The Dark Sacrament

by David Kiely

  “There’s a ghost in the playroom!” she blurted out.

  Darren and Sandy, still bouncing the ball back and forth, did not pause their game. Lucy grabbed her sister’s arm and shook it hard.

  “Sandy, there’s a ghost in the playroom!”

  “A what?”

  “A ghost!”

  “Yeah, right!” Darren stopped the ball with his foot and rolled his eyes. “And your head’s a bubble.”

  But Sandy was not amused. She was looking quizzically at her sister. It had been instilled in the children from an early age that fibbing was a sin. It was wrong. Sandy sensed that Lucy was telling the truth; her whole demeanor said so.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Quick, come and see.” Lucy grasped Sandy by the arm and propelled her toward the front door. “She might be still there.”

  Darren, not wishing to be left out, reluctantly followed the pair down the hallway. But when they got to the playroom door, they found it shut.

  “It was open the last time!” Lucy whispered desperately. “She must still be in there.” She put her ear to the door; she could hear shuffling sounds. “I can hear her lifting the videos. Listen.”

  Sandy put her ear to the door. She, too, could hear noises from within. She looked through the keyhole but saw nothing in the darkened room.

  “What are you three up to?” It was their mother. “Come on, upstairs. Bedtime.”

  “Lucy saw a ghost, Mum,” Sandy cried excitedly. “It’s in the playroom.”

  “Nonsense!” Linda had had a long, hard day. Ghost stories were the last thing she wished to hear so close to bedtime. She needed her sleep as much as the children did. A ghost. Such things were known to keep the children awake at night—with all the consequences for her own sleep and peace of mind. She had to put out this fire right away. “Nonsense,” she said again. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

  “But it’s true!” Lucy protested. “She’s in there sorting the videos. I saw her, Mum. I’m telling you, I did.”

  Linda considered her daughter’s anxious little face and the earnestness with which she spoke. She felt a slight shiver of unease.

  “I hadn’t said anything to the children,” she tells us. “Or nobody else. But the truth of the matter is that I’d had a brush with something myself a couple of weeks before. I don’t know if you’d call it a ‘ghost.’ I got this feeling there was a presence in the house. It seemed to be a woman’s presence, and I felt it most strongly in the girls’ bedroom. It was a little bit scary, but I’d kept my fears to myself. I’d no wish to alarm the children.”

  “Very well, Lucy,” she said, “we’ll have a look. And if she’s there we’ll have a little word and ask her what’s she’s looking for. And if she’s not there, it means that you only thought you saw her. Fair enough?”

  With that, Linda took her courage in both hands, flung the door open, and switched on the light—taking care to keep her eyes averted from the coffee table where the videotapes were stacked.

  “There…see. No ghost!” She entered the room and spread her arms wide. The children hung back in the doorway. “See?”

  The children’s attention was on the coffee table. Young Lucy was pointing.

  “But the videos—”

  “Now look, there’s nothing here!” Their mother’s tone told them she would tolerate no contradiction. “Upstairs, all of you, this minute. And I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

  That seemed to end the matter. Linda got the children to bed and went back downstairs to put the kettle on. She heard her husband Ian come in and switch on the television. He would be catching the nine o’clock news, as was his habit. Before joining him in a cup of tea, she went to check the playroom again. She had been putting it off, but it had to be done, if only to set her mind at ease.

  Linda had long given up tidying and putting things away in the playroom. It seemed a futile task. But, at that moment, she found herself fervently wishing for disorder; she prayed that she might see the usual mess: the videotapes strewn willy-nilly over the coffee table. That would prove Lucy’s story groundless. She opened the door and switched on the light.

  Her heart sank. The twenty or so tapes were neatly stacked—as neatly as a display in a store. Not only that, but all had been slotted carefully into their individual boxes—boxes that, in the ordinary run of things, Linda would find discarded underneath the coffee table and elsewhere.

  With trembling fingers she examined the top row. Each movie was in its correct box. There they were, neater even than she would have arranged them herself: James and the Giant Peach, Babe, Monsters Inc., Muppets in Space. The fifth box, however—Spy Kids—was empty. She looked about the room but could not find it. She went to the VCR and pressed the eject button. The machine was empty.

  I don’t have time for this, Linda thought. Perhaps the dog carried it out to the barn—he was known to do things like that—or perhaps one of the children had lent it to a friend at school.

  Without quite knowing why, she hurriedly removed all the tapes from their boxes, tossed some of the boxes back under the table, and generally returned the playroom to its usual, untidy, state. In the morning the children would see that it had all been one great joke.

  She was not smiling, though—far from it. As she pulled the door behind her, she had the feeling that another door was opening into another place, a place she had no wish to confront, or even consider.

  She decided, then and there, that she would not burden her husband with her suspicions just yet. He had enough to deal with, what with a full-time job from eight to five and the additional farm work in the evenings. Besides, Ian was a skeptic; he would not take it seriously. She would wait and see how things developed. With luck, there would be no more to it.

  In the days that followed, life returned to normal. The children went to school as usual; Ian went off to work; and Linda, with much to occupy her during the day, tried not to dwell on the strange phenomenon. Being a religious woman, she resolved to pray more with the children at bedtime. It gave her peace of mind, and it seemed to soothe them.

  A week later, however, Lucy had her second vision.

  It was about four o’clock on a calm, bright Friday afternoon. Linda was in the kitchen washing the dishes. Sandy and Darren were at the table, still busy with their homework, and Lucy, who tended to finish hers before the others, was outside at play.

  The first thing that a visitor to the Gillespie homestead notices is the silence that envelops it. The house lies some distance from the main road and neighboring farms, and the silence is potent. Linda, being at home for most of the day, is especially attuned to this quietude. The noises that disturb it are almost welcome: the hum of a far-off tractor, Ian’s car as it turns in at the gate, the playful shouts of the children, the barking dog that heralds a visitor.

  The scream of a terrified child is something else entirely.

  Linda dropped everything and ran outside, with Sandy and Darren close on her heels. Lucy was racing up the lane toward the house. She fell into her mother’s arms in great agitation. While Linda did her best to calm her, the child kept pointing back the way she had come.

  “He was there!” she cried, indicating the wild garden on the left. “A minute ago, Mommy…a man.”

  Linda took her by the hand.

  “All right, dear,” she said, “we’ll go down and have a look.”

  But there was no sign of the mysterious man. He seemed to be as nonexistent as Lucy’s “lady” of the previous week.

  “Look, there’s no one there, sweetheart.”

  Linda was perplexed, unsure what to think. Her daughter was behaving very much out of character. She rarely, if ever, made things up; it was not in her nature.

  “There’s nobody there, Lucy,” Sandy assured her.

  Lucy began to sob. “But he was there. I saw him. I swear he was there!”

  Linda could read the child’s anguish. She was torn between chastising her for bein
g silly and believing her. She dismissed both as unhelpful. Linda knew that her children were not given to attention seeking. She thought it better for everyone’s sake to remain neutral and simply to allow Lucy to have her say.

  “All right,” she said, “let’s all go inside and have some orange juice. Then you can tell us all about it.”

  Once settled and calmer, Lucy related what she had seen. As she was skipping down the lane past the garden, she saw a figure standing just inside the gate: a man. He was of average height and wearing a black, hooded cloak. His hands were clasped chest-high in an attitude of prayer. He was “like a monk,” Lucy said. He did not move or look at her, but seemed to be gazing fixedly down the lane. The words look and gazing are probably incorrect in this context, because the monk had no features as such. A “peachy haze”—Lucy’s charming description—filled the space where his face should have been.

  Linda listened with mounting dread. What on earth was happening? Ghosts appearing in broad daylight, inside the house and out-of-doors. She wanted desperately to discount the whole affair. Yet, of her three children, Lucy was the least excitable; she was a calm, level-headed little girl. Why this sudden change? Linda was growing very concerned. She resolved to visit her doctor and seek his advice.

  The doctor’s diagnosis held no surprises. Children have fertile imaginations, he told Linda, especially at Lucy’s age. They have difficulty distinguishing fact from fiction. What they see in movies can sometimes seem very real.

  There was nothing new there, but his next words angered Linda. He wondered if the child perhaps felt she was not getting enough attention. The “visions” might well be her way of refocusing her mother’s regard.

  Linda could not concur; she treated her children equally. But the visit to the doctor had eased her mind to some extent. Lucy was sleeping well and her schoolwork had not suffered. The general practitioner assured the mother that it was just a phase, that things would calm down.

  And they did.

  “Three whole weeks went by with nothing happening,” Linda tells us, “but you know, deep down I knew it was too good to last. And the reason I say that is because, even though Lucy wasn’t having any more visions, I knew, I just knew, that the strange woman was still in the house. I’d sometimes feel her on the stairs or the landing, but what really worried me was that she was strongest in the girls’ room.”

  While tidying up in there one morning, she noticed something odd. The children always made their beds before going to school. It did not require much skill—straighten the duvet, plump the pillow, and place it on top. But now she noticed that Lucy’s bed was made differently. The pillow had been placed beneath the cover. Linda shook her head in mild bemusement, left the room by and by, and thought no more about it.

  Until it happened again—and again. She was seeing it every day. She questioned Lucy. “I always put it on top, Mommy. I thought you were changing it.”

  The three children were sitting down to tea, having just got home from school. “Maybe it’s the lady,” said Darren, tucking into a slice of cake. He grinned.

  “Now stop that! There’s no lady in this house—and don’t speak with your mouth full.”

  “There is, Mommy,” Sandy announced bravely. “Lucy saw her twice—and we feel her in the bedroom as well.”

  “What!” Linda was stunned. “Is this true, Lucy?”

  The child nodded.

  “Come with me. Take your tea with you if you like.”

  She brought Lucy into the front room and shut the door. It was time to have it out with the girl.

  “Now, I won’t say anything about you being naughty, all right? You just tell me what happened. Right from the beginning.”

  The story came out. “I saw her when I was in the bath on Monday night,” Lucy began. “She went past the door because the door was open…and she…She stopped and looked at me, but she had no eyes, Mommy, because her face was all fuzzy like the monk’s.”

  Linda stared at her daughter and feigned a smile. She had no great wish to hear any more of this, yet knew she must.

  “And the second time, dear?” she managed to say.

  “The second time was yesterday when I was putting out the bin. She was…she was in the backyard. She was praying, Mommy.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Lucy screwed up her little face, irritated that her mother should ask such a silly question. “Because she was kneeling behind the wall and she had her hands joined…and she had a brooch on.”

  “A brooch?”

  “Yes. It was gold with a red diamond in the middle.”

  “Why did you not tell me this before?” Linda’s concern was growing.

  “I didn’t want to upset you, Mommy.”

  “I’ll not be upset, Lucy.” Linda tried to keep her voice calm. “Now promise me, sweetheart, the next time you see a strange woman or man, you must call me immediately. I want to see them as well, and I want to ask them what they’re up to.”

  Lucy nodded.

  “And there’s no woman in your bedroom. It’s the mirror inside the door.” Linda had placed a cheval mirror that had belonged to her mother in the girls’ room. Because of its age, it tended to swing too freely in its bracket. “Any time I walk into your room, the mirror moves, because it’s an old mirror. It’s not because of any strange lady. Even a bird flying past the window gets reflected in it, and you’d think it was a person.”

  The child seemed content with this explanation. She finished her tea, did her homework, and went out to play with the others.

  Perhaps the most unusual aspect of Lucy’s case is the extraordinary variety of her visions, coupled with the fact that they could appear at any hour of the day, nearly always in broad daylight and usually when she was engaged in some activity or other. Her encounters appear all the more baffling when one considers that over 80 percent of ghostly apparitions are seen at night, commonly when the observer is in a relaxed state, either having woken from sleep or about to fall asleep. Technically, these twin states of consciousness are known respectively as the hypnopompic and hypnagogic. Extensive studies have shown that an individual can experience odd phenomena when in either state. They may take the form of visions and other imagery; a frightening aspect can be a paralysis lasting minutes or even a loss of speech.

  Lucy was, of course, wide awake when she observed her “ghosts.” Her brain was active and therefore entirely able to distinguish truth from illusion. Daylight also lent clarity and relative unambiguity.

  Her next vision made its presence felt one evening at around seven—once again before night had properly fallen.

  Lucy was in the room she shares with Sandy. Their beds stand about four feet apart. The door was fully open and the landing light was on. Lucy sat down on her bed to slip into her sneakers. She had just laced them up and was about to rise when, in her own words, she “was made to sit down again.”

  There was a man standing just inside the door.

  She tried to call out to her mother but discovered she was tongue-tied. Again she had the sensation of being “held” in the one spot.

  The man was tall, about six foot; he looked to be in his thirties and was clad in a dark green uniform with matching beret. Around his waist he wore a black belt and across his left breast pocket was a military ribbon rack. Unlike with the lady and the monk, there was no “fuzziness” about this figure—Lucy saw his face clearly. He was stern and very pale, with sharp features—long nose, thin lips, and small, narrowed eyes—and he moved his head from side to side as if peering from one corner of the room to the other. He did not look at Lucy—at least, not as far as she could tell.

  The most significant thing about him, however, was his right arm. It ended at the elbow, and the sleeve was pinned back and secured at the shoulder. Because he was standing behind Sandy’s bed, Lucy could not see his feet. But she had seen enough and at last felt able to shout for her mother. As she did so, the “soldier” disappeared.

  Lind
a arrived breathless at the top of the stairs, to find a distraught Lucy once more insisting on the veracity of what she had just seen.

  Later that same evening, when she had finally gotten the children settled in bed, Linda decided it was time to tell Ian. Knowing him to be a skeptic, she did not expect much understanding. He was unwinding in the sitting room after a long day, watching the sports channel with his feet up. Bad timing, she thought, but he has to know; I can’t shoulder all this on my own.

  As she had anticipated, Ian saw little cause for alarm. “After all,” he assured her, “ghosts never harmed anyone. Lucy will grow out of it. It’s just a phase.”

  “But, Ian, these visions seem so real to her! We have to do something about them.”

  “Look,” he said, “your mother was psychic and you’re psychic. Lucy’s inherited the ‘gift.’ More like a curse, if you ask me.”

  Her husband spoke the truth. Linda did indeed share a most unusual “gift” with her mother: an ability to perceive things that others could not. At times, she could almost guess what another was thinking, and she frequently knew what people were about to say before they said it. And Ian was correct: it was more of a curse than a blessing.

  “She’ll grow out of it,” he said again. “And anyway, I haven’t noticed any change in her. She seems perfectly all right to me.”

  “But, Ian, you don’t see her from one end of the day to the next. I do. And I’m really worried about her. She’s just not herself.”

  “Well, if it puts your mind at ease, go along and see that parish priest of yours. Priests seem to be good at driving out ghosts and things, if them Hollywood films are anything to go by.”

  She was a bit miffed by his flippancy, for it hit a sore spot. Ian is Methodist and Linda is Catholic. When they married, each retained his or her respective beliefs, but Linda agreed to the children being brought up in her husband’s faith.

  “Look, it’s not funny!” she said.

  “Sorry, love. I know it isn’t.” He yawned. “God, I’m tired. Bedtime, I think.”

  Linda knew there was no point in further discussion. She got up as he switched off the TV.