The Dark Sacrament

by David Kiely

  Ed’s two younger brothers, Dan and Michael, were bachelors in their late twenties. They were plasterers by trade and worked in the family business. Their sister, Mary, the youngest sibling, worked in a daycare center. From the outset, all three made no secret of their dislike for Erin. Mary especially was highly critical of any changes she made in the home. Erin thought at first that her sister-in-law might be a sympathetic ally—she was, after all, the only girl in a family of boys—but Mary had other ideas. She seemed to resent the “intruder” who had the audacity to make a claim on her oldest brother’s affections.

  Dan and Michael were “odd”—Erin has no better word to describe them. They seemed incapable of holding a conversation and, when they tried to, could rarely maintain eye contact. For Erin, the effort to be friendly toward them was so taxing she gave up altogether. They were shy, she concluded; it was as simple as that. She got used to being ignored and was relieved to see them exit by the front door after they had visited their mother. Avoidance rather than embarrassment, she reasoned, was best all around.

  Father Lyons, however, was quite another matter. He was the parish priest, the only other visitor to the O’Gribben home, and for Erin a real enigma. A handsome man in his early forties, he did not fit the stereotype of the rural Irish priest. He seemed especially attentive to Mrs. O’Gribben’s needs, and called several mornings each week while on his rounds of the sick.

  What disconcerted Erin most was the freedom with which the priest came and went. He never bothered knocking but would materialize in the kitchen at any hour he pleased, grunt a greeting, and disappear into the patient’s room. Often he startled Erin by emerging from the mother’s bedroom when she had no inkling he was even in the house.

  The situation reached absurd heights one morning. Ed had left for work and Erin was dressing in the bedroom. She was intrigued to hear the upstairs toilet flush; it was at the end of the corridor. She peered out her door and was in time to see Father Lyons steal down the stairs. It was eight o’clock. What on earth, she wondered, was going on?

  “That made me so indignant,” she says, and it is plain to see that it still rankles almost a decade later. “After all, I was Ed’s wife, the ‘mistress of the house,’ even if ol’ Martha had other ideas. I thought it was a bit rich of Father Lyons, treating the house as his own. It just wasn’t on.”

  But he was a priest, and Erin’s upbringing dissuaded her from challenging him then and there. She was determined to do just that in the event it should happen again. It did, a day or two later. Father Lyons’s response astonished her.

  “Oh, but I have my own key,” he said cheerily, as if that explained everything.

  “Your own key. I don’t understand.”

  “It’s very simple,” he said, as if speaking to a child. “Ed had one made for me. Martha wanted me to have one.” He was no longer smiling, and his voice had taken on a patronizing tone. “After all, this is Mrs. O’Gribben’s home. If you don’t want me to have a key, perhaps you should discuss it with her.”

  Erin was flabbergasted. “Oh no, that’s all right,” she heard herself say. “Do as you please, Father.”

  “Good. As long as we know where we stand.” He rubbed his palms together and grinned. “Now, a cup of tea would be lovely. Bring it down to the room, would you. Time to look in on the patient.”

  He left Erin fuming. It was all she was going to take. She vowed that before the week was out she would tackle her husband about the intolerable situation.

  “I knew I was as much to blame,” she says. “I stood meekly by and allowed a bedridden old harridan to dictate my life, aided and abetted by a priest who showed no respect for another person’s privacy. So, right there and then, I swore I was going to have it out with Ed. I’d had enough—of him, his mother, and that stuck-up priest.”

  But the confrontation was postponed. Two days following Erin’s exchange with Father Lyons, the unexpected happened. Martha O’Gribben suffered a severe stroke and slipped into a coma. She was removed without delay to the county hospital.

  For the first time in seven months, Erin found herself quite alone in the old house. Ed and his siblings maintained a rotating bedside vigil, and the priest had no reason to visit. The young housewife was not unhappy being left by herself. She was taking a correspondence course in the hospitality trade and was working on completing the first module of the two-year program. Now she could study undisturbed and undistracted.

  All the same, the house was having an unsettling effect on her. She put it down to the isolation; she could not help comparing it to Wuthering Heights or some other bleak old ancestral home of fiction. And she knew full well that West Kerry had lost some of the innocent charm she remembered from childhood. Crime had affected the locality just as much as elsewhere; out-of-the-way dwellings had become easy pickings for burglars. Before going to bed each night, she made certain that all windows and doors were secured. She even locked her bedroom door.

  She slept well on those first two nights of solitude. Not so the third. That night she was to have her first brush with the paranormal.

  At about two in the morning Erin was awakened by a frightful pounding on her bedroom door. It was terrifyingly loud; it was as though somebody was pounding fists against it.

  She switched on the light, thinking it was Ed angered that his own bedroom door was bolted against him. Was he drunk? Trembling, Erin slipped out of bed.

  “Wait now, Ed! I’m coming.”

  Fumbling, she unlocked the door and yanked it open.

  There was no one. The landing was disconcertingly deserted.

  “Ed,” she called out hesitantly, “is that you?”

  No answer came. My God, she thought, what is going on? There was plainly someone in the house. The pounding on the door had sounded while she slept but continued after it roused her. It was no dream. Every fear she had entertained while alone in the house was lining up to assail her. She thought of burglars, thieves, rapists, murderers….

  She was standing on the landing wondering whether she should brave it down the stairs when she noticed something odd. The door to old Mrs. O’Gribben’s room was slightly ajar, and the light was on. It had not been on in days, not since they had taken her to the hospital.

  “Hello, who’s there?” she called out. She was endeavoring to keep the fear out of her voice. “You’d better come out right now or I’m calling the police!”

  She waited. There was no response.

  The bedroom seemed the safest place at that moment. She dashed back in and slammed the door shut. She fumbled with the key; her fingers were trembling. She sat down on the bed and tried to reason things out.

  “I’d been in ol’ Martha’s room only the day before,” she recalls. “And I distinctly remembered locking it. There’d been no one in the house since then—no one. I was frantic; I got down on my knees and started to pray to try and calm myself. It helped.”

  Eventually, Erin climbed back under the covers and switched off the light. The house was silent, reassuringly so. She drifted off.

  Shortly after six she was awakened by the telephone on the nightstand. It was Ed, always the early riser. Yes, he had been at his mother’s bedside all night. Why?

  “Just wondered, Ed. Thought maybe you’d come back for something and didn’t want to wake me.”

  “No,” he said, half-stifling a yawn.

  Erin decided to keep her unsettling experience to herself.

  “How is she? Any change?”

  “No, not really. But we lost her for a bit.”

  “What?”

  “Around two. Only for a few minutes, thank God.” She thought she heard Father Lyons’s voice in the background. “Look, got to go. See you at lunchtime.”

  The following night proved even more disturbing.

  Ed had left her on her own again. She slept fitfully and awoke in the early hours. She had had a very vivid and distressing dream: old Mrs. O’Gribben had appeared in the corner of the room, screami
ng at her over and over. “Get out of here!” she had ordered. “You’re not wanted in this house!”

  The dream seemed so real, almost as though Mrs. O’Gribben had been there in the flesh; it had none of the vagueness and disjointedness one associates with ordinary dreams.

  “It upset me no end,” Erin says. “I kept thinking something must be wrong. It was like one of those premonitions people say they have. So I called the hospital and got Ed on the line.”

  His mother had passed away a few minutes earlier.

  Sitting in the kitchen drinking cup after cup of tea, not daring to return to bed and perchance to dream again, Erin was knitting together strands of evidence and drawing a disquieting conclusion. Her “Wuthering Heights” was haunted.

  “I didn’t want to admit it to myself before then,” she says, “mainly because I always thought ghost stories were rubbish. Now I wasn’t so sure. All those weird things that were happening—they were like something out of a ghost story.”

  There was, however, a glaring inconsistency in Erin’s theory. Ghost stories involve ghosts, phantoms of the dead. Ed’s mother, though terminally ill, was still alive when the alarming disturbances began. She wondered how it was possible for a living person to haunt her.

  But Mrs. O’Gribben was certainly dead now. Erin could not bring herself to mourn her passing. Nevertheless, she did her duty and attended the funeral service; it would have been the scandal of the parish had she not. Predictably, Father Lyons conducted the service, and equally predictably eulogized at length about the kind, generous, and pious lady the deceased had been. One thing puzzled Erin: she was not the only person present who showed no grief. Neither Ed nor his siblings shed a tear. All seemed somehow relieved at their mother’s passing.

  She was missing something. She felt almost like an actor called upon at the last minute to stand in for a role—and nobody had given her the script to read.

  On January 18, 1997, one month after Mrs. O’Gribben’s death, Erin discovered she was pregnant. She was overjoyed. All the difficulties that had been plaguing her seemed to melt away. With her mother-in-law gone and having the house to herself at last, she felt freer and happier than she had ever been.

  Her difficult in-laws no longer had reason to visit, and she saw less of Father Lyons. The priest did not altogether stop coming around, though. Twice a week he would collect Ed on “parish business.” Both were members of the local Gaelic football cumann, or club. Every Tuesday and Thursday evening, Ed gave up his free time to coach the boys’ under-twelve team.

  As her pregnancy progressed, Erin became used to being left alone for most of the day and evening. The old house seemed somehow less intimidating; she felt that it was becoming hers. It no longer made her nervous. The two frightening episodes she had had concerning her mother-in-law—the pounding on the bedroom door and the nightmare—she put down to stress. It was a new year, she had made her resolutions, and a baby was coming. The new mistress of the house felt better about everything.

  Surveying her home early one morning, she made a decision: a clean sweep was called for. And the best place to start was the bedroom vacated by the scarcely lamented Martha O’Gribben. She would clear it out, perhaps turn it into a sitting room or study.

  There was something about the room that made her uneasy, even sans patient. It was not just the cold—that particular room had always been colder than the rest of the house, but she had got used to that. There was something else. An odor: “a dirty rotten odor, as though a toilet had never been cleaned in ages.” This noisome stench persisted even after everything—Mrs. O’Gribben’s effects, bed and bedding, the trappings of home nursing—had been disposed of.

  “The strange thing about it,” Erin says, “is that it didn’t seem to fade, as smells normally do. I could stand in the hallway with the door to that room open and I wouldn’t smell anything at all. But once I put my head in, it was overpowering.”

  After that, it began to follow her.

  “There was something really unnatural about it, because it would come and go at random all over the house, as if it was being switched on and off, almost like a light.”

  At first Ed claimed he smelled nothing but eventually gave in. “It’s probably a blockage in the sewerage system,” he said.

  Erin had her doubts. There were only two bathrooms, one upstairs, one down, both at the rear of the house. The smell had begun—and was still at its most pungent—in the mother’s room. It had no adjoining bathroom; none of the bedrooms had.

  It seemed to Erin that something was determined to thwart her attempts to set her own stamp upon the house. The smell was only the beginning. One evening, while in the kitchen writing up an essay, she felt certain she heard her name being called, but there was no one. On another occasion, she distinctly heard someone knocking on the back door and was surprised to find no visitor on the step. Sometimes she would awaken in the middle of the night with a jolt, believing she had heard old Mrs. O’Gribben’s summons—the walking stick being dragged across the radiator in the room below.

  Again, Ed was not prepared to share her concerns. “Maybe it’s my mother wanting you out,” he said dismissively.

  And Erin had the crazy notion that he meant it, too.

  In October 1997, Mrs. Erin O’Gribben gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Quentin was all a mother could wish for: a beautiful, brown-eyed little bundle, who rarely cried and rarely disturbed his parents’ sleep.

  Ed turned out to be an attentive enough father, but as Quentin’s first birthday drew near, he made a rather strange announcement. “We’ll not be having a birthday party for him,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’ll be no parties in this house.”

  “Why not?” She was puzzled. It seemed an odd thing to say. What was wrong with a birthday party?

  “We’ve never had them. My father didn’t like them, and neither did his father.”

  “Are you telling me you never had a birthday party? None of you? Not even when you were kids?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So it’s a family tradition, then.” Erin knew she sounded scathing but did not care. It was ridiculous.

  But Ed simply glared at her, saying nothing. She hated it when he behaved that way. It made her feel as if she were being the unreasonable one.

  “Okay, we’ll go out to a restaurant,” she said, annoyed. “Is that allowed?”

  “Fine,” he said after a time. “Yes, fine. You go ahead. I’ll be working anyway.”

  Father Lyons’s car pulled into the yard then, and presently Ed took his leave. Erin was left once again holding the baby. It was a situation she had come to accept as normal.

  Looking back now, she admits that there was a good deal wrong with her marriage. “All the signs were there,” she says, “but I chose to ignore them. You know how it is. I was young, idealistic. I thought I could change him and that things would work out. But I know now that you can’t change anyone. Not really.”

  But there were other, ominous signs that there was something not altogether right about the house. Erin could not help but conclude that the signs had multiplied around Quentin’s birth and in the months that followed. Nor was it her imagination; they were physical, concrete signs.

  The bedroom on the ground floor—the old sickroom—seemed to be the focus. She had succeeded in clearing it out but never actually got around to redecorating it. Time after time, the coldness and foul smell put her off. She let the room be, promising herself to tackle it “at some stage.” Quentin’s approaching birthday seemed to be the incentive she needed. She unlocked the door—and was greeted by a very odd sight.

  The windowsill and the floor below it were covered with dead black flies. This was puzzling. After all, it was wintertime and the window was perpetually shut. On closer examination, Erin saw that some of the flies were incomplete. It was as if they had been chopped in two or—more worryingly—bitten in two. A shiver ran through her. She rememb
ered seeing the same phenomenon some years before in a movie—The Amityville Horror.

  “I go cold thinking about it,” Erin says, “and not just because of the chill in the room. It was only later that I remembered more about that film, about the awful smells and the flies. A long time later. If I’d remembered then, I’d have been out of there immediately and taking Quentin with me. The slaughter of a whole family was responsible for the evil in Amityville, and I suppose I realize now that murder doesn’t always have to be physical; killing a person’s spirit is just as evil—maybe worse.”

  “I don’t know what was going through my head half the time,” she confesses. “I was beginning to think all kinds of things about the O’Gribbens. They were definitely dysfunctional; there was no love lost between them, that’s for sure. I had the idea that they all really hated each other. I just didn’t dare think about what might have gone on in their past. From what Ed told me, his father sounded like a right header. And as for the grandfather…I’d seen enough of the mother and the others to convince me they were all a bit loopy. Not dangerous, you understand—just loopy.”

  She hurriedly vacuumed up the flies, made the room a little more presentable, and left. It made her uneasy.

  But the following week curiosity got the better of her, and she went to check the room again. This time, the smell was worse—and the flies had returned. There were more of them, too: little black corpses on the sill, and more forming a semicircle below the window, as though somebody had spilled a jar of black peppercorns. Erin was repelled by the sight; she cleaned up quickly again and left.

  “It went on for weeks,” she says. “I’d hardly got rid of them but they’d appear again. I couldn’t understand it; there was no rational explanation I could think of. I thought about spiders. But there weren’t any, not in the winter. There shouldn’t have been flies either—but there they were. They made me sick just to look at them. Horrible things!”

  When finally the flies stopped appearing, their absence was compensated for by something equally bizarre.