The Dark Sacrament (41 page)

She began to experience unusually vivid dreams. Many were of a sexual nature; others—of diverse content—proved to be unerringly prophetic, and were all the more disturbing for that.

She dreamed of a wedding that, in the fluid way of dreams, turned into a funeral. Three weeks later, her cousin's wedding echoed the dream in chilling detail: halfway through the wedding breakfast the groom's father suffered a fatal heart attack. Erin kept the dream, and its tragic mirroring in reality, to herself.

One of her more curious dreams involved a frail old priest on a beach. It resembled the beaches close to her new home, but a larger town was visible in the background. The priest was standing behind a red line he had just drawn in the sand. He carried a stick—or it might have been an old-fashioned cane, such as those wielded by teachers of another era to punish recalcitrant pupils. Repeatedly, the priest pointed at the sand with his cane.

“Don't cross the line!”
he said, over and over.

Liz, Erin's next-door neighbor, appeared later on in the same dream.

It disturbed Erin. Priests rarely figured in her dreams. She had the nagging feeling that the old priest carried some hidden meaning, and that he was somehow linked to the recurrence of the manifestations. She could not keep it to herself. She decided to confide in Liz.

“Can you remember what he looked like?”

Erin described the priest as best she could. And the beach. She surprised herself with the amount of detail she had retained.

“It sounds like my uncle,” Liz laughed.

“How can that be? I've never met the man. How would I know what he looked like?”

“Beats me. But I'll show you a photo.”

She brought an album. Erin gasped, hardly able to believe her eyes. The old priest in the snapshot was the same man she had seen in her dream. Not only that—the picture had been taken on a beach.

“Father John Scully,” Liz said. “I believe it was taken in Bundoran. He spent his last days in a retirement home there, run by the Augustinians. God, now let me see…he must be dead about fifteen years at least.”

Erin did not know what to think. This was the stuff of ghost stories. Until that day, she had never set eyes on Liz's family album. It seemed inconceivable, then, that an image from that album should come to vivid life in her dreams. Something was invading her senses and her subconscious mind. The implications were both profound and alarming. Liz saw her distress.

“Wouldn't pay much heed to it, Erin,” she said. “If it makes you feel any better, I'm not surprised he was giving out to you about not crossing a line or whatever. He was a teacher in his day, and a holy terror from what I heard. Beat the life out of every child who sat in front of him. God forgive me, but I sometimes wonder how these people can call themselves men of God.”

“I know.” She wanted to say, “Liz, you don't know the half of it,” but all at once the image of Father Scully reared up in her mind and she heard him reiterate his ominous words. “Don't cross the line.”

Later, in her own home, she would mull over the possible significance of those words—and the fact that a priest had uttered them. Try as she might, she could not see how she was crossing any line. She had aborted her attempt to bring Father Lyons to justice, and his death certainly put an end to any prosecution. Nonetheless, the dream must be important and have a bearing on her present circumstances; why else did it include an uncle of her next-door neighbor? It was all very puzzling.

Sleep became impossible for Erin. Like the teenagers of Elm Street, she feared the dreams that might come and their consequences.

“I was dreading nighttime,” she says. “I would put off going to bed for as long as I could. I knew it was stupid. I'd have to sleep eventually, and then I'd dream. I kept asking myself what I'd do if I dreamed about my own death. Or worse still, Quentin's. I was at my wit's end. Linda said I should go to see the doctor, so I did.”

She told him about the nightmares but did not elaborate. He prescribed a short course of sleeping pills. The pills, he explained, would relax her but not prevent her dreaming. He recommended instead that she refrain from watching stimulating or violent television shows before bedtime and avoid alcohol late at night. Lastly, he suggested that she listen to soothing music while drifting off to sleep.

The doctor also advised a course of antidepressants. Erin declined.

“I couldn't tell him this but I knew it wasn't my mind that was being attacked,” she says. “It was my ‘spiritual integrity.' That's what I picked up later on. Linda called it that: my spiritual integrity. So medication wasn't going to help; I knew that. If I was really and truly honest with myself, I knew that the only thing that was going to help was an exorcism. But how do you find an exorcist in Donegal? Where do you even begin to look?”

Seeking an exorcism was no precipitate decision on Erin's part. She had been considering it for many weeks; in fact, she had thought long and hard on exorcism at the time of the more traumatic paranormal episodes in Dingle. But she knew very little about it beyond its lurid Hollywood portrayal. She did not even know if it was still being practiced. This time, she resolved to find out.

Common sense told her to seek out the parish priest and ask his advice. But she was still nervous around priests; she had not yet set foot inside her local church. Events took a hand, however. The presence she calls her “intruder” was to make up Erin's mind for her and send her hurrying to the priest. It happened less than a week after her visit to the doctor.

At about 4 a.m. she awoke to find herself pinned to the bed. Erin had always suffered from mild claustrophobia. Her worst nightmare
was finding herself a victim of an earthquake—awakening to discover that a ceiling, or an entire building, had collapsed on top of her, and the slow, agonizing death that would ensue. She could not believe that her nightmare had become real. She was being crushed by a paralyzing weight.

“God, it was awful,” she recalls with a grimace. “I thought I was going to die. I couldn't move. And the cold was back—much worse than before. It was
so
cold in the room. I couldn't decide if it was the weight or the cold that was paralyzing me. The only part of me I could move was my head.”

There was a smell too: the same pungent odor she had experienced before. More than ever it resembled burned candle wax.

She tried not to panic. It occurred to her that her intruder was immobilizing her for a reason, that she was being held against her will to prevent her accomplishing some action or other. She could not begin to guess what that action might be. Then she heard a child crying out, and that was explanation enough.

“It's Quentin, I thought. I was frantic. My whole body was numb. I couldn't budge. I remember screaming and calling his name over and over. And then I called out for God to help me.”

In that instant, all changed. Time for Erin seemed suddenly to telescope; the normal laws of space and motion no longer applied. In the next instant, she was out in the corridor and running toward her son's room. To this day, she cannot fill the gap in her memory between being trapped on the bed and finding herself out in the corridor. There is no logical joining up; it remains a mystery for her.

But she found Quentin deep in sleep. There was nothing to suggest that his sleep had been disturbed.

Then she heard the sound again: a child crying. It was coming from
elsewhere
in the house. She stood still, trying not to breathe too loudly, trying to place its exact whereabouts.

The pieces of the puzzle were snapping into place. She remembered the night in Dingle when she heard someone call her name. It
was the voice of a little boy. She remembered the little boy Quentin claimed to have seen. It was all starting to make sense—of a kind. She remembered the wailing of children heard down the phone line….

All of a sudden, the crying stopped. She returned to her own room but remained uneasy. She was telling herself that she could not leave her son on his own. What if something were to happen to him? What if the “intruder” were to turn his attention on Quentin? She would never forgive herself.

Erin went out into the corridor again. She was pulled up short. The sobbing had resumed. It was most definitely coming from some other part of the house, not from her son's room. The sobs of the phantom child were heart-wrenching: continuous, inconsolable, unutterably sad. As a mother, she felt moved to act, to rescue the child who was in such torment. But it was impossible to determine where the cries were coming from. One moment they would sound behind her, the next to her right or left. She would go in one direction and find that the sobbing had shifted. A line or two of a poem learned in childhood went through her head:
Little one! Oh, little one! I am searching everywhere.

She gave it up. Her rational mind told her that she was chasing after ghosts. She went into Quentin's room, locked the door, and eased herself into bed beside him. He slept on, oblivious to the danger that Erin felt convinced was threatening him.

Through the locked bedroom door she continued to hear the heartrending sobbing of the ghost child. Erin clasped Quentin to her and began to pray. Gradually, the weeping faded away, then ceased altogether.

At 8:30 a.m., having dropped off Quentin at school, she made an appointment to see the parish priest.

While walking the short distance to the parochial house, Erin was uneasy, for she was going against many years of unbelief. She could no longer recall when it was that doubt about God had set in, but she thought it must have been soon after she left school and
began to make her “way in the world,” as her late father put it. Her attendance at Mass stopped being a weekly duty and settled down to become the Christmas and special-occasion observance of the lapsed Catholic—again to quote her father, “hatchings, matchings, and dispatchings.” Erin usually smiled at that, but not now.

As for Quentin, she had not gone out of her way to bring him up in “the faith.” She had always considered it to be slightly hypocritical to instill Christianity in the child when her own faith was weak, to say the least. Ed, however, had made a point of having Quentin accompany him to Mass each and every Sunday, with Father Lyons as the celebrant. They shared a pew with Ed's siblings; Quentin had assured her that he derived little from the Masses. In hindsight, this came as no surprise to Erin. Like her, Quentin had not seen the inside of a church since they fled the Dingle Peninsula.

She did not know what to expect from Father Maurice Higgins. A part of her told her that she was doing the right thing, but in her heart she had little faith in the enlisting of a priest. Faith was the key, she decided. She had lost whatever faith she had a long time before. As she looked into the well-kept gardens along the route she was taking, she wondered how many of her neighbors shared her lack of faith. She wondered how many of them paid lip service to religious worship. God was a different matter, she thought. Erin had never lost her faith in God, her belief that the righteous would prevail, as they used to say. She asked herself how the priest would receive her.

He turned out to be a wiry man in his late sixties. He wore the tired, rheumy look of someone who had seen it all, done it all, and was not overly interested in seeing or doing much more of it. But he listened patiently, punctuating Erin's words from time to time with “dearie, dear,” tut-tutting and raising his eyes to heaven with a “merciful God!” or a “Lord save us!”

She could not tell him all; that much she had decided on, even before she reached the parochial house. She had asked herself what a fellow priest would make of her husband's homosexual affair with
Father Lyons. It was 2004, and the wounds to the Church inflicted by the disclosure of clerical sex abuse were still very raw. On meeting the elderly priest, she decided that he was not ready for yet another scandal. It might turn him against her, and she desperately needed him on her side.

When she finished, he sat back in his armchair and said, “Now, to be honest with you, Mrs…. ah…?”

“Ferguson.”

“Mrs. Ferguson, to be honest with you, I'm not used to this kind of thing at all. All that exorcism business isn't done these days anyway. But what I could do is come and say a Mass with you and the boy, and anybody else you'd like to be there––”

“Oh no, Father—just me and Quentin. I don't want anyone to know.”

“I understand. That's all right. But I think a Mass should do it.” He got up and fetched a diary from a writing desk. “The day after tomorrow, around eight in the evening?” He stood with his pen poised above the page.

“That would be very good, Father. I'm very grateful. Thank you so much.”

“That's all right, Mrs. Ferguson. We'll do what we can and trust that it works. And if it doesn't, then we'll try another way.”

Trust that it works? Erin had expected somewhat more from the priest. She knew very little about exorcism but had understood that it was the Church's most effective weapon against the paranormal. She also had been encouraged to place her trust in the extraordinary spiritual power of the Mass. The priest's words did not inspire confidence.

It seemed to her that Father Higgins was preparing her for failure.

He was as good as his word. He arrived at the appointed hour and celebrated a Mass in the living room.

Erin was acutely aware of the effect he had on Quentin. The boy was nervous; he could not meet the priest's eye.

“I sensed what was going through his head,” she tells us. “I'd prepared him as best I could for Father Higgins. ‘He's a nice old
man,' I told him. ‘He's coming to say prayers for us.' I thought he'd be okay with all of it, but he wasn't. I know it was the collar that did it. As soon as he saw that, he went all nervous. I was hoping he wouldn't. It wasn't fair that Frank Lyons turned Quentin off all priests. But who could blame him?”