The Dark Sacrament (26 page)

“I really couldn't tell what kind of language he was speaking,” Shane recalls. “It didn't sound like Latin. God knows what it was: Coptic, Hebrew, Aramaic…take your pick. We'd never heard it before and we sure as hell never want to hear it again. Then, during it,
the very same thing happened as when Father Dorrity was praying. That rumbling sound, only this time it was louder and it didn't stay under the sofa. It started to move across the floor. We could actually feel the floor vibrating under us—like there was something moving under the floorboards, very fast. And after about, say, a minute, it went out under the door and into the hall.”

The Dwyers were terrified, more so than when the unseen entity had assaulted the priest. This was paranormal activity of a different order. They had never seen the like of it. It seemed to them that Davage and his band had brought a new menace into their home, one that was gaining ground by the minute. They had nothing but prayer to hold it in check; they prayed more loudly than before. But Davage's voice kept rising progressively, the words spoken in the strange language vying with their prayer. Then, all at once, he stopped.

“Our guest in the hallway wishes to come in now,” he announced. He turned to the Dwyers. “You do not have to look at it if you don't want to. In which case, it would be best to keep your eyes closed.”

“I can honestly say that, until that night, we thought we'd experienced enough horror to last us a lifetime,” Shane says. “But when Davage said that, the pair of us just went into shock. We knelt there, just stiff with fear. We couldn't move. We couldn't speak. We tried to pray again, but it was as if we were struck dumb. All we could do was shut our eyes tight and wait.”

They heard the group direct some mysterious command in the direction of the door. For a few moments, there was nothing unusual.

“That changed,” says Shane. “There was this gradual coldness in the room. It crept up on you. It chilled you to the bone. I kept my eyes closed, and I know Moya did, too.”

They heard the doorknob turn and the door slowly open. The cold intensified, but there was something else: a truly vile odor was pervading the room.

“It”—or indeed “the guest,” as Davage called it—was now in the doorway.

“The smell of it was horrible. Really, really bad, like burning hair. I tried to hold my nose, but it was useless. Both of us started to feel really sick. But there really was nothing we could do. The urge to run out of the room was very strong, but that would have meant opening our eyes, and we couldn't bear to look at it. Besides, it was blocking the doorway—that's how it seemed. Something was telling us that, if we looked at it, we'd probably never recover from it…that we'd be part of it—if you can understand that. It's very hard to describe. It was just surreal, terrifying. I never want to go through anything like it ever again.”

Did he have the impression that this presence had human form?

“It's very hard to say. It was huge, that's for sure. And it rustled…like it had wings or suchlike….” He stops and chooses his words carefully. “I now know that it was…that it was a demon. What we've learned since then bears that out.”

Davage began addressing the creature in his arcane language. They could tell by his voice that he had turned in his chair and was talking to it, as if he were “having a conversation with someone.”

Astonishingly, the presence began answering in the same, strange-sounding language.

“But the voice was disembodied,” Shane explains. “A man's voice, very deep, but it was coming from all around the room. From the ceiling, the floor, everywhere. Sometimes we'd hear it right behind us, then in front…then from the armchair that we were kneeling beside.”

Both voices grew in volume. They seemed to be arguing. Shane wanted desperately to glance at his wife to check if she was all right. He was terrified. How must
she
be?

But he knew he dared not look. He could feel her arm against his, trembling. He felt certain he could hear her teeth chattering, not only from abject terror but from the subzero temperature in the room.

Suddenly, the deep-throated voice broke into English.

“Give me what I want and I will leave!” it bellowed.

“No, you
cannot
have him!” Davage snapped back.

“I will not leave until I have him!”

Davage lapsed into the sinister language once again, speaking very rapidly, like a judge lecturing a criminal in the dock. The exchange continued thus, as if the two were trading insults.

Eventually the rumpus ceased.

“Now, return to your pit!” Davage ordered.

They waited for the door to open and for the presence to leave. But nothing happened for several moments. By and by, they could feel the coldness and the horrid odor dissipating, then the swish of something passing them and making its way toward the sofa along the gable wall. They heard the rumbling sound again under the floor.

All at once, the room was quiet. It had gone. The curtains were being pulled open and chairs scraped back.

“You may open your eyes now,” Davage said.

Before they could get to their feet, the group had left the room. Shane hurried after them and caught up to Davage before he reached the back door.

“What the hell was all that about?” Shane's fear had turned to anger again.

“You heard, didn't you?”

“What in God's name did you bring into our home?”

“Oh, not me, Mr. Dwyer. I didn't bring anything in. It was there long before I got here.” He pulled a crumpled page from his pocket and handed it to Shane.

Shane looked at a series of squiggles running across the page.

“What the hell's that supposed to be?”

“Go inside and hold it up to a mirror. The names on there sent me here. I received messages from them.”

Shane was torn between hitting Davage full in the face and doing what he was told. He chose the latter course, if only to satisfy his curiosity. He went inside and held the paper up to the mirror.

He stood staring, dumbfounded. The reversed writing suddenly made perfect sense. There were three words.

E
DWARD AND
C
ORNELIUS

“How did you know my uncles?” he asked in disbelief. Davage was still on the porch.

“I didn't know them in life, but I met them in spirit. I talk to the dead. Or rather,” he continued with a chuckle, “they talk to me.” He looked up at the house. “This was their home. They never meant your father to have it, but you have it now. Perhaps that's your mistake. Perhaps you must pay the price. It's dangerous to meddle with the wishes of the dead.”

Shane was stunned. How could this stranger know so much? He had never met him before that day.

By now, the three women had returned to the car.

“It lives—” Davage began. The car engine started. “Sorry, I have to go now.”

“What the f*** are you talking about, ‘it'? What the f*** is ‘it'?”

Davage stepped back, wincing. “I do not care for your language Mr. Dwyer.”

“And I do not care for your brazen cheek! Now what the hell was that in the room just now?”

“A spirit, Mr. Dwyer. An evil spirit—a demon, some might say. It lives under the hearthstone in that room. That's its pit. It goes to ground there whenever you bring clergymen in or when you're saying prayers. But prayers are useless against it.”

Shane did not know what to make of it all. What he was hearing went beyond his comprehension. He recalled Father Dorrity mentioning the hearthstone, too.

“What does it…what does it…”

“What does it want?” Davage finished the question for him. “Oh, it wants
you
—or your soul, to be more exact. Pray all you want, but it won't do any good. You are paying the price for your trespass. I came here tonight to buy you more time. But I can't protect you
much longer. It's very simple: you sell the house and leave, or stay put and risk damnation. It's up to you.”

With that, he was gone. The car sped off, leaving a trail of dust and a great deal of panic in its wake.

No sooner had Shane shut the door than he heard a crash. It came from the green room. Moya was there before him. She was pale. On the timber floor lay the shattered remains of the crucifix that he had hung there so many months before. He wondered about the premonition Moya had had that first day, how she could have sensed that all was not right with the house.

There came a second crash, this time accompanied by the sound of breaking glass.

In the red room, the room they had just vacated, the picture of the Sacred Heart, the focus of their prayers, lay broken and ruined on the floor.

“Jesus!” was all Shane could say.

The destruction of the images marked the beginning of a spate of such attacks. From that day on, no picture, crucifix, or other sacred object was safe. It was as though the visit of the strangers had unleashed the fury of something unholy.

The Dwyers had had enough. They could not even ensure the children's safety in daylight. They themselves could no longer spend the night there. They moved out.

 

Father Dorrity briefed Father Ignatius McCarthy as fully as possible about the case. In total six clergymen, of various faiths, had attempted a deliverance, and none could procure more than a temporary respite. It was time to draw on the solemn rite of exorcism as outlined in the Rituale Romanum. Father Ignatius prefers to use the Latin version, believing it to be more effective.

“This was no restless soul,” he tells us. “The repeated hurling of the Bible onto the floor, the broken crucifix…the Sacred Heart
being dashed to the floor. All these things pointed to the likelihood that an evil spirit was at work.”

Why the Dwyer family? We wondered if it was something in their past, something about the old cottage and the uncles. Was it possible they resented the house returning once more to the family?

“God only knows,” he says with a sigh. “God alone has all the answers. All we can do is speculate. I'm sure Shane told you about Cornelius and Edward's habit of getting the holy water every Sunday. Who's to say but they put up with this demon most of their lives, and the holy water was their way of dealing with it. They couldn't tell anybody—they were too afraid—so they learned to live with it, God help them.”

“And when you look at it that way,” he continues, “you get an inkling as to why they left the land to outsiders. It wasn't out of spite. They wanted to spare their youngest brother, Shane's father, the horror of discovering the truth about the old place. You know they say that St. Patrick himself could not convert the tribes in that part of Ireland. The hold of the Druids was too strong; desperate things went on, by all accounts.” He grimaces. “And, given the Dwyers' experiences, who's to say the stories aren't true? Heaven knows what happened on that land in days gone by. We never know what we're inheriting, do we, now? It is strange how things work out. Had young Shane not insisted on buying the farm back, he would have been spared this whole sorry business.”

And Vincent Davage. What is the verdict on him?

“A very strange character, from what I gather. Certainly he dabbles with the darker side of things. Did he make the situation worse? Undoubtedly so. The attacks on the holy objects started soon after he left. But, God willing, all that is over now.”

Before we take our leave of Shane, he brings us down to the red room. After all that he has told us, it is not easy to feel comfortable there. He points out the sofa along the far wall that sits over the dreaded hearthstone, and the bookcase where they kept the Bible. The compassionate gaze of the Sacred Heart above the mantelshelf
looks down upon us. We do not wish to tarry in that room for too long; there is an uncanny air about it. The modern furnishings sit uneasily there, seeming to mock the cramped space. Perhaps it was never meant to be lived in, to be used as an ordinary room.

We are grateful for the outdoors, as Shane walks us to the car.

“The house has been on the market for almost a year now,” he says. “We haven't had one single bid in all that time. Word gets out; people talk. What can you do? We sank all our savings into this place and now it looks like we're stuck.”

We bring the conversation back to his uncles and the holy water. Did they ever say why they needed it in such quantities?

“Yes, before Edward died my father asked him. He gave a very odd answer. ‘For the hearthstone,' he said. Then added, ‘To put the fire out.' I thought it was the raving of a dying man.”

Shane Dwyer looks back at the house and sighs. “Unfortunately, I know now, to my sorrow, what it was he meant by that. Old Edward meant it literally, may God have mercy on him.”

Malachi Gant and Charlie Sherrin had never quite been friends, yet they had an understanding. Charlie is a neighbor who shares a quiet road in a quiet town in the northwest of Ireland.

Malachi is retired now, and has been for a good ten years. He was always a hard worker, and in the course of four decades or more had built up a very successful hardware business with a presence in three midland towns. When he sold the stores and retired, he had enough left over to realize a lifelong ambition: to see as much of the world as he could within two years. His wife, Blainead—“Blenny” to all who know her—was delighted by the prospect. She had rarely ventured far from her native Sligo.

First, they flew to America. Malachi's younger brother lived in Boston. They stayed with the family for a month, then rented an RV and set out in the direction of San Francisco, taking in no fewer than sixteen states in their leisurely progress across the continent. They devoted four more months to exploring California and Arizona, before traveling on down to Mexico and South America. A year later they found themselves in Florida, booking a cruise to Egypt.

It was 1996; it would be some years before the attack on the Twin Towers induced Americans to stay at home and in particular to avoid the Middle East. The passenger list was full when, at the beginning of October, the liner set sail out of Fort Lauderdale. Two weeks later, the
Gants' party arrived in Alexandria, wended its way slowly down the Nile to Cairo, and at last landed in Luxor. It would be the finale of the Egyptian sojourn, before they moved on to a resort by the Red Sea.

The cruise company had prepared a special treat for that evening. As dusk settled over the Nile, the Gants and the other guests were escorted by uniformed guides down the long Avenue of the Sphinxes that connects Karnak and the temple of the old gods. There they were, those gods, scores of them: ram-headed, floodlit, and magnificent, crouching stark against a background of palms and a sky the color of cobalt. Costumed light bearers had been stationed at intervals, each holding aloft a flambeau. It was kitsch but it was breathtaking. It was calculated to set the mood for the remainder of the evening.

Aperitifs were served in the colonnaded temple. Thereupon the guests entered the magnificent open-air dining area and were seated at tables laid with white and gold linen. Candlelight bathed the scene, and the floodlit, ancient columns formed a stunning backdrop on three sides. The air was laden with rich spices and the aromas of the East. Waiters in traditional costume glided from one table to another, serving a four-course dinner as music emanated from a classical quartet.

“This is the life, eh?” someone said. “Sure beats an all-you-can-eat shrimp supper down at Al's Seafood Diner.” His friends chuckled. The food was excellent, the company convivial. The wines, too, were fine and copious.

Halfway through the meal, however, just as the musicians had ended one piece and were about to embark on another, the tranquil atmosphere of the evening was shattered. A terrifying scream rent the air, sending a chill through the assembled diners.

“It was like a wounded animal, not human at all,” Malachi recalls, “and it frightened the life out of everybody, because everybody stopped eating at once. You could've heard a pin drop, as they say.”

All eyes were fixed on a solitary man at one of the tables. He seemed oblivious to what he had just done and sat staring into the middle distance, at something it appeared only he could see. Mo
ments later he got to his feet, letting the chair fall back with a clatter. Malachi recognized him; he had spoken with him earlier—the usual friendly chitchat. His name was Walter Ehrlich and he seemed an amiable sort. He had been to Egypt on a previous occasion, he said, many years before. His wife had been with him then but she had died in 1978. This year, he had come alone.

Perhaps that brief conversation had endeared Malachi to Ehrlich, because he now appeared to single him out. Slowly but deliberately, he approached the Gants' table, a glass of wine in his hand. The other guests could only stare; some were frightened, others uneasy. Their hosts seemed unsure of what to do.

“Where did you say you were from?” Ehrlich asked, fixing Malachi with a look of mild aggression.

“Ireland.”

“Catholic, right?” He emptied his wine glass and replenished it at once from a decanter. In a loud voice he said: “All you Irish are Catholics, that right?”

Somebody tut-tutted. Mr. Ehrlich was introducing a very sour note into what should have been a perfect evening.

He pointed directly at Malachi and lowered his face to meet the Irishman's eyes. For a fleeting moment, Malachi could not believe what he was seeing. Even now, years later, his voice quavers as he recalls the incident.

“God Almighty, I'll never forget that face,” he says. “Blenny saw it too and she was very upset.”

The face before him was no longer that of Walter Ehrlich. The features had transmogrified into something thoroughly freakish, a mask of utter malevolence. The lips were pulled back in a terrible grimace. And the eyes—they were no longer the eyes of a human but hooded, like those of a cold-blooded creature predating mankind.

“Let's go, Malachi,” Blenny urged.

He felt her hand on his wrist. She was trembling. But he was already recoiling from that awful face. He felt that he could not get far enough away from it.

Walter Ehrlich was not through with him just yet, though. As quickly as the dreadful, reptilian aspect had taken hold of his features, so did it seem to leave. The face returned to normal. Walter straightened and stepped back from the table.

“
F*** you!
” he roared. He looked fiercely about him, and Malachi will never forget the shocked expressions of the other diners. “F*** you all!
We
f*** you all, and to hell with the lot of you. There's no God here. Your God is dead!”

To everyone's astonishment, the troubled guest emitted a loud squeal, ran in the direction of the pillars to one side of the temple, and vanished into the darkness beyond.

All present—dinner guests, organizers, waiters, musicians—were appalled.

“Alcohol,” muttered the Egyptian maître d', shaking his head, his Islamic sensibilities repelled by the display. “To drink so much, not good.”

“I don't think so,” said a white-haired man, turning to Malachi. “No, I don't think it's alcohol. There are demons at work there.”

“You're joking,” said Malachi.

“No joke.” He was frowning. Blenny had exchanged pleasantries with the man's wife during the cruise. She had learned that he was a pastor of some kind, retired for many years. “That's demonic. I've seen it before, lots of times. When a man starts using that kind of language—and referring to himself in the plural—it's pretty clear that there are demons at work.”

The dinner was upset but not ruined. The quartet struck up again, playing a lively set. A waiter righted the fallen chair and removed what remained of Walter's meal. Malachi Gant was intrigued; he wished to learn more from the retired pastor. He was disappointed; the man was reluctant to discuss such matters. He murmured something about “leaving well enough alone,” and went on to ply a neighbor with golf stories.

The next morning, Malachi and Blenny found the “demoniac” at a poolside table. Walter looked pale, red-eyed, and nervous, and
was—even at that early hour—nursing a cocktail of some description. He studiously ignored Malachi, and for that matter everybody else in the party. The Gants never saw him again. According to the tour guide, Mr. Ehrlich had cut short his cruise and caught a plane back to Atlanta, his hometown.

Malachi and Blenny returned to Ireland in 1998. They had visited four continents. They had seen more sights than some will see in a lifetime. They brought back with them many wonderful memories, but Malachi is keen to stress that not all their memories were pleasant ones. Blenny and he had seen the world in all its facets, and some were unsettling, even gravely disturbing. He cites the Luxor incident involving Walter Ehrlich as being the most disturbing of all.

Today, at seventy-five and having endured four torturous years of demonic oppression, Malachi is forced to admit that the event in Egypt haunts him still. In hindsight he sees it not as an isolated, random occurrence but as part of a whole—the sinister beginning of his troubles.

“What if I hadn't gone on that cruise?” he asks despairingly. “It was as if that ‘face' followed me all the way home. I've never been the same since.”

Malachi is a nervous individual. This seems at first out of character because he is an imposing man: well over six feet tall, broad in the shoulders, with a grip like a blacksmith's. He towers over Blenny, who, having brought coffee and cookies, leaves Malachi to his story.

“She knows something of what I'm going through,” he says, “but I keep the more frightening bits to myself. I can't have her getting upset.”

His hands shake as he stirs his coffee. He seems genuinely frightened of something. We are here on the referral of Father Ignatius, who has told us only a little about the case. It may well be that he wished us to hear the details from the “sufferer's” own lips, so we could arrive at a more objective analysis. Malachi seems hesitant about sharing his experience. He reminds us from time to time that he is speaking of it “only because Father Ignatius asked me to.”

His story centers on his neighbor, Charlie Sherrin. He is a widower, some thirty years Malachi's junior, who lives down the road with his two teenage daughters.

Malachi has known the Sherrin family all his life. He went to school with Charlie's father; he watched the sons and daughters grow up and one by one leave the parental home. Charlie was the oldest; he remained. He is good with his hands, Malachi tells us. He practically rebuilt single-handedly the house he inherited, doubling its floor area and in so doing quadrupling its market value.

When Malachi ran his hardware business, the Sherrins were among his regular customers. He remembers how Charlie's father would come to him for everything from a nail to a bench grinder.

“Dan was a creature of habit,” he says. “If he bought from you once, he was a customer for life. He did a lot of odd jobs for people in the town here, mostly in the evenings and on weekends. I'd hire big things out to him: generators, sanders, that kind of thing. Charlie got a lot of that from the father. Terrible good with his hands. Never idle.”

On retirement, Malachi disposed of the business but kept some stock. He extended his garage to accommodate it all. He is an altruistic individual and well liked in the area, not least because of his habit of lending power tools and the like to friends and neighbors. When his daughter married, he helped her to buy her first home and even lent a hand with the decorating. His son-in-law got on well with Charlie Sherrin. They drank together, moved with the same crowd.

All that ended six years ago, however, on a summer's night when Charlie showed his dark side. The incident is an open secret in the street—yet nobody mentions it, not even Blenny.

“We don't talk about it,” Malachi says. “We never discuss it. As far as she's concerned, it's over and done with. That's how she likes to keep it.”

So what did happen on a balmy June night in 2001? What was it that transformed Malachi Gant from a healthy and vigorous man into a nervous wreck? The answer must lie a few hundred
yards farther along the road, behind the well-kept hedges of the Sherrin family home. But Charlie is saying nothing. It is also futile to question the other neighbors, including Malachi's son-in-law, who was an eyewitness to what occurred. What is left is circumstantial evidence—which is nonetheless compelling—and Malachi's own harrowing account.

Charlie Sherrin came over at about ten that evening. It was dusk and still warm. He was returning a hedge trimmer that Malachi had kindly lent him. They strolled back together from the shed. Malachi suggested a glass of whiskey. He had “the remains of a bottle” in the house and, as he himself was not much of a drinker, did not want it “going to waste.” Charlie readily agreed.

“But no sooner had we made ourselves comfortable in the parlor than he started,” Malachi says. “Complaining about everybody and anybody, so he was—the children, his in-laws. But that's the way he was: always finding fault. I think he must have had a run-in with everybody he met that day. Maybe the weather had gotten to him. It was a very hot day, and I remember he was still in his shorts when he came round with the trimmer.”

Malachi was not surprised to find Charlie in such a state. He hoped the whiskey would calm him.

“He carried so much hatred in him,” he tells us. “Or maybe it was bitterness; I don't know. He was forever running people down and he had such a vicious temper.”

The temper is something that Malachi returns to time and time again. He recalls Charlie's behavior toward his children as they were growing up.

“They were great kids. But he'd often throw stones at them in a temper. Big stones. I'd see him at it and think, if one of those stones was to hit that little girl it'd do serious injury.”

He goes on, painting a picture of a strangely unpleasant and volatile man.

“He'd lose it completely. I remember one time I was helping him mix some cement for the floor of a conservatory he was building.
Something went wrong with the mixer—I don't know what, but the cement was coming out all lumpy. Now, anyone else would have switched the thing off and had a look at it. Not Charlie. He starts kicking the thing and cursing. The language was terrible, very obscene. He ended up destroying the mixer, so he had to pay for it in the end. That's the sort he is—he just goes into a blind rage and doesn't know
what
he's doing anymore. I pity the daughters, always have.”

For years, Malachi has been concerned for their welfare. Nor was it only their father's violent temper they had to fear; it seemed to Malachi that Charlie's relationship with the children was always a little suspect.