Strange Possession at Viner Sound

Robin Percival Smith

Description

I have written about seven stories that I put away and have occasionally revised. One story started when I was anchored alone in Viner Sound in 1996. I felt a presence on board that set off my imagination. The book contains the stories of six lives. Two half breeds, Matti Wilson (part Finish and part Indian) and Bessie David (part Kwakuutl Indian and part Chinese). Chief Joseph of the Koeksotenok in the village of Gwayasdums. Shaman Caring-well in the village (cousin of Matti) and shaman to Chief Bell of the Tsawatenok. Lad and Jojo (sons of Chief Bell) held captive at a secret Japanese radio base in Viner Sound during WWII and died there. Jojo had not been given the rites at burial that would send him to Transformer for reincarnation and his spirit is trapped in Viner Sound. Jojo's spirit possesses Matti and shows him how the boys died at the radio base. He asks Matti for assistance in releasing his spirit for passage to Transformer so that he can be reincarnated. The lives of these main characters are interwoven in the novel's narrative.

The idea of spiritual possession was reinforced in 2002, when a Haida woman told me about her possession by the bad spirit of Hot Spring Island in the Gwai Hanas Park on the Queen Charlotte Islands. In 2012 I decided to self-publish, Strange Possesion at Viner Sound, to raise funds for my charities.

Sujets

• Fiction
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 23 août 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781456619602
• Langue: English

Extrait

Strange Possession
at Viner Sound
 
 
A Novel By
Robin Percival Smith

Copyright 2013 Robin Percival Smith
All rights reserved
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
http://www.eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-1960-2
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

 
 
Dedication
To the memory of my Father – A Pacifist
Prologue
I saw Windsong the first time that I sailed alone to Queen Charlotte Strait in 1988. I had intended to sail up to Port Allison from Blunden Harbor but the afternoon Northwest wind forced me to take refuge in the Kent Island anchorage. As I entered from the east, Windsong swept into the bay from the west. She chose to anchor under the lee of the islet and a wizened man hailed me to raft alongside. He sent me on shore with a stern line to attach the two vessels to the Islet. As I rowed back through a patch of calm water he winched the boats out of the wind.
Once our sailing vessels settled on his anchor, we both went below to enjoy the sea-solitude of our cabins. At happy hour he invited me aboard Windsong and I gathered together my red wine, cheese and crackers. I sat in his warm cabin opposite his bookcase.
You get the gist of a person from the books he reads and Matti surprised me as I stared at three prominent volumes, Aristotle's Metaphysics, Plato's Republic and a slim volume 'How Free Are We?' by Honderich. He was a kindred spirit in his choice of music, a rack of cassette tapes, all Baroque, Classical and Romantic.
"How wrong you can be about people, Robin," his eyes smiled from a masked face and the doctor in me diagnosed Parkinson's disease, "By your accent I took you for a G&T man," he proclaimed as he sipped his Martini.
As I left Windsong to cook and eat my dinner I extended an invitation to him to come on board Tremethick for a nightcap. His bland appearance did not prepare me for his question, "Do you think that reincarnation is possible?" asked with such ingenuous excitement as soon as he sat.
"Possible but not probable," I replied.
"What about the supernatural, do you think there are spirits?"
"Watching someone die," I hesitated to phrase my reply, "A dead organism and a live one look the same, yet different. Perhaps a spirit leaving is as good an explanation as any."
"You're a doctor, Robin; do you think that shamans have the power to heal?"
"How do you know I'm a doctor?"
"Tch, with a Celtic boat name that means doctor's house," he laughed at me. It was the first time the mask left his face and showed me that he did not have Parkinson's disease.
"You use the word 'think', not 'believe,'" I commented.
"Believe is not a philosopher's word," he scorned, "And what about shamans?"
"They are healers, as a western doctor my tradition is from war, our priests and apothecaries have been abandoned."
"At Hot Spring Island in the Queen Charlotte Islands the Haida say that there is a bad spirit that possesses people staying there."
"A visible spirit, a ghost?" I asked a little anxiously.
"They say that an unseen hand ties them to the bed in the night and it is terrifying so they say."
I shivered and his eyes smiled at me. I needed a diversion and asked, "Were you born around here?"
That was all the bait he needed to start his fascinating history. Matti was part aboriginal from his mother, Mary Wilson and his father, Matti Kurrika, the man who founded Sointula on Malcolm Island in 1900. At sunrise he finished his story, a story that started with his strange possession by the spirit of Jojo and ended with a personal tragedy at Viner Sound.
In 1991, Windsong was found beached on the Indian reserve at Viner Sound. The cabin, in immaculate order, his books still on the shelf and the logs for 1990-91 showed that he had arrived three days before Windsong was found. A safety deposit box key for a bank in Port McNeill was placed on the chart table. When opened, the box contained the logbooks for 1960 to 1970. Matti's body was never recovered.
Anyone who visits Viner Sound on Gilford Island and enters the narrow channel to the Indian reserve will find a snug harbor; hear the echoes as the kingfisher crosses from one side of the cove to the other. Alone in the quiet dark of evening you will know you are not alone although our concept of madness will prevent a sane man from divulging this secret. In 1996 I was anchored in the cove at Viner Sound. I turned into my bunk at dark to read. I seemed unable to concentrate, then Matti's voice instructed, 'Robin, tell my story.'

Finnish Settlement at Malcolm Island Suffers a Terrible Calamity.
Fire Breaks Out in a House Containing Over a Hundred People.
Eleven Unfortunates Lose Their Lives and Seventeen Are Injured.
From our correspondant, Vancouver, B.C., Feb 2nd - Thursday evening witnessed a grim tragedy with dire results to the Finnish settlers on Malcolm Island. The news was brought down by Matti Kurrika. In a terrible fire, which broke out while men were at a meeting in a large dwelling, in which 24 families were living, 11 persons were burned to death and 17 injured.
President Kurrika jumped from the building and was stunned. After he came to, a bundle struck his feet, he stooped and picked it up, and Found it was a baby rubbing its eyes and unhurt. It had been thrown from the second story. The mother was saved by jumping.
Chapter 1
Possession by the spirit of Jojo
Windsong sailed into Viner Sound from Hornet Passage in late afternoon. A narrow gut at the end of the sound separates Mount Dunsterville from the Carrington Hills. Mount Dunsterville rose up 2,000 feet off Windsong's port bow and the Carrington Hills less steeply off her starboard beam. Both sides built of purple-gray granite walls with evergreen trees growing precariously from the cracks on their stony shelves; between them an aisle of a great cathedral unobstructed by choir or altar, yet decorated for Christmas.
Matti remembered standing beside Michael, his Captain, mentor and friend from the war, at the East End of Ely cathedral as he had stared with awe at its unobstructed magnificence. In the Lady Chapel he viewed the ceiling through a mirror reflecting the intricate filigree that splayed out from the columns like a roof of a forest; an image that made him long to be back on the northwest coast of his youth where the fronds of the huge cedar trees roof the forest glade.
The river at the head of the sound wound its way through the clam bed mud at low tide. A green midden just above the beach marked the site of an abandoned Indian village. Before reaching the clam bed shelf, Matti hauled his sloop to port into the snug cove and went forward to drop his anchor into 24 feet of water. He felt the anchor touch the soft sandy bottom and grab. Windsong swung into the wind and Matti dropped the fluttering mainsail.
Matti furled the mainsail onto the boom and shouted, "Hoy, hoy, hoy," to bring the cove alive with echoes from the granite walls. Matti froze at the rasping cry of a kingfisher as it crossed the cove. He stood motionless believing in his invisibility just as the hunter uncles of his youth taught the boys. A sound that rang in the ears of his dog whose black Labrador face looked at Matti through the hatch, "Come, boy," Matti said as he drew the dinghy alongside. The dog moved his Great Dane body gracefully up the steps and leapt down into the bow. Three years had passed since Matti first held the small bundle in his arms with no expectation of the size to come. He tied the dinghy painter to a log as the dog bounded along the beach, barked and the sound echoed back. The dog pricked up his ears in expectation of company. When a puppy he was all black save his pink stomach and that prompted his uninspired name.
"Come, heel, Blackie," Matti called to control his dog.
Matti sat in his cockpit with contentment savoring the mixed aromas of his stew bubbling on his stove and the tobacco smoke from his pipe. He had not been back here to the village since the 1930s. The village was abandoned during the war when Shaman Fool proclaimed that bad spirits haunted the area. The shaman advised the people to stay away and Matti now saw that the forest had already reclaimed the area with few of the old long houses still standing.
"Shamans," Matti mumbled his scorn of those witch doctors of his youth.
Blackie put his head on Matti's knees and whimpered, "You feel the bad spirits?" Matti asked his companion with a ruffle of his black head.
If Matti had been asked that question before the war he would have scoffed and not deigned to answer. He had been brought up to fear the shamans, fear their power. At school in Alert Bay he had been taught the Christian belief in an all-powerful God, a god who would punish him for his earthly sins. He had come to think that both beliefs were crazy. Michael, his Captain and friend in the war, had told him to swap the word 'belief ' for the word 'think' because there was good reason for thinking about any phenomenon, religion or other people's beliefs, as long as you kept an open mind. In his post war sojourns at the Indian villages of the northwest coast tracing his origins from where his grandparents hailed, he had listened to the myths and legends of his relatives at Wrangell close to the mouth of the Stikine River and at Masset at the north end of the Queen Charlotte Islands with a renewed interest. His grandmother was born at Wrangell, into the house of a Tlingit chief and his grandfather was from the abandoned Haida village at Kiusta.
Matti put Blackie's food down before he sat to eat his evening meal in Windsong's tidy cabin. His war service in the SAS had made him organize the little space available to him with four men in or under one armored jeep. His cabin was a luxury of space