Simulacrum

By Aonghus Fallon

The novitiate Ignatius Flood arrives at a small Irish farm to identify the perpetrator of a supposed 'miracle' but finds himself falling for the beautiful, mysterious Eileen instead. He becomes convinced she's a simulacrum created by her aunt to trap the unwary. But then Flaherty turns up - larger than life, glowing with his own unique vitality. Is Flaherty responsible? Or is he a simulacrum too? (60,000 words approx.)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aonghus Fallon
• Release date: Jul 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476317991

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SIMULACRUM

Aonghus Fallon

Copyright 2012 Aonghus Fallon

Smashwords edition

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CHAPTER ONE

June 22nd 1954. Mrs Quinn’s farmhouse, Brocky, Wicklow

His Grace’s orders had been quite explicit. I was to visit him at eleven o’clock that evening. A matter most urgent, requiring your immediate attention, he had written in his thin, spidery hand. Why at so late an hour? Because he prefers not to advertise my presence to others. He has many spies in the city, but I am to be his most secret and his most trusted.

And so I found myself being admitted into the vast, shadowy confines of the Episcopal palace by one of his army of nuns, passing down long corridors and up many flights of stairs, before being ushered into his study.

Works of philosophy, theology and classical literature line those walls, the titles embossed on their spines in gold. A coal fire crackled in the grate of an immense fireplace, for although it is the height of summer, the nights are often cold and he is a man susceptible to the slightest draft. A lamp cast a pool of light onto a desktop strewn with half-finished letters and open books. I remember a pile of unanswered correspondence an inch thick, weighted down by a glass, star-shaped paperweight.

A plaster bust of his beloved Seneca stood next to the lamp. To the right of those letters were a pen and a small brass bell. There were few signs of overt religiosity. True, enclosed in the paperweight’s dome-shaped heart was an image of Our Lady, and the high wooden back of his chair was topped with the carved likeness of a cross pattée, but other than that, it might have been the study of any educated man.

He had held out his hand. I had stooped to kiss his ring. Then he rose, came round from behind his desk and clasped me by the shoulders, looking me up and down and beaming with pleasure. He loves me as a son, just as I love him as a father – he is the closest thing to a father I ever had. The citizens of Dublin see a stern, inflexible man, with a long, thin face like a hatchet, dark alert eyes that miss nothing, and a widow’s peak of black hair; but when he smiles he looks as vulnerable as a child.

‘Sit, sit,’ he had said, returning to his chair.

For some minutes afterwards he sat motionless, hands folded, studying the desk in front of him – marshalling his thoughts. Seeing those features in repose, I thought he looked tired. This is after all the Marian Year. Never has the church been so busy on so many fronts. Only the day before, His Grace had ordained over fifty young novitiates.

Finally he had sighed and looked up at me with a faint, tentative smile. ‘This will sound ridiculous, Ignatius.’

‘Nothing that concerns you could be deemed ridiculous.’

He had sighed again, then picked up the gold-plated fountain pen on his desk. He toyed with this constantly, his eyes never leaving it while he spoke. ‘About three weeks ago, a priest, Father Emmanuel McNulty, visited one of his parishioners – an elderly lady living on a small farm in the Wicklow hills – and purchased a red bantam hen.’

‘A hen?’

‘Yes, he’s partial to an egg at breakfast, seemingly. On his arrival home, he opened the basket in which the hen had been kept to find this –’

His Grace leant over, lifting the object next to his chair, and placing it between us.

I picked it up and examined it.

It was a quilted tea cosy designed to resemble a hen: very old and encrusted with dirt – feathers and muck and (from what I could deduce on the basis of one quick sniff) bird excrement. I could still see it had once been orange, and was struck by the look of mild ferocity in the bird’s eyes.

I put it back down on the desk. ‘Some sort of practical joke?’

‘Father McNulty insists otherwise. He insists he only managed to get the hen into the basket with difficulty, that it flapped and squawked throughout the whole business and continued to do so for most of his journey home – when it fell mysteriously silent. Well, Ignatius? What do you make of it?’

I was dumbfounded. ‘Father McNulty thinks some sort of … metamorphosis took place?’

‘Precisely so.’ The archbishop had knitted his two hands together and pressed them against his thin mouth.

I shrugged. ‘Father McNulty –’

‘I’ve made sure he’s given up his priestly duties for the time being and that he’s staying with relatives. Also, that he’s under constant medical supervision.’

I stared down at the tea cosy and a thought struck me. ‘Curious –’

‘Yes?’ Those bright eyes were studying me like a hawk.

I shrugged again. ‘Well, it certainly looks as if it were retrieved from a hen house.’

His Grace nodded. ‘My thoughts exactly.’

‘You think he might have been telling the truth? Or believed himself to be? Some feat of hypnotism, perhaps?’ I was feeling more and more out of my depth with every passing minute. ‘Or witchcraft?’

‘Father McNulty believes it is a miracle.’ His Grace managed to imbue the unlucky priest’s name with acid sarcasm.

‘He is mistaken.’

‘Why?’

I was already regretting making such a speedy pronouncement. I knew His Grace expected every supposition, no matter how minor, to be underpinned by sound logic and reasoning. ‘Well, when God transmutes something from one state to another, it’s usually to a higher state, is it not? Water into wine – or bread into the flesh of Our Lord Jesus Christ.’

An inquisitorial smile. ‘So you would regard a tea-cosy as of less practical value than a hen?’

‘Something alive has been changed into something inert – I mean, if we are to take McNulty’s preposterous story at face value. I can’t imagine anything less like a miracle. Besides, even if such a transformation did take place I am at a loss as to how any religious significance could be attached to it. Maybe this could be pointed out to Father McNulty. It might help him come to his senses.’

‘Oh, but he would beg to disagree. Father McNulty is convinced that this –’ and here the archbishop prodded the tea-cosy with obvious distaste ‘– is how the Blessed Virgin Mary chooses to make her dissatisfaction with the church known to me; that she has chosen the year in which I honour her especially, just like she has chosen Father McNulty to be her messenger. You see, according to our esteemed colleague, a point is being made. What was living and breathing and a source of plenty is now but an empty sham.’

‘Even disregarding his mental well-being, Father McNulty seems to be attaching an inordinate amount of importance to one shabby old tea-cosy.’

‘He has always been overly critical of the church, a hand-biter if ever there was one.’

‘Then if he is not mad, is it possible he made the whole thing up?’

His Grace sighed and rose. He was wearing as always, his cassock, complete with cape. It is this, I think, that gives the impression of height, for he is very thin. He went over to the window, staring out beyond the palace gardens to the street, his back to me, his deformity – one shoulder is slightly higher than the other, the result of falling from a tram while a teenager – all the more obvious now he was little more than a silhouette.

‘No. Father Emmanuel McNulty is honesty personified: that’s what bothers me, Ignatius. The story itself is ridiculous, but McNulty himself is not lying. It is just as you say. He believes himself to be telling the truth.’

‘Hallucination or otherwise, I cannot see it being a cause for concern.’ Yet even as I spoke I was beginning to realise why His Grace was so worried. The whole country has been whipped into a religious frenzy due to the Marian Year. I make no bones about the fact that this is His Grace’s doing. As a result, people would be gullible when it came to any supposed miracles – especially if the witness to one happened to be a priest.

‘Father McNulty’s story is ridiculous and incomprehensible,’ His Grace said, echoing my concerns, ‘but that won’t stop him telling it to anybody and everybody. And sooner or later he will find somebody willing to believe him.’

I felt sorry for my old mentor then, and tried to reassure him. ‘Nonsense. People will just say he’s a bit cracked. There are no other witnesses, nothing –’

His Grace did not look round. ‘I neglected to mention why McNulty visited the farm. It was not to purchase a hen. He had been giving last rites to a farmer who lived nearby. This man insisted something extraordinary had taken place on the self-same farm, something only possible due to God’s intercession, and that he himself had been witness to it. He died before he could elaborate any further, and so McNulty took it upon himself to investigate. He found nothing out of the ordinary, and thought the farmer delusional. Until the mysterious transmogrification of the hen, that is. Now do you understand why I’m so concerned? What if there’s more? What will we do then, Ignatius?’

He turned towards me as he spoke and I could see anxiety in his dark eyes.

‘Is that why you summoned me?’

‘Maybe I’m just a superstitious old countryman at heart, but yes: I want you to pay the place a visit.’

My heart sank at those words, although I had been expecting as much as dreading them.

I did not want to go. If His Grace is my father, then the Church is my home: a world where at all times I was conscious of the immutable laws which govern the universe and how these laws have been ordained by God. There is a very real pleasure to be derived from the knowledge that everything happens for a reason and according to his divine plan.

As for what was waiting for me out on that farm: I was not as sceptical as I pretended when it came to the possibility of a hen turning into a tea cosy – and not because I thought the transformation a miracle. Quite the opposite. There is evil in the world, and it can take many forms.

But I looked at that kindly face and knew I could not disappoint its owner. Never had my old mentor needed my help more. And I could understand why he was acting thus: this was his finest hour. His name was on everybody’s lips. His mind must have been haunted by what might go wrong, and he had seized on McNulty’s story and the ramblings of a dying man as a vindication of this fear. This was the tiny hairline crack which might, at any moment, widen into a crevasse. Or so he thought.

‘Then I will go, of course,’ I replied.

He beamed. ‘Thank you, Ignatius! Thank you!’

His Grace’s plan was simplicity itself.

Part of my training as a novitiate consists in fulfilling a series of ‘experiments’. These would normally be supervised by another Jesuit, but His Grace had seen fit to take on the task himself so that I served not just my order’s ends, but his own. The second of these experiments had involved me giving religious instruction at a school down in Limerick (one of the various tasks specified by our founder) but also attempting to establish if the headmaster of the school in which I was employed – as well as others in the locality – were part of a sinister ring involved in the importation of pornography and other questionable literature.

I had spent some two months down there, long enough to find the headmaster and his associates innocent of the first charge, but guilty of the second. Alas, I had been badly beaten on the very night I made my way to the local police station to present what evidence I had collected. This had been widely reported in the papers, although the actual reason for the attack was known only to us and my attackers.

There were three people living on the farm: an elderly woman, her niece, and a farm hand, Tommy Byrne. The old lady was an invalid and deeply religious – just the sort of person who might sympathise with a young priest who had been mistreated – and it was His Grace’s intention to exploit this fact. Father Brady, the Parish Priest, was to ensure that a letter reached the farm no later than the following morning, informing Mrs Quinn of my imminent stay: this on the grounds that I needed fresh air and solitude in which to recuperate.

Of course, she would welcome me with open arms, but in any event – with the full weight of the church behind this request – she could hardly say no.

It seems like a lifetime ago, yet it was only this morning that I rose, carried out my ablutions, then knelt down in that dingy little room and prayed for strength in the task His Grace had assigned me.

Afterwards I put on my black Chesterfield suit and collar and left the guesthouse. Minutes later I was striding down the city’s main street.

Already it promised to be a hot day. And in the morning sunshine, O’Connell Street seemed shiny and new: the shop awnings lining both sides of the street were dazzling white; the dark, bottle-green sides of the double-decker buses that rumbled past every minute or so seemed to gleam as if freshly washed; the girls who trotted by smelt as fragrant as newly cut lilies.

And yet if you were to turn down a single side-street leading off this famous thoroughfare, you would see a very different aspect to the city: ragged children, houses of grubby brick, prostitutes leaning out from second-storey windows, hawkers and street merchants everywhere. And so I knew the face O’Connell Street presented to the world to be a sham, just like the painted faces of the girls who teetered past me on their high heels.

At that moment I glimpsed myself in Eason’s window: a tall, grim figure, striding through the crowd like a hunter; and was filled with quiet satisfaction that – whatever the unpalatable truth that lay behind so much around me – my perception of myself should so exactly match the reality.

Foolish pride! I rose this morning one sort of man, and now go to bed a very different individual. I set out filled with a steely resolve, determined to serve the archbishop as best I could, but what I found here changed everything.

I was to catch a bus out to Wicklow, a double-decker bus, no less, for one ran out as far as Blessington, some eighteen miles from the city. I would not, however, travel to Blessington. I would get off at a place called the Lamb, formerly an inn, where a taxi would be waiting for me. His Grace had insisted my arrival be as unremarkable as possible so as not to arouse any suspicion.

The bus left from Burgh Quay, just across the Liffey from the Custom House. I saw from the timetable that it would take an hour at least to reach my destination and purchased a copy of the Irish Independent.

It was reassuring to see the hold the church had on our citizens’ hearts and minds. Only an Irish paper, surely, would have reported how the Pope had confirmed that Mary was ‘Queen of Heaven’, or how a pontifical mass had been held in Plymouth the day before to commemorate the martyrdom of Saint Boniface.

In Lourdes a cardinal had greeted a special contingent of Irish pilgrims. Closer to home, thirty thousand people had attended a Rosary Rally at Downpatrick.

And eighty priests had been ordained at Maynooth and All Hallows the day before.

Eighty priests! Fifty-seven by His Grace alone. No wonder he was so concerned that one troublemaker might undo all his good work!

The bus pulled up at the stop, huffing and puffing. After I and the other passengers had boarded it, it took off with a roar and with much lurching from side to side, navigated its way up