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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:
76375.1570@compuserve.com
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