“Am not!”
“Are so!”
“She only seems to be a child,” said Father Mabbley, having had a judicious sip of his brandy. “In fact, she may be the most adult person here.”
“Thank you, Father,” said Janet.
“It wasn’t necessarily a compliment, my dear. Now, where were we? Oh yes, I was beginning at the beginning. Have you all seen Psycho?”
“Oh, come on,” said Janet. “I’ve seen it maybe a dozen times. It’s always on TV. Did Father Pat think he was his own mother? He really was crazy.”
“I’ve never seen Psycho,” said Greg, “so I guess you should explain.”
“Well, then, this is what happened, as nearly as we can tell. By ‘we’ I mean myself and the two psychiatrists who were working for the prosecution. Father Bryce had multiple personalities. He also had a drinking problem, which is one reason, Miss Joyner—”
“I’m Miss Findley now.”
“Very well, Miss Findley. One reason not to drink. Rum is a demon. Likewise bourbon, which was Father Bryce’s undoing, by his own account. He had blackouts. Which is to say, times when he did things he didn’t remember afterward. Most alcoholics do have blackouts. It’s a convenient way to avoid a consciousness of sin. At some point on his road to perdition, probably after he’d had dealings with a young man who committed suicide, Father Bryce began to receive phone calls from another young man, who called himself Clay. Whether there ever was a real Clay, or whether he was, from the first, a fantasy in the poor man’s mind, there’s no way to know. But it seems certain that when he began receiving phone calls from Clay, the voice that Father Bryce heard was purely internal. The voice, one might say, of conscience. Conscience can be a cruel taskmaster, and Clay was no exception. Clay was Father Bryce’s first taskmaster, and, not unlike my friend Bing, he imposed a task that wasn’t simply a cash payment. He told Father Bryce to go to a tattoo parlor in Little Canada and have himself tattooed in an obscene manner. If you had heard Father Bryce’s confession, you’d have been entirely taken in by his story, until he insisted on showing you the tattoo that he supposed to be on his chest. There was no tattoo.”
“Jesus,” said Mary and Alison in unison.
“That was my own reaction.”
“When was this?” Greg asked.
“The first time was at the Shrine, when I heard his confession. He insisted on taking off his shirt to show me the tattoo that wasn’t there. And I thought, this man is crazy. But he was also dangerous, so I looked at the tattoo that wasn’t there respectfully and asked him to go on with his story. Later on I heard the story repeated, in greater detail, and I’ve no doubt at all that he believed every word of what he told me. Oh, my goodness, I see that this is becoming a very long story.”
“Go on,” said Alison. “Don’t be a tease.”
“You’ve had fair warning. Because the imaginary tattoo was just the beginning. I suppose that, psychologically speaking, the tattoo was a kind of self-imposed punishment for the death of the young man by the name of Kramer. The police suppose that Father Bryce learned of the boy’s suicide in the newspaper and that that triggered the fantasy of being tattooed. It was after that that Bing called him to deliver his own threat of blackmail, and that is when Father Bryce totally freaked. That is when he became Silvanus de Roquefort, the Bishop of Rodez and Montpellier-le-Vieux.”
“How’s that again?” said Greg, pouring more brandy into his own and Father Mabbley’s snifters.
“No more for me,” said Father Mabbley, once Greg had put down the bottle. “And it is a mouthful, isn’t it? So let us just call him Silvanus. A Catholic bishop in the south of France during the Middle Ages, when they were burning heretics at the stake. A period of history that the Church would rather forget. Apparently, Father Bryce had read about it, for his account was very circumstantial. Even though I was perfectly sure he was bonkers, because I’d seen that his supposed tattoo didn’t exist, I had a hard time dis-believing in the story he told me about all the things that he said had happened to him when he became Silvanus.”
“He became him?” Alison asked.
“He became him, and at the same time, Silvanus became Father Bryce. That was the problem. Father Bryce may be the first case of interactive multiple personalities. Because while Father Bryce was adventuring back in the Middle Ages, Silvanus took over the body, mind, and soul of Father Bryce. When you dealt with the man at the Shrine, it wasn’t Father Bryce you dealt with. Not at all. It was Silvanus.”
“You mean,” said Janet, “the way that when Janet Leigh gets stabbed in the shower it isn’t really Tony Perkins, it’s his mother?”
“Just so,” said Father Mabbley. “But, at the same time, somehow, Father Bryce was enjoying the life of the imaginary Silvanus de Roquefort. With—and here’s another complication—input from a book he must have read at some point, by a whacked-out sci-fi writer, A.D. Boscage.”
“The Prolegomenon?” Greg asked, perking up. “I’ve read that. It’s wild.”
“I have to agree,” said Father Mabbley. “Also, as the revised edition suggests, it was a complete fabrication. Though, in charity, it seems possible that Boscage was just as crazy as Father Bryce and believed everything he wrote. Though I doubt that. I think the man was just a canny charlatan. In any case, Father Bryce picked up on his medieval phantasmagoria, which turns out to be just that, for the site of his fantasy, Montpellier-le-Vieux, is nothing but a remarkable rock formation in the south of France; it never was the city Boscage describes in such fetching detail. The man is a novelist.”
“You’re sure of that?” Greg asked, setting down his snifter on the white carpet. “I drank it in.”
“You were meant to. Boscage was a professional, in his own weird way. I suppose Father Bryce drank it in as well, while he imbibed. He swears he never read the book after the first chapter. But it fueled his imagination, and when he snapped, he became a character in Boscage’s book. He became Silvanus. He fantasized an entire and complete day-by-day existence in the approximate era of the Albigensian Crusade. We think his Silvanus fantasies began even before his first phone call from Clay, during his blackout periods. He would check into a motel with a quart of booze and sail away into a hypnagogic haze.”
“Hypna-who?” Janet demanded.
“Gogic. It’s a strange, more intense kind of dreaming that happens on the borderline between sleep and waking. People who swear they’ve been abducted by aliens in UFOs have probably had hypnagogic hallucinations, the ones who aren’t simply lying. And there’s often a visionary component to hypnagogic dreams, the way there is to the dream journeys of shamans and Indian medicine men. They’re not only more intense, they signify. When Father Bryce traveled back in time to become Silvanus, he was becoming a more perfect priest, almost an archetypal priest.”
“I know what ‘archetypal’ means,” said Janet smugly. “It’s like in myths and fairy tales.”
“He was a bishop at a time when the Church’s power was at its height—for good and for ill. Instead of being what he was here and now—a parish priest in an institution that is falling to pieces. He was also, when he was Silvanus, a heterosexual—or, at least, a nightmare version of a heterosexual as filtered through the mind of someone who conceives of the sexual act as essentially obscene and violent. The Catholic Church’s view of sex has never been that friendly toward women.”
“We found that out,” said Alison, “at the Shrine.”
“I suppose, in a way, his attraction to altar boys may have been a kind of psychological barrier erected to prevent the woman-hating Silvanus from expressing himself. But Silvanus, once he’d begun to stir in the murk of Father Bryce’s blackouts, wanted out. So, unfortunately for you young ladies, when Father Bryce became Silvanus, Silvanus became Father Bryce.”
“Wait,” said Alison. “I thought he was Clay.”
“No, no.” Janet spelled it out: “It’s like The Three Faces of Eve with What’s-her-name.”
�
��Joanne Woodward,” Father Mabbley filled in.
“Right! Sometimes he was Clay, and sometimes he was—what was the other name?”
“Silvanus.”
“So,” Greg asked, “when he thought he was this Silvanus, that’s when he started killing everyone?”
“Yes, that’s what he thought. But the first murder he committed, which he described in dreadful detail, probably never happened. Delilah, her name was. Isn’t that classic? But she was only his fantasy, along with the tattoo parlor where he claims to have met her. The police went there, and it had been a tattoo parlor once, some four years ago. It was near a motel that Father Bryce often visited for his bouts of solitary drinking, so he must have taken it in, and it became a permanent fixture of his unconscious, along with the contents of the Boscage book. Then he did his best bit of interactive insanity, according to the prosecution’s psychiatrists: He appeared, as Clay, at the scene of the imaginary crime (which was an actual trailer court near Little Canada) and chauffeured himself back, as Silvanus, to his rectory in Willowville. From that point it was Silvanus who was in charge of Father Bryce’s mortal flesh, while Father Bryce was relegated to a medieval existence that became increasingly more horrific.”
“But if Father Bryce thought he was back living in the Middle Ages, how could he have told you about what was happening when he was Silvanus?”
Father Mabbley beamed at Janet. “That,” he said, “is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. When he first confessed to me, at the Shrine, he claimed to have no recollection of his doings in the days just gone by, when he was with you there. But then the clouds began to part. He remembered attacking Raven Peck when he’d entered her cell alone and found her in restraints. By this time the police already knew that he had violated her, because they’d tested the… fluids he’d left.”
“Let’s not talk about all that stuff, huh?” said Janet. “It gives me the creeps.”
“Same here,” said Alison. “Sometimes, when I think how close I came to the same thing happening to me…”
“Father Bryce felt much the same way about it. Horror and disgust over Silvanus’s behavior. Which was expressed, in Father Bryce’s imaginary medieval existence, in the most drastic possible way. He had himself crucified by one of the torturers working for the Inquisition. A priest, after all, is supposed to be reenacting Christ’s sacrifice on the cross each time he says Mass. And the details of the Crucifixion are impressed on a priest’s imagination by the need to deliver sermons on that subject at least once a year. You might say that he died for Silvanus’s sins.”
“I’ve heard those sermons,” said Janet. “They used to scare the shit out of me.”
“Did the Church actually crucify heretics back then?” Greg asked. “I thought they burned them at the stake.”
“Quite so. The rationale for Father Bryce’s crucifixion was another borrowing from the Boscage book, and Boscage in turn had taken his idea from a British writer, Joseph Cornwell, who proposed that the Shroud of Turin was the work of forgers of relics (a major industry in the Middle Ages), who created the uncanny image of the crucified Christ by duplicating the original process.”
“Gross,” commented Janet. “Do you think that’s what really happened?”
“It’s not for me to speculate. We know the Shroud is a forgery; that’s embarrassing enough from the Church’s viewpoint. If it was made in such a way, I can’t believe that any clergyman would have been directly involved. It seems the ultimate sacrilege, and that is probably why Father Bryce incorporated it into his vision of the Middle Ages. So. At the suggestion of our hostess, Silvanus entered the reliquarium that had been built to hold the threads from the Shroud, praying that it would be a doorway back to his own era, and when he opened the inner door, his prayers were answered. He returned whence he came, and it was Father Bryce who awoke in the darkness of the tomb, with the bats about him, beside the dead body of Hedwig Ober. He told me that he supposed he’d gone to hell.”
“Yeah,” said Janet. “It’s too bad he didn’t. He deserved it more than she did, though I can’t say I feel that sorry for her. Not after all that happened.”
“It was an awful way to die,” said Alison. “But my therapist says I shouldn’t blame myself for it. I didn’t know about the bats. Nobody did.”
“I think it can be fairly said,” said Father Mabbley, “that she had only herself to blame.” He turned to Greg. “Do you know, I think I wouldn’t mind just another drop of brandy.”
“Do you think there’s any chance that Silvanus will decide to come back?” Janet asked. “If he did, he’d sure give a scare to some of the other prisoners in that prison.”
“No, I don’t think there’s any chance of that. I think Silvanus died at the hands of the Inquisition. That’s what Father Bryce believes, anyhow, and he’s the expert.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” said Alison. “I don’t expect he’ll ever escape from prison, but if he did—”
“I don’t think you have to worry about either Father Bryce or Silvanus getting out of prison. Silvanus is dead (or gone to hell), and Father Bryce seems resigned to life without parole. I wouldn’t say he’s repented his sins. Pedophiles rarely do, because they don’t believe they’ve sinned. And while he deplores the crimes that Silvanus committed, he doesn’t feel that he’s responsible for them.”
“That’s bullshit,” said Greg. “No one else killed Raven Peck. No one else raped Mary Tyler. He did.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Alison, “and I’m glad he’s locked away and is never going to be paroled. But there’s a part of me that feels sorry for him, in a way.”
“It must be the same part that likes snakes,” said Janet.
“But that’s just it, he wasn’t a snake. Even when he thought he was Silvanus, and when he was hearing my confession that first time in my cell and started to come on about how pretty I was, and said I looked like the Virgin Mary—”
“The Virgin Mary?” said Greg. “You never mentioned that before.”
“I’d actually forgot about it. But even then, when I was most scared of him, he made me think of Jimmy Norton, who was this kid back in the eighth grade who tried to put the make on me. Only he was so afraid of touching me that it was almost comical. And sad, at the same time. I mean, yes, in one way he was just a creep, but in another way you knew that he’d always be like that, even if he got married someday. He would always be afraid of sex and think it was dirty but at the same time that it was something that he had to do.”
“Yes,” said Father Mabbley, looking down into his brandy glass with a sad smile, “I think that’s just who he was. There are a lot of Jimmy Nortons in our seminaries. I’ve known a few of them very well. And you’re quite right about what becomes of them. They may grow older, but they don’t grow up.”
He finished off his brandy and set down the glass decisively. “Well, there it is, the whole, uncensored story. Now let’s try to forget it, shall we?”
“There is nothing,” said Janet, “I’d rather forget.”
“Good, then let me vanish into the kitchen for no more than five minutes to whip the cream. I hope you all like strawberry shortcake?”
“I love strawberry shortcake,” said Janet.
When Father Mabbley had gone into the kitchen and Greg was clearing the dishes from the dining room table, Janet looked into the flames licking up from the logs for a while, and then, with a sigh of contentment, turned to Alison and said, “Is he making real whipped cream, not the stuff out of a plastic tub?”
“He always does.”
“Boy, isn’t this the life, Alison? Isn’t it great to be rich?”
45
Clay woke up with the mother of all headaches. The kind of headache where you could wish you didn’t exist, where all you wanted was to return to the nothingness of dreamless sleep. But there was no returning, he was awake.
He reached to the side of the bed, where he always kept a pack of Marlboros. But there was no pack the
re, there wasn’t even a table, and the bed almost wasn’t a bed, just some kind of cot, with another cot above it, bunk-bed-style. He couldn’t even sit up to take in where it was; he had to ease out of it sideways.
That’s when he saw the bars.
Shit! he thought.
How in hell? He couldn’t have got so drunk that he’d forgotten everything between doing whatever had landed him here and this present, very unpleasant moment. But his mind was a fucking blank. Like a big eraser had rubbed out a few months of his existence. Like he’d been dipped in Liquid Paper.
Something was wrong. Something more than the fact that he’d woken up in a fucking prison cell without knowing how he’d got here. Something internal. His hand reached down to his prick, and at least that was okay.
Except for one thing. It was cut. He had no foreskin.
Something was very wrong indeed.
He stood up, dropped the prison-issue shorts he’d been sleeping in, and looked down at his dick.
It wasn’t his. His hands weren’t his. There was something wrong with his whole body. It wasn’t the feeling you get from being massively hungover.
He looked around for a mirror, but he was looking around a prison cell (and a pretty ratty cell at that), and a mirror was not one of the amenities provided. There was the bunk bed, with its sagging mattresses (and no one in the upper bunk), a bench bolted to the opposite wall, a toilet with no lid in one corner, and in the other a kind of school desk with a few books on top of it and a plastic chair beside it. Clay had thought this kind of minimum-comfort prison cell had been made illegal sometime back in the seventies.
Three concrete-block walls, one of which featured a fucking crucifix, and a fourth wall of steel bars.
All he wanted to do was to look at his own face, but in prison you can’t always get what you want.
The toilet bowl, he thought. There’ll be water in the toilet, it’ll work like a mirror.
But when he knelt down beside the toilet to peer into its porcelain bowl, he couldn’t make out anything but his shadow. The cell was too dark, and of course, being a cell, there was no light switch.
THE PRIEST A Gothic Romance Page 34
