The Dark Sacrament

by David Kiely

  THE WOMAN WHO LEFT HER BODY AT WILL

  Angela Brehen was seventeen years old when she had her first taste of astral travel. At the time she did not call it that. In fact, she could not call it anything at all, because throughout the morning following the occurrence, she was almost speechless with terror. She imagined that she had died, so frightening was the experience.

  It was 1988 and Angela was a high-school student in Galway City. She was in her senior year, preparing to take her final examination. There was little to set her apart from the other girls attending the school; she was bright, but not exceptionally so. She had decided on a career: she planned on pursuing business studies and graduating from college before her twenty-first birthday, when she hoped to have a full-time job in Dublin—or England, perhaps.

  On Saturday, March 19, Angela finished her homework at about eight o’clock, watched some television, and went to bed around eleven. The family home was some two miles from the center of town, the last house in a quiet cul-de-sac. Her young brothers were already in bed, and she heard her parents retire about twenty minutes later.

  She awoke while it was still dark. Angela knew almost instinctively that it was long before time to get up; she did not even have to look at her bedside clock. She was lying on her back, the position she always found most comfortable. But there was something different about the room.

  It was nothing visible. As her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, she could make out the familiar contents of her room: the posters on the walls, the dresser with the mirror, her closet, the chair with her jeans draped over it. All was as it should have been. But there was something “funny” about the room, a sense that a change had taken place since she switched off the light. She closed her eyes again—and within seconds was wide awake, and very fearful.

  She describes the sensation as something she “half felt and half heard,” almost impossible to explain. It seemed to her that a force was approaching the place where she lay.

  “It was like a storm that was coming,” she says, “but not a violent one, nothing big or anything. I seemed to sense it coming to the house from a long way off. Something in my head was telling me that this force could go right through walls, and that it was coming for me.”

  The “force” entered Angela’s bedroom; it appeared to hover some distance from the foot of her bed and several feet off the floor. She was terror-struck. She shut her eyes tight, afraid of what she might see.

  In the next few moments, it seemed to her that something within her was resonating with the force that had entered her room. She felt a wave pulsing slowly up and down her body, traveling from head to toe. The sensation was, again, a heady mix of sound and feeling.

  She felt the force inside her quickening, the vibration coursing up and down her body. She was terrified. And when she felt her body being launched into space, she knew the dread of death, because she was convinced at that moment that she was indeed dying, or had died already. That her soul was leaving her body.

  “All sorts of mad ideas came into my head,” Angela recalls. “I suppose I was a religious girl in a basic sort of way, though I can’t remember praying very much outside of a church. But I did believe in God and heaven and the angels, all of that. I believed that when we die we go to heaven. I was convinced that the force I felt coming for me was the Angel of Death taking me off to heaven. But the last thing I wanted to do was die. I was seventeen, a kid. I was too young to die!”

  In a strange sense, she was conscious of the “being” that was Angela, as it somehow swept up out of her body at a steep angle. Too fearful to open her eyes, she asked herself if her soul had eyes at all. Yet her frightened mind was telling her that this new “body” it was occupying was identical to the one that lay on the bed behind and below her.

  And then she passed through the ceiling and roof of the house, and she could “see.”

  With her new eyes, she looked in awe at a sight that was new to her. Spread out below was the development where her home stood. She saw the roofs, the street lamps, the trees, roads, and swards of grass. She saw it all as if she were a bird.

  In other circumstances, Angela would have been enchanted by the whole experience. Which of us has not at some time longed to freely take to the air, to experience the liberation of unassisted flight? And here she was—“flying.” Not, however, in her physical body, but in something very much different. She was convinced more than ever that she had died.

  This conviction shocked her into opening her eyes at last. As in the case of a “falling” dream, Angela experienced a sudden drop to earth. She was back in her bed, with the yellow light from the street picking out the familiar objects in her bedroom. Her heart was pounding, she was sweating—but she was glad to be alive.

  She thought of praying, of giving thanks to God for her safe “return.” But she did not really believe in the power of prayer. Her family was not devout. Each Sunday, the Brehens paid lip service by attending Mass, but for Angela religion was a school subject and little more.

  She told no one about the unsettling experience, not even her best friend, Rhoda. Throughout the next day and in the weeks that followed, Angela puzzled over the bizarre episode. She had no ready explanation other than that she had been dreaming. And yet, the more she considered that possibility, the more implausible it seemed.

  “I think we know when we’re dreaming,” she argues. “Even if it’s a really vivid dream we still know it’s only a dream. I was convinced that this was something else entirely. What kept on going through my head was that other people must have the same experience—that it wasn’t just me. But I’d no one to turn to. I’d have felt like a right idiot even talking about it. My folks would have had me locked up.”

  She could not let go of the notion that she had stumbled upon the existence of a hidden faculty, one lying dormant in every human being, its presence unknown to and unsuspected by all but a few. She wished she could put a name on this remarkable capability.

  The more she dwelled on it and the more she recalled the wild exhilaration of that night, the less her fear of it became. By and by, she found herself wishing that the strange “force,” which had plucked her from her bed and transported her into the unknown, would visit her again.

  The Leaving Certificate examination was looming. Angela and her friend Rhoda made a trip to Dublin; they needed copies of old exams to study from. Their school had distributed the copies they had, leaving a few students without papers. The girls arranged to visit the educational bookstores and procure the necessary copies; they were going to Dublin anyway, to stay with Rhoda’s aunt.

  The friends “got the boring business out of the way” quite quickly. Rhoda wanted to visit the clothes shops, but Angela had little interest in fashion. They parted company; they would rendezvous at the bus stop on Nassau Street. Angela returned to her favorite pastime: browsing the bookstores for bargains.

  She happened upon the worn paperback in an equally worn shop down a side street. It had been placed on the wrong shelf. Its jacket showed two men of the East in silhouette and a snowcapped mountain; within the blackness of their forms a universe of stars was visible. The title was You Forever, and the author gloried in the unforgettable name of Tuesday Lobsang Rampa. She turned it over.

  Rampa…provides step by step instructions for enhancing your psychic abilities. The book is designed so you can work at your own pace to develop intuition, see auras, travel in the astral plane, see clairvoyantly, and make your life happier and more comfortable.

  She paused over that curious phrase “travel in the astral plane.” It excited her imagination. She wondered if those words might not hold the key to her extraordinary experience on that Saturday night in March. She flipped through the book; unfamiliar terms jockeyed for her attention. The author was promising considerably more than “astral travel.” There was psychometry, self-hypnosis, telepathy. Well, mused Angela, if they’re all part of the package, then so much the better. And in his foreword, the m
an with the wonderful name appeared to speak to her directly, to flatter her into believing that she was truly somebody special.

  Let’s at the outset state definitely that woman is the equal of man in all matters—including those relating to the esoteric and extrasensory realms. Women, in fact, often have brighter auras and a greater capacity for appreciation of the various facets of metaphysics.

  Somebody bumped up against her in the narrow confines of the shop. The book slipped from her hands.

  “Ah, sorry about that.”

  The young man ducked to retrieve it. He was perhaps twenty. His long hair, unkempt beard, and sloppy clothing marked him as a college student. He was carrying a shabby leather briefcase. He studied the book’s jacket.

  “That’s a good one,” he said, handing it to her. “I have all his books. It’s very interesting stuff.”

  The young man was earnest and keen. She thought she knew the type. They were given to talking too much and smoking foul-smelling, hand-rolled cigarettes. All were too opinionated for Angela’s liking. Yet this individual seemed not to fit the mold.

  “He’s actually English,” he said.

  “Who?” She had not been listening.

  “Lobsang Rampa. Claims he’s the reincarnation of some Tibetan monk or other. And who knows, maybe he is. He sure knows his stuff, anyway.” He seemed to blush slightly. “Are you interested in…eh…that kind of thing?”

  “Depends what you mean by—”

  “Meditation, out-of-the-body stuff.” Angela must have betrayed her interest because he followed with, “Can I buy you a pint?”

  “I don’t drink,” she said quickly. And, she was thinking, if I did I would not be drinking pints of beer. “And I don’t even know you.”

  “Barry.” He extended a hand. “Barry McNulty.”

  “Angela Brehen. I’m with a friend, though. I’ll be—”

  “Your boyfriend?”

  “No. I haven’t got a boyfriend.”

  The words were out before she had considered them, and she saw that the young man was interpreting them as an invitation. She was too young then to know how to respond; she had little experience with boys. Besides, Barry was not her type. She wanted to end the conversation, get out of the store somehow.

  “Look, I’ve got to go,” she said impatiently.

  He looked hurt. She felt that she had to make it up to him. But he was there before her, with another proposal.

  “Why don’t I give you my phone number?” he said. “Next time you’re up in Dublin you might give me a call.”

  She nodded. He produced a ballpoint and patted his pockets. He hesitated, began to open his briefcase.

  “Oh, write it here,” Angela said, passing him the book.

  “But it’s not your book,” he said with a grin.

  “It will be in a minute.”

  And it was. Barry McNulty inscribed both his phone number and address on the half-title page of You Forever. She left the store and left Dublin, and many years would pass before she saw him again.

  For three weeks, Angela struggled with the lessons contained in the tattered paperback, following each one to the letter. None seemed to work. She had so longed to reprise her exhilarating nocturnal “flight.” Dr. Rampa had as good as promised that she could release the hidden faculty whose existence she had guessed at. But she could not induce an “astral” flight through the meditation techniques he recommended. At the end of the three weeks, she had concluded that Tuesday Lobsang Rampa was a fraud. She consigned the book to a back corner of her closet and forgot about it.

  Within a month of her Dublin trip, Angela’s life changed utterly. Reality intruded, making her dalliances with the paranormal seem petty and frivolous. Without warning, her mother died. She had been diagnosed with diabetes, but no one had suspected the hypertension that led to a fatal stroke. Nuala Brehen lingered in the hospital bed for six days and then was gone.

  Angela’s father never recovered. Nuala had been his childhood sweetheart. On her death, he went into a morbid depression that refused to lift. He started drinking heavily—an unusual departure. His personality seemed to change accordingly. Within six months of Nuala’s death, he was a wreck. His health declined, he lost his job, and he became a housebound semi-invalid—and a very angry one at that.

  “What sort of a God is it,” he would rant, “who’d take a good woman like your mother and leave the shower of wasters we have running the country? There’s no bloody God at all if you ask me.”

  Angela’s faith was likewise shaken. Although she continued to believe in God, she could not accept the seeming injustice he had meted out. By this time, she had left high school and was about to start a course in business studies at University College Galway. She canceled, put it on hold. She took a part-time job in a drugstore in town and devoted her free time to looking after her father, while keeping the home together. She found herself acting as a surrogate mother to her brothers, by then ages eight and nine.

  The part-time job became full-time. Before she knew it, Angela was in her thirties, holding down a job she had no love for and caring for a father who was increasingly a burden.

  Eventually he too died—by his own hand. Life no longer held meaning for him. Angela found him still and cold in his bed, early one February morning. An overdose of prescription drugs had put an end to his misery.

  Angela was alone. Her brothers were living in Dublin; both were married with young families. Of the Brehen siblings, only she remained unwed. It was 2004. She was thirty-three, overweight, prematurely gray—and badly disillusioned. It was not how the bright schoolgirl of seventeen had envisioned her future.

  Toward the middle of July of that year, three events took place in rapid succession. Angela could not help but conclude that all were in some way linked. The first occurred on a Sunday. Rhoda, her old schoolfriend, whom she had not seen in over a decade, telephoned out of the blue to say that she would be in Galway that afternoon. She was, she explained, “en route to Chicago,” and was looking in on her mother before catching a flight at Shannon Airport the following morning.

  “By this time,” Angela recalls, “Rhoda was ‘a woman of some importance,’ as she used to joke. She was a partner in a Dublin investment firm, earning heaps of money and living the life of a high-flyer. She never married either; said she’d no time for it. So there we were, the pair of us, meeting again after all that time. Rhoda bought us lunch and afterward we went to a hotel for a few drinks.”

  The few drinks became a colossal binge. Angela barely remembers the taxicab that brought her home that night. But clarity was to come later on, after she had slept for an hour or two.

  She awoke in great perturbation. She had had a strikingly lucid dream. It differed in almost every respect from her usual dreams, even the most vivid. This particular dream had all the hallmarks of an experience she recalled from a time long flown—from when she was a twelfth-grader preparing for her final examinations. Angela was as certain as she could be that she had undergone, in her dreaming state, an out-of-body experience.

  “I dreamed that I woke up in my dream,” she says, “and I was in a strange bedroom. I saw this woman in a white nightdress lying sprawled across the bed, fast asleep with half the bedclothes on the floor. Something about the room told me I’d been there before, and when I looked around me, I remembered that I’d spent so many days of my childhood doing homework with my best friend in that very room. The woman on the bed was Rhoda.

  “I remember laughing, because she looked so ludicrous lying there, with her mouth hanging open, dead to the world, as they say. ‘Drunken stupor’ were the words that came to mind.”

  Then the voice came. It seemed to fill not only the bedroom but Angela’s head as well, defying her to guess its origin. All the same, it was different, she thought, from the voices we sometimes hear in the course of our day: the imagined voices of our loved ones, voices remembered, voices we manufacture ourselves. We can always tell them apart from the ext
raneous, unwelcome voices. This voice was one of the latter. It was female, sibilant but not unpleasant, and it spoke with a strong Galway accent.

  “Rhoda won’t survive the week,” it said. “You won’t see her ever again.”

  Angela was horrified.

  “If I’d been in my skin I’d have jumped straight out of it,” she says with a thin smile. “But of course I wasn’t. The next thing I knew I was waking up in my own house, in my own bedroom, wondering what had happened to me. Had I dreamt it? But I knew I hadn’t, because I’d been in that sort of situation before. I knew it was all real.”

  Her first impulse was to telephone Rhoda’s house. But after consideration she dismissed the thought. Rhoda would be sound asleep—and no doubt lying in much the same position as Angela had seen her. The clock told her that it was a little before 4 a.m. Rhoda would not relish being roused at that hour, with a plane to catch later that morning. Her mother, a widow of some years’ standing, was elderly and in poor health. Angela could not bring herself to disturb her. And what reason, she wondered, could she provide? “Mrs. Delany, your daughter is in mortal danger; I was in her bedroom in my ethereal body and this voice spoke to me.” It was preposterous. Angela, head already beginning to throb with an incipient hangover, resolved to phone at a “respectable” hour, turned over, and eventually fell sleep.

  She was awakened by her bedside telephone ringing shrilly. She cursed aloud on seeing the time. She had overslept by almost two hours. It was the drugstore wondering if she was coming to work that day. She assured them she was on her way. And suddenly, as she was hurriedly getting herself ready, the full force of that terrible message, delivered by a discarnate voice, struck her foursquare.

  Rhoda was going to die.

  Angela shut her eyes tight, as she did when she was a child “to make the boogeyman go away.” It never worked then either. She told herself she was being silly, that she was making too much of what was—on reflection, in the sobering sanity of a Monday morning—more than likely an alcohol-induced nightmare. She hauled a brush through her hair, shrugged into her coat, grabbed her purse, and went to start the week.