by Noel Scanlon
“Kindly let go of my boat,” I said, as we struggled in the water.
“No, no, no,” Ursula screamed. “I’m getting off this fucking haunted island if I have to swim all the way.”
She lurched at me splashing water in my face in an attempt to break my grip on the currach which we were both tugging in opposite directions.
“Are you insane?” I said, holding her off. “Are you incapable of seeing you can’t get away? If you go out there you’ll drown.”
“I don’t care if I drown,” she screamed. “I don’t care, I don’t care ...”
When I say that we were waist-deep in water, I mean that it was waist-deep between waves. The waves, when they surged were way over our heads. One of them roared in now carrying us towards the shore. We were separated from the currach and as we went under I grabbed hold of Ursula. We entered an underwater nightmare. There was a dense underwater forest of sea-wrack, long flat, slimy lengths that slapped across our faces. Bunches of it got caught between my legs and thin strips bound themselves around my ankles.
When the wave passed, I had to force myself upright against the resistance of the seaweed. It was trying to drag me down. Its embrace was a soft clinging deadly embrace. It was alive just as the wrack I’d seen on the shore had been alive and moving.
I pulled Ursula from under the water. There was seaweed clinging to her everywhere. It clung to her hair and her clothes. It was wrapped around her neck.
I fought my way towards the shore dragging Ursula with me, lifting great rolls of slimy sea-wrack out of the way. I stumbled and slipped but didn’t go down. If I did, I didn’t think I would have the strength to resist the seaweed and get up again.
I began to realize that we were in a seaweed forest which had been hit by an unnatural upsurge of growth similar to that which was occurring ashore. Everything was jumbo-size - the horse tail kelp with its leathery fronds, the devil’s aprons, the oar weed. The wrack was growing in a dark dense forest with stalks like trunks of trees. These stalks gripped the rocks as if with roots. Long ribbons of fronds twenty or thirty feet long waved in the water. They caught at us dragging us back, dragging us down. Once I slipped and fell to my knees and it began covering me, smothering me. I only got free by slashing at it with a sharpened stone and so loosened its hold.
Even ashore we were not safe. Among the exposed rocks the sea-wrack lay in wet rubbery layers ready to rise with the incoming tide and join the dark submarine forest. I didn’t put Ursula down until we had reached a sandy part of the beach well out of reach of the wrack. Immediately she coughed up seawater and, turning over, got sick on the sand.
We were still covered with seaweed. We had left the larger fronds behind but pieces still clung to us. It clung so tenaciously that it gave a strong suction pop as it came away. There was no way I could get rid of it all. For instance the only way I could see to get it out of Ursula’s hair would be to cut some of the strands with scissors.
I helped her back to her cottage which she had so recently vacated and there we stood dripping seawater, small tentacles of seaweed still adhering to our clothes and hair.
“Fucking hell,” Ursula said panting, “that seaweed was trying to drown us. It wasn’t passive. It was active. Even the little pieces. Look,” she said as she pulled a piece off her jeans. It resisted and only came away when she wrenched at it.
I didn’t need to be told. I was still shaken by what had happened. In a mental way I had long since known that the entities on the hill were influencing matter. But there is a big difference between mental acceptance and stark physical confrontation. That wrack had been trying to drown us. The shock of the attack made me really appreciate the extent of the power of the forces that had been here for so long and which the original inhabitants had fled from.
“Will you tell me what the fucking hell is going on?” Ursula asked, her hands on her hips. Pieces of devil’s aprons were matted in her hair. “You can’t say we just got entangled in that stuff. It attacked us for Christsake.”
“Sit down,” I said, “and try to calm yourself. Whatever is happening you’re not going to help by screaming like that.”
She flopped down on the bed. “All right,” she said, “I’ll keep calm. But this island is getting more and more weird. We’ve stirred up something or other that’s trying to wipe us out.”
She offered me a cigarette and lit it for me.
“We’ve stirred up something,” I admitted. “But it’s something that we can control with the help of the guru. You’ve got to believe that.”
“We don’t seem to be doing so great. With Rosemary dead, Enika going crazy, and now this seaweed thing.”
“What the seaweed means,” I said, “is that you can’t leave the island. It’s too dangerous. If you try to go out there again you’ll be drowned.”
“Fucking hell,” she said. She took a drag on her cigarette. “In that case if I have to stay, I’ll stay right here. I won’t leave the cottage. I wouldn’t go on that beach or up that fucking hill again for all the dope in Afghanistan. I’m staying right here in this room.”
“Yes,” I said, “maybe that’s wise.”
“I’m staying right here,” she said, “because this island is trying to kill us all.”
CHAPTER 19
I reached my cottage dripping wet and distraught. The incident with the sea-wrack had shaken me. But at least I was safe inside my own cottage.
Manju and Maya were sitting by the hearth. The open turf fire glowed redly at the base, less so towards the apex of the pyramid which they kept going all day with mathematical precision. I relaxed or at least I became less agitated. More and more, as the strange happenings on the island increased, I saw these girls as a calm centre, two imperturbable Indian goddesses. This seemed to be the only place, amid the smell of burning peat, the spiced lentils stewing in the black pot suspended from the iron hook, the roof timbers crouching low over the meagre furniture, where everything was normal and undisturbed.
Whatever was going on outside, whatever forces were emerging, in here I felt safe.
As I changed my dripping clothes, the girls rose to help me, hanging the pathetic, shapeless, dejected pieces of wet clothes on a string in front of the fire. The girls were calm and uninquisitive as if my appearance in sea-sodden clothes and my excited emotional state were the most natural and unremarkable things that could happen.
Maya infused some herbs in boiling water and I gratefully drank the brew. She daintily lowered herself on to the rough tripod stool. She did so with a slow sinewy grace, her gold bangles clinking along her slender arms until they were bunched at her wrists. She reached out for the vina and in a moment the strains of an Indian raga filled the cottage, leaping from her nimble brown fingers up to the rafters and around the room. The sound of the vina added to the ritual quality with which they invested bathing.
Manju watched a large cauldron of water steam gently over the turf fire.
When it was ready she poured the steaming water from the cauldron into the tub used for washing and made preparations for her bath. As she unwound her sari and took off her slip she folded them by the fire. But she kept on her gold ear-rings, her arm and ankle bangles, her diamond nose stud.
These girls, these golden forms, were as mascots that shielded me from the evil that lurked outside. Like the guru, they were my protection and salvation. Had they not both after all been touched and singed by the mind of the guru just as I and all the others had been?
The smell of perfume came strongly to my nostrils - Manju was using essence of jasmine in her bath. It reminded me of the ashram garden. But Manju, taking her ritual bath, didn’t have the ashram in mind. She was watching me with a coquettishness she hadn’t learned in an Indian society that had no place for it. I huddled by the fire troubled by conflicting guilts and desires. After Manju had bathed, she sat naked on my knee with a guilelessness that must have been more apparent than real. Would I help her, she asked squirming, paint a new red tilak
mark on her forehead. She was warm from her bath and, as she asked, her brown hand lightly caressed the back of my neck. With a sensual movement she shook out her long black plait and handed me one of the coarse towels we kept in the cottage. Would I dry her back where she could not reach and down there in the hollow?
I was red-faced from the heat of the fire, from the weakening resistance which I was putting up to so sensual and sybaritical a game. As I rubbed Manju’s golden back, Maya took her place in the tub. I was enthralled by those eastern incarnations, inhabitants of an oriental world which I had so laboriously tried to enter, those slim forms for so long so near to me in body and yet so far divorced in tradition and culture.
Her bath finished, Maya came to sit on my other knee, twisting her newly made plait.
I made an effort at resistance. I felt guilt that my spiritual ideals, for which I had striven so hard and so long, could be so easily seduced by this blatant but submissive carnality. I was driven mad by sensuality and some element of the forbidden.
Suddenly, there was a rumbling noise outside. It lasted for a few seconds only, then stopped. There was a pause, a flapping beat of time. Then the noise came again, accompanied this time by a fine earth tremor, such as we often experience here in central India. Vibrations came up through the ground like electric currents.
I waited, and, in a moment, the noise was repeated. It was coming from the hill. The stones and rocks on the hill had begun to move. They were advancing down the hill with a loud sound of stones banging and scraping against one another. They were on the move as if they had come to life.
We stood waiting and apprehensive until the first stone struck with such force that I thought it would penetrate the wall. The whole cottage shook. The space within the cottage rang like a hollow bell. We stood there waiting tensely to see if there were going to be more tremors. Was the cottage going to be struck again? Were we in danger?
Other stones followed on, tumbling over one another, gathering speed as they rolled down the hill. The attack went on for what seemed like an age but probably only lasted for a matter of minutes but during that period we were terrified of being crushed.
Then the stones stopped moving. Their attack stopped as suddenly as it had begun. There was an eerie silence. I was about to speak into the silence but something stopped me.
I sensed that everything had changed. A lot had gone on during the bombardment by the stones. Something eerie had entered the cottage and established itself within. I had the feeling that I had been transported to another world.
We were under psychic attack. I felt not quite myself as the psychic forces surrounded and threatened me.
I looked around me. Something had happened to all of us in the cottage
Like myself the girls looked not only dazed but altered. They seemed to me to be different. It was my perception that there was something profoundly different about them. But was my perception correct? Or was it fed by my overheated imagination?
What wasn’t my imagination was that the girls looked at me as if they had never seen me before. Their look turned to terror. What were they seeing? It was as if as if they were seeing a ghost. They both looked away and refused to make further eye contact. They wouldn’t make eye contact with me out of fear. They were afraid of me.
They thought that I had changed.
Could they be right? Could I be possessed without even knowing?
Could something awful have happened to me? Could I have succumbed to the psychic attacks? Could I have been taken over, possessed without my even knowing?
It was a frightening, terrifying concept,
Though scared stiff of what I might encounter out in the open, I ran from the cottage.
CHAPTER 20
I stood outside the cottage in a light drizzle of rain, upset and confused by what had just happened. The atmosphere was pulsating with an invisible psychic force.
I felt exposed. I wanted to get away from all this. I wanted to get back to who I was before.
The movement of the stones had started up again. I could distinctly hear their rumbling.
As I stood there, something came hurtling through the air towards me. It flew past me at great velocity, crashed against the gable-end of the cottage and fell into the turf stack.
I climbed up the clamp of turf, slipped and fell on top of it. Under me it was a wet gently heaving mass. It seemed to breathe lightly. Then I saw the stone and picked it up. It was an oval stone about a foot long with a hole cut in one end. It was a Druidic stone from the hill.
As I held the stone, something very strange began to happen. The stone began to come alive in my hand. It was, I saw now, roughly in the shape of a skull. Two intense focal points of light appeared in the stone. They were not so much eyes as free-floating points of light. But I can only describe them as eyes. For they had an expression, and the expression in those eyes was ancient and malevolent.
I wanted to drop the stone but it took me a moment to do so, a moment during which I was transfixed by horror. The stone seemed to be sticking to my hands. But eventually and with great difficulty I managed to shake it off.
My eyes were dragged in the direction of the hill. The only way I can describe it as it then appeared is to say that it glowed with some sort of cosmic energy. An unearthly metallic light cut an eerie swathe up the hill, throwing jagged, splintered, shadows this way and that. Falling drizzle was caught and tangled in these rays which produced a rising terror in my mind. The rays, stronger by far than the natural light, were coming from the megalithic tomb. They flood-lighted the Stone Man, whose outspread arms were moving, beckoning me towards him. I had to fight against a compulsive desire to obey.
With a great effort, I wrenched my eyes away and began to move off. Glancing behind, I could see Manju and Maya, their lovely oval faces framed in the cottage window watching me.
I staggered down to the church. Immediately I entered it I tested the vibrations. I sensed that the shadows lurking at the back of the church had grown stronger.
I knew that if the forces from the hill established themselves permanently here in our inner sanctum we were all finished.
I walked quickly to the guru’s room. He was not there. I took this to be a bad omen. Nonetheless I sat meditating, concentrating. I was ashamed at being so easily shaken and frightened. For years I had been in close contact with the spiritual world, far removed from whatever entities inhabiting inanimate shapes and dimensions had been let loose on the island.
Even then I understood that, without the intervention of forces for good like the guru, the universe is by its nature necessarily chaotic. Every atom is struggling to get back to the state of perfect balance from which it started when there will be no more struggle and no more life. At the psychic level the same imbalance reigns though the forces are less clearly defined and recognized.
What was happening in Inishwrack was a psychic upheaval of unusual magnitude. If the hill entities were to emerge fully and possess enough human forms, a period of destructive chaos would occur on the island and its surroundings. Outbreaks like this take place all the time. Though most of them are unrecorded, they have a devastating effect on the areas in which they occur.
I stayed in the church until I had gained a reasonable control of my mind.
On going outside I was aware of a new eerie additive to the landscape. What I had once thought of as a wild beauty now struck me as utterly changed. The unnatural growth of vegetation seemed to be different in purpose from the original growth. I apprehended the island as a changed place, a different place. I could feel apparitions tremble on the edges of perception.
I had long perceived our cottages in a highly intensified way, small enclosed areas clinging to the ground, low against the sweep of the hill and the Atlantic beyond. I had always seen them as tiny enclaves of warmth and security. But, after all that had happened, I could no longer see them in that light.
I was stopped in my tracks, startled by a high-pitched scream.
As I reached her garden, I stopped for a moment, shocked. Although I could still hear the screaming I could see none of her cottage apart from the roof. The growth which had taken place in the short time since Chris had complained about her vegetables being killed by weeds was fantastic. The growth had gone wild. Not only had her carefully made vegetable beds disappeared, but there was nothing to indicate that there had ever been a cultivated garden there at all.
Gorse had moved in from the hill and interspersed with the gorse were giant nettles. There were nettles everywhere. They marched down the wind-break into the garden. They dwarfed everything else. They had grown enormously. They were over six feet tall. It was unnatural. They were more like small saplings than nettles.
I would not have entered that jungle at all only for the renewed hysterical screaming. I pulled up a fence post, one of a lot I had brought from Carmody’s store, and began beating a pathway to her cottage. It was hard going. The nettles seemed to be aware of my presence and determined to stop me, to sting me. In a short time every part of me that was uncovered was rising in lumps from nettle stings.
Each time I swung on a giant nettle it made a noise that was like a cry of pain. The reaction of the nettles made me feel like some sort of murderer. But I ignored their cries and swung left and right until I was bespattered with sap, oozing slimy sap.
When I got close to the cottage I found that the whole structure was covered in growth. Bindweed had grown up the walls and spread along the roof in great rolls. The brambles, moving faster than the gorse, had got there first. It was rearing up the walls, making for the roof.
I pushed the door open. The inside of the cottage was in chaos. All Chris’s carefully made shelves had been pulled down and their contents strewn all over.