Hostage To The Devil

by Неизвестный

  As if on signal, both groups turned and started to come around the sides of the pool toward Richard/Rita. He started to get up when Paul's hand fell on his shoulder gently but firmly: “Wait, Rita.” The naked guests filed around him and stood stock-still. Nobody had yet spoken a word. Then Paul took Richard/Rita's arm so that he stood up. Twenty pairs of arms stretched out from all sides; and unhurriedly, calmly, they undressed Richard/Rita. His host, Paul, was nowhere to be seen at that moment.

  Then one guest, a young blond man in his late twenties,. came forward. Around his neck he wore a narrow black stole. There was a ruby ring on the index finger of his left hand.

  “Rita,” he said evenly to Richard/Rita, “I am Father Samson, willing minister of our Lord Satan. Come! Let us adore.”

  His voice, the hands and fingers of the guests, the low organ music, the sultry night, the light feeling in his body, the languid odor of the incense, all this fell into a pattern of softness which Richard/Rita felt all around him. He turned as gravely as the others and walked in procession around the pool, past the tall candlesticks, until they reached one of the altars.

  Now he had no further difficulty in understanding what they required of him. He waited passively and quietly.

  They easily lifted Richard/Rita and placed him on his back flat on the altar. Father Samson then appeared carrying a chalice. Someone placed a small folded cloth on Richard/Rita's pubic hair. Samson stood the chalice on the cloth. Then Richard/Rita heard three voices chanting the opening words of the old Latin Mass: “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,” to which they added the extra name: “et domini nostri Satanas.” Richard/Rita now understood. He felt a strange exultation.

  Father Samson had begun reading from a black-bound book held by another naked guest, a woman of about thirty-five. He gestured gravely as he proceeded. The others had grouped themselves around in two concentric circles: the inner circle, all males, had placed, each one, the left hand on some part of Richard/Rita's body. Those in the outer circle, all females, had placed their hands on the hips of the males.

  Just before the consecration, a woman pricked a vein in Richard/Rita's arm, letting some drops of his blood fall and mix with the wine in the chalice. Once Father Samson had uttered the words of the consecration (“This is my body. . .”), the guests paired off, lay down on the floor, each man lying between the legs of a woman. Father Samson parted Richard/Rita's legs, mounted the altar, entered Richard/Rita fully, took the chalice, sipped it, held it to Richard/Rita's lips so that he could sip it, and handed it to the nearest pair. While this pair was sipping the chalice, Father Samson started rhythmically to push and pull in Richard/Rita, saying as a refrain: “Say-tan!. . . Say-tan!. . . Say-tan!,”lengthening the first syllable as he drew partially out of Richard/Rita and hitting the second syllable with hard emphasis as he drove into Richard/Rita. As each pair handed on the chalice, they started to copulate following the rhythm of Father Samson, until all—men, women, and Father Samson—were chanting and copulating in unison. Richard/Rita was the only silent one.

  He lay, eyes closed, while Father Samson chanted on him. For the first time Richard/Rita felt a strange tingling starting at his buttocks, up through his spine, up the nape of his neck, around his skull, down into his shoulderblades, past his middle and abdomen, in around his vagina and down through his groin and calves, to the tips of his toes. For all the world it felt as if an electrifying fluid was being poured into him from Samson. Richard/Rita opened his eyes to look at Samson, but the light was too dim, and the blue trails of the incense were weaving through his vision.

  Richard/Rita could hear heavy breathing, but he could see no face, only the outline of a head. He murmured: “Father Samson. . . Lord Satan. . . Father Samson. . . Lord”—but he was interrupted by a harsh, grating sound of single words coming to him through the heavy breathing. “Girl-Fixer!. . . Girl-Fixer!. . . Girl-Fixer!” Richard/Rita no longer heard the chant of “Say-tan!” Now all seemed to be joining in “Girl-Fixer!. . . Girl-Fixer!. . . Girl-Fixer!” Father Samson's index finger was now deep in Richard/Rita's rectum, massaging, scooping, probing, pulling, pushing. Richard/Rita felt his own semen being loosened and flowing; and, inside him, he had a sharp sensation of very hot, sticky oil squirting around the wall of his vagina as he heaved and shook. “Have me! Girl-Fixer!. . . Father Satan. . . have me. . . smell me. . . fuck me. . . through. . . through. . .” Richard/Rita's voice rose steeply into a loud scream. The organ notes thundered, filling the air. As each pair of the guests reached orgasm, they screamed and groaned in a jumble of half-words: “Sayt. . . fuck. . . take. . . Sayt. . . have. . . smell. . . cunt. . . prick. . .”

  The scene subsided slowly. As the waves of pain, pleasure, and exultation ebbed in Richard/Rita, he knew that he now had a shadow-or, at least, that is how he described it. It was not glued to his body, nor did it fall on the ground beside him wherever he went. It was like a twin spirit or soul of his own soul or spirit. And it possessed his own thoughts, memories, imaginations, desires, words.

  Richard/Rita again opened his eyes. Father Samson was gone. Paul, his host, unsmiling, grave, helped him off the altar and motioned him to stand, legs well apart. One by one each of the guests came forward on their knees. Bending the head and pronouncing the long word “Say-tan!,” they clamped their lips over his vagina and sucked. Then they backed away out of the pool area.

  When the last guest was gone, Paul handed Richard/Rita his clothes, helped him to dress, led him around the house to the front, where a limousine waited with its engine ticking. The chauffeur opened the door for Richard/Rita. “You belong now, Rita. Serve him well” was Paul's parting phrase.

  As he lay in bed later, Richard/Rita could sense his shadow near him and with him. He felt secure. When sleep came, it was dreamless and deep.

  The aftermath was terrible. He now found that all his sexual activity—whether in fantasy or in fact—had become of the same texture as that repulsive level on which he had moved the night of his wedding to Moira. And it reduced all pleasantness, pleasure, beauty, joy, ecstasy, to sexual terms which today he characterizes as “animality.” It made him feel and think and live like an animal in heat, an animal which by a freak accident had been provided with a self-conscious mind and memory, but which would shortly lose those faculties and revert to being just animal.

  Richard/Rita is the only ex-possessed person I have known who still has a clear memory of what precise differences the culmination of possession made to his inner self-mind, memory, will, emotions, imagination.

  The entry point of continued possession, its bastion, was his imagination. In listening to him, one has to remember Richard's specific problem: gender and sexuality were one and the same for him. Once possession was completed, it seemed to him that he had an invisible but tangibly felt shadow, a twin of himself but yet distinct from him, and that from that point onward self-control and direction in him were exercised by that twin.

  He points to the fluid or electrifying effect he received from Father Samson at the Black Mass. For it now appeared to Richard/Rita that in his conscious hours all his thoughts and willing and remembering and sensations (and, therefore, all he said and did in the view or hearing of others) came in a very different way. Now continuously his imagination—rather than his memory or his senses or his reasoning mind—received “imprints” or “messages”: images, pictures, diagrams. There was also some other force or influence he could not accurately name. But because it specifically, directly, and exclusively concerned his sexuality, he calls it the S-factor.

  Once his imagination received one of those “messages” or “imprints,” then the whole internal mechanism of thinking, willing, remembering, and feeling with his five senses came into play. The control thus exercised on him was absolute. If he smelt an odor, if he desired something, if he remembered anything, if he thought or reasoned, it was all made possible by a prior “imprint.” And consequently any words he spoke or actions he performed were made possible
only by that source.

  The exercise of his sexuality—his desire and its consummation—was under the strictest control. The desire came without warning: it did not arise due to any exterior stimulus.

  To cap it all, there were other moments: hours of high possession when the control exercised over him acquired an intensity which blotted all else out. In “normal” time of possession, he was still self-aware, i.e., he saw and felt himself under the inescapable influence of those “imprints,” but it was he himself who thought, remembered, imagined, spoke, walked, acted. At the “high moments” of possession, it seemed to him that he no longer did any of those things. The very insides of his soul or spirit seemed to be drenched in another's being.

  He himself felt reduced to a tiny pinpoint of identity, to be imprisoned in the most solitary of solitudes, while every fiber and sinew of his life was permeated with an alien tyranny, a brute authority.

  And, as he is able to relate it now, only in that microscopic reduction of himself did he spontaneously revolt. There he had no memory of the past—only a memory that there had been a memory. Nor had he any anticipation of the future—only a consciousness that anticipation was impossible. Neither praying nor cursing, neither praise nor blasphemy was possible there. It was an undivided and infinitely sad present, an awareness of oneself surrounded by utter blackness and nothingness. The very self of Richard/Rita always refused (although it could do nothing about expelling) that constant shadow.

  Richard/Rita is emphatic on one point: the strict separation and distinction between the detectable and measurable area of his thoughts, emotions, memories, external actions, sensations, etc., on the one hand; and, on the other, the self he never ceased to be. All through his enigmatic experiences, that detectable and measurable area varied and changed under the influx of differing intensities, as masculine and feminine, male and female traits ebbed and flowed in him. Psychologists would, justifiably in their terms, describe it as rather extensive changes of personality. But the self—whether reduced to the pinpoint of possessed slavery or free within the general control of the central point in his imagination—that self never ceased to be the same.

  Asked about the suffering specific to possession, Richard/Rita says that the genuine pain of possession does not come from any physical distortion, deterioration, or ravages-these most of the time provide the possessed with a savagely twisted pleasure and thrill. But it lies instead in what he calls the “mirror of existence” of the possessed.

  The unpossessed, the normal person, is aware of the self he is only when it is reflected in another person or in things other than himself. And, without ever realizing it, when we perceive ourselves reflected in someone else or in objects other than ourselves, we instinctively compare that reflection of the self with an ideal measure we have formed but which we usually leave unspoken, even unthought. It is, however, ever present to us when we make comparisons of ourselves. This is the third, the hidden third, necessary for all comparison between two things. To be self-aware is to be able to compare our selves with the reflection and with the ideal measure.

  The possessed has no such awareness. For in the state of possession, the self-consciousness and self-awareness of the possessed becomes absolute solitude. There is no hidden third, no ideal. Metaphorically speaking, in possession a mirror is held up in which the self of the possessed sees only itself in itself in itself in itself and so on in an infinitely receding number of self-containing, self-mirroring images, with no end in sight. And this awareness is, by definition, complete and unending solitude.

  For those near Richard/Rita—his office colleagues, his immediate family, the few friends he had made in the immediate neighborhood of Tanglewood, there was a marked change in him dating from June 1971 onward. Their memories of this change are unanimous and date from about the time of the Black Mass—of which they knew nothing, of course.

  Richard/Rita now always wore male clothing; but ordinary people, who did not know his story, could not make out exactly whether it was a man or a woman they were meeting in Richard. Then there was the smell, not unpleasant, just pervasive. It has been described by some as “musky,” by others as “faded perfume” such as you get when you open an old chest of drawers, by others still as “a clean animal smell.” It pervaded Lake House, his room at the insurance offices, his car, his clothes, even his handwritten letters. People always found it distinctive; some found it repulsive. It varied in strength.

  Finally there were his peculiar fits. His normally deep-blue eyes would take on a greenish hue. Some hidden glow or luminescence emphasized the down of his face, neck, arms, hands, and legs, so that he looked sort of furry; but when you looked closely, you saw only skin. He spoke very little, mainly single words and at an extremely slow pace, accompanied by a combination of chuckles, grunts, snorts, twisting of his eyebrows, and mouth grimaces that contorted his lips around his teeth. Yet it was the indescribably roughened tone or timbre of his voice that disturbed people the most during his fits.

  At first sporadic through the summer of 1971, these fits increased in frequency, so that by late October they were of daily occurrence. There was then a peculiar fear-causing element in any conversation with Richard/Rita—and his job was 80 percent of a talking nature. When anyone spoke to him, their words seemed to fall into a deep, deep hole and to be lost. They felt he hadn't heard or that, if he had, there was no communication between them. Then, as they were giving up or trying again by repeating what they had said, he spoke either in single words or in a series of disconnected words. They made sense and, most of the time, gave an answer. But they seemed to come from far in the distance, from the bottomless depth of that hole into which their words had fallen. Impersonal, uncommunicative of any personality, unwarm, at that stage Richard/Rita reminded some people of the humanly unresponsive effect a tape recording gave them.

  People quickly learned that his responses and conversation always made sense. Indeed, they were highly intelligent and relevant. His business judgment was better than ever before. But always the freakish atmosphere communicated by the tone of his voice disturbed them. This, together with an almost overnight suspicion in his colleagues that “wherever Richard/Rita is, there is always trouble,” finally brought his dismissal from work and caused him to lose his friends one by one.

  The “trouble” was eerie. At first, it affected mainly his life at the insurance office. But gradually it affected anyone who contacted him even fleetingly—the delivery boys from the grocer, druggist, and dry cleaners, his cleaning woman, the laundry woman, his gardener. Once it got to a policeman who gave him a traffic ticket. And eventually it affected each member of his family who visited him. The “trouble” was strictly reminiscent of what happened at the Tower of Babel in the Bible story. Men and women who had known each other for years and had worked together intimately for substantial periods of time suddenly started to misunderstand each other and to wrangle and quarrel. To some onlookers of such “trouble,” it seemed as if what one person said was heard backwards by another person, i.e., with exactly the contrary meaning that the speaker intended. The “trouble” affected only those talking and dealing with each other. But once any onlooker got between the disputants—entered their “atmosphere,” so to speak—he or she was also affected by the “trouble”; and there was an additional source of babel and confusion and wrangling.

  Incidents of this kind took place always and only where Richard/Rita was present physically. He seemed to be highly amused at the whole thing, but he himself never got caught by the “trouble.”

  The “trouble” also affected those writing or typing in his presence: they wrote or typed the opposite of what they meant, or it turned out to be complete nonsense. And all incidents of the “trouble” cumulatively pointed too strongly in Richard/Rita's direction to be explained in complete disconnection from him.

  When there was no fit of any kind and no “trouble,” Richard/Rita's accustomed sweetness of character and affability came to the fore
. The change at those moments was almost shocking.

  It was some time before Richard/Rita realized why he had lost friends, why he found people turning away from him, and why he became unpopular in his office.

  In the last days of October he was fired. His brother, Bert, came in to see him. Then Bert went and talked with his immediate boss. From what Bert learned from him and from others in Tanglewood, joined to his own impressions, he concluded that his brother needed psychiatric care. But Richard/Rita's behavior then became a hide-and-go-seek game. Whenever he visited the psychiatrist, he was absolutely normal; and the psychiatrist could find nothing wrong or sick about him, no matter what diagnostic means he used. Indeed, the psychiatrist concluded that Richard/Rita's dismissal from the office was based on the boss's repulsion of Richard/Rita as a transsexual; and he advised Richard/Rita to sue for damages and reinstatement in his job.

  But matters took another turn when Bert and Jasper came and stayed with him for a long weekend. Richard/Rita had several fits.

  And the “trouble” was again very evident. Now, in his calm moments, Richard/Rita talked to them frankly and pathetically. He had begun to know in a dim and fragmentary way something of the drastic changes in him.

  His brothers stayed on at his house, determined to get to the bottom of it all. Richard willingly underwent a complete physical checkup. The results were negative. Further psychiatric examinations were equally fruitless.

  Bert and Jasper together with Richard/Rita decided to ask the local Lutheran pastor for some advice. He diagnosed Richard/Rita as a soul who had neglected God and prayer. When the pastor's counseling was of no avail, they called on the local rabbi. This man, a very saintly person, consented to read some prayers in Richard/Rita's presence. He also read some texts of the Talmud and explained them to the three brothers.