Hostage To The Devil

by Неизвестный

  If he had not known better, he would have sworn that about half a dozen people were talking with low voices in the next room. But he knew that, except for his parents and one house woman, he was alone with Edward in the house.

  Edward stirred uneasily and drew in a few quick breaths. His eyelids fluttered for a moment. He opened them slowly. His gaze traveled across the ceiling to the far corner of the room, then back again to David. “Can I help you, sir?” David asked. He had never addressed Edward in any other way. Edward gave a characteristic shake of his head which David knew so well from the past.

  Almost immediately Edward went into a short death agony, inhaling long, deep breaths, exhaling laboriously, heaving his chest, and groaning. David pressed the bell to call his parents, knelt down by the head of the bed, and started to pray in a whisper.

  But a motion of the old man's finger stopped him. Edward was trying to say something. David bent his ear down close to the dying man's mouth. He could barely hear the breathed syllables: “. . . prayed for them. . . I prayed for them. . . coming to take me home. . . you did not. . . lad. . ., home. . . you did not. . . home. . .”

  Those voices, David thought. Those voices. Men and women. When had he been with Edward and others when Edward had prayed for those others and he had not? Why would they need prayers? He could not get it out of his head that Edward had been talking about their visit to Salem. He did not see any connection. But he could not rid himself of the idea.

  Edward expelled one long breath. His lips moved and twisted slightly. David heard a faint rattle in his throat. Then he found himself alone in that long, deadening, unbroken quiet when the dying is done. Edward's eyes opened to the glassy sightlessness of a dead man's look.

  After they buried Old Edward, David stayed for a couple of days; then he went down to New York. He had one or two errands to do in the city, and he had a chance to meet Teilhard de Chardin. He brought with him a copy of Teilhard's Le Milieu Divin in the hope of an autograph.

  The meeting with the French Jesuit was brief and poignant for David. The mutual friend who arranged the meeting warned David as they drove to meet Teilhard that the old man had not been well lately. “Let's make the visit brief. Okay?”

  Teilhard was much thinner than David had expected. He greeted David affably but crisply in French, chatted for a few minutes about David's career as an anthropologist, then took the copy of his book from David's hands and looked at it pensively. As if making up his mind on the spur of the moment, he took a pen from his pocket and wrote some words on the flyleaf, closed the book, handed it back, and glanced at David. Teilhard's lips were pursed characteristically, his head slightly bent to one side and forward.

  David noticed the strength of Teilhard's chin. But, much more, it was the expression in Teilhard's eyes that imprinted itself on David's memory. David had expected to see the long, deep look of a man who had traveled very far and thought very steeply of the deepest issues in life. Instead, looking at him across the humped curve of that aquiline nose, Teilhard's eyes were very wide open. They had no hint in them of memories or reflections, no remnants of Teilhard's own storms. There were no traces of any glinting intelligence. The old paleontologist was completely with David, totally present to him, taking in David's own glance with a personable expression and a direct simplicity that almost embarrassed the younger man.

  After a few seconds, the older man said: “You will be true. You will be true, Father. Search for the spirit. But, even if all else goes, give hope. Hope.”

  Their looks held together for a moment more. Then they parted. Returning to the center of the city, David remarked to the friend who was driving: “Why in the end, or how in the end, did it become so simple for him?” His friend had no answer for him.

  Suddenly, David remembered: what had Teilhard written on the flyleaf of his book? He opened it. Teilhard's dedication ran: “They said I opened Pandora's Box with this book. But, they did not notice, Hope was still hiding in one of its corners.”

  David was bothered for weeks after that meeting by a nagging idea that hope had become difficult for the seventy-three-year-old Jesuit. But after his return to Paris for the remainder of his courses at the Sorbonne, the sharpness of the incident faded temporarily to the back of his memory.

  By the time David returned to the United States in June 1955, Teilhard had been dead for over two months.

  When he did return to the United States, few of David's former associates and acquaintances could recognize the new intellectual man he had become. He was thirty-four by then, in robust physical condition. His six-foot frame was lean and well muscled. His friends did notice the premature grayness, the faint but definite lines of maturity around his mouth, the disappearance from his face of that youthful ebullience with which he had been clothed five years before when he set out for Europe.

  Another look had replaced the ebullience: it was a certain “definitiveness,” as one friend described it. David's eyes were fuller in meaning. He spoke just as pleasantly as before, but less casually and with an emphasis that conveyed more meaning than ever before. When he talked of deep matters, those around him felt that what he thought and said came from an inner wealth of experience and resources gathered carefully, marshaled in harmony, and kept bright and burnished for use. He had the “finished” look. And more than one elder colleague remarked, “One day, he'll be the bishop.”

  Before starting his lectures at the seminary, David spent one extra year in private study, visiting museums, and traveling to various parts of the world where paleontologists were working in the field. This extra year was invaluable to him; he had time to reflect on the condition of research, to catch up on his reading, to acquaint himself with professional colleagues in the field, and to examine the various diggings firsthand. Then, in mid-September 1956, he arrived home to Coos County for two weeks' vacation on the farm with his parents. The following October he started giving his first courses at the seminary.

  The next nine years of his life passed uneventfully. From the beginning he was popular and highly thought of. The students conferred on him the nickname of “Bones” because of the fossils he kept in glass cases in his study.

  In May 1965, he was again staying in Paris, attending an international convention. During the three weeks he was there, he was asked one evening by an old friend, a parish priest from a northern French diocese, to help out as a substitute assistant at the exorcism of a fifty-year-old man.

  David had very little knowledge of Exorcism. Indeed, from his anthropological studies he was inclined to regard Exorcism as a remnant of past superstition and ignorance. Like any well-indoctrinated anthropologist, he could parallel the Roman Catholic Exorcism rite with scores of similar rites from Africa to Oceania and throughout Asia.

  “No, Father David,” the parish priest had answered him amicably when David had let the old man know that in his opinion Exorcism and satanic possession belonged to the world of invented myth and fable. “No, Father. This is not the way it is. Myths are never made. They are born out of countless generations. They embody an instinct, a deep community feeling. Fables are made as containers, fashioned by men deliberately to preserve the lessons they have learned. But this-satanic possession, Exorcism-well! come and see for yourself. At any rate, help me out.”

  In this exorcism David was substituting for a young priest who had fallen ill in the course of the rite. The exorcism had already lasted about 30 hours. “Just another couple of hours, and it is the end,” the old parish priest had told him before beginning.

  In fact, by the time David entered the case, the worst was over. After only two and a half hours more, the parish priest was about to complete the exorcism and expel the evil spirit. He asked David to hand him the holy-water flask and the crucifix.

  At that point, and without warning, the possessed man became rigid. He screamed and jeered: “If you take it from him, Priest, we needn't leave. He has too many enemies. We needn't leave! He didn't help them when they asked him.
We won't leave! We needn't leave!” Then a hideous, raucous laughter cackled at them all. The possessed man pointed a fine finger at David. “Hah-hah! Burnt. And he didn't pray for them. . . Father of hopelessness! Hah-ha!”

  David's nerves were jangled. The parish priest took the crucifix and the holy-water flask himself and concluded the exorcism successfully. Afterward, he had a short chat with David. He calmed the young man, but added: “You have a problem. I don't know your life. I am sure God will solve it at home for you.”

  Back in his own diocese, David had a heart-to-heart talk with his bishop, who remarked on the change in David: no longer the self-confident, sometimes cocksure, always rather inaccessible intellectual he had known, David was now questioning and searching for internal peace, working through some puzzle he could not verbalize but which he felt entangling him.

  David talked on, telling the bishop about the Paris exorcism and about his meeting with Teilhard years before.

  “Well, have you some serious doubts about your orthodoxy as an anthropologist?” asked the bishop after a time. “Or rather, perhaps, I should phrase the question differently. Do you feel that the exorcism experience has opened something in you, some deficiency perhaps, which your anthropology and your intellectualism were only hardening and making permanent?”

  “I honestly don't know,” David answered. “There is the death of Old Edward. Why did I take his last words so seriously? I know they meant something personal to me. But I don't know exactly what.”

  “Look, David,” the bishop finally said, “I will put you in touch with Father G., the diocesan exorcist. He has very little work, thank God. But he can help you one way or another—at least as far as the puzzle of that exorcism goes.”

  Father G. turned out to be a breezy character full of snappy little phrases and quick, jerky movements. “Okay, Father David, okay,” was his comment on David's story. “You have a problem. I have no solution for problems except action. I'm not an intellectual. I failed every exam they gave me. But they needed priests in the diocese so they let me through. I can say a valid Mass and baptize babies at any rate, even if my Latin is awful. And I am a good exorcist. The next time we have a case of possession, I'll put you in the picture. Only concrete participation in this matter will help you.”

  True to his word, Father G. took David as his assistant exorcist in two cases of possession the following year. Both were relatively uneventful; at any rate, nothing personal to David occurred in either of them. David, however, underwent a continuing change within himself in the succeeding two years. His experience with the possessed man in Paris and with the two exorcisms at home had convinced him that, whatever was at stake in possession and exorcism, it was not a question either of myth or fable, or of mental illness. In addition, he had to keep struggling to make sense of his personal history. He kept stringing a few facts together, trying to make sense out of them.

  There was, first of all, the dying conversation of his Uncle Edward about praying for “them” and their going “home,” and David's own failure to pray for “them.” Then there was Teilhard's “give hope” and his words on the flyleaf of the book. And, finally, there were the jeering words of the fifty-year-old man in Paris. On the face of it, he could not understand any of these things, and there seemed to be very little connection between them all. Yet David felt sure there was a connection, if he could only perceive it.

  During a few vacations at home on the farm, he walked down to the cemetery where Edward was buried. He sat in the old man's bedroom. He hiked over to stand in the same place Edward and he had so often visited, and stood in full view of the “Old Man” of Franconia Notch. Once or twice after dinner, he strolled up and down the copse at the west end of the house and thought about Edward. He always felt calm and peaceful in that copse but could not understand why.

  David's mother, who was always very close to her son and his moods, said briefly to him as he was departing for the seminary after one of those home visits: “David, some things take time. Time. Only time can help. Be patient. With yourself, I mean. And with whatever it is that is bothering you. Remember how many years it took Edward to arrive at his own peace.”

  David was grateful for these words and felt consoled. It was some sort of special message for him. But, again, there was the perplexing character of it: the consolation and the “message” character of herwords yielded to no rational explanation. Just as the effect of the copse on him, or the significance of Edward's last words, or what precisely the possessed man in Paris had conveyed to him, or the strangeness he had discovered in Teilhard. The point was none of his knowledge and scholarship seemed to be of avail. The meanings of all these incidents seemed to flow from some source other than his intellect; they were foreign to his knowledge and his learning. And this disturbed him.

  His students began to notice that the tone and, in part, the content of David's lectures changed. He was still as unrelenting as ever in his probings of traditional doctrines in the light of modern scientific findings. And he excused in no way traditional presentations of doctrines about creation and Original Sin.

  But a new element caught their attention. “Bones” returned again and again to the data of anthropology and paleontology with phrases they had not heard him use before. “As long as we measure this solely with our rulers and our logical reasoning, we will find no cause for hope,” he might say. Or: “In addition to the scientist's eye and the theologian's subtleties, we must have an eye for spirit.” Once he ended a lecture on burial cults in Africa saying, in effect: “But even if you analyze all these data theologically and rationally, you have to be careful. You can do all that faithfully, and yet pass blindly by the one trace of spirit present in the situation.” There seemed to be a note of regret in his tone at such moments.

  Very few people—and this included his students, who generally got to know their professors intimately—very few knew that by this time David had been appointed diocesan exorcist. Father G. had been severely injured in an automobile accident and would never walk again.

  David did not take his new post lightly. In his interview with the bishop when he accepted the post, he tried to get across a curious foreboding to his bishop. “I am changing,” he said. “I mean I am slowly coming to a deep, very deep realization about what I have become over the years. It isn't that I have gruesome problems. Rather, it's as if I had neglected something vital and the time is coming when I will have to face it. Exorcisms have the effect of making this need more acute,” he told the bishop.

  “You, Father David, can never stop being useful to the diocese,” was the bishop's remark.

  “No. Of course not. That is, I hope not. But—” David broke off and looked past the bishop. He had the vaguest premonition. If only he could tie it down in words. “It may be, Bishop, that at the end of a couple of years. . .” He broke off again and stared out the window. Vaguely he saw the faces of two choices rising up. Yet they made no sense to him. He turned and looked at the bishop. “It may be that I will resign from my teaching job at the seminary.”

  “Let's take a chance on that,” the bishop answered pleasantly, confidently.

  For three weeks in November 1967, David was on leave from the seminary. He was in New York dealing with the strange case of one of his own students, Father Jonathan, born Yves L. in Manchester, New Hampshire. By the time of his excommunication from the Roman Catholic Church, Yves had changed his name. He was fourteen years younger than Father David. Like David, he came from an affluent home and, for all practical purposes, was an only child.

  Yves' father, Romain, was Catholic, French Canadian, originally from Montreal, and a doctor by profession. His mother, Sybil, a convert to Catholicism, was of Swedish parentage. Her first marriage, a childless one, had ended when she was twenty-seven years old, in the suicide of her husband.

  Sybil was over forty and Romain was fifty-two years old when Yves was born. He had one half-brother, Pierre, by his father's previous marriage in Canada. Pierre'
s mother had died giving birth to him. When Yves was born, Pierre was twenty-eight, married, with children of his own, and living in New Jersey.

  Before her first marriage, Sybil had taught in a private Swiss school. She had been educated at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, and had a doctorate in philosophy. She emigrated to Canada with her parents in the early 19305. Yves' good looks obviously reflected his Swedish ancestry and particularly his mother's Nordic beauty.

  His childhood was a happy one. Relations and friends who knew all three over many years always remembered how united they were as a family, though some remember the house as too adult and mind-oriented for a little boy. Under his mother's influence in particular, by the age of nine Yves was reading voraciously; and seven years later, at the year-end examinations, he astounded his school examiners by his detailed knowledge of English and American literature.

  Yves' mother had a smoldering personality; she always conveyed the impression of deep and somber experiences within her. As with many converts, she was more Catholic than the Catholics themselves.

  His father's religion was of a more popular and instinctual kind. His youth had been spent in northwest Canada. Later, David was to find out that the earliest images retained by Yves' father were more or less like David's own: of rugged nature, gargantuan proportions of sky and mountain and water, unbeatable and often cruel forces in the snow, the storm, the wind, and the inhospitable soil.

  Yves' parents always remained devoted to one another, but sexual expression of that love stopped when Sybil underwent a hysterectomy after Yves' birth. Apparently a deep feeling of being wounded or deficient in her femininity took hold of her.

  Romain, on the other hand, entered a religious crisis of acute pain during his wife's pregnancy. Partly because his wife's life was endangered by the pregnancy, and partly due to a fleeting affair he had during that time, he developed a constant fear that, because of the sins of his earlier years and the affair during his wife's pregnancy, he would lose his faith, die an unbeliever, and suffer the loss of eternal life in Heaven.