Read Isis for Free Online Page B

me to his death.
     
    I missed my brother too much to allow his tragedy to be washed away in forgiveness like soapy water down a drain.
     
    When Spence wandered off for a bit, overcome with a need for privacy, I drew up a twig from the ground and wrote in the dirt, in our secret ancient Chaldean magic language, OSIRIS, ISIS SEARCHES FOR YOU.
     
    Beneath this, I drew one of the symbols of Isis herself—an ankh, the key of eternal life.
     

5
     
    That night, feeling as if I had been too hard on my older brother for nearly a year, I climbed the stairs to his room. I would knock, and tell him that all was forgiven. That Harvey had blessed us all. That even the sorrow of our lives could be turned into a shining victory over death itself.
     
    But outside his door, I heard her voice in his room.
     
    She was with him.
     
    Edyth.
     
    I listened to their love-talk from the hall. When the lights had gone out in his room, I went to the window where Harvey had held on to me to protect me from death’s own embrace.
     
    I peeled back the boards until my fingernails bled.
     
    A shock of cool air burst through from the other side, and I looked out over the sunken garden and across the cliffs to the blackness that was both sea and sky.
     
    I sang softly to the night, “Jack, swing up, and Jack swing down, up to the window, over the ground. Swing over the field and the garden wall—Watch out for Jack Hackaway if you should fall.”
     

6
     
    My rages began then, and I could not contain them.
     
    I found myself in the garden that night, beating my fists against the stone wall until it seemed the rock itself bled. In the cellars the next night, where no one could find me. I stood at the door of the Thunderbox Room and thought of Harvey there, washing up after working in the gardens all day, and out along the cliffs, looking at the locked doors of the Tombs and imagining the bones there, the death, the waste and end of all life.
     
    The world is backwards , I thought.
     
    The living should be dead.
     
    The dead should be living.
     
    The good should be victorious.
     
    The evil should die and stay dead.
     
    I went to the North Wing to hear my grandfather’s enfeebled shouts and curses. I nodded my head as he cried out about wrath and redemption and resurrection and smiting the wicked and praising the good.
     
    I understood, then, where his madness had come from: He, too, had experienced the loss of the good and the victory of the evil.
     

7
     
    Sifting through my grandfather’s nude photographs in the study, I began to see the women in them as of the devil himself. I went to my grandfather’s great mahogany desk and searched for the scissors beneath various old papers.
     
    I neatly cut the heads off the women in the pictures. I imagined each was a state execution, and this would kill the women who had somehow influenced Spence to lie with Edyth. I thought of the two of them passing the filthy pictures back and forth as Spence became aroused with passion and Edyth began to allow him intimacies. I took the scissors and the headless photos into the cellars that day, down into the water closet used by servants that led out into the outdoor stairwell. I decided I would flush the pictures down the drain, out of the house, for—having looked at them—I began to even blame the pictures for that terrible day.
     
    In the Thunderbox Room in the cellars, I looked at the cracked mirror, imagining the demons from my grandfather’s books circling around Edyth, tearing at her clothes. I imagined Jezebel and Delilah and Rahab and Ruth and Naomi, headless, coming toward her with a great pair of scissors and cutting off Edyth’s head. I imagined Spence hanging himself from the chandelier in the foyer. All of them dying horribly—even my beloved mother, who had allowed her mind to turn inward and keep her sick so that she would not have to be our mother again; my father, in Burma, or in India, or in one of the war-torn countries