The Dark Sacrament

by David Kiely

  Like most new parents, eager to capture each precious, never-to-be-repeated moment of their child’s development, the O’Gribbens had taken countless photographs of their son. The sitting room especially had become a showcase, with framed pictures everywhere. Erin’s particular favorite showed Quentin in a local park on his birthday. She loved it so much that she had had several copies made. One medium-sized print held central position in a silver frame on the mantelshelf. A second, larger version hung on the wall.

  Erin suspected nothing when, two days after the disappearance of the flies in the sickroom, she found the photo on the mantelpiece lying face down. She righted it without giving it much thought. Perhaps Ed had been looking at it, she told herself, and had not replaced it properly.

  But inexplicably, the circumstances repeated themselves on four more occasions.

  “I asked him about it,” Erin tells us, “but he said that he hardly ever went near the room—which was true—and I’d had no reason to doubt him. There was a TV in the sitting room, but we rarely watched it. That would have been Ed’s only reason for going in there. The room was for ‘visitors’; it was just the same in my mother’s house.”

  Both pictures became targets. Each time she entered the room, she found the one on the mantelpiece lying face down, and the bigger one turned to face the wall. And each time she righted them, the following day she would find them disturbed again.

  It was almost as if somebody was targeting her little son.

  In October 2003, on the eve of Quentin’s sixth birthday, Erin drove away from the old house on the Dingle Peninsula for the last time. She left behind the man who had masqueraded as her husband, who had vowed to love and cherish her, but whose vows had been a sham.

  She shut the door on the priest who had proved to be a travesty of a priest: Father Lyons. And finally she bade adieu to her in-laws, asking God to forgive them all and praying that she would never set eyes on any one of them again. She had lived for seven years in the grip of depravity; she was determined to put as many miles as possible between herself and the evil that was threatening her and her young son. So she chose County Donegal, 250 miles distant.

  She settled in a picturesque locality on the northwestern coast. Her smart semidetached bungalow is a world away from the decrepit farmhouse that was her home for too long. The sun is streaming through the patio doors of the living room where we sit as she relates her story. The peach-and-white color scheme is bright and uplifting. There is no whiff of mildew here, and it is hard to imagine the paranormal intruding on Erin’s “hideaway.”

  She escaped, then—left it all behind her.

  “That’s what you would think,” she says with a shrug, “but my story is far from over. When I stumbled on the horrific truth of what I had married into, all those weird happenings, the coldness, the foul smells, the flies, the strange noises in the house, my child’s photo being upset, suddenly everything made an appalling kind of sense. You know there were times when I thought I was going mad. Little did I realize that I was the only sane one among a whole network of mad, evil people.”

  It took Erin six years to come to terms with the full extent of that evil. In that time, the manifestations came and went, each one making way for a new one. In hindsight she sees that all were related, that each fresh outbreak of the paranormal should have been a warning to her.

  To be sure, she had her suspicions almost from the beginning. In the five months preceding her departure, all were confirmed.

  “Having Quentin and raising him almost single-handedly made me more conscious of a mother’s role,” she says. “I wanted to protect him at all costs, and it got to the point where I was not prepared to stand idly by and stay in my pretend marriage just for appearances’ sake. I had a responsibility to get at the truth for my son’s sake. When I began to face up to things, my world fell apart. It was just too bizarre to take in.”

  Her husband’s behavior and habits ought to have alerted her, and they did, to some extent. Yet Erin made the mistake so many women do when they marry into a set of circumstances that are insufferable: she came to accept them and grew to look upon them as normal.

  It started with those evenings spent at the football club.

  There were the children—always the children. Whenever Ed called Erin from the club, she would hear children in the background. Not playing football, as one would expect, but screaming and wailing. If she asked what was going on, he would say that someone had fallen down and hurt himself. The explanation did not ring true somehow; Erin had no recollection of Gaelic games inducing so many injuries.

  Then there was her own child. She had indeed brought him up single-handedly. Ed took virtually no interest in Quentin; he seemed content to have merely produced an heir. He showed no tenderness toward the boy. He did not behave as Erin, in her naiveté, had expected a father to behave. She had grown to accept this as normal.

  Likewise, Ed’s brothers—Dan and Michael—seemed strangely reluctant to show affection for their little nephew. They brought no candy, never spoke to him, complained when he cried. She had put this down to a lack of experience with children. This, too, she came to regard as normal rural bachelor behavior.

  But one day, when Quentin was four, Erin came downstairs to hear voices coming from the “sickroom,” Mrs. O’Gribben’s old room. No one but herself ever went in there. She opened the door—and got the shock of her life. Quentin was sitting on the windowsill, and Dan was removing the boy’s shirt.

  “What the hell are you doing? Jesus Christ, what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Nothing.” He could not meet her eye. He stood up to leave and tried to brush past her. Quentin seemed not to be perturbed.

  “I swear to God, Dan O’Gribben, if you ever so much as lay a hand on that boy again I’ll report you to the police!”

  A ghastly picture was taking shape. And Father Lyons seemed always to be part of that picture, whether in the foreground or behind the scenes. Right from the start, he had made Erin feel uneasy. There were times when she felt that he truly resented her. She would catch him looking at her in a disconcerting way. Not sexually—more antagonistically. From time to time, he would ask her questions that she felt no priest had a right to ask. They were intrusive and made her uncomfortable.

  “Everything all right on the family side of things now, Erin?” he inquired one evening in the summer of 2003. He was having a cup of tea in the kitchen, waiting while Ed was upstairs changing. The two were off to yet another “parish meeting.”

  “The family, Father? Oh, they’re all grand, I’d say. Mary calls now and again, but I haven’t seen Michael lately. I think him and––”

  “I didn’t mean that, Erin. I meant the physical side of things. Between Ed and yourself.”

  She was caught off guard. She reddened, unsure of what to say. She caught him looking at her queerly again.

  “You know I run marriage guidance courses, so I’m well acquainted with the physical side of things,” he said, without a trace of irony. “You can always confide in me.”

  Confiding in this man, who had consistently remained aloof from her, was the last thing Erin wished to do. But Ed saved the day, and her blushes, by appearing in the doorway. What happened next, however, unsettled her even further.

  It was as if the men had rehearsed a scene together, she thought, or that Ed had overheard the priest discussing him. In any event, he entered the kitchen and beamed at Father Lyons, ignoring her. The priest went immediately to him and clapped an arm around his shoulder. Erin half-expected them to embrace.

  “You wouldn’t want this good man running off with someone else now, Erin, would you?” the priest said with a grin.

  “I think that was the clincher for me,” she tells us. “It’s hard to put into words, but I think you know when a relationship is wrong. That night I really felt there was something very unhealthy about Ed and the priest. It was the way they looked at each other. It wasn’t the sort of thing fellas who’ve
known each other for years have. I knew by the way Father Lyons kept his arm around Ed’s shoulder as they left. It was altogether too intimate for my taste.”

  Erin believes it was at that moment that she put two and two together. “All those nights they spent at the football club and at parish meetings—how did I know if they were for real? My mind was racing that night. I went to bed and couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t get certain thoughts out of my head. I kept thinking of Ed, the priest, and those children. I was determined to get to the bottom of things.”

  She was still awake hours later when she heard the priest’s car coming around the back of the house. He was dropping Ed off, as he had done on a thousand occasions. Erin, driven mad by then with her suspicions, got up and went down the hall to Quentin’s room. It overlooked the backyard. He was sleeping peacefully, as expected. Carefully, she went and drew aside the curtain.

  The moon was high, gibbous, its light bathing the yard. The paintwork of Father Lyons’s black Mercedes gleamed. She saw the two men step out of car. The next thing she knew, they were locked in a passionate embrace.

  Erin reeled back from the window in horror. She almost woke Quentin with her sobbing. She hurried back to the bedroom and bolted the door. In a few heartbreaking seconds her marriage had ended.

  “What was that all about last night?” Ed demanded of the wronged wife the next morning. “Locking the door like that?”

  “What, you’re asking me?” She was furious. Lack of sleep seemed to have given her a courage she rarely had. She loathed confrontation with Ed. “You’re asking me about bolting the door? What were you doing with Lyons in the yard? I saw you.”

  “Oh, that.” He said it with a shrug. His nonchalance astonished her. “I thought you knew. Me and Frank have been lovers for years. And what of it?”

  She could not believe what she was hearing.

  “Sure, wasn’t it Frank who persuaded me to get married? Just to be on the safe side and to stop the gossip.”

  So all those evening trips to the football club were just a sham. Erin tried to take it all in. She was weary. She felt on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But she pressed on; there were still some matters that needed clearing up. She was still thinking of the football club—and drawing frightening conclusions.

  “My God, Ed, what have you been doing? The children…?”

  “What children?”

  “I heard them in the background. Crying. When I phoned you at the club. What were you doing? Ed, what was going on there?”

  He turned his back to her and crossed to the window. She waited. There was a part of her that wanted to run from the nightmare. But she knew that what she was experiencing was not a nightmare; it was real and it was happening to her. The only way to end it was to learn the truth.

  “The truth, Ed—no matter how terrible. I have to know. You owe me and our son that at least.”

  He turned back from the window, calmly took her by the arm, and led her down the hallway to what was once his mother’s bedroom. The foul smell had lessened over time, but the coldness was as bone chilling as ever. It was a dismal place.

  “This is where it all started,” he said evenly. “This is where I cried and screamed—just like the little brats that you heard on the phone.”

  There was so much fury in his eyes, Erin feared for her own safety. “Go on,” she managed to say. “I’ll try to understand.”

  But he seemed not to want her understanding. Her patience and her attempt at empathy seemed to make him even angrier.

  “Oh, you will, will you?” he roared, his face gone crimson. “Well, here’s the thing. My father raped me in here.” He pointed toward the mildewed baseboard. “He raped me there on his dirty old bed, nearly every night from as far back as I can remember. Then, when Dan and Mick and Mary came along, I got a break and he did the same to them. Then we started doing it with each other, because he liked to watch. And then––”

  “Enough!” Erin screamed. “Oh, Jesus Christ, enough!”

  He laughed in her face. He adopted a mock female voice. “‘The truth, Ed,’” he mimicked. “‘The truth, no matter how terrible.’ Well, now you’re getting the truth and you’re going to hear every nasty, horrible, dirty little bit of it.”

  She stood back against the wall, using it for support, as the monster that had taken the place of her husband continued his horrific confession—a confession that seemed to her to be more of a boast.

  “God, I was so happy when the old bastard died,” he said. “But I might have known it wouldn’t last long. Then she started.”

  He kicked the wall where his mother’s bed had been.

  “‘Gentlemen friends,’ she called them. They came at all hours, and ‘had’ all of us. Right here in this f***ing room. She used to wake us up and say, ‘Now go and be good to Mister so-an’-so. We need the money, now that Daddy’s not here.’ So what do you expect me to do, now that I’m supposed to be a man? I take revenge, that’s what I do. Because that’s what men did to me. Those little brats you heard deserve it. As long as I’m alive I’ll mess up every little bawling brat I see. I’ll take—”

  “Stop it, stop it!”

  She ran from the room, to emerge into the hallway. She heard him pull the door shut behind him.

  “His anger was like this living thing that took hold of him,” Erin says. “I could feel all the hate, going back years, all pouring out of him that day. Quentin was in the yard playing with one of his friends. They were on their summer holidays. Well, the last thing I wanted was for him to come in and see his daddy like that.”

  Erin had to know about Quentin. In her mind’s eye, she was back in the sickroom, when the child was four, and his uncle Dan had brought him in there. She could still see his rough hands with their permanently dirty fingernails undoing the buttons on Quentin’s shirt. She tried to form the question that she could not bring herself to ask. But Ed got there before her.

  “No, I haven’t touched Quentin, all right? Now, I’ve got things to do.”

  He strode from the house, slamming the front door behind him. Through the glass in the side panel she saw Quentin following his father’s departure with curiosity.

  “I think my heart was breaking at that moment,” she says.

  Ed’s confession gave Erin little relief. He had lied to her about everything, from the day they met. But at that moment, she accepted what he said; her sanity depended on it.

  Nonetheless, her marriage was over. The following day, she and Quentin moved out of the godforsaken old farmhouse and returned to her mother’s home in Tralee. Only after a couple of months did Quentin feel confident enough to confide in his mother; his new surroundings and his caring grandmother dispelled his fear. Erin learned what she had feared the most. She becomes terribly upset when recalling this.

  “You have no idea how horrible it was,” she says. “I’d begun to guess the truth, but it turns out it was worse than I’d dreamed of. They were all at it: every single one of those sick people. Ed had abused him, but so had his filthy brothers, Dan and Michael. And of course Father Lyons. I don’t know how they managed it, right under my very nose! But I suppose people like that are clever. They’re up to all the dirty tricks in the book.”

  With her mother’s help, she arranged counseling for the boy in Tralee. She could not send him back to school, not in Dingle. Instead, she decided she would keep him at home for a year, “to have him under my wing; I didn’t want to let him out of my sight.” She arranged for private tuition in September.

  Meanwhile, she was determined that the O’Gribbens and their degenerate priest be brought to justice. She set about having them prosecuted. That proved unexpectedly difficult.

  “I tried to get something done and alerted the powers that be, but I was thwarted at every turn. My letters would go missing or not get answered. I got tired of not being believed and of people thinking I was crazy.”

  Then the calls started.

  “They were anonymous at first, b
ut pretty soon they began to turn nasty. They threatened that if I persisted with a prosecution I’d ‘be dealt with.’ God, even my own mother thought I was inventing things. I suppose it was inevitable that I would have a nervous breakdown. Thankfully, I wasn’t so bad that I had to go into hospital. I needed to be there for Quentin, so I had to keep going. I’d a good friend living here in Donegal. Linda and me met on holiday in the mid-eighties and we’d always kept in touch. Her phone calls kept me sane throughout it, and when me and Quentin came to stay with her for a while I fell in love with the place. That’s when I decided to buy this house and make a clean break. I just wanted to get as far away from Kerry as was humanly possible without actually leaving the country.”

  In June 2004, Erin moved into her new home. She put the past behind her as best she could. She distracted herself with interior decorating and getting Quentin settled. He seemed to be happy and even had made a friend: little Connor from next door was a regular visitor. Linda was of tremendous help and a great boost to her self-confidence. She is an educational psychologist, a very necessary shoulder to lean on. She also introduced Erin to a whole new network of friends.

  Her life was returning to normal. Quentin had never known a truly normal life and was consequently enjoying its pleasures for the first time. Anxiously, Erin watched the boy as he got through his day, quietly registering every little quirk of personality, every little deviation from “acceptable” behavior, every word or gesture that might signal a reaction to the abuse he had suffered. Linda told her what to look out for.

  At the end of August, out of the blue, Erin got a phone call. At first, it seemed relatively innocuous: it was her attorney in Tralee. He was working with Ed’s lawyer negotiating her divorce settlement, and was keeping her abreast of progress. But he had news as well. A month earlier, Father Francis Lyons had died in a car crash. Such a shame, the attorney said, and so young—just forty-six. Erin feigned what she felt was the expected response.

  “I remember feeling sick and angry at the same time when I put down the phone. And I remember saying over and over to myself: ‘God, the monster got away with it, the monster got away with it!’ But, as I soon learned,” she says with a sigh, “you might get away with things in this life, but not in the next.”