Brendan receives a mysterious summons in a dream

Brendan Cronin receives a mysterious summons in a dream during a violent disturbance at the St. Bernadette’s rectory in Chicago. At 2:07 on Thursday morning, an immense, rhythmic pounding shakes the house while Brendan sleeps; when Father Stefan Wycazik wakes him, the pounding ends, red rings are visible in Brendan’s palms, and Brendan describes being called back toward the golden light of his dream. The episode leaves its cause unidentified, but binds the dream, the physical disturbance, and the marks together in a scene of mounting uncertainty.

Setting and First Signs

The episode begins in Father Wycazik’s second-floor bedroom, where a sound like a deep bass drum and hollow timpani wakes him. Its rhythm resembles a heartbeat, but with an extra beat: LUB-DUB-dub. The resemblance makes the noise at once bodily and strange. It is recognizable enough to invite comparison with a heart, yet its three-part pattern resists that ordinary explanation.

The alarm clock reads 2:07, an hour Father Wycazik knows is no reasonable time for a parade. That thought places the sound in the middle of an otherwise quiet night and gives the first impression of something external and inexplicable. Father Wycazik switches on his lamp, still bewildered and half asleep. The brief light does not settle what he hears; the pounding continues.

The Rectory Shakes

Father Michael Gerrano comes out of his room struggling into his robe and asks what the sound is. Father Wycazik cannot explain it. The next triple-thud is twice as loud as the preceding group, and the house reverberates as though struck by three gigantic hammers. Although the blows are powerful, their sound is muffled rather than sharp. The lights flicker with the impacts, and the floor trembles beneath Father Wycazik.

The priests locate the disturbance in Brendan’s room, directly across the hall from Father Gerrano’s. The noise grows so rapid that its echoes have no time to fade between blows. Father Wycazik’s first impression of a huge drum gives way to the image of an enormous machine, apparently throbbing from every side or hidden within the house’s walls. He has no explanation for it; the changing image records how the repeated impacts outstrip his ability to make sense of them.

The disturbance also sets ordinary objects in motion. The windows rattle; drapery hooks click against their rods; a hairbrush bounces on the dresser; coins clink together; and Brendan’s breviary slides first one way and then the other. A crucifix above the bed jiggles on its picture hook. When the breviary finally falls and the coins begin to spill, Father Gerrano backs toward the doorway, wide-eyed. The scene’s sacred and domestic details are caught in the same shaking room: the breviary and crucifix are not exempt from the force that moves the coins and hairbrush.

Brendan Wakes

Despite the apparent violence, Brendan is asleep. The detonations recall mortar fire in Vietnam to Father Wycazik, but Brendan dreams on, apparently undisturbed; in the pulsing light, a vague smile seems to tug at his lips. Father Gerrano shouts, but Father Wycazik cannot hear him over the pounding. While Father Gerrano retreats, Father Wycazik goes to the bed, calls Brendan’s name, and then grips his shoulders and shakes him.

The instant Brendan opens his eyes, the hammering stops. Its abrupt cessation surprises Father Wycazik as much as the first boom had startled him. The timing is the scene’s sharpest turn: the noise has intensified around the sleeping Brendan, and it ends when he is awakened. The sequence strongly links the disturbance to his dream, but supplies no definitive account of how the two are connected.

Brendan says he had been close to something and wishes Father Wycazik had not woken him. His words are dream-thick and carry a soft excitement. Father Wycazik pulls back the covers, takes Brendan’s hands, and turns them palms-up. An angry red ring marks each palm. This is the first time Father Wycazik has seen the stigmata, making the discovery a new and troubling dimension of the encounter rather than merely another sign of the house’s disturbance.

The Call and Its Unanswered Source

Asked what made the noise, Brendan calls it a calling and says it was calling him back. At first he cannot identify what called him. Once his eyes clear and he recognizes Father Wycazik, he asks whether the others heard it too. The question shifts the scene from the private experience of a dream to an event shared by the people in the rectory: the priests have heard the pounding, even if its source remains unknown.

Brendan then connects the summons to the golden light of a dream he had already told Father Wycazik about. He describes the call as drawing him back into that light, but cannot say what, or who, was calling. Father Gerrano, shaken and unfamiliar with what he is witnessing, asks for an explanation; the other priests continue to focus on Brendan. The unanswered questions are kept distinct: the scene does not identify the caller, explain the red rings, or establish what the light signifies.

Father Wycazik asks whether the experience will happen again. Brendan answers yes, with emphatic certainty. That expectation gives the night’s episode a forward pull without resolving its mystery: the pounding has stopped, but the summons is not presented as finished. Its significance lies in the convergence of a dream, a physical disturbance witnessed by others, and newly observed marks on Brendan’s hands, all pointing toward a recurrence whose nature remains unknown.