The Dark Sacrament

by David Kiely

  She tried to picture her mother seated with her back to the window, as she had been sitting that day. She would be nursing a cup of tea—a cup, never a mug—with a small plate of chocolate cookies at hand. She would be wearing the minimum of make-up. She needed her hair done; Angela had made the appointment for her the previous day. She had taken off her apron and was wearing her dowdy old beige housedress. She was stirring her tea; when thinking hard about something, she would spend a ridiculously long time stirring her tea.

  “Don’t make the same mistake I did, love,” she was saying. “Don’t make the same mistake I did.”

  It was Angela’s “mantra,” her equivalent of Barry’s father’s nautical instruction. Over and over, she had imagined her mother saying it, had concentrated on the lips moving, on the work-worn fingers gripping the spoon as she stirred her tea, on the pale yellow blind on the window, on the metronomic tick-tock of the old kitchen clock. She had become very proficient at it.

  “Don’t make the same mistake I did, love.”

  Somebody coughed softly. Angela thought for an instant that the sound came from her own throat but knew then it was Barry. So caught up had she been in her visualization exercise that she had blanked him out entirely.

  She sat up, annoyed.

  “Why did you do that?” she demanded.

  “Look,” Barry produced a pillbox from his pocket. He held out a tiny white tablet. “Take this,” he said. “Acid.”

  “Barry, I told you before: I don’t do drugs!”

  “But you drink, don’t you!” he shouted, his face contorting with rage. “It’s the same bloody thing. And it’s only half a tab.”

  “I was so shocked,” she recalls. “The calm Barry had turned into that awful creature again, the one I hoped I’d never have to see again. He just wasn’t himself. I know people say that about guys who do awful things, but in Barry’s case it was literally true. I was scared of him. I knew that if I didn’t take the LSD, something terrible was going to happen. I’d no option.”

  She took the pill and lay back down on the bed, trying not to show how frightened she was. She applied the meditation techniques, but it was hard to relax. Barry had unnerved her.

  Then, perhaps a half hour later, the LSD began to take effect. It was like nothing she had ever experienced. It was as though she were stepping outside reality, entering a place that obeyed other laws….

  And all at once she was there. It was no dream, no figment of her imagination, no restored memory. Angela had awoken in the kitchen of 1988. There sat her mother, Nuala Brehen, looking remarkably youthful—incongruously youthful, until Angela remembered with surprise that, in 1988, Nuala was about the same age as she herself was in 2004. She could very well have been looking across at herself.

  “Don’t make the same mistake I did, love.”

  “What mistake is that, Mommy?”

  Angela could not believe that she had spoken the words. Yet her own larynx had formed them; she had heard and felt them emerging from her lips. Except that the lips did not belong to her, not really. They were those of a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl. She looked at her hands. They were slim and svelte, the skin smooth and as yet unblemished by “liver spots” and damage the summer sun would wreak. She raised a hand to her hair and felt it long and lank; the trips to expensive hairdressers would come later.

  She was really there. She had done it. She had achieved the inconceivable: she had transferred her consciousness to the person she once had been.

  “Well done,” a voice said. “Oh, very well done, Angela. And there is so much more to be done. So much you can accomplish here.”

  It was the woman’s voice again, the one with the Galway City accent. It was coming from everywhere and nowhere, speaking with that same sibilance and breathy quality. Her master, her guide, her oversoul.

  But her mother was speaking again, cutting across the words of her spirit guide.

  “I don’t want you to go wasting your life, love,” Nuala Brehen was saying. “Me, I didn’t really have a say in the matter. But times were different then. My mother was a slave all her life, you know. She slaved for her husband and she slaved for us. She took me aside one time, the same way I’m doing now with you, and—”

  “Angela!”

  “—gave me the same advice I’m—”

  “Angela! Angela, come back now.”

  Her mother’s face was blurring, her words growing indistinct and garbled. Angela heard them as though they were being transmitted through a tank of water. The contours and colors of the kitchen were giving way to blackness. A voice was speaking softly at her ear.

  She opened her eyes to find Barry McNulty’s face swimming above her own, pale in the semidarkness of the room. She was back. She felt betrayed.

  “For heaven’s sake! Couldn’t you wait?”

  As soon as the words were out, she was regretting her folly. Now she would have to face his dark side. She felt strange, too; the drug was still exerting its power. She was not herself.

  But Barry showed no anger, only concern.

  “Wait?” he said. “I waited nearly three hours! We agreed on a limit of two, Angela. But you looked so normal lying there. I didn’t want to spoil anything.”

  “It can’t have been three hours. It felt like ten minutes.”

  “Trust me—it was three hours.”

  “I want to go back.”

  “Angela, it’s one o’clock. Maybe we should call it a night.”

  “To hell with that. I was doing so well, and you ruined it.”

  “Well, thanks very much. I was just sticking to our agreement.”

  “I want to try again. I may not get this chance again. I saw her, Barry. I spoke to her. She was as real as you are now.”

  “Your mother?”

  “You were right all along. It is possible. Oh, Barry, this thing is huge! This has to be about the most important breakthrough of its kind. I have to go back there.”

  Angela did go back, though not that night. Try as she might, she could not recapture the circumstances of that first excursion into her past. A week went by, then another, before Barry returned to her home.

  “I thought he was making me suffer because I’d been successful and he hadn’t. But it was all part of the game. I knew and he knew that the LSD had enabled my transition. In the end I had to ask him to let me have more and stay by me while I made a second attempt.”

  When he did come again, it was with the stated objective of returning Angela to the point at which she had left off. He said that he was going to learn from her. She was the pioneer, the one who had opened the door to untold possibility.

  As before, Angela took the drug and entered that state of “other” consciousness. Barry sat by the bed in the darkened room, on hand, as it were, to help in case of unexpected difficulties.

  “Don’t make the same mistake I did, love.”

  She was there in less time than it had taken before—so rapidly, in fact, that the “transfer” left her slightly dazed and disoriented.

  The selfsame tableau presented itself, as though she had never left it. There was her mother endlessly stirring her tea, like some fragment of film endlessly looping. And in a sense it was a good analogy; Angela was indeed returning to a moment that would always be there, to be played back endlessly by she who had discovered the secret mechanism. Now she wished to go beyond that moment.

  “I didn’t, Mommy,” she said, through the mouth of her younger self.

  Nuala Brehen stopped her stirring and frowned. “You didn’t what, Angela?”

  “I didn’t make the same mistake. I never married, you see. I never had children. I went out and got a job.”

  “What are you talking about, love? Sure you’re not making any sense at all.”

  Angela was going to make the most of the situation; she was going to exploit her newfound power to the full. She left the table, reveling in the feel of a body that was at once alien and somehow familiar. She was moving with you
thful grace and lack of effort, could feel the potency of the energy in her limbs. She had forgotten how it felt to be that age—and yet the tragedy of being that age, she knew, was that only in later life, when it is much too late, does one appreciate it.

  She turned back to the woman seated at the table.

  “What’s got into you, Angela? You’re acting very strange.”

  Should she tell her? Would her mother believe her? No, of course not. It was insane. She sat down again and looked long at Nuala Brehen. She felt such a surge of love for this middle-aged woman who had once been her darling mother. She could sense her thoughts and emotions, because in her “other,” older existence she shared a great many of them.

  For the first time ever, she sensed how it must have been to be her mother. Pregnant at seventeen and a half, married at eighteen, Nuala had never known the freedom of carefree, unattached young womanhood.

  “Mommy, I want you to know that I love you. You’re a wonderful woman.”

  Nuala stood up, hands automatically brushing her skirt for stray crumbs. Angela could sense that she had embarrassed her.

  “I’ll put the kettle on,” she said. “Would you like another?”

  “I’ll do it. You sit down there now. You never relax, Mommy. You’re always on the go.”

  Angela went to the stove, reached for the still-warm kettle, and brought it to the sink. She was smiling to herself as she allowed the tap water to gush into it. It felt so extraordinary to be there, at that time, in that place. She glanced left and right, seeing the sun come slanting in at the window, illuminating the old, worn cupboards….

  But—wait a minute. The cupboards were not old and worn; they were her own modern ones. She looked to the left of the window where the sepia-tinted picture of her grandfather used to hang. It was no longer there.

  Angela stopped what she was doing, perplexed, the ghost of a suspicion forming. She turned off the tap and set the kettle down. She looked again at the wall.

  It should have been magnolia, not canary yellow. In 1988 the kitchen walls were magnolia, gone dull in places, grease spattered in others, smoke darkened above the stove.

  But she was seeing yellow walls. A decade would pass before she had them painted yellow.

  She turned and studied the back of the woman seated at the table. Nuala Brehen was reaching for a cookie—a chocolate cookie.

  Two years before her death, Nuala Brehen was diagnosed with diabetes. She was immediately prohibited from eating chocolate.

  “I felt a tingling all over my face right then,” Angela says. “I knew there was something desperately wrong.”

  A moment later, she heard the mysterious voice again, which she had identified as belonging to her “oversoul.” It was speaking soothingly, coming from all corners of the kitchen, even from the ceiling.

  “Look again, Angela; look again,” it was saying.

  She looked, and the walls were no longer yellow but magnolia—good old safe magnolia. The cupboards were once again old and worn, and her grandfather’s picture was hanging in its rightful place. But she was having no more of this. She sensed a terrible danger.

  “I was panicking,” she says. “I was afraid of what might happen to me. Maybe I felt I might die or something horrible. I started to shout. I was shouting things like “Jesus, help me! Let me out of here!” I saw my mother turn to look at me and then I was shown the most horrifying vision.”

  Angela falters, on the verge of tears as she tries to describe the indescribable.

  “I was shown what the progression of death had done to my poor mother’s body. It was done in a kind of time-lapsed sort of way, and no matter what I did, I could still see it. I could even smell it. I squeezed my eyes shut, but I could still see everything. Then I heard that voice again and it said…I’ll never forget the words. It said, ‘See, Angela: no soul, no God, no afterlife. Only death, only death!’

  “I remember screaming ‘no!’ over and over.”

  Through her own frantic shouts she heard a third voice, a male voice, close at hand. It was derisive, mocking. She heard laughter and words she could not comprehend.

  The bright kitchen was darkening, as though it were sinking slowly to the bottom of a murky pond. With it went her mother’s eyeless corpse, still standing there, its head cocked at an angle, the ravaged lips mouthing silent words.

  She felt her body grow heavy, as though it were filling up with water or some other liquid. She opened her eyes to see Barry McNulty. He was sprawled in the chair, head thrown back, laughing insanely.

  Angela stumbled from the room, down the stairs, and out into the safety of the street. To this day she has no memory of what happened after that. Later, she was told that a neighbor found her wandering barefoot, shouting and screaming that the Devil was in her home.

  She was taken by ambulance to the local hospital.

  Angela spent three days in their care. They pumped her stomach. They told her that she had overdosed on drugs, that she was lucky she had not harmed herself, that she might have died. She was discharged with a caution and a lecture.

  “I didn’t dare tell them the real story. They would have had me locked up. But Barry McNulty was the one who needed locking up, not me. The first thing I did when I got home was to sit down and write him a letter, telling him in no uncertain terms that if he ever came anywhere near me again, I’d have him arrested for stalking.” Angela sighs heavily. “God, I was so naive to think it was that simple. I overlooked the fact that his powers went way beyond the physical.”

  Her problems began soon after she mailed the letter.

  “It started with little things,” she says, “very subtle at first, so that I thought it was just my own forgetfulness. I’d keep losing or misplacing things, like my keys or handbag. One day I found my make-up bag in the cutlery drawer…and I really got worried. Was I going mad? Another day I came home from work to find the front door unlocked. I always double-locked it. Always.

  “My first thought was Barry McNulty. Everything kept building and building. After that the nightmares started. In my dreams I kept being returned to that awful scene in the kitchen. One night I thought I saw that terrible image of my mother standing beside my bed. Then the phone would ring at all hours. Sleep became impossible. God, it was a living hell. I just wanted to die—to put an end to it all. My work suffered; everything suffered. There was no way I was going back to the doctor. I knew that medication and a spell in hospital were no cure for what I was suffering. Oh, how I regretted ever having dealings with Barry McNulty! He was grinding me down, so that I’d come to him for help.”

  Matters came to a head before too long. When they did, Angela was to discover just how powerful Barry was and how potent were the forces he had at his bidding. She was getting ready for bed one night. All seemed normal—until she sensed that there was something in the room with her.

  “I was pulling my nightdress over my head, when all of a sudden this…thing was behind me.” She struggles to describe it. “God, I really can’t put into words how awful it felt. It didn’t feel human; it felt like it was going to swallow me up. I knew, I just knew that if I turned around to look, something terrible would happen.”

  There were three other bedrooms in the house. She would sleep elsewhere. But, no matter where she went, the menace followed her.

  “I knew it was Barry who was doing it. He was taking his revenge for the letter and showing how he could control me. So I started pleading with him to take it away, whatever it was he’d sent to my house. I was convinced he could hear me. I told him I hadn’t meant to send the letter. I was crying and screaming for him to help me. I would have done anything at that point to be rid of that thing.”

  It seemed that her pleas were answered. Within minutes, as Angela lay slumped on the bed, sobbing, she sensed the presence departing.

  The telephone rang. She suspected who the caller was and knew she had to answer it.

  “Barry? Is that you?”

  For a mome
nt or two there was silence. Then the laughter started. It erupted from the receiver, hysterical laughter that grew louder and louder, until it filled her head and—it seemed to Angela—the house itself.

  She slammed down the phone. She went upstairs, took two sleeping pills, lay down, and soon fell into a groggy half-sleep.

  But her ordeal was far from over. Sometime later, she was awakened by noises outside the bedroom door. She sat up in alarm. Somebody was pacing up and down the landing.

  “Pacing is maybe the wrong word,” Angela explains. “It was more like someone dragging their feet…a stocky man with a gammy leg. There was wooden flooring on the landing, so I could hear these heavy boots echoing through the house.”

  She was distraught. She dared not put the light on, lest the sliver of light coming from under the door betray her whereabouts. In the circumstances, she did the only thing she could do. She groped her way to the door and quietly locked it.

  The dragging feet could be heard at the far end of the corridor. Angela got back into bed and sat in the darkness, holding her breath. She heard the heavy boots turn and begin the slow trudge up the corridor again. She prayed that the footfalls would somehow stop at the staircase and continue down the stairs.

  They did not.

  “Oh, Jesus, help me!” she whispered over and over to herself.

  The dragging footsteps approached her bedroom door. They stopped.

  Angela clamped a hand over her mouth. Inwardly, she was screaming, but she must somehow contain her fear. Whatever it was that stood on the other side of the door seemed to know how to induce the utmost terror in her.

  She waited—and waited—trembling.

  All at once, there came a frenetic scratching and scraping at the door. She describes it as being “like the paws or claws of an animal trying desperately to get in.” It was the last thing Angela heard.

  “I passed out,” she says. “Now I know what’s meant by the phrase ‘I nearly died of fright.’ That night I came as close as anyone could to doing just that.”

  “You do know,” Father Ignatius McCarthy said, “that it’s a bad idea to try to communicate with the dead? That’s why I advise people not to attend seances or that sort of thing. Jesus warned against it. You’re taking a risk.”