I am particularly interested in the
connections I can now see between some of the material in this book and
material in previous articles about cults, very different books and very
different people.
The first article introduced the two main
characters and ended with a description of some of the harm Esmé Scarron had
done by abusing his powers and knowledge.
The next topics to be covered are the
dreadful effect that Scarron’s attempts to influence her have on his chosen
disciple Meg Lambert and the cult leader/cult member aspect of their
relationship.
Many of the unpleasant symptoms that Meg experiences
are very familiar: they are typical of the negative effects that energy vampires
and black occultists have on their victims.
The unbearably drab existence
Early on in the book, thinking about the
delightful and exciting life that Scarron could offer her makes Meg’s life and
future in England appear unendurably drab in comparison. It seems that there
will be nothing for her back home but ordinary people and pastimes, ageing
morons, a dull colourless existence with no beauty and no sense of romantic
excitement and nothing to look forward to.
Many people have had a taste of this feeling,
especially ambitious people of ability who feel trapped in a limiting environment
and are desperate to escape from a godforsaken place full of deadbeat losers,
but in Meg’s case there is something sinister at work.
Meg was content with her life with her loving
mother in a small town on the beautiful Devonshire coast, and she would have
been happy to return to it until Scarron got to work and used his powers to invade
her mind and influence her. His plan is to force her onto his path by closing
other avenues in her mind, making her see him as the only way of escape from an
empty future. He is creating the problem with one hand and the solution with
the other.
This reminds me of how Scarron made his
daughter ill with one of his potions and tried to make her better with another.
I have written about someone else who feels
the same malaise and for much the same reason. It is not natural or normal in
her case either: there has been an intervention. The effect that Robin Jarvis’s
witchmaster and black magician Nathaniel Crozier has on the young girl
Jennet is uncannily similar to Scarron’s on Meg. There is a huge age gap in
this case too.
Nathaniel suggests to Jennet that her daily
life is unsatisfactory and that he will take her away from it. Jennet lives in
the beautiful seaside town of Whitby with a loving guardian, but because of
Nathaniel’s influence she ends up suffering from terrible feelings of futility
and emptiness.
Meg Lambert is lucky in that, unlike some of
the other people I mentioned in the Crozier article, she gets only a mild dose
of the dissatisfaction syndrome and it doesn’t last very long.
Draining, depression and the black swirl
Meg has been telling herself for weeks how
wonderful, glamorous and romantic Esmé Scarron’s life is and how lucky she
would be to share it. After all, she is full of admiration for his mind and could assist him in his work. She knows that all she has to do is say yes
to his proposal, but then she no longer wants to. His attempts to turn her away
from her old life and tempt her into joining him in his life have failed.
Scarron senses this and changes his strategy.
He hopes to make her want to marry him out of pity and the desire to help him.
He very unscrupulously uses his powers in
this new attempt to manipulate Meg. He beams waves of pity and sorrow at her. She gets this several times a day. Sometimes the
waves are so strong that she can hardly bear it, and she is indeed tempted to
marry him just because she pities him so much.
She can’t get him out of her thoughts when under
the influence.
She
also feels tired, cold, drained, weakened and unbearably depressed. She feels that she is being attacked and
bombarded, which of course she is. It is overwhelming and affects her badly.
At one point Scarron takes Meg to a high
place and launches attacks on several fronts.
Her faith in God withers. This reminds me of Zachary Grey and his
withering scorn when he talks to Vicky Austin about religion; Vicky however
defends her family’s beliefs.
Meg shivers with cold and comes close to
crying. Scarron looks down at her steadily, turns on the psychic pressure and
her senses go temporarily into a slow black swirl. This is another familiar
phenomenon; I mentioned a few cases in this article.
There is a comparable scene in The Moon by
Night in which Zachary takes Vicky into the cool and dark commissary to get
something to drink. He is in one of his negative moods, wondering what the use
of anything is and what is worth living for. This has a bad effect on Vicky and
she starts to shiver. Then comes the black swirl:
“I felt as though I were being drawn down
into a dark, deep hole. The sunlight was outside. It was shadowy at the
counter, and the blades of the fans whirring around seemed to suck me deeper
and deeper into the hole.”
It is uncanny how similar these two episodes
are.
Esmé Scarron is rather like a cult leader
Esmé Scarron has some characteristics in
common with cult leaders. He even owns an attack-dog!
He is arrogant and despises the mass of
humanity, although he himself does not bear close inspection.
He speaks of his circle of friends as
followers and behaves like the leader of an occult group. When he instructs Meg
in various metaphysical subjects, his voice is like an incantatory spell. It is
as if she is a neophyte who is being initiated.
Meg Lambert is rather like a cult member
Some of the things that Meg Lambert says in
defence of Esmé Scarron are similar to what cult members might say when their
leader is criticised.
There may not be anything more to it than
loyalty to a friend and a teenager’s typical rebellion against criticism and
attempts to control her, but I think that she has a very mild attack of the
cult member syndrome.
Meg makes excuses for Scarron and gets
annoyed when her friends at the guesthouse make fun of him.
Just as no one in Vicky Austin’s family likes
Zachary Grey, no one at the language school/guesthouse and in the local town
likes Esmé Scarron. Meg’s mother can’t stand him either.
However, Meg will not permit any criticism of
him. She has no respect for her mother’s feelings of mistrust and low opinion
of Scarron. She says to her mother, “Don’t say anything
against him, he’s my friend.”
Sometimes people stop thinking clearly when
under the influence. They may give wrong interpretations to what they see, hear
and learn and put good constructions on bad actions.
When Meg first hears the strange woman with
the damaged mind, who is actually Scarron’s daughter, call Scarron ‘mein papa’,
she dismisses it as an honorary title. She also attributes good motives to
Scarron for concealing the relationship: she thinks that Scarron has not
mentioned it because he wants to hide his kindness to the unfortunate woman.
I can see a mild form of the attack-dog
syndrome when Meg becomes angry when the owner of the language school, a former
victim of Scarron’s, speaks out against him. This is the woman whose husband
was sent by Scarron to a concentration camp. She knows what she is talking
about and is telling the truth.
Meg defends Scarron in a heated tone; she
does not believe the allegations of collaboration. She says, “...it’s unfair to
say things against him” and, “It’s awfully strong to call someone a ‘bad man’”
and, “Nothing will make me believe anything against him now!”
This sounds rather like my old friend, “How
can you say such things about such a fine person”! Same old, same old. Cult
members just won’t listen. They have been got at. The attack-dog syndrome is a
dead giveaway.
Still more to come
There are more connections and common
elements to be described, and there is the end of the story to be gone into in
more detail.
