The Secret Scripture

I thought God was coming to cancel me out just as surely as Fr Gaunt had. I don't know why I thought that, except, I felt that guilty.

The thin glimmering line grew and grew. The noise also increased, and under my bare feet I thought I felt the sand tremble, tremble deep under me, as if something were rising up through the ground. The lights widened and grew taller, and then it was roaring, gathering and gathering, and then it was what looked like the edge of a flying carpet of monsters, and then that noise had grown into the noise of an enormous waterfall, and I was looking up, indeed like a mad woman, certainly feeling as mad as a hatter, and fuller and fuller, bigger and bigger, came the noise and the lights, till I could see the round bellies of individual parts of it, and metal noses, and gigantic whirrings, and it was airplanes, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, all animal-like in the moonlight, but bizarrely, with the little thin windows visible at the front, and perhaps it was really madness, but I thought I could see little heads and faces, and it was all in formation as they say, grim, catastrophic, like something at the end of the world. And because the airplanes were all together, their noise was increased truly to biblical proportions, something out of Revelation, and the sky was filled with it over my head, metal, light and ruckus, and they poured over me, flying so close to the water that the power of the engines sucked up the water, tore the water up in torn sheets, that fell back to the surface with a swishing of snakes, and I could feel the airplanes pull at me, pull at the beach, trying to tear us from our places, trying to pull the brains out of my skull, the eyes out of my sockets, and then they were pouring over me, line after line, were there fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty? – for full minutes pouring over, and then begi

Some days later I was out on my porch, fussing over my roses. It was an activity that even in my distress brought a tincture of comfort. But then it is clear to me that any effort at gardening, even a haphazard, stop-go one such as mine was, is an effort to drag to earth the colours and the importances of heaven. It was cold that day and there were goosebumps raised along my bare arms. The very existences of the roses, not yet seen, furled so tightly and mysteriously in their green buds, was making me almost dizzy.

I looked back over my right shoulder because I heard someone moving along the road. Someone or something, it might have been an old donkey scuffling along, to judge by the noises. I didn't really want to be seen by man nor beast, even though there was such comfort in my roses. Maybe this year there would be a new look to them, not quite 'St A

And then it seemed suddenly colder than the mere cold of the treacherous Irish seaside day, and there seemed to be goosebumps added to my goosebumps. Wasn't this odd apparition my enemy now?

'Jack?' I called out anyhow, throwing caution to the wind. I had the mad thought that he might have come to help me. But what had happened to him? Now he was closer and even odder, if I didn't know better I would say he was singed, he was veritably singed.

The man stopped on the path, maybe astonished I had spoken to him. In fact he looked frightened.

'Jack McNulty?' I said, as if that might be helpful. Surely he knew his own name. Now I'm sure I looked as uncertain as he did.

He spoke like a man who has not spoken for a few days, the words stumbling out of his lip.

'What?' he said. 'What, what?'

He looked so solemnly scared I went down the path to the gate and stood nearer to him. I thought he might bolt away down the road, like a donkey after all. But I was just a small woman in a cotton dress.

'You're not Jack McNulty, are you?' I said. 'You certainly look like him.'

'Who are you?' he said, and gazed back towards the sea like he feared an ambush.

'I'm no one,' I said, meaning no one for him to fear. 'I'm Rosea

'Oh, I heard about you,' he said, but without the expected censure. He suddenly seemed very glad to be talking to me, to be meeting me. He raised his right hand a moment as if he meant to shake one of mine, but he let it drop. 'Yes.'

I was so relieved, I was so delighted he had taken this tone with me that I wanted to joke with him, to be pleasant with him, to tell him all the things that had happened, just little things, like the two rats the night before that I had caught in the act of carrying away one of my eggs through a hole in the hut wall, a hole so small one rat had put the egg up on his belly and let the other rat pull him away through the gap! Ridiculous. But it was the friendliness in his voice that did it, the mere simple friendliness, a thing I hadn't heard for so long, and didn't even know I missed.

'I'm Eneas,' he said, 'Tom's brother.'

'Eneas?' I said. 'What are you doing here?'

'I'm not really here,' he said. 'I shouldn't be here, and I should be gone shortly.'

'What's the stuff all over you?'

'What stuff?' he said.

'You're all black,' I said, 'And grey, like ashes.' 'Jesus, so I am,' he said. 'I was in Belfast. I was going back to France, you know. I'm a soldier.' 'Like Jack,' I said.

'Like Jack, only he's an officer. I was in Belfast, Rosea

This man Eneas stopped. He was trembling again now. He was in a bad state. The reflection of that lake of fire was still burning in his eyes.