by Noel Scanlon
Suddenly the black-headed seagulls that had been planing overhead began to swoop on me, uttering their raucous calls. At first I thought that they merely associated me with food scraps and that they were hungry. But there was something aggressive in the way they dived at me. I had to wave my arms and, even then, they would veer off only at the last moment. I began to run.
I had only run a short distance when another seagull hit me. It struck me in the back causing me to slip and fall on the smooth slippery stones. I was accustomed to seagulls gathering when I threw some garbage on the sea shore and had never taken any notice of them. I wanted to think that their hitting my back was only a misjudgement, caused perhaps by the strength of the wind. But I could not help feeling that the attack was, in some way, intended, that it was directed.
I struggled up to the cottage door and threw it open. I slammed the door behind me and stood panting and dripping water on to the flagstones. The boulders suspended by wire on either side of the cottage in order to hold the roof on, thumped resonantly against the walls. The wind was a wild animal snarling and leaping on the cottage.
CHAPTER 10
Manju and Maya were sitting on small stools on either side of the hearth, silent and statuesque. In the light of the turf fire they were embodiments of sanity and stability, contrasting with the storm and terrors outside.
Scrambling on my hands and knees (my hands were scratched from breaking my fall on the slippery stones of the littoral) I located the box which I kept under the bed and quickly swallowed two phials of the Indian drug I kept there. It was not a practice of which I approved, but in this case there was not time to regain equilibrium any other way.
Both girls were regarding me out of wide brown eyes that were only very faintly curious. Close as they lived to me, they had an inner life of their own with which I had little contact and on which I had only a peripheral influence. I assumed that, like myself, their inner lives had reached a state of intensity when the outside world impinged only marginally.
They made no enquiry as to why I was in such a state of emotion and dishevelment. Instead, Maya asked in Hindi if I would like some cinnamon tea. Although we lived in the cottage in such close proximity, she chose to address me in a formal or near-formal manner.
I nodded and managed to hold the glass reasonably steady while she poured, the gold bangles on her long delicate arm winking in the reflected glow of the fire. Gulping the tea, I began to feel the steadying effect of the drug. I thought I heard a rumble from the direction of the hill but it was not clear over the shriek of the wind.
I sat hunched up, slowly becoming calmer. Neither of the girls looked at me.
After a time, when I had recovered somewhat, Maya handed me a sheet of paper on which she had written in spidery Hindi hieroglyphics. I should mention that both girls had some training in astrology to which art they brought considerable occult powers. Both dabbled in casting horoscopes.
For certain purposes, on the island we kept the lunar division of time, the lunar day and the lunar month, each month beginning with a new moon and divided into the Shukla Paksha or bright half and Khrisna Paksha or dark half. At the head of the page Maya had written Dhanus, which is my zodiac sign in Sanskrit and under that Sukra-Vara, which is the day of my birth bringing me under the influence of the planet Sukra. She had written,
This period is auspicious for doing evil. The dark spirits are active. It is a time of change.
She had never written anything like that before!
I didn’t question her or ask her to enlarge on her horoscope as I knew from past experience it would be useless to do so. Often she didn’t herself know the significance of what she wrote. But what on earth did she mean? Did it have any connection with my recent experiences? Did it mean that from now on and for the fortnight of the dark period, the forces that inhabited the hill and seemed to be moving out from it would be active?
I sprang up so abruptly that I knocked over my stool. I was still over-tense and I had this strong sense of foreboding. Manju and Maya looked at me with mild surprise, then gently and languidly looked back at the fire where I saw now that the evening meal was cooking.
I waited in the cottage until the storm had abated. Then I went outside. I stopped dead. I looked about and listened for the seagulls afraid they might be waiting for me but couldn’t see any sign of them. There were no seagulls but there was definitely something waiting, some presence. There was nothing visible, but there was something there.
It appeared to be lurking around the west gable. I was later to have the constant feeling that outside the cottage and particularly the west gable by the peat stack was energized by some presence. Standing in the mist I felt the air all around me grow intensely cold. At the same time I distinctly felt something invisible brush against me.
I turned and ran along the path towards the church.
I had only gone a short distance when I ran straight into Chris and had to grab her to prevent her from falling.
“You gave me an awful fright,” Chris said.
I put my hand on her arm to reassure her though I doubt if it had the desired effect. Not that Chris really needed reassuring. She was by far the most solid and imperturbable person on the island.
“I’m going to collect some turf.”
The accent in which she delivered this remark, the mundane ordinariness of its content released the build-up of tension inside me and made me laugh a little hysterically. I almost blurted out what I had just experienced but Chris scarcely invited confidences of a psychic nature.
She pointed to where her turf basket had rolled away when I collided with her. Only then did I realize that I was gripping her tightly by the arm. I withdrew my hand and retrieved the basket.
“You look as if you’d seen a ghost,” she said.
I laughed again. I was not yet quite in control of myself.
It was clear that to get the turf Chris would have to go to the exact spot which was psychically energized.
“Couldn’t you get your turf another time,” I urged.
She looked at me in puzzlement. “Of course I couldn’t. We need it now. And I’ve no intention of spending a night in the cold with Enika.”
“Couldn’t you collect it in the morning?” I said a little wildly. “You might stumble over the peat and hurt yourself.”
But of course I was not able to dissuade her. Chris was a far stronger-charactered person than I was. In the end, she went on her way. I hoped that she would not see anything. I didn’t want any of the other members of the community experiencing these alien presences until I had had time to come to terms with them myself.
I hurried away. I had to go to the one place where I could obtain reassurance. And that was in the presence of the guru.
Inside the church it was quite dark. What light there was came from the burning candles. The smell of incense was heavy in the air. Hari and Arjun were dim forms in a corner. Unlike Manju and Maya, who came from northern India and were high caste with light brown skin, these boys were from southern India, were of a lower caste and quite dark-skinned. The dialect, when they spoke, was Tamil. They were the most intensely devotional of anyone on the island and showed no interest in anything else. For instance, they never wanted to explore the island or even walk on the beach. I think they regarded it as a cold hostile environment and their stay as a penance, a means of acquiring grace.
I greeted them, then softly opened the door of the guru’s cell. The tiny room, lit by a small oil lamp, was quite bare except for straw mats on the floor. The walls were of rough stone blocks bound by a little mortar but unplastered. There was no window. The atmosphere should have been cold and damp and cheerless. It was not. For the guru was there.
The guru was more plainly apparent than I had seen him for some time. Of course he didn’t have all the dimensions of a corporeal body but I could nonetheless see him clearly. He sat, or a projection of him sat, slightly above the straw mat. His legs were folded and his feet inter
locked. He was wearing a dhoti. His vibrations filled the little room. I looked into his eyes and they were as expressionless and as calm as still water.
I had run to the guru because I was frightened of what had begun to happen on the island. There were a lot of questions to which I would have liked the answer. Why had the vegetation begun to behave so oddly, not only the rushes and the bog irises but the brambles I had just seen proliferating outside the church door, brambles never ordinarily grew at this time of year? What was happening? Why did I get this feeling of being watched? What had begun to stir in the hill? What had made the Stone Man move? What had made the gulls attack me? Above all, what other apparitions and manifestations might we expect?
Of course, the guru, even if he had been present in body, would never have given a specific reply to any of these questions. That is not his way. He does not deal in specifics. He speaks in generalities and often in riddles. His followers have, from these general principles, to find their own way. If he did our thinking for us then we would not have to expend any effort and without effort we could never attain anything.
I knew I could not expect specific answers to any of these questions and yet my mind brimmed with them as I squatted on the floor staring at the guru. I tried to exclude them from my mind, to calm its agitated waves. But I found great difficulty in doing this.
Then suddenly as I sat there my agitation died down as if magically. The waves of nervousness subsided into stillness. I wondered why I had thought my questions and fears so urgent. They no longer seemed urgent or even important. In the guru’s orbit nothing was urgent. Spiritual vibrations, radiating from him, glowed through me. In here I felt safe. In here I was sure of the power of the guru in any confrontation there might be.
I suddenly fell into a state of deep meditation as I had learnt in India but which recently I had found obstructed by the intrusion of external elements so that it was now only in the guru’s presence that I could come anywhere near mind states which had previously been readily accessible to me.
Meditation, which I have constantly practised since coming back to India, is nothing more than controlling the mind and holding it to certain points. You can do it. Anyone can do it.
At first you hold the mind to certain parts of the body to the exclusion of all others. This in itself tones down nervous excitement and brings calm. The perceptions become finer as the mind penetrates to more subtle planes until, in time, you reach a high state of awareness which is beyond reason. This is the super-conscious.
This is the state the guru had reached but which I was then and still am so far from. It is in this condition that you come to glimpse metaphysical and transcendental knowledge.
It is perfectly possible for you, for anybody, to attain this and indeed most people, in moments of heightened experience, glimpse it at one time or another. But it is only highly enlightened men like the guru who remain in this state for protracted periods.
In the depths of my state of meditation the guru communicated with me. He reminded me of old truths which I had learned from him while in his ashram.
The mind is infinite. Meditation controls its vibrations. But what happens when you lose the power to meditate? Your mind becomes open to the atmosphere around, which is always full of thoughts and pulsations, both good and evil. When your mind reaches a certain state of tension, all the waves which correspond to that state of tension, perhaps from the present but also from the past, struggle to enter it.
That is what had recently been happening to me. I had lost the power to meditate and consequently I had become agitated. It was because of this that the pulsations of the hill were able to enter my mind.
I became aware of a cramp in my leg and shortly after that I felt myself, as it were, come to. The guru had gone. I knew that I had only been able to receive a small part of the vibrations of his mind. And even that was quickly receding.
I left the church. I tried to hang on to my guru experience but already I could feel the pressure of external events begin to impinge again.
Walking home, I could just make out Chris down by the shoreline in the twilight. I wondered for a moment what Chris, who came of wealthy parents, made of the isolation and austerity in which we lived. She was singing and her song rose in little eddies in the air. Was Chris on a spiritual odyssey of her own? Or was she so solid that she was immune from the experiences which were racking my mind?
She was moving about in the low tide forest of seaweed probably looking for dulsk among the wrack and in the rock pools. We used dulsk in cooking.
I was admiring her industry when suddenly she gave a shriek and began to run. It was happening again! A long roll of sea tangle was slithering after her. It was pursuing her, as if it had a life of its own.
I walked down to the inter-tidal zone. The rocks glistened with seaweed. I looked at the spot where Chris had been. There was a great mass of long amber-coloured tubers with globular extremities. There were long sheets of flat brown seaweed with thousands of thin fronds. There was sea tangle. All of it lay prostrate, a low-tide forest of knotted wrack. I touched a piece with my foot. It was wet and rubbery and slimy. It felt oddly alive.
I looked for the tide that might have moved it. But there was no water near it. The tide was still way out.
CHAPTER 11
I was almost back at my cottage when someone appeared from round the west gable and brushed past me. It was Enika. She looked pale and wan and a little wild. I remembered what Chris had told me about her and perhaps this influenced what I felt. At any rate I had the impression that the girl hurrying past was distinctly different from the rather vague and abstracted Enika I was accustomed to seeing here and there about the island. This girl gave me a look of concentrated hostility before hurrying by. In the past Enika had always been pleasant and almost as docile as the Indian girls.
I was back in the cottage and had closed the door behind me before my mind registered that anything was amiss.
I rushed in.
Ursula was standing in the centre of my room. In her hands she clutched a bundle of letters. The letter box had been dragged from under the bed and hung open, hundreds of letters spewing on to the floor.
Despite my recent meditation and contact with the guru, I felt a sudden rush of anger. Ursula had always had a disrupting effect on me.
I screamed at her uncontrollably.
“I was only taking my letters,” Ursula said defensively. “They’re addressed to me.”
She had changed her clothes. She no longer wore her sari but a sweater and jeans. “They’re my letters,” she repeated with a rather frightened aggressiveness, clutching them to her. “You had no right to keep them hidden in that box under your bed!”
I had never had a raw emotional confrontation like this since coming to the island. It was the exact opposite of what I desired. I sought, and still seek, a purely spiritual life even if I am too weak to attain the guru’s enlightenment. For these reasons I was horrified by the strength of the emotion that gripped me.
Was Ursula behaving like this because of the sexual interlude in the church? Did she see that as license to do what she liked?
“I want to leave the island,” Ursula said, thrusting her chin out.
I saw now that she had cut her hair. Her face looked rounder with her hair short. Her cheeks were flushed. I was shaking with emotion. I had to clench and unclench my fists to prevent myself from striking her. My voice was suppressed and compressed.
“You asked to join. Your letter is here.”
I went through the box scattering letters to left and right until I found it.
“Here,” I said, “read it.”
She would not of course. So I read it out to her. Its tone delighted me.
Dear Guru,
I am completely disillusioned with the materialism of modern life. Nothing I was taught at school and nothing I have experienced since has had any significance. My life has no point, no pattern, no goal. I have heard of your commune and
decided that is where I want to be. Already I have become a vegetarian. My father owns a chain of pork butcher’s shops which for years now I have refused to enter and won’t even pass the mangled bloody corpses of the slaughtered pigs which supposedly sane people actually eat....
“Well,” I said, “you wrote that, didn’t you?”
“Things have changed,” she said.
“What’s changed?” I asked.
“For starters, my friend is dead.”
“All right,” I said, “all right. I agree that that was unfortunate. But if you came here for spiritual experiences that’s not sufficient reason to go back to your father’s pork butcher’s shops.”
I was quite appalled by what I had said. Nonetheless, I was not prepared for the way she took off with a flight of emotional invective that fairly took my breath away.
“Who are you to talk about spirituality? After fucking me in the church at the first opportunity you got.”
So much for spirituality!
I knew that the incident in the church had been an unpardonable breach which was bound to have consequences. I tried to stare her down.
“Who do you think you are, you fucking nut-case,” she screamed. “Standing there in that black gown with that mad look in your eyes! I want to leave; I want to leave the island. And I’m going to.”
Looking beyond her, I noticed that neither Manju nor Maya had moved at all. They didn’t seem to be affected in the slightest by the emotional storm. Had they perhaps reached that state of calm serenity, that still centre of the whirlpool, which I had given up everything to try to achieve? The sight of them calmed me a little.
“Why do you want to leave the island?”
“How could I stay here after what happened to Rosemary? It wasn’t natural. Something very odd happened to her. The night before she went into a coma she saw something out on that hill, or met something out on that hill. I don’t know exactly what it was — she wouldn’t talk about it. But whatever it was it sure as hell scared the wits out of her. It changed her completely. It was scary. Then next day I found her lying in a huge clump of rushes her face all distorted. She saw or met something so unnatural that it made her collapse in a coma. That’s the state she was in when you cremated her. She wasn’t dead. She was still alive.”