by Noel Scanlon
I had decided to chance launching the currach that was at the pier given my fear of the sea and my general lack of seamanship it was a bit of a wild gamble. Currachs are inherently unstable and easily overturn if allowed to go broadside on to the waves. But it was that or nothing. It was our only chance to escape.
Something moaned a low moan outside. A loose window board flapped.
I shivered involuntary. I felt dark presences move behind me. They were getting stronger and stronger. My mind was being attacked. If I was being attacked no doubt so were the others.
Had any or all of them succumbed?
This opened up a whole new vista and made me more uncertain than ever. Were the others what they seemed to be or had they been taken over and were merely a body occupied by something else.
I looked from one to the other. They looked normal. Or so I thought until my eyes met Chris’s. She looked quickly away. She refused to look directly at me. Last time she had spoken her voice had sounded odd. Was the strange voice that emanated from her not her voice at all? Could good always reliable Chris have succumbed?
Then suddenly she looked at me and smiled. I had to be wrong. I was sure that the girl looking at me was the real Chris.
I had forgotten about the gulls perched on the roof waiting and ready to attack us. Suddenly they all took to the air. They began to fly directly at our shuttered windows, thudding against the boards in a suicidal manner. It was apparent that they didn’t care if they killed themselves or not in their effort to get at us.
I went around checking that the windows were properly shuttered to prevent the gulls getting in. I was testing a loose board when I heard a breathing sound outside. I looked out through a slit and came face to face with Dominic.
“Dominic! Come in.”
I ran to the door and let him in. A few gulls squeezed in with him.
Dominic said nothing but grinned that loose grin of his. He looked more imbecilic than ever. But I didn’t care. I was delighted to see him. He could be our salvation.
The gull which had got in was creating havoc inside the church. It was a herring-gull, larger than I had ever seen, with a powerful wing beat. It rose up to the rafters, hung there, then plummeted downwards clawing. I jumped out of its way, but Dominic seized it, wrung its neck with a quick movement of his powerful hands and threw it on the floor. I stood looking down on it horrified. Though its neck had been wrung, it went on squawking and trying to get to us.
Before we left, and desperate for some help, some guidance, some direction. I went into the guru’s room hoping against hope that he would be there. But I was disappointed. The guru was absent. I could pick up no trace of him. It was cold and dark and damp. A deep dark depression descended on me. It was so sudden and intense that for a moment I couldn’t move.
I had no feel of the guru. I could only feel emptiness and evil. Seen here from the ashram, it is quite apparent that the fault was mine. The good vibrations were there in the ether all the time. There were pulsations to be picked up, to be availed of. But my state of mind was too agitated to pick them up. I was, as I see it now, lacking in real spirituality
I had come to the island to found a spiritual community and what I had founded fell far short of what I intended. I was completely enmeshed in, and weakened by the physical. In our ashram here in India, which is a lighthouse of good sending its rays far and wide, even the rawest novice undergoes the most rigid discipline.
I had failed to be sufficiently disciplined and, as their leader, I had made no proper attempt to impose the disciplines of the order. I could and should have done better had not my spiritual defences been sadly depleted.
In the guru’s room now I looked about hopelessly for something to help and remembered the lock of the guru’s hair which he had once given me. I went to the carved Indian box in which we also kept incense and was relieved to find it there.
I put the chain and locket about my neck.
Though here in the ashram we regard such objects and their use as crude, many people find them highly efficacious. Anything that has touched the guru has power. Even his photograph has effected miracles across the country and people crowd to him on open days in the hope of obtaining dharsan, that is a glimpse of the holy man.
I left the guru‘s room to find the others waiting anxiously for me. I checked that they were all there: Chris, Ursula, Enika, Manju, Maya, Arjun and Hari, all huddled together.
“Let’s go,” I said. “We can’t go out the front, we’ll have to try the back.
As soon as we opened the back door, we were hit by a dense mass of shrieking seagulls swooping in until the church was full of them right up to the rafters.
“Follow me,” I shouted, making a path for the others, swinging my sickle and throwing off the seagulls who were dive-bombing us, clawing and pecking. “Cover your eyes,” I shouted. “Cover your eyes.”
We got everybody got out except Enika. She was the last and she resisted every inch of the way, screaming terrible screams of anger and frustration. But with Dominic’s help I managed to drag her out. When she continued to resist, Dominic threw her across his shoulders, kicking and screaming, while I banged the door shut, trapping several scores of seagulls inside.
CHAPTER 28
We began making our way towards the beach. The Indian boys were using their sickles on any vegetation that got in the way. They seemed to have found new courage and slashed at the ragwort, the brambles and fuchsia with great resolution.
Suddenly I found myself enveloped in blackness. It took me a moment to realize that what had grabbed me was an overgrown gunnera plant. The huge green leaf closed about me and squeezing tighter pulled me to the ground. The surface of the leaf was tough and leathery and covered with sharp little nodules.
From the blackness I was enclosed in I heard a disembodied voice a disembodied voice said. “No need to struggle. You’re one of us now, sur.” And it repeated on an ascending treble, “You’re one of us you’re one of us you’re one of us ...” The sound was inside and outside my head. I could feel it sapping my will. I couldn’t catch my breath as I felt myself being further sucked into blackness.
With the tip my sickle, I probed a small hole. After I had punctured it, I ripped the leaf along one of its veins. It took both hands to do this. The leaf was as tough as leather.
Air rushed in. With renewed strength, I hacked at the rest of the leaf and broke out of its deadly suffocating embrace.
As soon as I was free, I ran to help Chris to whom something similar was happening. I could hear her muffled voice swearing: “I can’t breathe. I’m being fucking suffocated. I told you they’d get us. And they have.”
After I’d freed Chris, we hurried to catch up with the others.
Stumbling over fallen nettles, tripping over heather that caught at our feet and avoiding the clumps of briars that sent long fronds swishing viciously through the air in our direction, we ran headlong towards the little bay.
Looking behind me, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The Stone Man, an inanimate stone structure had become animated and was on the lower slopes of the hill and coming towards us.
It went against all the laws of nature.
But there was no doubt about it. Through the swirling mist, I could see him coming after us in his strange lurching gait, moving at increasing speed. And as he moved there was a great thumping noise that shook the earth.
I had long known of the power of mind over matter. I have always accepted the existence of forces which scientists have by and large refused to investigate though frequently presented with evidence of their existence since such an acceptance would change the orthodox concepts of the world. I have since here in India quite often seen happenings which could not be scientifically explained. The guru, for instance, often absents himself from his physical body, which then exhibits no sign of life. He can suspend life, as we know it, for whatever period he chooses. When this happens the molecular structure of his body is altered so that it
derives energy direct from the sun instead of by food conversion, thus enabling him to forgo food for indefinite periods.
But what I experienced in Inishwrack was entirely different and in a different context. What occurred there was the resurgence of some ancient and virulent form of life, something as ancient and physically inert as the Druidic stones of which the Stone Man was composed was the most massive and spectacular intrusion I have ever seen.
The Stone Man was closer and gaining, causing the earth all around us to shake. It was like nothing so much as an earth tremor of the type we often experience here in central India.
But what horrified me was that the appearance of the Stone Man had changed.
In some way, the pieces which had once been only slabs of stone had become not only animated but had taken on a certain fluidity of movement. His arms and legs swung with a new smoothness. Even more startling was that all the Stone Man’s body was now covered with a flesh-like substance.
The Druidic stone that was his head had become much more clearly defined. There was now a face. This was luminescent. It had definite humanoid features from brightly glowing eyes to the outline of a nose and rough-hewn teeth.
In deepening terror and with the strength supplied by bursts of adrenaline, we all ran faster.
We scampered and fell over pieces of out-thrust vegetation and got up and ran again towards the beach where Dominic had already launched his currach.
Everything else, I noticed, had become less active. All the dark forces, all the entities that had been loose on the island, were concentrated now in the Stone Man. His eyes were fiery and glowing. His stone legs bent as if jointed as he cut a swathe through the vegetation, kicked gaps in stone walls. He had become a living thing, a repository of all the forces on the hill that had waited for so long to assume a moving mobile form.
I felt an icy Arctic blast on my back and saw that a wind was being channelled through the Stone Man’s open mouth. This wind was so strong that it made us stumble and almost fall. But it was not a clean wind like the Atlantic gales we were accustomed to. It was a wind that carried with it the stench of decaying matter and pulsated with all the energy unleashed by the forces attempting to possess us, to take us over.
Chris tripped and fell. I lifted her across the last stone wall that lay between us and the sea and hurled my body across after her.
The wall gave us a momentary shelter. The gale of wind coming from the Stone Man’s mouth was lashing the earth, picking up all the loose vegetation in its path. It tore up nettles and brambles by the roots and swept them through the air over our heads. It lifted sand up off the beach and churned up the sea where it struck.
Under cover of the stone wall, we crawled and dragged ourselves towards the beach. Crossing the marram grass in the dunes that flanked the beach I listened to the Stone Man behind us, his footsteps the heartbeat of the hill. All my thought processes were wiped out by a deep and fundamental fear, a fear that went beyond that of mere physical annihilation, a fear of what would happen to us if we were now to be trapped.
My pulse was racing. My breathing came in gasps as I tried to inhale as little as possible of the fetid stench that came from the Stone Man’s mouth.
I remembered the previous inhabitants who had been driven off the island by these same forces leaving behind their livelihood, their homes and their crops, and the old man who had taken to sea in the middle of the night risking drowning rather than stay there.
The Stone Man was close behind us.
I put my hand to the locket of the guru’s hair and closed my eyes seeking those pulsations which are always there from the present and the past for anyone who is receptive to them.
There was a scraping together of stones followed by a rending jolt. The Stone Man was slowing down. He was moving with less fluidity and synchronization. He was reverting to the original state when I had first seen him moving clumsily and awkwardly. But he was still coming after us, still emitting the same fetid gale.
The myriad shellfish under my feet were living watching eyes. The seaweed as I waded into the water wound itself around me, flat slabs of slimy sea-wrack which clung on.
Dominic helped the girls into the currach where they lay flat on the bottom. Hari and Arjun, their eyes closed, their hands joined, were chanting in Sanskrit as the boat lurched about, both the seawater and the sea-wrack slapping against it. I joined them crouching down in the currach.
The Stone Man crossed the dunes and lurched on to the beach coming towards us.
But there was something happening to him now. He was beginning to fly apart. The wind issuing from his mouth had slackened. His limbs and body were falling apart, sending rocks and boulders flying.
One of these rocks, several feet long, a lethal projectile which had formed the upper part of his right arm, flew low over the currach and splashed into the water.
As the Stone Man disintegrated, he gave off a burst of energy that shook the island.
At the same time, the hill flared up. For an instant it became luminous as if on fire. Purple lights danced over the Black Bog. For a moment I thought I could see Augustus John coated in slimy peat rising up from the bog and whispering, “You let us down, sur. You let us down.”
There was a horrible shriek as of something terrible, dark and evil dying. The shriek came from right beside us in the boat, from the body of Enika. It was long-drawn-out and awful. And when it ended she was unconscious in the bottom of the currach.
Dominic, grinning, shoved off and began to row.
The island behind us was momentarily quiet, a remote uninhabited island in the wild Atlantic, four miles long by two miles wide, dominated by a central hill.
We crouched in the currach bruised and battered and violently trembling, the only human beings in that area of intense desolation where humans were never anything more than a tentative and uncertain addendum to the scene, a plaything of forces beyond them.
CHAPTER 29
I have not been back to Inishwrack since that day when we so hurriedly left it.
All of the community came back to the ashram except Manju and Maya, about whom nobody was able to give me any information. They simply disappeared in Blackshell. Everyone I asked was evasive and I was in a hurry to get away. It seems that they disappeared into the Blackshell area and may well still be there. Chris left the ashram after a short time but all the rest of us stayed including to my to my surprise, Enika.
I now want nothing so much as to forget about Inishwrack and the horrors that happened there. And as I sit under this jacaranda tree it does seem very distant, in another world. Here it is quiet and peaceful. In front of me chipmunks jump and float down along the trunk of a papaya tree, their long tails fluffed out. Right beside me a little flower pecker bird is pecking at a gardenia that sways under its weight.
I will shortly be taking orders to become a monk as the guru considers that I am sufficiently spiritually advanced to take that step. That dominates my mind and I cannot think of anything else.
The physical involvement and the egotism which made me behave so ineffectively on the island will soon, I hope, be a thing of the past. I am now entering a new life. My only wish now is to attain that state where all is calm and silent, satisfaction but knows the power of thought and that whatever true thoughts he attains will live through eternity, Their vibrations crossing the seas, travelling through the world and entering similarly attuned minds.
The guru is my example and support. His radiant thoughts fill this ashram and everyone in it. My one hope is that someday I may be sufficiently advanced along the path to join him in that state which is beyond comprehension and which I sometimes glimpse as a bright but distant land.
I suppose that all this sounds like a pious hope and before I give myself over to my new life I should mention a letter which one of the novices has just brought to me here under the jacaranda tree. The letter is from Mr Benedict Ryan, solicitor, with an additional bill which he said was overlooked at the time.
He ended his letter,
I’m sure you’re having a grand time out there in India with the sun and the heat instead of the terrible damp and cold that we get in these parts and that gives every second person you meet such bad rheumatism.
There’s one bit of news that might interest you. I met our local auctioneer in the bar only last night. And do you know what he told me? He has a buyer for that island of yours. Isn’t that good news now? A couple, strangers to these parts, are very anxious to have it. It’s just what they’ve been looking for. They have a young family and think it’d be a grand place to live away-from-it-all. It seems they intend to start a garden and to live off that and shellfish and so on.
The auctioneer has let them have it on a caretaker agreement. They were enquiring from him about boats and from what he told me they’ll be landed out there just as soon as they can get a boat to take them.....