The Dark Sacrament (10 page)

Julie was coming to a better understanding of the entity's motives, what Dubois was trying to do to her. He was attacking her very faith.

“I know now what his plan was. That I'd give up my religion and go over to him. It took me a while to see this, even though all the clues were there. For long periods I stopped going to Sunday worship or saying prayers at all, simply to get some peace. Now I know that that's how demonic oppression works. By getting me to give up on God, the demon was priming me for something altogether more horrific, but I couldn't have known that at the time.”

Julie's “more horrific” development occurred at the beginning of 1992. The manner of the haunting shifted dramatically. The experience left her with the conviction that Pierre Dubois was intent on much more than molesting her at night. He wished to possess her—body and soul.

A single incident was enough to convince her of this. One night, she awoke to the familiar pattern of oppression: the paralyzing weight, the obnoxious smell, the stubbled cheek. But this time there was an additional torment. A hand was tightening about her throat; she could barely breathe. Dubois was attempting to throttle her. Her battle with the entity had become a fight for survival.

Unable to move her limbs, she sought in desperation for sacred words that might thwart the demon. At last she remembered the prayer a Catholic friend had instructed her to say if she ever felt threatened.

The words came to her, but the pressure on her throat was so great that she could hardly give voice to them. “In…the name…of…of Jesus…
Christ!
” The pressure lessened. “Get out of my life!”

Sure enough, the exhortation proved to be very effective. Julie felt the fingers relinquish their stranglehold. She was free.

She gave thanks to God, convinced as she was that her speaking the name of Christ had saved her. At the same time, she knew from bitter experience that Dubois would not take her victory lightly. Sooner or later he would seek vengeance.

He did so within the hour—just when she thought the coast was clear and was drifting into sleep again.

This time, there were no footsteps, but a low “zooming noise,” as Julie puts it; one that grew as it approached the bed. She remembers
sitting up to investigate, only to be pushed back down again by a hand pressing against her chest. She was attacked again, not throttled, as before, but by increased pressure of the crushing weight upon her body. So great was the pressure that she was certain that the entity was trying to crush the life out of her.

The housewife had never been willing to fully face the true nature of the creature that called itself Pierre Dubois. A part of her had been willing to accept the lie it fed her: the story of the Frenchman and his concocted history, the ruse by which a malevolent force had inveigled its way into her home. Now she felt certain that “Dubois” had never walked the earth as a human being, never been a blacksmith, never drawn breath. He—
it
—was a demon. And now it wanted her dead, so that it could drag her off to whatever dark region it inhabited.

She summoned the strength to resist as best she could, willing her arms to move and to push the vile thing away from her.

“I'd never really feared death, but I did then,” Julie says. “The terror of that, the fear, is impossible to put into words. I was fighting not only for my life but my soul as well. I was convinced that if I died, I'd be brought face-to-face with that thing that had tormented me for so many years. I'd be lost forever.”

She pleaded with her Maker. “Dear Lord, don't let me die,” she implored. “I don't want to see its face. Please, Lord, please!” Anything was preferable to that. Julie uttered one final, desperate entreaty.

“In the name of
Jesus Christ,
” she cried out once more, as loudly as she could, “
get out of my life!
”

Again, the weight lifted from her, and again she braced herself for the counterattack.

Strangely enough, it did not come. She switched on the bedside lamp and sat up, gasping for breath.

“I dearly wished I had not put that light on,” she says. “But by then it was too late.”

A shadow was rearing up at the foot of the bed. Julie describes it as “a blob, like a smoking black cloud, not the shape of a person—just a thing, but a terrible thing. The absolute evil that came
from it was overwhelming. I was so gripped with terror, I could not move, and I knew that if it came towards me I'd be swallowed up…destroyed, and that would be the end of me.

“Imagine what it feels like to know that you're going to be killed, and the person torturing you is deliberately making you suffer beforehand. That's how it was. I felt a level of fear that is beyond words. I implored the Lord to keep it away from me and, thank God, it stayed where it was. Then I heard the voice.”

For the first time ever, her tormentor actually
spoke
to her. There was no French accent but plain English, as though the entity realized that the game was up, as though it knew that it no longer could hide behind the deception that it was the spirit of Pierre Dubois, once a living human being.

The male voice was hoarse, stertorous, angry almost.

“Be quiet!” it commanded. “Go to sleep.”

Julie did exactly that. She was instantly asleep—chilling testimony to the control the demon had over her. When she awoke the next morning, however, it was with the possibility, and the hope, that the end of her long ordeal might well be in sight. She felt ready to finally speak of her torment to someone else.

She threw caution to the winds. She was past caring that the demon would exact vengeance if it thought it was threatened. She confided in the most devout believer of the family—her sister. Margaret advised her to see a minister at once. She persuaded her that an exorcism, carried out in the home, was her only recourse. Before Julie left, Margaret gave her a framed picture of Jesus with the inscription Christ is the head of this house, the unseen guest at every meal, the silent listener to every conversation. Julie hung it in her bedroom.

Having shared her burden with her sister, she felt some relief. She still could not confide in her husband but hoped that soon her troubles would be at an end. Margaret was eager to help her find a suitable clergyman. There were bound to be many, she said, who were proficient in the deliverance ministry.

“I was very much mistaken,” Julie says. “I went first to my own minister. He told me he'd never done an exorcism, but he gave me the name of another man. I went to him, only to be told the same thing. I must have gone to five or six, and none of them felt able to help me. I really think when they heard what I'd come through, they were too afraid to even visit my home. Honestly, I was really beginning to despair.”

During her search for a suitable exorcist, the siege of her home continued. The incursions could assume a variety of forms.

“There was one night in particular,” Julie recalls. “I was on my own in bed again, and some sort of loud noise woke me up. I was only half-awake, wondering what the noise was. I don't know why but I thought it might have been a dog barking. I waited for it to bark again. But we had no dog; nor did the neighbors on either side. I told myself that I'd imagined it, closed my eyes, and tried to get back to sleep. Then I heard the sound again—the one that woke me up.”

She knew at once that it was no dog, or indeed any earthly creature. Julie remembers it still with a bone-chilling clarity and dearly wishes that she could forget it—forget both the sound and the malignancy that pervaded the bedroom when it had died away.

“It was a man's laugh,” she explains, “a horrible, mocking, evil laugh. It filled the room, but it was inside my head at the same time. I remember putting my hands over my ears to try and block it out, but that didn't stop it. I couldn't get out of the bed, I was just powerless to escape it.”

In the dim light from the street, she saw, on the far wall, the picture of Christ given to her by her sister. It was hard to make out the features, but Julie had contemplated it so often while at prayer that she could call it unerringly to mind.

“I started to pray out loud to the image of Jesus,” she says. “But Dubois was not amused.”

The entity vented its fury in yet another demonstration of its power. As Julie concentrated on the face of Jesus, unseen hands gripped the picture, lifted it from the wall, and smashed it to pieces on the floor.

 

We have seen that, throughout the many years of her ordeal, Julie Neville had somehow managed to keep her children in the dark with regard to the demon Dubois. They were aware of
something,
of course—the noises and the taps turning themselves on and off were hard to ignore—but the two boys and their sister were never privy to what went on in their mother's room when she was alone.

“I could put up with the torture so long as it didn't go near the children,” she says. “I knew deep down that I should never have allowed Gordon to play with the Ouija in the first place. And as a mother, I had to take responsibility for my son's mistake. I was paying the price, but I promised myself that if it ever
did
attack one of them, I'd have to take action at once.”

Eventually, what she feared most came to pass. In the summer of 1994, John and Julie went on vacation with the younger children, leaving Gordon in charge of things.

He was looking forward to the freedom of the house and having his friends over. He was ill prepared for the phenomena he was to experience.

Gordon, now in his thirties, recalls that harrowing time.

“The first night wasn't so bad. I did feel kind of uneasy. I remember it being very cold, especially on the landing and in my bedroom, and turning up the heat. But I thought it was just me, being on my own in the empty house for the first time. On the second night I made the big mistake of sleeping in my parents' bedroom. I thought it would be more comfortable. Well, ‘sleeping' actually isn't the right word, because I didn't get any sleep.”

It started—as such phenomena often do—with an apparent accident, a fairly trivial occurrence as far as Gordon was concerned. A little wooden cross fell to the floor.

It had hung on the far wall, in the place left vacant by the picture of Christ, the one Dubois had destroyed. Gordon had not known of its existence. He would, in any case, have considered it to be no more than an item of idolatry; he was not a believer.

His mother had compensated for its loss with the cross, found when she cleared out the attic. Gordon had his back to it when it fell. It made only the dullest of
thucks
as it struck the carpet. He turned, bemused but by no means alarmed. Perhaps he should have been.

“The strange thing was,” he says, “that when I went to hang it back up again, I discovered that it couldn't have just fallen unaided, because the nail that held it was still in the wall and the loop of cord on the cross wasn't broken.”

Gordon got into bed.

“The cross shook me up a bit,” he says. “But I told myself I was just being silly, and after a while I dozed off.”

Not for long, though.

“I woke up because I heard this creaking sound coming from the wall on the left. My mother had a wardrobe on that side of the room, a big, heavy thing stuffed with her clothes and shoes and things. And there would have been a gap of about four feet between it and the bed. Anyway, I sat up to see what was going on and I just couldn't believe my eyes.”

The heavy wardrobe appeared to be growing in size, its dark bulk rising toward the ceiling. Gordon, still drowsy with sleep, blinked to focus his eyes. Bafflingly, the wardrobe continued to grow. It was filling his vision. It was making noises too; they sounded, for all the world, like a great beast groaning in pain. And all at once he knew the truth. The wardrobe was not growing. It was toppling slowly forward, its triangular pediment seemingly set on a collision course with Gordon,
as if somebody was pushing from behind.
The groaning changed to a deep bass sigh as the wardrobe's feet gave way beneath the weight.

Gordon sprang from the bed. The wardrobe crashed down.

“I tell you, I never moved so fast in my life,” he says with a shiver. “That thing was so heavy I thought it had crushed the bed itself. Later on, when I discovered what my mother had been going through for so long, I really freaked, because I realized that Dubois didn't like the fact that I had taken over her bed and was actually trying to kill me.”

Gordon spent the rest of the week at a friend's house.

When Julie learned of her son's experience, she knew that she could no longer keep her secret from the family. If the demon could attack Gordon, then why not his brother and sister? She was greatly afraid for them. She called the family together and revealed all, for the sake of the children omitting the most disturbing details. Dubois had occasioned enough sleepless nights in the Neville household.

John Neville was shocked and horrified; throughout the long years of his wife's ordeal he had remained blissfully unaware of the demonic presence in his very bedroom. To be sure, he had suspected that all was not as it should be, but had attributed Julie's troubles to depression. He was determined that she suffer no longer. He joined her in the search for a churchman who could put an end to her misery.

One man's name kept coming to the fore—that of Canon William H. Lendrum. Those whom the couple spoke to were loud in their praise of this man's qualities. Their search seemed to have borne fruit. It was February 1995.

Finding the exorcist had proved easy; getting hold of him was another matter. Julie believes that shadowy forces were at work to thwart her, that Dubois was determined that the exorcist would not cross his path.

“I tried the canon's number every day for a week,” she says, “but the phone just kept ringing unanswered. I checked with the operator, and I did have the correct number. But each time, it would ring out. The canon told me later that his phone hadn't been ringing at all at the times I said. He told me that this was a common feature in
his experience. The evil spirit, knowing it's about to be cast out, will do everything to stop it happening.”