The Dark Sacrament

by David Kiely

  The first occurred as the canon’s car approached the Rooney home. She had the distinct impression that the area—the entire estate—was filled with what she called “territorial spirits.” She claims that she could see them everywhere. Yet the interesting part of her vision concerned the Rooney house itself. Of all the homes in Cedar Close, it alone was being protected by a “ring of angels.” She saw them circling above the roof of the property.

  Her second vision occurred while the Rooneys were speaking with the canon and the pebble landed on the hearthrug. Florence had looked, as everyone had, to the open doorway. But no one else could sense what she sensed. She had the compelling impression that they were in the presence of a spirit child—a little girl.

  Canon Lendrum had suspected it in the first instance; now they felt certain that the “playful” activity was the work of the mysterious spirit child. He was glad, and for good reason. Florence’s vision had helped in establishing that there was no evil at work in 8 Cedar Close. A full exorcism would not be necessary. The best course was to pray for the child, that her spirit might find rest.

  He counseled the Rooneys to do likewise.

  Declan could rule out Scottie Byrne or a mischievous neighbor. In the days to come, he was almost sorry he had entertained either possibility. When he thought about it, it appeared increasingly unlikely that human agents were behind the disturbances. Declan was of two minds about this. Like everyone who comes face-to-face with the inexplicable, his need to rationalize became paramount. If he was being asked to believe in ghosts—if there was a little girl named Sarah, who was somehow connected with an antique fireplace—he wished to know why she was troubling his home. He wanted it all to make some kind of sense.

  He started to make inquiries. For a long time, they appeared to lead nowhere. But on October 10, 2004, five months after Canon Lendrum’s second visit and a full fourteen months after the Rooneys’ problems began, Declan made a breakthrough. He had been hunting down facts that might have a bearing on the case and had examined countless documents in local and national archives. In the history department at Queen’s University Belfast, he turned up something of great significance. In the nineteenth century, two children went missing close to what would become Cedar Close, in the area known as Ballylouth. The little girls, nine-year-old Mary Magee and Sarah Logan, age ten, were never found.

  So there she was—Sarah, the mysterious child Florence had seen. Declan experienced a tremendous sense of relief on unearthing this information. The pieces of the puzzle that had haunted him and his wife for so long were finally coming together. He hurried home in high excitement and related the good news to Stephanie.

  They knew the identity of their ghost. They could pray for her now.

  Stephanie went to Father O’Malley and arranged for a Mass to be said for the little girls. She anticipated that the priest would have no objection, and this proved to be the case. She felt it was prudent, too, to say nothing about the intervention of a priest of another faith.

  On Father O’Malley’s recommendation, the Rooneys began a nightly recitation of the rosary for the repose of Sarah’s soul. Nor did they ever neglect the prayer for the protection of Michael the Archangel. Since the onset of their troubles, it had become a routine part of their lives. They knew it by heart and no longer needed to refer to the written version. Nevertheless, Stephanie was reluctant to remove those copies of the prayer she had placed in every room.

  Over the previous months their house, understandably, had become a repository of sacred objects. The Rooneys and their relatives had come to the conviction that such objects were talismans against the unknown. The crucifix was now a permanent fixture on the living-room wall. A holy picture or novena hung in every room.

  One thing remained to be investigated: Declan still had not satisfied his natural curiosity with regard to the fireplace that Florence had seen in her vision.

  “It must mean something,” he said to Stephanie.

  “I wish you’d leave it alone. What’s the point in stirring it up again?”

  “I think it’s important that we know, Steph. Why would Florence Miller see a fireplace?”

  Declan had a hunch that the answer lay on his property. He sought out the contractor who had built the development. But Mr. Heaney seemed reluctant to discuss the matter. Yes, there had been a block of old row houses. So what? No, he did not know who the “previous owners” were. Did Rooney think he was chairman of the archaeological society or what? He had bought the land to build houses on, not for the purpose of digging up the past.

  Declan asked around. Somebody must know something, he reasoned. And somebody did. In exchange for a beer or two, Kevin McTeague, one of Heaney’s former employees, divulged some interesting information. He claimed that the Cedar Close development was built on the site of a fairy fort.

  This gave Declan more pause for thought. He knew a little about fairy forts. There are perhaps 40,000 all told in Ireland. Most are knolls or dunes, either naturally or artificially constructed. The fact that the provenance and purpose of these mounds were unclear to the country folk gave rise to the belief, in less enlightened times, that they were the homes of the “little people,” or fairies. The superstition persists that if anyone disturbs such a site, great misfortune will befall him.

  “That area beside your house is where it was,” McTeague told him. “Heaney had it leveled, but made sure he didn’t build on it. He wasn’t taking any chances.”

  “Oh, that’s just great! Now I’m hearing this when it’s too late. It would have been nice to know this before we bought the place.”

  “Depends on whether you believe in all that fairy stuff,” said McTeague. “But I remember when we were working there, it took ages for us to get the bloody job finished. Everybody took sick, one after the other. Then deliveries would be delayed; calls that Heaney made went astray. He lost a lot of money on the project. We were happy to see the back of Cedar Close, I can tell you. When I heard about your troubles, I wasn’t surprised at all.”

  Declan was not in the least superstitious; he had never believed in ghosts. Yet events over the past year had caused him to look closely at his skepticism. If the spirit-child theory was correct, and it had the appearance of being so, then why not the fairy story?

  But what to do with such information? They could hardly sell the house, not after barely two years. Besides, even if they did sell, it would probably fetch a much reduced price, given the talk in the neighborhood. McTeague had demonstrated to him that even casual acquaintances knew about the phenomena. No, Declan decided, selling was out of the question.

  If Canon Lendrum was to be believed, then the problem of the spirit child could be solved through prayer and faith. But the fairy fort? Nothing could be done about it, short of having Heaney bulldoze the site—an unlikely, and absurd, scenario. Declan’s only consolation lay in the fact that he had not been responsible for disturbing it in the first place. Perhaps McTeague’s story was true, insofar as Heaney and his workforce were culpable.

  Declan shared his concerns with Stephanie.

  “Look,” she said, “so far, for a whole six months, we’ve had no trouble—fingers crossed. So long as we keep praying for that little Sarah, things will be okay. God knows what happened to the poor wee thing.”

  “I know. But what if it all starts up again? All that spirit stuff.”

  “It won’t!” she snapped. “I wish you’d have a bit more faith, instead of listening to old pub talk. I don’t believe that fairy fort nonsense. Fairies are what alcoholics see when they’ve got the DTs, so I’m not surprised Kevin McTeague believes in them. He’s never out of the bloody pub.”

  And that seemed to end the discussion. They said their prayers and retired.

  It may have been coincidence. Stephanie is not so sure. Her own feeling is that Declan’s inquiries had somehow opened a door on some secret or other and in so doing had left both of them vulnerable to aggression from “the other side.” Whatever the c
ause or motivation, that night Declan was physically attacked. Of that there was no doubt. He awoke the next morning to find that scratch marks had mysteriously appeared on his torso.

  A rubicon had been crossed; war was declared. From that night on, events took a turn for the worse.

  Physical injury to a person by a paranormal agency is rare. According to psychic researchers, when physical interaction is present in a haunting it generally takes the form of touching, squeezing, or the sensation of an oppressive weight, none of which, in the main, leaves marks on the individual. The aggression to which Declan was subjected signaled a very worrying development. These were no longer the antics of a “playacting spirit child.” The rules of engagement had changed radically.

  Over the coming days and following from the physical attack, the Rooneys would come face to face with something they had dreaded from the outset. The entity would demonstrate, by targeting the sacred objects, that it was antireligious. When this occurs in cases of paranormal activity, when consecrated, protective objects come under attack, one must face the possibility that evil forces are at work.

  The couple vacated their home yet again. Each day, they would look in after work—and each day would be confronted with incontrovertible evidence of evil intent. Over the course of a week, all the religious objects in their home were targeted.

  It started with the crucifix above the fireplace. They discovered it lying on the hearth, where it had evidently been hurled with some force. What is more, the Fatima rosary that adorned it had been pulled apart and its beads scattered.

  On at least two occasions, they fled the house crying out in shock and physical pain. Incredibly, the holy water in the font by the front door was so hot that it burned their fingers. They had made a habit of crossing themselves on leaving the house. Something was trying to prevent them from continuing the practice.

  Water from the French shrine of Lourdes, which Stephanie kept on her nightstand, inexplicably turned to ice. More holy water was emptied onto the kitchen floor, and the bottle that contained it was flung under the table. A novena prayer to St. Jude was removed from its frame, torn into tiny pieces, and strewn about the bedroom floor.

  But perhaps the most startlingly malign incident—and one which confirmed for the Rooneys that demonic influences were at work—involved the prayers to Michael the Archangel, which Stephanie had placed in five separate rooms. She found the words hide here now scrawled in a child’s hand on the reverse of each prayer. Interestingly, the Scrabble letters had spelled out run hit hide.

  “‘Hide,’” Declan mused. “Maybe the two wee girls are playing hide-and-go-seek together.”

  “And maybe I’m going out of my f***ing mind, Declan,” said a distraught Stephanie.

  He looked at her with concern. She never used that kind of language—not unless she was truly upset. Yet he could not let go of the idea that the phantom children were playing games again. It was better to believe that than to question the nature of an entity that seemed to take delight in, by turns, boiling and freezing sanctified water.

  The new cycle of manifestations increased in frequency and grotesqueness. The prayer leaflets became the focus of something even more sinister and alarming. Mysterious symbols appeared one day on the walls of the living room, kitchen, and hallway.

  One, drawn at head height—about five and a half feet from the floor—resembled a staring eye. The symbols did not appear to have been applied with a writing implement, such as chalk or felt-tip marker, but seemed smudged, as if a finger had been dipped in a dark pigment of some kind. Declan thought at once of runes or hieroglyphs, but the drawings were like nothing he had ever seen before, whether in books, magazines, or TV documentaries.

  A curious odor pervaded the house, as of charred paper. The couple noted that it was stronger on the staircase. They hurried upstairs and inspected the bedrooms. Every copy of the prayer to Michael the Archangel was burned. They concluded that the ash had been used to daub the graffiti on the walls downstairs.

  It was time to seek help again.

  Canon Lendrum is understandably disappointed but never dispirited when he learns that his efforts at cleansing places or individuals have not been entirely successful.

  “We don’t know why one deliverance works immediately and another takes longer,” he says. “But I believe that it’s all a matter of faith. The unshakable faith of the deliverance minister must be matched by the unwavering faith of the afflicted.”

  Strictly speaking, in the Protestant ministry there is no formalized ritual for exorcising places. Nor is there a biblical reference to the purification of dwelling houses. The deliverance minister is therefore free to act at his own discretion. Rome’s chief exorcist, Dom Gabriele Amorth, describes how he and his fellow priest Candido Amantini go about this task:

  The Rituale [Romanum] includes some ten prayers beseeching the Lord to protect places from evil influences. They include the blessing of houses, schools and other buildings. We intone several of these prayers. Then we read the first part of the First Exorcism of persons, adapting it accordingly. Next we exorcise each room, in much the same way we would bless a house. We follow with another circuit of the rooms, this time dispensing incense. We end with more prayers. After the exorcism, it is very efficacious to celebrate a Mass in the house.

  “Very often the blessing of a house and a service of the Eucharist will be enough,” Canon Lendrum adds, “but there are those cases that demand more robust measures. The infestation of the Rooney household was one such case.”

  When the canon visited the house for the third time—again accompanied by Alison and Florence—he was struck by the threatening atmosphere. It was almost tangible even as they entered.

  “Evil invariably comes with a coldness,” he says. “Science has never been able to explain why this is so. I was not aware of it on the first two occasions, but I had the impression—and Florence confirmed it—that the child spirit had been replaced, or to be more accurate, ‘used,’ by sinister forces to gain access to the house.”

  He celebrated another Eucharist in the presence of the Rooney family. More prayers were said; the rooms were blessed a third time. As before, the canon and his party left Dungiven in the belief that whatever it was that had laid siege to the house had departed, never to return.

  “We felt liberated then,” says Stephanie. “We felt that a door was shut.”

  It was a door that had been opened by the restless spirit of a little lost girl named Sarah and used as a portal for evil to enter and disrupt the lives of an innocent young couple.

  We wonder about the scented wooden balls that started it all. Where did they end up?

  “Oh, we burned them a long time ago,” Stephanie says. “No more of that for us. We see them from time to time in the shops, and most people would say they look pretty and smell nice. But Declan and me, whenever we see them, well, a shiver runs through us. And who can blame us for that?”

  LITTLE LUCY AND THE PHANTOM FAMILY

  The Gillespie farmhouse, a gray stone, two-story structure, sits in thirty or so acres at the end of a narrow, meandering lane in the lake-rich countryside of County Fermanagh. It was built two centuries ago by an ancestor of the present family. The visitor will find nothing remarkable about the property; there is the customary yard with its barns and outbuildings, dotted with farm machinery standing idle or at the ready, depending on the season.

  Ian and Linda Gillespie are a handsome, hard-working couple. He is a businessman and farmer; she is a former teacher. Their three children are beautiful, intelligent, and well mannered. The family seem to embody the benefits of wholesome country living. It is hard, then, to imagine extramundane forces intruding upon this idyll, yet that is what occurred in the autumn of 2002. During September and October of that year, the Gillespies’ youngest child, eight-year-old Lucy, was the focus of a number of very unusual visitors.

  It began one evening when Lucy was playing in the yard with her sister, eleven-year-old Sa
ndy, and brother Darren, age ten at the time. Their parents were outdoors as well, herding cattle from a back field toward one of the barns.

  It was growing late, and all at once Lucy felt the cold. She bounced the ball back to her siblings and told them to wait while she fetched her coat. She sped through the open door of the farmhouse and down the hallway to the back room. This room, once a storeroom, had become the playroom; the children listened to their music and watched videos there.

  Lucy’s coat was hanging inside the door, which stood open—as it generally did. She stopped abruptly, pulled up short by a most incongruous sight. There was “a lady” in the room. She was bent over the coffee table by the far wall, her back to Lucy. She seemed to be arranging the videotapes.

  The girl was transfixed. Not through fear, it must be said, but because of “something” that held her in the doorway, something that was urging her to take careful account of every detail of what she was witnessing. For Lucy was in no doubt that the lady was not like other women. She knew of the existence of ghosts—or perhaps more accurately the possibility of their existence. What child does not? Lucy sensed that she was seeing one, in daylight, in her very own home. She had what she calls a “clear” view of the lady, though the lady herself was not quite as clear as a normal human being. She was “fuzzy round the edges.”

  Lucy could not see her face but had the impression that the lady was around her mother’s age. She was tall and well built and wore a long, gray, straight skirt and a burgundy shawl. The clothes were definitely from another century—even young Lucy knew that. Most bizarrely, the stranger appeared to have no feet. The hem of her skirt seemed to hover about three or four inches above the ground. She was so intent on tidying the tapes that she did not register the presence of the child—not that Lucy wanted her attention. She hurried back down the hallway, coatless and breathless, to relate what she had seen to her brother and sister.