The Arsenal Files 6/The Arsenal Files 6 (Arsenal Computer).ISO/epub/df9601r.zip/DFC

Text File | 1996-01-01 | 26KB | 455 lines

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HIS ANGELS HE CHARGES WITH ERROR
  by Carl Reader
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  All day and night I raised my eyes to your domain, Heavenly
Father, wondering if soon I would join you there by my own design,
or if I would be cast down to hell. I watched the deep bright blue
of daytime, with its darting doves like spirits free to roam all
the world, and I wondered at the black cloth of night above me and
wondered if I would have to disgrace the black cloth on my back.
With you in mind, night was like a holy garment pierced with
pinpricks to let the light of your glory shine through.

  All of my distant family, those relatives who shunned our small
religious branch of the clan, said it was such a shame my brother
died just after becoming a priest, that in his heart he must have
believed hell awaited him, and even that he wanted to go to hell.
I say it is a shame he died at all, especially since to my horror
and disbelief he found it necessary to take his own life. Neither
my mother nor my father thought Enoch was cut out to be a priest,
and believed that their bestowing such a ridiculous Biblical name
on him influenced him in his decision to destroy himself. In their
great guilt, with their tears still awash from sunrise to sunset,
they blamed themselves for his self-destruction.

  They believed that absurd name and the ridicule it had always
brought down on Enoch had unbalanced his mind, first turning him
into a priest and then to a suicide. From the first, they told me,
Enoch's name was a curse to him -- from the time in elementary
school three older, bigger boys beat him when he would not deny
his name truly was Enoch Wells to the times later in life when
girls made a laughingstock of him, changing his name from Enoch
to Eunuch to injure him. With all his heart I knew Enoch loved
those who made light of him, made him into a goat to deride and
pulled his horns till he bleated: "Enough of this painful life!
Enough! To hell with me where devils will be more kind!"

  As a consequence of his name and mistreatment as a child,
I doubt that Enoch ever knew the love of a woman in his short,
pious life. My parents were sorely grieved by this, and again
tore open their own hearts by blaming his faith and consequent
death on their naming of him and his unhappy early years. They
were doubly shocked and aggrieved when I chose to follow Enoch
into the priesthood after his death. They had named me Jonathan,
and said it was perfectly natural for others to call me John, and
treat me normally, and not abuse me.

  With tears that once again drew up the recent memories
of Enoch's death, they told me that I could be sure of a normal
life, saying that my name was the name of a normal man. They blamed
their misunderstanding and fears on an absurdly small contribution
to Enoch's derangement -- his name. They say the Church further
unbalanced him, caused his delicate psyche to turn in against
itself, and they do so want grandchildren. They say I am their last
hope for that.

  They will know all about how I came to my decision to follow
Enoch, to embrace a life of celibacy and deny further life to our
line, when they are apprised of all the details of his life, which
I discovered through an open door to hell that he showed me.

  My brother had been dead four days when a letter came to our
home addressed to me. It had no return address. It was of an
extraordinarily light weight, as if it had been borne on the
gossamer wings of angels to me, angels who were in haste to let
me know of my brother's predicament. I knew, standing in the
sunlight before our old rusty red mailbox, the annoying screeching
of its recalcitrant rusty door still fresh in my memory, that Enoch
was communicating to me from the dead. With all the ancient fears
of demons and angels possessing my seventeen-year-old soul, I
stuffed the unopened letter in my pocket and delivered the bills,
municipal notices and other everyday missives into my mother's
hands. I could feel the letter giving off a white hot heat on my
breast, as though hell still burned in its pages.

  My mother had wanted me to bring in the mail since she still
felt too weak and melancholy over Enoch to go outside. I, too,
still felt the horror of finding my brother with a thick hemp rope
tearing into his neck, his lifeless body, clad in his black
priest's garb, swinging high in display in our airless but sunny
attic, hanging from the highest rafter. Now the letter brought all
that back, brought back my tears washing his cold lifeless white
hand. I shall never forget that when I touched his dead body there
was already a thin coating of dust on his shoulder. His eyes were
open on eternity, and now with the letter I knew he was about to
share with me what he saw there.

  With the letter clutched in my hand, I climbed the staircase
up into the attic, fearful my mother might catch me communing with
the dead in their own sphere. Fervidly I believed the letter
heralded some transmigration of my brother's soul, that he would
appear, alive and red with health, before me when I tore open the
missive. Perhaps his soul would slip as a mist from the envelope,
and through some supernatural trick reconstitute itself into its
corporeal self before my very eyes. I had such heathen notions and
naive hopes of the afterlife in those days.

  What emerged from that envelope was not a mist, not a soul,
but my life's calling, written out in by brother's own hand. It
was indeed a letter from him, but written on the day before his
death and posted that same day. Before I read it, I cursed the
tardiness of our postal system, for I might have been able to save
him if they had delivered the letter on time. Five days was too
long to wait for any cry for help in this world, suffering of five
minutes is too great a time in this world. That is why I give you
my brother's pain now, word for word. I can't stand to see that
pain continue for perhaps all of time.

                               *  *  *

     Dear Jonathan,

     When you read this the worst will have happened and you will
   perhaps be confused by it. Believe me, please believe me: I did
   not want to die. It was necessary and ineluctable.

     I was seventeen, your age, when I learned of what I am about
   to tell you, although I did not know the full story until a few
   days ago and could not possibly have told it to you while alive.
   Lives change so suddenly in such unexpected ways, like candles
   suddenly blown out by a gust of wind. This letter will tell you
   why I became a priest. It will also tell you why I had to die. I
   hope and trust and pray it will not disturb your life, although
   in a way I know its information must.

     Sociologists say that suicide begets suicide, that a
   suicidal father will beget a suicidal son, and I know this is
   true now, despite what the Church tells us of free will. Murder
   also begets murder, as you will soon discover from what I'm about
   to tell you. I now believe that it was a single act of violence
   thousands of years ago that set the world on its present course
   of endless destruction and renewal. It was not an act of
   defiance, as our Church teaches us.

     Yes, brother, I am an apostate, but I am not so naive as not
   to know that blood waters the earth, that it makes it in the end
   green with life, but when blood is spilled in a horrible way, in
   conscienceless fashion, there are forces that seize hold of it,
   make that blood work for them in diabolical ways, and twist the
   great interrelated cycles of life and death into meaningless
   agonies, as I have been twisted, my very philosophies and meaning
   in life jumbled.

     Not too far from our home, a couple lives in anguish over
   the suicide seven years ago of their only son. You know them,
   the Pearsons. Their son David was a friend of mine. It appeared
   when he died, and it still does, that he should never have taken
   his own life, that he had every reason to be happy. Perhaps it
   appears to you now that I should never have taken mine, but by
   now I think you know that my joy in God is the reason for my
   death.

     There is one reason for both of our deaths, mine and David's.

     Three days before that David ended his own life, he and I had
   broken into the old Hewett mansion, for no other reason than to
   excite our boyish curiosities about old Harold Hewett, that
   eccentric millionaire who simply walked out of his huge home
   without so much as locking the door. As you remember, he was
   found severed in twain on the Delaware-Raritan railroad tracks,
   a millionaire who was the envy of all suddenly a hapless
   statistic. His death, too, was a suicide, I can assure you. I
   know.

     The Hewett mansion was our haven, a place to explore the
   life of a man we knew nothing about, but who held our immature
   imaginations in thrall as we examined the artifacts of his life.
   The closets were filled with suits long out-of-fashion. A wind-
   up victrola with a huge horn sat on a black walnut table with
   animals' feet at the bottom of its legs. Dust was everywhere,
   imbedded in the cretonne of the chairs and divan, blowing up
   around us as we sat or bounced on the old expensive furniture,
   thick on the Chippendales and caked on the hardwood floorboards.
   The entire house had the smell of a cellar.

     I was sitting in a high-backed green cretonne chair, reading
   past issues of Leslie's, the magazine from the twenties, the
   time when old Hewett walked away from all his worldly riches to
   find death, when David ascended the stairs with a particularly
   absorbed demeanor, as if called by a silent voice. He was gone a
   very long time. I left my reading, a story about a workingman's
   riot in Cleveland, to find what was keeping him so long on the
   second storey.

     He had never ascended the stairs. I found him three-quarters
   of the way up the spiraling conveyance, sunken and quivering in
   gelid fear, curled up against the wall with a blackness so deep
   encircling his eyes that I thought they had been smeared with
   soot. I saw his death in his eyes. Then I noticed that there was
   a column of black smoke at the top of the stairs, just now
   dissipating, but leaving a sulfurous taint to the air as it
   translated itself into nothingness. "It was there," said David,
   pointing to where the column had been, next to where I stood. "It
   was there." His words dropped so coldly on me that I shivered,
   and he turned again to me with that horrific expression of his
   own death. I spun around to look behind me, but saw only a
   latched latticed window which gave out onto the deep summer sky,
   an artistically beautiful blue summer sky at that.

     I led David down the stairs, supporting him under his arms
   and astonished at how cold his flesh had become. It was not
   until we reached the street (he insisted we leave the house),
   that he regained his ability to speak coherently. The mad story
   he told of what he had seen on those stairs was so horrific that
   I thought he had lost his mind, in spite of what little of the
   evil I too had seen and smelled. I dismissed his story until his
   death a few days later, when it all made sense. Remember, I was
   seventeen, and thought this sort of madness would pass without
   harming anyone. I barely knew what madness was.

     David insisted he had seen the apparition of a dead soldier
   on those stairs, a British redcoat frightfully mauled and
   slashed with open, gaping wounds, the secret interiors of his
   body exposed to view. So graphic was his presentation and so far
   from his usual inspirationless talk that for a moment I believed
   him. He said the visage had descended the stairs toward him,
   moaning in its death-agony, slashed and bleeding head to toe, and
   had pointed a finger dripping blood at him, hissed fiercely and
   said, "You're next." The visage then supposedly flicked the blood
   from his gouged hand at David into his face. I saw no blood on
   David's face. I had seen no blood on the stairs. I saw no reason
   to believe the story.

     But David was indeed next, as he killed himself three days
   later. The ghost had indeed been right.

     Perhaps it was the pain I felt at losing my only friend,
   perhaps I would have gone mad had I nothing to occupy myself,
   but I looked into the long history of the Hewett place. I wished
   to discover any clue I could as to why my friend died, since in
   my loneliness I had no understanding of death at that time, and
   found that there was indeed a history of suicides, all males,
   twelve in all, attached to the ancient manse. Something was
   inflicting a self-hatred on the innocent beings who entered that
   house, a suicidal frenzy that could not be denied and had
   resulted in the deaths of twelve men.

     I was astonished. As a boy of seventeen, I had opened a door
   to the caverns of hell, and had taken my first step inside.

     My research was so extensive and so impassioned that it did
   not take me long to discover what demon was in the house. I owed
   my passion for good to David, and to an end the evil. A British
   officer, on Captain Lesley Warren, had indeed been murdered in
   the Hewett place during the War of Revolution, although it would
   be more appropriate to say he had been butchered while alive. The
   British had been particularly harsh in our area toward the
   rebellious Colonials. Farms had been burned, farmers murdered and
   young women treated to the most vicious behavior.

     When a group of drunken Colonial soldiers trapped Captain
   Warren alone in the Hewett place, seeking an assignation with
   his lover, they felt no cause for mercy. Their bayonets were put
   to the most flagrantly cruel usage, his flesh sliced open and his
   most precious parts abused in the most horrible ways. The
   Colonials were further incited to butchery by the belief that
   this captain had taken place in an especially lewd execution of
   a pregnant rebel woman. She had been cut open at the belly, her
   baby had been taken out and beheaded, and in her own blood the
   British soldiers had written on the wall above the corpses "Ye
   shall not bear rebels."

     Wars create atrocities by the score, and Captain Warren
   would inevitably have gone on to his reward or damnation, whether
   he was present at the execution of the pregnant woman or not, had
   there not been among the Colonials a foolish, drunken, defrocked
   priest, who thought it proper to say mass after the butchering
   of the British invader. This was one Homer William Wilson,
   evidently a drunkard beyond compare or compassion. Whatever his
   constitution, he convinced the Colonials to assuage their guilt
   with religion.

     This fool laid out the body of Captain Warren on a table,
   comparable to the mensa, or table-altar, and intoned the magical
   words of the mass, but even these he could not speak correctly.
   For some reason known only to the dipsomaniac brain, he used a
   Gallic form of the mass from the late seventh century, and
   stumbled through the Words of Institution and badly altered the
   post mysterium, so that the Consecration was incomplete. I
   believe that it was at the epiclesis that he faltered most
   egregiously. The epiclesis is the liturgical invocation of the
   Holy Spirit for the purpose of consecrating the eucharistic
   elements. It is the point at which the eucharistic bread and wine
   become the body and blood of Christ. I believe that the bumbling
   "Father" Wilson freed the soul of Captain Warren not for its
   eternal reward, but through his utter misreading of the mass,
   created an eternity of wandering the earth in revenge.

     How many more would die after David at the hands of his ghost
   created during the Revolution so many years ago? I asked myself.
   Adrift prior to my friend's death, I now had a reason for
   existence, to wipe this scourge from the earth, for I had the
   surety of God's Kingdom to guide me on my pilgrimage. I would be
   a priest, and rid the world of the avenging soul of Captain
   Warren, this scourge I found right outside my back door, this
   demon in agony who had destroyed my friend. In all my years of
   study, I looked forward only to that time when I would enter
   once again the old Hewett mansion, empowered by God's word on
   Earth, and perform the Rites of Exorcism. Through my knowledge
   the devil in that house would be laid low.

     The time came just a few days ago for me. It came in more ways
   than one, for as you know by now I have failed in my duty as
   priest. The devil has gotten the best of me.

     I can say, however, that I did not fail as a friend, for a
   surprise awaited me as I entered that mansion of torture and
   death, clad naively in my black vestments and repeating nervously
   in my mind the opening lines of the Latin rite, confusing them
   with other tidbits of that ancient tongue. Libera nos a malo --
   free us from evil -- was an especially repetitious phrase in my
   frightened but determined consciousness . . . fool! Fool that I
   was I should have understood more, should have known more before
   dealing with an evil that deep. A priest fresh from his studies
   has no experience of something that malicious and arbitrary.

     I knew as soon as I entered the broken cellar window, sliding
   through the groundswell portal as if to my birth in hell, that
   the evil spirit of the British captain was present in the house,
   since there was a feel to the very air that I had been warned
   would be there by an old enfeebled exorcist priest. Summertime
   had no truck with the interior of that fiendish domicile: it blew
   icy as the devil's breath in there.

     My breath blew out before me in icy clouds: I shivered: the
   house itself did its best to scatter my concentration and piety,
   as its walls and floors groaned in anticipation of its burden
   being lifted from it. Its broken stairwells and scattered trash
   piles made it difficult to ascend to the first floor from the
   cellar, and I felt the confusion of my youth return, that time
   seven years earlier when I had last been lost in the house and
   had known so little of the diabolical.

     Before me the image of David's dead body invaded my thoughts.
   I saw his head blown to pieces by a single shotgun wound, and
   could not recall the words of the exorcism adequately. Finally,
   the grime of the manse imbedded in my robes after several falls,
   with cobwebs sticking to my hair, I stood before the winding
   stairwell in which I would perform the exorcism. By an act of
   will I had the first words of the rite ready to spring to my
   tongue.

     Then I heard the heavy slow tromp of boots on the second
   storey, and I nearly turned and ran. I recalled David's hideous
   death, and with new courage faced what was coming toward me. A
   piteous moaning accompanied each footfall now, and in my
   nervousness I repeated over and over again in a whisper the first
   words of the rite of exorcism. The agony of that creature on the
   second floor touched my heart as I waited for it, and I knew that
   it was for him I did this too, to set him free of his torture,
   that butchered British captain. I caught my courage and stepped
   up. As I ascended the stairs, he descended, with his heavy boots
   making as slow and painful a progress as my fearful sandals made
   up toward him.

     It was as I had imagined it would be when the captain came
   into view, the blood and gore and trailing guts and wheezing
   through punctured lungs -- with one exception. I neared the top
   of the stairs and the butchered beast leaned against the cold
   fieldstone exterior wall of the house, his never-healing wounds
   bleeding eternally over his torn garments, his liver exposed to
   view and his stomach opened to show the hideously half-digested
   contents of his entrails, his face slashed and scalp torn from
   the skull. The dark and horror of it all made me hesitate with
   pity.

     He fixed his eyes on me just as I was about to intone the
   first words of the exorcism and that gaze froze me, for I knew
   it. I could not move, for clad in the greatcoat of a British
   officer of long ago, suffering his wounds in repentance, was not
   some anonymous devil from long ago, but David Pearson. Before I
   could recover from my shock, my friend, with an agonizingly slow
   and reluctant gesture, his pain almost too great for him to bear,
   thrust his hand into the wound over his liver, soaking it in a
   pool of blood there, and then raised the stained hand over my
   head and shook its droplets onto my face, speaking half in
   English, half in Latin, as the corrupt Homer William Wilson must
   have hundreds of years ago, "Do this in mei memoriam. You're
   next. I am sorry, I am so sorry for this."  And with a sadness,
   but also a smile of infinite relief, my friend, the apparition,
   disappeared, leaving only the column of black smoke and the
   stinking sulfurous smell behind him.

     I knew in my failure that I was indeed next.

     David, while in life seven years ago, had not told me the
   spirit's full invocation. Perhaps he had not understood the
   Latin, being a simple uneducated boy. "Do this in remembrance of
   me," were the words that ended the anamnesis, the eucharistic
   prayer recalling the sacrifice of Christ. So Homer William Wilson
   had mis-spoke that part of the post mysterium, too. Now, because
   of that, and because David, in his shock, had not been able to
   communicate fully with me, I certainly was next. I wiped away the
   blood on my face on the sleeve of my vestment but felt the curse
   already working on my heart, turning it toward death as a fire
   burns down. I would want to leave this life soon, I knew. The
   devil had taken the rite of Christ and turned it to his own ends,
   and I knew I would be too weak to resist.

     I do not for long want to wander the Hewett mansion as the
   replacement spirit for the long dead Captain Warren, one doomed
   to feel his wounds as he felt them before he died and in his time
   of wandering before release. I do not wish to be a monument to
   the cruelty of war and the disasters of a misread mass. I long to
   say, "Missa acta est--in pace" and leave this place, Wilson's
   mass finally completed. Before my death, I learned of the twelve
   others who had fallen prey to this sinister spell, a curse not
   meant to be invoked but invoked nonetheless through error and
   drunkenness and inflicted on thirteen violatable victims.

     Jonathan, find an exorcist of the first order. Tell him of my
   ordeal. Do not let me wander for eternity in unspeakable agony,
   I beg you. Do it quickly. Do this in remembrance of me.

     Your brother,

     Enoch

                               *  *  *

  Brother, brother, I have tried. All my communication with the
renowned experts of exorcism in the Church have led to derisive
responses, or none at all. Believe me, I have gotten down on my
hands and knees and begged for your sake in front of arrogant,
unbelieving old men. I am sorry my studies have taken so long, for
my only choice was to become a priest and come to save you. I am
sorry your agony has had to continue for this long a time, for when
I think of you it is my agony for me, too. Soon your trial will
end, in one way or the other. I'm coming, brother, I'm coming. I
have learned the lessons of exorcism well, and soon will meet you
on the stairwell of the Hewett mansion. You must know that soon no
agonized spirit will be wandering the frozen halls of the Hewett
house -- either no one will, or I will.

  I do this in your remembrance.

                               (DREAM)

Copyright 1996 Carl Reader, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Carl's an editor with the Princeton Packet group of newspapers and
has published short stories in literary magazines and newspapers. He
self-published a Christmas story, THE TWELFTH ELF OF KINDNESS, and
it is scheduled to be published in Russia this year under the Sister
Cities program. His novel, MAMBA IN A BASKET, is soon to be with
Thunder Mountain Press on the Internet. You can email Carl at:
[e-mail]
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