The Dark Sacrament (36 page)

There were three other bedrooms in the house. She would sleep elsewhere. But, no matter where she went, the menace followed her.

“I knew it was Barry who was doing it. He was taking his revenge for the letter and showing how he could control me. So I started pleading with him to take it away, whatever it was he'd sent to my house. I was convinced he could hear me. I told him I hadn't meant to send the letter. I was crying and screaming for him to help me. I would have done anything at that point to be rid of that thing.”

It seemed that her pleas were answered. Within minutes, as Angela lay slumped on the bed, sobbing, she sensed the presence departing.

The telephone rang. She suspected who the caller was and knew she had to answer it.

“Barry? Is that you?”

For a moment or two there was silence. Then the laughter started. It erupted from the receiver, hysterical laughter that grew louder and louder, until it filled her head and—it seemed to Angela—the house itself.

She slammed down the phone. She went upstairs, took two sleeping pills, lay down, and soon fell into a groggy half-sleep.

But her ordeal was far from over. Sometime later, she was awakened by noises outside the bedroom door. She sat up in alarm. Somebody was pacing up and down the landing.

“Pacing is maybe the wrong word,” Angela explains. “It was more like someone dragging their feet…a stocky man with a gammy leg. There was wooden flooring on the landing, so I could hear these heavy boots echoing through the house.”

She was distraught. She dared not put the light on, lest the sliver of light coming from under the door betray her whereabouts. In the circumstances, she did the only thing she could do. She groped her way to the door and quietly locked it.

The dragging feet could be heard at the far end of the corridor. Angela got back into bed and sat in the darkness, holding her breath. She heard the heavy boots turn and begin the slow trudge up the corridor again. She prayed that the footfalls would somehow stop at the staircase and continue down the stairs.

They did not.

“Oh, Jesus, help me!” she whispered over and over to herself.

The dragging footsteps approached her bedroom door. They stopped.

Angela clamped a hand over her mouth. Inwardly, she was screaming, but she must somehow contain her fear. Whatever it was that stood on the other side of the door seemed to know how to induce the utmost terror in her.

She waited—and waited—trembling.

All at once, there came a frenetic scratching and scraping at the door. She describes it as being “like the paws or claws of an animal trying desperately to get in.” It was the last thing Angela heard.

“I passed out,” she says. “Now I know what's meant by the phrase ‘I nearly died of fright.' That night I came as close as anyone could to doing just that.”

 

“You do know,” Father Ignatius McCarthy said, “that it's a bad idea to try to communicate with the dead? That's why I advise people not to attend seances or that sort of thing. Jesus warned against it. You're taking a risk.”

He had received her in a book-lined study in the monastery. The room, with its faded antiques and heavily polished furniture, seemed an appropriate setting for the elderly exorcist, who had made himself comfortable in a leather wing chair.

Angela confesses that she has the greatest difficulty with people's ages, but to her, Father Ignatius was as old a priest as she had ever come across still fulfilling his ministry. She had traveled a long distance to see him. At first she considered going to see somebody in Galway; but she was known there because of her job in the drugstore. She thought it wiser to seek help farther afield. She needed anonymity. A relative suggested that Father Ignatius could help. In some circles he was known to have experience of “troublesome” cases.

Angela was at pains to communicate to the priest her need of his services without delay.

“My home was under siege,” she tells us. “I was a refugee in my own town. Since that terrible night, with the ‘visitor' from God knows where, I'd been forced to live in a guesthouse. I dared not go home again. I went back during the day to grab some things, but I couldn't stay more than a minute. The place gave me the creeps—even in daylight.”

At first, she could not come straight out and confide in this kindly stranger details of the insane enterprise—and yes, she thought of it then in those terms—that had brought her to such a
pass. She cursed herself long and hard for being a fool. Her gullibility had exposed her to unknowable danger. She had come to know the nature of such danger. But, for the time being, she was content in wrapping it in terminology that only hinted at the truth. Angela was at pains to point out that she had not been a willing participant in Barry's scheme. She was the victim. She was a little vexed that he seemed not to understand that.

“I hear what you're saying, Father,” she told him. “But I never went to any seances or that sort of thing. And I never
asked
for those strange out-of-the-body experiences that started this. They just happened.”

“Did they, now?” The priest looked at her intently. “Fair enough. But I'm not so interested in what happened to you at seventeen. At that age we all have fantasies about flying and being astronauts and heaven knows what else. No, I'm more interested in the present. Tell me something: that first time you found yourself ‘in the spirit,' as they say, in your friend's bedroom and then looking down on her body at the crash scene, what kind of state were you in—prior to all that?”

“What d'you mean, Father?” She laughed nervously but saw that he was not amused. “I was in bed asleep, of course.”

“That's not quite what I mean. Would there have been drugs or drink involved?”

“Well…yes.” She hesitated. “I'd been drinking both times.”

“To the point where you blacked out?”

Angela could only nod a response, too ashamed to say anything more.

“I thought as much. Now, please don't take this the wrong way, Angela, but I'm wondering if you appreciate how foolish that is—that drinking to the point where you black out. Most people don't, you see. Most don't give it a second thought. But
I
do. And here's the thing: when you're out of your mind with drink, or indeed drugs—they're all the same in my book, Angela—you actually leave yourself open. And anything can come in.”

Angela had never heard the like of it. It was ludicrous and she told him so. If that were the case, she argued, then a sizable swath of the population of Ireland was possessed. That was what Father Ignatius was implying.

“If you drink to excess,” he countered, “to the point where you forget who you are, you leave yourself vulnerable. That's all I'm saying. More evil acts are carried out under the influence of drugs and drink than most of us like to think about.”

She could not fault him on that. She hesitated. The full import of his words had registered.

“My God, Father, are you saying I'm
possessed?
” It was an appalling prospect.

“No, not possessed, but you certainly left yourself open to the possibility. You see, Angela, Satan is very clever. Not only can he use our weaknesses to fool us; he can also use our ignorance and vanity to lull us into believing falsehoods. That's the trap. Your weakness was believing you needed to contact your mother, and your ignorance in the area of occult practices led you to think it was actually possible.”

“But I really
did
see my mother, just as I remember her.”

“Exactly! Just as you remember her. We all carry around memories of people close to us who've passed on. I get people coming to me from time to time with that sort of story. They'll have been to this or that clairvoyant or medium, and they all come out with the same sort of nonsense. ‘Oh, such-and-such told me something that only my dead husband or wife or whatever would have known.' And I tell them what I'm going to tell you now. Satan knows all about us as well. And there's nothing to stop him looking inside our heads and using the memories we have of our loved ones to fool us.”

“He can do that?”

“He can do many things. He could even appear to some of our greatest saints in the guise of Our Lord or the Blessed Virgin. Why do you think the Vatican is so cautious when they hear of yet another
sighting of the Virgin Mary across the world? They have to be cautious; they know the score. Out of the many hundreds, only a handful have been officially recognized.”

She had to ask. It was the question that had gnawed at her for days. It would not let go of her.

“The thing that's in my house, Father…is it…is it the Devil?”

Father Ignatius gathered his thoughts before replying.

“That friend of yours—Barry. He sounds to me like he's involved in the occult in a big way. Very dangerous territory, black magic and all of that….”

Angela was opening her mouth, intent on explaining her naiveté, but Father Ignatius held up a hand.

“Oh, no doubt he told you it was white magic?”

The priest's perceptiveness astonished her. “Yes, he did. He said he was a healer, and he used white magic to help people.”

“Ah yes, he would say that, wouldn't he? ‘White' sounds very proper—more acceptable, you might say. That's the trap, you see. That's how the gullible get sucked into these things.” Father Ignatius looked at her steadily. “There's no such thing as white magic, Angela. There is only black, and all forms of magic are practiced with recourse to Satan.” He leaned forward. “Now, I don't want to alarm you, my dear, but I'd say that Barry has called up something of that nature to attack you.”

“When you say ‘something'…”

“An evil spirit, a demon. It sounds like it to me. Those noises you heard in the night, that inhuman presence you felt. This is done to frighten you, to cause great fear. But let me assure you that there's no more to fear; the good Lord will deal with it. We can get rid of it.”

“Do you mean, Father, that you'll do a…” She was hesitant to voice the word.

“An exorcism. That's what you're trying to say. Well, no, Angela, I don't expect we'll be doing a full exorcism. Not in the sense I think you mean it. Nothing as dramatic as that. But we shall see.”

The priest patted her shoulder.

“By the sound of it, it's your friend Barry who really needs the exorcism,” he said. “Not that he'd ever submit himself to one—more's the pity.”

Angela had not been a practicing Catholic since her teens. For her, prayer was a distant memory; prayers recited to ward off evil belonged to a distant past. She did not know what to expect that Friday. It was October 8, 2004.

Father Ignatius was due to arrive at seven o'clock. Angela, still too afraid to venture into her home, was sitting outside in her car when the blue Vauxhall pulled up. She was surprised and slightly uneasy to see that he was accompanied by two others. He had given her to understand that he would come alone.

The driver was a burly priest who introduced himself as Liam Mulryan. He would assist Father Ignatius, Angela learned, as would the third member of the party, Sister Immaculata, a soft-spoken, elderly Carmelite.

They entered the house.

The two priests excused themselves at once, explaining that they would “have a look around the place.” In truth, they were ascertaining where “presences” might be strongest.

Yet all seemed tranquil on that particular evening. Angela had half-expected to sense something, but the house gave off nothing more sinister than the disused feeling houses do when left vacant, even for a short period. All the same, she was nervous. Sister Immaculata kept her company in the kitchen as she prepared tea. She was grateful for the nun's cheeriness. She seemed intent on keeping the atmosphere light.

“People come to Father Ignatius all the time,” she said, “with stories about disturbances in their homes. A lot of the time it's a case of an old house settling on its foundations, or air in the water pipes, that sort of thing. On the odd occasion it's something else entirely, and we come along to help out.” She smiled.

Angela did not like the sound of that.

Presently, tea having been drunk, the two priests began their preparations. A Mass would be said in the living room. The table would serve as the altar.

Father Ignatius lit the candles and draped a purple stole about his shoulders. Sister Immaculata and Father Mulryan produced printed prayer sheets and knelt down to one side. Angela joined them. The service was about to begin.

It was nearing eight on a mild fall evening. All was quiet both inside and outside the house at the end of the cul-de-sac. The curtains were drawn against the darkness. The main light in the living room was on.

The celebration of the Mass passed off without incident. Angela was relieved, thinking all was over.

“Far from it,” she says. “Little did I know it was about to begin. Father Ignatius said that he wouldn't be doing an exorcism, but that was before he saw the house. I don't know what him and the other priest saw, but it must have been enough to convince them there was something seriously wrong.”

After the closing prayers, Father Ignatius announced that what he enigmatically referred to as “the blessing of the house” would commence. All made the sign of the cross. The celebrant opened his book and proceeded to read aloud.

“In the Name of Jesus Christ, God and Lord; through the intercession of the Immaculate Virgin, Mother of God, Mary, and Holy Michael the Archangel, the blessed apostles Peter and Paul, and all the saints, and relying on the holy authority of our office, we are about to undertake the expulsion of any evil spirits that are present here.”

There followed a respectful silence as Father Ignatius placed his book upon the table and joined his hands.

“May God rise up and may his enemies be dissipated,” he entreated.