The Dark Sacrament

by David Kiely

  We are sitting in Shane Dwyer’s kitchen as he relates his story. He is thirty-four, a tall, lean, dark-haired man with alert brown eyes and an easy manner. He and his wife, Moya, are both high-school teachers. They have two children: Emma, age nine, and Rory, five.

  “Yes, it is very quiet here,” Shane agrees, when we comment on how fortunate he is to be living amid such tranquillity. “But don’t let that fool you. The past two years have been anything but peaceful.”

  He is confirming what has already been told to us. We are here in this isolated part of County Galway because the events that took place in the Dwyer home caused alarm among quite a few clergymen.

  It began on June 10, 2004, the day the family took possession of their lovely new home. It was so much more spacious than their old one, a row house in Clifden. One would have thought, then, that everyone would be pleased, but that was not the case.

  “I well remember the day we moved in,” Shane tells us. “I felt that Moya wasn’t happy, but I put it down to the change of scene.”

  While the children played outside in the yard, the parents spent that first sunny afternoon unwrapping bric-a-brac and hanging pictures. They concentrated on the two small rooms to the front of the house, the “green room,” or lounge, to the left of the front door and the “red room,” or parlor, to the right.

  Unlike the rest of the house, these rooms are small. They faithfully follow the floor plan of the old cottage. In fact, the rooms, together with the hall and pantry, occupy the exact area on which the original Dwyer home stood. The couple had received a heritage grant to preserve this historical feature.

  “Granny’s Bible, where do you think?” asked Shane, hefting the heavy, leather-bound book in both hands.

  “Oh, the parlor. Don’t want the kids to get their hands on it.” Moya took it. “Here, I’ll do it.”

  She carried it down to the red room. Despite the heat of the day, there was a cold feel to it. She remembers that there was something about the room that made her uneasy. It may have been the thickness of the walls; the old cottage walls were designed to provide shelter throughout the long, damp Connemara winter. Moya stood up on a chair and placed the Bible on a high shelf to the left of the fireplace. As she did so, she heard the door shut softly behind her.

  “Shane, is that you?”

  No answer.

  Again, a slight shiver ran through her. She had the sensation of someone, or something, having entered the room. She rushed to the door and pulled it open. But there was no sign of Shane. Instead, she found him in the kitchen.

  “Why did you do that?” she asked.

  “Do what?”

  “You shut the door on me. In the red room.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you bloody well did! And it’s not funny.”

  “Look, the wind must have done it.”

  “The wind. Look at those trees, Shane!” She went to the window. “They’re as still as statues. There’s not a breath of wind today, and besides, the windows at the front are not open.”

  “Well, maybe it just swung to. New doors sometimes do that.”

  “Yeah, right. If it happens again I’ll want a better explanation.” She busied herself unwrapping another item.

  Shane said nothing. He knew his wife was not too happy with the move to the country. Born and raised in the lively, bustling town of Clifden, she had relinquished a whole way of life to live in “the back of beyond,” as she called it. Shane was fulfilling his dead father’s wish, and he felt guilty that Moya was part of that wish too—whether she liked it or it. He had noticed that every time they visited the house during its construction, Moya’s mood changed. On the return journey she would say hardly anything at all, and it would take a while for her to become “herself” again.

  He hoped that things would settle down once they had moved in. But here they were, barely two hours in the place, and she was accusing him of mischief. The signs were not good.

  “I’ll make some coffee,” he said, trying to lighten the atmosphere.

  Moya was not listening. She was looking thoughtfully at the picture of the Sacred Heart. Shane had just hung it near the stove, as his parents had done in their old home.

  “I don’t want it there,” she said abruptly. “I want it over the mantelpiece in the red room.” She reached into a box on the floor and hauled out a crucifix. “And this in the green room, on the back wall. Can you do that? Now, please?”

  He nodded. He was unsure of what to say. “Moya knew better than I did that something was wrong with the house. She told me later that she got an inkling on that first day, the day we moved in. She didn’t use the word evil but I knew what she meant. She felt that the holy picture and crucifix should be there. She didn’t know exactly why she felt that, but I trusted her intuition.”

  The months passed. The house became a home. Shane was gratified to be able to fulfill his father’s dream of having the land restored to the Dwyer family. As time wore on, he grew to love the house, to feel that he belonged within its walls. Moya had overcome her initial disquiet. Emma settled into the local school and made friends. They were living the idyll.

  But, before too long, there were signs—nothing overt, but small signs—that things were not quite right. The trouble began with three-year-old Rory.

  Emma and Rory each had a bedroom on the first floor. It was Shane’s habit, having tucked in the little boy, to check for the boogeyman. It was something he had always done; he supposed he would be doing it for quite some time to come.

  That particular evening, a little after seven o’clock, he made a great show, as usual, of crouching and peering under the child’s bed.

  “Nope, no boogeyman,” he assured Rory, getting to his feet again.

  “But the boogeyman’s not down there, Daddy!” The boy was looking fixedly toward the other side of the room. “He’s standing at the window.”

  “Right, I’ll open the window and throw him out.”

  He made a great show of striding purposefully across the room.

  “It’s all right now, Daddy. He just went into the wall.”

  Shane smiled, remembering his own childhood and the host of imaginary friends he had—the fairies, the hobgoblins, and creatures slight and small. Yes, children have rich imaginations, he mused. A pity they lose it all so quickly, when boring adulthood kicks in.

  He gave it no further thought. He continued to check under the bed each night for the boogeyman—and Rory continued to insist that “the bad man” was actually by the window. Then the child announced one night that he could dispense with his father’s sentinel services.

  “There’s no need, Daddy. Michael comes in and sends him away.”

  Shane smiled, ruffled Rory’s blond curls. “Who’s Michael, then?”

  “He sits on the roof and he’s got wings…and…and when you go out, he comes in and he sends the bad man away.”

  Again, images of elves and fairies came to mind. Shane filed “Michael” away as yet another denizen of a little boy’s fantasy world. At the same time, minor incidents were occurring in the Dwyer home. Each by itself was trivial, but taken together they were forming a pattern.

  “Items would go missing or get misplaced,” Shane explains. “You might set your coffee cup on the table, then go to get something in another room, come back, and discover that your cup had been moved to the draining board. Or we’d find the telephone off the hook for no good reason. At first we blamed each other, then we blamed the children.”

  The trifling anomalies were to give way to something more ominous. It occurred during the approach to Christmas.

  “It was bizarre,” Shane says. “Moya had put the Bible in the red room. Three mornings in a row we found it lying smack bang in the middle of the floor, and always opened at the same pages: Isaiah twenty-eight to twenty-nine.”

  He sees our look of bemusement. He fetches the Bible and turns to the chapters in question. “It seems to be all about the fall of Jerusalem
and the demon drink,” he says. “And before you get any ideas, I never touch the stuff. Never have.”

  He reads a verse or two.

  Woe to the crown of pride, to the drunkards of Ephraim, whose glorious beauty is a fading flower, which are on the head of the fat valleys of them that are overcome with wine!

  Behold, the Lord hath a mighty and strong one, which as a tempest of hail and a destroying storm, as a flood of mighty waters overflowing, shall cast down to the earth with the hand.

  The crown of pride, the drunkards of Ephraim, will be trampled under feet….

  “We couldn’t understand what any of it meant,” Shane confesses, “but it was leading up to something, and we soon found out. That Christmas, all hell broke loose.”

  The phrase is an apposite one. The first holiday season in their new home would herald a catalog of events so terrifying, so extraordinary, and of such frequency, that one is left wondering how anyone could endure it and remain mentally and emotionally unscathed.

  Christmas Day itself passed peacefully. Moya’s parents came for lunch, exchanged gifts, and left around nine o’clock. The children were put to bed soon after. The Dwyers watched a movie and retired at 11:30.

  But at midnight they found themselves wide awake and hurriedly switching on the bedside lights. Somebody was knocking on the front door.

  “Maybe it’s your parents,” Shane offered, on seeing his wife’s look of alarm. “They might have broken down on the road.” He got out of bed.

  “Hardly, they left ages—”

  Her words were cut short by another burst of knocking, this time louder and more furious. Shane hurried downstairs. He threw the switch that turned the porch light on.

  “I’m coming!” he called out. He drew back the bolt and flung the door wide.

  There was no one there.

  Perplexed, he went outside and stood on the step. Snow had been falling gently but steadily all evening. The garden and pathway were covered. The tracks made by his parents-in-law and their car tires were obliterated—and there were no fresh tracks to be seen. All about there lay a deathly silence.

  As he stood there trying to make sense of the mystery, a sudden fear gripped Shane. He slammed the door shut as Moya was coming down the stairs.

  “Children awake?”

  “Sound asleep.” He saw that she shared his unease. “I knew there was something awful about this place from the very beginning.”

  “I think you’re exaggerating, love. Maybe we imagined it.”

  But no sooner had he said the words than the frantic knocking started up again—this time on the back door. Shane rushed down the hallway to investigate but, as he did, the clamor at the back ceased and immediately resumed at the front.

  “It was then I had to admit we were dealing with something completely unnatural,” he tells us. “It was as if ten sets of knuckles were rapping…rapping really hard. And that’s the way it went on—stopping and starting. Back door, then front—back and forth, back and forth. Then together, at the same time.”

  The situation was too preposterous for words. They did not know what to do. They hesitated in the hallway.

  “Jesus, we’d better get out of here!” Shane said finally.

  “I’m not going anywhere!” Moya was shaking visibly. That surprised him; she was a strong-willed woman who did not scare easily. She started slowly up the stairs. “It’s outside. If you open the door again, it’ll come in. I know it will!”

  He followed her. All at once, the knocking ceased. There was silence. They stood for a time staring at each other.

  “It’s over!” Moya whispered. “Listen!”

  Feeling a little more confident now, they tiptoed up a few more steps, each sharing an irrational notion (they confided to each other later) that the slightest sound might trigger the terrible disturbances again. But just before they reached the top stair, they were pulled up short. Moya gripped her husband’s wrist hard. The front door was opening.

  It swung fully open. An icy blast swept into the house, making everything about them tremble and flap.

  “It blew open!” said Shane, seeing Moya’s terrified face. “The wind blew it open, that’s all. I’ll close it.”

  Steeling himself, he prepared to go back down the stairs. But, before he reached the bottom, the door had swung shut again, all by itself. He hesitated on the stair. He heard something. He felt something, too; it caused the blood to drain from his face. It was not his imagination—heavy footsteps were slowly crossing the hall, in the direction of the stairs.

  Shane hotfooted it back the way he had come. Moya reached out and grasped his arm, pulling him toward the bedroom, as one would pull a man out of the path of danger.

  “Oh, Jesus, Shane—quick!”

  They stumbled and half-fell into the room. Shane locked the door. Moya fell onto the bed, crying uncontrollably.

  “Shush.” He wanted her to stop. Even through the closed door he could hear the unseen intruder mounting the stairs, so loud were the footfalls.

  “They were the steps of a heavily built man wearing boots,” he says. “You could hear the stairs shake with every step he took.”

  The footsteps continued to climb the stairs. Shane put his ear to the door and listened, hardly knowing what was louder, the thudding of his own heart or the lumbering tread of the phantom boots.

  At the top of the stairs they halted. Moments later, they crossed the landing. Shane caught his breath—the children’s rooms were on that side. His terror was supplanted by the overriding urge to protect his children at all costs. He unlocked the door.

  “What are you doing?”

  He told her.

  “Oh God, Shane!”

  They found the landing deserted, nor was there any sound from the children’s rooms. Rory was sleeping undisturbed, as was his sister, Emma.

  The house was silent. Whatever had intruded seemed to have left them in peace, if only for the time being. Moya fetched the holy water she kept on a windowsill and gently blessed the children as they slept.

  “Let’s say a rosary as well,” she said.

  They knelt in their own bedroom and began the prayers. “Our Father who art in Heaven…” The words were soothing. “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil…”

  Moya held up a hand. “No, not ‘evil.’ ‘The Evil One’ is what we should be saying. ‘Deliver us from the Evil One.’ There’s an evil presence around this house. I can feel it.”

  “Look, you were the one who didn’t want to leave,” Shane said untactfully.

  She started crying, and he wished he had kept his mouth shut. His nerves were taut; he was not thinking straight. The uncanny occurrences had frightened him more than he was admitting to her.

  “It’s stopped now anyway,” he said gently. “Let’s finish the rosary. It’ll be all right.”

  The silence held. They knelt again and resumed the remaining decade. But hardly were they halfway through when Moya stopped again.

  “Shane, there’s someone outside the window!”

  He was growing exasperated. After all, they were on the upper floor; in order to reach the window, an intruder would need a ladder. And the blinds were drawn. He had no idea what Moya was talking about.

  “I heard something,” she insisted. “Listen!”

  But there was no sound apart from the ticking of the clock on the bedside table. The night was unusually quiet—as nights are when a fall of snow lies on the ground.

  “Very well,” he said, getting up, “if it puts your mind at rest.”

  He raised the blind and peered out. He had left the gable light on. Snow had started falling again. There was no trace of anybody near the house. He saw the distant lights of a car out on the road, but that was all. He left the window.

  “Nothing there,” he said. “What did it sound like?”

  But she did not need to answer because it came again, and this time it was loud enough for Shane to hear. He recalls it as sounding like a l
ow whimper, followed by moaning.

  “The wind.”

  But it was not—and he knew it. The moaning grew steadily louder and higher in pitch. There could be no doubt: the Dwyers were hearing the wailing of a grief-stricken woman.

  “Oh, my God!” Moya cried. “What is that? Who’s doing that?” She was still on her knees by the bed, twisting the rosary beads around and about her fingers. She tugged at Shane’s sleeve. “Let’s just keep praying!”

  He got down on his knees again. Although he tried not to show it, he was as terrified as his wife.

  They tried to pray more loudly, to drown out the woman’s voice and their fear. And yet, the more they raised their voices, the more the wailing intensified. In the end, a frightful, high-pitched screaming was drowning them out. They had a wild conviction that something or somebody was attempting to stymie their prayers.

  But they would not be deterred. Sheer terror spurred them on, and prayer seemed the only course to adopt. They wanted desperately for their prayers to be effective against the evil—they felt certain it was evil—that was encroaching on their home.

  They began a second rosary. Hardly had Shane recited the opening words than the banging on the front door started up again. He flinched. Even upstairs, the blows were deafening, seeming to resound throughout the house. They stopped, but the screeching from outside the window continued unabated and undiminished.

  And then, momentarily, it died away. Now it was replaced by a frenetic rapping at the window. It was too much; they had to abandon the rosary. The “intruder” had won.

  The couple hurried to look in on the children again, believing that the racket was bound to have awakened them. But, incredibly, as before, they slept on undisturbed. Shane could only conclude that some force was exercising control over their waking and sleeping.

  The siege of the Dwyer home—the screaming and wailing, the urgent rapping on windows and doors—continued all through the night.

  “It would switch itself off and on every half an hour or so,” says Shane. “The wailing in particular alerted us to the possibility that it might be a banshee, so I telephoned my family to check that everyone was okay.”