Oracle at the Adelphi

It was only when Satan Coil died that any of us discovered that
Satan hadn't been his real name. He died in 1956, the year that the
Russian tanks rolled in to Budapest to crush the Hungarian Revolution.
Of course the Hungarian Revolution was of no concern to me, I was nine
years old and what I cared about was my new black Raleigh Junior
bicycle, the TV set with the huge mahogany cabinet and the miniscule,
blurry and often rolling black-and-white picture, and the Glenalough
Adelphi, the local cinema that was owned and managed by Satan, where my
friends and I spent every Saturday afternoon, transported to other
lands, other times and other lives by the magic of the flickering
screen.

The idea of a cinema being owned and operated by Satan was one that
must have appealed mightily to the local Roman Catholic hierarchy, it
may even have been them who gave him the nick-name, but I suspect that
it emerged more from his habit of running up and down the cinema aisles
during the Saturday matinees when the building was taken-over by hordes
of runny-nosed pre-teenage youngsters intent on admitting their friends
without tickets through the fire-doors, while brandishing a
high-powered flashlight and screaming at them in his thick Galway
accent to "Sate in yer sates!". It was but a short step from "Sate-in"
to the popular familiar name for the Prince of Darkness. And the Prince
of Darkness, in a manner of speaking, is exactly what he was.

Satan was not a well man during the time that I knew him. He had been
tall, and may even have been handsome in his earlier years, but by the
beginning of my cinema-going career he had become unnaturally lean and
bent-over, wore a permanent hang-dog scowl on his scrawny pallid face,
and seemed always to have last shaved a couple of days prior to any
encounter. He spoke in little short bursts, punctuated by attempts to
catch his breath, each of which resulted in a cough-like gulp from
somewhere at the back of his throat. One could chart from Saturday to
Saturday the decline in his ability to climb the stairs to the
projection room.

Looking back across the decades to those distant Glenalough days,
things become obvious that were far from obvious at the time. I could
make a good stab now at putting a name to the condition from which
Satan suffered, but more importantly perhaps I can see some of the
underlying causes for the slow atrophy of his will to continue. Satan
had originally come to Glenalough and purchased the Adelphi in order to
be close to Dilly Morgan, the Widow Morgan, as we knew her, Sean
Morgan's mother. Sean Morgan was a couple of years older than me, a
street-wise thick-set ginger-headed boy with a penchant for bullying,
whom nobody liked but many secretly admired at the coarse Christian
Brothers Primary School at the south end of the town. Whether the Widow
Morgan was really a widow, or whether this was a courtesy title awarded
to any woman who found herself alone with a child in the hypocritical
and moralistic society of 1950s Ireland is anyone's guess. There were
even rumors that Satan Coil might have been Sean's father, but we
discounted that theory on the simple grounds that everyone knew that
the Coils were Protestants, and the idea of a romantic liaison between
a Catholic woman and an unbeliever was even more unthinkable than the
notion of fornication itself. More likely Sean was the result of some
ill-fated affair in Ms. Morgan's teenage years, and Satan, whose
devotion to Dilly was perfectly genuine, hoped that despite his
apparent disqualification on religious grounds he might still merit
consideration as a suitor to a Catholic woman who was, after all,
somewhat damaged goods herself. In the event Dilly Morgan never, to my
knowledge, showed the smallest interest in Satan's amorous advances,
and drifted into middle-life in the sole company of her thuggish son,
the two of them living in one of the smallest cottages within the town
boundaries of Glenalough, on the bank of an overgrown, littered and
rather foul-smelling stream that only flowed if there had been a few
days of heavy rain in the mountains. The cottage was called "Riversdale
House".

As well as being unlucky in love, the value of Satan's business
investment and the income that it generated declined rapidly and
steeply during his years in Glenalough. He often complained that it was
the Roman Catholic Church that had engineered his ruin, because
although Glenalough was technically within the Protestant dominated and
British ruled state of Northern Ireland, it was a border town and
peopled predominantly by Catholics. This Catholic/Protestant divide was
enormously important in every aspect of Irish life then and still is to
this day: about twelve years after Satan's death it led to the armed
uprising of the Northern Catholics that is still tearing the
unfortunate country apart. In fact Satan was less than honest about the
part played by religious affiliations in his floundering fortunes. The
truth was that the religious division functioned entirely to his
advantage, since the Catholics would come to see all the slightly
risqu? or anti-clerical films that had been banned by the Church in the
South. Indeed when he had something particularly controversial they
would flood across the border in their hundreds to taste the forbidden
fruit, so that whatever official line the Church may have taken about
Satan's picture-house the proximity of large numbers of its members had
never done his takings anything but good.

What really destroyed the Adelphi Cinema as a viable concern were
factors for which nobody in particular was to blame. The world was
changing. Television had taken a major hold, a lot of businesses like
pubs and hotels had purchased sets for the coronation of Queen
Elizabeth some four years earlier, and as the economies of both Ireland
and England emerged from war-time austerity into an era of expansion
and relative affluence more and more people could afford a TV of their
own, to rent if not to buy. Television meant up-to-the-minute news and
live or near-live coverage of major sporting events, which the cinema
news-reels could never match, as well as a good selection of films,
plays, music, game-shows and all the rest that encouraged the older
generation to stay in their houses. The excellent coverage of the
highlights of the Melbourne Olympics, only hours after the actual
events had taken place, was perhaps the final death-blow to many a
small rural picture-house.

The younger generation of course still wanted to go out to the cinema:
where else could you get away from the prying eyes of your parents and
family to sit with your boyfriend or girlfriend for several hours in
near-darkness on the pretext of attending a respectable and
socially-sanctioned mass-entertainment? But car-ownership or (for the
more adventurous young) motorbike ownership was becoming widespread,
and the fifteen or twenty mile drive to Belleek or Sligo to attend one
of the bigger and flashier cinemas was becoming part of the Saturday
evening ritual. No self-respecting teenager who was in a job would
invite a girl to the local flea-pit: he would make an event of it,
drive her to the county town, include a snack in one of the newly
mushrooming coffee-bars, and maybe park up for a while on the way home
and make sure that he got value for his evening's investment. At the
same time the standards of sexual explicitness permitted by the British
Board of Film Censors and the Roman Catholic Church began to draw
closer together, so that the occasional suggestive piece of dialogue,
lingering kiss, or even the fleeting glimpse of an exposed female
nipple was no longer sufficient to curb a film's distribution in the
Irish Republic.

In addition to all of this, an era in which patrons would accept almost
any double feature that the cinema manager was able to hire was giving
way to one in which people expected to be able to see whatever
Hollywood's latest offering happened to be. Three-or-four-year-old
circuit faithfuls, of which there were many, were no longer acceptable
to the cinema industry's younger customers, and new films cost so much
to hire that effectively they were only available to the larger chained
outlets. The role for cinemas like the Glenalough Adelphi was simply
melting away, and there was nothing that Satan Coil could do to change
that.

Satan became a bitter man, and the bitterness showed in his features
and sounded in his voice when he spoke. The young projectionist that he
had trained-up, Alfie McCormack, left to join the RUC in Belfast and,
some thirteen years later, acquired momentary fame as the first
Northern Ireland police officer to be killed by sniper-fire on the
streets of Dundalk.

For a while, Satan tried to run the cinema almost single-handed. He
arranged for the distributors to send a projectionist from Sligo along
with the film reels themselves four nights a week plus Saturday
afternoons and drive back when the show was done. On Tuesdays,
Wednesdays and Thursdays there was no program. He hired a girl for the
box office, sometimes sold the tickets himself, and usually showed
people to their seats wielding his famous high-powered flashlight. In
the daytime he could be found inside the darkened theatre clearing the
litter out from between the rows of seats, or outside attaching the
letters that made-up the title of the evening's program to the
illuminated display-board over the front entrance. The Saturday
matinees when the children got in for half a crown to watch a cowboy
film, a few cartoons and an episode of "Flash Gordon Conquers the
Universe" or Bella Lugosi's "Phantom Creeps" show were always his most
profitable sessions, and his stern commands to "Sate in yer sates"
sprang from a well-founded neurosis that he was losing a significant
proportion of his takings because of gatecrashers entering through the
fire-exits at each side of the screen. He tried locking the fire-exits
and received an immediate and strongly-worded rebuke from the Town Hall
threatening to withdraw his entertainment license if he ever did it
again.

Satan was effectively a cornered man, his economic future and whatever
capital he had taken with him from Galway were tied up in a venture
that was obviously nose-diving, his physical condition was
deteriorating at an approximately parallel rate, and his hopes for a
future with Dilly had long ago crumbled to dust and drifted away on the
breeze. There came a point at which Satan realized that he had nothing
left to look forward to, whereupon he turned to the traditional
self-medication for depression that comes in bottles and is sold at all
corner-stores everywhere. From that point onwards, things became
dismally predictable.

The summer that Satan Coil died was one of the hottest that we had ever
had in Glenalough. A shimmering haze softened the outline of the
distant Sligo hills and the stream outside Dilly Morgan's back door
turned into a desiccated white roadway with a surface hardness
approaching that of concrete, in which old packing-crates, tar drums,
bicycle-frames and iron bedsteads had been artistically half submerged.
My friends and I didn't have a great deal to do in the long school
holidays so we took to hanging around the cinema and annoying Satan as
he went about his daily tasks.

Between Satan and the local schoolchildren there existed a powerful and
subtle relationship based on fear, fascination, irritation, admiration,
distaste and probably a lot of other elements as well. There was
something of the bogey-man about him, especially when he shouted at you
in the darkened theatre, but deep-down you knew that he wasn't going to
do anything to you, unlike the Christian Brothers who would give you a
clip around the ear as quick as look at you. He filled the same role as
fairytale ogres and giants and horror-film monsters: you could enjoy
the thrill of being scared of him in perfect confidence that the threat
was unreal. For the braver among us it was fun to tease him and mimic
his Galway accent, to chant "sate in yer sates!" as he walked down the
road, but he had learned that the best way to deal with this was not to
react at all, and that caused us to lose interest fairly quickly. The
nick-name "Satan" was an important part of his image for the local
schoolchildren. Steeped as we were in religious superstitions of all
kinds, we had no difficulty in accepting that he was indeed the
embodiment of all that was evil and corrupt, and that when he was not
in the cinema he was somewhere in the deepest pits of Hell prodding
with a long three-pronged fork the roasting souls of people who had
died in mortal sin. Mothers would say to their wayward infants: "If you
don't come in here this minute I'll send for Satan Coil and get him to
take you away!". At another level of course we knew that he was just a
lonely old man trying to make a living out of a run-down country
picture-house, but children have no difficulty in simultaneously
accepting contradictory beliefs. That was one of the topics that Satan
and I used to talk about. If you wanted to make it sound impressive you
might call it the extent to which art is real and to which reality is
art.

I was one of the least boisterous of the local swarm of school-age
brats, and because I was an only-child living with my father I got to
stay out later than most of the others, and sometimes managed to see
the more expensive evening programs intended for adult consumption.
Satan took an obvious interest in the fact that I attended these and if
he found me on my own would open the conversation with a question like:
"What did ye think o' thon fill-em last night then?". The word "film"
is pronounced by most Irish people as though it has two
syllables.

In a one-to-one conversational setting there was nothing scary about
Satan Coil. In fact I began to realize that he was an intelligent and
sensitive man, who was able to guide me into seeing a lot of things in
"fill-ems" that I would otherwise have missed.

"What did ye think 'o the scene where the two of them was up in the air
in the big wheel," he would probe, "an Harry looks down at the people
the size of ants and says what would it matter if one 'o them ants
stopped moving?"

"I don't remember that bit," I would say, "I liked the shooting in the
caves at the end."

"They weren't caves," he would explain patiently, "them was sewers. Th'
sewers of Vienna. What is it that you find in sewers?"

"Rats?"

"Rats. Aye. Rats. Harry was a rat. Anybody that doesn't care about one
'o them ants stopping moving, that's a rat. Harry was an evil man, but
he was th' other fella's friend. The fella' that shot him in the
sewer."

"You mean he shot his friend?"

"Aye. But if your friend's a rat, what should ye do? Should ye stick by
him, or should ye do the right thing?"

And so it would go on. Satan Coil had the skill of a true educator, the
ability to lead his pupil to a critical understanding of a work of art,
and the forbearance never to force his own conclusion on his student.
All that he lacked was the trained academic's facility with words: he
was not an articulate man, and perhaps that had been his undoing with
Dilly. Through the few conversations that I had with him that brief
summer I began to realize quite a lot about why some films were better
than others. For example, one mark of a really good film is that it is
possible to look at the story in more than one way. I began to
understand that not everything in a good story, and maybe not
everything in a person or in life itself, is sitting right there on the
surface for you to see at the first glance. Satan Coil was my first
real teacher, the one who showed me how to take the first step along
the bridge that links childhood to maturity.

It was the Monday of the last week of our summer holiday when we heard
that Satan was in serious trouble. He hadn't bothered to put up the
title of the Monday night show over the front entrance, and in the
early evening the projectionist arrived in his car from Sligo and
pasted a notice on the glass door saying that there would be no more
performances at the Adelphi until further notice. A couple of us were
there on our bikes and saw him arrive, so we asked him what was going
on.

"None 'o your business," he told us brusquely, but he stopped off at
Flannigan's pub on the way back and within about twenty minutes the
news had reached us that Coil owed them so much money they were
refusing to rent him any more films until it was paid. Even at nine I
could see the illogicality of this, for if he couldn't show films how
was he going to pay his debts, but I could see no way into the circle.
Evidently, neither could Satan. At about eight o'clock that evening,
the time when the film would have been starting, the rumor reached us
from the Police Station that Satan Coil had been found dead in his
rooming-house by the landlady, who had come to collect back rent. He
had taken a cocktail of prescription sleeping-pills and Old Bushmills
Whiskey, whether deliberately or accidentally there was no way to be
sure.

Satan Coil's funeral was a far bigger event than any of us would have
expected. A brother of his that none of us had ever heard tell of came
up from Galway in a big black Austin car and paid for the funeral, with
a fine mahogany coffin and a horse-drawn hearse and a plot at the top
end of the Protestant graveyard where it didn't flood in the winter. I
wondered why the brother couldn't have done something for him while he
was still alive. Before I'd had those talks with Satan something like
that would never have occurred to me. A huge number of people came to
that funeral, even though it was in the Protestant church: nearly all
the children in the town, as well as the most of the older folk, and,
to my great surprise, Dilly Morgan and Sean. I saw Dilly shed a few
tears when they finally lowered the big dark wooden coffin into the
hole, and I wondered the same thing about her that I had wondered about
Satan's brother.

As you can imagine, we were a bit subdued in the couple of days that
followed the funeral. We hung around outside the cinema on our bikes
and talked in low tones about Satan's death, and whether or not he had
gone to Hell, which seemed pretty inevitable, having a name like that,
and being a Protestant. It was Friday, and we had no Saturday matinee
to look forward to, and school would be starting again on Monday. I
think that secretly a lot of us were feeling bad about the way that we
had treated Satan: even the business about getting in without paying to
the Saturday matinees seemed a bit mean and unfair now. We were
beginning to discover that as well as religion with all its random
rules and regulations about not eating meat on a Friday and never
taking the name of God in vain and all the rest of it there was a
genuine moral order in life which was based on kindness and justice. It
mattered how you treated other people.

About sundown, when we were thinking about heading home for our tea,
Sean Morgan arrived on his bicycle with that sly expression on his face
that generally meant he had a scam of some kind on his mind. Being
older than us and due to move up to the big school at the end of the
term he wouldn't have bothered to talk to us unless he had.

"Have yez ever heard of a s?ance?" he asked, pronouncing the silent "e"
at the end of the word. Of course we hadn't. "It's when you all gather
around and call-up the ghost of a dead person," he explained. "Why
don't we go to the Adelphi tonight and call up the ghost of Satan Coil?
I'll show yez how to do it."

We protested that the cinema was shut and we couldn't get in, but Sean
assured us that the green fire-exit would be open at midnight for
anybody with enough guts to come along. It was the kind of challenge a
nine-year-old boy couldn't really refuse.

I think there had been six of us leaning on our bikes when Sean had
issued the challenge, but only three of us showed up at midnight. That
wasn't particularly surprising, considering that it involved getting
dressed and sneaking out of the house without being heard or seen. I
had put my trousers on over my pajama bottoms and slipped my bare feet
into my sandals before sneaking out through the bedroom window and
climbing down into the back garden by way of the flat extension roof
and the water-barrel.

Ernie, the butcher's son, had a watch, and we waited until 12.15 in
case anybody else was going to come. Then with racing hearts, we gently
pulled open the fire-exit and peered into the empty theatre.

The huge inner space was in total darkness except for two yellowish
flickering lights right at the back, high up on the wall near the
projection room. We tip-toed in and soundlessly ascended the sloping
aisle towards the back of the cinema.

As our eyes became accustomed to the dark we saw that the light was
coming from behind the two projection slots high up on the wall.
Someone had been busy with a paintbrush and had sketched-in the shape
of two enormous eyes around them, the fiery projection slots forming
their glowing slit-like pupils. I felt myself enter into that
complicity in make-believe that participation in theatre or performance
of any kind requires. Part of me knew that the giant eyes had been
painted on the wall by Sean, that the eerie light was coming from
candles that he had positioned behind the projection slots, and that he
was in the projection room right now getting ready to give us the
"meeting with the dead" that he had obviously planned; but another part
of me was completely willing to accept the reality of the supernatural
dimension, eager to believe that the blazing eyes drew their light from
the deepest recesses of the Inferno, from which the ghost of Satan Coil
would soon address us.

We stopped before the weird apparition and sought each other's hands
for reassurance. Ernie the butcher's son was the first one to speak.
"Is that you, Mr. Coil?" he inquired with a meek politeness that he
would never have proffered the living Satan.

"Sate in yer Sates!" thundered a voice from behind the projection
slots, in a somewhat forced bass register and a very passable Galway
accent. It was such a shock that we literally fell over one another,
tumbling to the floor in a tangle of startled bodies, not knowing
whether to laugh or scream. No sooner had we fallen in front of the
mighty idol than a piercing white beam shot from one of its eyes to
light up part of the screen behind us. It was a good touch. This time,
at least one of us screamed. The scream seemed to break the tension and
from the middle of the little huddle of bodies I looked up in time to
see the beam cut and the flickering firelight replace its
brilliance.

"Are ye.... Are ye in Hell, Mr. Coil?" Ernie piped-up nervously,
entering completely into the spirit of the occasion.

"Aye, I'm in Hell sure enough," came the blood-curdling imitation of
Satan Coil's voice. At the same moment there was the clatter of a
falling object and one of the eyes lost its flickering inner light. We
heard the faint sound of someone shuffling around on the floor of the
projection room.

"Are ye.... Are ye burnin' up, Mr. Coil?" Ernie probed anxiously.

There was no immediate reply but the quality of the light issuing from
the two projection slots seemed to change. It seemed to become
noticeably redder and also brighter. Ernie repeated his question. There
was still no answer. We stood up almost simultaneously, keen to see
what change was taking place inside the imagined head of the fiery-eyed
monster. The light from the slots became brighter still and we fancied
that we could smell something like burning plastic. Within a few
moments the smell had become completely unmistakable and there was
smoke issuing from the two holes in the wall. We could hear the
crackling of material catching light and as we watched flames began to
snake outwards from the projection slots, lighting-up the whole scene
like a bonfire in a dark forest, staining the wall above the slots
black in their path, bending and thrusting to touch the high ceiling.
Behind us our three shadows danced insanely as we backed away
instinctively towards the aisle and the safety of the fire-door.

"God almighty! I'm out of here!" I heard one of the others announce,
and the two of them were gone in the wink of an eye.

But as for me, I found myself transfixed like a rabbit in the headlight
beam of a car, unable to avert my gaze from the gathering inferno,
hovering somewhere in the hinterland between two realities. The smell
was becoming unbearable and the intensity of the heat made me back
further away involuntarily, but something inside me told me that it was
not yet time to leave, that this night still had something more to
teach me. And so it proved.

With a single exception which I will presently explain, I have never
spoken to anyone of the things that took place in the Adelphi that
night. Neither have any of the others. Sean must have been able to get
out in time when he knocked over the candle, because he appeared at
school at the appointed hour on the Monday, and there was never the
least suggestion of his having had any part to play in the cinema
burning down. The destruction was so complete that the fire officers
were unable to say what had started it. It occurred to me afterwards
that if Satan had still been alive the insurance money might have been
his salvation. But as far as our midnight s?ance was concerned, it was
simply an event that had never taken place.

So what was it, you may be wondering, that happened between the time
the others fled and the time that I made my own escape? Well, I don't
expect you to believe this: I'm not sure that I believe it myself.
After all, I was a nine-year-old boy with a highly active imagination,
and the night's events had put me in the ideal frame of mind for
accepting the incredible. But if I were standing this moment before God
himself and had sworn to tell the truth or forfeit my immortal soul, I
would have to announce that the voice of Satan Coil spoke to me one
more time that night. It spoke quietly and calmly and it sounded
nothing whatever like Sean Morgan's adolescent mimicry. It asked me to
pass on a message, which, for what it is worth, I have since done. It
spoke to me politely, as a friend requesting a favor.

"Would ye do something for me?" it gently entreated from somewhere
within the flames, "Would ye tell Dilly Morgan thanks for comin' to the
funeral?"