The Dark Sacrament (31 page)

It was a bad omen. Tricia Downey had the uneasy feeling that the sighting of the “black form” might be the beginning of another and more frightening phase of the haunting. She went to the priests' house again, taking her daughter with her.

“Do you think,” Father Frank asked, “that you'd be up to spending a night in Katie's room?”

Tricia had not expected this. She had assumed that the priest would suggest a second blessing, or perhaps a Mass.

“I want to know more about what it looks like,” he said. “From what Katie tells me, it sounds terrible enough. But I'd like a second opinion.”

“You do believe me, don't you, Father?” Katie asked.

“I do. I believe that
you
believe what you saw. But Katie, nighttime is a strange enough time. Sometimes the darkness can convince us that we see things that aren't there, or we mistake shadows for real things. That's why I think we should let your mother spend the night with you.”

Privately, the priest thought that Katie might be having psychological problems, as adolescents often do. He was also distressed to learn that his house blessing had proved ineffective.

That night, Tricia shared the bed in Katie's room.

“Why did you turn off the heat?” she asked her daughter. “It's freezing!”

“I didn't, Mom. It's up full. See for yourself.”

Tricia went to the radiator. As was the case in her own bedroom, it was a double radiator. The valve was open fully. In the small room the temperature should have been almost unbearable.

“I'll have your father look at it tomorrow,” she said.

“It's been like that for days, Mom. It's
him.
He does it!”

Tricia's unease was growing. She had come armed with her rosary beads, her prayer leaflets, and a St. Brigid's Cross—woven expertly of rushes by a long-dead relative. She placed it, together with a Bible, on the nightstand.

Mother and daughter talked for an hour or more, not so much because they had a lot to say to each other but because neither was in a hurry to go to sleep. Both feared what dreams might come. At last, Katie told her mother that she was ready for sleep. Tricia kissed her goodnight and began silently praying. She was aware of Katie's breathing growing shallower. After a while, she too drifted off.

Tricia awoke from what seemed like a long sleep. Panic gripped her. She found herself pinned to the bed, effectively paralyzed, exactly as her daughter had described it. Beside her, she could hear Katie's soft snores.

“It was like a ton on top of me,” she recalls. “I knew it was bad—you could feel it was bad. I tried to make the sign of the cross, but it wouldn't let me. As I was raising my right hand, it was gripped at the wrist. I had my rosary beads under the pillow, so I tried to maneuver my left hand underneath to get at them, but again my arm was gripped, so I couldn't. I tried to pray, but I couldn't even speak. My tongue was frozen.”

She did not see the entity that night, and for this she was thankful; her torment had been traumatic enough. Yet the fact that it had not made itself visible to her did not mean she was free of it.

On the contrary, Tricia believes that the thing took this opportunity to latch onto
her,
allowing Katie some respite. She claims that it pursued her to her own room and appeared to her the following night, while she slept in her own bed, her husband by her side. It was the beginning of a series of attacks.

“It didn't matter that Hugh was in bed beside me,” she recounts. “I'd wake up and it would be on top of me. Then I started to see it. It was as Katie had described, an animal-like head, but the body of a human. It was a dense black form.”

Tricia screamed, waking her husband. Incredibly, he saw the attacker and described it in almost exactly the same way Tricia did. He could not believe his eyes. But he was courageous; he saw the danger his wife was in. He sprang from the bed and rushed to the dressing table, where Tricia had placed a bottle of holy water.

“He threw it over the thing,” she says, “and ordered it out of the room.”

It went. Katie's father did not know it then, but as the creature vanished from the bedroom, it simultaneously materialized downstairs in Katie's room. Having been thwarted in its molestation of the mother, it launched a fresh assault on the daughter.

At the breakfast table the next morning, the family held a council of war. They needed the priest again. Forty-eight hours later, Father Frank returned to the Downey home and offered Mass in Katie's room.

“After the Mass we had about a week of peace,” Tricia says, “before everything went crazy again. In the middle of the night, all the doors and windows would start banging—opening and shutting.
The boys started to talk about an animal in the bedroom that made pig noises. Eilish was the only one who wasn't affected; she sleeps like a log. But the rest of us were all being worn down, and it seemed the more we prayed, the worse it got. Katie and I didn't have the creature on top of us like before, but little did we know that after the Mass it went for poor Mirjana.”

“I couldn't tell you what Father Ignatius did,” Tricia says. “He spent a long time in Katie's room, then down in the old house praying, but it worked. Thank heavens! We've never seen or heard it since. God willing, it'll last. He said it probably was the spirit of a Hessian, which was a new one on me because I'd never heard the word before. But then Hugh started to look into it, and what the priest said started to make sense.”

 

The Downey land, which lies between two notorious battle sites, would have seen some of the worst atrocities and brutality perpetrated against the Wexford people. The Hessians, German mercenaries, were sent to Ireland in 1798 to help quell the rebellion inspired by the United Irishmen. According to more than one reliable account, they went on a rampage, raping, pillaging, and terrorizing the local population.

It is an intriguing explanation, not least because of the military elements in the haunting. There is the ghostly cavalry that the family heard in the night, the “battering ram” used against their front door, the sexual assaults on the females. All seem to reinforce the theory that the spirit of a marauding Hessian might have been at work.

Furthermore, the two women who appeared in the old cottage wore green dresses. It is significant that, in 1798, the wearing of the color green was forbidden by order of the English government. In County Wexford especially this order was defied almost universally by the women. They were to pay dearly for their defiance: the Hessians subjected them to the most vile and indecent sexual assaults. Many women died cruel and savage deaths.

But Hessian or not, Father Ignatius found it a very unusual and perplexing case.

“I don't rule out the presence of an evil spirit,” he tells us, “but I feel that a sustained attack on the religious objects in the house would have been more in keeping with the activities of such, but no religious objects were disturbed. The Downey home had a great many holy pictures and statues, so the opportunity was certainly there. Given the bloody battles that were fought in that part of Wexford, it is possible that it was the spirit of a soldier. Like Father McMenahan, I had that same sensation when I entered young Katie's room, that sense that I was intruding, that the room was its territory. Who knows—perhaps this Hessian was slaughtered on the spot where the Downeys built their new house. The killing could have been an act of vengeance for all the terrible things he did.”

And the incubus theory? Father Ignatius is noncommittal on the subject.

“The sexual element was obviously the most distasteful and frightening part for the females to have to go through,” he says. “I don't come across that kind of thing very often. The incubus and succubus—are they simply myths? You know, there is the great danger in this enlightened age of ours to relegate all such ideas to the ignorance of the Middle Ages. Satan has managed to get himself out of the picture very well in these modern times of ours—and managed it very successfully, I'm sure you'll agree. He can take on many implausible forms, so why not that of the incubus?”

Before we leave, Tricia takes us down to Katie's bedroom. It is a typical teenager's room, with its collection of cuddly toys and posters. There is not a whiff of the horrors that her daughter endured.

She points to a holy picture above the bed.

“That's Our Lady of Medjugorje. Mirjana gave it to us before she went back to Bosnia. Katie and I went to visit her in May. She lives near the shrine and we wanted to go and give thanks. I got a great feeling of peace when I was there…it was a very spiritual experience. I just had the conviction that we'd never be bothered with that thing again. You know, I came across a book at the shrine, and it said when we're bothered by these things, we should give them a nickname and laugh at them. The more you fear them, the more energy you give them to attack you.”

We wonder if Mirjana will be returning to the fruit farm.

“Oh, I don't think so,” Tricia says with a smile. “And who could blame her, poor thing? But we'll be seeing a lot of her. I love Medjugorje and I intend to visit the shrine every year. Out of all that bad stuff came something positive. If anything, it's given me a better understanding of spiritual things. That can't be bad, now, can it?”

Angela Brehen was seventeen years old when she had her first taste of astral travel. At the time she did not call it that. In fact, she could not call it anything at all, because throughout the morning following the occurrence, she was almost speechless with terror. She imagined that she had died, so frightening was the experience.

It was 1988 and Angela was a high-school student in Galway City. She was in her senior year, preparing to take her final examination. There was little to set her apart from the other girls attending the school; she was bright, but not exceptionally so. She had decided on a career: she planned on pursuing business studies and graduating from college before her twenty-first birthday, when she hoped to have a full-time job in Dublin—or England, perhaps.

On Saturday, March 19, Angela finished her homework at about eight o'clock, watched some television, and went to bed around eleven. The family home was some two miles from the center of town, the last house in a quiet cul-de-sac. Her young brothers were already in bed, and she heard her parents retire about twenty minutes later.

She awoke while it was still dark. Angela knew almost instinctively that it was long before time to get up; she did not even have to look at her bedside clock. She was lying on her back, the position
she always found most comfortable. But there was something different about the room.

It was nothing visible. As her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she could make out the familiar contents of her room: the posters on the walls, the dresser with the mirror, her closet, the chair with her jeans draped over it. All was as it should have been. But there was something “funny” about the room, a sense that a change had taken place since she switched off the light. She closed her eyes again—and within seconds was wide awake, and very fearful.

She describes the sensation as something she “half felt and half heard,” almost impossible to explain. It seemed to her that a force was approaching the place where she lay.

“It was like a storm that was coming,” she says, “but not a violent one, nothing big or anything. I seemed to sense it coming to the house from a long way off. Something in my head was telling me that this force could go right through walls, and that it was coming for me.”

The “force” entered Angela's bedroom; it appeared to hover some distance from the foot of her bed and several feet off the floor. She was terror-struck. She shut her eyes tight, afraid of what she might see.

In the next few moments, it seemed to her that something within her was resonating with the force that had entered her room. She felt a wave pulsing slowly up and down her body, traveling from head to toe. The sensation was, again, a heady mix of sound and feeling.

She felt the force inside her quickening, the vibration coursing up and down her body. She was terrified. And when she felt her body being launched into space, she knew the dread of death, because she was convinced at that moment that she was indeed dying, or had died already. That her soul was leaving her body.

“All sorts of mad ideas came into my head,” Angela recalls. “I suppose I was a religious girl in a basic sort of way, though I can't remember praying very much outside of a church. But I did believe in God and heaven and the angels, all of that. I believed that when we die we go to heaven. I was convinced that the force I felt coming
for me was the Angel of Death taking me off to heaven. But the last thing I wanted to do was die. I was seventeen, a kid. I was too young to die!”

In a strange sense, she was conscious of the “being” that was Angela, as it somehow swept up out of her body at a steep angle. Too fearful to open her eyes, she asked herself if her soul had eyes at all. Yet her frightened mind was telling her that this new “body” it was occupying was identical to the one that lay on the bed behind and below her.

And then she passed through the ceiling and roof of the house, and she could “see.”

With her new eyes, she looked in awe at a sight that was new to her. Spread out below was the development where her home stood. She saw the roofs, the street lamps, the trees, roads, and swards of grass. She saw it all as if she were a bird.

In other circumstances, Angela would have been enchanted by the whole experience. Which of us has not at some time longed to freely take to the air, to experience the liberation of unassisted flight? And here she was—“flying.” Not, however, in her physical body, but in something very much different. She was convinced more than ever that she had died.

This conviction shocked her into opening her eyes at last. As in the case of a “falling” dream, Angela experienced a sudden drop to earth. She was back in her bed, with the yellow light from the street picking out the familiar objects in her bedroom. Her heart was pounding, she was sweating—but she was glad to be alive.

She thought of praying, of giving thanks to God for her safe “return.” But she did not really believe in the power of prayer. Her family was not devout. Each Sunday, the Brehens paid lip service by attending Mass, but for Angela religion was a school subject and little more.

She told no one about the unsettling experience, not even her best friend, Rhoda. Throughout the next day and in the weeks that followed, Angela puzzled over the bizarre episode. She had no ready explanation other than that she had been dreaming. And yet,
the more she considered that possibility, the more implausible it seemed.

“I think we know when we're dreaming,” she argues. “Even if it's a really vivid dream we still know it's only a dream. I was convinced that this was something else entirely. What kept on going through my head was that other people must have the same experience—that it wasn't just me. But I'd no one to turn to. I'd have felt like a right idiot even talking about it. My folks would have had me locked up.”

She could not let go of the notion that she had stumbled upon the existence of a hidden faculty, one lying dormant in every human being, its presence unknown to and unsuspected by all but a few. She wished she could put a name on this remarkable capability.

The more she dwelled on it and the more she recalled the wild exhilaration of that night, the less her fear of it became. By and by, she found herself wishing that the strange “force,” which had plucked her from her bed and transported her into the unknown, would visit her again.

The Leaving Certificate examination was looming. Angela and her friend Rhoda made a trip to Dublin; they needed copies of old exams to study from. Their school had distributed the copies they had, leaving a few students without papers. The girls arranged to visit the educational bookstores and procure the necessary copies; they were going to Dublin anyway, to stay with Rhoda's aunt.

The friends “got the boring business out of the way” quite quickly. Rhoda wanted to visit the clothes shops, but Angela had little interest in fashion. They parted company; they would rendezvous at the bus stop on Nassau Street. Angela returned to her favorite pastime: browsing the bookstores for bargains.

She happened upon the worn paperback in an equally worn shop down a side street. It had been placed on the wrong shelf. Its jacket showed two men of the East in silhouette and a snowcapped mountain; within the blackness of their forms a universe of stars was
visible. The title was
You Forever,
and the author gloried in the unforgettable name of Tuesday Lobsang Rampa. She turned it over.

She paused over that curious phrase “travel in the astral plane.” It excited her imagination. She wondered if those words might not hold the key to her extraordinary experience on that Saturday night in March. She flipped through the book; unfamiliar terms jockeyed for her attention. The author was promising considerably more than “astral travel.” There was psychometry, self-hypnosis, telepathy. Well, mused Angela, if they're all part of the package, then so much the better. And in his foreword, the man with the wonderful name appeared to speak to her directly, to flatter her into believing that she was truly somebody special.

Somebody bumped up against her in the narrow confines of the shop. The book slipped from her hands.

“Ah, sorry about that.”

The young man ducked to retrieve it. He was perhaps twenty. His long hair, unkempt beard, and sloppy clothing marked him as a college student. He was carrying a shabby leather briefcase. He studied the book's jacket.

“That's a good one,” he said, handing it to her. “I have all his books. It's very interesting stuff.”

The young man was earnest and keen. She thought she knew the type. They were given to talking too much and smoking foul-smelling, hand-rolled cigarettes. All were too opinionated for Angela's liking. Yet this individual seemed not to fit the mold.

“He's actually English,” he said.

“Who?” She had not been listening.

“Lobsang Rampa. Claims he's the reincarnation of some Tibetan monk or other. And who knows, maybe he is. He sure knows his stuff, anyway.” He seemed to blush slightly. “Are you interested in…eh…that kind of thing?”

“Depends what you mean by—”

“Meditation, out-of-the-body stuff.” Angela must have betrayed her interest because he followed with, “Can I buy you a pint?”

“I don't drink,” she said quickly. And, she was thinking, if I did I would not be drinking
pints
of beer. “And I don't even know you.”

“Barry.” He extended a hand. “Barry McNulty.”

“Angela Brehen. I'm with a friend, though. I'll be—”

“Your boyfriend?”

“No. I haven't got a boyfriend.”

The words were out before she had considered them, and she saw that the young man was interpreting them as an invitation. She was too young then to know how to respond; she had little experience with boys. Besides, Barry was not her type. She wanted to end the conversation, get out of the store somehow.

“Look, I've got to go,” she said impatiently.

He looked hurt. She felt that she had to make it up to him. But he was there before her, with another proposal.

“Why don't I give you my phone number?” he said. “Next time you're up in Dublin you might give me a call.”

She nodded. He produced a ballpoint and patted his pockets. He hesitated, began to open his briefcase.

“Oh, write it here,” Angela said, passing him the book.

“But it's not your book,” he said with a grin.

“It will be in a minute.”

And it was. Barry McNulty inscribed both his phone number and address on the half-title page of
You Forever.
She left the store and left Dublin, and many years would pass before she saw him again.

 

For three weeks, Angela struggled with the lessons contained in the tattered paperback, following each one to the letter. None seemed to work. She had so longed to reprise her exhilarating nocturnal “flight.” Dr. Rampa had as good as promised that she could release the hidden faculty whose existence she had guessed at. But she could not induce an “astral” flight through the meditation techniques he recommended. At the end of the three weeks, she had concluded that Tuesday Lobsang Rampa was a fraud. She consigned the book to a back corner of her closet and forgot about it.

Within a month of her Dublin trip, Angela's life changed utterly. Reality intruded, making her dalliances with the paranormal seem petty and frivolous. Without warning, her mother died. She had been diagnosed with diabetes, but no one had suspected the hypertension that led to a fatal stroke. Nuala Brehen lingered in the hospital bed for six days and then was gone.

Angela's father never recovered. Nuala had been his childhood sweetheart. On her death, he went into a morbid depression that refused to lift. He started drinking heavily—an unusual departure. His personality seemed to change accordingly. Within six months of Nuala's death, he was a wreck. His health declined, he lost his job, and he became a housebound semi-invalid—and a very angry one at that.

“What sort of a God is it,” he would rant, “who'd take a good woman like your mother and leave the shower of wasters we have running the country? There's no bloody God at all if you ask me.”

Angela's faith was likewise shaken. Although she continued to believe in God, she could not accept the seeming injustice he had
meted out. By this time, she had left high school and was about to start a course in business studies at University College Galway. She canceled, put it on hold. She took a part-time job in a drugstore in town and devoted her free time to looking after her father, while keeping the home together. She found herself acting as a surrogate mother to her brothers, by then ages eight and nine.

The part-time job became full-time. Before she knew it, Angela was in her thirties, holding down a job she had no love for and caring for a father who was increasingly a burden.

Eventually he too died—by his own hand. Life no longer held meaning for him. Angela found him still and cold in his bed, early one February morning. An overdose of prescription drugs had put an end to his misery.

Angela was alone. Her brothers were living in Dublin; both were married with young families. Of the Brehen siblings, only she remained unwed. It was 2004. She was thirty-three, overweight, prematurely gray—and badly disillusioned. It was not how the bright schoolgirl of seventeen had envisioned her future.

Toward the middle of July of that year, three events took place in rapid succession. Angela could not help but conclude that all were in some way linked. The first occurred on a Sunday. Rhoda, her old schoolfriend, whom she had not seen in over a decade, telephoned out of the blue to say that she would be in Galway that afternoon. She was, she explained, “en route to Chicago,” and was looking in on her mother before catching a flight at Shannon Airport the following morning.