The Dark Sacrament (40 page)

“Enough!” Erin screamed. “Oh, Jesus Christ,
enough!
”

He laughed in her face. He adopted a mock female voice. “‘The truth, Ed,'” he mimicked. “‘The truth, no matter how terrible.'
Well, now you're getting the truth and you're going to hear every nasty, horrible, dirty little bit of it.”

She stood back against the wall, using it for support, as the monster that had taken the place of her husband continued his horrific confession—a confession that seemed to her to be more of a boast.

“God, I was so happy when the old bastard died,” he said. “But I might have known it wouldn't last long. Then
she
started.”

He kicked the wall where his mother's bed had been.

“‘Gentlemen friends,' she called them. They came at all hours, and ‘had' all of us. Right here in this f***ing room. She used to wake us up and say, ‘Now go and be good to Mister so-an'-so. We need the money, now that Daddy's not here.' So what do you expect me to do, now that I'm supposed to be a man? I take revenge, that's what I do. Because that's what men did to
me.
Those little brats you heard deserve it. As long as I'm alive I'll mess up every little bawling brat I see. I'll take—”

“Stop it,
stop it!
”

She ran from the room, to emerge into the hallway. She heard him pull the door shut behind him.

“His anger was like this living thing that took hold of him,” Erin says. “I could feel all the hate, going back years, all pouring out of him that day. Quentin was in the yard playing with one of his friends. They were on their summer holidays. Well, the last thing I wanted was for him to come in and see his daddy like that.”

Erin had to know about Quentin. In her mind's eye, she was back in the sickroom, when the child was four, and his uncle Dan had brought him in there. She could still see his rough hands with their permanently dirty fingernails undoing the buttons on Quentin's shirt. She tried to form the question that she could not bring herself to ask. But Ed got there before her.

“No, I haven't touched Quentin, all right? Now, I've got things to do.”

He strode from the house, slamming the front door behind him. Through the glass in the side panel she saw Quentin following his father's departure with curiosity.

“I think my heart was breaking at that moment,” she says.

Ed's confession gave Erin little relief. He had lied to her about everything, from the day they met. But at that moment, she accepted what he said; her sanity depended on it.

Nonetheless, her marriage was over. The following day, she and Quentin moved out of the godforsaken old farmhouse and returned to her mother's home in Tralee. Only after a couple of months did Quentin feel confident enough to confide in his mother; his new surroundings and his caring grandmother dispelled his fear. Erin learned what she had feared the most. She becomes terribly upset when recalling this.

“You have no idea how horrible it was,” she says. “I'd begun to guess the truth, but it turns out it was worse than I'd dreamed of. They were all at it: every single one of those sick people. Ed had abused him, but so had his filthy brothers, Dan and Michael. And of course Father Lyons. I don't know how they managed it, right under my very nose! But I suppose people like that are clever. They're up to all the dirty tricks in the book.”

With her mother's help, she arranged counseling for the boy in Tralee. She could not send him back to school, not in Dingle. Instead, she decided she would keep him at home for a year, “to have him under my wing; I didn't want to let him out of my sight.” She arranged for private tuition in September.

Meanwhile, she was determined that the O'Gribbens and their degenerate priest be brought to justice. She set about having them prosecuted. That proved unexpectedly difficult.

“I tried to get something done and alerted the powers that be, but I was thwarted at every turn. My letters would go missing or not get answered. I got tired of not being believed and of people thinking I was crazy.”

Then the calls started.

“They were anonymous at first, but pretty soon they began to turn nasty. They threatened that if I persisted with a prosecution I'd ‘be dealt with.' God, even my own mother thought I was inventing things. I suppose it was inevitable that I would have a nervous breakdown. Thankfully, I wasn't so bad that I had to go into hospital. I needed to be there for Quentin, so I had to keep going. I'd a good friend living here in Donegal. Linda and me met on holiday in the mid-eighties and we'd always kept in touch. Her phone calls kept me sane throughout it, and when me and Quentin came to stay with her for a while I fell in love with the place. That's when I decided to buy this house and make a clean break. I just wanted to get as far away from Kerry as was humanly possible without actually leaving the country.”

In June 2004, Erin moved into her new home. She put the past behind her as best she could. She distracted herself with interior decorating and getting Quentin settled. He seemed to be happy and even had made a friend: little Connor from next door was a regular visitor. Linda was of tremendous help and a great boost to her self-confidence. She is an educational psychologist, a very necessary shoulder to lean on. She also introduced Erin to a whole new network of friends.

Her life was returning to normal. Quentin had never known a truly normal life and was consequently enjoying its pleasures for the first time. Anxiously, Erin watched the boy as he got through his day, quietly registering every little quirk of personality, every little deviation from “acceptable” behavior, every word or gesture that might signal a reaction to the abuse he had suffered. Linda told her what to look out for.

At the end of August, out of the blue, Erin got a phone call. At first, it seemed relatively innocuous: it was her attorney in Tralee. He was working with Ed's lawyer negotiating her divorce settlement, and was keeping her abreast of progress. But he had news as well. A month earlier, Father Francis Lyons had died in a car crash.
Such a shame, the attorney said, and so young—just forty-six. Erin feigned what she felt was the expected response.

“I remember feeling sick and angry at the same time when I put down the phone. And I remember saying over and over to myself: ‘God, the monster got away with it, the monster got away with it!' But, as I soon learned,” she says with a sigh, “you might get away with things in this life, but not in the next.”

The day after the upsetting phone call, a change took place.

It was as if, with the news of the priest's death, something dark and malefic was loosed. Erin's lovely home, her retreat from the bleak past, was to become the focus of an evil presence. And it would announce itself in an all-too-familiar way.

“It started with the smell again,” she says. “When I came down the stairs the next morning to get breakfast, the strange smell from the old Dingle house was in the kitchen. It was faint, but it was there. I checked the bin, checked everywhere, but there was no telling where it was coming from. I knew it wasn't blocked drains, because these are new houses.”

Although mild at first, the stench seemed to grow stronger as each day passed. This was the first disquieting sign that something was not quite right. Linda suggested that it was perhaps a symptom of stress brought on by news of the priest's death. But when visitors to the house started to comment on it, she knew something was seriously wrong. Erin called in a plumber, but he found nothing.

Soon she began to discern another odor, different from the first. “It was like what you would get in a church. Not unpleasant—like the smell of incense and candle wax, not lighted candles but ones that have been extinguished. The funny thing was, I would only get it in Quentin's room and my own bedroom, and only at nighttime.”

Erin might have left Dingle, but Dingle seemed bent on coming to her. A third manifestation arrived: the coldness. The chilling coldness that had plagued the house in Kerry started to creep into her new bungalow. It was September and still very mild outside, but inside the house it was near freezing. Sometimes she kept the radiators
on all day, but to no effect. At night she piled both beds with extra blankets. It was the only way they could get to sleep.

She was reluctant to confide in anyone except Linda, not least because none of her new friends was aware of her past. She had mentioned Ed and Father Lyons and their gay relationship, but kept the unsavory details concerning the incest and pedophilia to herself. She was careful of what she said lest they think she was deranged. After all, if her own family found her story simply too hard to believe, what might her new acquaintances think?

She could not run; she could not hide. She had fled and it had found her again. She felt helpless in the face of encroaching evil. Erin resolved that she would make a stand in Donegal. She was going to draw on the power of prayer.

“I knew the local priest here to see,” she says, “but obviously I'd gone off the Catholic Church and all it represented. I hoped that prayer would work, and I made a point of praying with Quentin before he went to sleep.”

It worked. As the days passed and her prayers became more fervent, the stench and the bitter coldness began to abate. She was so relieved that she vowed to keep up her prayers. It was a matter of necessity.

The haunting of Erin, her son, and her home was to progress as a sequence of discrete manifestations. First came the olfactory: the foul or intrusive smells. Next, the auditory: unaccountable sounds and disturbances. There followed prophetic dreams and daytime visions, before the haunting culminated—most frighteningly—in a combined assault on all the senses.

The manifestations could occur at any time, without warning. She remembers one particular afternoon. It was a Saturday. Quentin had a day off from school. He was in the backyard, playing with little Connor from next door. Erin could keep an eye on him, or at least be assured of his whereabouts.

She had a mild headache, brought on by four loads of laundry and spin drying. She settled herself on the loveseat in the living
room, thinking that watching an episode of
Murder She Wrote
might help her relax. Ten minutes into the show, she lost interest, lowered the sound, curled up on the sofa, and closed her eyes.

After some minutes, she could feel the headache easing; the rest was helping. She resolved to keep her eyes shut, even when she heard Quentin come in. Drowsy, she heard him slide back the glass connecting door to the living room. He followed his usual pattern and crossed to the sofa. Instinctively, Erin pulled up her legs to make room for him.

“That you, sweetie?” she asked, not bothering to look. “Mommy's tired.” She stifled a yawn.

She felt the cushion yield as he sat down. The characters on television argued over the details of an L.A. murder as Erin tried to sleep.

After about ten minutes, she heard Quentin get up and leave, go down to his room, and shut the door. Unusual, she thought. Quentin never closed doors behind him—or drawers for that matter. Erin sensed that something was not as it should be. She went out into the corridor. His door was indeed shut. She thought he might not be feeling well. She knocked gently. There was no response.

“Quentin?”

It was most unlike him. She opened the door. The room was empty.

Erin was perplexed. She decided she must indeed have nodded off. She went out to the back garden. He was nowhere to be seen.

“Quentin!” she called out loudly. “Where are you, Quentin?”

There was no sign of him. She called again.

“He's in here with Connor, Erin.” Connor's mother was hanging out her washing. “They're in the front room playing. Did you want him home?”

“Thank God for that. How long's he been with you, Liz?”

“An hour, maybe more.”

Erin was stunned. It made no sense at all. At that moment Quentin appeared, excited.

“Mommy, come and see! Me and Connor built a castle.”

“Not now, sweetie. You need your dinner.”

She waited until she got him indoors.

“Quentin, answer me truthfully now, okay? Did you come in here a few minutes ago when I was lying down? And go to your room?”

“No, Mommy.” He shook his head solemnly.

“Are you sure, sweetie? Mommy won't be at all cross if you did.” Erin's heart was beating very fast and her mouth was dry.

Quentin was quiet for a time. Then he said: “It might've been the little boy, maybe, Mommy.”

“What little boy?”

“I see him sometimes in the garden. But Connor can't see him. Then sometimes he's in the house and he's crying.” Quentin became earnest. “And when I ask him why he's sad he goes away.”

“Does he run away?” Erin tried to smile to hide her mounting panic.

“No, he just goes into the wall. But he goes all blurry first.”

Erin could barely speak. She sat down heavily on the sofa and took Quentin on her knee.

“D'you know who he is, sweetie? I'll tell you who he is. He's a little angel that God sent. Now, the next time you see him, you must—”

“No, Mommy, he's not a little angel!” Quentin was adamant. “He's got no wings.”

Erin smiled. “That's because they're hidden under his shirt, sweetheart.”

Quentin's little face puckered with annoyance. “No, Mommy,” he protested, “he doesn't have any clothes on.”

Erin felt the color drain from her face. She could not speak. She was barely aware of Quentin squirming out of her embrace and leaving her lap. He went to the shelf under the TV and took out his favorite wooden jigsaw. All angels—and devils—were instantly forgotten.

“I'll make dinner now,” she heard herself saying, and went to the kitchen, much troubled.

That day saw the beginning in earnest of the renewed extraphysical assault on Erin. The new phase assured the return of many sleepless nights.