I DIDN'T BURN ROSEMARY ALIVE

by Noel Scanlon

  Suddenly Augustus John stopped struggling. At that moment, it seemed to me, he was normal and depossessed.

  “I’m sorry, sur,” he said. “I never meant to do this atall, atall.”

  He put out a hand and I tried to reach him. But it was hopeless. Only his head was still above the bog water.

  There was a squelch. He hit a pocket of gas and sank beneath the surface, which began to gurgle and belch. The psychic activity had diminished from the moment the entity had left Augustus John. I was aware of my cold and battered body in a bleak, deserted bog.

  The Black Bog was breathing quietly, its bog holes gurgling. Cautiously I began to pick my way out. I paid little attention to my body’s crying and whimpering. The gluey grip on my feet was less intense. The depossession and death of Augustus John seemed to have given the entities a temporary set-back.

  Slipping and falling and picking myself up again, I made my way from squelchy peat to semi-firm peat to peat covered solidly by a mesh of springy heather.

  CHAPTER 26

  I began to come to, slowly. It was morning and dim watery light was filtering through the shuttered windows of the church. How had I got there? The horrors of what had happened on the hill began to creep into my mind. Someone had pulled a blanket over me where I lay on the floor. I could feel my limbs stiff and uncomfortable. I was caked in dried peat from my wild plunge down the hill.

  I had no memory of how I had got into the church. Beneath the blanket I felt deadly cold. It was a deep unnatural cold.

  I looked down the length of the church towards the altar and the guru’s room. The guru was not there. Even the candle which had burnt since our arrival on the island had been snuffed out. I felt a dreadful emptiness and hopelessness.

  Our vital link with the guru was broken. To re-establish it would require deep meditation and a receptive state of mind. It would require suppressing and controlling the waves of the mind. But I, at any rate, was in no state of mind to do this. Without the guru I knew we were increasingly vulnerable to attack. Augustus John’s death had been a set-back for whatever evil forces were loose on the island. They had lost a human agent. Did this mean that they would increase their efforts to take over those of us who remained?

  The two Indian boys, Hari and Arjun, were hunched up on one side of the guru’s room.

  A form came towards me through the dim light.

  “You’re awake,” Chris said. “I thought you were never going to wake up.”

  I threw the blanket off and sat up.

  I felt dazed. “How did I get here?”

  “Hari and Arjun heard a battering on the door last night. When they opened it they found you there unconscious and dragged you in. You were in a terrible state. What happened?”

  “I got into difficulties in the Black Bog.”

  “The Black Bog!” she said, startled. “Why on earth did you go up there?”

  “I’ll tell you all about it later.”

  I didn’t want to upset Chris with too many details. She was already looking more shaken than I had ever seen her.

  “How’s Enika?” I asked.

  “Sleeping,” Chris said, pointing to a form in the corner.”

  I walked over to where Enika lay and bent over her. She appeared to be sleeping soundly. Maybe the convulsions she’d had which I was unable to restrain had been just that, convulsions. On the other hand maybe it was something more.

  I was acutely aware of predatory forms beginning to appear now that the guru’s mind waves had been blocked

  Looking around the cold deserted church I had a terrible feeling of desolation. The assault on the church had undoubtedly intensified. There had been a shift which brought all the shadows which were just around the corner, just beyond perception, that shade nearer. I felt them poised and ready to enter our dimension.

  Just then I noticed Enika wandering around at the far end of the church. How on earth had she got down there so quickly. I had just seen her apparently sleeping soundly. She must only have been pretending.

  All this alerted me so that when I saw her bending down and closely examining something on the ground I ran to see what she was doing. I was horrified to find that she was about to pick up some of the fungi which had found its way into the church and was no longer normal vegetation but vegetation inhabited and controlled.

  As she was bending down to pluck some, I grabbed her just in time.

  “Don’t touch that, it’s dangerous.”

  Enika looked at me blankly. Her look was the look of a stranger. I had seen that slack empty expression before and I knew well what it meant. She was in the process of being taken possessed just like before. I had caught her just in time. She was our weak link and I knew I would have to keep a constant eye on her.

  She struggled but I managed to pull her away.

  I led her back and asked Chris to keep an eye on her. Together we ripped up some material and tied her wrists

  It had been gradually coming home to me that the fate of everyone on the island rested on my shoulders. It was I who had brought them here. Without knowing, I had brought them into danger and now I had to try my best to get them to safety. I had been considering this in my mind for sometime and I was finally coming to the conclusion that something decisive had to be done. We couldn’t stay here unprotected. Our position on the island was untenable.

  “We’ll have to leave the island,” I said decisively. “Whatever is happening here, we aren’t able to control it. We’ll just have to get everybody together and go.”

  A thought suddenly occurred to me. “Why isn’t Ursula here?”

  “She went back to her cottage early today,” Chris said.

  I knew that I would have to go and fetch Ursula even though I had warned her not to leave the church. I looked across at Hari and Arjun. They looked confused and physically weak. I realized that I had never paid them as much attention as I should have, being engrossed in my own spiritual development. It was apparent that without the heat of India, without its rituals and noises and smells, without the structure which life in the ashram gave their lives, they were lost. They were entirely out of their element. Nothing in their childhood in a southern Indian village had in any way prepared them for this.

  I opened the front door and looked out.

  I cannot say that what I could see of the landscape in the morning mist that enshrouded it and all that desolate coastline looked radically different from what it had been the day before. But it felt different. The old sense of watchfulness was there, only stronger. I was under scrutiny. There was a spectral deepening of the atmosphere. During the night, vegetation had thickened around the church. The line of fuchsia bushes along the front wall which had already been oversize now looked more like forest trees than shrubs. The groves of wild rhubarb had always been only on the hill. Now I saw a tall stalk move and disappear behind the far gable.

  I looked for Ursula’s cottage but could not see it through the vegetation.

  I went back into the church and gathered up all the blankets and sickles we had. I asked Hari and Arjun if they would come with me. To my surprise they raised no objection, and I gave them a sickle and blanket each. They wrapped the blankets around their heads with something approaching alacrity. They had given up their vow of silence and let me know in high-pitched Tamil that the island was a bad place and that they wanted off it.

  The moment I put my foot outside the church there was a slight shift, a sharpening of focus as whatever or whoever was watching us registered our presence.

  A line of seagulls that had been perched along the apex of the church roof took off and began to follow us circling overhead and watching us out of beady eyes.

  After a short distance, I could see Ursula’s cottage up ahead only the top of its roof visible over the wild weed growth. It was only a little over a hundred yards away. But I knew it was not going to be easy. The growth had concentrated in this area. As I approached, I could see that the door was sealed off by a thicket
of brambles that extended up and over the roof. The wild rhubarb had reached one corner and was writhing forward. But the main obstacle was the nettles, grown as large or larger than the ones in Chris’s garden.

  Hari and Arjun looked stunned by what they saw and gestured helplessly. But I was glad to have them with me. I was glad to have any human beings with me.

  At first, it looked as if we were going to be unmolested. Everything looked unnaturally large and unnaturally green and unnaturally vibrant. But it kept its distance and I thought that perhaps we might get as far as the cottage without incident though the distance to be covered seemed to be attenuated by the white mist that swept down from the hill and made everything more than a few yards away dim and ghostly.

  Something struck me across the back and knocked me over. As I rolled clear, a giant nettle bent and lashed the ground beside me. Rolling under it I cut through its stem with the sharp sickle. The stem was soft and, possibly because of its rapid and unnatural growth, delicate and almost transparent. Hari and Arjun coming behind tried to lift it out of their way but sprang back rubbing their hands. They had been stung badly.

  From that point on we had to cut our way through a thick growth of nettles, hacking a path towards the cottages.

  The wind had got up and in its soughing I could hear noises and voices. I had the same sensation as I had had the previous night of walking on a living thing. I remembered how my foot had broken through into the black bog and how oddly alive that gluey substance seemed. It had been warm like black blood and I wondered if all the weird growth of the island was nurtured by that black blood.

  I have never experienced anything as odd as the atmosphere in that nettle forest.

  Here in India I have, as an aspiring monk, been part of, the most impressive sight in the world, a million people immersing themselves in the holy Ganges, the banks of the river and all the ghats a crawling mass of humanity. I was a tiny piece of flotsam carried along by the crowd and crushed by it. But even as one is crushed among the millions of the pious in India the experience is a human and uplifting one. The sensation, the vibrations, coming from those unnaturally grown nettles was inhuman.

  I cut into the stalk of another nettle that had begun to bend towards me. As I made contact I felt a tingling sensation run up my arm like an electric shock. At the same time, at the instant of contact, nightmarish forms swam up from my subconscious to darken my mind. Each time I cut into a nettle I was startled by a shrieking noise. The nettles were screaming. I was cutting into something that was alive. Something that actually felt the sharp blade of the sickle.

  Nettles on either side bent and tried to strike me. I was glad of the thick protective clothing I wore and the blanket over my head but even so I was being stung.

  The two boys had fallen behind and I could see them stopped, their arms raised in an attempt to protect themselves from the nettles. Then they began to retreat. They were even less well equipped and less suited to this type of confrontation than I was myself.

  I looked ahead. At least now I was close to Ursula’s cottage.

  A vibration began and then established itself. A desolate dirge came seeping into the nettle forest. It had the dimension of other darker worlds. It rose in pitch until it pierced my brain making my head throb. It crept out from the air all around me.

  I heard the rumble of moving stones from the direction of the hill. Augustus John’s voice distant and a little off key whispered, “Just step this way, sur. Just step this way. We have some business to finish.”

  I slashed at the nettles more wildly than before and in the process got myself stung badly about the neck. The nettles had become more accurate in their attack as if they were learning from experience. They seemed also to have developed a means of communication since they had begun to arc across the path ahead of me.

  They continued to shriek as I cut into them. And there was something else. As they were cut, they squirted a fountain of sap, a grey sticky, stinging liquid at me. I held back afraid of its reaching my eyes.

  I turned on hearing a human scream some distance behind. Hari and Arjun had retreated right out of the nettle forest. They were clear of it and in the open. But this had exposed them to the gulls, which had now begun to attack. There were several dozen gulls dive-bombing the two boys, trying to perch on their heads and peck at their eyes.

  “Use your sickles,” I shouted. My voice sounded muffled and deadened.

  I do not know if the boys heard me but in any event they were by now lashing out in self-defence. Hari decapitated a gull that was maintaining a precarious clawing balance on his friend’s head. The blankets over their heads, they ran towards the church disappearing in the mist. The gulls followed circling and cawing.

  “Step this way,” the Augustus John voice said in mocking invitation. The voice was much closer than before. It seemed to come from inside my head. “It won’t take a moment, sur. Just step this way.”

  As I got close to Ursula’s door, the spirits of the past moved in and out of the thickening mist. They had been there before man and would be there after him. I could feel the dark force of their presence, see the glow of their eyes or rather the concentration of energy that looked like eyes.

  Whispering voices were crescending. A humming, buzzing sound was tearing at my nerves, mangling my brains. The Augustus John voice spoke sinuously in my head. “You’ll soon be one of us, sur. Why don’t you just put that sickle down and make things easier for all of us.”

  I could now hear Ursula screaming from inside the cottage and hammering at the door.

  Brambles had grown all over the doorway and I attacked them with maniacal strength. The brambles lashed out at me. One long piece which had been twining along the lintel swung backwards and wound itself around my waist. By the time I had cut it away the thorns had torn me right through my clothes. The whole clump of brambles was moving and writhing like the beds of snakes one sometimes sees at jungle shrines. They came at me, swishing through the air like whips. A glancing blow caught me on the cheek and blood began to run down my face.

  The door gave way, pulled open from the inside, and I was propelled through it. Ursula stood there white-faced, wild-eyed and distracted.

  “Where the fucking hell have you been? What do you mean by leaving me here to be driven out of my fucking mind?”

  Ursula gave every appearance of having been attacked. Her T-shirt was torn and there were several gashes in her jeans. A piece of bramble was still sticking by its thorns to the leg of her jeans. Other pieces of bramble were strewn about the floor. The windows themselves were completely covered over with growth so that the cottage was dark and gloomy.

  “Christ,” she said, “what a nightmare. Why did you leave me here last night?” She screamed dementedly hitting me with her fists. “Why did you leave me here on my own with all those fucking ghosts ...”

  Behind her, at that moment, there was a movement, a thickening of the atmosphere, and the apparition of Rosemary Brown trembled in the air, just as it had done at the funeral pyre, only now it was complete, the subtle body finally formed. Though it was the only presence to show itself, the air around vibrated with unseen forms until they seemed to crowd the little cottage.

  Ursula began to sob hysterically. “I went out of my mind, do you understand, out of my fucking mind. It was terrible. I felt ghostly presences all around me. I couldn’t sleep. And a voice kept whispering to me. It was Rosemary’s voice saying, “Come and join us.” The voice went on all night repeating the same thing over and over like a chant.”

  Ursula laughed hysterically.

  “She wanted me to join her and at times I nearly gave in. And if I had I’d have been condemned to float around this fucking crazy island forever in the same ghostly way she is.” That’s what would have happened to me, isn’t it? That’s what would have happened.”

  She struck my chest again. “That’s what would have happened if I’d given in, isn’t it?” She pointed to the fungoid growth all a
round the edges of the room. This growth was everywhere underlying everything.

  She ran forward, ripped some out, threw them on the floor and stamped on them. Fungi squirted millions of spoors into the air and they quickly formed and spread.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what would have happened. But we have no time to discuss all that now. You have to come with me straight away, there’s no time to lose.”

  “I’m not going,” she shrieked and began to sob. “I’m not going, I’m not going.”

  A bramble snaked in through the window.

  “They’re waiting for us out there,” Ursula screamed. “But they’re not going to get me. I’m not going out there.”

  “You have to,” I said, “you can’t stay here. We’re all going.”

  She continued to resist as I dragged her from the cottage and began slashing our way back through the forest of nettles.

  CHAPTER 27

  The door of the church was locked. I banged on it and called out.

  I was frantic to get in, not only because the church was the only relatively safe place on the island, though I noticed that the seagulls were back roosting on the apex of the roof watching us restively. Several began to flap their wings. One took off and circled us ominously.

  “Let us in, for Godsake,” I called.

  Hari opened the door a couple of inches. He looked as scared as no doubt I looked. I burst in pulling Ursula with me and banged the door behind us. At least we were all back in the church. Hari and Arjun were crouched together holding hands and chanting Sanskrit prayers. Manju and Maya were sitting silently apparently unperturbed.

  I said, “We’re getting out of here. You’ll all have to be ready to leave immediately. And stay together. We have to get down to the pier.”