Thomas M. Disch (46 page)

“That’s over now, thank heaven,” Father Mabbley said, “and it’s all turned out for the best. At least for the four of us. I felt a similar frustration all this long while, because I was unable to talk about all the things I learned from Father Bryce and from the police—not even with Alison and Greg. In part, that’s because his first confidences were told to me under the seal of the confessional.”

“But you’re not a priest anymore,” Greg pointed out.

“That doesn’t relieve me of an obligation to my vows. It only means that I don’t draw my salary from the Church anymore. In any case, Father Bryce eliminated that scruple by insisting that he would tell the police what they wanted to know only if I acted as his interrogator. He was quite obstinate, and the police indulged him in his whim. And so I learned the whole of the story again, in extraordinary detail. And almost all of it turned out to be pure fantasy.”

“But I thought he’d confessed to everything,” said Janet. “That’s why there wasn’t any trial.”

“Indeed, he pleaded guilty. But most of the crimes he confessed to me, often in great detail, weren’t the crimes he committed. And vice versa. In fact, it’s hard to be perfectly sure what crimes he did commit. For instance, I don’t think it was Father Bryce who killed my friend and Greg’s cousin, Bing Anker.”

“That’s news to me,” said Alison. “I mean, that was one of the few cases where there was a witness. The woman who saw him in back of Bing’s house, getting into his car. That much was in the newspaper.”

“Yes, but then the police ballistics test showed that the gun that killed Bing belonged to Gerhardt Ober. And we’re quite certain that Gerhardt also killed Father Bryce’s mother and twin brother at about the same time.”

“Why would he do that?” Greg asked.

“The police had no idea at first. Unless he’d been told to by Father Cogling. They
think
that’s why he killed Bing Anker.”

“Father Cogling ordered a hit?” Greg marveled. “Jesus, these Catholics.”

“Not
all
Catholics do such things, Greg,” Father Mabbley chided. “Only a few.”

“So Father Cogling had his henchman kill your buddy so that Father Bryce wouldn’t be blackmailed?”

“More likely, he acted to spare the Church further scandal. The Church abhors scandal, as you have learned. Didn’t you sign papers as part of your settlement agreeing never to talk about any of this to the press?”

“We had to,” said Alison.

“We
all
had to,” said Janet impatiently. “But what I don’t understand is, how did Father Cogling
know
there was a scandal in the works? Were they
both
sleeping with the altar boys?”

“No, there’s never been a breath of scandal about Father Cogling in
that
regard. The police
think
that Father Cogling was in the habit of listening to Father Bryce’s phone conversations, and that while I was eavesdropping on Father Bryce and Bing, when Bing was being such a rash fool (may he rest in peace), Father Cogling was doing the same thing on his end of the line without Father Bryce’s knowledge. It’s all very complicated.”

“You bet,” said Greg.

“Really,” said Father Mabbley, “I should begin at the beginning. But if I might impose on your hospitality, Alison, I
would
like a bit of brandy at this point. I know that I was the one who insisted that we have only Diet Coke with our dinner, but I am beginning, a little, to fade.”

“Surely, Father Mab. Greg, would you get him something? We
could
have had wine with dinner.”

“Ah, but you see, we didn’t have the
right
wine. And the wrong wine is worse than none at all.”

Greg returned with two brandy snifters and a bottle of Rémy Martin. He poured brandy in both snifters, gave one to Father Mabbley, and took the other himself.

“You don’t offer any to your guests?” Janet said reproachfully.

“Janet,” Alison scolded, “you’re thirteen.”

Janet settled back in the sectional. “Well, at least you got
that

right this time. At
home
Mr. Findley lets me have wine. Except I have to put water in it, so I almost can’t taste it. It doesn’t matter. I just hate being treated like a child.”

“You are a child,” said Alison, smiling.

“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 dayby-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.”