by Noel Scanlon
I DIDN’T BURN ROSEMARY ALIVE
MYSTIC ISLAND
NOEL SCANLON
Copyright © 2016 Noel Scanlon
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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For Joan
My companion, soul mate, friend, and wife.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 1
I didn’t burn Rosemary Brown alive. I know that even now Ursula suspects that I did but it is just not true. When I cremated her she was definitely dead.
Though I am writing this book in Guru Pradavana’s ashram near Kanpur in central India, the extraordinary events which I have decided to put on record took place on the island of Inishwrack off the west coast of Ireland. I was travelling in that area when I heard of an island for sale and visited the local auctioneer.
“A grand island,” the auctioneer said. “And ideally situated. Due to the influence of the Gulf Stream it has a mild climate and a situation of warmth. All the beauties of nature are guaranteed on your doorstep.
“It’s rarely that a property of this calibre comes on the market. Between ourselves, sir, you’d want to take it while it’s still in it.”
There was nothing in his description to suggest the strange evil powers that resided in the island, or the outbreak of psychic activity that was to endanger us all.
The price was extraordinarily low and I bought it sight unseen. At that time I had already spent some years in India and was looking for somewhere in the west where I could set up a religious community to further the guru’s teachings. The guru believes that the spiritual component of man has been so diminished by materialism that, unless man’s spirituality is reasserted, mankind and his stay on this planet is doomed.
To my surprise, young people had shown an enormous interest in this project. The island seemed an ideal place to make a start. So I went to Inishwrack with four young Indians who were followers of the guru, two boys and two girls, and initially took four other girls from the large number who had wanted to join us. The idea was that if the venture was successful we could take on many more and develop from there.
Inishwrack is one of scores of islands in Clew Bay. Shaped roughly like a mussel shell and dominated by a central hill, it is four miles long and two miles wide. To the west are sheer cliffs against which the Atlantic hurls itself constantly sending foam bubbles rising in the air. On the eastern side is a bay with a long beach and an old pier. It seemed in every way to suit our needs. There was seafood to be picked up on the shore, mussels, periwinkles, oysters and the like and ample land for gardening. We could, in time, become largely self-sufficient.
In setting up the project I got to know a little about the local people who live along the mainland opposite the island. The only village in the area is the village of Blackshell, population one hundred and fifty persons.
I found the villagers a closed community and suspected a certain hostility to our project.
But this was no more than I would have expected in any remote community. The local storekeeper was talkative, even garrulous at times, but I had the feeling that he was keeping something hidden from me. He hinted that the island had a bad reputation and a strange history but, when I asked him to be more specific, he either changed the subject or closed up like a clam.
I asked the solicitor about this and he told me, a little anxiously I thought, not to pay any attention to what the storekeeper or any of the villagers said. The villagers were, he claimed, a very superstitious people. Evidently, he had no high regard for them and looked down on them as a backward, rural people.
In the flurry of getting supplies out to the island, dwellings repaired and our community established, I listened to, but was unaffected by, the hints and oblique remarks with which outsiders sought to tell me in a roundabout way that the island was not an ordinary island and that there was danger in going there.
We completed our initial reconstruction and ferried across what we needed to establish ourselves with the help of a boatman, Augustus John, and his hunchbacked brother, Dominic. From then on it seemed to me we could live free from interference of any kind.
In those early days I was charmed by the freedom of island life and the island’s great natural beauty. I enjoyed climbing the hill, taking walks over the soft pile carpet of the heath and breathing in the Atlantic air, so much fresher than that of India.
I loved to gaze at the yellow gorse, the purple heather. It seemed to me to be an island of great charm. As I walked the littoral, my feet crunching on seashells, the otters and seals were so tame that I could walk right up to them as they lay out, their flappers spread on slabs of rock. If it rained and misted rather too much, I found this to be a soft balm after the harshness of tropical heat. If there was a shortage of sun it made me appreciate it when it did come out to highlight the wealth of colour on the island, the sun-rays a million dancers on the ocean’s surface.
I only began to become aware that there was something very odd about the island, something very wrong, after the death of Rosemary Brown.
CHAPTER 2
I stood beside the funeral pyre on the marram grass by the sea-shore and threw on the last of the driftwood and dead fuchsia and gorse bushes we had gathered. By now the body was burned. All that was left of Rosemary was the unconsumed bones mixed with wood ash. The others had not liked to watch and had left me to attend to it.
I did not then and do not now see cremation as gruesome. The people of Kanpur, and indeed from all over of India, often bring their elderly relatives to the banks of the Ganges well in advance of death. To be cremated there and have one’s ashes strewn on the Ganges water is something sacred and blessed. It is what will happ
en to my own body and that of everyone else here in the ashram.
It was in this context that I viewed our cremation on the island and, though we had none of the sandalwood that the wealthier Indians use, we had plenty of local wood. It was, no doubt, an unusual event to take place on an Irish shore but that didn’t occur to me at the time.
Rosemary’s death had, as far as I could ascertain, been from natural causes. I had a basic knowledge of medicine which I had acquired during my time of wandering in India.
Ursula had found the body on the hillside and I was there shortly afterwards. I applied all the resuscitation procedures possible over an extended period of time but without success.
I should, I suppose, have gone to the mainland to report the death. But this would in no way have helped the dead girl. And it would have brought down on us a cumbersome bureaucracy and the type of interference which we had specifically come to the island to avoid. We were out there in the Atlantic so that we could run our community along our own lines.
The girl, then, had died from natural causes. The corpse, it is true, was rather emaciated. But then we were all emaciated to a greater or lesser degree. One of our rules was that everyone had to be a vegetarian and we observed, both in India and on the island, a very strict diet. Our bodies were never inflated by the poisons which meat-eaters constantly absorb, or bloated by any of the grosser products to which the west is addicted. When I say, then, that the deceased was rather emaciated, so were we all, the better to attune our bodies and minds to the meditation and spiritual quest in which we were engaged and which we had come to the island to pursue.
As I tended the pyre, it crackled and flamed. The wind gusted a little and blew acrid smoke into my face. I looked up to see that Ursula had joined me. Ursula and Rosemary had shared a cottage. They were two of the four Caucasian girls on the island. They had all, of course, been to India, and had spent time in the ashram-- that was a prerequisite for joining.
Ursula seemed quiet and well in control of herself. She stood there while I read the appropriate texts and watched her. At that moment, I thought that I saw in her a spiritual quality, an extension of her personality, which, up till then, had been less apparent in her than in the other girls. She had always been the most physical of the group. She had a round face, long curly hair. She was disturbingly sexual. But training at the ashram had given us all a fair degree of control over the rude physical elements of this life which, as the guru teaches, is a dream of no great consequence, everything of significance and real substance being in the mind. It occurred to me that this event might give Ursula the spiritual stimulus she needed. I had, after all, with the guru’s guidance, selected her from hundreds of applicants to be among the first who were allowed on the island.
There were then, and still are, thousands of non-Indian followers of the guru in various parts of the world. The numbers who wanted to join reached its peak following the media exposure we had been unable to avoid on arrival in Europe and which had given our sect instant fame though, like all fame created by the media, it was artificial and transient. It was forced on us and we didn’t want any part of it. Outside pressures could never be more than an embarrassment.
Smoke got in my eyes, forcing me to turn away. I looked back at the hill. Whatever part of the island you were on the hill was a dominant feature. Its summit was steep, rocky and oddly impressive in its barrenness. The lower slopes, however, looked ordinary enough. Rushes proliferated in wide swathes. A patchwork of tiny fields bounded by grey stone walls dragged by hand from the soil in some past age, crept upwards until they expired in the boundaries of the Black Bog.
It was within this boundary that the Druidic circle of Standing Stones with its pagan altar and megalithic tomb were situated. And the Stone Man.
The Stone Man was a figure about thirty feet high with stone slabs roughly carved as his body, other slabs as arms and legs and an irregularly rounded stone as a head. It was quite impossible to imagine how the occupants of the island had ever put these pieces together without mechanical aids.
I had the strong feeling that he was watching me and waiting. I had felt vibes from the Stone Man before. But, now, for the first time, I perceived him, in some strange way, as the power centre, the focal point of the hill.
Ursula caught my attention and brought me back to what I was doing, to the cremation which was to be such a watershed in all our lives. She looked at me strangely before she dropped her eyes. Her expression was at the same time dazed and sensual.
“You’ve just burnt her alive,” she said, “you fucker.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. I looked sharply at Ursula but she was staring at the ground. “Rosemary wasn’t dead. She was in a trance. You’ve just burnt a girl alive. You fucking maniac.”
I turned and walked away along the shoreline in a state of confusion.
Had Ursula said what I thought she had said? I could not believe it. No one had ever addressed me like that before. Perhaps I had only imagined the voice. That must be the explanation. Somehow I had plucked the words from the air.
To the east, the Atlantic was a heaving green over the five miles that divided the island from the mainland. The tide was out and, under a luminous grey sky; rolls of sea-wrack littered the beach. Thrown up by the tide, it was yellow and brown and red and grey, spread on the beach or draped over rocks.
I stopped abruptly and stared at the wrack unbelievingly. A very odd thing was happening. A long coil was slithering across the rocks. It must have covered fifty yards before it stopped.
I ran down to the beach. There was so much wrack about that I couldn’t distinguish one coil from another. I stood staring at it, waiting for a piece to move or show signs of life. Nothing happened. I began to wonder if it had moved at all or if I had imagined it.
My attention was diverted by something falling with a splash into a rock pool nearby. I looked up to see a squawking seagull. It had dropped something. Instinctively I looked back at the smouldering funeral pyre around which a squabbling flock of seagulls were circling and squawking. They reminded me of the vultures in the Parsee Towers of Silence in Mumbai which devour the bodies laid out in burial. I could not help making the connection in my mind.
Ursula, I noticed, had left the funeral pyre and was dawdling along behind me. Yet I had the feeling that she was following me with intent. Of course, her suggestion that her friend had been burned alive, if indeed she had made the suggestion, was a ridiculous one. People have always been obsessed with the idea of themselves or someone else being buried or burned alive.
As I walked on, slanting sunlight illuminated patches of the island, its heather and moorland, its grey stone walls across which low-lying cloud and mist rolled spasmodically. The short grass was damp and laced with silver cobwebs.
I stopped and picked a bog iris. It was not something I usually did. But I was attracted by its size. I am not naturally observant but I had a good idea that this bog iris was by far the biggest I had ever seen. It was unusually large. It was tough too. It took quite a chuck to pull it. It seemed to actively resist me and I thought it squirmed once in my hand.
From that moment, intimations that the island was not what it appeared began to come together in my mind.
I turned off the shore on to the narrow path that led up into the Deserted Village. I walked across the square to where a de-consecrated church stood. It was now our temple and the spiritual centre of the island. Outside, it looked like the ruined church it was, with all its windows roughly boarded up. I slipped noiselessly inside.
The transformation was dramatic. For one thing, there was not a great deal of light and this made it easier to see the old church as the temple we intended it to be. We had covered the walls as far up as we could reach with Indian hangings depicting scenes similar to those you can see in Khajuraho and other temples of northern India.
The two Indian boys, Hari and Arjun, were burning joss-sticks. These two boys came from southern India and had already spen
t years in the ashram. They were destined to become monks. At the moment, they were maintaining a vow of silence. They very seldom left the church and spent most of the day meditating. I had noticed then, and have noticed even more forcibly since coming back to India, that this comes more easily to Orientals. They are more accustomed to sitting still than are Europeans. Their limbs seem to be more pliable and they can certainly assume the various meditation poses more readily. It took me a long time to learn these techniques and to meditate properly. Even to breathe properly has, I think I can say, required more determination on my part than on that of the Indian disciples.
It was, I suppose, as much an effort of mind as anything physical, but stepping through the doors of that church was for me to make a complete transition from the west of Ireland to India.
I went to the guru’s room, which was once the sacristy, to see if he was there.
I should at this point explain the guru’s participation in our community. The guru had agreed to help us spiritually. He was never with us on the island in a physical sense but he was with us spiritually and we could see and sometimes communicate with his projection or insubstantial body.
I looked into his room and could see him now in this form. Even when seen in the flesh the guru is in no way physically impressive. In projection his frail body wrapped in a thin vermilion robe was supernaturally still, his eyes gazing into the infinitely remote spiritual spaces where for the most part he lived. I could feel a compelling and soothing quietness flow from him.
Guru Pradavana is a spiritual giant. To reach the stage he had reached is the culmination of many previous incarnations. He has on the way acquired control over both physical and spiritual phenomena. He frequently withdraws from the physical world into mystical trances. When in these trances he often appears to his followers in various places. It was in this manner that he used to visit us on the island.
This ability on the part of holy men is well known and widely recognized here in India. It is never exhibited for public show - that is left for the charlatans who mostly operate in the west on a money-making basis. In India these spiritual feats are recognized as the natural attributes of a certain stage of spiritual development. Our guru is by no means the greatest or best-known guru in India. There is a well known holy man in Mysore who has several million followers and who frequently performs miracles.