One Eye On The Darkness

Chapter Eleven

"But only speak the word, Lord, and my soul shall be healed."

Frieda knelt and prayed the petition together with the handful of other, mostly elderly worshippers in attendance at the early morning Mass. She had felt the need to come here today. It was again an instinctive response, just like her reaction to the phenomena back home. Fight or flight, the old cliched evolutionary programming built into all of nature. She had flown to where she felt safest, the parental home, and by extension here, to her childhood church of St Urban

She had not told her elderly parents anything about the poltergeist. They had been troubled enough as it was by Frieda's ear for the lingering remnants of the dead without the burden of some new revelation of spiritual unrest.

On awakening in her old room that morning, she had immediately felt soiled and dirty beside the fresh linen, the scent of pot pourri and bright sunshine highlighting the floral curtains. She had showered but the feeling remained, as though something had touched her deep down and left its filthy handprint within. It was nothing that mere soap and water could remove.

So she had arrived early at the church, pressing the priest there to hear her confession before Mass. The young pfarrer had obliged, absolved her, prescribed one Our Father and one Hail Mary as penance, and then she had remained for Holy Communion. She knew she needed to prepare herself for the coming evening, when she would return home for the blessing of her apartment, and face again whatever it was that had infested it with its presence.

If Fr Derrick was right, then she had badly misjudged the origins of the entity. It was no lost and desolate soul paying its dues. Instead, she was forced to consider an even more disturbing possibility. That the emptiness she had felt in that cellar had attracted some vestige of the evil that had occurred there. Some wraith that fed on such depravation and which had been drawn into the same void she had experienced.

The dirtiness she had felt had been part emotional and psychic detritus, and part a nagging fear that she forced down like bile. Fear that the entity had taken up residence not so much within the apartment as within her.

"But only speak the word, Lord."

Frieda repeated the plea again. Some sense of consolation settled on her, subtle but definite. It was enough to sooth her for now, here within the walls of a sacred space.

The test of its endurance beyond them was still to come.

***

Frieda heard nothing from Schluter that day, for which she was grateful. It was a timely and providential lack of contact that enabled her to focus on the evening ahead.

Still, as she drove back along the A43 and into Muenster, the WDR2 radio station news bulletin unsettled her with a report on the still missing Stephanie Brink. There was as yet no trace of the twenty-one year old student despite intensive door-to-door enquiries and appeals for witnesses.

The usual accumulation of late-afternoon, homeward-bound commuters on Weseler Strasse belied the inexplicable events taking place in Frieda's tiny corner of it. The sounding horns, the smell of petrol, made the supernatural seem very distant, unreal even. But as Frieda knew from the gift she possessed, that ethereal dimension of the universe lay only just beneath the surface. The material veneer was only skin deep. If anything, it was the supernatural world that defined the nature of human reality.

It was the old iceberg metaphor. The ninety percent that cannot be seen underpins and supports the ten percent that can be.

Frieda sat in her car directly outside her apartment building until Father Derrick arrived, her fingers drumming constantly on the steering wheel. By the time he drew up in his modest blue VW Polo just ten minutes later, any calm she had attained earlier in the day had evaporated, and her trepidation levels were going through the roof.

"Good evening, Frieda," Derrick greeted her breathlessly as he locked his car. "Sorry I'm a little late. An appointment with another of my parishioners took longer than I thought."

Late? Frieda glanced at her watch. She hadn't noticed. She felt suddenly lightheaded.

They climbed the stairs to Frieda's apartment, the echoing of their feet in the stairwell jarring inexplicably on her nerves. The air was taut so that she felt unable to breathe. It was a common sensation in the presence of death, and the discomfort in her chest grew more intense the higher they climbed.

As if he had himself sensed her discomfort, Father Derrick placed a hand gently on her arm as they reached the door and she dug in her jeans pocket for her key.

"Alles gute," he said quietly. "Everythings fine."

His words reassured her a little and the tension eased slightly.

Frieda didn't know what she'd expected to find. Given the events that had driven her from the flat the previous day, to find the place had been completely trashed in her absence would probably not have surprised her. But the exact opposite was the case. Everything was as she had left it. No displaced furniture, much less unexplained writing was in evidence. In fact there was an almost uncommon sense of cleanliness about the place, but Frieda guessed that this perception was merely a product of the bright evening sunshine streaming in through the large living room window.

And the atmosphere was surprisingly light. There was no hint of the heavy menace that had pervaded the apartment the previous night as Father Derrick followed her into the living room and set his carry case onto the small dining table.

He opened the case and removed his stole, kissing it before draping the long band of purple silk round his neck. Then he took out a vial of holy water, a leather bound Bible and smiled warmly at Frieda.
     
"You have a lovely home," he commented with an appreciative glance around the light and airy lounge. "Let's do our best to keep it that way for you, shall we?"
     
Frieda returned his smile. The elderly priest's confidence was infectious. She nodded and Father Derrick crossed himself and bowed his head. "Let us begin by saying together the Lord's Prayer."

Crossing herself also, Frieda joined in the recitation of Christianity's most famous prayer. Again she felt her nerves tighten, unable to properly close her eyes in expectation of some malevolent response to this invocation of all that was holy. But they reached the final 'Amen' with no interruption or expression of hostility.

Father Derrick proceeded to mark the doorway with the sign of the cross, using the vial of holy water as the medium for these crucifixes on the wooden frame.
     
"In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit," he repeated firmly three times, once for each of the crosses placed to the side and over the entrance.
     
And still nothing.

As Father Derrick moved on through the flat, Frieda trailing after him, and reciting with him every prayer, every Bible verse, she had one eye always open, looking out for the darkness she had believed dwelt there. Her expectations were still running at fever pitch, that this sense of security was a false one. That at any moment the darkness would be provoked into a rage that would swallow up the sunlight.

But the blessing proceeded unopposed, every room sanctified by sacred texts and holy water, with only the occasional muted sounding of a horn intruding from out on the busy street. To seal the blessing, Father Derrick recited the traditional prayer to St Michael, invoking the protection of this chief of archangelic beings. Then the priest closed his Bible with a satisfied smile that Frieda returned.

"And that, as they say, is that," he said, patting Frieda's arm before removing his stole and packing it back neatly into his case. He turned back and pressed the jar of holy water into Frieda's hand.
     
"Keep this," he urged. "And pray often. Cling to Christ. We have swept the room today. But it needs to be occupied now by the Spirit of God."

Frieda nodded. For once she felt nothing, heard nothing. There was a quietness she had not been privy to in a long time. No background noise, no static to trouble her. It was as though a shutter had been pulled down over the world.
     
"Good night, Father," she said as she saw the priest out. "And thank you."
      
Another angry motorist somewhere outside on Weseler Strasse sounded their horn, but that was the only noise to break the peace.