The Dark Sacrament (37 page)

“And let those who hate him flee before him,” the nun and the younger priest said in unison. Sister Immaculata held her prayer
sheet close to Angela and indicated the responses. They would be given by three voices.

“Let them be dissipated like smoke,” Father Ignatius continued.

“As wax flows before fire, so let sinners perish before God,” the trio answered from the text.

“Look on the cross of the Lord. Be defeated, all enemies!” The exorcist's voice was gaining in volume.

“The ancient strength will conquer, the King of Kings!” The words of the nun and young priest rang out with the certitude of the faithful. Angela strove to keep up.

The strange-sounding, medieval words were affecting her. As she spoke them, it seemed to her that they were charged with power and that she was to some degree partaking of that power. The solemnity of the occasion and the earnestness with which the three religious prayed caused her to dwell on the gravity of her situation. She was uneasy.

“Let your mercy be with us, O Lord!”

“According to our hopes in you,” said Father Ignatius, concluding the prayer. All bowed their heads in silence.

From upstairs came the unmistakable sound of a door opening. Angela gasped and looked at the others, but they did not stir.

Father Ignatius took up his prayer book again.

“We exorcise you, each unclean spirit, each power of Satan—”

The words were cut short as the same door was, quite audibly, banged shut.

“…each infestation of the enemy from hell, each legion, each congregation, each satanic sect—”

Heavy footsteps, sounds produced by a number of booted feet, were crossing the landing. Several moved quickly and as one, as if marching to some ethereal command; others dragged behind as if they belonged to the wounded. They paused abruptly at the head of the stairs, marching on the spot. Angela bit her lip in fright. Sister Immaculata laid a comforting hand on her arm.

Father Ignatius glanced at the ceiling and waited for the commotion to cease.

Presently, it did. He looked back at his text and continued, unperturbed.

“In the name and by the power of our Lord Jesus Christ! Be uprooted and put to flight from the Church of God, and—”

The phantom footsteps began descending the stairs, tramping out a slow, ordered rhythm. It seemed that they paused and marked time on each and every tread. Their determined marching was like that of a platoon of battle-weary soldiers advancing in a final push. With each tread gained, the marching grew louder.

Tramp, tramp, tramp.

“Be uprooted and put to flight from the Church of God—”

Tramp, tramp, tramp.

The footsteps were drawing ever nearer. Angela let out a little cry. Of the company, she seemed to be the only one who was showing fear.

“…and from the souls that were made in the image of God and redeemed with the blood of the divine lamb.”

Tramp, tramp, tramp.

The phantom army had reached the bottom of the stairs. The measured tramping of so many pairs of boots now filled Angela's hallway. All that separated the group from the horror was the living-room door. Father Ignatius took up the crucifix and pressed it to his lips. Father Mulryan remained kneeling with his head bowed in prayer. The nun passed her prayer sheet to Angela. She spread her arms wide and gazed heavenward. She was about to speak. Abruptly, the din in the hallway ceased.

The nun seized her chance. She spoke out into the tense silence, in a voice that was loud and confident. “Father, in your goodness, come to us now,” she implored. “Now in our hour of need. O good Jesus, hear us. Save us, O Lord. Save us, your servants, from every threat or harm from the Evil One. We beg you, we beg you!”

Angela's hands began to tremble. The prayer sheet fell from her grasp. Father Mulryan calmly retrieved it and handed it back with a reassuring smile.

Sister Immaculata continued. “We beg you, Father, through the intercession of the archangels St. Michael, St. Raphael, and St. Gabriel to protect us now. To protect us now in our hour of need. Come, O Lord; come, O Holy Spirit; come, O Holy Virgin Mother; hear our call. Deliver us from the evil that is present here.”

Father Ignatius lowered the crucifix. Sister Immaculata placed an arm about Angela's shoulders. The young priest raised his head and looked toward the door as if in expectation.

All waited. As if on cue, the next manifestation presented itself.

The sinister scratching and scuffling that had driven Angela from her home started up on the other side of the door. She began to shake and sob in terror. She was unprepared for any of this; it was to have been a simple “blessing of the house.”

Father Ignatius took up the crucifix and held it aloft, facing into the danger.

“Do not dare further!” he commanded in a loud, authoritative voice. “Do not dare further to defile this place, most cunning Serpent. Do not dare further to deceive the human race.”

The scratching noises grew louder.

“…to persecute the Church of God, to strike and shake the chosen of God like chaff. God the Father commands you. God the Son commands you. God the Holy Spirit commands you.”

The scratching began to lessen.

“Christ orders you, he who is the eternal word of God become man. He who destroyed your hateful jealousy against the salvation of our race.”

There came a frantic pounding, as if a dozen heavy boots were kicking against the door, drowning out the words of Scripture. But Father Ignatius would not be deterred. His voice soared above the cacophony.

“He who humiliated himself, making himself obedient to death. He who built his Church on a firm rock and provided that the strength of hell would never,
would never
prevail over that Church.
He who will remain with his Church for all days, even up to the end of human time.”

The door flew open. All heads turned. Just as suddenly, it banged shut again. This action was repeated twice more in rapid succession, sending tremors through the room. The candles guttered wildly, then died; the bottles of holy oil and water fell over.

Angela made to stand up. She was terrified. She wanted to escape, out through the back door. The nun tightened her arm about her shoulders.

“We're nearly there,” she whispered. “Have faith, child. God is good.”

Father Mulryan righted the bottles and relit the candles. The exorcist took up the holy water and began sprinkling it about the room.

“The sacrament of the cross commands you! The virtues of all the mysteries of the Christian faith command you. The most exalted Mother of God, Mary the Virgin, commands you. She, though lowly, trampled on your head from the first instant of her Immaculate Conception.”

Angela felt her fear dissipating under the comforting arm of the nun and the words spoken so commandingly by the priest.

He laid aside the holy water and unstoppered the bottle of holy oil. Sister Immaculata helped Angela to her feet. She and Father Mulryan each placed a hand on her shoulder. Father Ignatius anointed Angela's forehead with the oil.

“I command you and bid all powers who molest this servant of God, by the power of God Almighty, in the name of Jesus Christ our Savior, through the intercession of the Holy Virgin Mother, to leave this servant of God forever and to be consigned to the unquenchable fire, to that place that the Lord God has prepared for you.”

The blessing being accomplished, he went to the door. It was time for the banishing. Father Ignatius moved through the hallway and the downstairs rooms, sprinkling holy water as he went. His voice, charged as it was with authority, could be heard throughout the house.

“Go now from this place! Death is your lot, impious one. And for your angels there is an endless death. For you and for your angels the unquenchable flame is prepared. Because you are the prince of cursed homicides, the author of incest!”

They heard him ascend the stairs.

“The head of all the sacrilegious, master of the most evil actions, the teacher of heretics, the inventor of all obscenity. Go out, therefore, impious one. Go out, criminal. Go out with all your falsehoods. Leave, therefore, now. Go away, seducer! The desert is your home. The serpent is your dwelling. Be humiliated and cast down. Behold, the victorious Lord is near and quick. All things are subject to his power.”

Returning to the living room, he went to Angela and, making the sign of the cross on her forehead, said, “May your servant Angela be protected in soul and body by this sign of your name.” On her chest he made the sign of the cross again: once, twice, thrice.

“Preserve what is within this person,” he intoned. “Rule her feelings. Strengthen her heart.”

All present again bowed their heads in silent prayer. As she prayed, Angela felt her fear drain from her. In that moment, she did indeed sense that her heart was strengthened.

Father Ignatius motioned for them, his little congregation of three, to kneel again. He extended his hands over them.

“Father,” he intoned, his voice gentle, no longer that of the bane of demons, “we pray you, all-powerful God, that evil spirits have no more power over this servant of yours and in this place, but that they flee and not return. Let the goodness and the peace of Our Lord Jesus Christ enter here at your bidding, Lord. For through Jesus we have been saved. And let us not fear any ill, because the Lord is with us. He who lives and reigns as God with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, for ever and ever. Amen.”

Father Ignatius then led Angela through a profession of faith. The ceremony ended with the Lord's Prayer, the Anima Christi, and a final prayer of deliverance. The work was completed.

“It was a long night,” Angela recalls. “But a long and miraculous night, that's for certain.”

And, after her visitors had gone, she did something she had not planned on. She went to sleep in her own bed. She sensed that she could do so without fear, without a thought for unseen and unwelcome forces.

“Before they came, I thought I'd be leaving with them to stay at the guesthouse,” she says. “That wasn't the case. My fear had vanished completely. I fell asleep immediately from the exhaustion, and woke up knowing—simply knowing—that I'd never be bothered again.”

 

Angela Brehen still lives in Galway City. Her new home is on the other side of the river Corrib and a considerable distance from the house of her birth. She moved there shortly after the exorcism, in the spring of 2005.

“It wasn't because I was afraid of being ‘invaded' again,” she assures us. “No, I certainly didn't move for that reason. It was because Barry McNulty still knew where I lived, so I thought it safer to move, and I gave up my job in the shop as well. I just needed to make a clean break. My job seemed to belong to that time as well, when I was foolish and naive. I've grown up a lot since then. You know, the positive part of all of this was that it brought me closer to God. He saved me—I know he did. I'm sure of it. And the irony is that evil brought me to goodness. I had to come face-to-face with the one to find the other.”

She later learned that Barry McNulty's home was found abandoned. She has not seen him since.

Father Ignatius believes that he may have fled the country. Having received us in the book-lined study of the abbey, he speaks frankly about the case. And Barry.

“She'll never be bothered by him again,” he declares with confidence. “She's safe now, thank God.”

We wonder about Barry's psychic gifts, if he can still call on them to help him work his mischief.

“Oh, he might have the Devil on his side,” the priest says, “but Angela has God on her side now, and he's no match for God.”

Was it coincidence then, his running into Angela after all that time, in Galway, in the same city?

“I don't hold with coincidence. Barry had a purpose in mind when he bumped into Angela as if out of the blue. He knew what he was doing; I'm sure of that. Someone in the grip of demonic control feels compelled to act, to do the most objectionable things to others in order to somehow save themselves. There's a hierarchy of evil spirits. The minor ones, the foot soldiers, do the dirty work, to prepare the way for the generals. Their job is to enslave. Barry was attempting to enslave Angela, make her suffer so much fear that she'd have to turn to him to take the ‘thing' away. If she hadn't sought out God's help, heaven knows how she might have ended up.”

“I pray for Angela,” he says later. “I pray for Barry as well. Now
there's
a man who's in sore need of prayer! I hope and pray that wherever he is, he'll receive the help he needs.”

We ask him his opinion of Barry's TC, the transference of consciousness. He shrugs.

“I'm not saying it's not possible. Of course it is. If you read up on a number of saints, you'll come across that kind of thing. Except in Angela's case it wasn't what she thought it was. Barry probably started out innocently enough, then got deeper and deeper into it until he'd gone too far. We know so little about ourselves, how our minds work, that we can be easily fooled. And Satan and his minions are out there, just waiting for a chance to fool us. That's how it's always been, ever since Eve was tempted with the apple.”

He chuckles.

“We aren't half as advanced as we think we are,” he concludes. “We know so little. When you reach my age, that's the time you'll come to realize how little you really know.”

Erin Ferguson knew at once she had taken the bend too sharply, but knew too late. She had made no allowance for the fresh fall of rain. Her car was skidding toward the white van, and there was nothing she could do to prevent it. She braced for the impact.

She must have blacked out. She came to, after what seemed like hours but could surely have only been seconds, brought around by an urgent rapping on her window. The face she saw through the glass startled her. It was a man's face—a man with eyes so dark and penetrating that her immediate impulse was to reverse the car swiftly and flee the scene. She was a lone female on a remote road miles from nowhere; the stranger might be anybody, capable of anything.

He continued to stare in at Erin, saying nothing. Should he not, she thought, be asking if I'm all right? Should he not be showing some concern? She tentatively reached out a hand to lock the door, but he got there before her and yanked it open.

“Are you okay?” He had spoken at last.

“I think so.”

It was a good way from the truth. Erin sat up in her seat, giving thanks that she had been wearing a seat belt. She had muscle pain, neck pain, a raging headache. But nothing seemed to be broken. She angled the mirror, and her eyes widened at the sight of the bruise above her left eye. It was going to be a nasty, ugly bump.

Erin climbed out. She did not like the way the stranger's dark eyes flicked to her skirt as she smoothed it down.

Surprisingly, the damage to the van was slight. Her car had grazed the rear mudguard and spun out of control, to collide with the mossy face of the crag that ran down to the road.

The owner of the van introduced himself as Ed O'Gribben. Erin apologized for the damage and offered to cover his repair costs without involving her insurance company—her premium was high enough as it was. He said very little, simply nodded when appropriate, and continued to stare at her in his unsettling way. They exchanged details; he would be in touch as soon as he had an estimate.

Ed O'Gribben helped her get her car back onto the road. There seemed to be very little wrong with it, and that was all to the good. Erin had no wish to remain on that isolated stretch of road a minute longer. More than the distress of the accident, the man with the too-dark eyes unnerved her. She departed with a sense of relief. As she drove away, she could not have imagined that a year later, in June 1996, she and Ed O'Gribben would be exchanging rings and vows at the altar.

They had met “by accident”; the elements had thrown them together. Perhaps that should have been a warning.

The first months of Erin's marriage were difficult. At Ed's insistence, she gave up her job as a legal secretary—in any case, commuting to and from work was becoming unsustainable. She was having to adjust to a whole new way of life. A city girl at heart, used to the bustle of Tralee, the Kerry capital, the twenty-six-year-old now found herself hopelessly isolated in the hinterlands of the Dingle Peninsula.

The house that “came with” her husband—as Erin joked in the beginning—was at least a century old. It was situated at the end of a long lane, and looked as lonely and forgotten as the landscape it stood in. Imposing though it was at a distance, when seen at close quarters, the gray stone, two-story building was downright shabby.
The moss-caked roof was dilapidated enough, but there was moss also on the paving that led to the front doorstep, and the window frames were peeling and decaying.

If the outside was disappointing, the interior was not much of an improvement. Erin was crestfallen when Ed showed her around; she just managed to hide her dismay. The rooms were large, yet frugally appointed with heavy oak furniture. The carpets were threadbare. The windows, hung with dusty drapes from another age, admitted very little light. She was reminded of the gloomy atmosphere of a funeral home.

“I tried to put a brave face on it,” she tells us at our first meeting. “A lick of paint and some cheery wallpaper would soon put things right, I said to myself. It was also heartening to see that there were radiators in every room.”

But the puzzling part was the cold. Why, she asked herself, was the house so cold when there was central heating? And why did every room reek of mildew?

Her husband was a successful building contractor. He had made a point of telling her as much when they started going out together; often he would proudly point out a school or development his company had built. Why, then, live in near squalor? Surely he could have carried out some improvements. Or, better still, tear the old house down and erect a new one. After all, the family land extended in all directions; the site was there already, so Ed could build with minimal outlay.

But he had very different views on the subject.

“My ancestors built this place,” he declared one evening. He said it a little too gruffly for Erin's liking. They had just finished supper and he was preparing to look in on a client. (He seemed to be forever visiting some client or other.) “It doesn't do to tamper with the past.”

“Ed, you're only thirty, for heaven's sake! You sound like an old man of eighty.”

He did not respond, only stared at her in that unsettling way of his and left.

“And why do you need to go out so much?” she shouted after him, as the back door slammed shut. “Why am I always left alone with
her?
”

The “her” was Ed's seventy-nine-year-old mother, the woman Erin called the Matriarch—but only to herself, under her breath. Ed had referred to her in their dating days but always in an offhand way, as though his mother were no more than a minor part of his life.

The reality was otherwise, as Erin was to discover. Martha O'Gribben would command a principal role in the couple's marriage. Erin had made the old woman's acquaintance on her wedding day, when the bridal pair returned to the rambling old house on the Dingle Peninsula.

First, she discovered why Mrs. O'Gribben had been unable to attend her son's nuptials: she was very frail and confined to bed with arthritis. This was news to Erin. She had not bargained for the role of a geriatric nurse; worse, her husband seemed to take for granted that it was a natural extension of her duties as wife and housekeeper.

All might have been well had Martha been kindly and considerate, like Erin's own mother. But, frail though she was, the old lady nevertheless seemed intent on making her daughter-in-law's life as difficult as possible. She occupied a room on the ground floor, at the front of the house and, most disconcertingly, directly under the couple's bedroom.

Erin remained standing in the kitchen until the sound of Ed's jeep had died away. She sat down at the table again, buried her face in her hands, and wept. Her tears flowed freely; there was no mascara to run, for she had stopped wearing much make-up of any kind. Make-up seemed at odds with the drabness of the house—like wearing a ball gown to the office party. She desperately wanted to call her family for a heart-to-heart talk. Gemma would understand. But she was reluctant to disenchant her younger sister; Gemma had such idealistic notions of marriage. And as for her widowed mother, she could hardly go upsetting her, either. Her mother was so proud
of the “wonderful match” her elder daughter had made. Ed was the perfect son-in-law: wealthy, courteous, and handsome.

“I should be happy,” Erin sighed to herself. “By rights I should be happy.” But, as she allowed her gaze to drift about the kitchen, lingering on the heavy cupboard with its display of decades-old crackle china, the distempered walls and ancient door, the overall dismalness of the place struck her. “How did I get here?”

She got up and began clearing the table. But no sooner had she finished than she heard an all-too-familiar sound. It was the frantic banging of a walking stick against the radiator in the front room. It made her feel even more depressed. Mrs. O'Gribben was demanding her attention.

“Yes, I'll be with you in a minute!”

She checked the clock. It was 9:15. Time for the bedtime ritual—time to metaphorically don her nurse's cap and do the necessary.

Erin recalls with dismaying clarity her first meeting with Martha O'Gribben. “I remember having the same uneasiness I felt on the day I literally ran into Ed on that winding road,” she says. “To be fair to Ed, my first misgivings seemed cockeyed. He was a thorough gentleman. He was always so attentive and loving when we were going out together. He'd make a fuss of me. He was like that as well during the first months we were married.”

To be sure, there were sides to him she neither liked nor understood, yet the good she saw in him outweighed the bad—or the mysterious. Perfection being impossible, Erin was willing to settle for less. As most women are wont to do, she had told herself.

But Mrs. O'Gribben was a different story. There was no discernible warmth in the woman. Her manner was as cool as the hand she offered in greeting. At first Erin felt sorry for her, interpreting the hostility in the old woman's eyes as (somehow understandable) resentment of her new daughter-in-law. That, coupled with the antipathy of the bedridden toward the able-bodied. Yet, as time wore on, she was to discover that the woman's hatred went deeper—deeper by far than anything she could have imagined.

Bang!
The radiator was struck hard, its note reverberating through the house like a bell and sending Erin's nerves a-twitching.
Bang!
Again.

“I'm coming!”

The radiator had been struck twice more before the “nurse” could attend to the patient. She assisted Mrs. O'Gribben with her ablutions and gave her her medication and nightcap. These tasks had become so routine that Erin now performed them without a thought—and without a word. She had long given up on small talk and pleasantries, nor did she expect a word of gratitude for her trouble. Instead she awaited, as always, a complaint of some kind.

“This cocoa isn't hot enough!”

“Well, maybe if you drank it quicker, it wouldn't have time to go cold.”

“Maybe if you left it longer on the boil, you mean.”

The daughter-in-law made no reply. She knew the script too well. Acquiescing seemed the best way to keep the peace. She picked up the mug and headed for the door.

“I'll reheat it, then. Be back in a minute.”

“And another thing: you're not allowed any callers to this house, d'you hear?” Mrs. O'Gribben tightened her crocheted bed jacket about her. “This is still
my
house, not yours. And as long as I'm here, you'll do as I say.”

“I know,” said Erin with exasperation. “You've been telling me that from the minute I got here.”

It was a repetition of so many of her evenings. When she was single, working in the office in Tralee, Erin's life was relatively uneventful. Yet, compared to her new situation, it seemed almost exciting. Thinking back on those days, as she frequently did, she wondered if she had not made a blunder.

For marriage to Ed, far from the expected idyll, had become a mind-numbing routine. Her only outing was to the nearest town twice a week to do the shopping. Even then, her time was not her own, because old Mrs. O'Gribben could not be left unattended for long.

Gradually, the young Mrs. O'Gribben began to withdraw into this curiously caged world. Her friends stopped telephoning. No wonder; whenever she arranged to meet them, something would upset her plans, and Erin would have to cancel. That something usually involved her mother-in-law.

She rarely saw her husband. When he came home from work around five, somebody was sure to call, and he would be off again. Often she would fall asleep in the early hours while waiting for him and wake in the morning to find that he had already left.

The house received few visitors. No neighbors dropped by for a chat, as was the case with Erin's mother. From one end of the week to another she only saw her in-laws.

“If I'm honest with myself,” she tells us, “I'd have to say I'd have preferred no visitors at all rather than that lot.”

Ed's two younger brothers, Dan and Michael, were bachelors in their late twenties. They were plasterers by trade and worked in the family business. Their sister, Mary, the youngest sibling, worked in a daycare center. From the outset, all three made no secret of their dislike for Erin. Mary especially was highly critical of any changes she made in the home. Erin thought at first that her sister-in-law might be a sympathetic ally—she was, after all, the only girl in a family of boys—but Mary had other ideas. She seemed to resent the “intruder” who had the audacity to make a claim on her oldest brother's affections.

Dan and Michael were “odd”—Erin has no better word to describe them. They seemed incapable of holding a conversation and, when they tried to, could rarely maintain eye contact. For Erin, the effort to be friendly toward them was so taxing she gave up altogether. They were shy, she concluded; it was as simple as that. She got used to being ignored and was relieved to see them exit by the front door after they had visited their mother. Avoidance rather than embarrassment, she reasoned, was best all around.

Father Lyons, however, was quite another matter. He was the parish priest, the only other visitor to the O'Gribben home, and for
Erin a real enigma. A handsome man in his early forties, he did not fit the stereotype of the rural Irish priest. He seemed especially attentive to Mrs. O'Gribben's needs, and called several mornings each week while on his rounds of the sick.

What disconcerted Erin most was the freedom with which the priest came and went. He never bothered knocking but would materialize in the kitchen at any hour he pleased, grunt a greeting, and disappear into the patient's room. Often he startled Erin by emerging from the mother's bedroom when she had no inkling he was even in the house.

The situation reached absurd heights one morning. Ed had left for work and Erin was dressing in the bedroom. She was intrigued to hear the upstairs toilet flush; it was at the end of the corridor. She peered out her door and was in time to see Father Lyons steal down the stairs. It was eight o'clock. What on earth, she wondered, was going on?