by David Kiely
The day after the upsetting phone call, a change took place.
It was as if, with the news of the priest’s death, something dark and malefic was loosed. Erin’s lovely home, her retreat from the bleak past, was to become the focus of an evil presence. And it would announce itself in an all-too-familiar way.
“It started with the smell again,” she says. “When I came down the stairs the next morning to get breakfast, the strange smell from the old Dingle house was in the kitchen. It was faint, but it was there. I checked the bin, checked everywhere, but there was no telling where it was coming from. I knew it wasn’t blocked drains, because these are new houses.”
Although mild at first, the stench seemed to grow stronger as each day passed. This was the first disquieting sign that something was not quite right. Linda suggested that it was perhaps a symptom of stress brought on by news of the priest’s death. But when visitors to the house started to comment on it, she knew something was seriously wrong. Erin called in a plumber, but he found nothing.
Soon she began to discern another odor, different from the first. “It was like what you would get in a church. Not unpleasant—like the smell of incense and candle wax, not lighted candles but ones that have been extinguished. The funny thing was, I would only get it in Quentin’s room and my own bedroom, and only at nighttime.”
Erin might have left Dingle, but Dingle seemed bent on coming to her. A third manifestation arrived: the coldness. The chilling coldness that had plagued the house in Kerry started to creep into her new bungalow. It was September and still very mild outside, but inside the house it was near freezing. Sometimes she kept the radiators on all day, but to no effect. At night she piled both beds with extra blankets. It was the only way they could get to sleep.
She was reluctant to confide in anyone except Linda, not least because none of her new friends was aware of her past. She had mentioned Ed and Father Lyons and their gay relationship, but kept the unsavory details concerning the incest and pedophilia to herself. She was careful of what she said lest they think she was deranged. After all, if her own family found her story simply too hard to believe, what might her new acquaintances think?
She could not run; she could not hide. She had fled and it had found her again. She felt helpless in the face of encroaching evil. Erin resolved that she would make a stand in Donegal. She was going to draw on the power of prayer.
“I knew the local priest here to see,” she says, “but obviously I’d gone off the Catholic Church and all it represented. I hoped that prayer would work, and I made a point of praying with Quentin before he went to sleep.”
It worked. As the days passed and her prayers became more fervent, the stench and the bitter coldness began to abate. She was so relieved that she vowed to keep up her prayers. It was a matter of necessity.
The haunting of Erin, her son, and her home was to progress as a sequence of discrete manifestations. First came the olfactory: the foul or intrusive smells. Next, the auditory: unaccountable sounds and disturbances. There followed prophetic dreams and daytime visions, before the haunting culminated—most frighteningly—in a combined assault on all the senses.
The manifestations could occur at any time, without warning. She remembers one particular afternoon. It was a Saturday. Quentin had a day off from school. He was in the backyard, playing with little Connor from next door. Erin could keep an eye on him, or at least be assured of his whereabouts.
She had a mild headache, brought on by four loads of laundry and spin drying. She settled herself on the loveseat in the living room, thinking that watching an episode of Murder She Wrote might help her relax. Ten minutes into the show, she lost interest, lowered the sound, curled up on the sofa, and closed her eyes.
After some minutes, she could feel the headache easing; the rest was helping. She resolved to keep her eyes shut, even when she heard Quentin come in. Drowsy, she heard him slide back the glass connecting door to the living room. He followed his usual pattern and crossed to the sofa. Instinctively, Erin pulled up her legs to make room for him.
“That you, sweetie?” she asked, not bothering to look. “Mommy’s tired.” She stifled a yawn.
She felt the cushion yield as he sat down. The characters on television argued over the details of an L.A. murder as Erin tried to sleep.
After about ten minutes, she heard Quentin get up and leave, go down to his room, and shut the door. Unusual, she thought. Quentin never closed doors behind him—or drawers for that matter. Erin sensed that something was not as it should be. She went out into the corridor. His door was indeed shut. She thought he might not be feeling well. She knocked gently. There was no response.
“Quentin?”
It was most unlike him. She opened the door. The room was empty.
Erin was perplexed. She decided she must indeed have nodded off. She went out to the back garden. He was nowhere to be seen.
“Quentin!” she called out loudly. “Where are you, Quentin?”
There was no sign of him. She called again.
“He’s in here with Connor, Erin.” Connor’s mother was hanging out her washing. “They’re in the front room playing. Did you want him home?”
“Thank God for that. How long’s he been with you, Liz?”
“An hour, maybe more.”
Erin was stunned. It made no sense at all. At that moment Quentin appeared, excited.
“Mommy, come and see! Me and Connor built a castle.”
“Not now, sweetie. You need your dinner.”
She waited until she got him indoors.
“Quentin, answer me truthfully now, okay? Did you come in here a few minutes ago when I was lying down? And go to your room?”
“No, Mommy.” He shook his head solemnly.
“Are you sure, sweetie? Mommy won’t be at all cross if you did.” Erin’s heart was beating very fast and her mouth was dry.
Quentin was quiet for a time. Then he said: “It might’ve been the little boy, maybe, Mommy.”
“What little boy?”
“I see him sometimes in the garden. But Connor can’t see him. Then sometimes he’s in the house and he’s crying.” Quentin became earnest. “And when I ask him why he’s sad he goes away.”
“Does he run away?” Erin tried to smile to hide her mounting panic.
“No, he just goes into the wall. But he goes all blurry first.”
Erin could barely speak. She sat down heavily on the sofa and took Quentin on her knee.
“D’you know who he is, sweetie? I’ll tell you who he is. He’s a little angel that God sent. Now, the next time you see him, you must—”
“No, Mommy, he’s not a little angel!” Quentin was adamant. “He’s got no wings.”
Erin smiled. “That’s because they’re hidden under his shirt, sweetheart.”
Quentin’s little face puckered with annoyance. “No, Mommy,” he protested, “he doesn’t have any clothes on.”
Erin felt the color drain from her face. She could not speak. She was barely aware of Quentin squirming out of her embrace and leaving her lap. He went to the shelf under the TV and took out his favorite wooden jigsaw. All angels—and devils—were instantly forgotten.
“I’ll make dinner now,” she heard herself saying, and went to the kitchen, much troubled.
That day saw the beginning in earnest of the renewed extraphysical assault on Erin. The new phase assured the return of many sleepless nights.
She began to experience unusually vivid dreams. Many were of a sexual nature; others—of diverse content—proved to be unerringly prophetic, and were all the more disturbing for that.
She dreamed of a wedding that, in the fluid way of dreams, turned into a funeral. Three weeks later, her cousin’s wedding echoed the dream in chilling detail: halfway through the wedding breakfast the groom’s father suffered a fatal heart attack. Erin kept the dream, and its tragic mirroring in reality, to herself.
One of her more curious dreams involved a frail ol
d priest on a beach. It resembled the beaches close to her new home, but a larger town was visible in the background. The priest was standing behind a red line he had just drawn in the sand. He carried a stick—or it might have been an old-fashioned cane, such as those wielded by teachers of another era to punish recalcitrant pupils. Repeatedly, the priest pointed at the sand with his cane.
“Don’t cross the line!” he said, over and over.
Liz, Erin’s next-door neighbor, appeared later on in the same dream.
It disturbed Erin. Priests rarely figured in her dreams. She had the nagging feeling that the old priest carried some hidden meaning, and that he was somehow linked to the recurrence of the manifestations. She could not keep it to herself. She decided to confide in Liz.
“Can you remember what he looked like?”
Erin described the priest as best she could. And the beach. She surprised herself with the amount of detail she had retained.
“It sounds like my uncle,” Liz laughed.
“How can that be? I’ve never met the man. How would I know what he looked like?”
“Beats me. But I’ll show you a photo.”
She brought an album. Erin gasped, hardly able to believe her eyes. The old priest in the snapshot was the same man she had seen in her dream. Not only that—the picture had been taken on a beach.
“Father John Scully,” Liz said. “I believe it was taken in Bundoran. He spent his last days in a retirement home there, run by the Augustinians. God, now let me see…he must be dead about fifteen years at least.”
Erin did not know what to think. This was the stuff of ghost stories. Until that day, she had never set eyes on Liz’s family album. It seemed inconceivable, then, that an image from that album should come to vivid life in her dreams. Something was invading her senses and her subconscious mind. The implications were both profound and alarming. Liz saw her distress.
“Wouldn’t pay much heed to it, Erin,” she said. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m not surprised he was giving out to you about not crossing a line or whatever. He was a teacher in his day, and a holy terror from what I heard. Beat the life out of every child who sat in front of him. God forgive me, but I sometimes wonder how these people can call themselves men of God.”
“I know.” She wanted to say, “Liz, you don’t know the half of it,” but all at once the image of Father Scully reared up in her mind and she heard him reiterate his ominous words. “Don’t cross the line.”
Later, in her own home, she would mull over the possible significance of those words—and the fact that a priest had uttered them. Try as she might, she could not see how she was crossing any line. She had aborted her attempt to bring Father Lyons to justice, and his death certainly put an end to any prosecution. Nonetheless, the dream must be important and have a bearing on her present circumstances; why else did it include an uncle of her next-door neighbor? It was all very puzzling.
Sleep became impossible for Erin. Like the teenagers of Elm Street, she feared the dreams that might come and their consequences.
“I was dreading nighttime,” she says. “I would put off going to bed for as long as I could. I knew it was stupid. I’d have to sleep eventually, and then I’d dream. I kept asking myself what I’d do if I dreamed about my own death. Or worse still, Quentin’s. I was at my wit’s end. Linda said I should go to see the doctor, so I did.”
She told him about the nightmares but did not elaborate. He prescribed a short course of sleeping pills. The pills, he explained, would relax her but not prevent her dreaming. He recommended instead that she refrain from watching stimulating or violent television shows before bedtime and avoid alcohol late at night. Lastly, he suggested that she listen to soothing music while drifting off to sleep.
The doctor also advised a course of antidepressants. Erin declined.
“I couldn’t tell him this but I knew it wasn’t my mind that was being attacked,” she says. “It was my ‘spiritual integrity.’ That’s what I picked up later on. Linda called it that: my spiritual integrity. So medication wasn’t going to help; I knew that. If I was really and truly honest with myself, I knew that the only thing that was going to help was an exorcism. But how do you find an exorcist in Donegal? Where do you even begin to look?”
Seeking an exorcism was no precipitate decision on Erin’s part. She had been considering it for many weeks; in fact, she had thought long and hard on exorcism at the time of the more traumatic paranormal episodes in Dingle. But she knew very little about it beyond its lurid Hollywood portrayal. She did not even know if it was still being practiced. This time, she resolved to find out.
Common sense told her to seek out the parish priest and ask his advice. But she was still nervous around priests; she had not yet set foot inside her local church. Events took a hand, however. The presence she calls her “intruder” was to make up Erin’s mind for her and send her hurrying to the priest. It happened less than a week after her visit to the doctor.
At about 4 a.m. she awoke to find herself pinned to the bed. Erin had always suffered from mild claustrophobia. Her worst nightmare was finding herself a victim of an earthquake—awakening to discover that a ceiling, or an entire building, had collapsed on top of her, and the slow, agonizing death that would ensue. She could not believe that her nightmare had become real. She was being crushed by a paralyzing weight.
“God, it was awful,” she recalls with a grimace. “I thought I was going to die. I couldn’t move. And the cold was back—much worse than before. It was so cold in the room. I couldn’t decide if it was the weight or the cold that was paralyzing me. The only part of me I could move was my head.”
There was a smell too: the same pungent odor she had experienced before. More than ever it resembled burned candle wax.
She tried not to panic. It occurred to her that her intruder was immobilizing her for a reason, that she was being held against her will to prevent her accomplishing some action or other. She could not begin to guess what that action might be. Then she heard a child crying out, and that was explanation enough.
“It’s Quentin, I thought. I was frantic. My whole body was numb. I couldn’t budge. I remember screaming and calling his name over and over. And then I called out for God to help me.”
In that instant, all changed. Time for Erin seemed suddenly to telescope; the normal laws of space and motion no longer applied. In the next instant, she was out in the corridor and running toward her son’s room. To this day, she cannot fill the gap in her memory between being trapped on the bed and finding herself out in the corridor. There is no logical joining up; it remains a mystery for her.
But she found Quentin deep in sleep. There was nothing to suggest that his sleep had been disturbed.
Then she heard the sound again: a child crying. It was coming from elsewhere in the house. She stood still, trying not to breathe too loudly, trying to place its exact whereabouts.
The pieces of the puzzle were snapping into place. She remembered the night in Dingle when she heard someone call her name. It was the voice of a little boy. She remembered the little boy Quentin claimed to have seen. It was all starting to make sense—of a kind. She remembered the wailing of children heard down the phone line….
All of a sudden, the crying stopped. She returned to her own room but remained uneasy. She was telling herself that she could not leave her son on his own. What if something were to happen to him? What if the “intruder” were to turn his attention on Quentin? She would never forgive herself.
Erin went out into the corridor again. She was pulled up short. The sobbing had resumed. It was most definitely coming from some other part of the house, not from her son’s room. The sobs of the phantom child were heart-wrenching: continuous, inconsolable, unutterably sad. As a mother, she felt moved to act, to rescue the child who was in such torment. But it was impossible to determine where the cries were coming from. One moment they would sound behind her, the next to her right or left. She would go in one directio
n and find that the sobbing had shifted. A line or two of a poem learned in childhood went through her head: Little one! Oh, little one! I am searching everywhere.
She gave it up. Her rational mind told her that she was chasing after ghosts. She went into Quentin’s room, locked the door, and eased herself into bed beside him. He slept on, oblivious to the danger that Erin felt convinced was threatening him.
Through the locked bedroom door she continued to hear the heartrending sobbing of the ghost child. Erin clasped Quentin to her and began to pray. Gradually, the weeping faded away, then ceased altogether.
At 8:30 a.m., having dropped off Quentin at school, she made an appointment to see the parish priest.
While walking the short distance to the parochial house, Erin was uneasy, for she was going against many years of unbelief. She could no longer recall when it was that doubt about God had set in, but she thought it must have been soon after she left school and began to make her “way in the world,” as her late father put it. Her attendance at Mass stopped being a weekly duty and settled down to become the Christmas and special-occasion observance of the lapsed Catholic—again to quote her father, “hatchings, matchings, and dispatchings.” Erin usually smiled at that, but not now.
As for Quentin, she had not gone out of her way to bring him up in “the faith.” She had always considered it to be slightly hypocritical to instill Christianity in the child when her own faith was weak, to say the least. Ed, however, had made a point of having Quentin accompany him to Mass each and every Sunday, with Father Lyons as the celebrant. They shared a pew with Ed’s siblings; Quentin had assured her that he derived little from the Masses. In hindsight, this came as no surprise to Erin. Like her, Quentin had not seen the inside of a church since they fled the Dingle Peninsula.
She did not know what to expect from Father Maurice Higgins. A part of her told her that she was doing the right thing, but in her heart she had little faith in the enlisting of a priest. Faith was the key, she decided. She had lost whatever faith she had a long time before. As she looked into the well-kept gardens along the route she was taking, she wondered how many of her neighbors shared her lack of faith. She wondered how many of them paid lip service to religious worship. God was a different matter, she thought. Erin had never lost her faith in God, her belief that the righteous would prevail, as they used to say. She asked herself how the priest would receive her.