to lay its body down upon the flagstones, I was convinced that I had begun losing my grasp of what was real and what was not.
     
    But I felt that brief spark of what I would later come to regard as psychic ability. That window—which opened in my mind when I fell with my brother—seemed to burst wide again.
     

9
     
    That night, I stayed up until dawn, poring over my grandfather’s books of the sacred and the profane.
     
    At sunrise, I went to Spence’s room.
     
    I opened the door to look in on the two of them lying in bed.
     
    I could not even look directly at Edyth or my brother, but instead looked through them.
     

    Edyth shrieked when she saw the scissors in my hands, and while I tried to explain that it was not to hurt her or him, Spence leapt from his bed and knocked them from my fingers.
     
    The scissors scuttled across the floor toward the wardrobe.
     
    “You have to let this go!” he shouted. “You are driving all of us mad! You had no right to come into my room! You have no right to interfere with Edyth! It was you who killed him, Iris! You with your foolishness! I was there when you fell! I stood behind Harvey when he reached for you. You pulled him out of that window, Iris! We could have saved both of you, but you pulled him out !”
     
    “It’s a lie! It’s a lie!” I cried, covering my face, trying to block out his terrible voice.
     
    “Ask anyone who was there!” he shouted, his face above me, a monstrous face, a liar’s face. “Ask Edyth! No, ask Percy! Ask Elizabeth from the kitchen! They all saw it. They all saw you reach up and pull him down! If you had just let him draw you up, you both would be here. You are the one who took him to his death! I could kill you, Iris! I could kill you !”
     

1
     
    I ran out to the Tombs with keys in hand, stumbling several times. My own tears blinded me. I did not understand why my brother had told me such terrible lies, but I knew he was wrong.
     
    I did not pull Harvey out the window. I could not have done it. We were doing our old trapeze act, and I was meant to reach for him. Yet, in my mind, as I recalled those brief moments before we fell, I could not help but now see that Spence was correct. I had been too eager and had felt Harvey lose his balance as I reached up for his arms. But I did not pull him out of the window. He had fallen; it was an accident. If anyone was to blame, it was Edyth Blight. Edyth Blight and her harlotry, and slapping me hard enough that I fell backward from the tall window.
     
    Edyth had killed him and had nearly killed me.
     
    I pressed my hands to my face as I fell down in the grass in front of the doors of the Tombs. Please, Harvey, let me know you forgive me. Please.
     
    I unlocked the doors of the Tombs and ducked my head to take the steps down among the narrow rock corridors where the Villiers were buried.
     
    I checked the graves marked along the plastered stone wall and looked in the recesses of rock where stone biers had been placed.
     
    I found Harvey’s tomb, and tore a strip of cloth from my dress. I used it as a blindfold, for I wanted to block out all of the world around me. I used it the way Old Marsh had told me blindman’s buff had once been played, not as a game, but as a way of speaking with the dead. I turned about until I was disoriented. Strangely, I did feel as if I had stepped into another world, and in that self-imposed darkness, I began to feel as if others were there, surrounding me.
     
    I wanted to see Harvey