The Dark Sacrament (30 page)

Tricia is of the opinion that the night she heard the horses was the night “the molester” entered her home.

“I was woken up around four,” she says, “by the sound of horses' hooves out on the road. It was like there was a cavalry of horsemen passing. Hugh heard it too.”

The Downey house lies close to the road. It is a minor road that has been there a long time. When the old house was built more than five centuries ago, there was a road running past it, connecting the town of Enniscorthy with the coast.

But horsemen no longer travel the roads of Ireland; horse trailers are used instead. Nor do horsemen ride at night. Hugh Downey drew back the curtains and looked out. The lamps on the gateposts were bathing the roadway in a soft light. There were no horses. The road was deserted.

“It was astonishing,” Tricia continues, “because when we opened the window, the noises just got louder. There was this babble of voices, men shouting at each other. We couldn't understand what they were saying. To be honest, I couldn't even tell if it was English. But, as they passed and the commotion was dying down, we heard like one horse rearing up and whinnying, like it was being turned against its will. Next thing,” Tricia puts a hand to her heart at the
memory, “next thing, we hear it galloping up the avenue to the house and the rider letting out this terrible howl. God, it was awful! Like some sort of war cry.”

Moments later, there was a single, ferocious thud on the front door. “Like a battering ram were being used against it.” The house shook with the impact. The whole family woke up.

The next day, the children were too tired to attend school. That night, everyone retired to bed earlier than usual. Everyone slept soundly—everyone, that is, except Katie.

She was roused from sleep because she heard noises in the room. She could breathe only with difficulty. The cause was not hard to discern: somebody was lying on top of her. She could not move a muscle.

“I was terrified,” she says. “I couldn't see his face but I knew it was a man's body.” We see her embarrassment and understand what she means. “He was grunting and panting. Not like an animal, but like a person, someone demented. It sounded sexual, really horrible.”

She attempted to call out but it was as if her vocal cords were frozen. Soon the grunting stopped and gave way to labored breathing. The horror-stricken teenager could sense a face very close to her own. Still she could see nothing; the room seemed darker than ever. She tried to scream.

In the room across the way, her seven-year-old sister, Eilish, the youngest child, slept soundly. As did the rest of the family on the second floor—Katie's parents and her brothers, Paul and Liam. No one had heard the unearthly sounds emanating from whatever it was that was pinioning Katie. And no one heard her scream because she was unable to. “I was numb from the weight on top of me, but not only that. It was as if the bed was outside in the yard, the room was so cold. Like an icebox.”

For how long she lay there, stunned and immobile, she cannot say. Nor does she remember going to sleep that night, but she did. She appeared at breakfast white faced and shaken.

“I can't go to school today either,” she told her mother, breaking into tears.

“I couldn't quite believe what she was telling me,” says Tricia. “Really, I'd never heard anything like it, and at the same time I wondered why on earth she would make up such a thing. The next night we moved her into Liam's room, and he doubled up with Paul.”

“Everything was all right the first night after that,” Katie explains, “but the second night I was disturbed again. Not by the thing on top of me, but by someone sawing wood—well, that's what it sounded like. I put the light on and I couldn't believe my eyes. The wardrobe doors were open and the drawers were being pulled out and in…out, in, out, in, really fast.”

Katie sprang from the bed and rushed out into the corridor. She was surprised to find the rest of her family, with the exception of little Eilish, assembled there. Her mother saw her fright.

“It's okay now, love,” she said. “It's gone.”

She saw Katie's puzzlement. “What's gone?” the girl asked.

Paul was in floods of tears. Crying was something her know-it-all young brother rarely did.

“Paul thought he saw a black thing when he went to the bathroom,” Tricia explained. “But it's gone now.”

Katie decided to keep quiet about the drawers; her mother was upset enough and would never sleep. But she could not keep it to herself. What happened with the wardrobe was unnatural. It also proved to her that she was definitely not dreaming. The things were real; they were under attack. She told her mother at breakfast the next morning.

Two days after Katie's experience with the drawers, Tricia was forced to accept that it was true. “I was in her bedroom tidying up when I heard the strange sawing sound, exactly the way Katie described it. I turned round and couldn't believe my eyes—the four drawers were being pulled out and in, all by themselves. I nearly fainted. I knew then that I'd have to call on the parish priest.”

Father Frank McMenahan, a personable young man, new to the parish and the county, came to bless the house the following evening. He assured Tricia that a blessing would put things right.

All the family gathered in the Downeys' living room, which looks out over the orchards. The priest prepared for the ceremony by lighting a candle, blessing two basins of water that Tricia had made ready, and reciting several prayers of protection with the family.

He then motioned to Katie to take the lighted candle and follow him; her brother Paul was to take along one of the dishes of water. The priest filled a plastic squeeze bottle with some of the water. Katie and her three siblings could barely contain a smile. They had been brought up accustomed to solemnity in the Church. Incense was dispensed from a brass censer, Holy Communion from silver
and gold vessels. To see a plastic squeeze bottle being prepared for the sprinkling of holy water was highly unusual.

And it was more than sprinkling. The house was to be thoroughly drenched. So thoroughly, in fact, that water ran down the walls. They went from room to room, Father Frank making the sign of the Celtic cross on each lintel and window. It was a cross enclosed within a protective circle. Its significance was not lost on the Downeys.

“The moment I went into Katie's room,” Father Frank tells us, “the hairs rose on the nape of my neck. A feeling of icy coldness cut right through me. I almost lost my balance with the force of it. There really was no logical explanation for it.”

We wonder if it could have been suggestion. After all, both mother and daughter had described in detail what had taken place in the room. It would have been fresh in his mind.

“Suggestion?” he says. “There's always that possibility. But it was too real for that. I'm a skeptic at heart where such things are concerned, but that really shook me.”

The priest blessed the room, sprinkling—if anything—even more holy water than he had used elsewhere. He left the Downey home, confident that whatever it was that had “visited” the family had been expelled.

He could not have been more wrong.

“After he blessed the house, it went crazy,” Tricia Downey says with a shudder. “It was growling and banging, not only during the night, but in the daytime as well—upstairs and downstairs.”

 

The thing Katie described has all the hallmarks of the incubus.

The incubus—the name derives from the Latin
incubare,
meaning “to lie upon”—is, according to traditional belief, an evil spirit or demon that takes male form to have sexual intercourse with a sleeping woman for purposes of procreation. Its female counterpart is known as the succubus.

There is reason to believe that the notion of the incubus was founded in misogyny. As early as the fifteenth century, the Church showed an unhealthy interest in female sexuality. The hunt for witches became an instrument for the further suppression of women. To many, it was inconceivable that a woman should have sexual desires of her own. Should a woman be seduced, willingly or unwillingly, then the blame might be laid at the door of the incubus. The
Malleus Maleficarum
of 1486, that notorious handbook of the witch-finder, recognized three categories of suspected witches: those who submitted voluntarily to evil, those forced by other witches to sleep with incubi, and those assaulted by incubi against their will.

Descriptions of the entity were not in short supply. “The incubus,” according to Francesco Maria Guazzo, in his
Compendium Maleficarum
(1608), “can assume either a male or a female shape; sometimes it appears as a full-grown man, sometimes as a satyr; and if it is a woman who has been received as a witch, it generally assumes the form of a rank goat.”

Belief in the incubus persisted up until the eighteenth century, when the medical profession at last began to question its validity. Some viewed the entity as being no more than the invention of a woman's perverted imagination. It was pointed out that the incubus could be conveniently blamed for an unwanted pregnancy or used to conceal an illicit affair.

And yet, there is a high incidence of reports of such attacks in present-day Europe and America, in communities that long ago dispensed with many sexual taboos. There seemed to be no good reason why Katie Downey should concoct an account of a nighttime visitor that corresponded so closely to traditional descriptions of the incubus. That it was singling her out for attack was self-evident.

 

“We were more afraid for Katie than for any of the others,” Tricia tells us. “The thing only seemed to be interested in her. I mean, I'd heard noises and so did the others. But it seemed to be focusing on her. I was very worried by the sexual element. I mean, Katie knew about the birds and the bees—all the children did—but she'd never had a boyfriend. She found it very difficult to talk about what was happening to her. So why on earth would she make it up?”

Soon the unthinkable would occur. The incubus began materializing next to Katie's bed.

“The first time I saw it I was wide awake,” she explains. “I'd just turned over on my side to try and get more comfortable when there it was standing beside the bed. I tried to get away from it, but as I did, I was lifted up. Then suddenly I was back on the bed and it was on top of me. I could make out this shape, the ‘head' of whatever the thing was. It had a human shape, but on the top of the head there were two things—not horns exactly, more like ears of some kind. Instead of grunting and panting, that first time I saw it, it started screaming and howling, like something gone berserk. I was so scared I just passed out.”

Between October and January of 2005, there was little respite for Katie. The family took to saying a rosary in her bedroom before going to bed. Some nights it worked, but more often it did not.

“Just when I thought it had gone, it would come back,” she says. “My schoolwork suffered. I lost all confidence in myself. It didn't like to see me happy. I got a part-time job in my uncle's pub, just so
I could stay out late. But, on my way home in the early hours, I'd start panicking. I used to stay over with a friend, but I couldn't do that every night. Always when I'd go into my bedroom, it'd be there waiting for me. I could feel it. For a while, when it started to show itself, I didn't tell anyone. I didn't want to scare Mom. But in the end I knew I had to. I just couldn't go on.”