The Dark Sacrament (29 page)

It is tragic that a man like Malachi has been left in old age to carry such a burden. How could he have known, as he traveled the world with Blenny, that those two glorious years would be followed by five years of torment? In Egypt he accidentally stepped into the path of evil in the form of Walter Ehrlich. No one could have foreseen that, upon the Gants' return, that same evil would manifest itself on the very road where they live.

The Egyptian episode continues to intrigue us. We wonder if it was in some way linked to Malachi's 2004 experience. Father Ignatius does not dismiss the notion. “It's entirely possible,” he says, “but very difficult to establish. Do not forget that evil is to be found just about everywhere in this world of ours. It's also true to say that men like Malachi Gant—spiritual men—will always be more susceptible than most people to attack from evil forces.”

On leaving Malachi's home, we draw level, some distance farther on, with the Sherrin house. We cannot help pausing to steal a look. In the garden there is a man with his back to us, off to one side, clipping a hedge. At the sound of the car, he turns slowly to stare at us, but we do not linger. The weight of Malachi's testimony proves too much; we have no inclination to examine at close quarters the face of evil.

The following events, which occurred on the Downey fruit farm between August 2004 and January 2005, were recreated through interviews with Patricia Downey, the owner's wife, her daughter, seventeen-year-old Katie, and a deposition written by Mirjana, a twenty-one-year-old foreign worker.

Always, there was something not quite right about the farm, as far back as anyone could remember. It was the land, not the homes that had been built upon it in the course of five centuries or more. Neighbors and friends suggested that the land was cursed. Tricia Downey did not rule this out.

“I never would've believed it myself,” says the mother of four. “That wasn't how I was brought up. We're Catholics and we believe in what the Church teaches us. But, given what we've been through, I keep an open mind.”

 

The Downey farmhouse is in County Wexford, and lies roughly midway between two sites of great historical significance. Vinegar Hill and Oulart Hill are battle sites. In the spring of 1798, each was the scene of some of the most ferocious fighting ever witnessed in the country.

At the first, overlooking the town of Enniscorthy and the Slaney River, the rebel army suffered a great defeat. They were the United Irishmen, spurred to revolt against English rule in their country by
the successes of the American and French revolutions. Oulart, some miles to the east, was the place where that same ragtag militia saw its greatest triumph. Among its captains was the fighting priest Father John Murphy, whose brief but valiant military career is celebrated in the ballad of
Boolavogue.

These ancient facts, as we shall see, would come to have a bearing on a prolonged assault on the Downey family.

The name Oulart derives from the Gaelic word for orchard,
úllord,
literally “apple field.” Today, apples still grow on Oulart Hill, but they are of the wild and inedible variety. Better, luscious varieties grow in the orchards owned by the family. Hugh Downey is the proud owner of close to a hundred acres given over to apple and pear trees. Although much of his produce is bought by Irish supermarkets and cider makers, he also exports fruit to foreign markets. The business is thriving and the family is among the wealthiest in the area.

It was not always so. There is a house very near to the Downeys' own. It is a long, one-story cottage that speaks of harder times. It is, we learn, more than 250 years old; in fact, it was standing here at the time of the Rising of 1798, when the Irish made a valiant but unsuccessful attempt to end British rule. The Downeys occupied the old house up until a few years ago. This fact, too, has a bearing on the case.

The family has lived in the area for generations, Tricia Downey tells us.

 

“I'm from County Kilkenny myself,” she says, “but my husband's people are here five hundred years, if not more. They go back a long way.”

Tricia is a pretty, well-groomed woman of forty-one. She speaks with the residue of an English accent, picked up during years spent working as a secretary in London. It was there that she met her future husband, Hugh. They married in 1988 and have four children: two boys and two girls.

Every year, they employ a small workforce of men and women—immigrants, mainly of East European origin. The women are quartered in the old one-story cottage, the men in an adjoining building.

“That house was rebuilt three or four times,” Tricia tells us. “It still had a thatched roof when I moved in. I liked it, though. There was something very quaint about it, even though it was a bit cramped. But Hugh insisted on building a new house. He'd lived in the old one all his life, so I suppose it was understandable he wanted a change.”

In October 2003, construction work on the new Downey home was completed. The family moved in toward the end of December, when the fruit harvest of that year had been picked, packaged, and dispatched to the respective buyers.

The room we are sitting in has a huge picture window that looks out over a good portion of the Downey land. The sun is low and slants between neat rows of apple trees, now bare of fruit. The seasonal workers all have gone. The place is quiet.

“That's how it was too before it all began,” Tricia says. “It started in a very quiet way. Just after my sister passed away.”

Tricia's sister, Claire, was only thirty-five when she died of ovarian cancer. It had been diagnosed late and was too far gone for treatment to be effective. Claire had never married, so it was left to Tricia to either consign her to a hospice or make her final days comfortable in her own home. She chose the latter. Claire was moved into the old house a few weeks before the new one was ready, and when the family made the move she went with them. It was agreed that
she should have the room that daughter Katie had earmarked for herself. It is on the ground floor, across the corridor from her sister Eilish's room. Katie did not object; she loved her aunt dearly.

The family is unusually devout, and their home reflects this. It contains many examples of religious iconography. We know of several priests' houses that have far fewer images of Jesus, Mary, and the saints, or statues to the Child of Prague, Michael the Archangel, St. Martin de Porres, and many other holy men and women we cannot readily identify. There are prayers also: hand-stitched samplers calling on the Lord to “Bless this House” and to protect its occupants against danger of an otherworldly nature.

Throughout the months of her sister's terminal illness, Tricia had prayed for her recovery. She led her family in countless rosaries, said novenas at home, and petitioned the nuns in a nearby convent to do likewise. Despite all this, Claire died early in the evening of July 6, 2004. Tricia was at the bedside up until the last. “I was holding her hand as she was dying,” Tricia recalls. “Her last words were, ‘It's getting dark, oh so dark!' and I remember assuring her she was going to God's light and to just let go.”

Ostensibly, there was no link between Claire's death and what was to ensue in the Downey home. In reality, however, there
was
a link, and that link was prayer.

The prayers for Claire did not end with her death. Like all committed Irish Catholics brought up to believe in the importance of prayers for the dead, the Downeys—if anything—increased the fervency and frequency of their praying. Day after day, evening after evening, the house rang with Our Fathers, Hail Marys and other supplications to the Almighty, that he might look favorably on the dearly departed.

“It started with the eggs, would you believe,” Tricia says, “a few weeks after Claire's death.”

Tricia rose earlier than usual, roused the others, and went to fix breakfast. She opened the refrigerator in the utility room to get the eggs and bacon. There were no eggs.

“Did you move the eggs, Katie?” she called out.

“Not me.”

But they were there—out of sight in the back of the fridge, where eggs had no good reason to be. Tricia, still consumed with grief, thought no more about the incident. She had any number of things to occupy her.

But the following morning the eggs had again gone missing. They were nowhere to be seen in the fridge. Tricia was vexed now. She immediately blamed her offspring.

“This is no time for stupid games!” she said. “Whoever's messing around with the eggs has to stop it right now.”

But none of the children seemed to be responsible. It was, Tricia reflected, a trivial thing. But, later in the day, when she was preparing to do the laundry, there they were—all eight eggs in a neat pile in the drum of the machine.

Eleven-year-old Paul was the joker in the family. When he came in from school, despite his hot denials, she grounded him for the evening. That would teach him. Before going to bed, she locked the eggs in the store cupboard and put the key under her pillow. Surely that would be the end of all the childish devilment.

But, alas, it was not the end but rather the beginning of devilment that would prove far from childish. The next morning, she did not need to check the storeroom; lined up on the kitchen table were the eggs. And the storeroom remained locked.

“I knew then there was something very strange going on, but I'd never really experienced anything paranormal. Well, I say never really—there was just one incident when we were living down in the old cottage. One night I woke up to find two women, an old one and a young one, standing in the corner of the room. But that was the only time.”

A month passed without further incident. A memorial Mass was said for Aunt Claire in the parish church, attended by the Downeys and a number of relatives. By this time, all the dead woman's effects had been removed. Katie had made the room her own.

On September 28, shortly after she had gone to sleep, the fifteen-year-old was wakened by a series of loud poundings and scratching noises on the ceiling. She could not tell where they were coming from. She left her bed—and met her parents on the stairs. They were agitated.

“Were you making that racket?” Hugh asked sourly. Katie's room lies directly under theirs.

“No, Dad. I thought it was somebody else.”

They found all the ground-floor lights on and no one about. Tricia asked who was last downstairs, if perhaps somebody forgot to switch off the lights. But Katie was the last and she swore she had turned everything off.

Things went downhill from then on. There was an almost tangible presence in the Downey home. In Tricia's words, “a thing had started to visit.”

“You'd hear it at all hours of the day and night,” she recalls. “You'd be sitting and you'd hear it shuffling about. Not footsteps as such, but rustling and shuffling. You couldn't see anything, though. Not at first.”

As the days passed, the presence gradually made itself known. Again, there was nothing threatening. Tricia decided to resume the rosaries they had dispensed with a month after Claire's death. “Looking back on it now,” she says, “I think maybe that's what made matters worse.”

Around the middle of October, the Downey household was awakened by a scream in the night. Katie burst into her parents' room, crying and shaking with fear. It was just after two in the morning.

“Mom, there's something in my room!” she sobbed.

They were shocked at the state she was in. Tricia got out of bed and put her arms around the girl. “Look, love, you've had a nightmare, that's all.”

“No, Mom, it was real. I swear it was real!”

“I'll go down and check,” Hugh said. “Like your mother says, it's just a bad dream. You'll see.”

He returned shortly, shrugging his shoulders. There was nothing. By this time, Katie had calmed down sufficiently to give an account of her experience. “I woke up because I felt something on my back,” she tells us. “It was pushing me out of bed. I looked round because I thought maybe it was Mom or Dad wanting to wake me up for school. But there was nothing there.”

It felt as though somebody was trying to eject her from the bed, as if she did not belong there. She thought that somebody was playing a joke on her. Then suddenly the duvet was whisked off the bed, leaving her shivering.

“To be honest, I thought it was ‘night fears' and that she'd dreamt it,” Tricia explains, “but she was very sure of what she felt and saw. Of course Hugh saw nothing in the room. The duvet thrown on the floor, but that was all.”

Katie was the first victim. Before long, the rest of the Downeys were to discover that her night fears were more than mere illusion. For the time being, though, the manifestations were innocent, playful almost. The episode with the eggs was followed by others of a similar nature.

“When I came home from school I'd notice things moved in my room,” Katie recollects. “Things being left open—drawers and things. I thought maybe Eilish was doing it. I knew it wasn't my imagination, because a couple of times I made a note of something I closed, and when I looked five minutes later, sure enough, it would be open again.”

In the night, she would hear noises, “a lot of running and banging upstairs in Mom's room, and scratching.” But Tricia, for her part, thought the disturbances were coming from Katie's room.