Island-in-Waiting

by Anthea Fraser

The path we were walking along had been winding its way between the sweeping lawns but now it divided, one fork leading to the houses and the other back in the direction of the main gates. John hesitated.

  “Are you making for anywhere in particular?”

  “No, just trying to shake off a headache.”

  “Oh, bad luck. I’d better leave you then. I have to collect a couple of books from Staff House and class begins in five minutes.”

  He set off down the path and I had started along the other one when suddenly, with an incredulous shaft of fear, I seemed to see him lying on the ground covered in blood.

  I spun round, wide-eyed. He was still in sight walking quickly away from me. I tried to call out but no sound came. He had almost reached the house and a clock in my head started on an ominous count-down to disaster.

  Frantically I hurled myself forward over the grass, my feet seeming hardly to move as I fought my way through the sudden density of the atmosphere. Stop! I shrieked silently. Don’t go any further! Wait! But he didn’t stop, or even look round until, just short of the shallow step leading to the porch, he became aware of my pursuit and turned in surprise. By then it was already too late. With a last superhuman burst of speed I flung myself against him and we fell together against the heavy wood of the front door. In the same instant a deafening crash exploded immediately behind us and as the clouds of dust rose we could make out the shattered remains of a huge chimney lying on the path.

  John’s hands were gripping my shoulders, his face above mine suddenly ashen.

  “My God, that was a close thing! If you hadn’t –”

  Beside us the front door burst open and people came hurrying out to see what had happened, gasping and exclaiming at our escape.

  “It was Chloe!” John said jerkily. “She saved my life. If she hadn’t pushed me clear –”

  Everyone clustered round, congratulating me on noticing the sudden danger, and I had almost convinced myself that no-one would suspect the truth when a couple of workmen, white-faced, pushed their way through the small throng.

  “Anybody hurt? Thank God for that! There was nothing we could do – it just suddenly toppled and fell.”

  Someone said importantly, “Fortunately this young lady saw it in time,” and I held my breath.

  The workman turned to me. “You saw it, Miss? But how could you? It wouldn’t have been in sight until it was actually on its way down!”

  “And I left you at the fork in the path,” John put in excitedly. “To have reached me in time, you must have started running well before the chimney began to fall!”

  There was a sudden startled silence and a dozen pairs of eyes fastened on me almost fearfully. I said limply, “I just – thought something might happen.”

  “It was the hand of fate!” asserted the second workman, crossing himself. “Your time had not yet come.”

  John took my hand. “Chloe, how did you know? Can you explain it?”

  “Not really. I had a sudden – impression of you lying hurt, that’s all.”

  A woman in a white overall pushed her way forward. “I’m Matron, my dear. I think perhaps it would be advisable if you came and lay down for a while.”

  I shook my head. “No, really, thank you. I’m all right and my sister-in-law will be expecting me.”

  John said awkwardly, “It seems so inadequate to say thank you.”

  “There’s no need, anyway. In the circumstances, what else could I have done?”

  How far back, I wondered, did the chain of coincidence stretch? I’d decided on a walk only because of the headache, which in turn had been caused by my experiences during the night. Had it all been elaborately designed in order to save John Stevens’s life?

  “You’re late,” Martha remarked when I eventually arrived back at the cottage.

  “Just another touch of E.S.P.,” I said wearily, and told her what had happened.

  “The ram the other day and now this. It seems to be stepping up, doesn’t it? It’ll certainly give them something to talk about in the staff-room!”

  Dully I wondered what Neil would make of it. And Ray – Hugo was full of questions when he arrived home.

  “What’s all this about your life-saving act? It’s got St Olaf’s by the ears, principally because there seems to have been no logical way you could have known of the danger.”

  He listened carefully as I gave him the brief facts. “And that’s all? You’ve no idea what alerted you to it?”

  “Pure instinct, I suppose.”

  “Precognition, more like.” He looked at me closely. “It’s not the first time, is it? Is this another legacy from your hypnotist friend?”

  “Possibly,” I replied steadily, “but it wasn’t really precognition this time. I ‘saw’ John lying on the ground covered in blood, and that didn’t happen.”

  “It probably would have done if you hadn’t intervened. So much for predestination.”

  “Perhaps it was clairvoyance, then?” Martha suggested. “After all, the fault in the chimney was presumably already there. Chloe sensed it and subconsciously deduced what was likely to happen.”

  Hugo sighed and stood up. “Well, don’t make a habit of this kind of thing or we’ll have to hire a booth and set you up in business on Douglas Pier!”

  I tried to smile but his obvious disquiet had only strengthened my resolve not to confide in him more fully. As I’d suspected, the more extravagant of my mental wanderings would have to be kept to myself for the time being.

  Eight

  My see-sawing emotions were no steadier when Ray called for me as arranged the next morning, and perhaps gauging my turbulent mood he made no mention of the incident which must have been uppermost in his mind.

  “I thought we’d go down through Kirk Michael and Glen Helen to St John’s,” he said as we turned in the direction of Ballaugh. “We can have a look at Tynwald Hill and then take the mountain road down to the south-west tip.” He slowed to negotiate a flock of sheep which, with an alert dog at their heels, were moving down the road ahead of us.

  “I’d like to show you Cregneish. The Folk Museum will be closed now the season’s over but you can still see the typical Manx cottages, all thatched and whitewashed, and there’s a grand view from there over the Calf. There’s a bit of Norse for you, by the way: islets alongside a larger island are known in Scandinavian as calves.”

  “Is there much Scandinavian influence left on the island?” Unwillingly I was remembering my dream of the tall fair men thronging the hillside. It hadn’t escaped me that they very closely resembled the sign outside the Viking Restaurant.

  “A fair bit, especially in the north, though the culture is basically Celtic. Half the surnames on the island are Norse, my own included. Most of them begin with Q, K or a hard C. Incidentally, one of the most common is Christian. Fletcher Christian of the Bounty mutiny was a Manxman.” And llliam Dhone–

  “This is Bishopscourt, on the right here. You can’t see much of it from the road. Part of it was built in the twelve hundreds and it’s been the official residence of the Bishop of Sodor and Man for centuries, though the present bishop lives elsewhere, which seems a shame.”

  Kirk Michael awaited us, with its palm trees lining the road, its deep blue water and pretty houses. “There’s the Irish coastline across the water,” Ray pointed out. “You’ll be seeing England and Scotland too, if the weather stays clear. We’re right in the centre of the British Isles. They say from the top of Snaefell you can see six kingdoms: England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Man, and the Kingdom of Heaven!”

  The road was lined with hedges of prickly gorse and hips and haws glowed redly like a scattering of rubies. Above us fluffy white clouds raced across the blue sky. Ray’s naturalness was having its effect; for the first time I was actually enjoying his company and as I relaxed I felt the stirring of a long-dormant love for this sturdily independent little island.

  The road started to climb and on either side the fields fell away criss-cros
sed by gorse hedges, with cattle and sheep grazing peacefully and plumes of smoke rising from the farmhouses, and as we drove, Ray recounted odd snatches of history and folklore as they came into his head, about Mannanan the Magician who had lived on South Barrule and used to throw a cloak of mist round the island whenever strangers approached.

  “He couldn’t hide it from St Patrick, though, and when the people began to pay tribute to him and his monks instead of to Mannanan, the magician turned himself into three legs joined together and rolled like a wheel down the hill. We still talk of Mannanan drawing his cloak when the mist comes down.”

  The road was now hemmed in by thickly wooded hillsides and a river cascaded on our left. In the autumn sunlight the trees were a riot of rich colour – spruce and fir, oak, sycamore and beech. “Glen Helen,” Ray told me as I exclaimed in delight. A few minutes later we had left the glen behind us and were approaching St John’s. “You know about Tynwald, of course?”

  “Only that it’s a parliament independent of Westminster.”

  “And the oldest continuous government in the world,” Ray said with quiet pride. “It’s been in existence over a thousand years.” We came up the road past the cattle market into St John’s and his voice blurred in my ears as I found myself gazing with a kind of numb resignation at the oddly shaped hillock of my dream. So today was not to be an escape after all.

  “It was a site of Celtic sun-worship even before the Vikings,” Ray was explaining. “The four tiers of the hill are made up of soil from the seventeen parishes of Man, symbolizing the entire island. On Old Midsummer Day every year the laws are read out here in English and Manx Gaelic.” Was it Manx, then, the language in my dream that I had not been able to identify?

  The echoes of that dream were all about me, the heat that suffused me no part of this cool October day but burning down from a sun which had set a thousand years ago. The murmur of voices and the clank of swords formed a continuous undercurrent to Ray’s voice as he parked the car and led me up the stone steps to the topmost tier.

  “The sun-worship bit is still there if you look for it. The ceremony takes place at noon with the sun directly overhead and the dignitaries face to the east. It’s hard to know where one culture ends and another begins.” He went on talking about Keys and Deemsters and I wondered dizzily how many of the vibrations which were bombarding me came directly from the folk memory of Tom Kelly the hypnotist and how many were channelled through his nephew at my side. And as Ray’s actual presence came to the forefront of my mind, I became aware that he was standing watching me with a look of expectant excitement.

  “You’re getting something, aren’t you?”

  His face came back into focus and the past, throbbing with heat and pageantry, receded into its own wraiths.

  “I knew Uncle’s influence was bound to come out here!” There was an exultant note in his voice and immediately all my fears came rushing back. His easy charm that morning had deceived me into relaxing my guard so that he could prove to his satisfaction the bonds that still held me. Martha had warned me not to trust Ray.

  I pulled away and ran ahead of him down the steps but he caught up with me before I reached the foot of the hill. “Surely you can see what a breakthrough this is! Five years, for Pete’s sake, and from the way you were acting up there, you’re as much under his spell now as you were on that stage!”

  I shuddered. “That’s not true! I shouldn’t think he knows anything about it.”

  “For sure he doesn’t. He’s not done any mind-reading since and like any gift it fades if you don’t use it. But that’s the wonder of it, don’t you see, that just the residual influence is enough to produce the dreams and the premonition you had yesterday. God, the possibilities it opens up!”

  I started to shiver violently as though I had in truth emerged from the heat of summer into this cool autumn morning. He caught hold of my arm, spinning me round to face him. “What was it that you saw up there? What era – Vikings, or the Horsemen of the Parishes riding in procession?” His eyes were burning into mine as though he could read my mind at will. “Chloe, for God’s sake! I’ve got to know!”

  I pulled myself free and started back towards the car and, swearing under his breath, he came after me. ‘It’s stepping up,’ Martha had said, and Hugo: ‘Another legacy from the hypnotist?’ Now Ray assumed without question that the dreams, the premonition about John and the ghosts of Tynwald came to me directly from the mind of Tom Kelly. If they were all right and my mind was really so firmly welded to his, were any of its thoughts my own?

  I knew, as he slammed the car door, that Ray was annoyed with me for remaining silent but I felt unable to justify myself to him. These last few minutes had been a new experience, a strange half and half world of the past impinging on the present without a total time slip. I went over them again and again, probing and analysing, and it was some minutes before I began to distinguish a new uneasiness, a deepening sense of despair which weighed increasingly down on me until it was almost unbearable.

  Apprehensively I looked out of the window to find some reason for it, but we were driving along a pretty road halfway up a hill and the glorious foliage was with us still, lit to rust, bronze and gold in the thick sunshine. But whether there was any reason or none for my misery I found I couldn’t stand it. I put my hands suddenly over my ears. “I don’t like this place! Let’s go back!”

  Ray didn’t answer and when I glanced at him I saw the gleam of satisfaction in his eyes.

  “Please, Ray! I’m frightened!” If he wanted me to beg I was prepared to do so, anything to get away from the appalling sense of doom which was now overpowering me.

  He smiled slightly and I realized with a shock that my distress was being inflicted deliberately, as a punishment for resisting him.

  If he refused to help me I must somehow escape by myself. With a sob of terror I wrenched open the car door but he leaned across me and slammed it shut again. “All right, all right, I’ll take you down.”

  “What’s that noise?” I demanded as he turned the car on the narrow road. “That distant rumbling? It sounds like thunder.”

  He was still smiling and for the first time I saw cruelty openly on his face. Charming and attractive he could be, as long as he was getting his way, but below the surface lay a more unpleasant side of his nature – the one, no doubt, which Martha had admitted frightened her.

  “I can’t hear anything,” he said.

  So the noise too was for me alone, together with the terror and pain which were darkening my mind. I gripped the sides of the seat and shut my eyes tightly, willing myself to keep calm, and as we moved away down the hill the suffocating horror gradually ebbed until I was able to breathe more easily. Back on the main road Ray stopped the car and lit a cigarette.

  “What was that place?” I asked in a whisper.

  “Slieu Whallian, the witches’ hill.” For all his apparent detachment his voice shook slightly. “Women suspected of witchcraft were put in spiked barrels and rolled down it. If they were dead when they reached the bottom it was considered to be divine judgement, if they were alive, proof of their powers and they were burned at the stake. At least, that’s how the story goes. A medieval case of ‘Heads I win, tails you lose’.”

  After a long moment I said, “If I’d been living in those days I’d probably have suffered the same fate.”

  “Are you going to tell me this time what you felt?”

  “Sheer terror,” I said flatly, “and difficulty in breathing.”

  “The rumble you mentioned would have been the barrels rolling.”

  I looked at his pitiless face with a kind of sick horror and the expression in his eyes changed as he reached for me. “I warned you not to fight me, my darling. I can punish you if I have to, but it shouldn’t be necessary.”

  His mouth blocked off my protest and since he was stronger than I, I lay rigidly in his arms, emotionally uninvolved in his kisses. Only when I felt his hand fumbling at my breast
did I put up my own to intercept it and turn my face away.

  “Now what’s the matter?” he demanded unevenly.

  “That’s enough, and it’s no use threatening me again.” I sat up and pushed back my hair. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking I’ll submit to anything for fear of being ‘punished’ as you call it. What’s the penalty for refusing to kiss you, anyway? A visit to Cronk-ny-arrey-lhaa?” I broke off, seeing his eyes widen. “There – isn’t such a place, is there?” The name had come into my mind without thought.

  “Indeed there is, a Viking burial mound. What’s more, you pronounced it perfectly. Perhaps I need a yellow flower in my buttonhole after all.”

  Protection against witchcraft – “It’s your own fault,” I said shakily, “you deliberately triggered it off.”

  “But you brought it on yourself, didn’t you now? You were being rather stubborn, my love, and I felt it was time for a demonstration of how the land lay. I think you’ll agree it was effective.”

  “So far,” I said slowly, “you’ve always had the advantage of surprise. Now that I know what you’re trying to do you’ll find it isn’t so easy.”

  He gave a short laugh. “A challenge, is it? Right, my lovely, we’ll see who’s the stronger. Now, do we call a truce and go on with the tour?”

  “Only if you promise to abide by it and not attempt any more take-overs.”

  “Take-overs,” he repeated slowly. “A good description, that, though I’d prefer to think of it as a merger; a complete merger, body, mind and soul. How does that strike you, Chloe Winter?”

  I shook my head. “Out of the question.”

  “We’ll see, we’ll see. Now, after all this mind-bending I’m sure you’re in need of a bite of lunch. Don’t look so wary, my love! I won’t play any more games with you today.”

  So we stopped for lunch at an isolated little inn and then drove on along Foxdale and down the Sloe road through bleak mountain stretches with South Barrule towering over us and thickly wooded plantations on every side. And Ray, his good humour restored, started again on snippets of folklore – about the Rider of Sloe, the Ben-varreys or mermaids round the coast, the fearful Tarroo-ushtay that lived up in the Curraghs and the Nightman who blew on his bugle before a storm.