The Dark Sacrament by David Kiely Page A

it would still come for me. I hinted to a few friends that I was hearing things in the house. I asked if they believed in ghosts, that sort of thing. But I couldn’t come right out and tell them…. I just could not bring myself to tell anybody, not even John, about the sexual assaults, about what was really happening to me. It was a living hell.”
    The months passed and the hauntings continued. Having her husband beside her at night helped somewhat. But John was no defense against the evil that lurked in the darkness of the bedroom.
    â€œThrough time, I was forced to accept my suffering. There was nothing else I could do. The more I prayed, the more I was tormented. If he didn’t come for me before I fell asleep, I’d wake up to find him pressing down on top of me. He was determined that I had no peace, no peace whatsoever.”
    She was startled into wakefulness one night, as if from a “falling” dream. Dubois had changed tack.
    â€œIt felt as if an invisible fist was pounding my pillow,” she says. “I can find no better way to describe it. The pounding was so fierce that my head was bouncing off the pillow. It went on for a whole minute, maybe two. Then it stopped altogether. I was asking myself if I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing. So I tried to get back to sleepagain; I was really tired. But whatever it was that was hitting the pillow obviously didn’t want me to sleep, because the next thing I knew the bedclothes were whisked off me—in one fell swoop—and dropped at the foot of the bed.”
    It was the start of a new phase in the attacks. As time went by, the pounding on the pillow and the removal of the covers became such routine occurrences that they failed to unnerve her; she would simply leave the bed half-asleep and rearrange the covers.
    Pierre Dubois had taken up residence in the Neville home. More odd things began to happen—occurrences that could not be explained away by logic or science. Lights would flicker for no reason; water taps would turn themselves on, then off. There were minor anomalies in her bedroom, little changes that only she would notice. She would sometimes find the items on her dressing table mysteriously rearranged. On several occasions she discovered her perfume hidden in a corner of the closet. One night she drew the curtains, went to the bathroom, and returned to find them pulled open again. The children began to complain of hearing mice in the night, but Julie was certain there were no mice in the house.
    Often, when she had friends and neighbors over, they could very clearly hear floorboards creaking upstairs, as though somebody was walking about. The children heard the creaking too but, as is often the case with children, they got used to it, and to the other noises and unexplained presences.
    Julie urged them not to speak of those things at school or elsewhere. It was bad enough that she was subjected to the disturbances and torment; the last thing she wanted was to attract undue attention to her family and herself. People do not, as a rule, react compassionately to reports of preternatural infestation; many tend to suspect that the victim has somehow, whether by word or deed, “brought it on herself.”
    It reached the point where Julie could no longer be alone in the house during the day. The uninvited “lodger” was no respecter of the daylight hours; he could appear at any time.
    â€œI was faced with a choice,” she says. “I could stay in the house and go out of my mind, or get out as often as I could.”
    She decided to go to work again, and found employment as a shop assistant. It helped.
    But working by day served only to postpone the nocturnal ordeal; Dubois would be there on her return. In the evening, as soon as she turned the key in the front door, she felt that someone or something had been waiting for her. There was the pervasive smell of burning coal and a heaviness in the