The Dark Sacrament

by David Kiely

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.

  “He never got on with one of his daughters,” Malachi confides. “The oldest one. I don’t know what was going on there. It could be anything. He’d talk about things in front of the girls that wouldn’t be nice among adults. He’d always have language that wasn’t good, or yarns and dirty stories, always of a sexual nature. Given what he did to me, I would say that it wasn’t only physical abuse those children suffered at his hands. He could be terrible obscene. I don’t know how many times I saw him even going to the toilet in front of his daughters.”

  Malachi sees our confusion. He explains.

  “I’d be in his back garden. In the summer, like, maybe he’d have a barbecue.” He shakes his head sadly. “He wasn’t all bad, you know. But he’d be after drinking I don’t know how many cans of lager and be wanting to go to the toilet. So in front of the girls he’d open his pants and let go against the hedge or something. It was a strange thing to do, but Charlie saw no harm in it.” Malachi pauses, reflecting. “Or maybe he did know it was wrong, and did it out of divilment. He was like that. The children were afraid of him. They were always very quiet, never a peep out of them.”

  He continues his account of the June evening in 2001. Charlie Sherrin had appeared to be his customary complaining self, but there was nothing out of the ordinary that Malachi could see. They had drunk a glass of whiskey and Malachi had poured another, finishing the bottle. He turned to fetch the water jug. Then something happened that made his blood run cold. All at once, he was right back in Egypt, hearing once again the ear-splitting howl of the demoniac, Walter Ehrlich.

  Charlie Sherrin was squealing like a pig.

  The pig has had a hard time of it throughout history. In at least two major religions, the animal is looked upon as an “unclean” creature whose flesh is denied to the faithful. There is no satisfactory reason for this, despite repeated attempts by Jewish and Islamic scholars to justify the proscription on the basis of biological or nutritional science. Yet pigs crop up often in cases of demonic disturbance.

  In addition, devils and satyrs were traditionally depicted with cloven, piglike hoofs. No doubt the oft-quoted biblical story of the Gadarene swine did much to associate the pig with the demonic in the Christian consciousness. The fact remains, however, that pig sounds are identified with several of the most notorious episodes of diabolic infestation. They were reported in one of the most shocking: the Smurl family in Pennsylvania, a haunting that lasted many years. At the height of the disturbances, porcine noises were heard coming from within the walls of the family’s home.

  Malachi froze on hearing the blood-curdling squeal. But, before he could react, he felt a tremendous blow to the back of his skull. Only later did he conclude that Charlie Sherrin had struck him with the empty whiskey bottle. He passed out.

  When he recovered consciousness, he was lying outside on his front lawn. Evidently Charlie had dragged him there.

  “He proceeded to kick me. He kicked me very badly,” Malachi recalls.

  In fact, the attack was so vicious that the victim required six days of hospitalization. Malachi, dazed and bewildered, lay screaming on the grass as the neighbor assaulted him most brutally. He was dimly conscious of Blenny emerging from the house, of his neighbors, Jim and Margaret, running down the garden path that separates their property from his own. He remembers all three attempting to pull Charlie off him. It proved impossible. He seemed to have the strength of ten men. Malachi heard Blenny scream a
s she was flung across the grass. Margaret and Jim suffered a similar fate.

  But Malachi’s nightmare was only beginning. His hands are shaking as he relives that terrible night and relates what occurred next.

  “Charlie pulled the clothes off me,” he says. “I couldn’t believe what was happening. It was like it was happening to somebody else. He tried to have sex with me—there’s no other word for it. He was trying to have sex with me. I was semiconscious, and I couldn’t move. The weight of him was indescribable. It was like I had the weight of a big plow horse lying on top of me.”

  Then the unbelievable—and truly terrifying—took place. As Malachi lay on his front lawn, in great pain and with his clothing in disarray, he was aware of something extraordinary happening to the ground itself, within a radius of three feet of him. It was slowly splitting open.

  “When Charlie was on top of me he kept trying to force my face into the ground, but I managed to keep my head up so that my chin got buried instead. That way I was just about able to breathe. With my head in that position and my body paralyzed, the only part of me I could move were my eyes, or so I thought. I could see this big curved gash opening up in front of me, and I knew something dreadful was about to appear. I tried to squeeze my eyes shut, but I couldn’t…I just couldn’t.”

  The vision that Malachi was forced to witness was indeed more dreadful than anything he could have imagined. Five objects began to rise slowly out of the earth. They formed a rough semicircle about him and the man who was trying to sodomize him. Though maddened by pain, Malachi was in no doubt as to what the objects were. They were human heads.

  “They were terrible looking. It was the grotesque face that I’d seen in Egypt multiplied five times—only worse. These faces were disfigured: all sores, terrible teeth and mouths, and they were all biting, like biting towards me. It was like a vision from hell, worse than anything you could ever dream about, and the stench coming from them was terrible. They just rose up out of the ground, staring at me, trying to attack me—but they couldn’t because they had no bodies that I could see. Just the heads. I’ll never forget them. I thought I was going to die at that moment. I was calling out to my wife and Jim and Margaret. The heads were shrieking. It was as if they were waiting for Charlie to kill me. Like I was some sort of offering that he was making to them.”

  It is an astonishing account of a near-apocalyptic vision, the agony of a severely traumatized man. But, leaving aside for a moment the most bizarre aspect—the nightmarish heads—the account is shocking. On a calm summer’s evening a neighbor suddenly goes berserk. Without provocation, he attacks a man who has always been kind to him; he drags him out in front of his home, strips him, and tries to rape him in the presence of his wife and next-door neighbors. It defies belief.

  Malachi remembers that, for a moment, the great weight pressing down upon him relaxed. He found his voice.

  “Jesus, help me!” he cried out. “Jesus, help me!”

  At the sound of his entreaties, Charlie Sherrin abruptly left off his attack. The ghoulish heads, their mouths still opening and shutting obscenely, began to retract into the earth. Malachi felt the weight on his body ease a little further. But his ordeal was not yet at an end. Suddenly, the hair on his scalp was being yanked upward with great violence. Before he knew what was happening, his abuser was crouched down in front of him, their faces almost touching.

  But the face that confronted Malachi was no longer that of his attacker. He was looking into features that resembled those of the hideous heads. He began to scream uncontrollably. Charlie thrust his victim’s face into the earth to muffle his screams and turned to address the onlookers.

  “We’re not finished yet!” he crowed. “We’re going to make an example of Malachi.” In an eerily calm voice, he told them in obscene detail what he intended to do.

  Malachi was reminded of another frightening parallel with the Egypt incident: the use of the word we. He remembered the pastor’s words: “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 pastor had good grounds for saying this. The Gospels of Luke and Mark record how Christ came upon a possessed man who evidently lived in a cemetery. On being asked his identity, he replied, “My name is Legion.” Luke explains the curious name: “He said Legion because many devils were entered into him.”

  Charlie Sherrin returned his attention to his victim and attempted to enact that which he had just described. Malachi shakes more than ever as he recalls the brutal rape. Mercifully, it seems to have been over quickly. At last, his terrible work done, Charlie left without a word. When the coast was clear, Blenny and the others rushed to Malachi’s side and helped him into the house.

  “They got me in the door,” he says. “I couldn’t get up the stairs and lay there very badly broke up. Blenny got the doctor for me. He took me into hospital.”

  Malachi told the doctors and nursing staff that he had fallen down. No one believed him; his injuries were not consistent with a fall. It was evident that he had been attacked. They asked him if he knew the identity of his attacker. He lied. They asked him again. Somebody wanted to alert the police but Malachi stubbornly refused to involve the authorities. Even in his suffering—and despite the appalling sense of shame and outrage the assault had engendered—he still had consideration for Charlie Sherrin’s daughters, and had no wish to cause them hardship.

  As Malachi lay recovering in the hospital, his mind was a riot of thoughts, all frantically trying to explain his neighbor’s atrocious and thoroughly unprovoked conduct. He could find no explanation.

  It did occur to him, however, that it might not have been the first time that Charlie had assaulted a man in this way. The more he thought about it, the more little memories of him began to stir. He was remembering certain words and actions and hints dropped by the children and others….

  Yet Malachi is an unusually forgiving and understanding man. When, three days following the attack, Charlie came to visit him in the hospital, he received him without rancor. Charlie, for his part, denied any recollection of the incident. He looked with dismay at Malachi’s bruises, some healed, many not. Malachi insists that he almost saw compassion in that look—compassion mixed with remorse.

  “I don’t remember a thing,” he said.

  “Well, I do!” Malachi told him. “Why did you do it, Charlie?”

  “I honestly can’t remember a thing,” he insisted. And with that he jumped up from his chair and hurriedly left the ward. That was the last time Malachi spoke to him. Six uneasy years have now passed.

  “My trouble didn’t stop there,” Malachi Gant says. “The heads gave me an awful turn and I couldn’t forget them. They kept returning to haunt me.”

  It is undoubtedly the motif of the grisly heads that transforms the case of a man being attacked by a deranged neighbor into something altogether more sinister. One’s initial response to such outlandish accounts must be to query the state of mind of the narrator at the time. Certainly Malachi, by his own admission, was in no fit state to think clearly. He had been knocked senseless by a blow to the head, dragged from his home, and kicked mercilessly in the head as well as the rest of his body. He was dazed. In such a state of disorientation it is easy to imagine things. Yet a vision of ghastly heads, such as Malachi claims to have seen, seems to belong more properly to the realms of drug-induced hallucination than a vision brought on by pain. Not even the horrors reported by those experiencing delirium tremens come close to this description. It has more in common with the terrible visions recounted by the saints and mystics of antiquity.

  In short, the heads are the false note in the story. The vision is easily discounted—and would have been, had Malachi’s story ended there. It did not. Some weeks after the attack, when he had recovered from his injuries, he had another ordeal. Fearful though it was, it was infinitely more benign than the first.

  Father Ignatius McCarthy’s monaster
y is in the next county. Over the years, Malachi was a frequent visitor. He would give his services freely to the monks when they needed odd jobs done or—as was often the case—when they required the use of a power tool.

  He was drawn to that place for two reasons: he found spiritual renewal there, and he could look in on an old school friend, Brother Canice. The two were very close. In adult life the monk had become Malachi’s confidant. Whenever Malachi experienced a crisis of faith—no matter how big or how insignificant—Brother Canice would unfailingly set him on the right path again.

  Brother Canice died on New Year’s Day, 2000, a few minutes after midnight. Malachi was glad that his old friend saw a “little bit of the millennium.” “He was fascinated by the idea. It meant more to him than most of us. He loved the notion of Jesus going into a third millennium. It’s what he’d always prayed for.”

  Since the incident in his front garden, Malachi had been tormented by memories of the terrible heads. He had nightmares about them, and on occasion would awaken to find that the horrible vision was still with him, the tableau of the ring of heads appearing suspended in the air above his bed. He prayed often and long for deliverance from them. One night in early September 2001, when the nightmare had seemed more real—and more threatening—than ever, something roused him.

  “I was staring in terror at the heads above me,” he says, “when I realized there was a figure standing by the bedside. I looked up and saw Brother Canice. He was as real as you are now. He was looking down at me and smiling. I think he had a pair of rosary beads in his hand. When I looked again, the terrible heads were gone, and from that time on I never saw them again. That was all due to Brother Canice. I’m sure of it.”

  The attack in June was proving more devastating than Malachi had imagined. Not only did his mental health suffer but there was a physical deterioration as well. It was as though something was attacking his entire person, as a virus will enter the body and work its deadly way through the various organs and cell systems. That summer, Malachi was laid low with a raft of minor ailments, from head colds to muscle pains to inexplicable rashes. He had always had a strong constitution and was dismayed to find himself visiting his doctor sometimes twice a week. Dr. Moran could find no immediate cause beyond what he called “the onset of old age.” Perhaps of most concern was Malachi’s sudden weight loss. He had lost more than twenty pounds in eight weeks.