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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:
 76375.1570@compuserve.com
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