by Noel Scanlon
“I think she’ll be all right as long as she doesn’t eat any more mushrooms which she must never be allowed to do,” I said. “Put her on a strict diet with a definite ban on anything that grows on the island”
I looked down at Enika. She didn’t look like a young girl at all. Her face was blank and pallid. Her eyes were moving behind her eyelids. She seemed to be waiting for something to repossess and revitalize her.
CHAPTER 15
I paused outside Chris’s door on the way out. Bindweed was growing up the handle of the spade that was leaning against the wall. The nettles by the doorway seemed to me to have grown while I had been in the cottage. All the vegetation seemed to have grown.
I decided to pull the nettles for Chris and bent down to get a grip near the roots. I gave a pull but it had no effect. As I was tugging, something lashed me about the neck and made me step back. There was a strong stinging feeling on my flesh and already little lumps were beginning to form. The nettles had lashed out and stung me. I took the spade from beside the door, slashed them down, then dug the roots out.
As I walked out through the garden I could not at first see any of Enika’s mushrooms. But bending down I could see them all right, a mass of them growing beneath the weed cover. I stamped out as many as I could.
I began to walk along the track to the beach.
The island could not have looked prettier. There was a myriad of shades and colours not to be seen in the usual grey light. Spirals of peat smoke rose almost perpendicularly from the chimneys of the cottages. A pair of plump young blackbirds flapped out from the wild fuchsia hedge ahead of me. Wild flowers grew along by the stream.
The sky was wide and high. Lucid grey light fell from it and suffused the earth. Moist temperate freshness dropped from the silent air.
At a casual glance the hill looked perfectly ordinary. Even the area around the Stone Man looked ordinary. The little fields bounded by dry stone walls marched up its lower flanks in a pleasingly irregular formation. The brambles lay slack and harmless-looking along the walls. The heather on the heath was a vivid purple.
But I knew that all this prettiness was on the surface. It was only a camouflage for what stirred and moved beneath. The vegetation was over-stimulated. The heather should have been completely faded by now. There should not have been any flowers at this time of year. There should have been none of this vivid growth.
Instinctively I gave a grove of wild rhubarb a wide berth. For the grove was steadily extending in size. It looked more like a jungle growth than something that would grow on a windswept island. It looked fresh and green and was dripping little drops of moisture which fell like drops of fear in my mind.
Despite its brilliant colours, despite its freshness and lushness, pretty was not the right word for this landscape. There was something too odd about it for that. There was a strangeness, a sense of waiting, an extra dimension that was not normally to be found in vegetation. It was sapful and abundant. It had an extra sheen, a glow. But I knew that it was unnatural and alien.
I reached the beach and began to walk along it. Seagulls planing overhead seemed to register my presence.
The sea water crept silently inwards over the shingle, over the millions of sea creatures that crept and crawled up through the sand at the turn of the tide. I crunched over them and, as I did so, I had an intense feeling of being surrounded by millions of little pin-points of life that were as aware of me as I was of them.
I heard a crunching noise behind me. Someone or something was following me.
Suddenly Dominic’s sheepdog came flying down the hill, flying over stone walls, soft-touching the bracken, its muzzle quivering. It began to circle me with a mad excitement.
I turned and Dominic, who had been following me, stopped. He kept waving, walking a few paces, and waving again. He did this in an imbecilic way with a foolish leer and a wild wave of his arm. He would walk a few paces, break into a trot, stop, and wave again. He was grinning from ear to ear. His shadow falling on the sand reminded me again of the form that had lured me up the hill and then disappeared into the megalithic tomb.
I followed Dominic past the currach moored by the pier and into the graveyard.
Ruddy-faced, Augustus John arose from among the long-abandoned Celtic crosses. He came striding down towards me, sharpening a hand sickle of the type for cutting rushes and the like.
“Ah, there you are, sur,” Augustus John said with an affability which I deeply mistrusted.“I got tired with the waiting and came in here to cut the nettles from around me grandmother’s grave. God rest her soul.”
The nettles, I noticed, were just as outsize as those in Chris’s place.
“All me ancestors lived on this island,” Augustus John went on, “and every last one of them is buried right here in this spot.” he grinned and his grin made me squirm uneasily. I could feel a strong gnawing of apprehension.
Augustus John was always able to affect me like this. He was always respectful, but his respectfulness was just a thin cloak for the swaggering dominance he actually felt.
The graveyard in which he stood was, even in daylight, a gloomy and eerie place. All the dead from the Deserted Village had, of course, been buried here. It was now completely overgrown and wild. A faded inscription read “On Their Souls Sweet Jesus Have Mercy.”
“What are you doing here?” I demanded.
“Ah now, sur,” Augustus John said mockingly, “I knew you’d ask that. Even though I knew a gentleman like yourself wouldn’t object to me cleaning up me ancestor’s grave.” He said this with a sort of low cunning. Dominic stood with his arms dangling. I tried to contain my temper. Augustus John was playing with me, trying to take a rise out of me. He was here for some purpose, if not for several. There was a purpose in everything he did however tortuous and hidden it might be.
“Shur I won’t keep you in suspense any longer. I was sent out here with an urgent letter to give you.”
He handed me a letter and I tore it open. It was from the solicitor in the nearby market town.
Dear Sir,
I’m really surprised that I’ve had no reply whatever to my previous letters regarding Miss Rosemary Brown.
Her parents are wealthy Yanks and the likes of them will spare no expense to trace their daughter. Would you believe it, they’ve already been to India and now they’re certain sure that she’s living out on your island. They have employed me as their agent in this regard and I’m working night and day to carry out their wishes. Last time you came ashore I just missed you and was held up all night due to heavy flooding making the bog roads impassible. Sitting in the cold in the car I kept looking out at your island in the broad Atlantic and wondering what you saw in it all, though it must be lovely in summer when the sea is flat and the rhododendron bushes are in bloom.
Now, sir, I’m waiting for you right this minute. What I suggest is you come over and we try to clear the matter up. No harm in that. Then I can get these Yanks off my back. They are forever pestering me and can’t be put off like a normal client.
Please help me out in this or I will have to take other action which isn’t something I care to have to do to a gentleman like yourself.
The contents of the letter stunned me. Despite the ludicrous come-all-ye style, it was like a blow to the solar plexus. I was having enough trouble without this rude intrusion from the outside world. Much as I hated going to the mainland, how could I get out of it?
Augustus John was saying, “This grave’s in an awful state. It badly needs cleaning up. Though I’ll say one thing for it. Me oul grandmother, God rest her soul, has the best view I ever seen from any graveyard in Ireland. There’s nowhere you’d be buried you’d have a better view from.”
In the flat sea, a seal-like animal lifted its large head. Something stirred among the bushes at the other side of the grave-yard.
“All right,” I said abruptly, “I’ll go and see this man.”
I was just about to step into the boat when A
ugustus John said slyly, “Are you not going to change your cassock today, reverend?”
Furious at the oversight, I ripped my cloak off and pushed it between some rocks.
Dominic held the currach steady, staring at me oaf-like, his mouth hanging open. The dog hopped in after me. Its hair was wet and smelled strongly. It crouched, hugging the bottom.
Augustus John shoved off, then lowered an outboard engine which I had not noticed before. Starting it, he said, “I just got a loan of this yoke for the trip.”
The sea was smoother than usual though this to my mind in no way made it safe. It still heaved and breathed, this strip of ocean beneath whose temporarily flat surface I could see depths and shades and other mysteries that were thankfully hidden.
From the beginning there was something about the crossing that I didn’t like. Seagulls materialized out of nowhere and began to follow us. They swooped down and I thought they were dive-bombing us but they either straightened out at the last moment or picked something out of the sea.
Suddenly a big bull seal rose out of the water behind us. Or was it a seal? The next moment it was submerged and came right up under us raising the currach out of the water. We were thrown dangerously from side to side.
Augustus John looked frightened. There was an odd stricken look about his red face. He gunned the boat forward looking over his shoulder all the time. He did not speak another word till we were nearly across. Then, with an air of mockery that was not quite mockery, he said in a low voice, “You have to watch them seals. You wouldn’t know what they’d get up to. You see they’re neither fish nor flesh and that’s the truth. Would you believe me now if l told you that I’ve seen them back in that graveyard dancing a jig? Well, it’s God’s truth. There they were, their skins laid on one side, dancing away, the women with their hair twisted and twined about their heads.
“And I’ll tell you something else, sur.In the past seal women married into some of the families around Blackshell here. In the latter end, the seal women disappeared back into the sea. But you can always tell their offspring by the class of hair and eyes they have.”
I looked at Augustus John. Was there not something distinctly fish-like about him?
CHAPTER 16
As soon as we were ashore, I looked around for Augustus John and Dominic but they had disappeared. They had always had this facility for fading wraith-like into the surroundings.
I didn’t want to be on the mainland. I was uneasy about being there. My stomach was in a knot of apprehension. I was sorry I had come. I should have made some excuse.
On the other hand I had come and now I had no choice but to go ahead. I began to walk along the road. At intervals, iron bed-ends stopped gaps in hedges. These bed-ends were placed in the gaps after the death of the occupant of the bed. There seemed to be a remarkable number of them. But then death, as Augustus John so often remarked with his black humour, was very common nowadays. Augustus John seemed to me to greet each new death with its wake and attendant entertainment with a solemnity that barely hid his delight.
There was an obsession with death in Blackshell. There was an awareness of the closeness of the spirit world whose effect on ordinary life fills the folklore of this wild coastline. The crosses and amulets and statues were a protection against its evil manifestation. These symbols were a way of rationalizing it. By recognizing its existence they were able to go on living their daily lives.
I didn’t really mind what the local people believed in. But what did bother me was some new darkening of the atmosphere. It was an added psychic dimension. Once or twice I saw, out of the corner of my eye, something slide off into shadow behind the bed-ends.
When I turned to look at it, it moved just beyond the range of my perception. It looked as if the intrusion of the spirit world was not confined to folklore.
When I entered the small square room that acted as a post office I was met with hostility. Of course the locals were naturally suspicious of strangers. I could understand that. But there was something more to it than that. I remembered the changed atmosphere, the moving shadows. Had psychic happenings broken out here in the village? Were they blaming me for them? Had they heard of what had begun to happen out on the island?
The postmistress immediately stopped gossiping to other customers and pointedly turned her back on me. After several enquiries she informed me there was no mail.
Then, turning around, averting her head, and fixing her small button eyes somewhere to my right, she slid across the counter a copy of the local Western Herald before retiring behind a small partition which housed the telephone exchange by means of which it was possible, if the postmistress felt so inclined, to contact the outer world.
I stood in a pool of hostility tinged with expectation. Not only had I been wrong to come to the mainland but I had been wrong to come in here. I had made a mistake.
Meantime I was unable to prevent my eyes skimming over the first paragraph of the heavily underlined article which the post mistress so obviously wanted me to read.
DISTRAUGHT PARENTS SEEK DAUGHTER ON INISHWRACK
Mr and Mrs Brown of Long Island, New York, have been unsuccessfully trying to trace their daughter who they state was abducted by an oriental cult which has recently taken up residence on Inishwrack, a deserted island in the bay……..
I stopped reading and hurried from the post office, aware of the postmistress’s satisfaction at my reaction. My heart palpitated. This put my meeting with the solicitor in an even worse light. But I could not get out of it now. I headed for Carmody’s.
As I walked I became aware of a group of dirty, rosy-cheeked children on the road tying tin cans to the tail of a terrified dog.
As I drew level with them they began to follow me chanting, “There’s the man from the island. There’s the man from the island.”
Their hostility was no less intense than that of the postmistress.
Their leader, swaggering called,“Hey, mister. Where’s your tail? Where’s your tail?”
It struck me that he looked remarkably like Augustus John and I wondered if he was a relation.
I am often followed by bands of children in India though less so now that I wear Indian clothes and am no longer readily recognizable as a sahib. The Indian children touch one’s hand begging, “Paisa, paisa.” They have a clinging quality, but they are weak and half-starved and need paisa if one has any to give them. The young brute behind me, already as aggressive as a man, was bursting with energy, his red corpuscles inflamed by the constant consumption of red meat. He leaned against a bed-end, the others grouped behind him.
“Show us your horns, show us your horns,” the innocents chanted, crowding closely around their leader who screamed, “Hey, mister, why don’t you cast a spell on us?” His eyes were wide open and eager, his face shone.
I went into Carmody’s, stumbling over the hay rakes, turf spades, pickaxes and rolled barbed wire that leaned against the back wall. The smell was made up of beer and bacon and burning peat.
Mr Carmody, fumbling with the stub of a pencil on a scrap of brown paper, was serving an old woman. He looked distraught and abstracted, his mind somewhere else. Seeing me, he said “Go right on through. Your man is waiting for you in the snug.” Then he added his statutory, “Terrible weather we’re having.” His eyes flitted about seeking something, his lips moved loosely.
All along the road I had been considering how I was to confront the solicitor representing Mr and Mrs Brown whose daughter resided now in an urn in the church. Passing the bar, I jumped at the sight of a garda leaning against the counter. He too seemed to be waiting for me. I would have turned around and run away if that had been possible. How was I to explain the death of Rosemary Brown? How was I to explain to a country solicitor the spiritual values, the fasting and self-denial, on which our community was based?
The solicitor was occupying the same seat in the snug as the reporter Mr O’Reilly had done. But while Mr O’Reilly had sat perched on the edge, this
man’s bulk filled it.
He was smartly dressed for the area, that is to say he didn’t wear the usual rubber boots and had around his neck a sporty-looking tie. He lumbered to his feet.
“Well aren’t you the hard man to find! God knows I’m used to elusive clients but you beat the band. Glad to see you anyway,” he said, enclosing my skeletal hand in his large fleshy one. “What’s your poison?”
When I told him that I didn’t drink alcohol, he said, “Never mind, some of my best friends are pioneers.”
I was in such a state of mind that I knew I was going to find it difficult to handle this interview. “I must say I’m surprised,” the solicitor went on, “to find a gentleman like yourself, a man of education, burying yourself in a place like this. Do you not find it backward now?”
I didn’t reply. I had not gathered my composure.
“Well, I do.” The solicitor said, taking a slug of his whisky which had just arrived and extending his feet towards the peat fire. “I’ve heard of the back of beyond, but this is the arsehole of the world.”
I found his method of expressing himself offensive but I was so afflicted by nerves that I barely prevented myself from laughing sycophantically at his ‘joke’.
“Did you know that this whole area has a very peculiar reputation,” he went on. “Nobody knows the half of what goes on. Nobody lets it out, you see. Everybody is related to everybody else and that way they keep it all in the family.”
At this point the garda came in and stood with his back to the fire warming his backside while he took everything in without appearing to take in anything. What was he here for? Was the law to be involved? I felt trapped like a prisoner under interrogation. I clenched my hands and gripped my knees to control my shaking limbs.
The solicitor took another slug of whiskey.
“Now to get down to business straight away,” he said. “I see you haven’t brought Miss Brown with you.”