by Noel Scanlon
I could see that Ursula was not thinking straight. But I didn’t like what she said all the same. Was I forever to be haunted by the unfortunate Rosemary whose death I had nothing at all to do with?
“Rosemary was most certainly dead. You’re just saying that because you’re upset. She had no pulse whatever or any other sign of life.”
“The guru has no pulse when he’s in a trance.”
Now she was being obtuse.
“That’s something completely different. The guru has reached a state of enlightenment where normal physical criteria no longer apply.”
“Maybe Rosemary had reached the same state.”
“You know perfectly well that she hadn’t. She was well and truly dead. And you made no suggestion to the contrary. If you thought all this why didn’t you speak up at the time? You could have stopped the cremation.”
Ursula was silent for a moment. Then blurted out, “Why is she coming back? Why does she appear to me every time I visit the cremation site?”
I was both appalled and excited by what she said. For it proved that someone else was seeing that particular apparition.
“What did you see at the cremation site?”
“I saw Rosemary.”
“What exactly did you see? Did you see all of her?”
“No,” Ursula said. “Just part of her.” She hesitated. “Just her head.”
I found that intensely interesting. But to Ursula I said, “You were very close to Rosemary. So it’s only natural that your imagination should play tricks on you. That’s no reason at all for wanting to leave the island.” I could not let her leave of course, I could not let anyone leave.
“That’s not the only reason I want to go,” she said, “though it’s enough. Look, I came here because I agreed with the community idea. I still do. I’m as anti-materialism as I ever was and I’m fully prepared to believe that the guru is an extraordinary person at an extraordinary state of development. I don’t at all mind the isolation or the away-from-it-all way we live. But when the things that are happening here start happening, I get to see it’s time to move on.”
“What happenings?” I asked.
“For Christ’s sake,” Ursula said. “You know as well as I do that there’s something very odd going on here. The whole atmosphere has become weird. There are these odd lights on the hill at night.”
“That’s just St Elmo’s fire.”
“I don’t believe that for a moment. But even if l did there are too many other things.”
“Like what?”
“Like the vegetation. It’s unnatural the way it’s started to grow. Have you seen the nettles? They’ll soon be the size of fucking trees.”
“You’re overwrought,” I said quickly. “You need something to calm you down.”
I went into the store-room to get a herbal mixture which had a strong sedative effect. While holding the lantern aloft searching for the packet, my attention was drawn to a patch of orange in the corner.
The mushrooms were back again! Full-grown as if they’d never been pulled! And there were more in another corner.
Returning to the kitchen, I gave Ursula the herbal mixture. “Take some of that tonight and you’ll feel better. You can’t leave the island just now. You underwent the same initiation rites as everybody else.”
She looked as if she would go berserk. Her breasts rose and fell under her sweater.
“I don’t care what fucking vows I took,” Ursula screamed. “I’m fucking well leaving.”
“You need time to think about it,” I said. “Meantime I’ll ask the guru.”
“The guru!” she shouted. “How can you ask him when he’s in India? And anyway he’s already ascended up to heaven.”
I was not really surprised that she said this. I had always sensed that her spirituality was a sham, assumed for some egotistical reason of her own.
“You know that you shouldn’t have said a thing like that.”
At that point she broke, lost her control completely.
“My God,” she screamed. “How did I ever get myself stuck out here on this crazy island haunted by God knows what and run by a fucking nut.”
Suddenly she launched herself at me and began to beat her fists on my chest. Her beating fists warmed me and her eyes sparkled. I knew that the crisis was over. I caught her fists and held her in a tight embrace. I kissed her and she softened in a manner that was extraordinarily physically attractive. I remembered her writhing under me on the church floor after the cremation.
“You’re crazy,” she said. But she made no effort to get away. “Absolutely fucking crazy.” Her voice was soft now. It carried no conviction. I held her for a moment then released her. She began to cry.
“I don’t care what you do to me,” she said. “Just let me out. I’m frightened of what’ll happen if I stay.”
I knew I was in control now.
“All right, Ursula,” I said. “I’ll see what can be done. Go to your cottage and stay there. Meditate. Try to regain your mental balance.”
She clung to me for a bit, then left meekly enough. I could hear her running down the path.
After she had gone, I went back into the store-room and quickly plucked some fungi I saw there which was oddly resistant and threw them on the fire.
The way they resisted and indeed clung on to me put me in find that fungi are neither plant nor animal. Billions of years ago when animals and plants diverged the fungi took the animal not the plant branch. Then later they began their own evolution but because of the way they had evolved they retain a number of key biological traits that make them more animal than plant and therefore more like us. They digest other organisms just like we do. At every stage of their life fungi reveal how much like us they are.
Manju and Maya, those twin anchors of my physical life, sat quiet and still on their stools as they were wont to do for indefinite periods. They seemed to be quite unaffected by, indeed not to have noticed the scene with Ursula. Languidly, Manju manoeuvred the black pot suspended from the iron hook over the fire and placed before me on the kitchen table a plate of bhujia and puris, her speciality. I pretended to eat but in fact only played about with the food — my stomach at that stage was in no condition to receive anything.
Maya reached with her slim gold-bangled arm and gently lifted a sod of turf from the creel. Her build was so delicate, her wrists so thin, that the turf which we had inexpertly cut and brought home seemed gross and crude in her hands. Though indolent in other ways so that the cottage was always grossly untidy, Maya assiduously tended the fire all day, a self-imposed task.
I gained some temporary peace from the girls’ composure as they sat staring into the fire. These peat fires were a central part of the ritual of our lives and, indeed, their aromatic smell at all times was not only in the air but clung to our clothes.
As I tried to eat, my attention was attracted to the window opposite the kitchen table. There was something there watching me. Once or twice it rattled the window. I thought I saw the outline of a form, the glow of eyes, but could not be sure. But what I could be sure of, was what I felt, and that was the presence of something. The light outside was still in that state which in these parts is euphemistically called twilight, a state of semi-light and semi-darkness which is supposed to apply to the evening but quite frequently persists all day for many days. It is a time when the real becomes unreal, when the practical certainties become blurred around the edges, when the imagination runs free. It is a time when the darker things which have hidden all day, banished by the light, creep out from their hiding-places.
There was a tap at the window. Nothing quite as definite as a tap but some mass pressed against it.
I pushed back my stool and ran outside.
CHAPTER 12
Outside I could not see anyone though I could feel the vibrations of something having been there.
Restless, I began to walk down through the Deserted Village, past the tumble-down houses.
I
wondered why the original inhabitants had really fled from them. The local superstition, which caused people to shun them to the extent that no one would go near them, had always seemed to me to be silly. But I was not so sure any longer. What if the superstitions had a real and terrifying basis? Had we been wrong to locate in the Deserted Village?
We had refurbished three of the cottages apart from my own - Chris’s was at the very far end of the long straggling village and the others were spaced out. We had chosen what seemed to be the most solid structures. Seen from the outside, all of our cottages looked primitive. The stone walls were solid enough. But the work which we had done looked terribly amateurish and insecure. Each inhabited cottage shed little beams of light from oil lamps.
I had just learned from my recent encounter with Ursula that, while I thought I had known her, I obviously didn’t. Her attitude had been a revelation. It followed from it that I really had no idea of what was going on inside the heads of the others. And I thought I had known them so well. The known had become unknown. The very smoke from the cottage chimneys hung like so many question marks in the sky.
Up till now, I had assumed that I was the only one seeing apparitions or having psychic experiences. But Ursula had disabused me of that idea. If she had seen an apparition of Rosemary what might not the others have seen? What had Rosemary seen?
Someone or something was moving ahead of me among the cottages. Was this what had looked into the kitchen at me? My senses have never been very reliable, my life so internalized and my imagination so keen that I have sometimes difficulty in distinguishing between shadow and substance. But in this instance I saw something lurk, then move.
Because I had to give it a human form (the alternatives were too scary and my mind could not yet accept a non-human form) I decided it must be Dominic.
The idea of Dominic being on the island annoyed me, but, at the same time gave me relief. I had strictly forbidden the brothers ever to land except when I needed them to take me to the mainland and even then I only allowed them as far as the pier. As I have said, I suspected that they spent time in an old boley house at the other side of the island but I never had any real proof of this.
The idea that the form was human, was Dominic, allowed, indeed induced, me to go on.
The shadow seemed to see me and slid away from the window which indicated that Dominic, if it had been Dominic, had had one of the girls as his objective.
In a moment I was myself at the cottage windows adopting the role of voyeur which I had attributed to Dominic. I had never spied like this before. The scenes I had expected to see were of girls meditating silently in the prescribed manner in between quiet domestic activities. But what I saw was not at all what I had expected.
My first surprise was to see Ursula, whom I had assumed to be sulking at home, in Hari and Arjun’s cottage, and the two boys, who were on a vow of silence and whom I had not heard speak for weeks, chatting away with apparent animation. This seemed all the more remarkable since they knew no English and Ursula knew no Tamil. But they were communicating all right. While I stood there watching, Ursula rolled cigarettes and offered them all round. In a moment the three were smoking and giggling. What on earth were they smoking? I was shocked. I had no idea that so much went on that I didn’t know about. I had always naively assumed that the community found fulfilment from our rites and meditation and so on.
I jumped back from the window as Ursula came to open it.
I walked down to the jetty. I wanted to find out where Dominic had gone and what he had been up to. Was it only fancy that made me think I heard a currach being dragged across the stones and the splash of water as it was launched? My straining eyes could not see. Night water crept silently inwards over the shingle, over millions of sea creatures that crept and crawled up through the sand at the turn of the tide. Night water lifted the sea-wrack to hang wraith-like and tendon-trailing in the shallows.
A single seal lifted its whiskered head and called. Except that it was not a seal’s call. It was like one but not quite.
The call was returned from the graveyard. This ancient graveyard beside the jetty was a desolate and eerie place. Celtic crosses leaned awry and tombstones that had fallen over with age or been flattened by the elements were overgrown with moss. These tombstones were crudely cut and inscribed REST IN PEACE. I sincerely hoped they were resting in peace.
I heard the call again. I knew that the people of Blackshell believed seals to be inhabited by the spirits of the dead. Something crawled off a flattened tombstone and slid towards the sea. Then another and another. Whatever they were, they were not seals. For one thing they were too big and the shape was wrong. But what else could they be?
I did not want to find out.
I turned away from the graveyard wall, from the fallen tombstones. The shadow was ahead of me moving towards the hill. It must surely be Dominic. He was hiding out on the island. Or so I told myself, though in my heart of hearts I doubted if it was really he.
He led me upwards along a rough narrow boulder-strewn gully. On either side of the gully grew brambles. The girls gathered the seedy little blackberries in season and Chris made blackberry jam and blackberry pie. Brambles kept getting in my way. Of course they had always grown wild and had never been trimmed back. But they had never been this far into the gully. Normally they grew on the ditches with just the odd shoot coming across the path, but now they seemed to be everywhere.
I had observed the unnatural growth on the hill from down below but it was something else to be in among it. What I had not bargained for was the feeling it gave me, as if each bramble had eyes all along its length.
A bramble caught me about the leg. I had to stop to get it off my trousers. All the little thorns seemed to have locked into the material. When I pulled, it resisted. The only way I could get it out was to pull part of the trousers leg with it.
I might have given up at this point only I saw Dominic’s shadow again.
I got through the brambles in the gully and out on to an open heath where it was easier to move over the rough grass. Though here the rushes were a problem.
I had often done the climb before. It was usually easy. But now the damp rushes were clinging to me. Some of them became entwined around my feet making me stumble.
I became gradually convinced that the vegetation had acquired a will of its own. The rushes which pressed themselves against me were not only alive but seeing and feeling. There seemed to me to be no doubt about it. They were not actually blocking my passage - after all I was getting through. But they were brushing constantly against me, sensually, as if experimenting with some newly acquired power.
Oddly enough, this did not scare me as much as it should have. It was as if my mind had been lulled. And anyway it was far too late to turn back. Dominic’s form dancing before me led me high up on the flank of the hill.
It was only when I was up there that I realised that the vegetation was only a surface manifestation, a cover for something else, something which lay sentient and watchful far beneath.
Dominic was not to be seen and I realized that he had only been a lure to get me up here. And now that I was here I was trapped. The whole area began to throb. I was subjected to the full power of whatever lurked here. It was aware of me and watching me.
Dominic had disappeared inside the megalithic tomb. The tomb I knew with absolute certainty was the most potent of the forbidden areas which the islanders, when they lived here, had avoided. It was the place which the old man in the annexe had told me about, the place from which something had emerged terrifying him out of his wits. The knowledge made the nape of my neck tingle.
Something black emerged from the tomb. I told myself it was Dominic. I wanted it to be Dominic. And it did resemble him to the extent that it was misshapen. But it was not him. It had never been him. It was something that had assumed his form. I was the only living person alone on that hillside. The apparition slid into the Stone Man.
At the same
time the Stone Man began to give out a humming noise. This humming floated in the air and hung about him in a high-pitched throb that grated on my nerves. Then I saw that something was happening behind the Stone Man in the Black Bog.
The bog lit up with a purple light which I told myself was coming from the burning off of the gases that peat bogs sometimes emit. The purple light illuminated the shapes of the bog oak which had once been a grove sacred to the Druids. These ancient oaks glinted in white rows behind the Stone Man. Their weathered wind-torn, writhing shapes and forms seemed to be about to march in a petrified throng.
The humming gained a higher and higher pitch till it almost left the range of the human ear. A change came over the Stone Man. He became suddenly alert drawing energy perhaps from deep in the hill, perhaps from the black form which had entered him and become part of him. The rock that was his face became animated, with air whistling through the hole of his mouth and blowing towards me. In the thick waiting air something moved out from him to surround me. It was a dark magnetic force. It repelled and terrified me. But at the same time it drew me towards it with a strong gravitational pull.
I pulled against it but it forced me to step forward.
I shut my eyes and tried to make contact with the guru. I saw him sitting calmly in his cell in the ashram, his fathomless eyes staring into eternity. I made a connection with him, felt something of his power. It was as if a light had suddenly been switched on inside me.
With my eyes still shut I turned my back on the Stone Man. The pull of that dark force slackened. With a tremendous effort, my body as heavy as lead, I took a few paces. Then began to plunge wildly down the hill, falling and picking myself up and falling again, leaping over rushes, clattering over low stone walls, racing mindlessly away from whatever had entered and animated the Stone Man.