Isis (4 page)

Read Isis Online

Authors: Douglas Clegg

“And did he give them his first born?” I asked, a bit fearful of the answer.
 
“Of course he didn’t. Would you? He forgot about his vow. A boy he were, and none too bright. When he became a man, he married a lovely girl from Bodmir Moor. They had their first child the Christmas after they married. Only when he began to hear the scratching at the windows did he remember his promise. He went to priests for removal of this curse, but none could help. But you understand, the trick of calling up the dead is a one-way street, miss. For no one—no priest, no king, no saint—knows how to send the dead back where they came from. When the dead have been promised, the dead must be paid.
 
“No, he did not want to give up his child. Who would? He ran to the ends of the earth with his wife and son. He did not think the bones of the Tombs here at Belerion Hall would find him across a sea. But the dead, they find paths—highways—what no living soul knows unless they been to the other side. These paths go beneath the earth, beneath the ocean itself.
 
“Though I weren’t there, nor anyone I know, I heard—one day—when a local peddler went ’round to sell wares, he saw black marks as if fire scorched the house, yet nothing burned. And their shoes and slippers remained where they had stood before they were dragged off. The only signs that they’d had a child—a boy of seven by then—were some wooden toys off in a corner and a child’s finger, severed at the second knuckle when he had been pulled into that between-place by the warriors. Written upon the walls of the house, in the ancient language of the dead, were the words ‘Come Ye Not Here to Sleep or Slumber.’” Here, Marsh stopped and glanced over at me to see if I believed the story. “And you know what they found the very next day, miss?”
 
“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 daylight and crouched down, locking the doors, for I felt as if I had intruded on something holy by looking into the place of the dead.
 
2
 
In summer, I had no fear of the Tombs.
 
In winter, I grew sad watching it from the upstairs windows, for it made me think of death, as did the storms and my mother’s sorrows.
 
On rainy days, I explored my grandfather’s immense and musty library, with its volumes of strange and wonderful books. It had no windows at all, so I could forget the gray wintry world outside. Its ceiling looked like elegant chocolates from a London confectionery, and it had bookcases so high that I had to climb ladders to see it all. I crept over to the hearth rug with several books and lay there in front of the huge stone fireplace to begin my escape from Belerion Hall through the pages of novels and histories.
 
3
 
I worked my way through the Latin texts and through many of the classics that I could find. Other treasures were also buried here, including love letters my grandfather wrote my grandmother when they were both young, and drawings that my father had made as a boy in the margins of primers that had been saved.
 
My grandfather had kept a small pile of nude photographs of women, tucked behind an oversized 1835 edition of the Bible with a dark snakeskin cover. I sifted through these pictures, marveling at this secret wickedness of the Gray Minister. I looked upon these figures as if they would teach me what being a woman was within the world of men. I made up names for each of the girls—Biblical names like Delilah and Rahab and Ruth and Naomi and Jezebel, of course. I did not see them as lascivious in the least, for they seemed as my mother and I had in our pageant—works of art posed by a photographer who gave them flowers in their hair, or a tasteful hand drawn over their private parts.
 
Even Jezebel, the naughtiest of them, had a garland of daisies across her small belly, and though her head was cocked back slightly and her legs parted, she seemed to be contemplating eternity as she lay there. I knew this was a gentlemen’s collection, but there was something pristine about these women, who, as nudes, could have been statues in great museums.
 
I located the page in the Bible where each woman was mentioned and pressed the corresponding picture of the nude into that page. I drew Harvey to the library to show him the pictures. He acted shocked at seeing them, and told me they were not meant for delicate young ladies. But I showed him Rahab and Delilah and asked him, “Do you think she is lovely?”
 
He blushed and shook his head. “No, not at all. Not lovely at all. Put those away, Iris. We really should burn them.”
 
As I wandered deeper into my grandfather’s library—for behind every book was another, and behind every bookcase, another could be drawn out if the latch were located—I also found books of a very different nature.
 
My grandfather’s old library still contained his books on the occult, for though he beat the Good Book with one fist, he studied demonology in order to learn the names of the devils he wished to cast out of the world. I spent many hours, unnoticed by even my governess, in the old mahogany-lined library and delighted in the wicked books. I read grimoires and the medieval texts as I learned Latin in the morning and the tales of witch-finders and demon-raisers before tea.
 
I shared this with Harvey, who was—at first—aghast at my grandfather’s extensive occult collection, but soon joined me in delight as we began writing secret notes to each other, left around the house, in some ancient coded language supposedly created by the Chaldean Demon-Raisers or the
Medieval Witch Alphabet
. Harvey left little jokes for me that I then had to translate from the strange symbols of the codes, and I left brief notes of “Spence on warpath” or “The Gray Minister knows your sins” under his tea saucer, or folded neatly into one of his favorite magazines.
 
4
 
One night, after supper, I began crying for no reason that I knew. Harvey took me for a walk along the stone-hedges of the sunken gardens by the full moon’s light. The air was heavy and smothering with spring fragrances, and damp with recent rain. “Why so sad?” he asked.
 
Although many things had been bothering me, I ended up speaking of our mother and her sorrows. Finally, I said, “And it’s because of our father.”
 
“Ah,” Harvey said.
 
“It’s as if . . . as if . . .” I fought back tears. “As if he’s dead.”
 
“But he’s not.”
 
“No. He’s in India or Burma or Australia or Africa. Everywhere but here.”
 
“He is important for this country.”
 
“But not us.”
 
“No, not us,” he said, kissing the top of my head. “I know. I know. Let’s summon the dead, Iris. They can go bring father to us.” He chuckled, and I laughed as well at his light-heartedness. “We know that Chaldean summoning ritual.” He began saying it aloud.
 
“Oh, you mustn’t,” I said, clapping my hand over his mouth. “What if it’s real?”
 
“True,” he said. “It won’t work unless we go to the Laughing Maiden. Oh dear, Iris, you’ve been too influenced by all that reading and by Old Marsh himself. He is a crackpot. We could no more summon the dead than . . . than we could fly out the windows.”
 
We made jokes about what kind of warriors we would call from the dead to go find our father and make him come home to us. At the Laughing Maiden, Harvey took my hands in his and we recited the words we’d learned from one of my grandfather’s books.
 
Yet, as we suspected, no demon arose, no dead came to do our bidding.
 
“It’s a pity,” Harvey said. “If the dead had asked for my first-born, I’d have said yes, for I shan’t have any children.”
 

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