Isis by Douglas Clegg Read Free Book Online Page B

again. I wished with all my might that he would come to me.
     
    I prayed first to God, and then to the gods I had heard once roamed this land.
     
    I nearly conjured his face in my mind.
     
    Remembering how we had once tried to summon our father by using an old spell, I recited this as well. I imagined that I held the bones of the dead in my arms as I said this, and wished for them to rise up from their pathways and bring my brother back to me, to life.
     
    “Let’s summon the dead,” Harvey had said to me our first spring in Belerion Hall. He and I had laughed as we sat down at the Laughing Maiden after supper and said that we wanted to see our father. Harvey used a handkerchief for a blindfold and put it on, turning around and around a few times. At first we laughed more, and then we grew sad, for our father was alive. We could not summon the living with the ancient Chaldean summoning spell, and it was the living we wanted then.
     
    When the night had grown dark, Harvey had slipped his arms around me in an embrace that was both comfortable and familiar and that still haunted me after a few years had gone by.
     
    We had talked of death then, and of life, and of how we would both grow up and move away from Belerion Hall. “But I will always find you,” he said. “Just summon me from the ends of the earth. Just call me here.”
     
    The smell of lavender; the whisper at my ear as he told me how much I meant to him and always had; and how he called me Isis after our play, and I called him Osiris. And like Isis, I told him, I would always find him and bring him back home with me.
     
    That night had seemed innocent and sweet, but as I stood before his grave with a blindfold on so that I might be distracted from my purpose, I felt a shiver of terror go through me.
     
    Yet, I could not stop.
     
    I prayed to the dead.
     
    Send him to me.
     
    No matter how.
     
    Bring my brother home to me.
     
    I will give you anything for him to return. Anything at all. My life. My life. All lives. All that I can.
     
    Hours passed, and I heard a few sounds, as if some small animal—a rat, perhaps—skittered along the carved rock floor.
     
    Then, I heard what seemed to be a man clearing his throat. Yet I did not take off my blindfold to see who was there with me. I did not want to break the spell of imagining that Harvey had arisen as if he were Christ from the tomb. I knew that once I drew that blindfold from my eyes, I would see the nothing that was there: the carved rock with the old tombs and burial places. While the blindfold remained, I could believe that he stood beside me, nearly touching me.
     

    I could believe that I smelled lavender.
     
    As I was about to give up this foolishness, I felt a draft of chilly air as if a window had opened, but within me. Some call this the higher self, but for me, it felt as if it was someone other than me, some other girl. I called her Isis, in order to see her as different from myself.
     
    Come back to me, Harvey. Come now. Come from those highways of the dead. I cannot live without you. I cannot live if I can’t see you again.
     

2
     
    Later that night, I stood looking out the window, remembering Harvey’s embrace as we fell from it.
     
    The moon’s white light cast itself upon the sunken garden just beyond the flagstone walk. The wind blew in gusts from the sea and lightning played along the far reaches of the horizon, though it would be hours before the storm came to our estate.
     
    I saw a wriggling movement in the shadows of the stone walls.
     
    A whirl of motion, as of leaves and seedlings stirred up by a sudden breeze.
     
    As if I were connecting parts of a puzzle drawn upon the air, I saw a strange form manifesting itself from the soft white milk thistles that blew in a circular motion at the garden wall.
     
    It seemed the outline of a man.
     
    He arrived in a breeze where thistle and deer-broom whirled and formed a pattern that at first I could not distinguish as