Hostage To The Devil

by Неизвестный

  In the morning he would know it was all real: he was isolated from all he had ever made his own and from all he had ever been. And he had to wait. But, obscurely and earnestly, he realized that whatever it was he awaited, could come to him only under these conditions.

  A conversation David had with Father Joseph at the end of the third week reveals the crux of David's struggle and his state of mind toward the last phase of his four-week test. It was Father Joseph's third visit. Each time, he had questioned David about the experience he was undergoing, and each time he himself had left the house overwhelmed by a sorrow and inner pain which he found intolerable. And David had warned him: “Don't delve very deeply, Father. You can only get hurt. And come to see me in the mornings. In the afternoon I doze a little. Evenings and nights are too much for anybody but me.”

  This time, stepping into David's room from the sunlit corridor outside, Father Joseph took a moment to get used to the semidarkness. Little lines of sunlight ran around the edges of the shutters. In the far corner beside the fireplace, he saw David sitting at a small table, hunched over a page of writing. A single candle stood on the table; it was all the light David allowed himself.

  David stood up and pointed Joseph to an armchair when the priest entered. “Have a seat, Father.” Their eyes did not meet while he spoke.

  David had not shaved for a couple of days. He was gaunt and hollow-cheeked. There was very little color in his face. But it was the immobility of his features that first struck his visitor. His cheeks, forehead, nose, chin, and neck seemed to be frozen into motionlessness, as if too much inner determination and too much constant resistance had resulted in a total hardening of his appearance, a setting of his face into an expressionless shape.

  His eyes particularly held Father Joseph. They seemed to have grown larger, the lids, heavier, the whites, whiter, the pupils, darker than they had been. Obviously David had been crying a good deal. But at this moment his eyes were clear, steady in gaze, remote in look.

  There was no hint of a smile or of any pleasant emotion, but neither was there any unpleasantness. Nor fear. Nor pain. Nor were David's eyes blank. They had an expression; but that expression was totally unknown to Joseph. He had never seen it before in anybody's eyes. And he was at a loss to explain it or describe it. He was looking at the eyes of someone who had seen things of which he could have no inkling.

  He knew better than to indulge in pleasantries, even to ask David how he was. They both sat there in silence, both understanding what was in the other's mind.

  From outside, some isolated sounds penetrated faintly into the room, a truck passing on the road, the twittering of some birds, a dog barking on a distant farm.

  “I don't think the real attack has come yet, Father Joe,” David said slowly to his visitor, in whose mind this was, in fact, the uppermost question. Then he added as if to answer a query: “Yes, I will know, because the others will come at the same time.”

  They both waited. David's visitor knew from previous conversations who “the others” were. David was convinced that his release from this trial could only come through the spirits of Salem Old Edward had mentioned on his deathbed. But somehow or other Old Edward was now associated in David's mind with those spirits.

  Then David said: “It's been bad but bearable up to this.” Father Joseph shot a discreet look at David: his eyes were hooded as he gazed down at the table. Joseph looked away in an embarrassment he himself could not understand. David's voice was deep, very deep, and every word came out as if a special effort was needed to form it.

  “No,” David went on, answering another unspoken query of Joseph's. “There is nothing you can do. Must fight it alone. Pray. That's all. Pray. A lot. Pray for me.”

  There was another long silence. By now, Joseph knew that the silence between them was chockful of a conversation he could not pin down. He could not make out how it progressed or what it concerned exactly. Joseph was a simple man without any subtle ideas and with no complexities in spirit. His heart and instincts had not been smothered in any pseudointellectualism. He did realize that it was a conversation so subtle and intimate that it flew high above all words, in fact did not need words. It passed between them in another medium. But Joseph warily refused even to visualize that medium. He felt that too near an acquaintance with it would mean he would never be able to talk with words again. Words were beginning to be crude, vulgar lumps of sound, insensitive, uncouth, meaningless. David and Joseph were both walking at that moment beyond the thin edge dividing language from meaning, and meaning was now a cloud enveloping them both.

  Father Joseph waited until he felt from David that he should leave. Then he started to rise unhurriedly. David said: “Say a Mass for them. They need prayers. I failed them. Now I need them, their help, and their forgiveness.” Joseph looked at him questioningly, then stopped the words rushing to his lips. Joseph now believed that David had already been “visited.”

  For the next week, his fourth at the farm, David's days and the greater portion of his nights were spent on the chair by the bay window. For the last day or so before the final struggle, a curious silence had fallen over him. It was not ominous or fear-filling. But it was so profound and so devoid of any movement in his thoughts, emotions, and memories that the doubt and uncertainty it provoked in him took on proportions of agonizing anticipation.

  Yet no amount of anticipation quite conveyed the anguished reality of his “visitors” and their “visit.”

  The first hint of their presence came about eleven o'clock one night. All that day a storm had raged around the farm. The storm had prevented Father Joseph from making his promised weekly visit. David had spent the time contemplating the sheeting rain and the lightning flashes from his window. Then, except for a distant rumble of thunder and an occasional, sudden, whipping shower, the storm was spent.

  David sensed the cloak of exhaustion that always fell quietly on the countryside after it had been thrashed and seared and smothered by wind, lightning, thunder, and rain. Usually the land shook off that cloak quickly and resumed its habitual night stance as a repository of energies hatching, breathing, coiling, exercising, pulsating, self-renewing, waiting for the sun and the light of the new day.

  He waited for the inevitable rustling and quickening in the fields outside the house. But tonight the silence of exhaustion seemed to prolong itself. A commanding hand had stopped the course of nature in order to make way for special visitors. And, in David's consciousness, all these changes resided as mere overtones to his mood.

  The most acute and self-aware point in his being was still a pulse of expectancy, of waiting that grew deeper and deeper with the prolonged silence over the land. Once more David seemed to hang over that pitch-black void. Waiting seemed once more to be his very essence, the only reason for his continued existence. “As long as I can wait. . .” was his mood. Waiting, straining, to hear, to see.

  After perhaps an hour, he knew that somewhere near him there was a curious sound.

  At first, when he heard it, his attention did not pick it up. It was so faint, it might have been the sound and feel of the blood pumping in his own ears. But after a few seconds, he began to distinguish it. His body stiffened as the sound grew ever so slightly louder.

  He could not identify the sound. Within him, yet in some way connected with the faint sound, little wisps of memory touched his consciousness briefly, tantalizing him as they skipped by, leaving him all the tenser. He seemed to remember. Little splinks, jagged fragments of shattered mirrors reflecting some shadow life; but he could not make out exactly what was being recalled to him.

  He realized that the act of trying to remember was itself a blockage to remembering, the act of thinking a hindrance to knowing. At one point, the sound died away completely. He was suddenly alone. And he found himself falling back on the chair brusquely. He had been half out of it, apparently, in his craning forward to listen. His palms and forehead were wet. And his yearning to know seemed infinitely sad. />
  Then the sound started again. David realized now it was coming from no particular direction. Not from outside the house. Not from inside it. Nor could he say it was coming from all directions at once. He felt foolishly that in some way or other it was a permanent sound that had always been there around him. He always had heard it. But he had never listened to it, or ever allowed himself even to acknowledge that he heard it.

  He turned his head right and left. He twisted around, listening to the interior of the room. And with a sudden violence he understood why the sound seemed to come from no direction. For the first time in his life, he knew what it was to hear a sound registering in his brain and mind without any of the normal exterior conditions of hearing—no sound waves, no exterior source of sound, no function of his eardrums. Beyond all doubts or caviling, he knew that it was real sound which could not be heard with the external ear.

  The physical strangeness of that new hearing had a mysterious warmth of reality. It was more real than any other sound he could ever hear in the physical world. It broke the silence of the night and his vigil more penetratingly than if a gunshot had exploded outside the window. Intensely pleasurable, because so secret. Deeply relieving, because it dismissed the silence around him in a fashion so intimate to him alone. Absorbing, because it came from no place, yet filled all his inner hearing. But cowing, because in some transcendent way it had no tenderness.

  That sound was a whole revelation. He now understood that there was a knowledge of material things and a way of having that knowledge—in this case, of sounds—which did not come through his senses. His fear and distrust battled with this realization whenever a stray sound—the cry of a bird in the night, the hooting of an owl—struck his hearing in the normal way. These new, fearful, wallowing sounds seemed to belong to the very substance of audible things and his hearing of them to be absolutely true hearing. The external sounds of the night—even the occasional shuffle of his own feet on the floor—seemed to belong to a fleeting world, artificial, not real at all, but constructed merely by external stimuli and by his own physical reactions.

  The babel of internal sounds was growing, and the “artificial” world of his normal life appeared to be like a flimsy trellis with wide gaps or a wall made of widely separated wires. A crude, blustering, overwhelming new reality was rushing in through the holes.

  With that, David began to understand vaguely what possession meant, for that inrushing babel was in control of him. He could not eliminate it, repel it, examine and analyze it, decide he liked it or disliked it. It allowed him no reflection or rejection, did not elicit acceptance, caused neither pleasure nor pain, disgust nor delight. It was neutral. Because neutral, it was baleful. And it began to shade his mind and will with its own neutrality of taste and judgment more wasting than an Arctic wind. Whatever beauty, harmony, and meaning had been associated in his memory with sound now began to wither. He felt that withering keenly. He knew its dreadful implications.

  “My God! Jesus!” he suddenly screamed to himself without sound. “My God! If all my senses-sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch-are invaded like that, I'd be possessed. I'd be possessed. Jesus! I'd be possessed.”

  He tried to say “Jesus” out loud, to cry out some prayer such as the Hail Mary or the Our Father, some prayer he knew and had said a couple of thousand times every year for the past 35 or 40 years. But he heard no sound at all from his own lips. He was sure that he had pronounced the words. But possession of his hearing was too far gone.

  The babel grew louder and louder by infinitesimal but relentless degrees. The sound itself was without rhythm, David remembers. It was a combination of thousands of little sounds, literally a babel of sounds. It grew louder-approached him in that sense. The many little sounds started to harmonize into two or three particular syllables he could not rightly distinguish. The sounds grew greater, but they coalesced at such a slow pace and with what seemed such interminably long pauses between changes, that a new oppression began to cramp his mind and body. It was his craning, waiting, expecting, his anticipation—all stirred into pain by the hard stick of fear inside him. Yet, within him, some strong, indomitable muscle of soul held firm.

  As the coalescing little voices took shape and rhythm, David began to hear the beat of those syllables louder and more distinctly. As the beating rhythm took body, he found his body swaying in unison, his feet beating on the floor, his hand beating on his knee, his head and shoulders jerking forward and backward. He still could not make out the syllables, but the rhythmic beating was animating every part of his body. His own lips started to pick up a syllable now and then. The voices grew louder still. Thousands of them. And more thousands. And more.

  Falteringly but with greater accuracy his lips searched out the sounds and fell into unison with the voices that were grating out those syllables louder and louder and louder. His tension grew. His physical movements went faster and faster. The sound of the voices was a roar in his inner hearing now. His own voice picked up the syllables.

  Mister Natch. . . Mister Natch. . . Mister Natch. . . Mister Natch. . .

  A whole army of voices was marching through his brain and soul, shouting, grating, hitting, screeching that last syllable, Natch! Natch! Natch! Natch!, until David felt he was going to turn into a palpitating, jerking string of taut muscles and mad sound.

  As the noise reached a crescendo, David had practically let go, surrendered, was waiting for disintegration through sound. Then a new and utterly different note echoed through the din. He stopped slipping, surrendering. Some inner part of him that had not been tainted now came alive.

  The new sound was clear, somewhat like a bell, but he knew no metal produced that sound; he knew its notes would not die when the hour sounded and passed. It was a sound that sang rather than rang. It echoed with a promise of permanence, sustained, continuous. It was a living sound. And while it had the haunting beauty of tonal silver speaking musically and without words through purest air, it also came sheathed in that liquidity and warmth whose message is love achieved.

  As David's heart sprang up toward the new song, he began to abhor all the more that loutish chant, Mister Natch! Mister Natch! Mister Natch! But still he could not free himself from its violent, seductive force. And so there formed a void, an abyss, an unbridgeable chasm whose walls were made of sound, whose floor was purest pain. One part of his mind became a bed of shaking, blustering depression; and his will recoiled from it in spasms of disgust. Another part of his mind was transfused with calm and secure freedom full of repose, immune to any fleck of darkness. “Between us and thee there is a great gulf fixed. . . they who would pass over it, cannot.” Bits of fright shot like electricity around ragtag phrases trailing in David's memory.

  And sound, always sound. Thumping, roaring, cantankerous, raucous, reeling round him like coils that deafened him and smothered him. And then, fresh and far, far above in some region of sunlight and upland calm out of any possible reach, but reaching him nonetheless, there was that other note, opposite, intimate, welling with unimaginable sweetness that wet his face with tears of yearning.

  At a certain point, all this immersion in sounding opposites and echoing contradictions became both diversified and intensified. The conflict for possession of his hearing was extended to his other senses and to his inner pooling of senses. As the conflict increased and seeped through him, the fonts of fear and desire, of repugnance and attraction welled up until all his senses echoed his agony.

  He fell on his knees, his forehead pressed against the cold glass of the window, his hands locked in prayer, his eyes wide open and staring out at the night but unseeing of other eyes that watched from outside. For the next few interminable minutes, the hurricane contention between good and evil always twisting violently through our human landscape was funneled and focused on that kneeling figure of David, and the conflict seized him totally.

  Suddenly, at one moment, he was floating on an inland lake of unruffled waters within delightful valleys carp
eted in green woods and peaceful lawns of wild flowers. Ahead lay an eastern sky, its clear blue face bronzed by a rising sun. Then just as suddenly, he was tossing frenetically on a mountain river rushing through a high gorge into which no sunlight reached. Nothing seemed to keep him from drowning or being impaled and crushed on shark-toothed rocks and ugly-headed crags. His body was carried through cascades and rapids overhung and hemmed in by gigantic battlements of sheer cliffs rent with narrow chasms and inhanging precipices. Throughout this violence, he was pursued by the clomping of Mister Natch and wooed by the lilting notes of that other music from far above.

  Then again, without warning, all the confusing contrasts increased in speed and variety. He was jammed into a quick-change theater alternating between horror and relief, beauty and beastliness, life and death. There was no sense, neither rhyme nor reason to it all. Now he saw delicate-limbed, silk-clad bodies dancing on a green platform and starching rhythms on the winds. Then, quick as a flash, he was scrutinizing eviscerated corpses, open bellies with the guts plopping and slobbering out on thighs and knees, bodies slit from chin to chine, severed breasts, gobs of eyes and fingers and hair, carpets of excrement. Now it was bunches of heavy, ripe fruit draped between trees or entwined in Spanish moss on a great levee. Then, in the kaleidoscope of insanity that was David's world in those excruciating moments, it was heavy canisters of urine pierced with holes, spraying the gaping eyes and mouths of cadavers, thousands of cadavers, men, women, children, fetuses, thrown higgledy-piggledy over a stony plain.

  As the bewildering, horrifying sets of images tumbled in front of his eyes, he felt his control ebbing. He was only sure of one thing: two forces were contending for possession of him, and he could not avoid the flooding of his senses. He could not rid them either of the filth or the beauty. All his life he had been able to control himself. Now control was gone. The invasion continued.