by Неизвестный
Finally even the psychiatrist stopped, his professional calm ruptured. He had the half-annoyed, half-hurt look of someone interrupted in the middle of a sentence. He looked quickly at Gerald and the others, alarm spreading across his features. For the first time in his professional life, Dr. Hammond was face to face with something he knew was far beyond his reach to categorize as a verifiable known or unknown. What he was then beginning to perceive, he felt, he had always known but never acknowledged, even in the deepest moments of the eight years of analysis through which he had successfully passed.
But his scientific mind was his only ready defense, and he kept up the protest in his mind: Verify! Get the facts! Test them! But he knew. There was no verifiable fact. There was a reality made transparent to him. Before this moment, he would have labeled this a product of the irrational. But it now appeared to be real beyond all reason. And he had always known it.
Slowly they all began to hear sound. It was, at the beginning, like the sound of a crowd or mob-feet pounding faintly, voices shouting, screaming, yelling, jeering, talking, distant whistling and grunting. They could not fix from what direction it came. The teacher glanced out the windows at the pond. The trees were moving gently in the wind; a few ducks paddled around in the water; the evening was still bright. Then the noise sounded nearer, just as confused as ever, but now with one overall mood or note: mourning for an ineluctable sorrow. Listening to that sound on the tape recording of the exorcism, and as it grows louder and louder, one begins to get the conviction of listening to the tortured murmurs and helpless protests of a mob in agony, keening and wailing for deeps of regret, screaming and groaning for the ache of punishment and unremitting penalty, yelling impotently in condemnation, vibrating as a whole beast of suffering, as some protean heart thumping in the mud and squalor that history never recorded and human mercy had never penetrated.
Over and above all the voices but constantly weaving in and out among them, there was the full scream of a woman orchestrating all the other noises and voices around itself as their theme. It came in great rising and falling curves, louder and fainter, still louder and then fainter, regular, upbeat, jarring, resounding with a passion of pain and lost hope.
Gerald noticed that everyone in the room seemed to be bending, lowering his height as if afraid of something moving in the upper part of the room. Nothing was visible up there.
Dr. Hammond sat as if unable to move from the edge of the couch. Richard/Rita's lips turned blue, his eyes open and staring vacantly. The attending doctor moved to his side to take his pulse and found his body very cold, the pulse steady but weak.
“Father, this cannot go on much longer,” Father John managed to shout to Gerald. “He's taken enough already.”
“Not very much more! Not very long, now!” Gerald shouted back. But the remainder of what he wanted to say went unsaid. It was the psychiatrist who now claimed his attention. Dr. Hammond had slipped off the couch and stood in an askew way looking halfway around over his shoulder at Richard/Rita, his eyes narrowed with apprehension, his notebook fallen and forgotten. No one, the psychiatrist included, could shake his mind loose from the web of pain and regret pervading the atmosphere.
The noise and the din of sobbing and mourning rose finally to an undulating pitch. Richard/Rita's face suffused with color; red patches and streaks discolored his arms and neck. Even his eyes deepened in color. He was trying to speak.
Gerald was alerted: something was coming, and he felt he must make his final challenge very fast.
“In the name of Jesus, you are commanded to leave this creature of God. You will go out of Rita and leave him whole and entire. . .”
Richard/Rita's sudden scream split their eardrums. “We go, Priest. We go.” It was a million turbulent voices as one, full of eternal ache and pain. “We go in hate. And no one will change our hate. And we will wait for you. When you come to die, we'll be there. We go. But”—Gerald heard the sharp injection of hate hissing through the sorrow—“we take him.” Richard/Rita's hands suddenly swept up in a wide arc toward Dr. Hammond. It was a quick but clumsy movement.
Hammond jumped backward. And Richard/Rita fell off the couch to the floor as the assistants jumped forward and held him down.
“We already have his soul. We claim him. He is ours. And you cannot do anything about that. We already have him. He is ours. We needn't fight for him.”
Richard/Rita was wheezing like someone being asphyxiated, eyes bulging, neck muscles standing out, his long hair falling back, his chest heaving, as he half-rose in his effort. “You can't get him back. He is ours. He does our work. He doesn't need a box. He puts everybody else into it.”
All calm was gone from Dr. Hammond; his face was a picture of black fear.
“Here. . . we can't stay here any longer.” It was still the voice from Richard/Rita, and it was full of inflexible pain and bitterness. “There is too much to suffer here. Where will we. . .” The voice trailed off.
Richard/Rita kicked and scratched at the straining assistants. Then he started to scream until at last he fainted, and above and around them the last syllables of his words trailed off into the din of voices. They spiraled up to a thin, high note, then sank to a thumping resonance like the bellowing of a gored bull. Slowly they faded into the distance. Those many tortuous voices, those myriad footfalls with decreasing rhythm and ever fainter sound all began to withdraw farther and farther from their presence, like a funeral procession plodding its way inch by inch, swaying and twisting, out of the city of man, swallowed by the great, unknown wilderness of the surrounding night. That single beating scream of the woman still rang dolefully but more and more faintly above the dying echoes of the withdrawing multitude, until finally there was only a little swatch of sound rising and sinking, rising and sinking, and in the end never rising again out of the silence.
As the sound had receded, Richard/Rita's struggling had progressively ceased. The tension holding everyone had lessened and lessened until they realized one by one, as they lifted their heads, moved uneasily, then looked at each other's faces, that they were standing alone with each other in a small bedroom, that there was a curious silence, and that their world was still right-side up. It was over. All was well.
Gerald glanced at the psychiatrist. He was leaning back against the wall, spectacles in one hand, while he cried unreservedly into his other hand. “Bert, see to him, will you?” Gerald said gently.
“Leave me. Leave me be,” muttered Dr. Hammond, in between his tears. Then he drew a deep breath: “I'm all right. Leave me be.” He walked slowly to the door, pulled it open, then half-turned and looked back at Richard/Rita and at Gerald. He had the look of someone unjustly hurt; and his eyes held a puzzlement and appeal. Then, without a word, he turned and went out. He would have conversations with Gerald later. But now he had no words. And he was tired beyond belief.
After about 20 minutes, they lifted Richard/Rita on to the couch. He was coming to. He motioned with his hand to Gerald. He was obviously very weak but quite self-possessed and aware. Gerald saw the smile in his eyes and faintly at the corners of his mouth.
“Father, I have not felt so restful and so light in ten years. I. . .”
“No need to say much now, Rita,” said Gerald.
“But, Father Gerald, I. . . I am happy for the first time for a long time.”
“We'll talk about it later,” Gerald said, smiling through his pain; he was bleeding again and his pelvis was riven with an aching soreness. He straightened up as much as he could, and turned to go.
“Father Gerald!” Richard/Rita struggled up and leaned on one elbow. He was looking out the window. “I am. . . I. . . please. . . call me Richard. Richard I was born. Richard I will die.” He glanced up at Gerald. “The rest of it”—his gaze traveled down over his body—“for the rest of it, let's rely on God and—and Jesus.” He paused and looked away as if remembering or trying to remember something. Then, looking again at Gerald, “Father, they told me. . . or I he
ard them say—I don't know which—there isn't much time. . . you know. . .” He broke off lamely.
“I know, Richard,” Gerald said trying to smile, but feeling the lead weight inside him. Somewhere deep in his belly a gray slug was eating his vitals. And somewhere in his heart, a lump of coldness had taken up residence. “I know. I have known for quite a while. I know. It's all right. It was my own choice.”
Outside on the driveway, Dr. Hammond was sitting in the driver's seat of his car waiting. The engine was already started.
“Going to be a very wet night, Father Gerald,” he said. Despite the strain, there was a note of cordiality and respect Gerald had not noticed before. “Let me drop you on my way to the office. I must get my report on tape tonight before I forget anything. They can type it up tomorrow.”
Gerald slid in painfully beside him and waved goodbye to Jasper, who had been helping him.
“Tell me, Dr. Hammond,” he said chattily as they swung out on to the main road, “do you believe in the Devil?”
Uncle Ponto and the Mushroom-Souper
“Uncle Ponto!” Jamsie screamed in fury as he reached for the door of his apartment. “Uncle Ponto! This time, I'll do it. By Jesus, I'll do it. You'll see! I'll do it.” He banged the door after him. As he scrambled down the steps into the street and fumbled with the car key, he muttered angrily: “That does it-permanently, eh? That does it. I'll fix you, you little bastard.”
Jamsie was shaking all over his tall, raw-boned frame. He was gripped by a sense of frustration that put him almost out of control of himself. His reddish hair and high complexion had always been startling for people. But now his cadaverous face was flushed with passion, his eyes were blazing. His appearance must have been frightening.
In a few moments he was at the wheel. Fumbling and cursing, he got the car started, made a quick, jerky U-turn, and was immediately off gathering speed as he headed away from San Francisco.
Jamsie was seething with an accumulated rage so great that he continued to shake. He had put up with Uncle Ponto's annoyances for over six years. Finally he had had enough. Even though Ponto had left him alone a lot of the time, and even though he had been able to sleep in peace in his own apartment at night until fairly recently, and even though he had at times even relished the eerie company of Ponto and got a kick out of their encounters, nevertheless, on this early Saturday morning, he had had enough. Ponto wanted to move in completely and permanently and immediately, to take him over, him and his entire life. And something had broken inside Jamsie. He had to finish the whole thing now.
“You won't bother me any more. You'll get off my ass. You'll. . .”
Jamsie's voice trailed off. A glance in the rearview mirror was enough: Uncle Ponto was on the back seat, that same uncouth smirk on his face that always enraged Jamsie.
“I told you before,” Jamsie shouted violently into the mirror, “that is a dirty smile. A pig's smile! A foul, swinish smile!” Then in a sudden excess of anger and frustration: “Hell! Hell! Hell!” He paused to negotiate a corner. “Hell again! Now you've asked for it, Ponto. This is it.”
He lapsed into silence, breathing heavily, and drove on. Now and again he shot a furtive glance into the rearview mirror to reassure himself that Ponto was still there. Jamsie could see the squarish head ending in what was almost a point, the narrow forehead with the tiny zigzag eyebrows slanting upward, the large, bulbous eyes with the whites so reddened that you could hardly distinguish them from the deeply pink irises. And Ponto's nose and mouth and chin—what there was of chin—had always reminded Jamsie of a long, thin pencil stuck in a very ungainly Idaho potato.
Ponto's face looked as if it had been put together in the dark by several people working at cross-purposes, with each part coming from a different face. No one part really matched another part. Even his face color, a brownish-black, clashed with his sparse blond hair, which sat like a cheap toupee on top of that peculiar pointed head.
He would have been comic-looking—and Jamsie sometimes had a good laugh at his facial characteristics—were it not for the normal expression on Ponto's face. For it was in no way the comic face of a circus clown, in which irregularity and human feeling combined to give a sense of pathos. Ponto's was a caricature of a human face. Where the clown's face read: “Laugh! But know that I mirror the helplessness of us all,” Ponto's face read: “Don't laugh! But do despair, because I mirror the real absurdity of you all.” And what really prevented Jamsie from any constant amusement about Ponto's face was the thick transformation through which it could pass. At times it did not look human at all. It was something else for which Jamsie had no name-neither animal nor human nor even a nightmare face born in bad dreams or shown in the Chamber of Horrors.
“All I'm asking for, all I ever asked for,” Jamsie remembers Uncle Ponto saying softly sometime later, as they drove onto Highway 101, “is that you let me come and live with you. I won't be in the way. You need a friend like me.”
Jamsie snorted with rage; his steering became erratic for a moment.
“You see,” Ponto continued in his primest tones. “You see! You shouldn't have got so upset. You're not as good a driver as your father, Ara, was.”
“Leave my father out of this,” Jamsie grated.
Ponto's voice was something else again. Never loud, even when Ponto was screaming, it had a painful effect most of the time. It left ringing echoes inside Jamsie's hearing, so that any kind of extended conversation with Ponto ended up in jabbing earaches.
As a matter of fact, Ponto had only started to bother him long after his father's gradual degeneration from self-supporting artisan to New York hack driver to part-time pimp to dope peddler. Yes, and long after his mother's taking to prostitution on New York streets as a last, desperate means of livelihood.
Leave them out of this, Jamsie thought silently. What lay between himself and Uncle Ponto was entirely personal.
In brief, Jamsie had had enough of Uncle Ponto's harassment. Two years of sudden appearances morning, noon, and night, and of uninvited interventions that had wrecked his personal life, all this had finally become too much. In the beginning Jamsie had even welcomed Ponto's unpredictable antics. They had provided some relief to his boredom. At times he had been amused, stimulated, even bettered and helped in various practical difficulties. And, after years of creeping horror prior to Ponto's first appearance, years of being pursued by strange, intangible threats, Ponto was at least a visible butt for Jamsie's general anger at life and at people—and at himself. But that had been merely the beginning.
It might have continued like that if Ponto had not changed his tack. But, after a while, Jamsie had found that Uncle Ponto was pressuring him. From being an occasional visitor and companion, Ponto had started to assume the role and privileges of a familiar, a close associate, an intimate friend. It was only then that Jamsie had received the full blast of Ponto's twisted personality. And it had been too much for Jamsie.
They were coming up to San Jose. Ponto had started to speak again. But Jamsie had been taken in by Ponto's put-ons before. He clamped his lips tight, resolved to give Ponto the old silent treatment. It had occasionally worked in the past. Jamsie had heard it all before: what Ponto thought of his father and mother; how he, Jamsie, should stay away from women and liquor (“Women are death,” Ponto dinned into him; “booze makes you easygoing”); who really was Jamsie's friend in this life-Ponto himself, or people like Lila Wood, Jamsie's onetime girlfriend, and Lila's friend, Father Mark. On Ponto rambled.
Jamsie had just passed San Jose and entered Highway 52, and was heading eastward to Hollister. Ponto's tone took on a note of suspicion. “You told me you didn't like San Benito County, Jamsie!” A pause. “Jamsie!”
Jamsie kept his eyes glued to the road.
Ponto changed his tone. Now he was wheedling. “Just say, 'Yes,' Jamsie.” Ponto was almost plaintive. “Just say, 'Yes.' You've no idea. . . I don't want to go back.., All those homes up there. . .” Jamsie glanced up at the ho
uses dotting the hillsides. “There's no welcome for me up there in spite of their boozing and bitching and despair.”
With no reaction or answering word from Jamsie, Ponto fell silent. Jamsie stared ahead. Another long silence.
Sometime later, as Jamsie turned south on Highway 25 into the San Benito River Valley, a sardonic smile crept involuntarily across his mouth. I'll show you, he was thinking. You little sonavabitch. This will rid me of you, get it all over with, once and for all. Uncle Ponto was agog again. He was becoming frantic. “Jamsie, you're opaque to me now. Stop THAT! You hear me! Stop THAT! I'm getting bad vibes, very bad vibes. All darkness and fog.” The memory of Lila's friend, Father Mark, came back to Jamsie again. “Mushroom-Souper,” that's what Ponto had derisively nicknamed Father Mark. On the one evening Jamsie had visited with the priest, Mark had treated him to mushroom soup made from his own recipe. Afterward, Jamsie had talked with him into the small hours of the morning, telling him of his early life, of Ponto's harassment, and of his own deep despair and continual rage against life. Mark seemed to understand much more than he was able to explain to Jamsie. But several times during that conversation, Jamsie had found himself incapable of going along with what Mark proposed: to get rid of Uncle Ponto. Always, at that point, Jamsie felt an unaccountable fear. If Ponto no longer existed in his life, what would happen? It was just as if Ponto represented some security or as if in some way or other he had given his word to Ponto.
He glanced at Ponto in the rearview mirror. Ponto was leering contentedly. The sight of that gash Ponto passed off as a smile roused Jamsie's anger again. He could not restrain himself.
“You're the son of the Father of Lies!” he shouted poisonously at Ponto. “That's what Mark said Jesus called him..”
Jamsie's ears were split by a high-pitched scream from Ponto. “DON'T!” Ponto shouted. “Don't mention that person's name in my presence. Don't mention THAT!” Ponto's queer face was contorted in utter misery.