The Dark Sacrament Read online

  Gary is right-handed.

  Jessica watched with astonishment and a creeping disquiet as her son’s pen traveled over the page. The words he was writing—though English they were—made no sense at all.

  “What’s he writing, Mommy?” Kelly asked nervously, sharing his mother’s unease.

  “I don’t know…. Gary?”

  Gary did not reply but continued to write frantically. Then all at once he stopped. His body seemed to relax and he calmly turned to the next page. Jessica went to snatch the copybook away, but before she could reach it, his body had tensed again and the frantic writing continued. She tried to lift his wrist, but was shocked to discover that his arm and the hand that held the pen were quite immovable, as if “made of rock.”

  She watched in horror as the writing, clear and then illegible by turns, started pouring out filthy words and phrases that had no place in a ten-year-old’s vocabulary. There were drawings too: little designs resembling signs of the zodiac and five-pointed stars. She knew they were not idle doodles but had darker connotations.

  In such a bizarre situation, she did the only thing she could. Grasping Gary around the waist, she pulled the chair from under him and hauled him away from the table. Incongruously, his body remained in a rigid seated position as though the chair were still in place, while the hand clutching the pen continued to make frantic writing motions in midair. Jessica lowered Gary to the floor. He collapsed, seemingly in a dead faint.

  “I was sick with worry,” she says. “It was too much to take. I never saw the like of it. I couldn’t understand any of it; it was crazy. I thought Gary was going to die. But a few seconds later he was all right again. He opened his eyes and looked around. The first thing he said was, ‘What happened, Mommy?’ He didn’t remember a thing. Nothing.”

  Jessica tore the pages from the copybook, ran into the living room where a fire burned in the grate, and tossed them onto the coals. She averted her eyes as the pages burst into flame. She could not bring herself to look at the strange lines written by her son’s hand. Nor did she wish to know where the garbled words and sinister pictographs had come from. Of one thing she was certain: they had not come from Gary; the words had not been his. More unnerving still, the handwriting had not resembled her son’s. It was too elegant, as if from the hand of an artist.

  When she returned to the kitchen, Gary was again seated at the table, wearing the same glazed look. She shook him; she was angry. He seemed to come to his senses. But then he looked her in the eye, and Jessica will never forget his words, so utterly out of character and so unexpected were they.

  “F*** you,” he spat and ran from the house.

  Jessica believes that her mind was fully made up at that moment. She was finally acknowledging that she was up against a very powerful force, one that could induce a sweet, mild-mannered fifth-grader to change utterly. The change was frightening. Jessica had feared it before; now she was in holy terror of it. She asked herself what could happen next.

  She thought of God. Her visits to Father Dominic in his monastery had, to an extent, turned her thoughts to the Lord, yet she had to admit to herself that it was a deity unfamiliar to her. The monk’s religious world, with its statues and incense, was not the one she had known as a child. She told herself now that it was silliness, that God did not change but his worshipers did. Christ was Christ, whether worshiped in a vast, thronged Roman basilica or in a plain and unadorned Lutheran chapel.

  But these were rational considerations. Her heart told her that she must seek out the help of a priest of her own faith. She withdrew to the quiet of her bedroom, picked up the phone, and called John Ashwood, an Anglican vicar.

  He came to visit her that same evening. He was sympathetic on learning of her difficulties and at once recommended the services of an exorcist.

  “What!” She was incredulous. “Are you telling me Gary needs to be exorcised?”

  “I do. From what you tell me, it sounds as if there’s an unclean spirit at work. I’m not saying that it’s controlling Gary; I’m saying that it’s influencing him in some way. And it’s time to send it back to where it came from before it does any more mischief.”

  Her son needed an exorcism. She turned the curious word over in her head. Its associations seemed too outlandish by far. But she had to face facts and take the minister’s advice seriously.

  “All right, Vicar,” she said at last. “If you think it’ll help Gary. When could you do it?”

  “Not me. I haven’t the experience. But there’s a good man who does: Canon Lendrum. He’s retired now but still very active with deliverance.” He patted her wrist. “Leave it to me. I’ll get in touch with him. If anybody can help, it’s William Lendrum.”

  Jessica and her son arrived by taxi at the Lendrum house in south Belfast on a wet, March afternoon. It was Gary’s first visit to the city. From the bus he had seen the twin cranes in the old Harland & Wolff shipyard, “David” and “Goliath.” They loomed majestically on the skyline, bright yellow against the gray. He wished to go there at once, see the giants close up. “Later, dear,” his mother promised him. There was more urgent business to attend to.

  Canon Lendrum studied the boy—perhaps the youngest “visitor” he had ever welcomed into his home. He hesitated before thinking of Gary Lyttle as a demoniac, one suffering from demonic oppression. During his long ministry he had encountered several such unfortunates. None had appeared as normal—or as bright—as did Gary.

  He impressed the canon with his spontaneity and precociousness. He answered all questions put to him seemingly without guile. There was no sign whatsoever of the willfulness that Reverend Ashwood had spoken about on the telephone, and certainly no trace of the bad language. Gary seemed to him to be a well-adjusted boy.

  “So you haven’t been to school lately?” he said.

  “No, Mr. Lendrum.”

  “How long is that now?”

  “Three months.”

  “Three months tomorrow,” Jessica said. “I daren’t send him back. They think he’s a lunatic or something. It’s very trying.”

  “I’ve no doubt.” He turned back to Gary. “Your mother tells me you fight a lot with the other boys.”

  “They’re always picking on me. They call me names.”

  “What names might they be?”

  “They call me a devil.”

  “But you’re not, are you?” the canon said with smile. “You’re a good boy.”

  Canon Lendrum did not doubt it. What he saw before him was a boy of ten, dark-haired, good-looking—as normal a youngster as one could hope to meet.

  “I was struck by the way he answered my questions,” he tells us. “Gary was confident, intelligent, articulate, and in no way intimidated.” And seemingly guileless, too—until, that is, one looked into his eyes.

  The canon finds it difficult to put certain matters into words. Not that he is short on descriptive powers; he is an excellent eyewitness with seemingly flawless recall. Yet he is unable to portray in full what it was he saw that day when he met Gary’s gaze. The closest he can come to an adequate description is that the boy’s look was “old beyond his years—older than mine even, and I’m eighty-two.”

  The canon can only describe the phenomenon in terms of emotion, for he is speaking of something that he believes lies outside the world of rational thought, beyond the human. He is convinced that, for a moment at least, it was not fully the boy who gazed back at him but a part of another personality entirely. For want of a better name he calls it “Tyrannus,” and he believes it was the demon that was seeking to dominate the boy. (He is careful to avoid the word possession, preferring to speak in terms of control or affliction.)

  But the moment passed and Gary was “himself” again. The canon continued as though nothing untoward had occurred.

  “Tell me about the Ouija board,” he said. “Where is it now?”

  “At the river.”

  “Really?” It seemed unlikely.

  “I
hid it.”

  “Do you still play with it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Often?”

  “Two or three times a week. It tells me stuff.”

  “Stuff?”

  “Yeah, about how I’ll be when I grow up.”

  “Tell the reverend about the Bible, Gary,” his mother prompted.

  “It says I shouldn’t read it. It says it’s rubbish.”

  “Mmm. How does it do that? How does it tell you these things?”

  The canon had chosen his words with care. He knew as well as anybody that Ouija does not make pronouncements of its own accord but simply replies to questions asked of it. He wondered about the nature of the question that had elicited the condemnation of the Bible. Gary’s next words supplied the clue.

  “I ask it questions the voice tells me to.”

  “Whose voice?”

  “The man’s. Tyrannus. He says that I shouldn’t go near a church. He says bad things’ll happen to me if I do. And he says I should stay away from the Bible.”

  “Does he indeed? And do you agree with him, Gary?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Answer me this, Gary: do you want to be free of this evil?”

  “Yes, Mr. Lendrum. I do. But Tyrannus doesn’t want that. He says if I don’t do what he says he’ll make me feel so bad that I’ll want to kill myself.”

  “Never mind what Tyrannus wants, Gary. It’s what you want that matters.”

  “But he can stop me doing what I want.”

  “Only if you allow him to.”

  Canon Lendrum rose then and crossed to a little table by the window. On it were his Bible and a cross attached to a weighted base. Taking the book, he went to Gary and stood over him.

  “I can take away any power that this ‘man’ has,” he said.

  Suddenly Gary shrank back. He looked distressed.

  “What is it?”

  “He’s laughing,” the boy said. “I can hear Tyrannus laughing. He’s laughing at you, Mr. Lendrum.”

  “Pay no attention, Gary. Put your trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.”

  Canon Lendrum held his palm aloft. He raised his voice.

  “I bind you, in the name of Jesus Christ, and by the power of the Holy Spirit, I strip you of your influence over this child!”

  Gary began to shake. His mother, who was well used to his making jokes, at first mistook it for laughter. And in a sense it was. But the laughter was not Gary’s; later he would say that it was “Tyrannus” laughing and trying to induce Gary to join with him in the laughter, to show him the absurdity of this elderly ecclesiastic with his Bible and his medieval beliefs. But Gary says that at that point his overriding emotion was one of fear.

  The laughing of the demon ceased. The boy had stopped shaking. His eyes were shut.

  “It’s up to you now, Gary,” the canon said. “You have to make the decisions now, you understand? No one else.”

  Gary said nothing.

  “You must ask Jesus to help you.”

  “Say it, Gary,” his mother instructed. “Do what Reverend Lendrum says.”

  It was clear to the canon that Gary was unused to prayer. Nevertheless, the boy joined his hands as instructed, shut his eyes, and spoke in a loud voice.

  “Please help me, Jesus!” he cried.

  “Very good,” said the canon. “Now, repeat after me: I put my trust in you, Jesus…”

  “I put my trust in you, Jesus.”

  “…and I invite the Holy Spirit into my heart and into my life.”

  “I invite the Holy Spirit into my heart and into my life.”

  Gary opened his eyes. Did Canon Lendrum see within them a normal ten-year-old, free of that entity he had witnessed earlier? He is not certain. But there was one more thing the boy must resolve to do, one final act that would serve to ensure his deliverance.

  “Gary, I want you to go with Reverend Ashwood and find that Ouija board. Will you do that for me?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Then I want you to burn it. Is that clear? I’ll be giving Reverend Ashwood a call next week, and I want him to tell me that the board has been burned.”

  “It will be,” Gary assured him.

  But Gary failed to keep his word. When Reverend Ashwood accompanied him to the river, there was no sign of the Ouija board. Either it had gone missing or Gary had secreted it in another place. Either way, Gary was not saying.

  A week later, his grandmother started experiencing paranormal activity in her home when Gary stayed over. It took the form of strange noises and shadowy manifestations; they were present in his bedroom and in other parts of the house. They caused the grandmother so much distress that she too submitted herself to a rite of exorcism with Canon Lendrum.

  At this point in time, in 2007, Gary’s mother seems powerless to effect any change in her son’s behavior. It would appear that she has relinquished control of her son. She prays for him and clings to the one positive note in Father Dominic’s assessment. “Gary is very special. Some of our greatest saints suffered frequent attacks from the Devil so that their souls might be purified. God is testing him.”

  The priest might well have had St. Teresa of Ávila in mind when he said that. Certain aspects of the life of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic who founded the Discalced, or Barefoot, Order of the Carmelites show interesting parallels with young Gary’s experiences.

  She was shown visions of hell, saw demons of “abominable form,” heard voices, suffered severe mental anguish, and had frequent seizures, which could last longer than an hour. About one such seizure she wrote the following:

  On another occasion the Devil was with me for five hours, torturing me with such terrible pains and both inward and outward disquiet that I do not believe I could have endured them any longer. The sisters who were with me were frightened to death…for the Devil had made me pound the air with my body, head and arms and I had been powerless to resist him. But the worst thing had been the interior disquiet. I could find no way of regaining my tranquility.

  When we spoke with Gary, we inquired about his continued use of the Ouija board. It is understandable that he should try it once, particularly as he had discovered it in such unusual circumstances; it was less clear why he should have gone back to it again and again, given the mischief it caused. Gary made the same reply each time: “I was bored.”

  Preteen boys should not be so jaded by life. Yet Father Dominic suspects that Gary’s boredom is a symptom of our times. It is a topic he has touched on more than once. “In the past, religion created a moral code of ethics and acceptable modes of behavior in society,” he says. “Twenty years ago children knew right from wrong. Today, self-interest dominates our thinking, and moral criticism is considered old-fashioned, so that children are allowed to do whatever they please and therefore have no defenses against evil. How else do you explain the rise in binge drinking, drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, and violent crime? How else do you explain the anarchy in schools, the lack of respect?”

  “Oh, the Devil is very clever in his methods,” he goes on to say. “By making God look archaic and outmoded, he creates a vacuum in the lives of the susceptible, which he, the Enemy, can then move in to fill.”

  The word vacuum is interesting in this context. We never learned what first led Gary to become so frustrated and tired of life. As outsiders, there were only so many personal questions we could ask. But it is clear that his boredom was born of a need for diversion; there was a vacuum that needed filling.

  “Grown-ups have no end of diversions these days,” Father Dominic says. He sighs. “At times I think half the world only wants diversion. I know this sounds like preaching, but I wouldn’t be the first priest to say that the Devil makes work for idle hands. I see the truth of that in the rise in drug abuse, alcohol abuse, pornography, violence. It all starts as diversion, a way to relieve boredom.”

  “Children don’t have these things, but they do have magic,” he says. “They love magic t
ricks. Show a boy a bit of magic and his boredom lifts immediately. So what better way to ensnare a little boy than to show him real magic?”

  When Gary unearthed the board by the river that day, and saw the planchette leap into the air, he could have run away. He chose not to. It was magic. By tarrying to see what would happen next—to see what the conjurer had up his sleeve—he showed himself to be receptive, and thereby exposed his vulnerability.

  Father Dominic and Canon Lendrum are agreed that the processes of oppression and possession can only be understood in retrospect and verified by those individuals who have undergone successful exorcisms.

  The process of surrendering to evil is twofold. First, the mind must be rendered receptive; the will then becomes amenable to acting upon that which is being offered.

  Enter the Ouija. Elsewhere in this book we examined the disturbing repercussions of the “game,” principally the case of Julie Neville, the County Antrim woman who was tormented by a demon for fifteen years. There are a great many such tales of misadventure. For instance, it is not widely known that the “talking board” figured large in the true-life case on which William Peter Blatty based his novel The Exorcist. The demonized youngster was in reality a boy named Robbie, and the exorcism took place in 1949 in his hometown, Cottage Hills, a small community in the state of Maryland. The boy was thirteen at the time.

  The family was from St. Louis, Missouri, and an aunt would visit from time to time. She was a medium who, among other things, used the Ouija board extensively to contact the spirit world. Robbie learned the “art” from her and continued to employ it without adult supervision. When his aunt died suddenly in January 1949, the boy tried to communicate with her. That was when the manifestations—which would lead to his demonization—started in his parents’ home. Minor and seemingly innocent at first, they grew in time to be unmistakably malignant.

  This appears to be a common pattern where the Ouija is concerned. Most modern commentators on the use of the boards will warn that they should be approached with extreme caution. One churchman likened playing Ouija to allowing a child to build sand castles on a beach primed with land mines. The sensible advice is perhaps to avoid the Ouija altogether. The boards have too much unfortunate history.