Through a Glass Darkly

by Bill Hussey

  I caught old Ma Rowbanks throw a reproachful look at her son. Jim looked up, worry written across his weathered face, but I felt that candle blaze within. The clouds that Mendicant had spread there had weakened and now drew back further.

  ‘But in the Lord we are strong. At the End of Days, when all other lights are extinguished and Man is left alone, facing the end of all things, His Light will be a beacon, shining yet in the darkest hour. And it shines here. No shadow, no Evil can triumph before our faith, for by its nature the shadow is weaker, coming after Him and perishing before Him. ‘I am the Alpha and Omega’, He has said, ‘the beginning and the end, the first and the last’. We here must face our fears or they will …’

  The baby choked.

  Its eyes fixed and dilated. Its chest shuddered and sank. Little hands twisted into claws. Jim Rowbanks tore the limp child from his wife and laid it out on the Communion Table. Frozen, I watched the crowd press around, heard the confused babble of advice, the screams and cries. Only Ma Rowbanks stayed where she was. She sat in the first pew, staring directly at me. I imagined that I heard her thoughts:

  This is what comes of facing our fear, Father. This is the price we pay.

  Through the throng, I saw glimpses of the tiny dead thing. Jewels of water still adhered to its brow. Its eyes were rolled back, its lips turning blue. Valerie flipped the baby over and started rubbing its back.

  ‘Father! Quickly, the rites.’

  Jim was grief-stricken. Desperate. But the horror that I might be responsible for the child’s death, robbed me of my senses. I had wanted to stamp out the hopelessness of this place. I had wanted these people to feel that they could face their demons in the strength of God. I had challenged the power that moved here and it had lashed out. I managed to walk to the table. To lay my hands on the unmoving child. To mumble a few broken prayers. The light within burned to its lowest ebb.

  A breeze whistled down the aisle and into the chancel. I looked up. Over the heads of the confused, wailing congregation, I saw the church doors open. The wind picked up, threw the service sheets from the pews and splashed the water in the font. There was shuffling in the crowd, a parting of people. Through them I saw snatches of dark clothes and striking white skin.

  Mendicant.

  He moved, without hurrying, up the steps to the Communion Table. Gently, he took my hands from the dead child. A voice, that sometimes answers my prayers, told me to reclaim the tiny body. That whatever was being done, it was better that the child remain as it was. I could not obey. Black marble eyes held me. His fingers arched over the baby and dug rhythmically at its chest. His lips moved, but I could not hear the words.

  The barest movement. A twitch of legs. Then the baby’s eyes focused. His breathing came in gasps. He started to cry. He was bundled into thin arms and given to his mother.

  ‘Yours, I believe.’

  ‘Oh, God. Thank you. Thank you God,’ Jim Rowbanks muttered.

  ‘No need to thank God, Mr Rowbanks. You can thank me.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Jim asked. I noticed the farmer’s expression as his eyes flitted across Mendicant’s features. It was as if he saw something there which disturbed him.

  ‘I’m a doctor. An old friend of Father Brody here,’ the man smiled, showing worn, yellow teeth. ‘My name is Mendicant.’

  Forty-four

  Brody’s Story

  BUNDLE 1 –

  MENDICANT IN CROW HAVEN – 1976

  The next few hours passed in a blur of shifting faces and locations. I dimly remember moving outside and watching Jim, Valerie and the baby disappear in an ambulance. Then old Ma Rowbanks herded us back to the farmhouse where a buffet tea was laid out. I chatted to Michael Rowbanks, all the while keeping an eye on the saviour Doctor as he moved among my parishioners.

  There were no faltering conversations, no conspiratorial glances. They cooed over the new local celebrity, patting him on the back and calling him ‘a good chap’. Some of the mothers even passed their children to him, as if he would give the infants a benediction. The Rowbanks children tried to get him to pose for a photograph with Ma Rowbanks, but he demurred politely. If truth be told, I was jealous as well as anxious. When I had arrived in the village, I had been greeted by a cold, indifferent congregation. Now those same people took this thing unquestioningly to their bosom. At last, he glided over to me. I cannot now recall the words he whispered, but I found myself following him to the door. We left the Rowbanks’ as the call came through reporting that the baby was out of danger.

  Before I knew it, I was in the library, taking the drink Mendicant proffered. The light from the fire danced through the cut glass of the brandy decanter, dappling his face with motley colour. His voice was quiet, soothing almost.

  ‘You ask: Why do they not recognise him for what he is? They should. They are used to seeing the darker heart beating beneath the skin. But, like many people whose lot it is to suffer, they are fooled by small acts of kindness. Only you, Asher Brody, see me as I really am. I do not know how you look beyond this …’

  His appearance altered in a moment. Instead of the skeletal figure beside me, there sat a young man. Handsome, with golden hair about his shoulders, beautiful as the Morning Star.

  ‘… and see this,’ he said, his face falling back to its shrunken dimensions. ‘Some, like Jim Rowbanks, may catch the smallest glimpse, and I cannot fool the camera, but you see. You pierce the veil of my adopted flesh. I appear to you as I am, withering in the last stages of my current incarnation. But soon, like young Master Rowbanks, I shall be reborn …’ he gave a hollow laugh. ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life.’

  ‘You are nothing,’ I said.

  ‘And yet you are drawn to me. You yearn for the truth that I know.’

  ‘I yearn for nothing outside my faith.’

  ‘If you truly believe that, then you should be able to stop what’s coming. You have dreamed of such a match all your life, have you not? Your brother was the hero; your time never came. I offer you a chance that few men ever have: to become everything you ever dreamed.’

  ‘How do you know me?’ I asked.

  ‘I see your dreams, Asher. I see your faith, wide and shallow. Have the strength to put it to the test. Prove me a father of lies, or accept the truth you have always known. That Man is truly alone in his suffering.’

  ‘The Lord is with me.’

  ‘Then end me, if you can. A new metempsychosis is coming. Let’s see if you can stand against it.’

  He leaned forward. Against his skin, the red light thickened and appeared to run. He opened his mouth wide. The library fell away and I was drawn into that darkness.

  I found myself in the transept of the church, kneeling before the altar steps. Candles in sconces burned along the walls of the nave and, placed before the Communion Table, a vigil light flickered. It must have been night outside, for the stained windows were bleak and colourless. Was I really now inside my church or slumped and dreaming in Mendicant’s curious library? Clenching the crucifix around my neck, I rose to my feet. As I did so, I heard the mewling cry of a child. Then I saw it. A bundle wriggling upon the Communion Table.

  ‘In time of trouble, he shall hide me in his pavilion,’ I murmured, mounting the steps and approaching the altar. ‘In the secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me. He shall set me upon a rock …’

  My feet echoed in the stone heart of the church. The candles flared, throwing my shadow across the tiny form. Its head was covered in the folds of the blanket. I reached out, my hand trembling.

  ‘And now shall my head be lifted up above mine enemies …’

  I plucked back the blanket. The candles guttered and died. By some unknown light, I saw it.

  ‘Sweet Christ.’

  Innocence desecrated, grace polluted, here, in the fortress of my faith. How can I describe what lay twisting before me? I cannot. I will not. I saw the wounds of lust upon Mark Jeremiah Joseph Rowbanks, and my soul balked. Yet I knew, instinctively, that as hi
deous as this physical defilement appeared to be, it was nothing more than an illusion. A cruel amusement conjured by Mendicant to unnerve me. What the Doctor really had planned, however – this metempsychosis – would not be mere illusion. Whatever evil was about to transpire, it would be very real.

  While the baby cried, I screamed prayers and obscenities into the roof of the church. The echo of my voice resounded like laughter between the beams. Laughter that stayed with me as the scene faded, and I awoke in my bed at the Old Priory, my body twisted in sweat-soaked sheets.

  *

  For days, I hardly ate or slept. Functioning on some auxiliary level, I gave Mass, heard confessions, wrote my sermon, while all the time checking and re-checking my memory for some mention of ‘metempsychosis’. I had many friends who studied arcane mythology, but none who believed it had any practical application. There was only one man who might believe me, and I did not want to burden his last days with worry.

  At the end of a week of heavy research, all I could gather was that metempsychosis, or the transmigration of souls, was an ancient belief, spread across a startling number of civilisations. In different forms, it was present in many of the religions of Asia and the Ancient World, cropping up in early Judaic and Christian writings, and even in the rich beliefs of the tribes of North America and Australia. The central tenet in all these versions was that a soul may be disconnected from the body (temporarily in sleep or permanently in death) and that it might then be transferred between organisms.

  I was lost. I knew only two things for certain. One, that Mendicant, whatever he was, believed that he could prolong his life. And second, that the Rowbanks family was central to his plan. On a rare excursion into the village, I heard that the good Doctor had become a regular visitor to the farm. That he had been virtually adopted by the family and had lavished gifts on the children. I made up my mind that I had to speak to Jim about my concerns. Surely, with all that he had told me, he would believe my story.

  It was in the early hours of the morning, eight days after my last encounter with the Doctor, when I happened upon something. I had been ploughing through a dry tract on Orphic religions that I had picked up in Venice years ago, when an illustration of a woodcut caught my eye. It was a picture of a blank-faced child, encircled by runic designs and the legend: TABULA RASA. I had a vague memory of seeing something like it in one of Mendicant’s books. Beneath the illustration was the following text:

  Note should be made of a short-lived sect that existed on the southern coast of Thessaly. They were known as either the Keepers of the Soul Springs or the Metempsychosists. They worshipped Dionysus as the god of life, death and rebirth. During bacchanalian orgies, it is claimed they practised a rite of rejuvenation, during which child sacrifices were offered up and the souls of the old and worn were put into the empty vessels of the slaughtered young. Mention of this sect is made in the writings of Pliny, who noted that the rituals were attended by ‘hosts of dark and rapier-beaked birds’. (See Birds of Thessaly n.23 or the Stymphalian Birds (article: Behind The Labours of Hercules)). This woodcut was found among the few remaining papers of Don Amone, the so-called ‘People’s Saint of Castile’. Amone was brutally murdered in 1590, his vast collection of incunabula destroyed or stolen.

  I could wait for no further confirmation of my fears. I might spend another month searching through dusty archives and discover little more about the ritual than I had already ascertained. Meanwhile, Mendicant would have found his new vessel.

  I knew that Jim Rowbanks would be up and about early. At four a.m. I put the tract in my pocket and started out for the farm. The morning was warm, but heavy rain clouds had rolled over the forest and spread across the village. A band of crows circled above the lower field of the Rowbanks farm, tormenting the horses that pawed and grunted at the ground.

  I was halfway up the dirt track when I heard the farmhouse door snap open. Jim came striding down the path. I read in his face that I was too late.

  ‘Tell me,’ I said.

  ‘The little ones. The twins. Dead.’

  I held out my hand to steady him.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Doctor says it was probably an infection, passed by Mark to his brother. It wasn’t an infection, Father. It was him.’

  ‘He’s been here?’

  Grief twisted Jim’s features.

  ‘Last night. He kissed them both before he left … None of them can see,’ he looked back at the house. ‘I knew, Father. I knew, and did nothing to stop him. I saw, that day in the church … Something in his face. And the wind, did you hear it? I don’t think it came from outside. It came from the mouths of the saints in the windows. From the Madonna. They were speaking to us, but we didn’t hear.’

  ‘Jim, take hold of yourself …’

  ‘I told you, didn’t I, Father? This place draws things to it.’

  ‘Listen, has he been back?’

  ‘They’ve called him already. Ma and the others. They’re sitting around in the house like statues. None of them have cried. They won’t, until he comes ….’

  I saw the grief and violence brimming within him.

  ‘Don’t do anything rash,’ I said. ‘I have to contact an old friend. I will return.’

  I left the broken man and went back to the Old Priory. I had wasted a week poring over thousands of pages, when a footnote and a phone call might have given me the knowledge to save those children. I did not hesitate now. I reached the house in double-quick time and went straight to the study. The connection, stretching halfway around the world, crackled and fizzed.

  Samuel Willard had taught me the true, joyous love of God. ‘Taught’ is not the right word. Inspired. Even as I heard his age-cracked voice at the end of the line, I imagined him as the young priest who had nurtured my faith all those years ago. If I had been faced with such a predicament in days gone by, my first instinct would have been to contact him. Recently, however, he had been very ill. In his eightieth year he had contracted pneumonia. This, coupled with a collapsed lung, meant he was very frail. The doctors had advised that he should be admitted to hospital, but he would not leave the Seminary that had been his home for over half a century. None dared to contradict the kindly but determined ‘Grand Old Man of St Patrick’s’. It was with grave concern, therefore, that I called my old friend.

  ‘Asher, my boy,’ he said. ‘How are you? Have you settled into your new parish? Why you ever wanted to go to England I don’t know. Grey country. Grey people.’

  Hearing his voice again was too much. Despite his years and the poorness of the line, he heard my emotion.

  ‘What is it, boy? We’ll put it right, whatever it is.’

  I can’t remember exactly how I told him the story of my time in Crow Haven. I’m sure it was very confused. When I finished, he was silent for a time. Over the hum of the line, I thought I heard the pounding waves of Manly and the screech of the gulls.

  ‘Did I ever tell you, Asher, that I am English?’

  ‘No. I always thought …’

  ‘I came over when I was twenty-two, after the Great War. I took a job at the convict prison in Fremantle before moving east. Before my twenty-fifth year, I had seen all the horrors that one lifetime could bear. The hell of the trenches and then the degradation of humanity that was the hillside prison. But in those darkest hours, He shone in my heart the brighter. You told me of the illustration in your book. The boy with Tabula Rasa printed over him? When you live through horror, that is what you must become. Tabula Rasa. An empty vessel for God to fill with strength. Knowledge will get you so far, but belief will give you the power to stand.’

  ‘But what can I do? Love of God will not tell me what Mendicant wants.’

  ‘It may surprise you to learn that, when I was a boy, I studied at a college not far from your parish. Jericho was its name. There was a rather extraordinary legend attached to the place. A great store of ancient knowledge that moved between worlds. One night, coming home from vespers, I passed an archway
and thought I saw …’

  My old friend proceeded to tell me the most impossible story.

  ‘I must admit,’ he continued, ‘that, aside from that experience, I have no knowledge of ghosts and demons, but I do believe in them. And I believe in you. Go to Jericho. I will phone ahead and make the arrangements. Ask for Willard at the gate …’

  He gave me some further instructions. I noted down things that weeks before I would have called superstitious nonsense.

  ‘Remember, Asher, tabula rasa. Clear your mind of prejudices and limitations. Be as an empty vessel and allow God’s love and His wrath to fill you.’

  I said goodbye to Father Sam. I would never hear his voice again.

  I set out for Jericho.

  Forty-five

  Brody’s Story

  BUNDLE 1 –

  MENDICANT IN CROW HAVEN – 1976

  I don’t know why I translated the Transmigration of Souls. Perhaps, even then, I had some inkling that the Doctor’s end would not be of my making. That I was, like John the Baptist, only the precursor; preparing the way.

  As I drove away from Jericho, I looked at my watch and found that it had stopped at a quarter-to-midnight: the time that I had entered the archway and left the world. The translation had taken a good three hours or more. Yet, when I passed the cathedral, the solstice clock chimed twelve. Either that grand old timepiece was wrong, or time itself was out of joint. Perhaps those hours of work within the confines of the library had occupied only fifteen minutes in the real world. I had been absent from Crow Haven for a few hours at least and, although I had put Jim Rowbanks on his guard, I knew that Mendicant had a way of warping a man’s perceptions.

  I left the city lights behind. The twisting, shadow-thick country roads were so still and unmoving that my imagination betrayed my fears. Above the rattle of the engine, I thought I heard whispers telling me that I was too late and that everything I feared had come true. In the headlights, I glimpsed the dark shimmer of blood on bark and, occasionally, a gaunt face staring between the bracken. Rolling down the hillside into Crow Haven, I passed deserted streets, silent houses and windows with curtains tightly drawn.