Hostage To The Devil

by Неизвестный

  There was silence for a while. Jamsie glanced at either side. How happy he had been here in this countryside with his father for a few days of a childhood visit years before. Eastward stood the Diablo Range-an ironic touch to the situation, Jamsie thought. To the west ran the Gabilan Range. Ahead lay the Pinnacles National Monument. They should arrive within an hour at the park.

  Got to get it over with, Jamsie began saying to himself over and over again. But, as the memories of his childhood happiness passed before his mind, he began to wonder. Got to free myself, he found himself thinking. Got to rid myself of this “familiar,” got to free. But Ponto started to chatter again and interrupted his thoughts.

  Every time he started to think, really to think, Ponto would interrupt. That, he realized, was what capped his resolution to end it all: this perpetual muzzling of his thoughts and feelings. When Ponto talked in his strange way, his words seemed to drown all of Jamsie's thinking. He could not think or feel.

  Jamsie pressed down on the accelerator. He had to get to the Pinnacles.

  Then, without warning, pain blocked his memories and dulled all thought. He felt the pressure inside his chest. He had experienced it before when trying to resist Ponto. It began at his rib cage just beneath his skin; and, as it had during the last few weeks, it started to contract inward toward the center of his body. It seemed to be pulling at his brain trying to force it down his spinal column.

  All Jamsie could think of was the counterstratagems Mark had tried to teach him that evening.

  “Jesus,” he muttered under his breath.

  Then he began to spell the word out letter by letter. “J-E-S-U-S, J-E-S-U-S, J-E-S-U-S.” About 20 times. Next he spelt the name out by running down the alphabet from A to J, from A to E, from A to S, from A to U, from A to S. Then he started all over again.

  He did not do this as a prayer. He had been taught it by Father Mark as a means of blocking Ponto's influence.

  The internal pressure started to lessen. He could breathe again.

  “Jamsie,” came the horrified squawk of Uncle Ponto. “You know I don't like that. I don't like that at all. You know very well. I can't stand that. Stop it this minute, or I can't go on. You will lose me, you hear. You will lose me.”

  Jamsie started laughing, first of all quietly in his throat, then uncontrollably out loud.

  “My friends and relatives won't like this at all,” squeaked Ponto, voice high-pitched, elbows beating against his sides, hands wringing in the air. Jamsie laughed and laughed. This was what he used to call Ponto's “duck fit.”

  At least that worked, he thought. He did not know why that name disturbed Ponto. But Jamsie laughed from sheer relief nearly all of the next 32 miles. He had a pain from laughing. He was profoundly relieved to have got the best of Ponto for now, at least.

  At times he stopped laughing when his thoughts became grim. Then, catching sight of Uncle Ponto's pointy little skull, heavy lids, and chinless face covered with that fretfulness of Ponto's “duck fit,” he would start laughing again.

  At the gate of Pinnacles National Monument the ranger took his money. Jamsie parked the car beside the Visitor's Monument, bought a map and a flashlight, and set off across the chaparral of Pygmy Forest. He knew where he wanted to go. And he was almost jubilant. But immediately Uncle Ponto was by his side. Jamsie now paid no attention to him. Something in the air exhilarated him. He felt freer than he had for a long time. He started to walk quickly. “Reservoir, here I come!” he hummed to the tune of “California, Here I Come!”

  Ponto started to wheedle him again. “Jamsie, sit down a moment. Smell the hollyleaf cherry, the manzanita, these wild flowers. Sit down and rest a while. You were told to watch your heart. You're my investment. You're home for me. You're not going to walk all nine miles up and down, are you? Please! Jamsie! Please stop and talk it over with me. Please!”

  Jamsie kept on. As he started to climb up to Bear Gulch Caves, he opened the map.

  “It's no use, Jamsie,” said Ponto. “I tell you, it's no use.”

  Jamsie turned his back on Ponto, searching the map for his way to the reservoir. But Ponto was up to his tricks again. Every time Jamsie's eyes and finger came near that name on the map, the name shifted. It shifted and sidestepped and dodged him, zigzagging across the map.

  Jamsie began to get angry and then fearful. He slammed the map onto a flat rock and plunged his finger at “Reservoir.” But it was too late. “Reservoir” slipped off the map and shot up into the sky over his shoulder.

  Jamsie sprang up, cursing and hurling profanities at the blue sky where the word “Reservoir” danced and flowed around like a pennant towed by an invisible airplane. He swayed as he squinted up. Suddenly, “Reservoir, here I come” danced around in the sky. Then a whole skyful of dancing words spelled out letter by letter—and backwards: S-U-S-E-J, E-I-S-M-A-J, S-U-S-E-J, E-I-S-M-A-J.

  Jamsie stamped on the ground. He was violently angry again. “To Hell with you and your tricks, you filthy brute. To Hell with you and your tricks. . .”

  But he only heard the echo of his own shout and knew he was alone. He looked up. All was quiet. The sky was clear and blue. There was no trace of Uncle Ponto. The dancing letters were no more. He was alone.

  He grabbed the map and stumbled on. Now his mind was made up.

  After another half mile, Jamsie entered Bear Gulch Caves. He had been here about 20 years before with his father, and his memory started to serve him.

  Halfway up through the narrow corridor of the cave, he began to hear more than his own footsteps. At first, it was the splashing of unseen cascades and the gurgling of underground streams. But quickly he began to realize a voice was becoming audible. It was Ponto's, of course.

  “Jamsie, you know I will have to give an accounting for all this foolishness. I am responsible.”

  The voice came from above. Jamsie pointed the flashlight to the roof. Long ago some huge blocks of rock had fallen across a narrow fissure in the canyon wall and stuck there, closing it from the light of day and forming a roof. Ponto was dangling in between two of those rocks, his eyes glittering with malice. “Oh! I'm here all right.”

  “What the. . .” Jamsie was about to erupt; then all the fight drained out of him. He suddenly felt weak and helpless. In a sort of desperation, he started to run and stumble through pools of water and over rocks, wetting his feet and scraping his shins and ankles. Behind him, always near, came Ponto's mocking voice: “This can only end badly, Jamsie, if you keep on like this. You have to come back to me in the long run, you know. You can't do without me now. Not now!”

  That “Not now” pursued Jamsie in a thousand echoes. It increased his panic and his need for flight.

  Then he saw glimmers of daylight ahead of him. He scurried on, pursued by Ponto's voice echoing from every cranny. Finally he clambered up the last few rock steps cut out of the cave walls, and into the sunlight. Ponto's voice seemed to die away into the darkness he had just left. He was out of breath, perspiring from every pore, and shaking. He had bruised his elbows, knees, and ankles. His hair had fallen over his eyes.

  But the sight now before him was a sudden distraction from his panic: the reservoir, calm, blue, unruffled, glasslike, without the merest ripple. And reflected in its face were the brown and gray and black spires and pinnacles of the surrounding land, undisturbed images intertwined with the greens and ashen-whites of the vegetation. It was a perfectly still mirror world in which the only movement came from the few clusters of utterly white clouds reflected from the sky. There was no sound whatever from the great things around him. Distance was telescoped. Time paused for him.

  Then, in a little inner explosion of a new panic, Jamsie noticed the Shadow over to his right. A tall finger of brown-gray crag jutted out of the cliff wall over there. The Shadow stood beneath it and out of the glare of the sunlight.

  Over on his left Ponto's exasperated voice called out from the cave mouth: “Well, if you have to do it, get on with it. Get it ov
er with! Go on, Jamsie! An ideal place for it!”

  Jamsie glanced over at the Shadow. In the darkness beneath the crag he thought he saw a movement, like someone sighing with relief that the desired end was near.

  Ponto's voice struck at him again: “Go on, fool! Jump! They tell me it's okay now. Jump!”

  As Ponto's voice died away, the Shadow moved beneath the crag ever so slightly. It might have been bending forward a little in order to follow more closely what Jamsie was about to do. Its outline, still dim, became more visible in its general details.

  What Jamsie now found strange was his own lack of rage and fear, For the first time in three years, he felt neither. Instead, he felt that relief and easement of body and mind somehow akin to what you experience when you fill your lungs with air, after having held your breath to the point of suffocation. Why am I calm now? was the question he put himself.

  He turned his head and gazed at the Shadow, as if he knew the answer to that question lay in its direction. That question and others were agonizing. His eyes calmly bored into the darkness surrounding the shape.

  In the few moments before the Shadow slipped back into obscurity, Jamsie had enough time. The face, the head, the way it stood, all the details began to fall into place for his memory. The Shadow was tall, abnormally tall. And bulky. The body was covered in black folds. He could see the two arms raised at the elbows, the palms of the hands turned out toward him, the fingers clenching and unclenching. The head was lifted up, thrown back, as it were, in a fixed haughtiness, a resisting pride. Dimly he could make out eyes, nose, mouth.

  The shape of that face riveted Jamsie's attention. It had all the details of a human face. Yet it was not human. It was something else. Where had he seen it? That face had been with him all his conscious life, even in his childhood and during his teens. And from the first day he had taken a job. Sure, it was Ponto's face. There was something of his father's face there, too, the face Ara had late at night when he was on a “job.” And others he had once seen but had now forgotten. Many others.

  It all took a few quick moments. As the Shadow receded noiselessly into the darkness beneath the crag, Jamsie became conscious of another element in himself. It was a tiny voice of instinct, a primal part of him still alive and vibrant. He knew he had seen the father of all man's real enemies. The Father of Lies and the ultimate adversary of all salvation, of any beauty, of each truth throughout the cosmos of God's working.

  Beneath the crag there was suddenly only darkness. Jamsie's eyes fell away from the Shadow's hiding place. His thoughts came back to the reservoir.

  He looked at the smiling calm of the waters and up to the North Chalone peak. He remembered what his father had said to him when they had looked at it together years before: someday he would climb all 3,305 feet of it. Waters and peak were clean-wholesome in some way Jamsie could not explain but did feel intensely. He could not, he thought to himself now, he could not soil them with his own dead and bloated body floating face down, its back to the peak, its juices polluting the water. Just the thought now made him feel uncouth, ' almost sacrilegious. ;

  He looked away quickly from the clear surface of the reservoir. He stood stock-still. His mind was blank, his eyes, unseeing. He no longer desired to end it all here. But he could not think either of returning to the increasing torture of life with Ponto. “I have no desires at all,” he, T thought helplessly. Then, as though pointing out to himself something he could not quite grasp, he repeated again and again: “I'm in shock. I'm in shock.”

  Ponto broke in peevishly: “You can do nothing, desire nothing, are nothing-except a human wreck about to kill yourself.” Then viciously: “You”—a long drawn-out pause—“are finished”—again the cruel pause—“dead already, but you don't know it.” A short pause. Then, like a pistol shot: “Jump!”

  Jamsie did not budge, did not even shake or move. He was certain that Ponto lied. He knew that his will was not helpless, although he did not know what to do. He knew now that preserved in him was a deep desire stronger than any other. He felt tears coming to his eyes; and he knew those tears were forced from him by that deep, deep desire.

  Alarm entered Ponto's voice again. “Jamsie! Be a man. Get it over with!”

  Jamsie looked over his shoulder at the Shadow's hiding place. It had not gone. It seemed to have lost its undulating ease and draped I complacency, to have gone rigid in some way he could not fathom.

  Then Ponto started to chant in his eunuch's voice: “Jump-uh! Jump-uh! Jump-uh! Jump-uh!”

  The words with their rhythmic extra beat hit Jamsie painfully as hailstones lashing his ears. He sought some escape, some gimmick to block those quick, stinging blows.

  “Jump-uh! Jump-uh! Jump-uh!” went Ponto's voice in a high, spiraling tone, speaking quicker and quicker.

  Jamsie's thoughts started to go awry. The torment of that voice was becoming too much. He remembered Father Mark and his instructions. The trick, that was it! The trick! He began desperately spelling out the name of Jesus again and again: J-E-S-U-S. J-E-S-U-S. J-E-S-U-S. Then he ran all the letters together like an incantation—J-E-S-U-S-J-E-S-U-S-J-E-S-U-S.

  But now, he found, those letters and their piecemeal pronunciation meant more to him than a gimmick. The pain of Ponto's chanting diminished. Jamsie's tears flowed more sweetly, more as a relief than a gesture of suffering.

  The tears blurred everything as he threw one more glance at the sky and the water, then heard himself break the silence of all nature, shouting, “Father Mark! Father Mark!” He shouted the name over and over. The echoes came back at him from all sides, from above and below, Father, Father, Father. . . Mark, Mark, Mark, and died away over the rocks and pinnacles.

  He stepped back a little, then a little more, then some more, away from the edge of the reservoir. He turned back, looking toward the cave mouth and then at the Shadow. He realized he would have to pass by them both if he returned to the Monument Gate by Bear Gulch Caves.

  The echoes died away. The Shadow beneath the crag had dwindled into itself and was almost indistinguishable again from the darkness beneath the crag. There was no sound from Ponto.

  In the silence, Jamsie turned around and stumbled off down by the Moses Spring Trail, hugging the walls of the canyon. He was alone all the way down. The two hours of respite were welcome. When he arrived in full view of the parking lot, he was still saying two names, Jesus and Mark, over and over again to himself.

  The ranger looked up from the magazine he was reading. “Need any help, buddy? You look beat.” “The phone. May I use the phone?”

  Within a few minutes Jamsie was talking with Father Mark. “Stay where you are, Jamsie,” Father Mark told him. “Don't drive back, whatever you do. Wait for me.”

  That evening Jamsie returned with Mark to San Francisco. They spoke little on the way. As they approached the rectory, Mark sensed a new unrest in Jamsie. “What is it? What's wrong?”

  “Ponto. He hasn't said a' word. He hasn't appeared. I wonder if. . .”

  “Don't. Just don't.” Mark spoke firmly. Then he added drily, “Your old Uncle Ponto couldn't sit in this car.” Jamsie nodded. But he remained uneasy.

  As they entered the rectory, Jamsie was not sure if for one moment he had not seen Ponto inside the gateway. The shadows cast by the street lamps were playing against the gate pillars and seemed to be a rustling cover for some rigid forms towering above him, leaning forward in an askew fashion, watching his every move, waiting for some moment of their choosing.

  The case of Jamsie Z. presents us with an almost open-and-shut example of what used to be called “familiarization” or possession by a “familiar spirit” in the classical terminology of diabolic possession. I say “almost” because, in Jamsie Z.'s case, “familiarization” was never completed. Jamsie resisted, was exorcised, and the intending “familiar spirit” was driven out of his life.

  “Familiarization” is a type of possession in which the possessed is not normally subject to the conditions o
f physical violence, repugnant smells and behavior, social aberrations, and personal degeneracy that characterize other forms of possession.

  The possessing spirit in “familiarization” is seeking to “come and live with” the subject. If accepted, the spirit becomes the constant and continuously present companion of the possessed. The two “persons,” the familiar and the possessed, remain separate and distinct. The possessed is aware of his familiar. In fact, no movement of body, no pain or pleasure, and no thought or memory occur that is not shared with the familiar. All privacy of the subject is gone; his very thoughts are known; and he knows continually that they are known by his familiar. The subject himself can even benefit from whatever prescience and insight his familiar enjoys.

  Although there was a definite connection between certain events and traits of his childhood and the experience that culminated in his exorcism, it was only after the age of thirty that he was openly approached by a “familiar” spirit and proffered “familiarization.” From the age of thirty-four onwards he was subjected to multiple forms of persuasion by the spirit calling itself Uncle Ponto. But Jamsie's case does illustrate many of the traits of “familiarization” and the inherent dangers for those who give even a token consent to “familiarization.”

  Jamsie was born in Ossining, New York. His father, Ara, was of Armenian descent; his mother, Lydia, was of Greek descent. Both were third-generation Americans. Ara was a carpenter by trade, and played the clarinet in his spare time in order to earn extra money. Lydia belonged to a Boston family whose large fortune had been made in ship chandlering and on the stock market.

  Lydia saw Ara for the first time at a small evening concert in Glen Ridge, New York. Improbable as it seemed to her family, she fell in love with Ara then and there. And Ara with her. On Lydia's eighteenth birthday they were married, over the violent objections of her family. Even the threat of being disowned and cut off entirely from the family fortune could not stop Lydia.

  Jamsie was born one year later, in 1923. The family lived in Ossining for another five years. But by 1929 Ara and Lydia had decided to move to New York. He was not making enough money in Ossining. Lydia's mother and father were pestering Lydia to desert Ara and to return to the family with her son. New York, Ara and Lydia thought, would provide more work for Ara and a greater anonymity for the three of them. Ara had a letter of recommendation to a taxicab-fleet owner. He and Lydia had high hopes of success in the city.