The Dark Sacrament Read online

  “What’s this man’s name, darling? Do I know him?”

  “His name’s Tyrannus.”

  “Tyr—What sort of a name is that?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Where did you meet this man?”

  “At the river; it was the man I saw on the throne,” he said, his words tumbling out in a torrent, “the one that was like the Devil, only it wasn’t the Devil; it was Tyrannus. He was on the stairs, and he was huge; he was ten times bigger than me.”

  Jessica could only stare.

  Tyrannus is not a name one comes across very often. One of the movies in the Star Wars series had a minor villain named Darth Tyrannus, and a recent television series set in ancient Rome featured a gladiator named Tyrannus. Jessica was familiar with neither character. To the casual eye, Tyrannus seems to contain elements of “tyrant” and “tyrannosaurus”; it could be argued that both words would hold a fascination for a ten-year-old boy. In fact, Tyrannus is a Latin name, derived from the Greek tyrannos, meaning “sole ruler.” It is not difficult to see how “sole ruler” could come to mean “cruel despot,” as tyrant does today.

  In literature, we encounter the name in a play by the tragedian Sophocles: Oedipus Tyrannus. It is more usually entitled Oedipus Rex or Oedipus the King. What is not widely known is that a man named Tyrannus is mentioned in the New Testament. Paul the Apostle had been preaching in the city of Ephesus:

  But when divers were hardened, and believed not, but spake evil of that way before the multitude, he departed from them, and separated the disciples, disputing daily in the school of Tyrannus. (Acts 19:9)

  This brief allusion is all we have to go on. There has been speculation as to who Tyrannus was, but it remains speculation; nothing about this Greek schoolmaster has come down to us. It might be thought that Gary had picked up the reference somewhere or other; Sunday school comes to mind. And it is a fact that the boy has a Protestant background.

  Jessica recalled vividly that afternoon she found him frozen with fear, staring open-mouthed at something at the top of the stairs. He had spoken of the stairs again. She wondered if they held the key.

  “So this Tyrannus was in our house, Gary?”

  He nodded, increasing her fears.

  “That day? The day you…”

  “Yeah. He scared me. He was huge. A big man, dressed in black, and he was covered in stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?” she asked, not really wanting to hear the answer.

  “Rotten stuff. All dirt, like he’d come out of the ground, and he had wounds and big cuts all over him, but he was laughing at––”

  “That’s enough!” she snapped. “You’ve been watching too many horror DVDs at my mother’s. By heavens, I’m going over there tomorrow and—”

  “No, Mommy!” Gary cried. “It wasn’t the films; it was the Ouija board.”

  And then he told her of the board, of the entity on the throne, of how it seemed to have followed him home.

  The more Jessica heard, the more troubled she grew. She wondered why Gary would suddenly invent such things. It was not like him. Her good sense advised her not to give his story approbation by appearing to believe it. An active imagination was all well and good, but this particular fantasy seemed downright unhealthy. She said as much to Gary, fed him a good, nutritious dinner with plenty of greens—on the doctor’s orders—and banished the entire disquieting affair from her mind.

  She consoled herself that the new “friend” was not the pedophile she had feared but a creature of boyish make-believe.

  She wondered if “Tyrannus” was not a character in Star Trek, a “Borg”—whatever that might be.

  Gary returned to school the following week. But he was not the Gary of old; he had altered radically.

  Reports began to reach his mother of a change in his behavior, indeed in his general demeanor. She learned of bullying, of using bad language, of treating his teachers with gross disrespect. It was as though he had undergone a complete change of personality. She could not understand it, asked herself if she were to blame, if her parenting skills were faulty.

  On the Monday following his return to school, he came home late again. It was October and the evenings were longer; it was dark by the time Jessica heard his key turn in the front door. She was torn between anxiety and annoyance. He should have known better.

  His excuse was that he had been “fooling around” by the river. The river again! She demanded to know more but Gary refused to tell her. She had to reprimand him for swearing: “I won’t have that kind of language in this house.” Again he picked a fight with his unfortunate little sister.

  Calm was eventually restored. Gary still had a lot of catching up to do, and she left him to his homework. But later that evening, as she was cleaning the bath, she heard Kelly call out from the living room. She sounded frantic. Jessica wiped her hands and hurried down, thinking that Gary had again attacked his sister. He had not.

  He was again lying on the floor. His lips were blue, his eyes were glazed over, and his body was locked once more in the mysterious paralysis.

  Again she called Dr. Flynn, and once again he hurried to her summons. He was in a quandary. He telephoned his brother-in-law at his home. The neurologist could offer little practical advice; the EEG had, after all, ruled out epilepsy, and the other tests showed that Gary was physically healthy.

  “I’m afraid I can do nothing more with him, Mrs. Lyttle,” the general practitioner confessed. “I’m going to have to refer him to a psychiatrist.”

  He saw her anxious look.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I don’t think there’s a serious mental problem. It’s probably the onset of puberty. Some boys react to it more strongly than others. All those hormones leaping about in there.” He smiled. “Enough to drive anybody a little bit batty.”

  “But what about medication, doctor? Something to calm him down?”

  “That’s the very reason why I wouldn’t like to prescribe anything of that nature. You never can tell with puberty. The wrong drugs could be disastrous. Besides, I don’t believe in sedating children. As far as I’m concerned, parents who go down that road are giving up accountability. Antidepressants are no substitute for love and understanding, which is all a child needs.”

  And so began what would prove to be an extended course of psychiatric treatment. The therapist, a child psychiatrist and consultant to Letterkenny General Hospital, embarked on what she called “Gestalt” therapy. Dr. Sally Mulgrew wished to focus on Gary’s “self-awareness.” Jessica understood little of what the woman told her, Gary even less. But Sally was persuasive, and the boy seemed to take to her; there was an excellent rapport.

  On her advice, Gary saw Sally once a week. Each session lasted a hour, and the therapist was happy with his progress. Jessica noticed the change too. He was returning to his old self, the sweet-natured Gary she knew.

  It was therefore with great dismay that Jessica, in early spring, took a phone call from her son’s headmaster.

  “Gary’s had an attack of some sort.”

  She feared the worst, sensing what was to come.

  “You’d better come over, Mrs. Lyttle. It happened midway through a geography lesson.” (Jessica, even in her anxiety, asked herself why the man deemed this an important piece of information.) “We’ve alerted his doctor.”

  As if that were not serious enough, Gary suffered a second seizure that very week. It came, as did the others, without warning. He was recovering from his ordeal at school and was stricken in much the same manner as before. With one important difference: this time, neither Jessica nor Kelly witnessed the seizure. It was Carmel Sharkey, the neighbor from next door, who reported it. She had been “babysitting” Gary while his mother went shopping.

  “Jessica,” she said when Dr. Flynn had departed, “you’re not going to like what I have to say to you.”

  “Don’t tell me any more bad news. I can’t take it.”

  “No, dear, that’s not it. I thi
nk you should take Gary to see a priest.”

  Jessica was stunned, as any mother would be. The neighbor was suggesting that her son was somehow unclean, in the biblical sense—touched by evil. No mother could countenance such a thing. The stigma is too great.

  “What are you saying, Carmel?”

  “For his own good. I think you know full well what I’m saying.”

  “Well, maybe I do. But Lord save us, Carmel, not a priest. He wouldn’t go near a priest.”

  “How can you say that? Have you asked him?”

  “I just know, that’s all. Carmel, you’re scaring me.”

  “You’ll have to face up to it, though. That stuff you told me about the Ouija board—I heard about a woman in England who had a lad who was messing around with a Ouija board. All sorts of things began to happen. They’re bad news, Jessica, so they are.”

  “Ah, please, Carmel! Don’t start that old nonsense with me.”

  Jessica was accustomed to her friend’s pietistic ways. She humored her, although privately she felt that Carmel Sharkey’s devotion to statues was no better than the idolatrous practices of the more primitive African tribes. In the Sharkey home there were more statues to Christ and the Blessed Virgin than Jessica had seen in respectably sized churches. There was a bewildering assortment of effigies of saints, whose identities could only be guessed at. Carmel did not wear her faith on her sleeve; she decorated her home with it. Yet, in all the time that Jessica had known her, she had never once tried to impose any of her beliefs. Until now.

  “Half the world doesn’t think it’s nonsense, Jessica,” she said then, hurt.

  “That may be, but I won’t have the likes of Father Sheridan putting ideas into my son’s head. I don’t like that man. He seems to me to be too fond of the good life for his own good. Why would a priest need two cars anyway?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of Father Sheridan. There’s a lovely old man I went to before. He’s in a Cistercian monastery over in Tyrone. I’m sure you know it.”

  “I do.”

  “He’s a healer. They say he—”

  “Ah, please, Carmel!” Jessica cried again. “It’s bad enough I’d take Gary to a Roman Catholic monastery, but to a healer. Come on. What is he, some sort of witch doctor, or what’s this they call it—a shaman?”

  Carmel was shaking her head with vehemence.

  “Father Dominic is nothing of the sort. You’d like him, Jessica. He’s a kind, gentle soul. And he’s genuine.” She took her friend’s hand. “Do it for Gary. What have you got to lose?”

  She made an appointment that day. A two-hour drive took them to the monastery on the shores of Lough Neagh. Gary said nothing as his mother parked the car close to a large and rambling Georgian building. Jessica was nervous as she pushed open a door that seemed to have been built for the passage of giants.

  They found themselves in an echoing hall with a high ceiling, bare except for a long, pewlike bench, a table, and old portraits of popes upon the walls. There was a small room off the hall and a sign saying reception.

  “We’ve come for Father Dominic,” Jessica told a smartly dressed young woman.

  Minutes later, the monk entered the hall by another door. He was a big man, bearded and dressed in the robe of the Cistercians. Jessica put his age at seventy or more. He barely looked at them as he crossed to yet another door. He pushed it open and beckoned.

  But when all were seated in the little sitting room, Father Dominic showed himself to be the kindly soul described by Carmel Sharkey. He spoke softly, smiled a good deal, and did not pry into areas that were of little relevance. He listened to Gary’s tale, eyes shut, nodding from time to time.

  To Jessica’s surprise, she heard her son speaking of matters he had confided to no one else. In the wake of his third seizure, she had sent him to stay with her mother for a few days. She recalled that he returned home, if anything, more nervous than he had ever been. He refused to be drawn out then, but now he was telling the priest what had befallen him. Jessica mused that Catholic confession must work in a similar way.

  “I couldn’t sleep at Grandma’s,” Gary was saying. “I kept seeing things.”

  “What sort of things?” Father Dominic asked.

  “Bad things. Shadows. Big, black shadows.”

  “In your bedroom?”

  “Yeah. I knew there was somebody there but I couldn’t see him properly. He kept changing. There were noises too.”

  “In your room as well?”

  “No,” said Gary with determination. “They were all over the house. It was—”

  “It’s an old house, Father,” Jessica said.

  “I kept hearing them at night,” Gary went on. “They were up in the ceiling and in the walls. Real scary stuff. Like there were animals there. But Grandma doesn’t have any pets. I had to have the light on all the time.”

  Father Dominic had gone silent. Jessica saw that he was looking into Gary’s eyes with consternation.

  “Tell me about this Tyrannus,” he said.

  “He shows me stuff. He showed me what I’ll be like when I’m grown up, when I’m twenty-eight or twenty-nine. I’m in an office with a big desk. Tyrannus says that if I come over to him I’ll be very rich.”

  “‘Come over,’” the priest repeated quietly.

  “He says I’ll have great power in the future. And loads of money. But I must do what he wants.”

  Let us examine Gary’s account. He claims that Tyrannus showed him his future as an adult. Evidently Gary was to become a successful businessman. That, in itself, is most unusual. When small boys dream of their future they do not see themselves sitting in offices. Offices are boring. They see themselves as major-league football players, or rock stars, or astronauts—the glamorous jobs. Gary’s account is without doubt highly unorthodox.

  Having listened to Gary’s story, Father Dominic took the boy’s wrist firmly in his big hand. From a pocket of his habit he drew out a small object: an oval-shaped silver casket with a glass window. Behind the glass a fragment of something old and yellowed was visible. Jessica knew it to be a relic; Carmel had several. The priest pressed the little casket lightly to Gary’s brow and murmured a prayer.

  Next, he taught the boy to say another prayer. It was framed in simple words that a child would have no difficulty remembering. Before they left, he took Gary’s mother aside and gave her a leaflet containing a simple prayer to be said daily.

  “I think you should know, Mrs. Lyttle, that you did well to bring the boy to me today. I don’t like what I see in him. There’s evil at work, I’m afraid.”

  Jessica was stunned by his directness. She fumbled for words, unwilling to accept that Carmel had guessed the truth and that the monk was confirming it.

  “But he’s only a child, Father.”

  “Indeed. Children know the difference between good and evil by an early age. Five or six, mostly—if not before. Your son is choosing evil. He is entertaining this ‘demon.’ I’ve seen its like before and I know it for what it is.”

  She turned to look at Gary. He was still seated on the chair that was too high for him, legs swinging in impatience as his eyes roved the dark paneling of the room and its somber paintings of ancient martyrs. Evil? She saw no evil there.

  “He’s going to have a very difficult and painful life if he doesn’t resist this thing now,” the priest said. “It’s imperative that he fight it, and you have to help him in that fight.”

  His words dismayed Jessica. But she was angry, too, at the ugly picture being painted for her. In what was becoming a perverse situation, she felt the need to assert what she believed.

  “Listen, he’s fantasizing!” she said defiantly. “Nobody believes in demons anymore. We live in more modern times, Father.”

  “Indeed,” Father Dominic continued calmly, “but I assure you they are not a fantasy. The Devil and his fallen angels exist, whether you believe in them or not. Not believing in evil means you are not armed against it. For whatever reas
on, your son has become a prime target. God is requesting that you turn back to him. It is up to you to help Gary come to this understanding.”

  Jessica felt defeated, hopeless. She wanted to cry.

  “I want you to promise me something,” the priest said gently, sensing her despair.

  “Yes, Father?”

  “I want you to promise me you’ll have him say those prayers to the Blessed Mother every day. She has such great power over the evil one,” he added enigmatically. “She’ll protect you. Prayer is the only way to fight against this. And I want you to bring Gary to see me again. Shall we say this day fortnight?”

  Jessica agreed. By the time they got home again, she felt that she needed a strong drink. She had much to mull over, and most of it was decidedly unpleasant.

  Under his mother’s supervision, Gary recited twice a day the short prayers that Father Dominic had taught him. He continued to visit the hospital in Letterkenny, and Sally reported steady progress. Jessica brought him to see Father Dominic again, and continued to do so every other week. After each visit it seemed that a little more of Gary’s old self was being returned to him. Jessica felt that a bleak period was ending, that whatever it was that had come into the boy’s life was leaving him in peace.

  But Gary skipped his prayers one day, and another day soon after, and before long he had let the habit slide. Jessica had never held with prayer at the best of times, and perhaps for this reason did not mind too much. And everything was fine again, was it not?

  She had lulled herself into a false sense of stability, so much so that when the next untoward manifestation took place, she found herself totally unprepared for it. It happened one evening as Kelly and Gary were doing their homework. Once more, it was Kelly who alerted her.

  “Mommy, Gary’s going all funny again!”

  She turned, to find her elder son staring into the middle distance, seemingly oblivious to his surroundings. His left hand was moving rapidly over his copybook. That was the first indication that all was not well.