by Noel Scanlon
I plunged frantically on, tearing my clothes, scratching my limbs, running blindly past groves of gunnera that lunged towards me.
CHAPTER 13
Somehow I got inside the cottage. I stood there on the flagged floor panting from my exertions and subsiding fear, my clothes ripped, my limbs bruised, my mind about to crack. It took some moments for the atmosphere of security and refuge and escape to filter through to my brain.
Manju and Maya were sitting in exactly the same position by the fire. They looked so normal, so unperturbed, so calm and undisturbed, that I wanted to cry with relief. Manju was playing the vina, the Indian instrument that is supposed to represent the body of a goddess by reason of its curved neck, its gourds for breasts, its frets for bracelets and so on. The music Manju drew from it was soft and comforting and above all human, as different as could be from the humming I had heard from the mouth of the Stone Man. I began to feel safe or at least not immediately threatened.
I crouched by the fire and let the human warmth surround me and humanize me. Under Manju’s slender, brown quick-tripping fingers the vina created a magical circle around us, an oriental atmosphere, an oriental melodic raga. The strains of the vina mingled with some Indian smell, perhaps the smell of the coconut oil with which Manju and Maya constantly oiled the black plaits that hung down their backs.
I sneaked looks at the two child-women seated on either side of the hob in their saris laundered in the mountain stream and dried on the fuchsia bushes that came right up to the back wall. Beneath their ankle-length saris, their toes peeped from open chappals. Red tilak marks in the centre of their foreheads had been freshly applied. The firelight fell on their slender bodies. Collapsing sods of burning peat splashed them with colour. Reaching for the bellows, Maya began to blow the fire which fanned into blazing brightness, sending darts of firelight across the stone flagging and up to the rough beams dimly apparent. All this engendered a close cut-off intimacy. It gave me a feeling of safety. I had escaped for the moment and my escape made me light-headed. I also felt suddenly sexually aroused.
In the warm womb of the cottage I gave up all thought of sexual celibacy, the spiritual goals I had pursued for years in the lonely arid wastes of my mind. I was glad to give up everything I had ever learnt in order to escape from the remembrance of what I had just seen on the hill. I had been drawn through a veil and on the others side I had encountered terror.
I had been given a glimpse of sights I did not want to see, entered dimensions whose strangeness and menace I could not handle. I had to forget them, distance them. In order to survive the night, to survive at all, I had to bury myself in something that was firmly rooted in ordinary humanity and desire. Something that would hold the dark thing that was moving on the hill at bay.
With head averted, I touched Maya’s golden arm, touched it with my rough bramble-torn hands. That touch drove from my mind the Stone Man and whatever had moved out of the tomb. My fingers tripped along to that erogenous zone of young brown flesh that lay between her low slung sari and brief choli. The feel of that warm flesh lapped and rippled through me. I saw the Indian girls as goddesses of the flesh and desire as a fine thread drawing me towards their silken web.
Maya said nothing. With head bent she stared at the fire, neither yielding nor unyielding. I gazed at the curve of her neck and the red tassel hanging from the gold ornament that fitted tightly around it. Her frail beauty, her unconcern, or her apparent unconcern, pierced me. It agitated my breathing.
In my perverse way, the fact that Manju and Maya were my own, my household possessions, created in me a passion that verged on the incestuous. The fact that we barely communicated, that their eastern minds were beyond my grasp, added to their attraction. The fact that I was breaking my own and community rules only added to my excitement as we collapsed on to the four-posted bed by the fire and their brown limbs entwined with my white mottled ones.
I had always seen these girls as child-women, as eastern incarnations, as innocent as Krishna’s gopies. They were, of course, no such thing. They read me better than I read myself. They had anticipated this for a long time and were ready when it happened. They weren’t lewd in the way that Ursula was lewd. They were submissive, their eyes downcast. I was the master; they were eager to do my bidding. They knelt as if doing obeisance. They didn’t bring to the act the western concept of original sin or any of the western mental paraphernalia.
As they buried me beneath their lithe limbs our contact was purely physical. Their features blurred with excitement, their lips glistened wetly, their bodies were abandoned, their hands manipulative. And their eyes? What was it I saw in those large dark Indian eyes set in those fragile oval faces as they bestrode me? Was it passion? Or was it something else?
They coupled, these oriental beauties, as athletically as depicted on any piece of ancient erotic sculpture that adorns so many Hindu temples, couplings that embrace men and women and gods and demons and deities. My brown-breasted partners in their physical dexterity so different from their calm fireside repose seemed to have torn pages, indeed chapters, from the Kama Sutra, that Hindu bible of eroticism.
I was the master; they the temple concubines. They were doing me a service and yet it was not my body but the balance of my mind which they were saving, for arousing my lust and gratifying my body they grounded my mind in the physical. They drew my mind way from a contemplation of horrors which I could not bear to think about.
Maya and Manju released in me a tension which was unbearable and saved me, for the moment, from facing up to what was happening on the island. On the shaking four-posted bed our three bodies squirmed and thrust and rolled. But even at the height of my passion, my long self-imposed discipline survived to the extent that something, some part of me, some essence I had at all costs to preserve, remained untouched, stood aloof and hovered about my frenetically thrashing body.
Something else hovered too. It hovered outside the window rattling it gently and looking in, something horrible but not yet quite fully formed.
CHAPTER 14
“All my vegetable plants are being choked by weeds,” Chris lamented as we stood beside her cottage in the garden she had so laboriously created.
I didn’t like what I saw. I resisted the evidence before me that the wild growth on the hill had taken over Chris’s garden.
Her garden had always been meticulously kept. I have never had any interest in gardening myself but Chris was an enthusiast. She used to claim that plunging her hand into the earth really did something for her, released all sorts of tensions. It made, so she said, contact with something primeval and primitive.
There was something primeval and primitive at work here now but not something which she or anyone else would want to make contact with.
“I’ve spent months digging out those beds,” she said. “Now they’re just a mass of weeds.”
It was perfectly true. Her purple broccoli, her brussel sprouts, her leeks, all seemed to have disappeared beneath a proliferation of weeds.
“You saw this garden when I dug it over and cleaned it - not a weed anywhere. And it isn’t that I haven’t been looking after it. I’ve been out here every day slaving away. You’d think it had never been weeded.”
If I had not known all the work she had put in, I would not have believed her. Bindweed, couch grass and yellow ragwort were growing rampant. And nettles. These nettles, as Ursula had claimed, were extraordinarily tall and thick-stemmed. There were clumps of them here and there throughout the garden. I bent down and pulled some weeds to reveal the shape of a bed of young broccoli plants. Around each plant bindweed had curled itself tightly as if purposely choking the life out of it. I tried to pull the bindweed away but instead the broccoli came out by its roots. It was limp and dying anyway.
“Have you ever seen anything like it?” Chris asked. “Would you ever think that I turned the whole plot over with a fork, pulled every weed and raked the beds till they were absolutely no weeds.
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��There must be some explanation,” she went on. “Weeds just never grow that fast. What could have caused it? Is it that there’s something extra special about the soil in this particular spot?”
I said nothing. What could I say? I didn’t want to frighten her by telling her the way the vegetation had caught about my legs with apparent intent when I was on the hill.
“I just give up,” Chris went on. “There’s nothing I can do to save those vegetables. It really annoys me after all the work I’ve done. And the funny thing is that the weeds have spread out of the garden up to the house. Come on till I show you.”
The front of Chris’s cottage, which had always been so neat, had taken on the same unkempt look as her garden. Weeds had rooted and were growing exuberantly all along the front. Convolvulus had begun to climb the wall. There were nettles on either side of the doorway, nettles grown even taller than those out in the garden.
“Disgusting, isn’t it. Let’s go inside.”
We went past the nettles into her cottage. As we did so they leaned towards us and one grazed my back.
The cottage was, as usual, spotlessly clean and tidy. Chris had constructed her own furniture from driftwood and fish boxes thrown up on the shore. There were boxes and trunks and a long couch which was a marvel of ingenuity. The striped tom-cat which I had brought from the mainland was pacing nervously about the room.
“I can’t seem to get him to settle down,” Chris said. “He keeps seeing things in corners and spitting at them. I suppose it’s just the strange environment.”
She put the kettle on the fire to boil and fetched plates and cups from a cupboard. The cat gave up its patrol and sat on the hearth at my feet. The cottage looked as usual. But its pleasant, normal atmosphere was gone. I thought I saw a shadow fall across the open half-door. There was a tension in the air.
Chris prattled on about this and that. More than anyone else in the community, she was concerned with the mechanics of physical survival.
Her talk was down to earth. I tried to keep it that way. I willed myself to be lulled by it.
When the kettle boiled, Chris made yarrow tea. It was one of her specialities. She collected the herb which grew wild on the island and dried it in accordance with the instructions in one of her many cookery and survival books. As she poured the tea into mugs she said, “I’m disappointed about my garden. What I’l1 have to do is try another piece of ground. There are lots of other patches I could dig but they wouldn’t be producing until next year. Can you think of anything to do about the weeds?”
“We could try week-killer if you like,” I said doubtfully.
“No, I won’t have weed-killer. It’s pure poison.”
I began to sip the yarrow tea. We were silent for a while. I thought I heard a movement outside, a quiet stealthy movement.
She began to cut slices from a blackberry tart she had fetched from a cupboard.
“Try some of this; it’s freshly baked. I couldn’t believe my luck in finding some blackberries still on the bushes. And not the usual little seedy ones. These were big and juicy. Tell me what you think of it.”
I sampled the slice she had handed me. “It tastes delicious,” I said.
“I’m glad you like it. Fresh blackberry pie. Full of vitamins.”
The cat had fallen asleep but it kept moving uneasily and twitching as if fighting some unseen enemy.
I ate the tart and took small sips of the tea. The cottage really had all the ingredients for a pleasant homely atmosphere, one which Chris had a talent for creating. But the various ingredients did not add up to a whole. The tension tightened. Something outside, something not as definite as a shadow, closed in on the cottage. The atmosphere had gone bad. I noticed the head of a nettle outside the little window. Had it been there before?
Chris went on about seaweed and alginates. I sipped more of the tea. It tasted sharp and bitter. But perhaps it did have some of the properties that Chris claimed for it. I gulped most of the mugful down and then, to get rid of the taste, finished the piece of blackberry tart.
Suddenly I felt an abyss open up in my mind. The ordinary homely surroundings began to change into something grotesque. The hearth beside me changed shape. The interior of the cottage darkened. We were not alone anymore. Things began to move out of the shadows.
I could not understand what was happening. I felt as if I’d had taken some hallucinatory drug. The atmosphere got worse. Reality fell apart and I felt myself being thrust through into a place that was dark and ugly.
I jumped up, seized Chris’s blackberry tart and the mug of yarrow tea which she had only sipped and threw the lot on the fire.
“What on earth are you doing?” Chris asked startled.
I didn’t reply. She leaned across and took my hand. “What’s wrong? What’s the matter? Why did you do that?”
I shook my head clearing it. “Sorry,” I said. “It was just a spasm.” She looked at me oddly. “Was there something wrong with the tea or the tart? Did they disagree with you?”
I didn’t want to frighten her but I wanted to warn her. In the end I said, “I don’t know how to put this. But something very odd is happening to the vegetation on the island - the indigenous vegetation at any rate.”
“You mean like in my garden?”
“Yes, that’s part of it. But only part of it. Something is happening to the vegetation all over the island. Not only in your garden but all over. So there’s a rule I’d like you and the others to follow. Don’t eat anything that grows wild on the island, neither yarrow nor blackberries nor sorrel nor anything else. And don’t use well water either. Only use rainwater.”
Chris looked baffled. “But I thought we were trying to make ourselves more and more self-sufficient.”
“I know. We were. But things have changed. I’1l get extra supplies to make up for any dietary deficiency.”
Chris didn’t look convinced. She obviously thought I was over-reacting. But she decided to humour me. “All right,” she said and began talking about something else. She was really a very perceptive girl and quick to react. While we sat there in the firelight chatting, she smoked cigarette after cigarette rolling them from her herbal mixture.
After a time Enika came in. Immediately she did, I felt a chill as if cold fingers had touched my spine. I had up till recently thought of Enika as a gentle and co-operative girl. She had the mild eyes of the introspective. She was keen on meditation and receptive to the guru’s teachings. Not that she talked much about it. She was inclined to wander off by herself along the beach or maybe just listen to the gurgling of the stream.
This girl who came into the cottage now was a different person. She had a slack empty expression altogether without animation. Her face was as blank as an unpainted canvas. She looked like some sort of zombie and I remembered Chris having told me about her change of personality.
“Hi,” Chris said cheerfully.
Enika didn’t respond. I could hear her behind me taking a saucepan from where they were kept hanging from hooks.
“Where did you get those?” Chris asked.
“In the garden,” Enika answered.
“Where in the garden? I didn’t sow any and I got rid of the ones that appeared in the house.”
Alerted, I turned and saw Enika breaking mushrooms into the saucepan. They were larger than any I had ever seen.
“Don’t let her eat those mushrooms,” I shouted.
“I found them in the garden. I found them in the garden,” Enika was chanting in a little-girl chant. Her lips did not seem to move, as if she was a ventriloquist’s dummy and the ventriloquist was sitting somewhere else out of sight. Her eyes had widened but their expression was still blank.
Chris approached her and began to take the saucepan from her. The mushrooms I saw now were not the most deadly but nonetheless had to be taken from her. Enika’s hands tightened on the handle of the saucepan until she was holding it so firmly that her protruding knuckles were white.
“Be a
sensible girl,” Chris coaxed. “We’re only thinking of your health. We don’t want you to poison yourself.”
But Enika’s empty eyes had taken on a look of virulent hostility which seemed to come from something lurking inside her. “These aren’t for me,” she said in, her thin-voiced, little-girl chant. “They’re for you. You must eat mushrooms every day. Like I do.”
“Who said so?” I asked loudly.
The question seemed to disturb her and she began to blink her eyes in confusion. I jumped up, wrenched the saucepan out of her hand and threw the mushrooms on to the blazing turf fire.
Enika screamed a most horrible high-pitched scream. Her blank face had taken on a look of flat hate. Her eyes rolled inwards in their sockets. Then she went for me in a maniacal fury. I was both taller and stronger and heavier but she had her hands about my throat before I could stop her.
She had the strength of the possessed. It put Chris and me to the limit of our strength to loosen her grip before she choked me. Eventually I managed to pinion her arms to her side. But, as I held her, her screams increased. They seemed to be tearing her body apart. She twisted and arched her body in a way that nearly knocked me down. As she screamed there were little flecks of foam on her mouth.
“Slap her face,” I told Chris. “We have to get her out of this.”
After Chris had struck her a few times she went slack in my arms and I carried her over to the couch. Although her pulse was racing she felt abnormally cold. Touching her was like touching a corpse.
Chris fetched rugs and we wrapped her up. After a time her pulse regulated and she felt less cold. Her breathing was normal.
“Has she ever had a turn like this before?”
Chris rolled another cigarette and dragged on it. “Like I told you, she’s been behaving oddly. I mean she seems to see things that aren’t there and sometimes when she goes outside she comes back in a terrible state. Then she talks to herself in a way that makes you think that she’s terrified of what she has seen out there or what she imagines she has seen. But she’s never been violent like this before.”