by Неизвестный
He could not discern where the struggle lay. His confusion of mind was like molasses oozing over spiders, paralyzing every effort at control and every natural movement. Sometimes it seemed his will was made of rubber twisted this way and that and cruelly snapping back at his mind like a wet towel smacking the face. Sometimes his mind was a sieve through which stinging particles tumbled, each one tabbed with a jeering name: Despair! Dirt! Smell! Puny! Mush! Misery! Mockery! Hate! Beast! Shame!. . . There was no end to them. At other times, he realized, his mind and will were only exits, sewage pipes; and his imagination was the recipient of what they vomited. Out through them were pouring the shapes of the real struggle that lay in another dimension of himself. Deep down? High up? Conscious? Unconscious? Subconscious? He did not know. But certainly somewhere in the depths of the self he was. All the hidden valleys of that self were red with his agony. Every high peak was a sharp slope of tumbling confusion. Each plain and corner was crammed with pressure and weight and sorrow. His imagination was now a cesspool swelling with gobs of repulsive images and twisted fears.
“I'm alone,” he thought, covering his face with his hands for an instant.
“Yes! Alone! Alone! Alone! Alone!” came the answer in silent mockery.
It seemed to be himself answering himself with a blasphemy as primal as the scream of the first man who murdered another man, and as actual as the grunt of the latest mugger on that same October night driving his knife deep into the back of his victim on Lenox Avenue.
“Oh, God! Oh, Jesus!” Peter exclaimed within himself. “Oh, God! Oh, Jesus! I'm finished. . .”
Then, as suddenly as it had come, and for no reason he could discern, the Presence receded from him; but it did not leave altogether. Peter felt as if extended claws pricked themselves loose out of his flesh and mind and folded back unwillingly.
Without Peter's knowing, a small gale of consternation—a pale copy of his own agony-buffeted his assistants all this time as they kept troubled watch over Marianne.
Little patches of relief spotted Peter's consciousness. His eyes focused again. Over rims of tears, he could now see her. She was a body of trembling. It seemed that everything beneath her skin and hair and clothes was moving in unnatural agitation, arhythmically, but that her exterior remained somehow still. Her mouth opened a fraction. The lips moved wordlessly.
And then, for the third time in his life, Peter heard the Voice.
It came from nowhere. It merely sounded; it was audible to Peter and all present, but it did not come from any discernible direction. It was everywhere in the room, but nowhere in particular. It was level in tone, slow in speed, without any trace of breathing or any pause. Not high-pitched. Not deep. Not throaty. Not tinny or nasal. Not male. Not female. Accentless. Controlled. Peter had once seen a film about a talking robot; when the robot uttered a word, each syllable, as it was pronounced, was followed by eddies of gurgling echoes of itself. The echoes muddied the next syllable; and so it went on for the syllables of each word in a sentence.
The Voice was something like that, but in reverse: the eddying echoes of each syllable preceded the syllable itself. To the listener, it was excruciating to understand but impossible to blot out. It was distracting and dizzying. The effect was like a million voices stabbing the eardrum with nonsensical confusion and clamor, preechoing each syllable. You tried to pick out one voice, almost succeeded, then another piled on top of that; you tried to pick out another, but the first one came back at you. And so on, seeming scores of persistent voices exasperating you, confusing you, defeating you. Then the Voice pronounced the syllable; and your confusion was complete with frustration, for the syllable and the word were drowned in the general babel.
Like most people, Peter had acquired the knack of “reading” voices. We all develop such an instinct and have our own classification of voices as pleasant or unpleasant, strained or peaceful, male or female, young or old, strong or weak, and so on. The Voice fitted into no category Peter could think of. “Unhuman I suppose you'd call it,” he said later. “But it was the same as in Hoboken and Jersey City. With the added touch, of course.”
The “added touch” was his way of indicating the peculiar timbre of the Voice at each exorcism. In Hoboken as in Jersey City the timbre conveyed some violent and shocking emotion that aroused fear. But the timbre in the Voice that October night was different. “For all the world,” said Peter, “as if the Great Panjandrum himself was speaking, and all the little panjandrums pronounced each syllable before he did. His precursors, if you wish.”
The timbre, the “added touch,” conveyed a single message: utter and undiluted superiority. It didn't hit the emotions, but the mind, freezing it with a realization that there was no possibility and could never be any possibility of besting it; that its owner knew this, and that he knew you also knew; and that this superiority was neither sweetened by compassion nor softened by an ounce of love nor eased by a grain of condescension nor restrained by one whit of benignity toward one of lesser stature. “If sound can be evil, with no human good in it all,” said Peter, “that was it.” It brought him up to the thin edge of nothingness and face to face with the anus mundi, the ultimate in excretion of self-aggrandizing sin.
Then the bedlam and confusion of the Voice died away as if into some middle distance.
The four assistants lifted their heads, as Marianne's own voice was heard speaking with heavy deliberateness, almost quietly, in comparison with the preceding uproar.
“Nobody mortal has power in the Kingdom. Anybody can belong to it.” A short pause. “Many do.” Each word had come out polished, precise, weighty, and clear as a newly minted gold dollar tossed onto a bar counter.
Time for the final assertion, thought Peter. His final shot. The trump card of every exorcism: the power of Jesus and his authority.
“By the authority of the Church and in the name of Jesus, I command you to tell me what I shall call you.”
Peter kept his voice level as he issued the challenge. All his hopes rested on the acceptance of that challenge. Rejected, the challenge could only result in further distortions of Marianne. At this stage, Peter knew she could not take much more. But there could be no turning back now. And to break off was total defeat. He could feel the nervousness in his assistants: all and everything in the room reflected the tension of the moment. Peter knew, and each one present knew, he had issued a final challenge.
“You command!” Now Marianne sounded amused, as though Peter had told a joke. He kept reminding himself that this was not Marianne, but the spirit using her voice. Still his heart sank a little. “I am us,” he heard her say. “We are me. Isn't is? Aren't are? What we are called is beyond human mind.”
We! Peter was riveted by that key word. Only those of the Kingdom used it. Peter knew instantly that he was almost there and he had no intention of allowing the Presence to identify again with Marianne, so he broke in brusquely.
“There is no immunity for you and your kind in the universe of being.”
The calculated and cold ruthlessness, a new note in Peter's interruption, brought the ex-policeman up sharp. Years of experience had given him a sixth sense for lethal threat and attack, for hatred and open disgust. He had heard many a cop speaking to arrested murderers in that tone, and many a killer behind bars telling of his hatred in as controlled a way as Peter was using now. He looked at Peter's face. It had changed. Something subtly merciless had lodged there.
Peter continued: “You, all of you, are. . .”
“Tow, you, you have no particular immunity, my friend.” Marianne“s emphasis was exact as she broke in. Nicely calculated. Just heavy enough to make one uneasy. Too light to betray any ripple of annoyance or fear.
A vague uneasiness ran through Peter's assistants; they moved spontaneously nearer him. The Presence was getting to them. For all his instructions to them before the exorcism began, he knew there was no way to prepare them for the shock, the fear, the onslaught.
Marianne's bo
dy was utterly still, her face pasty white, her lips barely open. After a pause, her voice continued with the merest edge of sharpness: “You may have polished your knee balls in a Confession Box”—this with a sneering inflection—“but you were not sorry, friend. Not always, anyway. So where is your repentance? And need I tell you, priest, without repentance, you have sins still? And you! You command the Kingdom?”
In his memory Peter heard Conor's caution: “What happened in pahst histhoree, happened. The recorrd shtands. Ferivir. Loike a shtone 'n a feeld, opin 'n' maneefist. Fer awl teh see, me bhoy. Incloodin' the Grate Panjandhr'm hissilf. No, don't deny it. Wallow in humilitee.”
“How shall we call you?” Peter persisted.
“We?” Sarcastically, but calmly.
“In the name of. . .”
“Shut your miserable mouth. . .”—it was suddenly an animal growling the words. “Close it! Shut it! Lock it! Fuck it!”
“. . . Jesus. Tell us: how shall we call you?”
Then a low, long cry came from Marianne's lips. All in the room held their breath as the Voice gurgled and they made out the words with difficulty: “I will take my toll. I will take our pound of flesh. All 142 pounds of him! I will take him with me, with us, with me!” Complete silence. Then Marianne's voice: “Smiler. I just smile.”
Peter glanced at her face. The name was obvious, now he knew it. The twisted smile was back on her mouth. Now, he realized, he had to deal with the most ancient of man's tempters and enemies: the hater who deceived you with a smile and a joke and a promise.
The cleverness of it. How could you suspect or attack someone called Smiler? And if they just smile at anything you do, what can you do? The whole thing-God, heaven, earth, Jesus, holiness, good, evil-becomes a mere farce. And by the evil alchemy of that farce, everything becomes an ugly joke, a cosmic joke on little men who in their turns are only puny little jokes. And, and, and. . . the utter banality of all existence, the wish for nothing.
He wrenched his mind away from this dead blanket of depression and concentrated again. This was the meeting point with Marianne.
“You, Smiler, you will leave, you shall leave this creature of God. . .”
“This annoying affair has gone on long enough.” The words had a smirking quality overlaid with pomposity. “Marianne has made her choice.” Peter's inner reaction was: We are almost there. Marianne's voice continued: “You understand better than these oafs do. After all. . .”
“. . . because love is all there is needed. . .” Peter continued.
“. . . her life is short, as is yours. She takes what she can, as you. . .”
“Because love is all there is needed.” Peter repeated himself. But the monologue by Smiler went on uninterruptedly.
“. . . take it with your arrogance.”
“And you, Smiler, you rejected love.” There was a sudden break in the exchange. For a split second Peter waited. “We came from love,” he started again. But that was as far as he got.
“LOVE!!!” The word was fired out at him like a pistol shot. The assistants bent toward Marianne, expecting violence in the wake of that shriek. Peter straightened up, not in suspense, not as though expecting more. Conor had said never trade shouts but let outbursts run their course.
But there was no more shouting. It was the violence of the loathing in Marianne's voice that was physically painful to Peter, as it continued on studiously and quietly: “Yes. . .” A trailing pause, as if ruminating. Then: “Ah! Sixty-nine. Right? A handy image!”
Peter winced at the tone and the mental picture. His memory was wilting his effort, and he prayed.
But Marianne went on with unruffled mercilessness as if reciting from a technical report. “And first the tongue, its apex like a single wet pink eye with a white iris, goes exploring: sliding its dorsum over each groin, every epithelial cell registering the ripples of the museums gracilis, following the tautened adductor longus, summoning saliva to glisten its course toward the darkling mountain, the mons veneris. Her saphena majora rustles and tickles with rushing blood.”
A retort rushed to Peter's mouth. He held it back.
Marianne continued. “Then, at the os pubis it lingers, all its papillae hungry, tensile, wet. Filiform cries to fungiform, fungiform to circumvallatae, circumvallatae to foliatae; 'On! Brothers! On!' ”
The doctor whistled through his teeth and glanced at Peter. But Peter was dangerously abstracted from the scene. He could hear Mac's sigh, that long-distant day in the sunshine, miles and decades apart from this evil encounter; he could see her lying on the slope of the sand dunes, felt one hand lying lightly on his belly. And then he had the wisping image of her lying in her coffin just before it was closed forever.
Inexorably the recital went on. “Amid his moans and her heaving, the tickling in his sacrum (ah! Resurrection Bone! Those rabbis had a word for it!), through his thighs; the corpus cavernosum fills up with thick red-black blood. The tongue stabbing within, and she closing around it, holding it.
Smiler was now using Marianne's voice in a soft, matter-of-fact tone. There was a short pause of seconds. Then, with a burst of fierce contempt:
“He is fucking her. And like the hyena with a dead deer”—the voice rose to a scream—“he starts with her anus, and she like a mother snake is swallowing her son. LOVE?????” A piercing, shattering scream. The voice fell to a sneer: “Cunni-cunni-cunni-cunni-cunni! Peter the Eater.” Then casually, as one asks the time of day: “Tell us, Peter. Are you sorry? Do you miss it?”
Marianne's father had his face buried in his hands; his shoulders heaved with sobbing. The ex-policeman and the banker stared red-faced at Peter. His young colleague leaned on the night table, his face ashen. The tirade, like a great, sprawling canvas, had thrown a mass of screaming colors and nonsensical patterns of thought and feelings over them all.
The doctor reacted more quickly than the others: “Peter, can we pause?” He was apprehensive, seeing the bloodless color of Peter's face and a distracted look in his eyes. Peter gave no answer.
Smiler, the cosmic joker, smears and tears at everything, Peter was thinking to himself, as he ruminated and groped toward his next step. Smiler, who turns memories to dirt and chokes you with them. But then he's not subtle. And he's not clever. Peter thought: This is either a trap for us, or we have Smiler trapped. Which?
He found himself reacting by instinct: “Silence! Smiler! Silence in the name of Jesus! I command you to desist, to leave her. Tell me that you will obey, that you will leave her. Speak!”
The other men in the room glanced at Peter, surprised at the force in his voice. The verbal assault had left them raw, ashamed of something vague, with a feeling that they had been filthied. They had expected Peter to wilt, to have been crushed. They had been willing to lose hope.
But now they took something from him. They sensed what he knew, saw it on his face, and almost heard him telling them: “I may be engaged in this to my own humiliation. But Smiler is equally engaged in it and there is no escape for him. Just hold on.”
Smiler spoke, but as if Peter had never spoken. “Well! Here we have a thing never seen in the Kingdom”—the voice calm again—“a little drop of sea water pulls a little membrane around it and rots for a million years on an ancient, forgotten shore, and sprouts little hair-trigger nerves and puny little earthen mechanisms, and stands up on two spindly limbs one day, and says, 'I am a man,' and lifts its snout to skies above and says again, 'I am so beautiful'. . .”
“Silence! Desist!”
“You ugly sod! You smelly little animal. . .”
“And let the soul of Marianne be beautiful once more with the grace of. . .”
“Beautiful?” For the first time, the voice was raised almost an octave higher. “Beautiful?” Now it was a shrill, high-pitched, and painful scream of questioning scorn. “You helpless, yelping, puking, licking, slavering, sweating, excreting little cur. You whipped mongrel. You constipated shit canister. You excuse for a being. You lump of ur
ine and excrement and snot and mud born in a bed on bloody sheets, sticking your head out between a woman's smelly legs and bawling when they slapped your arse and laughed at your little red balls”—the scream of high-decibel invective ceased suddenly, followed by three syllables pronounced calmly and with loathing contempt—“You creature!”
“And so are you, too. You creature.” Peter surprised himself at his own self-possession: his adversary had made a mistake, and Peter knew it. Peter also surprised himself with the contempt he found himself putting in to his riposte.
He continued: “Once nothing. Then beautiful. The most beautiful of all God made.” The bitter taunt in Peter's voice turned every head but Marianne's in his direction. He went on lashing and provoking. “Then ugly with pride. Then conquered. Then thrown from the heights like a dying torch.”
A low roar issued from Marianne's mouth.
Peter went on unabashed; he had his adversary exactly where he wanted him: “And expelled, and disgraced, and condemned, and deprived forever, and defeated forever.”
Marianne's body quivered.
“Hold her down!” he muttered to his assistants. Just in time. She was shaking violently. The roar was now the bellow of a pig with a knife gouging out its jugular in gobs of blood.
Peter piled it on: “You, too, creature of God, but not saved by Jesus' blood.”
Again the long, howling wail.
As its sound died away, Peter's whole body was electrified with fear.