The Dark Sacrament (19 page)

And that seemed to end the discussion. They said their prayers and retired.

It may have been coincidence. Stephanie is not so sure. Her own feeling is that Declan's inquiries had somehow opened a door on some secret or other and in so doing had left both of them vulnerable to aggression from “the other side.” Whatever the cause or motivation, that night Declan was physically attacked. Of that there was no doubt. He awoke the next morning to find that scratch marks had mysteriously appeared on his torso.

A rubicon had been crossed; war was declared. From that night on, events took a turn for the worse.

Physical injury to a person by a paranormal agency is rare. According to psychic researchers, when physical interaction is present in a haunting it generally takes the form of touching, squeezing, or the sensation of an oppressive weight, none of which, in the main, leaves marks on the individual. The aggression to which Declan was subjected signaled a very worrying development. These were no longer the antics of a “playacting spirit child.” The rules of engagement had changed radically.

Over the coming days and following from the physical attack, the Rooneys would come face to face with something they had dreaded from the outset. The entity would demonstrate, by targeting the sacred objects, that it was antireligious. When this occurs in cases of paranormal activity, when consecrated, protective objects come under attack, one must face the possibility that evil forces are at work.

The couple vacated their home yet again. Each day, they would look in after work—and each day would be confronted with incontrovertible evidence of evil intent. Over the course of a week, all the religious objects in their home were targeted.

It started with the crucifix above the fireplace. They discovered it lying on the hearth, where it had evidently been hurled with some
force. What is more, the Fatima rosary that adorned it had been pulled apart and its beads scattered.

On at least two occasions, they fled the house crying out in shock and physical pain. Incredibly, the holy water in the font by the front door was so hot that it burned their fingers. They had made a habit of crossing themselves on leaving the house. Something was trying to prevent them from continuing the practice.

Water from the French shrine of Lourdes, which Stephanie kept on her nightstand, inexplicably turned to ice. More holy water was emptied onto the kitchen floor, and the bottle that contained it was flung under the table. A novena prayer to St. Jude was removed from its frame, torn into tiny pieces, and strewn about the bedroom floor.

But perhaps the most startlingly malign incident—and one which confirmed for the Rooneys that demonic influences were at work—involved the prayers to Michael the Archangel, which Stephanie had placed in five separate rooms. She found the words hide here now scrawled in a child's hand on the reverse of each prayer. Interestingly, the Scrabble letters had spelled out run hit hide.

“‘Hide,'” Declan mused. “Maybe the two wee girls are playing hide-and-go-seek together.”

“And maybe I'm going out of my f***ing mind, Declan,” said a distraught Stephanie.

He looked at her with concern. She never used that kind of language—not unless she was
truly
upset. Yet he could not let go of the idea that the phantom children were playing games again. It was better to believe
that
than to question the nature of an entity that seemed to take delight in, by turns, boiling and freezing sanctified water.

The new cycle of manifestations increased in frequency and grotesqueness. The prayer leaflets became the focus of something even more sinister and alarming. Mysterious symbols appeared one day on the walls of the living room, kitchen, and hallway.

One, drawn at head height—about five and a half feet from the floor—resembled a staring eye. The symbols did not appear to
have been applied with a writing implement, such as chalk or felt-tip marker, but seemed smudged, as if a finger had been dipped in a dark pigment of some kind. Declan thought at once of runes or hieroglyphs, but the drawings were like nothing he had ever seen before, whether in books, magazines, or TV documentaries.

A curious odor pervaded the house, as of charred paper. The couple noted that it was stronger on the staircase. They hurried upstairs and inspected the bedrooms. Every copy of the prayer to Michael the Archangel was burned. They concluded that the ash had been used to daub the graffiti on the walls downstairs.

It was time to seek help again.

Canon Lendrum is understandably disappointed but never dispirited when he learns that his efforts at cleansing places or individuals have not been entirely successful.

“We don't know why one deliverance works immediately and another takes longer,” he says. “But I believe that it's all a matter of faith. The unshakable faith of the deliverance minister must be matched by the unwavering faith of the afflicted.”

Strictly speaking, in the Protestant ministry there is no formalized ritual for exorcising places. Nor is there a biblical reference to the purification of dwelling houses. The deliverance minister is therefore free to act at his own discretion. Rome's chief exorcist, Dom Gabriele Amorth, describes how he and his fellow priest Candido Amantini go about this task:

“Very often the blessing of a house and a service of the Eucharist will be enough,” Canon Lendrum adds, “but there are those cases that demand more robust measures. The infestation of the Rooney household was one such case.”

When the canon visited the house for the third time—again accompanied by Alison and Florence—he was struck by the threatening atmosphere. It was almost tangible even as they entered.

“Evil invariably comes with a coldness,” he says. “Science has never been able to explain why this is so. I was not aware of it on the first two occasions, but I had the impression—and Florence confirmed it—that the child spirit had been replaced, or to be more accurate, ‘used,' by sinister forces to gain access to the house.”

He celebrated another Eucharist in the presence of the Rooney family. More prayers were said; the rooms were blessed a third time. As before, the canon and his party left Dungiven in the belief that whatever it was that had laid siege to the house had departed, never to return.

“We felt liberated then,” says Stephanie. “We felt that a door was shut.”

It was a door that had been opened by the restless spirit of a little lost girl named Sarah and used as a portal for evil to enter and disrupt the lives of an innocent young couple.

We wonder about the scented wooden balls that started it all. Where did they end up?

“Oh, we burned them a long time ago,” Stephanie says. “No more of that for us. We see them from time to time in the shops, and most people would say they look pretty and smell nice. But Declan and me, whenever we see them, well, a shiver runs through us. And who can blame us for that?”

The Gillespie farmhouse, a gray stone, two-story structure, sits in thirty or so acres at the end of a narrow, meandering lane in the lake-rich countryside of County Fermanagh. It was built two centuries ago by an ancestor of the present family. The visitor will find nothing remarkable about the property; there is the customary yard with its barns and outbuildings, dotted with farm machinery standing idle or at the ready, depending on the season.

Ian and Linda Gillespie are a handsome, hard-working couple. He is a businessman and farmer; she is a former teacher. Their three children are beautiful, intelligent, and well mannered. The family seem to embody the benefits of wholesome country living. It is hard, then, to imagine extramundane forces intruding upon this idyll, yet that is what occurred in the autumn of 2002. During September and October of that year, the Gillespies' youngest child, eight-year-old Lucy, was the focus of a number of very unusual visitors.

It began one evening when Lucy was playing in the yard with her sister, eleven-year-old Sandy, and brother Darren, age ten at the time. Their parents were outdoors as well, herding cattle from a back field toward one of the barns.

It was growing late, and all at once Lucy felt the cold. She bounced the ball back to her siblings and told them to wait while she fetched her coat. She sped through the open door of the farmhouse
and down the hallway to the back room. This room, once a storeroom, had become the playroom; the children listened to their music and watched videos there.

Lucy's coat was hanging inside the door, which stood open—as it generally did. She stopped abruptly, pulled up short by a most incongruous sight. There was “a lady” in the room. She was bent over the coffee table by the far wall, her back to Lucy. She seemed to be arranging the videotapes.

The girl was transfixed. Not through fear, it must be said, but because of “something” that held her in the doorway, something that was urging her to take careful account of every detail of what she was witnessing. For Lucy was in no doubt that the lady was not like other women. She knew of the existence of ghosts—or perhaps more accurately the
possibility
of their existence. What child does not? Lucy sensed that she was seeing one, in daylight, in her very own home. She had what she calls a “clear” view of the lady, though the lady herself was not quite as clear as a normal human being. She was “fuzzy round the edges.”

Lucy could not see her face but had the impression that the lady was around her mother's age. She was tall and well built and wore a long, gray, straight skirt and a burgundy shawl. The clothes were definitely from another century—even young Lucy knew that. Most bizarrely, the stranger appeared to have no feet. The hem of her skirt seemed to hover about three or four inches above the ground. She was so intent on tidying the tapes that she did not register the presence of the child—not that Lucy wanted her attention. She hurried back down the hallway, coatless and breathless, to relate what she had seen to her brother and sister.

“There's a ghost in the playroom!” she blurted out.

Darren and Sandy, still bouncing the ball back and forth, did not pause their game. Lucy grabbed her sister's arm and shook it hard.

“Sandy, there's a ghost in the playroom!”

“A what?”

“A ghost!”

“Yeah, right!” Darren stopped the ball with his foot and rolled his eyes. “And your head's a bubble.”

But Sandy was not amused. She was looking quizzically at her sister. It had been instilled in the children from an early age that fibbing was a sin. It was wrong. Sandy sensed that Lucy was telling the truth; her whole demeanor said so.

“Are you sure?”

“Quick, come and see.” Lucy grasped Sandy by the arm and propelled her toward the front door. “She might be still there.”

Darren, not wishing to be left out, reluctantly followed the pair down the hallway. But when they got to the playroom door, they found it shut.

“It was open the last time!” Lucy whispered desperately. “She must still be in there.” She put her ear to the door; she could hear shuffling sounds. “I can hear her lifting the videos. Listen.”

Sandy put her ear to the door. She, too, could hear noises from within. She looked through the keyhole but saw nothing in the darkened room.

“What are you three up to?” It was their mother. “Come on, upstairs. Bedtime.”

“Lucy saw a ghost, Mum,” Sandy cried excitedly. “It's in the playroom.”

“Nonsense!” Linda had had a long, hard day. Ghost stories were the last thing she wished to hear so close to bedtime. She needed her sleep as much as the children did. A ghost. Such things were known to keep the children awake at night—with all the consequences for her own sleep and peace of mind. She had to put out this fire right away. “Nonsense,” she said again. “There's no such thing as ghosts.”

“But it's true!” Lucy protested. “She's in there sorting the videos. I saw her, Mum. I'm telling you, I did.”

Linda considered her daughter's anxious little face and the earnestness with which she spoke. She felt a slight shiver of unease.

“I hadn't said anything to the children,” she tells us. “Or no
body else. But the truth of the matter is that I'd had a brush with something myself a couple of weeks before. I don't know if you'd call it a ‘ghost.' I got this feeling there was a presence in the house. It seemed to be a woman's presence, and I felt it most strongly in the girls' bedroom. It was a little bit scary, but I'd kept my fears to myself. I'd no wish to alarm the children.”

“Very well, Lucy,” she said, “we'll have a look. And if she's there we'll have a little word and ask her what's she's looking for. And if she's not there, it means that you only
thought
you saw her. Fair enough?”

With that, Linda took her courage in both hands, flung the door open, and switched on the light—taking care to keep her eyes averted from the coffee table where the videotapes were stacked.

“There…see. No ghost!” She entered the room and spread her arms wide. The children hung back in the doorway. “See?”

The children's attention was on the coffee table. Young Lucy was pointing.

“But the videos—”

“Now look, there's
nothing
here!” Their mother's tone told them she would tolerate no contradiction. “Upstairs, all of you, this minute. And I don't want to hear another word about it.”

That seemed to end the matter. Linda got the children to bed and went back downstairs to put the kettle on. She heard her husband Ian come in and switch on the television. He would be catching the nine o'clock news, as was his habit. Before joining him in a cup of tea, she went to check the playroom again. She had been putting it off, but it had to be done, if only to set her mind at ease.

Linda had long given up tidying and putting things away in the playroom. It seemed a futile task. But, at that moment, she found herself fervently wishing for disorder; she prayed that she might see the usual mess: the videotapes strewn willy-nilly over the coffee table. That would prove Lucy's story groundless. She opened the door and switched on the light.

Her heart sank. The twenty or so tapes were neatly stacked—as
neatly as a display in a store. Not only that, but all had been slotted carefully into their individual boxes—boxes that, in the ordinary run of things, Linda would find discarded underneath the coffee table and elsewhere.

With trembling fingers she examined the top row. Each movie was in its correct box. There they were, neater even than she would have arranged them herself:
James and the Giant Peach, Babe, Monsters Inc., Muppets in Space
. The fifth box, however—
Spy Kids
—was empty. She looked about the room but could not find it. She went to the VCR and pressed the eject button. The machine was empty.

I don't have time for this, Linda thought. Perhaps the dog carried it out to the barn—he was known to do things like that—or perhaps one of the children had lent it to a friend at school.

Without quite knowing why, she hurriedly removed all the tapes from their boxes, tossed some of the boxes back under the table, and generally returned the playroom to its usual, untidy, state. In the morning the children would see that it had all been one great joke.

She was not smiling, though—far from it. As she pulled the door behind her, she had the feeling that another door was opening into another place, a place she had no wish to confront, or even consider.

She decided, then and there, that she would not burden her husband with her suspicions just yet. He had enough to deal with, what with a full-time job from eight to five and the additional farm work in the evenings. Besides, Ian was a skeptic; he would not take it seriously. She would wait and see how things developed. With luck, there would be no more to it.

In the days that followed, life returned to normal. The children went to school as usual; Ian went off to work; and Linda, with much to occupy her during the day, tried not to dwell on the strange phenomenon. Being a religious woman, she resolved to pray more with the children at bedtime. It gave her peace of mind, and it seemed to soothe them.

A week later, however, Lucy had her second vision.

It was about four o'clock on a calm, bright Friday afternoon. Linda was in the kitchen washing the dishes. Sandy and Darren were at the table, still busy with their homework, and Lucy, who tended to finish hers before the others, was outside at play.

The first thing that a visitor to the Gillespie homestead notices is the silence that envelops it. The house lies some distance from the main road and neighboring farms, and the silence is potent. Linda, being at home for most of the day, is especially attuned to this quietude. The noises that disturb it are almost welcome: the hum of a far-off tractor, Ian's car as it turns in at the gate, the playful shouts of the children, the barking dog that heralds a visitor.

The scream of a terrified child is something else entirely.

Linda dropped everything and ran outside, with Sandy and Darren close on her heels. Lucy was racing up the lane toward the house. She fell into her mother's arms in great agitation. While Linda did her best to calm her, the child kept pointing back the way she had come.

“He was there!” she cried, indicating the wild garden on the left. “A minute ago, Mommy…a man.”

Linda took her by the hand.

“All right, dear,” she said, “we'll go down and have a look.”

But there was no sign of the mysterious man. He seemed to be as nonexistent as Lucy's “lady” of the previous week.

“Look, there's no one there, sweetheart.”

Linda was perplexed, unsure what to think. Her daughter was behaving very much out of character. She rarely, if ever, made things up; it was not in her nature.

“There's nobody there, Lucy,” Sandy assured her.

Lucy began to sob. “But he
was
there. I saw him. I swear he was there!”

Linda could read the child's anguish. She was torn between chastising her for being silly and believing her. She dismissed both as unhelpful. Linda knew that her children were not given to attention seeking. She thought it better for everyone's sake to remain
neutral and simply to allow Lucy to have her say.

“All right,” she said, “let's all go inside and have some orange juice. Then you can tell us all about it.”

Once settled and calmer, Lucy related what she had seen. As she was skipping down the lane past the garden, she saw a figure standing just inside the gate: a man. He was of average height and wearing a black, hooded cloak. His hands were clasped chest-high in an attitude of prayer. He was “like a monk,” Lucy said. He did not move or look at her, but seemed to be gazing fixedly down the lane. The words
look
and
gazing
are probably incorrect in this context, because the monk had no features as such. A “peachy haze”—Lucy's charming description—filled the space where his face should have been.

Linda listened with mounting dread. What on earth was happening? Ghosts appearing in broad daylight, inside the house and out-of-doors. She wanted desperately to discount the whole affair. Yet, of her three children, Lucy was the least excitable; she was a calm, level-headed little girl. Why this sudden change? Linda was growing very concerned. She resolved to visit her doctor and seek his advice.

The doctor's diagnosis held no surprises. Children have fertile imaginations, he told Linda, especially at Lucy's age. They have difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction. What they see in movies can sometimes seem very real.

There was nothing new there, but his next words angered Linda. He wondered if the child perhaps felt she was not getting enough attention. The “visions” might well be her way of refocusing her mother's regard.

Linda could not concur; she treated her children equally. But the visit to the doctor had eased her mind to some extent. Lucy was sleeping well and her schoolwork had not suffered. The general practitioner assured the mother that it was just a phase, that things would calm down.

And they did.

“Three whole weeks went by with nothing happening,” Linda
tells us, “but you know, deep down I knew it was too good to last. And the reason I say that is because, even though Lucy wasn't having any more visions, I knew,
I just knew,
that the strange woman was still in the house. I'd sometimes feel her on the stairs or the landing, but what really worried me was that she was strongest in the girls' room.”

While tidying up in there one morning, she noticed something odd. The children always made their beds before going to school. It did not require much skill—straighten the duvet, plump the pillow, and place it on top. But now she noticed that Lucy's bed was made differently. The pillow had been placed beneath the cover. Linda shook her head in mild bemusement, left the room by and by, and thought no more about it.