The Dark Sacrament (33 page)

“No, that's the wrong attitude. You should develop it. That's where I come in.”

Angela did not like the turn Barry's conversation was taking. He was altogether too sure of himself and too intrusive. She reminded herself that she hardly knew him, much less trusted him with her private affairs. And what, she asked herself, could be more private than your own thoughts, your very dreams?

“I've always been psychic,” he said. “My mother was, so I think I get it from her. Over the years I've perfected the art. I help a lot of people with my gift, Angela, and you can too.” He sat back in the chair. “I suppose you could call me a healer.”

“Really! You mean you can heal diseases?” Angela thought it best to humor him.

“I can do anything,” he announced with all the zeal of a cult leader. “I am what is known as a magician in the great Western tradition.”

“You mean you're into black magic?”

“No,” he quickly corrected her. “On the contrary, magic is a powerful tool that can be used for good or evil. Black magic seeks to destroy; white magic seeks to improve and heal. As I say, I use my gift for the betterment of mankind.”

He raised his drink, basking in what he believed was Angela's silent admiration. She, on the other hand, could not help thinking that Barry's speech had been rehearsed, that it was a stock speech kept in readiness to impress the gullible.

“W. B. Yeats,” he said, “was one as well.”

“The poet? He was a magician too?”

“Yeah, the poet. He was one of the most important members of the Golden Dawn.” He leaned forward, his hands clasped together. “I have to level with you, Angela. Running into you—in the chemist's—it wasn't an accident.”

She felt uneasy. “Oh?”

“A little bird told me you'd be there. Well, if you must know, it wasn't a bird—it was a voice. You told me about the voice you were hearing. I have one as well. It goes with my psychic abilities. See, I knew you were experiencing this stuff even before
you
did. That's why I'm here.”

She was growing nervous. “I don't follow.”

“Let me get us another drink, Angela,” he said. “Then I'll explain the plan to you, see what you think of it.”

The “plan” turned out to be one of the most audacious ventures that Angela had ever embarked upon. Barry's initial premise was simple: they would “visit” each other clairvoyantly.

“And that was my biggest mistake,” Angela sighs. “But I was lonely; I was vulnerable. I'd just suffered the trauma of Rhoda's death. My mind was in turmoil…and in a strange way I didn't want to disappoint him. From what he told me, I believed he could help me. When I look back on it now I can see it was mad, but at the time it seemed almost logical. Barry McNulty was very convincing.”

They exchanged addresses and, with the aid of paper napkins, each sketched out a crude map pointing the way. “Though I doubt if you'll even need a map,” he said with conviction. Barry's home was on the outskirts of the city. In passing, she learned that he was divorced, with three children who lived with their mother. He had joined the civil service on leaving college. Angela found that incongruous but said nothing.

They met again in the same hotel. They agreed on “rules.”

“We promised each other that we wouldn't pry,” she goes on. “That we'd respect each other's privacy. If one of us had somebody round then the other would make themselves scarce.”

Barry had brought along an unusual item. It was a book on meditation techniques. It was photocopied, and she got the impression that the original was not in general circulation but a limited edition, perhaps published by the occult circle to which he claimed
to belong. He urged her to study it well. It was, he said, greatly superior to her old Tuesday Lobsang Rampa book.

She was also to discover that he used drugs to help achieve what he called his “altered states.” He did not come right out and admit it, but rather hinted. He suspected that Angela would shy away from the very notion of narcotics, and in that he was correct. The idea appalled her.

During that second meeting, they laid down the ground rules and fixed a date for the first experiment. Angela did not know what to expect when Barry told her he would visit at a prearranged time.

“Will I be able to see you?” she asked.

“I doubt it. The purpose of the exercise is for
me
to see
you.
”

On the night in question, a Saturday in early August, she stayed up late, reading without much interest a copy of a woman's magazine. She had made herself comfortable in the living room; from time to time she would cast a nervous glance at the clock.

“I was sitting there,” Angela says, “reading some silly problem page or other, trying not to get too afraid, when all of a sudden I felt this presence in the room.”

She put away the magazine and turned in her chair. She saw nothing.

“I didn't have the feeling it was Barry,” she remembers. “You know the feeling you get when you're in a room and there's someone behind you. It's a ‘knowing' feeling, comfortable even, because you're familiar with the person who's there. This wasn't like that. It was terribly unsettling. For the short time it was in the room, I had the strongest urge to run out the door and just keep running. I remember getting up and backing towards the door, and just as I was doing that, the phone rang.”

“Did I scare you?” At first she did not recognize the voice. The words were delivered in a curt, clipped manner. It unsettled her so much that she could not speak.

She thought she heard people laughing in the background. Then the question came again.

“Did I scare you, Angela?” This time, the tone was deliberately threatening.

“Barry? Barry, is that you?” Angela tried to keep her voice calm. She could barely hold the receiver steady.

“Of course it's me! Who the f*** else could do what I've just done? Now, do I have to ask you the question a third—”

“No, no!” Something told her that she must humor him, play his game. She had the unreasonable fear that the consequences of antagonizing him might be terrible. “Yes…yes, Barry, you did scare me. I—I can't describe it.”

“Leave the descriptions to me,” he said brusquely. “Your house is a semidetached bungalow,” he continued, in a smooth, matter-of-fact voice, as though reading from notes. “There's a dining room with open-plan kitchen on the right and a living room on the left. You have a dado rail with blue flowery wallpaper and a suite of furniture to match. There are two standing lamps, one next to the TV, the other next to the two-seater.”

Angela, standing in her hallway, clutching the phone, was looking through the doorway into the living room. The back of her head tingled as Barry proceeded to describe what she was seeing, as though he were standing right beside her.

“There's a coffee table with two magazines,” he went on. “The
RTÉ Guide
and
Marie Claire.
The carpet is dark gray with a light blue design running through it. On the mantelpiece there are six or seven photographs. One of them is of you with an older woman in front of Tower Bridge.”

“Stop!” she cried. “I believe you, Barry. Jesus, it's too weird for words.”

Again she heard laughter in the background.

“I'd call that a very successful experiment, wouldn't you? Tomorrow night it's your turn. I'll be expecting you around ten.”

“Barry, I—”

“Angela, you'd better stick to the plan,” he said abruptly, “or you'll regret it!”

The line went dead, leaving her perplexed and not a little afraid. She wondered what it was she had gotten herself into.

 

The next day, she tried to reach Barry McNulty but without success. His phone was off the hook.

“I was so shocked by his manner,” Angela says. “I think that shocked me more than the weird presence in my living room. I was in turmoil for the entire day, and the awful thing was, I couldn't tell anyone about it. They'd have had me certified. At the same time I tried to rationalize his odd behavior. If he was a drug user, and there was every indication that he was, then he probably wasn't even aware of having been so rude to me. In the end, I decided it was safer to go along with what we'd planned. I'd try to visit him clairvoyantly at the appointed time, then have nothing more to do with him.”

At the same time, she was very afraid that her attempt at remote viewing would fail, and she had an irrational dread of such failure. “Something told me that if I didn't succeed he would make me suffer. I'd read his photocopied book from cover to cover and back again. I knew it like the back of my hand—but only in theory. I started asking myself what would happen if the techniques didn't work.”

She had to make sure. She recalled that, prior to her out-of-body experiences involving Rhoda, she had drunk heavily. Convinced that alcohol might hold the key, she bought a bottle of brandy. She settled herself on the living-room sofa and proceeded to drink enough to make her woozy. She felt her muscles relax. She lay back and applied the meditation techniques.

They worked. She seemed to pass out, to awaken in an altered state of consciousness. It was not a dream, but not quite reality either—not as Angela knew it. It was a trance.

Barry's map, drawn crudely on the hotel napkin, had proved unnecessary. His home was a cottage, perhaps at one time the gate
lodge to an estate that no longer existed. Even in the gathering dusk she could clearly see that its roof was in disrepair; in fact, the place was little more than a barely habitable shack. Angela entered through the broken slates, rotten battens, and rafters—and was dismayed by what she saw there.

“I sort of got an inkling of why him and his wife had split up,” she says. “It's possible that he was into all this stuff when they were together, but…I don't think any woman could have lived there, not without going out of her mind. It was like stepping into Marilyn Manson's den.”

The interior resembled, if anything, a temple. Ranged about the main room were the trappings of magic and mysticism. Angela saw shrines to Eastern deities, statues and statuettes to the gods of antiquity, gold, black, and red candles, bowls of incense, ceremonial daggers, and—on the walls and in great profusion—drawings, prints, and paintings of characters from legend. The adjoining room was given over to books, hundreds of them. A bedroom adjoined it. Lastly there was a sitting room; it was a mess, a jumble of furniture and bric-a-brac of every description. Sprawled on a sofa set against one wall was Barry, a can of beer in his hand. He looked up on her entering. Astonishingly, he was aware of her presence. He set down his drink and raised a hand in greeting.

“You made it,” he said, grinning. “Angela Brehen, you and me are going to have
fun.
”

“I was not prepared for what happened next,” she recalls, grimacing at the mere memory of it. “But as he spoke, his face began to contort in this horrible way. Like something you'd see in a scary movie. And he was coming for me; he looked completely different. I was so scared. All I wanted to do was get out of there. That was when I woke up with a jolt. I was back in my own house, thank God.”

On her return to “reality,” Angela gave herself a few minutes. They had agreed that she should telephone him at once “while it's all still fresh in your memory,” but she had to compose herself first. She was still trembling as she dialed the number, not
knowing what to expect—the unpleasant stranger she had seen him become, or his normal self. To her immense relief he was the latter: the customary, self-assured Barry McNulty. She tried hard not to show her fear or slur her words as she gave a description of his home. He was delighted; it all tallied. She had proved to him that his search was over.

Prudently, she made no mention of that “other” Barry. There was no opportunity to do so, because he did all the talking. He embarked upon a long-winded explanation of what they had experienced. She could follow most, if not all, of it. He called it TC, transference of consciousness. It was his own designation; he disliked such terms as astral travel and out-of-body experiences. “An OBE,” he joked, “is something you get from the Queen of England.” She learned that he had sought long and hard for a partner, somebody who shared his facility for TC.

The following weekend, he invited himself to her home. He said he had an important experiment he wanted her to take part in.

“I was really shocked at his brazenness,” says Angela, “but knew I must agree. You're probably wondering why I didn't tell him the show was over and just end it there. But even when I tried to, I was filled with so much fear, I couldn't get the words out. It was as though he had this hold over me, some kind of power. You know, I used to think that people that fell under the spell of the likes of David Koresh and Jim Jones were just fools, but now I know different. You stay with people like that out of sheer terror. I now know that what I was experiencing were the symptoms of demonic oppression. To Barry, it was business.”

Barry's “business,” as he called it, was the exploration of other dimensions. Angela learned that he had accomplished much on his own, but needed a partner for what he called the “tricky stuff.”

“I didn't like the sound of that,” she says, “but when he explained it, it seemed okay. We would take it in turns looking after each other when one of us was out of the body. It seemed reasonable. Or rather, I kidded myself into believing it was reasonable.”

Barry McNulty required Angela's cooperation in an experiment. It did not, on the surface, appear in any way sinister. In fact, it had at its heart such endearing sentimentality that she was forced to reevaluate her poor opinion of him. She began to think that her terrible experience—her witnessing his alarming transformation—was simply her imagination playing tricks on her.