Cream of the Crop 11/Cream of the Crop 11-1.iso/faq/df9601g.zip/4L

Text File | 1996-01-01 | 26KB | 466 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.
 --------------------------------------------------------------------
 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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