The Dark Sacrament (12 page)

That day, Gary was subjected to a series of tests. They included a blood test to search for low blood sugar or even diabetes. The neurologist ruled out both. He considered the possibility that the boy might have a weak heart, but a cardiogram showed otherwise. Gary had a robust constitution.

There remained the final possibility: epilepsy. Jessica was truly alarmed by the prospect. Even though she knew very little about the affliction, she understood the dreadful implications. He was just a child; what sort of a future would he have? It was too hard to even think about.

There are two principal factors that can trigger epilepsy: it can be inherited or can result from brain dysfunction, commonly called a seizure. As far as Jessica knew, there was no history of epilepsy in her family; and it was likewise unknown in her ex-husband's line.

The neurologist ordered an electroencephalogram (EEG). If there were patterns of abnormal electrical activity in the brain—epileptiform abnormalities and the like—then epilepsy was a distinct possibility. The scan, however, revealed no such irregularities; the
boy's brain was completely sound. An epileptic fit is usually of short duration, on average five minutes. Gary's lasted almost an hour. Epilepsy was therefore ruled out.

When he was discharged the following day, no one was any the wiser as to what had happened to him in the kitchen. He himself had very little memory of the seizure. All he could call to mind was being seized by a great fear. Then he blacked out, to regain consciousness in the hospital. He thought of it as a great adventure—especially the brain scan. He had likened the huge machine to something he had seen in an episode of
Star Trek.

“Like the Borg were experimenting on me,” he told his mother excitedly.

“If you say so, darling. You just try to rest now.”

Understandably, Jessica was beside herself with worry. She suspected that something was terribly amiss with her son but could not even guess at the cause. Her thoughts returned to that day, two weeks earlier, when she found him seemingly in a trance, halfway up the stairs. She was not satisfied with the explanations he had given; she wished to learn the truth.

She waited until Gary had recovered from his ordeal and was back to normal—insofar as she could ascertain. School was out of the question; he would not return for another two weeks, on Dr. Flynn's orders.

“Gary,” she began, “we have to talk, you and me.”

She switched off the television, much to Kelly's annoyance. The little girl slunk off to her room.

“Gary, I want to know what happened that day—the day you saw something on the stairs. Would you like to tell me now?”

“It wasn't anything.”

“Yes, it was. And I want to know what it was. When they were treating you at the hospital, Dr. Flynn asked me if you'd had this sort of thing before, and I told him about that day. He says the two things must have something to do with each other. Now, have they?”

Gary shrugged, unable to meet his mother's eye. She pressed on.

“Kelly says you have a new friend. Is that true?”

“Yes. And it's none of her business.”

“Is that why you were fighting with her? That wasn't nice. You never used to fight with Kelly.” She sat down next to him. “Who is this boy? Do I know him?”

“What boy?” Gary asked, in seeming innocence.

“Your new friend!”

“He's not a boy. He's a man.”

Jessica swallowed hard. This was the last thing she wished to hear. Only that week there had been extensive media coverage of a child-abuse scandal in England. Thoughts of how an adult could manipulate a child—she remembered they called it “grooming”—were still strong in her mind. The reports had alerted her to the vulnerability of children; that it could happen to anybody's kids. Even hers.

“What's this man's name, darling? Do I know him?”

“His name's Tyrannus.”

“Tyr—What sort of a name is that?”

“I dunno.”

“Where did you meet this man?”

“At the river; it was the man I saw on the throne,” he said, his words tumbling out in a torrent, “the one that was like the Devil, only it wasn't the Devil; it was Tyrannus. He was on the stairs, and he was huge; he was ten times bigger than me.”

Jessica could only stare.

Tyrannus is not a name one comes across very often. One of the movies in the
Star Wars
series had a minor villain named Darth Tyrannus, and a recent television series set in ancient Rome featured a gladiator named Tyrannus. Jessica was familiar with neither character. To the casual eye, Tyrannus seems to contain elements of “tyrant” and “tyrannosaurus”; it could be argued that both words would hold a fascination for a ten-year-old boy. In fact, Tyrannus is a Latin name, derived from the Greek
tyrannos,
meaning “sole ruler.” It is not difficult to see how “sole ruler” could come to mean “cruel despot,” as
tyrant
does today.

In literature, we encounter the name in a play by the tragedian Sophocles:
Oedipus Tyrannus.
It is more usually entitled
Oedipus Rex
or
Oedipus the King.
What is not widely known is that a man named Tyrannus is mentioned in the New Testament. Paul the Apostle had been preaching in the city of Ephesus:

This brief allusion is all we have to go on. There has been speculation as to who Tyrannus was, but it remains speculation; nothing about this Greek schoolmaster has come down to us. It might be thought that Gary had picked up the reference somewhere or other; Sunday school comes to mind. And it is a fact that the boy has a Protestant background.

 

Jessica recalled vividly that afternoon she found him frozen with fear, staring open-mouthed at something at the top of the stairs. He had spoken of the stairs again. She wondered if they held the key.

“So this Tyrannus was in our house, Gary?”

He nodded, increasing her fears.

“That day? The day you…”

“Yeah. He scared me. He was
huge.
A big man, dressed in black, and he was covered in stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?” she asked, not really wanting to hear the answer.

“Rotten stuff. All dirt, like he'd come out of the ground, and he had wounds and big cuts all over him, but he was laughing at––”

“That's enough!” she snapped. “You've been watching too many horror DVDs at my mother's. By heavens, I'm going over there tomorrow and—”

“No, Mommy!” Gary cried. “It wasn't the films; it was the Ouija board.”

And then he told her of the board, of the entity on the throne, of how it seemed to have followed him home.

The more Jessica heard, the more troubled she grew. She wondered why Gary would suddenly invent such things. It was not like him. Her good sense advised her not to give his story approbation by appearing to believe it. An active imagination was all well and good, but this particular fantasy seemed downright unhealthy. She said as much to Gary, fed him a good, nutritious dinner with plenty of greens—on the doctor's orders—and banished the entire disquieting affair from her mind.

She consoled herself that the new “friend” was not the pedophile she had feared but a creature of boyish make-believe.

She wondered if “Tyrannus” was not a character in
Star Trek,
a “Borg”—whatever that might be.

Gary returned to school the following week. But he was not the Gary of old; he had altered radically.

Reports began to reach his mother of a change in his behavior, indeed in his general demeanor. She learned of bullying, of using bad language, of treating his teachers with gross disrespect. It was as though he had undergone a complete change of personality. She could not understand it, asked herself if she were to blame, if her parenting skills were faulty.

On the Monday following his return to school, he came home late again. It was October and the evenings were longer; it was dark by the time Jessica heard his key turn in the front door. She was torn between anxiety and annoyance. He should have known better.

His excuse was that he had been “fooling around” by the river. The river again! She demanded to know more but Gary refused to tell her. She had to reprimand him for swearing: “I won't have that kind of language in this house.” Again he picked a fight with his unfortunate little sister.

Calm was eventually restored. Gary still had a lot of catching up to do, and she left him to his homework. But later that evening, as she was cleaning the bath, she heard Kelly call out from the living room. She sounded frantic. Jessica wiped her hands and hurried down, thinking that Gary had again attacked his sister. He had not.

He was again lying on the floor. His lips were blue, his eyes were glazed over, and his body was locked once more in the mysterious paralysis.

Again she called Dr. Flynn, and once again he hurried to her summons. He was in a quandary. He telephoned his brother-in-law at his home. The neurologist could offer little practical advice; the EEG had, after all, ruled out epilepsy, and the other tests showed that Gary was physically healthy.

“I'm afraid I can do nothing more with him, Mrs. Lyttle,” the general practitioner confessed. “I'm going to have to refer him to a psychiatrist.”

He saw her anxious look.

“Don't worry,” he said. “I don't think there's a serious mental problem. It's probably the onset of puberty. Some boys react to it more strongly than others. All those hormones leaping about in there.” He smiled. “Enough to drive anybody a little bit batty.”

“But what about medication, doctor? Something to calm him down?”

“That's the very reason why I wouldn't like to prescribe anything of that nature. You never can tell with puberty. The wrong drugs could be disastrous. Besides, I don't believe in sedating children. As far as I'm concerned, parents who go down that road are giving up accountability. Antidepressants are no substitute for love and understanding, which is all a child needs.”

And so began what would prove to be an extended course of psychiatric treatment. The therapist, a child psychiatrist and consultant to Letterkenny General Hospital, embarked on what she called “Gestalt” therapy. Dr. Sally Mulgrew wished to focus on Gary's “self-awareness.” Jessica understood little of what the woman told
her, Gary even less. But Sally was persuasive, and the boy seemed to take to her; there was an excellent rapport.

On her advice, Gary saw Sally once a week. Each session lasted a hour, and the therapist was happy with his progress. Jessica noticed the change too. He was returning to his old self, the sweet-natured Gary she knew.

It was therefore with great dismay that Jessica, in early spring, took a phone call from her son's headmaster.

“Gary's had an attack of some sort.”

She feared the worst, sensing what was to come.

“You'd better come over, Mrs. Lyttle. It happened midway through a geography lesson.” (Jessica, even in her anxiety, asked herself why the man deemed this an important piece of information.) “We've alerted his doctor.”

As if that were not serious enough, Gary suffered a second seizure that very week. It came, as did the others, without warning. He was recovering from his ordeal at school and was stricken in much the same manner as before. With one important difference: this time, neither Jessica nor Kelly witnessed the seizure. It was Carmel Sharkey, the neighbor from next door, who reported it. She had been “babysitting” Gary while his mother went shopping.

“Jessica,” she said when Dr. Flynn had departed, “you're not going to like what I have to say to you.”

“Don't tell me any more bad news. I can't take it.”

“No, dear, that's not it. I think you should take Gary to see a priest.”

Jessica was stunned, as any mother would be. The neighbor was suggesting that her son was somehow
unclean,
in the biblical sense—touched by evil. No mother could countenance such a thing. The stigma is too great.

“What are you saying, Carmel?”

“For his own good. I think you know full well what I'm saying.”

“Well, maybe I do. But Lord save us, Carmel, not a priest. He wouldn't go near a priest.”

“How can you say that? Have you asked him?”

“I just know, that's all. Carmel, you're scaring me.”

“You'll have to face up to it, though. That stuff you told me about the Ouija board—I heard about a woman in England who had a lad who was messing around with a Ouija board. All sorts of things began to happen. They're bad news, Jessica, so they are.”

“Ah, please, Carmel! Don't start that old nonsense with
me.
”

Jessica was accustomed to her friend's pietistic ways. She humored her, although privately she felt that Carmel Sharkey's devotion to statues was no better than the idolatrous practices of the more primitive African tribes. In the Sharkey home there were more statues to Christ and the Blessed Virgin than Jessica had seen in respectably sized churches. There was a bewildering assortment of effigies of saints, whose identities could only be guessed at. Carmel did not wear her faith on her sleeve; she decorated her home with it. Yet, in all the time that Jessica had known her, she had never once tried to impose any of her beliefs. Until now.

“Half the world doesn't think it's nonsense, Jessica,” she said then, hurt.

“That may be, but I won't have the likes of Father Sheridan putting ideas into my son's head. I don't like that man. He seems to me to be too fond of the good life for his own good. Why would a priest need two cars anyway?”

“I wasn't thinking of Father Sheridan. There's a lovely old man I went to before. He's in a Cistercian monastery over in Tyrone. I'm sure you know it.”