The Dark Sacrament (32 page)

“By this time,” Angela recalls, “Rhoda was ‘a woman of some importance,' as she used to joke. She was a partner in a Dublin investment firm, earning heaps of money and living the life of a high-flyer. She never married either; said she'd no time for it. So there we were, the pair of us, meeting again after all that time. Rhoda bought us lunch and afterward we went to a hotel for a few drinks.”

The few drinks became a colossal binge. Angela barely remembers the taxicab that brought her home that night. But clarity was to come later on, after she had slept for an hour or two.

She awoke in great perturbation. She had had a strikingly lucid dream. It differed in almost every respect from her usual dreams, even the most vivid. This particular dream had all the hallmarks of an experience she recalled from a time long flown—from when she was a twelfth-grader preparing for her final examinations. Angela was as certain as she could be that she had undergone, in her dreaming state, an out-of-body experience.

“I dreamed that I woke up in my dream,” she says, “and I was in a strange bedroom. I saw this woman in a white nightdress lying sprawled across the bed, fast asleep with half the bedclothes on the floor. Something about the room told me I'd been there before, and when I looked around me, I remembered that I'd spent so many days of my childhood doing homework with my best friend in that very room. The woman on the bed was Rhoda.

“I remember laughing, because she looked so ludicrous lying there, with her mouth hanging open, dead to the world, as they say. ‘Drunken stupor' were the words that came to mind.”

Then the voice came. It seemed to fill not only the bedroom but Angela's head as well, defying her to guess its origin. All the same, it was different, she thought, from the voices we sometimes hear in the course of our day: the imagined voices of our loved ones, voices remembered, voices we manufacture ourselves. We can always tell them apart from the extraneous, unwelcome voices. This voice was one of the latter. It was female, sibilant but not unpleasant, and it spoke with a strong Galway accent.

“Rhoda won't survive the week,”
it said.
“You won't see her ever again.”

Angela was horrified.

“If I'd been in my skin I'd have jumped straight out of it,” she says with a thin smile. “But of course I wasn't. The next thing I knew
I was waking up in my own house, in my own bedroom, wondering what had happened to me. Had I dreamt it? But I knew I hadn't, because I'd been in that sort of situation before. I knew it was all real.”

Her first impulse was to telephone Rhoda's house. But after consideration she dismissed the thought. Rhoda would be sound asleep—and no doubt lying in much the same position as Angela had seen her. The clock told her that it was a little before 4 a.m. Rhoda would not relish being roused at that hour, with a plane to catch later that morning. Her mother, a widow of some years' standing, was elderly and in poor health. Angela could not bring herself to disturb her. And what reason, she wondered, could she provide? “Mrs. Delany, your daughter is in mortal danger; I was in her bedroom in my ethereal body and this voice spoke to me.” It was preposterous. Angela, head already beginning to throb with an incipient hangover, resolved to phone at a “respectable” hour, turned over, and eventually fell sleep.

She was awakened by her bedside telephone ringing shrilly. She cursed aloud on seeing the time. She had overslept by almost two hours. It was the drugstore wondering if she was coming to work that day. She assured them she was on her way. And suddenly, as she was hurriedly getting herself ready, the full force of that terrible message, delivered by a discarnate voice, struck her foursquare.

Rhoda was going to die.

Angela shut her eyes tight, as she did when she was a child “to make the boogeyman go away.” It never worked then either. She told herself she was being silly, that she was making too much of what was—on reflection, in the sobering sanity of a Monday morning—more than likely an alcohol-induced nightmare. She hauled a brush through her hair, shrugged into her coat, grabbed her purse, and went to start the week.

Three days passed without incident. On Thursday, Angela put in a full day at the drugstore and was on hand to supervise the late closing. It was past nine o'clock when she arrived home, tired and in need of cheering up. She had a glass of wine and watched half a movie.

“I remember feeling terribly depressed. Seeing Rhoda again made me realize what a failure my own life had been. There she was, traveling the world in a high-flying job, and there I was—living alone, a lowly shop assistant with nothing to look forward to but old age.”

That night, Angela did not stop at one glass of wine. She drank the entire bottle. She collapsed into bed around one o'clock. She could not know that she was about to have another out-of-body dream, more terrifying than the previous one.

The mysterious force came for her as before, lifted her from her bed, and propelled her into blackness. As was the case in Rhoda's bedroom, there was no intervening sensation of travel.

“I woke up in what I called ‘the spirit,'” she says. “I found myself high above a city. It was broad daylight.”

She thought at first that it must be New York. There were skyscrapers and a network of highways linking the strange city with a green and flat countryside. Then she saw what could only have been an inland sea, or indeed a lake. A voice in her head—the sibilant one with the Galway accent—was telling her that the city was Chicago.

She remembers with amazing clarity finding herself above an intersection in what looked like a business district. The light of a summer afternoon slanted between the buildings, casting long shadows. A line of cars waited for the lights to change.

Some distance away—two blocks away to be exact—there was a flurry of activity. From her vantage point, Angela had a bird's-eye view.

She saw a speeding white car approaching the intersection. The lights changed and a yellow taxicab moved forward. There was no possibility that the driver of the white car could stop in time. He tried to swerve, and the cab driver did the same. Had both not attempted the evasive maneuver, all might have been well. But the white car struck the cab on the passenger side, sending it spinning across the intersection and into the path of oncoming traffic. There was a pile-up.

Angela found herself being propelled at great speed toward the stricken taxi. She was among the first to examine the wreck. Lying in the back seat was a woman of about her own age. Her eyes were open and staring, her head twisted at an unnatural angle.

It was Rhoda, and she was dead.

Angela woke again in her bed. She was shaking with terror, her heart hammering so fast that she feared for her own life. She stumbled from the room, made her way downstairs, went into the kitchen, and poured herself a brandy. She drank it swiftly and poured another.

This time, she did not hesitate to ring Rhoda's mother. As it happened, the elderly woman slept very little and was not in the least perturbed. After all, Angela Brehen was an old friend of her daughter's.

“Listen, Mrs. Delany, would I be able to get in touch with Rhoda? Did she leave a number or anything?”

Rhoda had. It turned out to be that of a hotel in Chicago.

It was after 2:30 in the morning. Angela knew that America was several hours behind but had no idea in which time zone Chicago lay, only that it was farther west than New York. She dialed the number and was greeted at once by a pleasant-sounding woman. Yes, Ms. Delany was a guest. Could Angela hold?

Angela broke the connection a minute later. She was trying to come to terms with the impossible.

“I couldn't believe it,” she says. “I still can't. But it turned out that Rhoda was killed that day at the time I saw it happen, allowing for the time difference. I saw it all like it was happening right in front of me. I couldn't have imagined it because it was only later that day that we got word back in Galway. I went round to Rhoda's mother and heard about it. And the horrible thing was, she was somehow holding
me
responsible. God knows why. After the funeral she never spoke to me again.”

Rhoda's remains were flown home and laid to rest in Galway. The funeral took place some eight days after the accident. But before then, on the Saturday following Rhoda's death, Angela was to have her third odd experience. This time, however, there were no
paranormal overtones—or so it seemed. It was simply a meeting between two people, in ordinary, workaday circumstances.

Angela went to her job in the drugstore as usual. She was greatly perturbed by her friend's death and the events surrounding it; she thought that the routine of work would help her cope with the tragedy.

By lunchtime she had recovered some of her equilibrium and could bring herself to chat with the regular customers. At one o'clock she grabbed a sandwich, did some desultory shopping, and was back at her post at a little after two.

To this day, she asks herself how it was she recognized the face. Sixteen years had passed since she last saw the man, in 1988. And she had been no more than a child.

“To crown it all I'd only spoken to him for about five minutes,” she reminds us. “I wouldn't say I have a great memory for faces. About average, I suppose. But right away I knew it was Barry McNulty. He was much thinner than I remembered and his hair was a lot shorter, but there was something about him that I recognized. Maybe a certain look he had—a kind of intenseness.”

Barry had a little boy with him, of perhaps five or six. The child looked bored and was running a sticky finger along a neat display of hair colorants. Angela saw two boxes topple. She left her station at the back of the shop.

“Angela? It is you, isn't it?”

“It is indeed, Barry—Angela Brehen. That wasn't today or yesterday.”

“You didn't marry, then, I take it?”

He had lost none of his forwardness. It was a trait she found unappealing in men. She found herself staring at the child, whom Barry now had by the hand. He must have read her thoughts because he hurried to enlighten her.

“My sister's boy, not mine. He's staying with me a few days. I'm living here now, you know. Moved last month.”

“That's a coincidence.”

“Isn't it?”

There was something about the manner in which he said it that left her wondering.

He was glancing about the store. “So this is what you do, eh? Nice.”

He thinks I own the place, Angela concluded. She had no intention of disillusioning him.

“Did you like the book?” he asked suddenly.

“Book…?”

But she had remembered at once, as soon as he walked into the shop. She had given not a thought to it in sixteen years.

“It was okay,” she said. “Well, not really. If you want to know, I didn't think much of it at all.”

Something in her face must have betrayed her, brought to the surface the terror of the past days. Barry was looking at her intently.

“There's something wrong, isn't there? I've come at a bad time; is that it?”

“No, no. Well…yes. A friend died.”

“I'm sorry. Were you very close?”

“We were once.”

He was still studying Angela's face, seemingly trying to find answers there. “Why do I get the impression there was something very unusual about this friend's death?”

“Maybe you're psychic, Barry.”

“As a matter of fact, I am.” He saw her frown. “Seriously. I know things. Like that time in the bookshop; I could sense what you were looking for.”

His nephew was betraying an almost intolerable impatience to leave. Angela suggested they meet that evening. She knew a quiet little hotel off Shop Street where they could talk further. Barry found her there a little after eight.

Over drinks they got better acquainted. She found him an unusually good listener—so good, in fact, that before long she was
confiding in him details of the bizarre events surrounding Rhoda's death.

“I read about it in the
Tribune,
” he said. “One of these freak things. We know not the day nor the hour, as the man said.”

“But
somebody
knew,” she countered.

“What do you mean?”

“A voice told me in a dream.”

“Hmm.”

“Is that all you can say—‘Hmm'? I'll tell you something, Barry: it totally freaked me out, hearing that voice.”

“I can well believe it. But look at it this way, when you're a remote viewer, you're—”

“Remote viewer?”

“A clairvoyant. That's what it is, you know: clairvoyance, remote viewing. When you view a scene remotely, you're entering a different dimension altogether. Time doesn't exist there—at least, not as we know it. So it doesn't matter if something is in what we call the past, present, or future; for the clairvoyant, it's happening in the here and now.”

“So I can see into the future in the same way I can see the present? I thought the future didn't exist. That we have free will. That we can all make our own future. It isn't written in stone.”

He looked at her keenly.

“That's only someone's theory, Angela. Nothing more. You yourself proved it wrong. You knew that Rhoda wouldn't survive the week. The voice told you so. That's as much proof as you need that you can look into the future.”

“It could have been coincidence.”

He laughed loudly. Heads turned. He lowered his voice.

“That's rich coming from somebody who claims to have visited her best friend clairvoyantly—twice in the one week. Angela, you know as well as I do it was the real deal. You had a premonition of your friend's death, and you traveled to Chicago to see it happen. I
believe you, because I've been there myself. You have a gift, just like me: a psychic gift.”

“That's not what I'd call it. I want to be rid of it, if it's all the same to you.”