The Dark Sacrament (34 page)

With the benefit of hindsight, however, she thinks otherwise: she believes that it was part of his attempt to exert control. Barry seemed to have an uncanny knack of knowing what she was feeling and thinking, and knew how to manipulate a situation to suit his own ends.

It was an idea he had toyed with for years, or so he claimed. Like many men who never knew their father—or who had lost him at a very early age—Barry greatly missed his, and forever sensed that an important bond had been broken. His greatest wish was to meet his father again, to relive those few short years that were little more than hazy memories, and ones that faded unrelentingly with each passing year of adulthood.

For he had loved his father dearly, and his mother reassured him throughout his boyhood that his father had loved Barry, his youngest child—loved him if anything more than his other offspring. An industrial accident had killed him, Angela learned. He had clung to life in a hospital bed for forty-two hours before death intervened. He had called out for Barry, but the boy had arrived too late—by mere minutes.

“I was nearly in tears when he was telling me all this,” Angela says. “I could understand what he'd gone through because it was the same with my mother, though I was old enough to take it better. He was determined to see his father again, and I was the one who was going to help him.”

It was going to be a complicated procedure. It would involve a little more than TC. By this time, Barry was so proficient in inducing TC that he saw it as child's play. Angela had seen how easily he could do it. But this was of a different order.

“Did you ever do LSD?” he asked.

“Barry, I told you what I think about drugs.”

“Sorry, I forgot. Well, I did a lot of LSD. That's what got me started with this other thing. In my first year in college, a few of us were fooling around with LSD. Brilliant stuff altogether, but Jesus, if you had a bad trip then you knew all about it! But the point I'm making is that you were always warned not to go tripping on your own. You could do stupid things, get into a lot of trouble. Some guys in the States jumped off tall buildings, thinking they could fly.”

“God.”

“So that's why you needed what we called a ‘buddy.' He'd be someone who stayed straight, didn't drop any acid. So if you started freaking he'd be able to take care of you.”

Angela listened as Barry's speech seemed to revert almost effortlessly, and probably unconsciously, to the jargon and narco-speak of decades past. As he spoke, she felt relieved that the drug scene had never fascinated her.

He spoke of spontaneous clairvoyant experiences induced by LSD. They were no hallucinations, he was at pains to point out, but genuine TC. The hallucinogen appears to have triggered in his psyche the same mechanism that caused the release of Angela's etheric double when she was seventeen. Barry had no explanation for this. He did, however, discover that once the drug had facilitated TC, he could dispense with it—or so he said.

“I want to see if time travel is possible,” he told her with an absolutely straight face.

“Come on, Barry, be serious. Time travel!”

But he hastened to assure her that he was using the term in an innovative sense. He was not foolish enough to believe the nonsense one came across in books on the subject of astral travel, he said—the wild claims people made of their ability to travel back in time to, say, ancient Rome, or the building of the pyramids, or even the Crucifixion. That was impossible, he said; Einstein had said so, and that
was good enough for Barry. His method involved what he called “awakening in consciousness in your own past,” he explained.

“I was seven when my dad died,” he reminded her. “So I was conscious in the sense that I could reason, work things out for myself. There's this memory I have of being with him; it's so clear I can remember every detail. He loved sailing, had his own boat, kept it moored down at Bullock Harbour in Dalkey. It was only a tiny thing, a cheap fiberglass job, but to me it was a huge yacht. I kept begging him to take me sailing with him but he never would. He'd take one or two of the others, and sometimes my mother even, but he never took me because I was hopeless at swimming. ‘But I'll wear a life jacket,' I used to say, but he still thought it was too dangerous.

“Until one Saturday morning, very early, he boots me out of bed and tells me we're going sailing. I'm telling you, Angela, that was just about the happiest day of my life. I'd just turned seven, I was on my school holidays, it was a fabulous summer—and I was sailing in Dublin Bay with my dad!”

Angela recalls Barry's expression of rapture as he spoke of that wonderful day of long ago.

“I can still remember the wind on my face, the sea spray coming up over the boat, and my father teaching me how to maintain a starboard tack. Then he let me take the tiller. It couldn't have been for more than five minutes, but by God it felt like an hour. ‘Hold that heading on the Bailey, hold that heading on the Bailey,' he kept saying, meaning I had to keep the bow pointing at the Bailey lighthouse off Howth. And that's the image that's stayed with me all these years: me in my life jacket gripping that tiller, my arms on fire, my dad grinning at me and giving me the thumbs-up. He must have been as proud as I was. I want to use that as my focal point.”

Barry's audacious plan was to TC into the mind of his seven-year-old self. In effect, time travel.

“I knew the idea was totally off the wall,” Angela says. “But I couldn't tell him what I really thought. I was afraid of what he might do. It was safer to humor him. I kept thinking he'd overdosed on something. I
was checking his eyes to see if they were normal—you know, that the pupils weren't dilated or anything. But he was serious.”

“He told me that he nearly made it once or twice,” she says. “He told me he was very close. He would use the mantra—he called it that—of his father saying over and over, ‘Hold that heading on the Bailey.' He said he was nearly there but at the last minute he chickened out. He didn't know if he'd be able to come back.”

“Then he told me about something that made me prick up my ears,” she says. “He told me that a
voice
came to him the last time he attempted it. He was just about to give up when he heard the voice. It said, ‘You can do it.'”

Unlike Angela's mysterious voice, heard in Rhoda's bedroom shortly before her death, the voice Barry heard was male.

“I had him describe the voice, and what he told me corresponded with what I experienced that time. It seemed to come from both outside and inside his head at the same time. He had an explanation—Barry always had explanations. He said it was his
oversoul
speaking to him.”

 

Listening to Angela Brehen is sometimes akin to attending a talk given by a psychic or some such dabbler in the paranormal. No sooner has one digested one arcane belief than another presents itself.

Barry McNulty's “oversoul” appears to have much in common with Jung's concept of the collective unconscious. In some respects, it also seems to correspond to the Judeo-Christian idea of the soul: both are eternal; both survive the death of the body.

Barry had a further interpretation. He likened the oversoul to the Eastern concept of “masters”—masters in the sense of a group of individuals (or advanced souls, to employ the esoteric terminology)—who watch over humankind and guide the soul along the “proper” spiritual path.

“You heard your oversoul speak to you,” Barry told Angela. “I heard mine.” The gender was unimportant, he assured her. Her oversoul or master communicated with her using a female voice because it judged that she would be “more comfortable” with this.

It appeared to make sense.

 

In the quiet of Angela's home, the two embarked on a series of experiments that she concedes were bizarre. Barry would be the “traveler” and Angela his “minder.”

The traveler would attempt to TC with the younger self; the minder would be on hand to deal with possible emergencies. Barry's fear was that, were he to TC for a prolonged period, a stranger—or perhaps some busybody of a neighbor—might think he was in a coma and call the paramedics.

Barry's talk and his desire to be reunited with his father had a profound effect on Angela.

“Up until that point I hadn't thought very much about my mother,” she says, “but then one morning I woke up in floods of tears, and I knew that what I was experiencing was the grief of my eighteen-year-old self…of the young girl I'd been when my mother died. God, it was terrible! I was going through the whole grieving process, but this time it was worse, ten times worse. Barry came to the rescue, of course. What he said made so much sense. It was something like: ‘There's only one way to heal your pain, Angela. Your mother's calling you. You must visit her on the astral plane and prove to her that you're all right.'”

Angela confesses that at that point a “reunion” seemed the answer. She felt that a meeting with her mother—however unorthodox—would lift her out of the desolation she was feeling.

“I knew I had to see her again,” she says. “I'd convinced myself that talking to her, if only for a minute or two, would put things right. I wanted to tell her I was happy, even if things hadn't worked
out the way she hoped they would. I suppose I wanted her to be proud of me.”

So Barry and Angela each fixed their “golden moment,” the target they would aim for. He went first. Angela had prepared the room, her old bedroom, where she had had her first experience of astral projection at the age of seventeen. She felt that there might be something “special” about the room. She cleared it of everything except the bed, a chair, and the night table. They drew the curtains, and Barry made himself comfortable on the bed. It gave her a strange sensation.

“I couldn't help thinking what my mother would make of me having a man in my old bed—well,
on
the bed at any rate. But, as I said, there was nothing between Barry and me. He was strangely asexual; there was always something very cold about him.”

Barry assured her he would give a sign of some description if his “transfer” was successful. He could not be more specific.

“You'll know,” was all he said.

“What if it goes wrong? What then?”

They had discussed this at length, yet she needed to be sure she understood him. After all, his sanity—if not his life—might depend on her correctly interpreting his signals.

“If I'm not back—if I'm not awake—within two hours, then I want you to wake me gently, okay? No rough stuff. Don't shake me; don't press. Just call my name softly. Keep calling until I wake up.”

“And if you don't?”

“I'll leave that to your own discretion.”

Barry need not have worried, however, because he did not succeed. He tried that night and the next. He even tried the day after, in broad daylight. “Maybe I need to be able to visualize the sun on Dublin Bay,” he said. But, day or night, nothing worked. He was sorely disappointed. Or so it seemed.

It was Angela's turn.

She began in good faith and high spirits. The thought of meeting her mother had eased her grief-stricken depression considerably. Now she was determined to succeed.

She lay down on the bed, shut her eyes, and made herself comfortable, secure in the knowledge that Barry was on hand should anything go wrong.

“By that stage I trusted him,” she says. “All my earlier fears gave way to…awe, I suppose. Yes, awe is the best way to describe it. He became my guru. I believed that if he could help me see and speak to my mother again it would change everything.”

Angela had never before even entertained the possibility of communicating with her dead mother. She had always considered spiritualism and seances to be somehow unhealthy, if not downright wrong. She had no wish to disturb the dead. But what Barry was exploring was not the same thing at all, she reasoned; it was a matter not of contacting the dead but of returning to a time when Nuala Brehen was fully alive and vital. Surely there was nothing wrong with that.

For an hour—Barry was keeping track of time—nothing happened. Angela, as relaxed as she could will herself to be, tried to recreate that tableau from her past. The kitchen. The kitchen in 1988; not so very different from the kitchen in 2004, yet sufficiently altered to interfere with her visualization. She had had it renovated in 1998, had replaced the table and chairs, had had new fronts put on the drawers and cupboards. The walls were canary yellow now, magnolia then.

She tried to picture her mother seated with her back to the window, as she had been sitting that day. She would be nursing a cup of tea—a cup, never a mug—with a small plate of chocolate cookies at hand. She would be wearing the minimum of make-up. She needed her hair done; Angela had made the appointment for her the previous day. She had taken off her apron and was wearing her dowdy old beige housedress. She was stirring her tea; when thinking hard about something, she would spend a ridiculously long time stirring her tea.

“Don't make the same mistake I did, love,” she was saying. “Don't make the same mistake I did.”

It was Angela's “mantra,” her equivalent of Barry's father's nautical instruction. Over and over, she had imagined her mother saying it, had concentrated on the lips moving, on the work-worn fingers gripping the spoon as she stirred her tea, on the pale yellow blind on the window, on the metronomic tick-tock of the old kitchen clock. She had become very proficient at it.

“Don't make the same mistake I did, love.”

Somebody coughed softly. Angela thought for an instant that the sound came from her own throat but knew then it was Barry. So caught up had she been in her visualization exercise that she had blanked him out entirely.

She sat up, annoyed.

“Why did you do that?” she demanded.